Beatitudes

By Al Ferber

Between beatitude and oblivion, between war and orgy, between the waking and the dead was the Jazzed Generation: Bernard Corset, Yank Bivouac, Rupert Rugburn, Helmut Bungholes, and Beatrice-- Bernard's muse and soul. Between ON THE ROAD and CATHOLIC BOY, between HOWL and OEDIPUS, between CATCHER IN THE RYE and the INFERNO were the BEATITUDES.

Hop Wechsler

Jack Kerouac smoked his first joint in a jazz club in 1941....went on the road in the 50's and died somewhere in another galaxy...yet I would swear that he took a ride with the crew in Beatitudes.. I could hear him comment on how things are never things, and hip is in the eye of the unhip. The ride of Beatitudes took me along the road less traveled that only Kerouac and Ginsberg translated for me until Ferber came along. The truth is in the characters and the lie is in the truth.

Jack Apsche.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 12, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462844609

Al Ferber

Al Ferber a septuagenerian going on 13. Born. Regrettably… A North Philly kid. Survived education at Temple U., Penn State, Villanova U. Alcoholic 30 years. Sober 23 years. Indenture servant to Catherine the Great 34 years. Learned to love and appreciate cats and one dog. Authored 30 books of poems, 2 novels, 3 chap books. Poems in Magazines in U.S., England, Scotland, France. Still alive, on the downward path of the sliding board, as of this writing. An undocumented alien in the world. Resides Ocean City, NJ surrounded by water with Cathi, Luna, Mitzi, and Opal. So there.

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Copyright © 2003 by Al Ferber.

Cover art by Melissa Apsche

Author photo by Cathi Ferber

Edited by Hop Wechsler & Cathi Ferber

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 of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

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www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Book One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Book Two

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Book Three

17

18

19

20

for Cathi

&

my dad

Many thanks to Paul Lutton and Jack Apsche for valuable feedback during the unfolding of this book.

Special thanks to Hop Wechsler & Cathi for believing in Beatitudes, for spending their time to make invaluable editorial suggestions.

Also by Al Ferber

Salvation & the Beads, poetry, Newtown Printers, Newtown, PA, 1975

GUS, poetry, Pudding Press, Columbus, Ohio, 1982

Inventory In The Badlands, poetry, Johnston Green Publishers, Isle of Skye, Scotland, 1986

Gus: Biographical Notes of a Part Time Alter Ego, poetry, Cutting Edge Press, Bensalem, PA, 1994

Poems From The Avalanche, Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, 2000

Private Stash (Love Poems From Heaven And Hell), Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, 2001

Diamonds In The Rough, a novel, Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, 2001

Circus Maximus (Comedy Night In Hell), poetry, Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, 2002

The Human Museum, poetry, Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, 2002

Hotel Fantastique, poetry, Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, 2003

L’ Strange Cafe, poetry, Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, 2003

Introduction

They’d grown up, (a generation of chicken littles), curled up in the fetal position underneath their school desks, waiting for the BOMB to fall. And the BOMB would come from Heaven just above their heads as a small group of them, against their teachers’ cautions, crawled out from beneath those desks, changing them, and they changing everything in the world around them forever.

Prologue

We hate ourselves, you told me.

We love ourselves, I told you.

We love ourselves too much, you told me.

I know, I told you.

We walked out of the darkness, our eyes warm and blank as night.

We were wearing nothing except each other’s shadows. We were no one.

We made our way to the bar, past the tramps and macks and whores of Hallowe’en.

More were coming whether we acknowledged them or not. We heard the monotonous soundtrack: SAvoir faire is EVrywhere … We were nowhere.

We had become what we never were before, become our own Medusas and Hefners and Salomes and Sades, yet here we were again, in the warmth of what never was and never was not, what would never be and would never be over. Were we happy?

Why don’t you be with me, I asked.

Because you’re wretched, you told me.

A banana walked by, wasted and numb. SAvoir faire …

Why am I wretched? I asked you.

