Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (15 page)

twenty-two

In the dead of the night, I started to write. If Steve wanted more pages, I'd give him more pages. If Sylvia wanted more action, I'd give her more action. But first I felt it was necessary to write a true homage to Clyde and Fox. As characters, I had them down cold by now, I thought, and certainly I could complete the novel out of my own imagination, which is what every reader would believe it to be anyway. I did not need any longer to faithfully chronicle their ridiculous little hobbies and adventures out of the whole cloth of their existence. They were the characters and I was the author. I could now make them do or say anything I wanted. Maybe Clyde had been right all along. Maybe I
was
destroying them. What an odd occupation I had, I thought wryly. I was destroying them in order to create them. But it had to be done. And yet, I missed them. I realized, almost wistfully, that I might never see them again.

I started with Fox, hearing his voice in random past conversations, empathizing with his nuthouse background, getting inside his head. I felt like Faulkner, throwing the story to the winds. I felt like McMurtry, writing two hundred pages of boring shit before I really got going. I felt like solitary J.D. Salinger, who only mixed interpersonally to get inside the heads of real people and then cut them out of his life and nailed their hearts and souls to the page with a million typewriter keys. I felt like Fox and I felt crazy like a fox and I felt nothing. I said my farewells to Fox by writing a sort of stream-of-nervousness soliloquy in his voice and putting him back in a mental hospital:

