Rapid Transit: 1948, an Unsentimental Education

By Jascha Kessler

Jascha Kessler has published 7 books of his poetry and fiction as well as 6 volumes of translations of poetry and fiction from Hungarian, Persian and Bulgarian, several of which have won major prizes. In 1989, his translation of Sndor Rkos CATULLAN GAMES won the Translation Award from the National Translation Center (MARLBORO PRESS). His latest volume of fiction, SIREN SONGS & CLASSICAL ILLUSIONS: 50 Stories, appeared in December of 1992. His verse translation of Sophocles OEDIPUS TYRANNUS, with an Introduction, appears in 1998 (University of Pennsylvania Press). He served as Arts Commissioner for the City of Santa Monica 1990-1996, and won a Fellowship in Fiction Writing for 1993-1994 from the California Arts Council.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 18, 1998
• ISBN: 9781462801435

Jascha Kessler

Jascha Kessler is a poet, writer, and translator. His translation of Traveling Light by Kirsti Simonsuuri won the Finnish Literary Translation Centre Award in 2001. He has held a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy, where he was also Fulbright Professor of American Literature. He is currently Professor Emeritus of English and Modern Literature at UCLA.

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RAPID TRANSIT:

1948

Jascha Kessler

Copyright © 1998 by Jascha Kessler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States ofAmerica.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

parts of this book have appeared as short fictions, and in other versions in the following places:THE TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW, MIDSTREAM, TALES, ITALIA*AMERICA, and in the anthology, CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SATIRE.

odi et amo

et ces voix d’enfants chantants

dans les neiges d’antan & c.

the word is not in them

INTERBOROUGHRAPID TRANSIT

. 

"And hour by hour my heart beating

Heart beating ravaged at my life

And my mind with time more savage"

...a dwelling place of the spirit. But what does that word signify? What can it mean in an age which calls every facile babbler a representative of the spirit and which at bottom seems to have no choice except to see in the life of the spirit either a highly-developed means of combat or of amusement?

—Martin Buber

My generation still had certain literary residues from earlier ones to latch onto: father-son problems, Antiquity, adventure, travel, social issues, fin-de-siecle melancholia, marital questions, themes of love. Today’s generation has nothing in hand anymore, no substance and no style, no education and no knowledge, no emotions and no formal tendencies, no basis whatever — it will be a long time until something is found again.

Addendum: confusion and bad writing alone does not make one a surrealist.

— Gottfried Benn

Then the angel of death came

to kill the slaughterer

who slaughtered the ox

that drank the water

that put out the fire

that burnt the stick

that beat the dog

that savaged the cat

that devoured the kid

my father bought for two zuzim:

one kid only — only that kid. 

...why did I want to get past 17...for 18? Which, being stubborn and unlucky, I could survive.Duh beer climbed ovuh duh mounting, ‘n’ whuddya tink he sore?He sore anudder mount....

God! my fingers give a twitch, and the cancer tube jumps right in my face! Now there are three holes in my shirt and a fat red bead glowing on Mama’s Chinese rug. Smells like punk. Camel shit. Do it good. Do cattails grow along the banks of Styx? What was I about to think? Hell. Oh yes, what it would take to get through my eighteenth year to heaven — when my own fingers flang the frazzled butt up at my face! Two fingers of both hands nicotine-stained up to, but not yet above, the second knucklebone. Biggest accomplishment of my seventeenth year. ‘Tis but a little thing, my Lord, yet mine own.

In Forty-seven,

we missed Heaven.

We’ll come too late in Forty-eight.

(Last entry in Captain Stormfteld’s Logbook)

