The World Is the Home of Love and Death (34 page)

I have special organs for intimately familiar registry—in a hug, for instance. I prefer the distances of speech: “Everything O.K. with you today?” I ask.

I hate asking this stuff. I hate my life. But to stay sane, about this stuff, and cool, and to have stamina, is male character. I used to regulate my own breathing toward a more masculine, a weightier effect by imitating the fashions of his breath, his style in the local light of the mad void of the arrival of each new moment.… The racing but tired sense of unadvisable risk and of beauty-of-a-familiar sort, the bathroom, the early morning, the tonality of things here (us with each other), afflicts me so that I
dislike
the two moles on Dad’s wide, onetime muscular, now flaccid neck midway down the side of his throat and the stipplings of shadows on his strongly bearded chin. I am caught in the dimensionality of continuance.… This is different from mere time, everything unstatuelike, everything without stillness; it seems as ornate and striking as girls’ breasts, the rhythm-beset continuance, the
logical
progression of
what-next
in the unstill, toppling moment, on top of the what-has-happened-so-far. Acts arise and fall: the axe: I find life too full of suspense.

Bones of skeletal light obliquely lie in odd reality on tiles and towel racks—shadows stretch from behind the towels at a slant toward thetile floor and the white rug. Some future or other will not happen. Some future will—incest and death. In me is a motionless and radiant air with breath unrepresented: it is a dream of an eternity of attention even while moments come without sound, without an ideological whoosh. What do things mean if life keeps happening? Meaning becomes a special project of ignorance, the soul’s
as-if-sacred-seriousness.

My prick bears a sporadic weight of hallucination. I am aware of a dirty comic thing of cunt—real and fuzzy cunt, pinkish, reddish: its grin of otherness. The sense of real cunt is obliterating. I remember Daddy in his tirade hurting me in scattered fingertip-and-toe-itchy ways. This comes back to
a sense of cunt.

“Are you daydreaming, pooper?”

I nod.

He says, “You’re young.…” Then he says, “You know enough, you know too much, I’m just a big noise from Winnetka: you got enough sense to
hee-year
a man with
good
sense?”

“What do you mean, Dad?” Pause. “Tell me what you
meant?
”

“I can’t tell you everything, I can’t give you every little thing on a plate, I can’t say it all—you have to know some things by your lonesome. Don’t be fresh—be fresh like a daisy, but don’t be fresh.”

It’s hard to talk to grownups.

“Be like the thief of Baghdad …” he says. “He has a nice smile.” A movie,
The Thief of Baghdad
, had a star, Sabu, the elephant boy who wore only a white thing over his dong and who had a thin, brown chest and a
funny
friendly servile-mischievous, deep-spirited smile.

I say as if to his ghost while he’s alive: “I’m fourteen: you’re
forty-four … Be careful of me
 …”

“What are you talking about
now?
I’m old. I’m ill. I get some advantages …” He says, “David and Saul … David and Goliath …”

I don’t get it.

He said dimly, nobly, distantly—like some old tall movie star—“How many boys have
that
with their fathers?”

“What? David and Goliath?” I don’t try to pretend he’s my friend—he’s a failed father who is ill and has some sort of fantasy about us being wartime friends.

Life is not entirely without its mercies; it is not entirely demonic or without limit. To notice the shape of Dad’s breathing is like trying to hear a sentence; to hear a sentence is like following directions to find a gas station in a strange town. My awareness of his breath, partly medical, partly embarrassed is, in the end, as if I were in the presence of a male Medusa’s face, a
merde-oozer.
He’s not going to try to grab me when I stand up. I tend to try to be stonily male in Dad’s presence, showing off.

Daddy, blond-haired, large-muscled, softening, partly rotted, laughs at something: “Ha-ha. Ha-ha …”

Part of the boy’s somewhat meager collection of intimate facts is this brief, risky stage of a tie to S. L. Silenowicz. His arms, his
neck
, his voice among the tiles (a stately baritone, jaded), the heat of his presence are part of the maybe after all truly half-sacred
dirty
vocabularies of The Real.

My father’s breath has become in these minutes a frightened snoring, a grossly skimming and scraping along sound: frightened spurts of uneven breath. He is faking it. He is awake to his power to affect me.

“You sound O.K. today …” I say and stand up.

He says, “Spare the bullshit and spoil me.” I stick out my arm to keep him at a distance and move, in my pajamas to the shower. I will undress behind the purple shower curtain.

He says, “Wiley, I’m a young man and I’m sick and I have to die. How do you think that makes me feel? I’m done for. Well, you can kiss my ass, all of you.… Christ. Hell—I’m
scared
—I’m not ashamed of it,” he says to the curtain which I am now behind. “I can’t take care of anyone, I can’t take care of
you
, I’m sick. I’m sick of being sick. I wouldn’t apologize to God Himself, do you hear me. Make God apologize to me—that’s the ticket. What do you think of that? He would if he was a gentleman and not a devil. You ever been scared? Well, what I want to tell you, my advice to you is, you want to be a goodguy, take me as I am. I don’t want to be a hero no more, no more, no more …”
No more, no more, no more
was from a jazz song. “You don’t know what it’s like to be sick …”

“I’ve been sick …”

“You’ve
never
been sick.… You’ve never been sick like this.… No one knows.
It hurts all the time.
I’m scared all the goddamned time.”