Because. Because we can never just be, we can never just be without becoming too much, without becoming—

Becoming what?

Who we are, why we know each other.

Death walked by, dragging His velvet sythe. Eleven o’clock and the band was coming.

We both went silent, our eyes darkly swooned over Thee Menstrual Vampyres, a band wrapped in black, with the poet Myrrh Maydh in his dark cloak.

We’re doomed, Myrrh Maydh sang, wrapped in his own dark.

We’re doomed, you told me.

Why? We’re in London.

I know.

We’re not doomed, I told you. We’re in London.

Myrrh Maydh walked over to the drummer and kissed him on the head. We’re doomed, he sang.

William. I worry.

What’s wrong?

I worry he won’t be OK, you told me.

Who?

Roman.

Why wouldn’t he be OK?

Why would he be OK?

We were in London. Together. Without Roman. His year of Warsaw, five months past, was the opposite of our week of London: our darkness was a decadence, a warmth, whereas Warsaw was empty, funereal, sad.

The Who walked by, the dead one and the other two. Myrrh Maydh sang, I useta lovurr but I hadta killurr. The Menstrual Vampyres went, Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh.

Warsaw, you exhaled.

Warsaw will be OK, I told you.

Warsaw won’t be OK. He won’t be OK. We haven’t talked since Wednesday morning. I worry. Five months away and we meet tomorrow or—we won’t.

I know. We touched. I know. We’re here. Now. Hallowe’en. Myrrh Maydh, who sang, ooh la la la, ooh la la la, ooh la la la, ooh la la la, when we touched.

I know, you told me.

Will you write me? you asked.

Will I write you in Warsaw? Kitten, two weeks in Warsaw—

No. Will you write me. Someday.

We touched. I will.

I was working on a novel. Warsaw, London. You. Orpheus, Eurydice, you.

I wrote whatever I had, whatever was never enough.

We’re doomed, Myrrh Maydh was taunting a male chanteuse in a black crushed velvet gown. Willya fook me now? Willya fook me?"

I walked out with you,towards the Rookery where we were in opposite rooms. We were exhausted. Bears, queens, warlocks walked with us towards the end of the dark.

We dreamed of Warsaw, bleak and wrapped in shadows.

I woke without you and the darkest hour was just before dawn.

Myrrh Maydh sang, Yurr obsolete my baby, my purr olfashunn baby, I said baby baby baby yurr out of tyme.

Hop Wechsler

Book One

THE BEATITUDES

1

BERNARD

Bernard Corset was born just after the end of World War II on the still hot breath of the atomic bomb, the stench from the melted rotting flesh of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still making its way across the Pacific Ocean to the flared nostrils of America. He sprang from the firm loins of a passionate Italian woman named Bella Donna, who had been impregnated approximately nine months earlier, by a passionate and well hung sailor named Dominick, in the back seat of his dark green 1942 Chevrolet two door coupe. At the time Dominick had just returned from three years at sea chasing the yellow peril all over the Pacific Ocean and Bella was so glad to see him.

During the three years Dominick was away Bella had worked in a defense plant where they manufactured toilet seats specially sized and fitted for submarines. She was an assertive young woman who eventually became supervisor on her shift and felt it her patriotic duty to allow all male 4-F workers under her charge to pleasure her orally during lunch breaks to keep their morale up. In this way she managed in her mind to remain faithful to Dominick. His was the only or almost only penis that had ever entered her vagina and she was going to keep it that way. She was saving her version of virtue for his return.

Dominick went to work in the factory where his father had worked before him that now manufactured giant batteries for submarines. He hated his job but that was to be expected. All men hated their jobs. It would have been un-American not to hate his job. Besides, if he didn’t hate his job he wouldn’t have had a legitimate excuse to go to the tap room after work every day and get falling down drunk. They lived in a small city on the East Coast of America called Norphelia, in a section or neighborhood of Norphelia called Brownstone, that no longer exists except in the memory of one Bernard Corset. Interestingly nothing in the Brownstone section of Norphelia was made from Brownstone. The houses were all made from the same red brick and the major buildings in the community such as churches, schools, libraries and government buildings were all made from gravestone.