My building’s one of three bricked together side by side. Half the block. No communication between them except over roofs haunted by kids or through moldy cellars threaded by unmentionables that give the Super’s dog conniptions. Brown bricks long ago faded to anemic sandstone, smut streaks dribbling down their faces from window sills. Six storeys of plain windows mostly blanked by decrepit venetian blinds or tattered shades, the rooms of old momsers who wouldnt have new shades put in even if the landlord skipped this year’s rent raise. They’re like Maxine’s people downstairs: her mother pads out for a pack of Chesterfields, backless slippers for the bunions; girdleless, braless; wrapped, for the frost, in a fusty mink over her chintz-flowered housecoat, akafahrchtel, akaschmattah; her father, who travels half the year, trots to schul on Saturday in his light tan kidskin wingtips, natty in a grey plaid, vested suit, pink cheeks shiny as a shaved pig, plump hands manicured like a pool shark’s. Yet their apartment’s bare, dimly lit; furniture archaic, clunky, mahogany-veneered Grand Rapids Ohmpeer. And Maxine’s oh so ladylike in Peck & Peck black with white Peter Pan collar beneath standard Barnard polo coat, her blue, exopthalmic, teary left eye with its tic. Ash-blonde Maxine, who confronted me just now after midnight in the elevator, feinting like a wary wrestler: the very same Maxine who, two weeks ago in this same echoing box, Surprise! tore open her coat, lifting her arms wide to embrace me, kissed me, pressed her belly to me, rubbed her breasts against me, and when we passed the next day stared hard at me with a questioning look, as though her heart wailed, He loves me, he loves me not, my demon lover...loves...me! Love, oh love, oh messy love!

Identical entrances for these neuter buildings of iron-grilled glass doors ceaselessly swinging to, unoiled, uncushioned — bang, bang! Why do Jews bang apartment house doors? Answer: because Irish Italians Negroes Puerto Ricans bang doors too. A door is to bang. To bang doors may be a poor thing, my Lord, but it’s honest. Your burglar, now, will sneak past a door, silently on tiptoe stealing, every step with caution feeling. Your grinning Irish doorman will catch Park Avenue’s door. Every time her Lebele banged their door Tante Frieda’d go screaming up and down her foyer like a haggard seagull.Oy! gey in drard arayn! Until she banged one herself last year, that Rexall’s door that banged back at her and crashed in smithereens — she collected 5000 green ones from that. Quotha: I lost my period from fright, Judge!Oy, iz doos ah Tante Frieda! "Tante Frieda had no flow for the past ten years, „ my

Mama grinned. I used to steel myself when going into her apartment, Never mind that smell of singed cork — it‘s only Frieda‘s beets stewing.

Our entrance doors give onto lobbies checkerboarded with marble mottled blackish-green, the hue of time, floors so begrimed kids can‘t see to play skully on them in the winter in the dim light by the mailboxes. A ratty runner leads from the entrance to the selfservice elevators, and under it the marble‘s dulled to menstrual red by years of wet galoshes scuffing over the carpeting. A dark lobby weakly lit by two chandeliers, wrought-iron recollections of some Garden in Spain, oh yes! carrying two dozen 10-watt, candle- shaped yellow globes. Only, some burned out long ago, some were stolen, the rest never installed, leaving maybe three to gloom on in memory of those faded, brown-out years.

You descry this lobby in its charnel November dusk with its pair of twisty pseudo-baroccoco pillars furnished with „Spanish" sconces in which only one bulb glows, and by whose thin aura can be distinguished on the surrounding walls stucco reliefs of birds and flowers that never were, all rusting under the varnish that bubbles and burns them slowly through the incinerating years. At the foot of each pillar stands a heavy mahogany side chair a la Chinoise manner, scarred, indestructible, serving by day for pregnant mommas and panting bubbas, who plotz away in them while waiting and waiting for the elevator, their shopping bags soaked by pickle juice and potcheese liquor. The elevator though is stopped between floors by Maxine and me, embracing each other through our winter coats. By night the same chairs serve as resting places for long, nicotined-fouled palavers after midnight by Maxine and me, our voices in the naked hall sounding too loud in the wintry gloom.

Oh dreary, six-storey buildings, with their purgatorial seventh flight up to the roof, their marble stairs the cheap gray-white of barber shop counter-tops. Cold too, those stairs; too cold to sit on in winter, though we do sit very long — because she will promptly plunk herself down to keep you from getting in at her if she stands backed against the wall. Seated, she can throw both knees into your chest when you make your move. Dolly especially is good at blocking that pass. Why then is Dolly there with you, whispering, holding hands, and kissing hard with her thin, locked lips? Obligated for a pretzel and ice cream soda? Moral Dolly, who will kiss and kiss, giving back the taste of pretzel salt and whipped cream. Dismal storeys: ten apartments to the right, ten to the left, two to six rooms. In all of them a variety of sameness it hurts to think about. Though each smells different. My youth alas, from ten to seventeen, passed away there: Mass Man‘s Mass Kid.