A mental hospital is not always as romantic a place as it's cracked up to be. You always think of Ezra Pound or Vincent van Gogh or Zelda Fitzgerald or Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath or someone like that. Not that all the above-mentioned people resided in mental hospitals. All of them probably belonged there, but so do most people who don't reside in mental hospitals. I know Emily Dickinson never went into a mental hospital, but that's just because she never went anywhere except for brief walks in her garden with her dog, Austin. If she'd ever gone into a mental hospital and talked to the shrinks for a while, they never would have let her out. She might've done some good work there, but that would've been her zip code for the rest of her life. Now you take Van Gogh, for example. He lived in one with a cat and did some good work there. They put him in for wearing lighted candles on his hat while painting The Night Cafe. Today, the arbiters of true greatness, Japanese insurance companies, have determined that his work is worth millions. Sylvia Plath I don't know too much about except she wrote good prose and maybe some great poetry and then she put her head in an oven and killed herself, so by then it was too late to get her into a mental hospital. Everybody thought she was crazy for many years until her husband's second wife also croaked herself and then people began to wonder if maybe Silvia had been all right and it was her fucking husband who was crazy. I mean, to have two wives conk on you like that, each one topping herself) on your watch, pretty well indicated to most people outside mental hospitals that if that husband wasn't crazy, there was something wrong with him. Now Ezra Pound I don't know a hell a lot about except he hated Jews and still managed to do some pretty good work in wig city. Hitler and Gandhi, both of whom belonged in wig city, for different reasons, no doubt, somehow managed to avoid the nuthouse circuit. They did , as we know, each spend a bit of time in prison, which in some ways is not as bad as being in a mental hospital except that you come out with an asshole the size of a walnut. In a sense, Hitler and Gandhi, who represent polar opposites of the human spirit, each found himself in prison where the absence of freedom and the distance from their dreams may have contributed to their achieving some pretty good work. Hitler, who hated Jews almost as much as Ezra Pound, wrote Mein Kampf, which was almost immediately translated into about fourteen languages and would have made him quite a favorite at literary cocktail parties if he'd been willing to stop there. Unfortunately, he couldn't hold a candle to Anne Frank. Gandhi, who spent his time in prison listening to a South African mob singing, "We're gonna hang ol' Gandhi from a green apple tree," did some scribbling of his own but mostly realized that he was tired of the London yuppie-lawyer drag and it was time for visions and revisions both sartorially as well as spiritually. But God only knows how Hitler and Gandhi, who were both interesting customers, would have fared had they been incarcerated in mental hospitals instead of prison, As it was, each man found himself creating and writing in the calaboose, something that almost never happens in a mental hospital because shrinks are constantly prescribing meds that keep you invariably, perpetually, hopelessly lost. Speaking of lost, Zelda Fitzgerald certainly qualifies in that category and technically, I suppose, she was confined to a "sanitarium," which was not truly a mental hospital if you want to be a purist about it but no doubt still probably had a sign in the lobby that read: "This Is Tuesday. The Next Meal Is Lunch." She'd been drinking a lot of her meals, evidently, and so they'd put her in this sanitarium in Asheville, North Carolina. The irony of the whole situation was that the sanitarium was in Asheville and the place burned down one night with Zelda and a fairly good-sized number of other no-hopers inside. I've wondered why God so often seems to send fires and other catastrophes to sanitariums and mental hospitals. It's kind of like swerving to hit a school bus. But all that being as it may, it's just ironic, I think, that the sanitarium burned down and that it was in Asheville. But before Zelda came along to screw things up, I was commenting on the fact that mental hospitals are far sadder and more sordid places than you'd think, as all these colorful, fragile, famous, ascetic people populate them. I mean, it isn't all Van Gogh and his cat. I mean, there are men following you with their penises shouting, "Am I being rude, Mother?" in frightening falsetto voices. People in mental hospitals shriek like mynah birds all the time. And masturbate. Dylan Thomas was a good one at that. He used to masturbate a lot but I don't think they ever put him in a mental hospital though God only knows he belonged there. And speaking of God only knows, Brian Wilson undoubtedly belongs there, too, except what would happen to the Beach Boys if you put Brian Wilson in the nuthouse? The only one of those guys who was really a surfer was Dennis Wilson. And you know what happened to him? He drowned! Ah well, the Channel swimmer always drowns in the bathtub, so they say. But I suppose I've come pretty far afield in this tawdry little tale that the shrinks would assuredly call a rambling discourse. If getting to the point is the determinant of whether or not you're crazy, then half the world's crazy. Trouble is, it's the wrong half. I mean, whoever said anything important by merely getting to the point? Did guys like Yeats and Shelley and Keats—who, by the way, all belonged in wig city—ever get to the point? I mean, what's the point of getting to the point? To show some shrink with a three-inch dick that you're stable, coherent, well-grounded? Wait—I haven't even gotten to Jesus yet. Sooner or later everybody in a mental hospital gets around to Jesus and it's a good thing that they do because I'll let you in on a little secret: Jesus doesn't talk to football coaches. He doesn't talk to televangelists or Bible Belt politicians or good little church workers or Christian athletes or anybody else in this God-fearing, godforsaken world. The only people Jesus ever really talks to are people in mental hospitals! They try to tell us but we never believe them. Why don't we, for Christ's sake? What have we got to lose? Millions of people in mental hospitals who say they've talked to Jesus can't all be wrong. It's the poor devils outside mental hospitals who are usually wrong or at least full of shit and that's probably why Jesus never talks to them. Anyway, you can probably tell by the fact that I'm not employing any paragraphs and the fact that this little rambling discourse tends to run on interminably that this looks like a mental-hospital letter itself, if that's what you think, you're right, because I am in a fucking mental hospital as I'm writing this tissue of horseshit and it's not one of those with green sloping lawns in that area between Germany and France that I always forget the name of. Hey, wait a minute! It's coming to me. Come baby come baby come baby come. Alsace-Lorraine! That's where the really soulful mental hospitals are. Unfortunately, I'm writing this from a mental hospital on the Mexican-Israeli border and I'm waiting for a major war to break out and they don't have any green sloping lawns. They don't even have any slopes, all they have is a lot of people who talk to Jesus, masturbate, and don't believe they belong in here. It's not a bad life, actually, once you get the hang of it, unless of course you hang yourself, which happens here occasionally, usually on a slow masturbation day. Anyway, the reason I'm telling you all this is because I don't really belong here. I've told the doctors. I've told the shrinks. I've even told a guy who thinks he's Napoleon. The guy's six feet tall, weighs two hundred and fifty pounds, and he's black, and he thinks he's Napoleon. I probably shouldn't have told him in the first place. The other day a woman reporter came in here from the local newspaper to do some kind of Geraldo-like exposé on the place and she interviewed some of the patients and one of them was me. I told her I was perfectly sane and I didn't belong in here. She asked me some questions and we chatted for a while and then she said that I sounded really lucid and normal to her and she agreed that I really didn't belong in here. Then she asked me, since I seemed so normal, what I was doing here in the first place and I told her I didn't know, that I just woke up one day and here I was and now the doctors won't let me out. She said for me not to worry. She said when she finished her exposé on my condition, these doctors would have to let me out. Then she shook my hand and headed for the door. About the time she put her hand on the doorknob, I took a Coke bottle and threw it real hard and hit her on the back of the head.

