Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (2 page)

The eats and atmosphere at Johnny’s were pretty much as Fariña describes them. From time to time there’d be live music. Peter Yarrow, later of Peter, Paul and Mary, had a standing gig there, maybe one of his earliest. He alternated with a rock ’n’ roll group, all of them related, from the grocery across the street. In a few years these same two currents, modern folk and working-class rock, would flow together in what we remember now as the music of the high ’60s. Fariña’s ear was taken not so much then by pop music as by more traditional American forms like jazz, and especially blues, both country and black. To the now canonized Buddy Holly he listened with some ambivalence—evident in the novel—but he did pay close attention to “Peggy Sue.” It seems now that in the guitar break of that recording he may have caught something others didn’t, some flash of things to come—but this could also just be my own retro-fantasy. Two albums of the period I know he was crazy about were Mose Allison’s “Back Country Suite,” also mentioned in the novel, and the English version of Weill and Brecht’s
Threepenny Opera
.

When it came to dancing, Fariña went for Latin music. He was blessed, and knew it, with a happy combination of heritages. His mother was Irish and his father Cuban. He had relatives in both countries and had visited with them. It happened that in ’58 and ’59 there were a number of students from Latin America in the School of Architecture, and their circle was one of several that Fariña could move in with some intimacy and ease. Their weekend parties were regarded as the best around. Fariña danced a strange
paso doble
I’ve never seen since, and whose authenticity I can’t confirm. But the women he danced with, though now and then puzzled, were certainly enjoying themselves, which was the whole point.

Each year on St. Patrick’s Day, the tradition in the Architecture School was to construct a giant, what seemed like hundreds-of-feet-long, Chinese dragon, get as many folks under it as possible, and go running around the campus, in and out of classes and lectures, hands emerging from underneath the critter to grab and fondle the nearest coeds, many of whom had their hair tinted green. Everybody whooped it up all day long with oceans of beer dyed the same color. This was the one day, close to the Spring Equinox, when Fariña’s two ethnic sides swung into balance, and he could indulge both. He would end the day with a crowd of dragon personnel, all spattered green, down at a venerable bar called Jim’s, standing up on a table with a mug of green beer, quoting García Lorca’s “
Verde, qué te quiero verde
. . . .” This would produce a long series of toasts to everything green,
cervezas verdes, coños verdes. “El barco sobre la mar
,” Fariña hollered, “
y el caballo en la montaña!
” Years later, in California, around sunrise on the morning of his marriage to Mimi Baez, we happened to stagger into each other in somebody’s front yard, both hung over. It was somewhere out in the country, in the hills near Palo Alto. We then managed to have one of those joint epiphanies. Fariña was staring up one of the slopes nearby. A white horse was standing out on this very green hillside, looking back at us. Of course Fariña and I were both thinking of Lorca’s horse on the mountain.

Sometimes at college we also succeeded in getting on the same literary wavelength. We showed up once at a party, not a masquerade party, in disguise—he as Hemingway, I as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the other had been through a phase of enthusiasm for his respective author. I suppose by then I was learning from Fariña how to be amused at some of my obsessions. Also in ’59 we simultaneously picked up on what I still think is among the finest of American novels,
Warlock
, by Oakley Hall. We set about getting others to read it too, and for a while had a micro-cult going. Soon a number of us were talking in
Warlock
dialogue, a kind of thoughtful, stylized, Victorian-Wild West diction. This may have appealed to Fariña partly as another method of maintaining Cool.

The first time I read
Been Down
. . . was in manuscript, an early draft, in the summer of 1963. I remember giving him a lot of free advice, though I’ve forgotten what it was exactly. But fortunately he didn’t take any of it. He must have wondered if I thought we were still back in writing class. Later, having rewritten it, ten pages from the end of the final draft, his hand went out on him. “Did you hear about my Paralyzed Hand?” he wrote in a letter. “Why Tom old boy”—
Warlock
talk—“I woke up this here otherwise promising morning with a clump of inert floppy for a hand. Lentils. Lentils and some kind of exhaustion known only to nits in sedentary
occupations. Me, the once hunter after restless game gone to seed in a J. C. Penney armchair covered by a baby blanket. . . . But the hand came back by pins and needles after a month and I got done. . . .”