When I was little, before the War, going to visit a friend to pass the long, winter afternoon on the floor with some miserable erector set, the smell of those apartments about keeled me over — worse than Frieda‘s menstrual beets. Other smells, other lives. Feet smells, soup smells, and always the one, common smell that pierced your head like a hot wire — it came from the blue powder for cockroaches and waterbugs and silver fish, sprinkled behind sink and toilet, under the fridge, behind stove and sink, in the back of the broom closet. What is it, copper sulfate? A smell you whiffed everywhere because once each month the bell rang: Exterminator! You never knew when he was due. If you weren‘t home when he came, the bugs increased and multiplied like the plague on the Pharoah; but if you were caught by him you choked for a week on the nostril-pinching taste of his powder. God! how often I was alone when he buzzed — I‘d open by mistake: there he was in a gray, zipped-up, jumpsuit, a black gas mask covering his face. Muffled and mad, he yelled, Exterminator! Oh! and then in he marched, paying no attention to me nor anything, only heading for kitchen and toilet. He carried a big rubber bulb full of that deadly powder, its foot-long, black bakelite syringe held out before him, like a robot with a ray gun. You heard some kids never were seen again after a visit from...The Exterminator! When I swore I‘d never open the door again, they both laughed at me for days. I must have thought it was an enema nozzle that he poked around with. That was why I kicked my father‘s tooth out that time they tried to give me an enema, „to flush the fever from my system." Once a month he came by, and once a month Tante Frieda got her migraine. I thought she let him in so he would use that syringe up hers, because my father said she was bugs like her Lebele...though we had all the roaches, Mama added. Seems funny now, linking The Exterminator to Frieda’s curse.

Actually, what I was thinking when that butt scattered itself all over, was....oh, hell, take this evening with Bertha. Sheer hell. (Excellent example of Pride, Pal.And of Wrath. Yours. Truly.)

Bertha’s building is around the corner on Barnes Avenue. It was meant to be ritzy, a courtyard with hedges in it framing its two cruddy plane trees and three entrances set inside. It’s faced with corrugated maroon and black bricks, with every few in a course sticking out to make a random pattern. Windows on the sixth floor are semi-Moorish, exotic, a la Bronx. Lobby’s bigger and gloomier than ours; Moorish mailboxes have frosted glass to see through; apartment numbers are set in the wall in porcelain mosaic. Rit...zy!. Called her after supper. Raspy-voiced Poppa comes on, growls, — Barry? I dont know no Barrys.

—   Lemme talk-a Bertie, hunh?

—   Bertha! Which one is this Barry?

Jeee-sus! Then she gets on the line with that soft, scared voice you‘d never connect with her tall, filled figure, 25 years‘ of subtle, ripe flesh.

—   Barry?

—   Look, I toldhim Barry. It’s Walter.

—   Oh, she says. I thought....

So I ask her if she wont come down to walk by the light of the moon? It’s up over the Parkway, frost glittering on the grass, & et cet.

—   I‘ll have to ask, she says.

—   My god, Bert!

—   Look, you come up and call for me, she whispers. He‘ll have to let me out.

So I go on round the corner. Top floor. Fairly clean building;

but — that apartment! Ring. Nothing. Ring-ring. Heavy shuffle. Door opens slowly-slowly, and this flabby old guy over six feet stands there, panting at me a breath smelling like the mopstring guck mixed with extermination powder that comes out from behind the toilet bowl. White-stubbled face. Bags of gray skin under nasty, flintgray eyes. Hooknose stuffed with the hate-snot between bulging, suspicious eyes. In one paw the POST. I snuffle greasy potatoes, charred hamburger fat. Sockless feet in forty-year-old leather slippers, wrinkled trousers slung below his ruptured belly. Over his stoop shoulders, I glimpse a long, empty hallway, uncarpeted, floor caked by dirt trudged into it for years. Dim, dusty glass doors hang open listlessly like his shirt, framing the living room at the end with its sagging Morris chair lit by the yellowed bulb of an old bridge lamp with a bronzed ashtray welded to it, a fringed shade from ‘way back in the Thirties. And a curtainless window, venetians half-raised, askew, slats twisted. How does such a princess live in this pigsty? No wonder she gets headaches. No wonder she never graduated, but took a job as a waitress in the Blue Bar: she has to pay him rent for her room in this rancid place. Consider this: 60 apartments in this building, behind every