"Don't forget!" I shouted.

twenty-three

Writing Fox's little diatribe from the mental hospital in what I imagined to be his own words and voice made me laugh and then made me start to feel lonely. I hated to admit it but I missed that visionary troublemaker more than I'd expected. And, if I permitted myself to think about it, I missed Clyde even more than I missed Fox. And most of all, I suppose, I missed that warm, alive feeling I usually had when the three of us were together. Writing about their exploits just wasn't quite the same as doing crazy things with them. What if the two of them had suddenly moved to another city or another country and I never saw either of them again in my life? Maybe Trump had pressed charges and made things hot for them. Maybe they'd just decided to let their Gypsy souls lead them out of town or even across the pond. I would, of course, be out ten thousand dollars on Fox's bail. But also, I thought, I would be out much, much more in the coin of the spirit, the money of childhood that can never truly be saved or counted. They would be free birds flying forever in someone else's sky, and I would be left to pick up the pieces of our star-crossed ephemeral friendship, trying to put it back together one little word at a time. It was a daunting, lonely task but it was a task I would not shirk. It was, I believed sadly and sincerely, what my life had come to. I now possessed what part of me had always wanted, I suppose: a writer's life. A romantic, monastic, lonely, mad, eviscerated, bloodless, empty, vicarious, melancholy, self-pitying, world-weary, futile, tormented, yet oddly glamorous writer's life. If I'd been writing a hundred years earlier, I'd probably have been working in a chilly garret in Paris or in a damp and windswept castle in Scotland. Anything to be cold.

It was very late, indeed, and I was thinking about Clyde. How I felt when she gave my hand a quick little squeeze. When she smiled that crooked, seductive smile that promised things I probably now would never receive. The way my life seemed to always brighten when she called me Sunshine.

Books get dusty. Paper is such a lonely thing. Paper is so sad before you fill it with ridiculous little words. It makes you feel like Dr. Zhivago after losing Lara, gazing out over an endless, aching, snowy plain of nothing but sorrow and empty and white. There is nothing to replace a lover, nothing to replace a friend. But that is where you have to start if you want to be a writer or an artist or a man.

I thought of the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: "It is a better thing by far that the lad should break his neck, than that you should break his spirit." Was it actually in the realm of conceivability that I could cause harm to the spirits of my maybe erstwhile, maybe forever friends merely by capturing their odd little hobbies and their great hopeless dreams and thoughts in a web of words? Clyde could not have been right about that, could she? She was somewhere out there in the rest of the world and I was here alone in the basement with only cigarettes and coffee, a little lamp, and a growing pile of numbered pages for companions on a journey of bleakness and despair. Could the mere mechanics of writing, chronicling, articulating an abstract notion such as love or life or friendship make that very entity go away? Wasn't writing just another occupation like any other, only more futile and perverse? Did Clyde truly have some Gypsy background similar to the American Indian that ingrained in her being, like a flashing railroad crossing sign, not to let anyone take a photograph of you for fear it would surely suck away another small piece of your soul and keep you from becoming an Indian when you grew up?

I was thinking about Clyde. I was writing about Clyde. I was just getting ready to light a cigarette. That's what I was doing when the buzzer sounded for the front door. It startled me slightly. Except for Clyde and Fox, I was not in the habit of receiving visitors in the middle of the night. I walked warily over to the intercom, pushed the button, and said, "Who's there?" It was not a very original thing to say but at that hour of the night I was fresh out of creativity. What creativity I'd had was undoubtedly lying somewhere on a snowy plain in Russia. A voice came back to me through the intercom. It was a warm, familiar, feminine voice. It said, "Let me in or I'll blow your house down." I buzzed the front door open immediately and opened the door to my apartment and in walked Clyde, fragrant and cool as a sailor's dream.

"You've done a lot with this place," she said facetiously, looking around the barren flat. Her eyes at last settled on the typewriter and the stack of pages. "You've done a lot," she said again, softer this time.

Impulsively, she walked around the desk, picked up a page, and casually perused the manuscript. She put it down and picked up another. In the lamplight, her countenance was that of a porcelain poker face and she looked as beautiful as I'd ever seen her. I'd never been very objective, of course, when it came to Clyde. I stood there watching her quietly as she read two or three more pages and put them back on the desk. Then she stared out the window into the darkness and her face seemed to soften, making her slightly less imperial and, if possible, even more attractive.

"Not bad," she said at last. "I like the 'crooked seductive smile.' "

"I do, too," I said. "It's very seductive. Not to mention crooked."

"It's comforting to know the book is good."

"Did you ever doubt it?"

"Not really, Walter. It might just be kind of fun to be a literary heroine. And speaking of heroin, don't believe all that gibberish Fox is feeding you about my being a heroin addict. Fox was the heroin addict. I didn't even know him then but he's mentioned it to me many times. He's just trying to stir up a little trouble between us. He is a world-class troublemaker, you know."