When I first read the book, I was comparing it with my own experience of the same place, time, and people. It seemed then that Gnossos and Fariña were one and the same. It was also great fun recognizing the real-life counterparts of the other characters, being tickled by what he’d done with and to them. Now, nearly twenty years later, seeing a little further into his method, I think maybe it wasn’t so simple. He didn’t just take things that had happened and change names. He really worked his ass off, but the result is so graceful that the first time around I was fooled completely.

For many of the characters, Fariña seems to have begun with the key traits that in their Cornell originals appealed to him most—Drew Youngblood’s decency, Juan Carlos Rosenbloom’s manic bravado, Judy Lumpers’s build—and then from these cores gone on to develop each of them more fully. Presently, as characters will, each took on an inside-the-novel life, separate from whoever they’d been outside it. There isn’t much point Naming Names here—they know who they all are and they walk among us, even today.

Gnossos himself is not Mr. Perfect, by any stretch. He has a short temper and a low tolerance for organized religion, national mythologies, incompetence, resignation, anybody from the American South, racist or not—the list of resentments goes on. He is susceptible to the thrill of vendetta or karmic adjustment, an impulse I suspect isn’t entirely absent from why Fariña wrote the novel. Gnossos uses drugs and alcohol injudiciously, and gets publicly abusive with women, something I never saw Fariña do. His own approach to women was never less than courtly and sensitive, though not without perhaps one or two jiveass moments.

The wolf story, for instance. This is one of Gnossos’s encounters with homicidal animal life, the other being the monkey demon of
Chapter 14
. In the book, Gnossos tells the wolf tale to Kristin McCleod, a young woman he’s falling in love with. He puts it in the form of a dialogue, in which Kristin, and we reading, are asked to provide the sense data—the cold, the squeak of the snow, the Adirondack visuals. It is Fariña’s most perfected version of a piece whose early tryouts many friends first heard at Cornell, some more repeatedly than they really wanted to. He was in fact dismayingly successful with the wolf story, which he was using then mainly to hustle coeds, often those on whom one had sort of had one’s own eye. Most of them, as I recall, went for it. Each time he told it, of course, he rewrote, so it got better and better.

The monkey demon or mandrill-at-the-window story didn’t play as well. Some only thought he was being dramatic, others thought temporarily insane. When winter boredom set in there was always a chance of entertainment in sneaking up to Fariña’s window at unlikely hours and making what we imagined to be mandrill faces and sounds, in hopes of some reaction. But he would only half-smile, and shrug, as if to say, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

But it remains one of the most effective of the many dark scenes in this novel. The darkest of all, and I think the best written, is the sequence that takes place in revolutionary Cuba, in which Gnossos’s best friend is accidentally killed. Although a few pages of campus rioting come later, the true climax of the book is in Cuba. Back in his Hemingway phase, Fariña must have seen that line about every true story ending in death. Death, no idle prankster, is always, in this book, just outside the window. The cosmic humor is in Gnossos’s blundering attempts to make some kind of early arrangement with Thanatos, to find some kind of hustle that will get him out of the mortal contract we’re all stuck with. Nothing he tries works, but even funnier than that, he’s really too much in love with being alive, with dope, sex, rock ’n’ roll—he feels so good he
has
to take chances, has to keep tempting death, only half-realizing that the more intensely he lives, the better the odds of his number finally coming up.