tin-sheathed door there are so many whom death has undone   

He sidles out. She rattles on about nothing for a whole half-hour: it’s a delaying action. Tells me things like, Well, when she was eleven her mother has a heart attack. Bling! When she was fifteen her SeeBee brother’s killed on Okinawa. Blang! Leads me to her room, shows me his picture in uniform with his tattooed arm draped on her shoulder. Then she dives into a dresser frothy with panties and stockings, fishes out the black N.I. webbed belt he gave her on his last leave. She doesnt know why she’s saving it. I could have it, if it fits; it’ll hold up my dungarees, okay? Belt’s a belt’s a belt, I think, even a dead man’s. Stick it in my hip pocket when her old man returns from his creep to the corner candy store. So, there she stays, with that wheezing hulk of a father who’s always asking if she lets them kiss her, she says, who opens the door when she’s saying good night by the elevator, and yells, Bertha! It’s late, send him home! Waits behind the door, and as soon as she walks in, slaps her around. For what?

—   For nothing! she says, eyes filling.

Always tears, idle tears. Howie says she’s no Rapunzel. Howie tells me to stick to her, she’s not as shy as she acts. The fact is, she quit school because she got knocked up after three guys got into her round behind the Blue Bar one night after work, one after the other: bling, blang, blong! That’s why old Poppa Bear’s so insanely jealous! Finally we get out.

Once in the park she lets me take her hand. I intended to try and find her hot button. A whole month I’d waited before making this move. And there she was, grateful to get away for a stroll in the cold night air with Barry, that nice young man, to confide her aching heart to him, while he’s feeling...but a mere hangnail’s worth of doubt. (Casanova’s cold heart, you got, Pal?). Tells me last week he beat her with his strop. Now she’s scared he might have another attack because of aggravating over her and never taking any fresh air except Sunday when she’s stuck home ironing her blouses for the week.

—   Jeez, whyn’t you leave? Besides working, you’re free, white, and well over twenty-one — you donthave to pay him room and board.

So, it’s another story. Last year she was rooming in the Village with a girlfriend when he had his attack and couldnt pay the rent and lost his job and needed help and where could he get an apartment that big for that little money in this neighborhood where they’d lived twenty-five years, et cet. So he didnt really mean it when he belted her.

—   Besides, it dont hurt that much, she says

I am outraged. I tell her he takes advantage because he’s her father; that he’s robbing her life away.

—   Look how nervous you are, I say. Your hand’s all sweaty.

By then we’ve reached the loop in the Bridle Path. I stop, turn

her to me. By now I can hardly walk, what with having been nauseated by that dead apartment and now contemplating that weeping beauty. Glancing at her cherry-ripe lips, at her blushy cheeks in the moonlight — just a tad rouged — sensing those pouting tits behind the imitation mouton coat under the serge jacket that loosely slides over her rayon crepe blouse, and hearing the nylon scritching between her thighs as we walked, I lost my place in the catalogue of her miseries. My oh my! Here we have a woman, a heart-thumper. She goes limp and doesnt kiss back, so I just mash away at her wet face. Slip my hand into her coat and over her left breast. Always start with the left, is the received wisdom. Get a shock: stiff nipple. I do believe she’s melting. Hang on. Her knee lifts between mine; her breathing’s heavy. I hang on. Then, as I squeeze that pound of meat inside in its padded wire basket, she gasps, presses it back in response — then pulls back with a muffled sob.

Sometimes I think the received wisdom is just booshwah: better the left hand to the right tit, so you can secure her with the stronger right arm; also you deflect their right arm from shoving you away simply by lifting your left elbow. But I forgot that tactic because I was so startled she actually stopped when I stopped, faced me and lifted her face.

—   What’s the matter?

—   I thought you were taking me for a walk, she says. Come

on.

I’m numb, cant think. Just as things are getting going, she tears loose. My timing must be off. Yet how do you know when is the moment when? Oh Jesus, I could hardly move a leg.

—   Let’s sit down for a smoke, I say.