Bernard would learn early on there were only two ways to do things in the Corset house, Bella’s way and/or Dominick’s way, and there was no way of knowing which one was going to be in force from one second to the next. As a result Bernard learned early on to be flexible, resilient and illusive.

Bella found that after Dominick’s return from the hottest, bloodiest war in history she continued to have a taste for those patriotic tongues from the defense plant where she no longer worked because of the birth of Bernard, fed in no small part to Dominick’s inability to perform his husbandly duties while in his daily alcoholic stupors. She took to having visitors during the day who enthusiastically satisfied her womanly needs, then quickly dismissed them as soon as she finished with them.

She was a walking screaming contradiction: a liberated independent woman who had a love hate relationship with everything that was expected of her as a woman and mother. Her feelings toward Bernard being a prime example. He had done to her, he had done for her, what no other man had ever done, what no other man would ever do, what no other man could ever do. He had stretched her almost to the breaking point during gestation, the skin on her abdomen grew so tight she thought it might tear open at any moment during child birth, he brought to her the most intense level of inexplicable combination of pleasure and pain she would ever experience as a woman or as a mother almost ripping her wide open with a violence that she was forced to assist in, with a VIOLENCE THAT SHE LOVED AND HATED EQUALLY her son Bernard came into this world completely unaware of the intensity of the mixed set of emotions his mother would forever feel toward him. He was the worst and best of everything she would ever experience and that experience was a one shot deal over and done with never to be repeated and for that she loved and hated him.

Dominick faded into the dim world that is a husband’s lot. The daily grind that awaits every man not long after that one, and there is only one, fantastic night in the back seat of a car or on the beach or in a rented room somewhere, anywhere, when his seed swims up the love river of passion and finds the egg and seals his doom. The factory, the tap room the whipping boy for the vitriolic tongue of his wife, the silent passive acceptance of hell. Dominick was not a noteworthy man given to spiritual revelations, divine inspirations or anything of the sort. There was no poetic appreciation or understanding of the tragicomic nature of his life. There was no understanding whatever that there was a plight. Dominick was a man of no expectations and therefore perfectly suited for his life in perpetual indentured servitude. He had been an enthusiastic stud whose passion for his wife was somehow mysteriously and inexplicably left in the back seat of his Chevy coupe. He worked in the factory, he went to the tap room, and he loved and hated his son. But he neither knew nor asked the WHY of any of it. He simply did.

These were Bernard’s parents and these were their feelings toward him caught in the midst of a backwash of something that none of them would ever be able to explain or define.

Bella kept the 4-F guys coming around during the day until Bernard started to learn to speak which he did without her assistance. Had he been born a mute she would have been just as happy. No. Happier. In fact she prayed that he would be struck mute so’s not to have to put an end to her daily or almost daily pleasure parade of military rejects. Her prayers went unanswered and she took to sneaking out after Bernard had gone to sleep and Dominick was deep into his usual alcohol induced coma. Bella spent many a long night in the back seat of many different vehicles and on the beds in many different rented rooms, always leaving in plenty of time to make breakfast for her men at home, not having been missed by either one of them. At least for a few years.

Bella was able to keep the other women on the block in check by leaving their husbands off her list of visitors. Without a word ever spoken between them each one knew bringing trouble to Bella would mean bringing certain trouble to themselves. Their silence was tribute to her obvious gesture of qualified respect. Bernard became a separate problem entirely. More than once he woke from an afternoon nap to wander into his mother’s bedroom finding her reclined on the bed resplendently naked with an equally naked but strange man on his knees, masturbating with one hand, the other busily tweaking one of her nipples, his face buried in her crotch.

