ACROSS MY BIG BRASS BED
AN
INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
“There he stripped
himself naked
and engaged in a
wrestling match with no one,
proclaiming
himself victor over no one,
bowing to an
audience of no one.”
—Euripides, Herakles
PART
ONE: “THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES”
“I would make
these nymphs endure.”
—Stéphane Mallarmé, L’aprés-midi d’un faune
“My want of
success with women has always been caused
by my excessive
love of them.
—Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Confessions
I
drove, aimlessly but alertly, fighting traffic, around the basement. I pressed the big red plastic button in the
middle of the knurled steering-wheel with the heel of my palm, but the horn
didn’t work. I recall it clearly: the
silent horn in my mind. If it was
powered by batteries, and those batteries were dead, that was a problem I could
solve. Already a problem solver, because
my parents and I had been in the business together—never seeking a profit, only
union—from the beginning. I recall the
silent confidence in my mind as clearly as its silent envelope or cloud of unknowing. Were there lights too? In mind or car? Two little flashlight beams for our perpetual
twilight? There was a radio to be sure,
my red and white transistor, with its two little serrated wheels for tuning and
volume, propped on the seat next to me, hissing and crackling. I kept it for years, like a teddy bear. And when I lost him I truly lost him: I do not know how it happened. He was simply gone. Maybe the horn was an air-horn, like clowns
used, its rubber bulb collapsed with long use.
Maybe it had been an entirely
false horn from the first moments of its design, a play-horn, a big button
connected solely to my imagination.
The cause was beside the point; what mattered was that I didn’t let it
get the best of me. Don’t let it get the best of you! was my motto. Mom and Dad agreed. If the horn didn’t work, couldn’t work, had
never worked, that was of so little consequence I almost had to laugh. I made
do as I came around the furnace with my own vocalizations, the beep and
variations on the beep: the honk, the
air-raid siren, the fog-horn. My voice
is my soul. I prefer to think in tones
rather than words. Every now and then I
would feign astonishment (perhaps the
only trick of that sort in my bag just then) at the incapacity of my fellow
drivers and shout something like, “Look out!” or “Hey, watch where you’re
going!” Then suddenly it was over and I
was nosing my vehicle into a far dark corner, sighing with relief at the end of
another long and mysteriously bootless day.
I made careful, silent egress from the faintly rustling and creaking
plastic car, and tip-toed my way up the stairs, which also creaked, to the top,
where I silently opened the door to Carla’s mother’s kitchen. I stepped around it and silently—save a single soft click of the hard, fat
tongue of the latch on the strike plate as it lodged in the shallow dish of the
frame—CLICK—closed it. In the depths
of the gloomy basement, had Carla heard that subtle but singular sound? Did she now feel alone? Perhaps abandoned, deserted? Did she feel in her inarticulate way a loss
of mutually sympathetic unity? I took a
moment to collect myself. The floorboard
creaked. I took a deep even breath,
exhaled it in a perfectly meditative demonstration of balanced respiration, and
took another. I was the Master of
Breathing. It was very quiet in the
kitchen, in the house, in the neighborhood, because President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy had just been—new word— assassinated. This is of course old news now, most people
have, I think, heard about it and if they think about it, it is very like a
thought about, say, Abraham Lincoln, who got his brains blown out too, enjoying
a stage show, in the District of Columbia, our nation’s capital, but not a
state in its own right, in 1865, after having emancipated—older word but still
deep and glossy with mysterious meaning—an immense population of Negro slaves
in the revolting South , while Kennedy was waving and smiling in celebration of
a New Golden Age of universal civil rights and civic responsibilities in the
backseat of a long black convertible in the midst of a motorcade—new word—in
the midst of a parade, in Dallas, a big city, much bigger than Minneapolis and
Saint Paul, where Carla and I lived, a mythic cowboy city in Texas, but only possibly that out-and-out bona fide
state’s capital (I was ashamed to realize I didn’t know, when it seemed
only yesterday that I had all forty-eight down, AND the two new ones)—that is
to say, both of these gigantic, heroic men had been laughing and enjoying
themselves in important places and important times at the instant their brains
ceased to cohere, the gelatin melted, the electricity failed, the chemicals
decomposed—but, as I began to say earlier, the news then (I had seven years of acute and penetrating observation, and