We do that. Once out of the house, she smokes like a chimney. Cant even think what we talked about; her new job typing, maybe. My ears are ringing; I have a shooting pain in the lower back. I’ve wasted good time letting her list her sorrows. I’m feeling mean: because she limply takes her father’s bullying, because she’s wasting my oh so sympathetic hardon. I let her have it, scorn scorching my face in the cold moonlight.

—   My father’s a sick man, she whines.

—   Too late, Bertie! You’re down the chute. Weak character. Obviously a masochist: youlike that bastard beating on you. You wont kiss me, but you let him strop your ass to shreds. Stay in your miserable room with that sadistic miser, and you’ll end up with somebody like Stan.

—   You know Stan? She grabs my arm, startled.

—   I hear the guy packs a gun to the track. If he doesnt pistolwhip you to pulp, you’ll end up with a 100 barbies in your belly. So why not check out now — suicide suits your type!

—   You know Stan? She sucks in her breath.

—   Listen, Bertha. Because I’m just 18 doesnt mean I havent studied 4 years with Stan at Ye Olde College of Billiards & Pool. I know you go out with him. He’ll bust your arms for what you just pulled on me. I am not your average rape artist, so I’m taking you home good as new. Stan wouldnt.

And I wax indignant, with a goddammit this goddammit that goddammit the other. Lay it on heavy about Stan telling the guys details of his lays, what they look like when they come & et cet...pool hall drivel, punk drool. I dont look at her face.

—   Look, Walter, I’m tired, I got a headache. Let’s just go home. Be a good boy now.

So? So this good boy takes her arm like Fauntleroy himself. We get back to her building by 11:30; sure enough, her windows are the only ones lit.

—   He’s waiting to hear the elevator stop, so’s he can come out and yell down the hall. Dont take me up, she says.

I shrug.

—   Thanks for your kind words, she adds. I’ll always think of you with pleasure. If I live.

—   You’ll live...till you die. Remember to keep a dozen belts in stock — for the men in your life.

Actually, I didnt say that. Kept my lips tight and didnt even try to collect a routine goodnight shlurp and squeeze. As the elevator swung shut, I half-turned to glimpse her pull a hankie from her coat pocket and turn away to snuffle in it.

I think, rounding the block, Okay, I‘m sorry, dammit. Not thatshe’ll ever know. I’d never hint it.Nietzsche’s right: weakness pulls a man down. Weakness is for those to weakness born. Stamp it out. The strong must keep self- control, not plan a pass at a Bertha as soon as the the loop in the Bridle Path is reached. My father always says, Try tact, putz, or you wont get ahead in life. By which he means, Shut yourpisk no matter what, since where’s the dignity in an open trap. I kick myself home, not just for the having listened to the pathetic story of her crummy life, and pretending to sympathize, but for telling her off like your callow high school cynic. Your true Nietzschean would have been rational, proud, abandoning her to her fate, and not tormenting her, the way Stan kicked that mangy, mongrel bitch out of the poolroom yesterday because she was pregnant and too trusting to slink out of his way. Your true Nietzschean’s no bully. Friedrich would have abominated your average Nazi as idolized by Himmler & Co., just as he loathed their grandfathers, the Good Germans of his day. And think now, given that father, the dead mother, the dead brother, and that dessicated apartment — wouldnt I, like Bertha, have been pathetic? Wouldnt I too have lapsed into weakness, become my own victim...? For that matter, isnt Leon drifting away, despite our pledge of friendship? Why? What does he fear in me — rather, in himself?

2/7/48

What is a poet? Who can sing?

Ignorant. Mute. Isolate: what silence, exile, and cunning come to in the Bronx.

2/8/48

I cannot think, because I dont know how to ask a question. There must be some method by which to go from what you know to what you dont. What might it be? A formula, some way of putting the case, step by step and in good order. How did Euclid come to do it? Even so, discoursing on the method doesnt work. What question? and what order? I wander, but see no path. Does each step constitute the path? Looking back? I cant make one out either. I want to stop right here, right now, but I am terrified. I cannot stop, because the earth turns and I have to step out to keep up. So the self drifts on, even as you try to hold your breath. You have to breathe, without wanting to. Confusion makes one irritable.

2/9/48

Others seem busy: thinking, analyzing, enumerating, elaborating what they call a technique in the notebook of their days. But is it only a system of self-communion they construct? That implies self-consciousness. Self, what’s that? I dont believe they know truly any such thing.