Even switching her schedule around so she would have her encounters after dark, in the dead of night, away from

Bernard’s probing and what she thought were accusatory eyes, ran into snags. Around the age of four or five Bernard began waking in the middle of the night with nightmares and was unable to get back to sleep. Bella found him several times sitting at the kitchen table, his arms wrapped around himself, rocking back and forth on the chair in a terror that only a four or five year old child can experience when abandoned by both parents repeatedly. On those occasions she was at once filled with guilt and resentment. She would comfort him and take him back up to his room, sit with him until he had fallen back to sleep then come back downstairs and spend fifteen minutes cursing him for making her feel guilty. She never questioned him about the subject or the nature of his nightmares. She was too preoccupied with her thoughts of the potential problems they posed for her late night outings.

And so, Bernard was left to grapple with those nightmares on his own. Nightmares where he was trapped in a dark subterranean river adrift on a raft. Obvious symbolism for up the proverbial creek without a paddle. But being as young as he was he hadn’t heard that one yet nor would he have understood it if he had. All he knew was the sense of uncertainty and isolation terrified him. He probably didn’t even know that. All he really knew was something about it scared the living shit out of him. His mother was obviously not interested in hearing about it and he wasn’t about to admit to his father that he was afraid of anything. Dominick had survived World War II, the factory, the tap room, and Bella.

Dominick never beat Bernard aside from the occasional swipe to knock him out of the way as he stumbled from the front door to the couch of their brown brick row home on Purgatory Street. The beatings Bernard took from his father were more painful than physical beatings. When Dominick wasn’t drunk enough to be in a complete stupor he let out all his resentments for the job that he hated that he didn’t know that he hated, for all the liaisons that Bella was having with countless gimps and deformed men across the city at all hours of the day and night in the back seats of cars in rented rooms in storage closets on bathroom floors that he didn’t know about, for Bella’s contempt of him that he was completely oblivious to and for his own contempt for his son that he was completely unaware of. These were the beatings that Bernard received at the tortured unintentional eyes of his father.

Bella was not a prostitute. She never accepted money for her favors. Some considered her a low class whore but if you were to ask her demented and deformed love partners she was anything but a whore, she was an angel of mercy allowing them a reliable outlet for sexual and emotional tensions that would otherwise go unattended, and to what consequences they would rather not project. Bella had larger issues than the men she allowed to have sexual pleasure with her or anyone’s opinion of her. She had problems with the big guy. God. She resented the way He had laid things out making women literally beasts of burden, bosoms for suckling their young, bosoms for suckling boys and men, a hole between their legs for no other purpose than a repository of sperm and child birth, throwing in an occasional orgasm as if that were going to make the whole thing worth the trouble. She hated God and she hated men with their unfeeling, unthinking, throbbing pricks. If she had her way every male upon having his first wet dream would be struck dead in his sleep. But for some reason she did not reflect this venomous thinking or feeling on the poor twisted souls of her afternoons and nights.

These men had nothing but gratitude for Bella’s unusual kindness to them. And would occasionally offer her gifts, which she occasionally but only occasionally accepted, either things that could be consumed on the spot: like morphine, liquor, or candies or practical things: that could be used around the house and go unnoticed as special or significant additions to the household. For instance she might accept a case of canned tomato sauce. She would never accept anything like jewelry, money, or a radio.

Bernard was not as fortunate as the twisted men Bella met in the shadows. She tried to veil her contempt for him, she tried to do the mother thing as best she could but it didn’t take a theater critic to see her heart wasn’t in it. She didn’t believe even the slightest bit in the character she was trying to portray. Bernard wasn’t a theater critic, he was her son and he knew it was a performance and a very bad performance at that.

Between Bella and Dominick, Bernard didn’t seem to have much of a rack to hang his emotional hat on. Neither one of them ever told him they resented him, neither one ever told him they didn’t love him. In fact they used those words often. They said to him I love you, Bernard, so many times that they soon lost their meaning, if ever they held any meaning at all.

It didn’t take too many years for Bernard to piece together that he was in this game for better or worse and