gently guided study with Mom and Dad already behind me) was brand new, without
precedent, and it was being televised, which was also a brand new means of
intense study and mind-blowing imagery, though most households had owned a set
for, on the average, dare I say, a decade:
devoted, however, for the most part, to the limitless variations of
comedy, every house on my street,
Washington Boulevard, left on 105th Street, and left again on
Terrace Avenue where Carla lived, had looked closed up, as if every family in
the neighborhood had gone on vacation, drapes pulled across livingroom windows,
mothers and wives watching in sorrowing disbelieving silence—in silence again,
both in mind and mouth, the silent black-and-white TV images of the riderless
horse and the flag-draped coffin in the—new word—rotunda—and the wholly incomprehensible scenes from the parade, the
motorcade, the sudden speed and inexplicable moments, blurred and ominous and
deeply strange. Some houses between
Carla’s house and mine even looked abandoned, as if their occupants had been
unable to bear the assassination and the scene in the rotunda, the
simultaneously sped up and slowed down scene in the back seat of the
convertible, unable to hear those somber words and unprecedented images without
breaking down, without some kind of flight.
Whatever it meant to be human, President Kennedy could no longer manage
it. I listened to the silence in Carla’s
house for a moment, holding my breath, then flung the door open and pounded
down the stairs, banging the flimsy boards as loudly as I could. When I reached the bottom, when I was
standing as it were in a pool of light, the first of many, honestly if not
brilliantly illuminated, my face clear and shining, complete, good, proud, but
feeling the light make and unmake tiny shadows as the dangling bulb continued
to shiver in the eerie vacuum of my thunderous descent, I shouted, “Honey, I’m
home!” And I was. I felt it in my blood, in my bones, in my
humming brain. Carla rushed in upon me
from the damp gloomy darkness of our little apartment, and we embraced
passionately. Her hair was dark, wavy,
lustrous, and it bobbed around my face as we hugged and kissed and awkwardly danced
our interpretation of family life, offered, to ourselves, a representation of
the great and good love that grows so strongly and beautifully between husband
and wife and their children. We had no stratagems
for power, for one’s domination of the other.
Our fantasies of each other were wholly defined by adoration and desire
tempered by the knowledge that the greatest desire was a mystical, sympathetic,
constantly turning yin and yang union.
There was no room for resentment or secret calculations of how love
might be destroyed, if it had to be.
Carla was a lovely little girl.
She looked like a six-year-old Italian movie-star. As far, in those days, as I understood
physical feminine beauty and “sex appeal,” she was irresistible. When I played soldier—those days when I could
not go to Carla’s house and ravish and protect her in the damp dark basement,
with its mildew-stained concrete-block walls and cobwebbed window wells and
those two bare light bulbs, the one shivering at the foot of the stairs, the
other over the washing machine, those days when I was out in the fresh air with
my friends killing, being killed, arguing the finer points of death (how much
movement constituted life, did you have to hold your breath, and most
importantly, how long did you have to stay dead, yesterday we’d agreed that
death was no more than a ten-count, but today…?)—those days when I was alive
and stretched out on my bunk in Africa, Carla was like a pin-up girl to
me. Her picture was painted on my
fuselage. I was deeply affected by her
beauty: the glossy hair, the dark eyes
and thick lashes, the soft chubby cheeks…but what sharpened it—whatever “it”
was, my evolving desire? my apprentice appreciation? my innocent willingness to
proceed?—what sharpened it past my
understanding, were her teeth, her front teeth, which were bucked. I loved those teeth so much I wanted bucked
teeth of my own, and went around, publicly, privately, at school, at home, with
my bottom lip tucked behind the less magnificent, tetracycline-stained central
incisors I would have to live with. I
loved Carla’s teeth. I wanted them in my
mouth and I wanted to admire them in her rosy mouth. I wanted to touch them with my lips and
tongue, with my own inferior teeth. I
marvel at such intensity. We were
playing house. We knew we were playing
house. We set out explicitly to do just
that, to pretend we were husband and wife in the mode of our parents but
innocently unaware of the torment, the hatred, the despair, the mania, the
depression that actually constituted married life, family life: Carla poured me a rich steaming cup of
imaginary coffee in the morning and made sure a hot and nutritious imaginary
meal from all four food groups was waiting for me when I came home after work,
and she asked me how my day had gone.