Close to the end of his last term at Cornell, Fariña seemed to grow impatient. He had a job waiting in New York, and they didn’t care, he said, if he got his degree or not. There may also have been some romantic disaster involving Kristin McCleod’s original, though we never talked about it and all I heard was vague gossip. We were in one class together that term, and studied for the final at Johnny’s Big Red Grill over bottles of Red Cap ale. Next day, no more than half an hour into the exam, I was scribbling away at an essay question, caught a movement, looked up, saw Fariña handing in his exam book and leaving. He couldn’t have been finished. As he came past I raised my eyebrows and he gave me that smile and that shrug. This was the last I saw of him for a while.

He went to New York, to Cuba, married Carolyn Hester, got a career in music going, toured overseas, lived in London, Paris, got divorced—then it was back to California, Boston, California again. Sometimes we wrote letters, sometimes—not often enough—we’d run into each other. We talked on the phone the day before he died. His book had just come out. We arranged to connect in L.A. in a few weeks. The next evening I heard the news over an AM rock ’n’ roll station. He’d been riding on the back of a motorcycle on Carmel Valley Road, where a prudent speed would have been thirty-five. Police estimated that they must have been doing
ninety, and failed to make a curve. Fariña was thrown off, and killed.

I called his house—no answer. Called the AP in Los Angeles—they couldn’t confirm anything for sure. It never occurred to me to call the hospital up there. I didn’t want to hear what they’d say. The only person I found in that night was a long-distance friend who’d also known him at Cornell. She didn’t have any more solid news than I did. Both still hoping, hope fading, we talked for a long time, into the middle of the night, about Fariña and the old days, in our voices the same mixture of exasperation and love most of us had always felt whenever his name came up. Finally, toward the end of the conversation, she laughed. “Just thought of something. If
that fucking Fariña
,” she said, “has only been seriously hurt—if he goes up to the edge of It, and then comes back, you realize—we’re
never
going to hear the end of it.”

—T
HOMAS
P
YNCHON

This one is for
MIMI

“I must soon quit the Scene . . . ”

Benjamin Franklin
in a letter to George Washington
March 5, 1780

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

Gnossos finds a Home. Fitzgore and Heffalump see a Ghost. A plan for Sustenance is Conceived. A checkout woman meets the King of Mexico.

CHAPTER 2

The Fraternity Smoker Type Thing. The Paregoric Pall Mall. The saga of the Enema Bag begins. Pamela Watson-May: Hooray and up she Rises.

CHAPTER 3

Good morning, blues. Heffalump as Mother. Monsignor Putti. A First Encounter with the Dean of Men.

CHAPTER 4

Blacknesse and the Dark Goddess. Gnossos tells an Antecedent Tale. A curry dinner of sorts. Mrs. Blacknesse in a sari procures a pair of tweezers for feeding a spider to a Carnivorous Plant. Nostalgia and Ferment at Guido’s Grill (or) The Plot Thickens. A second encounter with the Dean of Men.

CHAPTER 5

Jimmy Brown the Newsboy? Two Curious Strangers, The Bullwhip, and the Artificial Eye. A most Peculiar proposition. L’Hopital’s Rule and the homicidal return of Watson-May. Apotheosis in the Rucksack.

CHAPTER 6

Morning Martinis and Strontium 90: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. The Beagle and the Bunny-Rabbit (an Interlocking Epiphany). The happy little Grüns, the Greenhouse, and the pot of Pot. The Great Rhetorical Question. Heffalump as Insightful Mother. A Credo?

CHAPTER 7

Zombis, Vampires, and the girl in the Green Knee-Socks.

CHAPTER 8

Love among the Black Elks. Gnossos tells another Tale. Mojo and the Masochistic Microbus.

CHAPTER 9

The Voice of the Turtle, Gnossos as Prometheus. The Object found dwelling in the Commode.

CHAPTER 10

A Dream before Dinner. The Virgins Two: a Confrontation. A Paradox in Indelible Ink.

CHAPTER 11

Oeuf. The Plot persists in Thickening.

CHAPTER 12

Yea, Hooray, the Happy Couple. Madness through Pragmatic Method.