Leon says people tell him I am arrogant, loud, aggressive. Barbarian. I dont understand it. I have so little self; whatever self is mine, there’s less of it every day, so who’s behaving like that? When I drop off after midnight, if I let myself drop off at all, I no longer expect to wake as someone I still know. Maybe I am dissolving. Maybe the water’s rising. Yet no one notices it. Peter gloomily says I look quite well, his standard Monday morning greeting. He wants me to tell him how shitty he looks? They see me walking, talking, eating — arrogant, loud, aggressive — yet no one knows I am vanishing. How dreadful. So, who’s in control?

2/12/48

Never to have to ask. Never to have to answer. To be a naked thought, or else its thinker encased in jelly, some fine, clear aspic that protects it from irritation by other organisms, from the sudden blow, from storm, fire and flood and earthquake. How many others would prefer to be jellyfish? How many like me are they breeding? Do they fret about being unable to think about themselves? Who lack the power to think themselves thinking? I bet even Einstein wasnt conscious of his consciousness. Mind you, I dont go so far as to say, who lack the power to act as a self. Shouldnt there somewhere be a teaching to teach us to live a life of thought? A genuine school for thought, not those K-12 lurches carrying us from one grade of fossilized instruction to the next. Gradus ad opossum: a furry ball asleep. It’s not rational, this style my friends display — these acned college students mixed in with these numbed ex-GI’s, or my nighttime buddies, those poolroom bookies and apprentice-hoods — it is merely rationalized. Belongs to characters in realist novels by Dreiser, Steinbeck, Farrell, et al. Boys bred to serve the world bureaucracy, coming and to be, a kingdom vast, but without a king. Yet were we not born free? Shouldnt we aim rather to produce people who could learn how to think? No, we prefer the mechanical method, as if thought could be mass-induced somehow, for instance by records played while we slept — somnigogy to gogyphilia, gogyphilia to philiasomnificop^deia. Painless learning is what we want. Not hard, like this struggle up Parnassus every day, a boulder to shoulder up the mountain. That mysterious mountain. Shoulder to boulder, colder and colder, we groan as we shove it along.... Give me some men who are stouthearted men, who will fight for the right to.... Who needs them, let alone ten thousand more like me? For that matter, who needs even one like Nelson Eddy?

2/15/48

As the sun falls, a battalion of the dead rings the fort. They close in, dropping fearlessly into the moat, swarming over. Now they try the sealed ports, groping banging thumping like the zombies they are. My single, isolate self paces a cold, empty chamber atop the citadel. Escape now! Sidling along damp, stony walls, avoiding the slotted windows, it seeks the shadows dancing around the bonfires they have lit in the courtyard. Their drumming never stops. Cut!

A groping, deep sea diver, peering through the murk. Now his clumsy suit’s sprung a hairline leak, a pressure of 100 atmospheres forces a steady trickle of water in, the last air’s bubbling out, his body’s inexorably compressed into the helmet, his consciousness shrinks to a point. He sees himself scraped out of the retrieved casque a mere two handfuls of bloody jelly. Hey, who’s manning the pump up there? My angel. Where is he? Gone for a smoke. Forgot me. Or, there’s a struggle on the deck: drunk, yo-ho-hoing pirates clambering aboard, coming after my treasure map. Or, it’s mutiny, and some spiteful coward’s chopping at my line. Cut!

B movies. Bronx kind of imagination. Those idiotic similes for what I feel: the looming world. Every day I find things I cannot say in words. How can there be contact between men, when our language does not adhere to reality? One senses the world, but how speak to other minds of what one knows? The metaphors in books no longer signify.

Leon agrees: mumbles something about a philosopher he’s been reading. Weisseinstein or Witkeinstone. Something like that.

— Whazzat? One White Stone, Stoneless Wit? His name auf Navajo?

—   Very funny, he says. Words are one serious problem.

—   Words scare you shitless, Leon, I reply.

—   Not you, I suppose!

—   Who, me?

I was bluffing. The problem’s serious, all right. Even if it’s not important. Words redeem. And words redamn. Not The Word, though. That one’s swaddled in The Word, as saith the poet, unable to speak a word. Meta-physic for a constipated fellow. Words are the living dead, the Zombies who surround me. You cant kill them, Doctor! We have got to find the telepathic madman who’s sending to them! Before it’s too late! Enough! Evil lives! Cut! Another B-flick memory screened for me, though screening what fear? Still and all, words do live. And I fear them.