Not well, I told her, hugging and laughing, one soul but two
stories: I’d just had a piano lesson
from a woman who frightened me so much I had begun to hallucinate, the piano
tipping up on one end and then the other, so that I was playing vertically most
of the time, as if on a storm-tossed ship at sea. I closed my eyes and
continued to play, seeing flashes of bright light on which a kind of text or
score was barely visible, and vivid luminous primary colors in a kind of swirling
river of a landscape passed before me. I confessed some of this to my mother,
who played the piano beautifully, and she
confirmed an apparent ability on my part, a seemingly genuine magic, to
make myself sick, genuinely ill, with a fever, to avoid those terrifying
lessons—and I thought, wait, I am making myself sick? No, no, no, it’s the witch at the piano!—but
conversations like that, and the attendant gestures, the non-strategic
narratives of how the world was stacked against us and getting worse by the
day, mattered hardly at all. Carla, my love, and I, went through those
motions because we wanted to hug and kiss.
The fact that we were pretending, that the food was in our minds only,
that our love, because we were children and knew it, was childish—that should
have made even our passion a performance, a representation that pleased us on
the level of theater, not as expressions of real and therefore uncontrollable,
remorseless emotion. Real desire, real
need. Were her teeth merely a
fetish? What I felt was raw, wild
lust. I knew that as surely as I knew we
were pretending, playing, acting, imagining.
How then did I reconcile such radically opposed perceptions of reality? Was I simply a poet-in-training? An actor?
It would seem to be so. It seems
to have been so. I have been wholly given over to intensely felt
demonstrations of what I believed was selfless love, a kind of demented Don
Juan so lost in his “action,” so lost in his “character,” offering displays so
histrionic and void of actual meaning they are, in a way I can never understand
until it’s too late, false, exactly as
false as I was sure they were true—consequently violent. It must have been false from the beginning,
with Carla, because by Halloween I was through with her. She taken to apparently uncontrollable
sobbing that smacked of bad acting, of histrionic play-acting…but which I
realized I often heard muted, coming from Carla’s mother in some nether region
of the little house. When I decided our
selfless union had become corrupt or at least contaminated and strange, I went
to the class Halloween party dressed as Superman. I wore my everyday blue-jeans and a blue
sweater upon the breast of which my mother had sewn a golden S. My red cape was an old frayed towel, used and
threadbare, dyed scarlet. One of the
other boys had come as a tiger in an elaborate costume that was the talk of the
party. He would have been the most
popular boy in school had he not mistaken his judgment at a crucial moment and
frightened Tina, my new hope for selfless love, frightened her genuinely when
he had only been playing. “I’ll save
you, Tina!” I said, and lunged at the tiger, knocking him off his feet and
dazing him. I stood quickly, and when I
saw that he was still on the floor, grabbed him by his sturdily stitched tail
and dragged him toward some kind of tiny building that had been erected for the
holiday, either a jail—that’s how I remember it, law and order as some kind of
theme even as we celebrated lawlessness—or a castle. When he finally got to his feet, I pushed him
hard into the building, so hard that he began to cry. As authority figures swooped in, I fought my
way back through the cheering crowd to Tina, who was still in a state of shock,
still so frightened that she did not understand I had saved her, that it was I,
I who had saved her, who was hugging and kissing her. She wept and I kissed the tears from her
cheeks, remembering guiltily how unmoved Carla’s tears had left me. When she hit me, I stepped back in pure
bafflement. Again and again she hit me,
and I let her, because I was selfless, because I didn’t know if she was playing
or not. I went from a completely heroic
mastery of the scene to fearful disorientation—in which I wanted unmistakably
to cry, too, but did not—ending in a completely anomic breakdown: I felt entirely alone and despised the people
around me. Knuckleheads. Weaklings.