"I do know. Were you really in a carnival?"

"The carnival was allegorical. Just about everything in my life is allegorical, now that I think about it. With me, you've got to read between the lines, or, in your case, write between the lines. Whatever you want me to be, you'll probably discover that I am."

"What if I want to make an honest woman out of you?" I said.

"What if I just want to suck your cock?" she replied.

She looked through me then and her eyes flashed like tilt lights on a pinball machine. There was no smile on her lips, crooked, seductive, or otherwise. She was being serious. Even more frightening, she seemed to mean what she said. I held my breath. For that defining moment, all of New York City appeared to have come under a storybook spell. All traffic and sound and belief were suddenly suspended in a vacuum of something close to childlike awe. Then our eyes met, our bodies standing as motionless as statues in a park. When she spoke again, it was in a husky whisper.

"Well," she said, "do we have any takers?"

Somewhere in the night, a statue in the park raised his hand and it was me. That was all Clyde needed. She came around the desk like a madwoman. Soon I was on the floor, my pants were off, and her head was between my thighs devouring my manhood like some carnivorous creature on the African veldt. Occasionally, I could catch the flash of her eyes as her hands tightened around my legs and her head began to bob robotically. She probably would have sent my penis to Venus quite rapidly if I hadn't noticed, on a downward bob cycle, that a figure was standing at the window.

Lying on my back, I was able to get up on my elbows high enough to obtain an unimpeded view on the following clown cycle. Incredible as it seemed, Fox was standing outside the window wearing some kind of night-vision goggles over his eyes. Normally, this would have been enough to have made anybody's pasta at least slightly al dente, but Clyde was doing something different now and it seemed to be keeping everyone in the game. I became suddenly aware that she had taken both of my balls in her mouth and was making achingly slow, ruthless circles with her head, first going in one direction for a few passes, then reversing and going in the other. I laid my head back on the floor and closed my eyes.

Then several things happened at once. My body started to tremble and I knew it would be only a matter of moments before the hostages would be released, yet, at the same time, I could hear an incessant buzzing noise in my head. I couldn't tell at first from what point the noise was coming. All I knew for sure was that I was coming. I thought that the sexual act had been so powerful that an auditory hallucination had accompanied the climax. Then I heard a disembodied voice that I gradually realized was emanating from the intercom.

"Walter, are you there?" it said. "Open up! It's me. Clyde."

Like a man in a dream I walked over to the intercom, buzzed her in to the building, and opened my door. Moments later, Clyde came in and appeared to be looking at me rather strangely.

"You seem out of breath, Walter," she said. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," I said. "In fact, I was just-um-thinking about you."

"Only
thinking
about me?"

"Yes, of course," I said, recovering quickly. "I haven't seen you for a while and I've missed you."

"Let's go for a walk," she said.

"A walk? It's almost two o'clock in the morning."

"What else have you got to do?" she said.

We walked in silence for a while, taking in the nocturnal sights of the city. There were more people on the streets than you would have thought at that hour, stragglers, hell-raisers, lost boys and girls, denizens of the night. At one point, Clyde took my hand and gave it a little squeeze and things were almost all right for a time. Then I started feeling like a man in a dream again. I nearly found myself wondering if I was a man walking with a woman down a street in the night or if all this was merely taking place within the confines of my novel. And as we walked, questions popped into my mind unbidden. Was it possible for a bad man to write a good book? Could a cold, jaded, selfish man, increasingly incapable of emitting even a spark of human warmth, push little words around in such a fraudulent fashion as to fool the world into believing he'd written a decent, serviceable, even compelling novel? The answer to both of those questions I now clearly realized was yes.

And now another question came into my mind, the answer of which I was only vaguely aware: Was I rapidly, hopelessly, inexorably turning into that man?

We came upon the familiar corner where the bar known as the Unicorn had once stood. The sign was gone now, but in its place was another. It read: "Coming Soon. Grand Opening. Starbucks."

There must have still been hope for me because I could feel Clyde's heart explode as she stood beside me. Even had we known it was coming, I thought, there was nothing we could have done about it. Like it or not, it was a sign of the times. But, as we would soon discover, it would prove to be much more than that. It would mean more than societal evolution or corporate greed. It would come to represent the crowning glory of the bond of our little triumvirate, the spiritual high-water mark of that reckless, fragile entity that was Clyde and Fox and myself. Like a noxious vapor, its proud and bland confidence would come to embody the very destruction of us all.