Yet why doubt words, O faithless one? (Who said that!) I doubt because words are sequins sewn on this glittering clown-suit we wear for life. Our sack of paraphernalia is stuffed with them. We lug the load till we drop. I fear words because I dont know what they are for. So why squat here into the wee hours, like a toad in the fountain of life, scrawling ce livre du moi-meme? Because innately I am not a toad, but a prince. Show us a sign, we would see a sign! What about that Great Carbuncle in my forehead? That‘s no Philosopher‘s Stone under my curls — that‘s a pocket of pus. Call me Mr. Whitehead. Seriously folks, your average scribbler, I sit here only to keep from doing worse. What could be worse, to call it quits? Murder, maybe? (Do the murder on yourself, Pal, the other way‘s immoral.) Dont give me any of that l‘acte gratuite business — that‘s grap. Enjoy what the world provides: temptation. Such as taking in more than you can digest: more smoke; more food; beer beer more beer; wind and cold. Zombie! walking for hours, then standing and shivering in wet shoes in a dark store front. Sheer boredom. See how much you can stand. I try to dampen the energy that flares up by exhausting myself for no reason. (That is wrong, Pal. Thereis a reason.) You think you cant control it. Your arm does things by itself. You find yourself writing. Your ankle twists and trips you. Your fingers knot and twitch as you fall asleep. And you hear a voice mumbling words, phrases uttering themselves to you. You listen, pondering. What is it you overhear? Who speaks to you? Is it the Angel? (No, you must entreat him first, Pal.) I dont know how. Sleep on a pile of rocks maybe.

But we wont mention any of this to Leon.

Or, I hear faint singing. It seems to rise down below from a chorus of prisoners, and it has the lilt of a Red Army Chorus out of some old propaganda epic I saw as a kid on Union Square. And it seems mixed in with fake snow pouring down like bleached cornflakes over Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians. Virile and sugary at once. It is disgusting; and below them all, there’s a wolf howling too.

Or, there are sudden fallings away, and I feel faint. I will be biting fiercely into a hot pastrami with cole slaw on rye as Leon sits opposite me bloodying his french fries with the 57th flavor of them all, made by the Heinz familee the best familee on the Zuyder Zee, oh, stop that music! when my jaws lock on me, and it takes an enormous effort of concentrated will to make them unclench and resume biting and chewing and chewing and.... Who would tell the doc his symptoms, while looking at the doc’s tic he wont admit to. No, the doc will put you away, sans aspirin for you, the dear anodyne.

Meantime, after walking all day to and fro in the earth, my stomach cries like a babe for its food, while I go on feeding it wind. Satan on Delancey Street. Werther in Flatbush. Manfred in Manhattan. Grim and double Grimm. Where is Panurge, though? In Hollywood wearing the mask of Groucho, like my Marxist semblable. I see my own name suddenly ripped away in tatters by the wind, whirled down the street and into a sewer. Where is it going? If I wish to get from the known to the unknown, must I fling myself after it and be swept away like the proud Tin Soldier in his paper dinghy? Ted be nimble, Ted be quick, Ted jump over that third rail slick! There’s a dying fall for you. Plangent poesy.

Poem about a killing on the subway? Call it, In the Labyrinth. I mean, that bum last night on the IRT, with a daily news wadded in his fly because his pants have no buttons, a puddle of puke next to his cheek, his bulging left eye bleeding. Did he sense my staring at his poor orb, practicing hypnotic command across the Bronx: die die die? Stan coming home from the track would have kicked him for a laugh. But I used thought, ordering that too-too sullied body to melt cell by cell, and dissolve into a chemical goo before we reached 242nd Street. (Worth all of 56ί in today’s American market.) Hitler got more out of people: sold their fat for soap, hair for wigs, bones for fertilizer. I said «we, « because I was concentrating so hard on killing him that the train was already in the yards — I never noticed our car being shunted off. Just as I caught myself inching towards him, I fled an impulse to stomp

and kill, bite into that foul, rancid carcass    Got out, jumping

tracks to a new train. Seven third rails I hopped onto, and off again: fancy footwork. If I’d stumbled, and with