No chance of unified sharing of souls.
A year passed, during which I guess I was working on my material,
because I emerged as a comedian. Cheryl
Schmolke was the Queen of the Second Grade at Jefferson Elementary School, a
pretty girl with big eyes, brunette hair in a pony-tail, and an air of being
much older than eight—as was I. We had
just finished an hour of instruction in the basics of geology, and Cheryl and I
found ourselves alone at the sink in the science corner of the classroom. She was washing the dust and grit of samples
from her hands, and I said to her, “Cheryl, I didn’t know what your head was
made of, so I took it for granite.” I
turned away, toward the classroom with its rows of desks and backs of heads
shooting out in lines of crazily skewed perspective that must have been the
product of incipient vertigo, but nobody was actively listening to us,
listening to us as I hoped they might be, like “kids” do in a play,
twenty-five-year-old Broadway stars pretending to be five-year-old Broadway
stars—when the “main character” says something outrageous, that big, wonderful,
sinuous rubber-necking double-take.
Nevertheless: Cheryl giggled. Word spread quickly of my staggeringly
felicitous sense of humor, and the class appreciated my nascent sexual
superiority in the way that only children can, with dead-pan blinking and
delightfully grave suspicions. Had there
been no hub-bub, as I thought there had been, when I spoke? Had everybody heard me? Had Mrs. Erickson? Was I truly amusing or would I be punished? It was possible, and I accepted the
possibility then as candidly as I do now, that I had been both amusing and
deserving of punishment. I saw, first
and foremost, however, how important it was to make women laugh, that nothing
of consequence could be achieved if you did not take very seriously their
senses of humor and their need for lively, energetic men. I said, some time later, the next year, I
think, third grade, fourth grade, while I stood as if smoking a cigarette, with
that kind of tough nonchalance, next to the anchoring pole of the swing-set on
which Cathy Gibbs was swinging, nonchalant but like I was still working a
routine, the same routine: that what
sexy smart Cathy ought to do was to bite my cork. I had no idea what a cork was, and, if I ran
through all the possibilities in my mind, no cork that I might conceivably call
my own was a thing that wanted biting. Still, that was what I said to her, and the
only discernible effect was a slight increase of swings per minute. Cathy had given me the impression she was
earthy, from a different side of the tracks, working class and Catholic as
opposed to managerial class and Protestant, perhaps, I have no idea, had no
idea, only a sense of exotic permission.
But it was permission for selfless union with a girl I thought I might
love. It turned out that she admired me
as a partner in science projects and had no interest in selfless unions of
souls. In consequence I suppose, I had
studied for a long time the cover of a National
Geographic (my grandfather, who
disliked farming and wished only to learn, had given me subscription for my
birthday) that appeared that spring: it
showed an American soldier walking through the jungle in Vietnam. I knew
something had changed. It threatened
selfless union with attractive girls. We
were no longer at Jefferson Elementary, they were busing us to wherever they
could find the space, and I must simply have felt, being cast about, without a
steady center to study, licentious. License, the inherent anarchy of being among
“others,” among people, id est,
unlike those among whom we have matured, and whose conversation seems therefore
odd and therefore mad, the inherent criminality of comedy—all this must have
made the allure of uniforms, of a harmless, childish fascism, more than hard to
resist. It is possible, certainly, that
I had no inkling of political and cultural forces as vast and nasty as all
that—just the sense that something had changed in a place called Vietnam, the
only evidence for which was the attractive photograph on the cover of the National Geographic—and that I was
simply excited, thrilled, to be
united (this is two years later) at a brand-new school with a brand-new girl
named Joni. It was a real marriage—if
common interests and enthusiasms, and proper sanction and ceremony are what
make marriages real—or at least a relationship acknowledged as valid and
binding by society: we were taking flute
lessons together, and had been nominated and elected to the twin posts of
Crossing Guard at Madison Elementary School.
We were the most serious and talented children in the band, had genuine
responsibility, genuine authority outside the band, outside, even, the physical
plant of the school itself. We went,
almost hand in hand, through hours and hours of intensive instruction, during
which it was made plain and repeated over and over that lives were going to be
in our hands, the lives of our friends
and neighbors in our hands. We were going to be up against automobiles,
and we were shown lurid film-strips of what automobiles could do, did do
frequently and regularly, to human bodies.
When we passed that course, when we proved with our attitudes that we
had increased our knowledge and made it practical, rather than breaking down
and becoming undone by the horror of it, we were presented with certificates of
worth and accomplishment, and garments of webbed straps, bandolier-like, with
little plastic cups sewn just below the broadest band, the belt, in which we
were to insert our flag poles. The flags
were orange with red stop signs, trimmed in white, and we were given white
gloves to further distinguish ourselves in the dangerous if ordinary milling
and shouting of the intersection. But
what made the uniforms truly authoritative as well as snazzy were the
caps. They were in the style of military
officers, pure white visors and crowns with orange bands circling the base of
the crown. Black chin-straps. Joni was nearly a foot taller than me but no
one seemed to care or notice, or if notice, to not think it odd, or if think it
odd, to interpret in any way detrimental to me.
It was in the nature of things:
we were in the sixth grade, which is the bottom of the heap, now, of
middle school, but which was then the top of the heap of the elementary grades,
and Joni, like many young women, had shot past most of us boys. She had the beginnings of breasts and hips
and I had been secretly courting her for at least a year—it seemed like
forever, like no girl had meant a thing to me before Joni. If it threw my notions of sympathetic
selfless union into disarray, I had high hopes that it was truer, a kind of
more mature love, and nurtured the relationship carefully. I forbade myself irony and wasn’t even funny
most of the time. I was gentle and—most
important—knowing. That is to say,
knowledgeable beyond my age, and, for my age, wise. I’d given up everything for
scholarship—everything but practical understanding of everyday tools and
machines. Like bicycles, for
instance. I was a straight-A student but
could flip a wrench back and forth in the palm of my hand, box-end to open-end,
open-end to box-end, like a switchblade.
As often I could without seeming obvious, never two days in a row and
usually only once a week, I would rocket toward Joni’s house on 105th. Just as I figured I was coming into the view
of her bedroom window, I would make a face, theatrically big, to make sure it
would carry across her yard, of concern, and shoot a glance back at my rear
wheel. I would squeeze the calipers
around the polished rims of the wheels, come quickly but adroitly to a stop,
and dismount—not with the least hint of annoyance or alarm, but forthrightly
and calmly with curiosity, readiness, and capacity. Those states of being or attributes of
character or whatever they are I now lack entirely; they are as absent from my
self as if they had never been part of it, and I am forced to ask were they ever genuinely there? I thought so at the time. I was very clear about the difference between
the show I was putting on for Joni—monkeying around with chain, thinking almost
aloud too much slack as I
demonstrated that slackness, adjusting the cables with one twist clockwise and
one twist counterclockwise, tapping the spokes as if listening for some slight
tonal evidence of looseness—very clear about the difference between that and
the show I’d put on for Carla (much less the absurd posing for Cheryl and Cathy,
and the confusing, troubling affair with Tina):
with Carla I had been aping a love I knew I had no understanding of, not
even any real interest in, but which would allow me to hug and kiss the
beautiful bucktoothed girl, believing the frankness of the play (a frankness I
assumed Carla shared) mitigated the pretense and might even bear real
psychological fruit, somehow, later on, when I became capable of real love; but
with my bike and the mysterious new Joni, I was demonstrating real skill. If it’s true that the call for the
demonstration was not quite honest, was in fact rigged, that nothing was wrong and I was only showing what I was capable of if
something truly went wrong, it is also true that I thought it was something
that Joni would like to know, perhaps even needed to know. When we were made crossing guards, I was
convinced that a force greater than my own will, greater than my transparent
wish to show-off, was confirming and encouraging me. The show may have been gratuitous, the
uniforms silly, but the skill, the sympathy that made the shows possible, the
childish street theater and the community service—those gifts were real. But of course there is a great difference
between a sense of rightness and even confirmation, and action in the world. My instinctive belief was that once you
commenced to act, unease fell away; there were simply too many other things to
deal with, and in my limited experience with action, that was so. But as I stood on my side of the street that
sunny mild September day in 1967, and felt my plastic crossing flag flutter
stiffly in the breeze, and saw Joni’s flag flutter in the same gust a fraction
of second later, I began to suspect that
unease might be more a shadow than a cloak:
no matter how one occupied oneself, you could not throw it off, it would
still be there. I began to act but felt,
if anything, more uneasy with each passing second. Joni seemed troubled. The width of the street was sufficient to
make my perception of her as “troubled” pretty clearly an exaggeration born of
my own anxiety, but she was not so far away that I couldn’t make out a kind of
uncertainty in her posture, a tentativeness that could have been the first
stages or signs of haste, of precipitate action. Nothing much was at stake, and if I give the
impression I sensed disaster looming, I must say I did not. There was very little traffic, and none of
our fellow students had arrived yet at the intersection. Some men were laying sod on the oval island
that was the new school’s front yard, in the center of which stood a flag-pole
also so new it had no flag to raise. I
could see some parents coming up my side of the street, and some very small
children with them. Joni was schoolside
and couldn’t stop darting apprehensive looks at them, at me, back at them, back
at me. She was very tall, as I’ve said,
and though not in the usual way horsey-looking, horse-faced, she did strike me
as a filly about to dash off for the far side of the corral. I wanted to wave to her, but was afraid it
would be interpreted as some kind of official gesture, coercive, one bound to
confuse whoever saw it, since it had no relation to public reality, merely a
private concern. And yet I waved. I couldn’t help myself. It was a small, subtle wave that I hoped
would reassure Joni, even calm her if indeed it was panic that I thought I saw
approaching in the deep background of the picture, if the restlessness and
uncertainty I thought she was exhibiting were the simmering precursors of a
mistake in judgment or a breakdown of nerve.
But I failed. I think I
failed. How can I say? It was so long ago, the stakes so low, the
arc of the action so submerged in ordinary murk…but what I thought I saw was
that my wave was being misunderstood.
What I remember seeing is Joni coming rigidly alert, then after a tense
few seconds of scrutiny, straining her head forward, opening her dark
mysterious horse-like eyes as wide as they could be, demanding, silently but
with clear impatience, what I meant with
the wave. Suddenly there was a crowd
around me of mothers and tiny children and cars were approaching the
intersection from all four directions at once.
Joni, still giving me a look, stepped off her curb. I made an even more subtle sign: halt,
hand palm-up, facing out, but held very closely to my side, and waving just a
bit. Then I said to my pedestrians,
“Follow me, please,” and stepped off my curb.
Automobiles were not the military vehicles they are now: if you called a car a tank, it was an insult, a deprecation, a suggestion of awkward
ugliness. Our cars were long and wide,
to be sure, but very low. Grills looked
like teeth—but not sharp teeth, friendly teeth, rather, smiling, and rear
fenders almost always had some kind of tail-fin swoop to them. They were sleek. We had a Buick Electra 225, a long low blue
Greek tragedy of a car with a black vinyl top.
It had fins and a somber, ambiguous, classical smile, pistons the size
of one-gallon paint cans, eight of them banging up and down in their
storm-drain cylinders, the jets in the four-barreled carburetors spraying gas
like they were fire-hoses in a roar so perfectly muffled it purred rather than
rumbled. It generated horsepower of a
nearly incalculable order. But at that
moment, crossing the street for the first time as a professional, with eight or
ten of those wide, wide flashing grills suddenly upon me, I felt I could have
stopped anything, a ten-ton truck, everything.
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