I know, you told me
, I say silently.

“IT’S TERRIBLE EVERY SINGLE MINUTE EVERY SINGLE DAY, IT’S TERRIBLE DAY AND NIGHT—YOU WANT TO SEE THE SHOW? YOU WANT TO SEE ME DIE IN LITTLE PIECES? I’m dying, you think that’s funny? You want to see the elephant die? I’m not playing anyone’s game anymore, do you hear me?” I’d turned the water on in the shower. “You can go to hell—everyone can go to hell. It can all go to hell. I don’t want any of this.… It’s not living. My heart is
no good.
And the goddamned doctors’re stupid—stupid and mean—they’re killers. What do they know? They know how to send a bill. They don’t feel anything. They don’t feel any of it.… I
am dying like a dog.…
Every son-of-a-bitch and his cousin want me to go easy on
them.…
They tell me to act like a man. I’m not gonna do it. I live on charity. I hope every last one of those sons-of-bitches has to go through what I’m going through. They can kiss my ass. I got no time for their stupid filth.”

For a moment, my mind’s defenses are peeled back like a foreskin. I don’t know what it means, the brutal excitement of being close to a man like him, to a guy who says that stuff. My eyes and mouth harden as in school when I stop listening, harden with darkness, with blindness, with sophisticated stupidity.

But then I change my mind and listen partly in retrospect: I figure Dad’s speech is man stuff. I assume S.L. is realer even than my sense of him which is real too. My real, present-tense sensibility now today is closer to hearing him than when I was young; the veils over sounds, over intentions are torn … I see that he has secret shames—and conceit. Decorums, grammars, school correctness … of the sort there is among boys not in a classroom.

I remember when my body started to get sexual in the real way, balls dropping, the first unchildish hair, the first sizable boniness here and there. Then came the change in dreams and then my face changed, my skin and the size of my lips, and then my voice altering—and my new humors,
et cetera
 … I remember how
unspeakable
in school that change was. I am interested in a know-it-all apprentice way: I’m one of those kids who sort of
personally
exist.

Childhood had seemed fantastic to me even when I was a child, the sweetness of things, the size—sometimes fantastic with disaster. Behind the curtain I have three-quarters of an erection; it is painful to me, the weird uncertainty of susceptible potency. I am a boy, an apprentice-man. Daddy said to me once,
The carrot, the carrot-dick stuff, that can k-k-kill you.…
He says now with a certain friendliness: “You have to jack off for both of us, that stuff can kill me.”

Leave me alone.…
His prying. He’d said this stuff before: nearly everything said between us has a history.
Intimacy
 …

I turn the water up louder.

Dad was an exhibitionist. He winks at me (in memory). He still has a small-town style, a kind of out-of-date vanity as an old-fashioned man, a
gentleman
—nostalgia is a form of romance among men in the Midwest. Maybe it’s always a style—sort of a
you know who I am … I am not a surprise.… A
form of seductiveness. He was in style still with rural people; this showed when he went into the VA hospital. Sometimes his sickness got worse when he was in a rage. He mostly slept in my room after I was ten years old, lived alongside me in actual days, actual nights. He lived with me, not Momma. He slept alongside my dreams at night.

Now he says, “You’re like a weed. You grow like a weed.” He doesn’t know what tone to use. “We’re a pair of Tarzans.”

No, we’re not.

We’re in a third-floor apartment; treetops alongside the sidewalk stir outside. We’re on
Kingsland Avenue
 …

I had noticed the change in all my smells. He could bear to be near that—I was surprised and thought he was nuts. My ambitions as achild changed every few months when I started to grow, when I became
a growing boy.
My inner feelings were as if written on a sheaf of papers that were crumpled into a single black-and-white wad, flowers and
no-flowers
of odd heat, faintly cold and half-understood. Businesslike daily toughness, tough-nerved realism but the realism changed day to day as I did physically, a kind of flowering, partly dirty. Even in the cold water of the kinds of shower I took, I have hottish breath as if there were now a fire in my consciousness or a lot of fires: things burning without clear, or formal, outward reason; and the recurrent smoke of this stuff choked me even in the water. The odd, gulping atop the inner heat, atop the feverish heat at moments, the queer, private smoke that makes me comical,
a fool.…
Why would my ill father
want
to be near this smelly, incomplete, smoke-ridden, fever-brained person, this skinny, early man?

Dad on the other side of the curtain says, “Are you tired of being a saint? I guess your balls dropped—or didn’t they?”

“I don’t know …” I said from inside the water. I remembered my balls hung high and being little beans and now
there they are
 … The delay or lags of the mind toward transformations … my balls had been throbbing for months.

“You got a lot to learn,” Dad says on the other side of the curtain. I’m playing a bit with my whang-ee. He says: “I’m putting ideas in your head. You got too many there already—take some advice from me: don’t be too important. Just be human. Don’t let nothing get in the way of being
human.
Believe me, I know … I learned the hard way. Love and affection come first—you know about the bluebird of happiness? Well, that’s the truth—the bluebird of happiness is right in your own backyard. So be human …”

The changing light of meaning inside a speech, the direct lying and hopeful swindling, and the hot air, and then in other phrases hopeful almost-sincerity, a hidden proposition and sincerity—
Be a fool and listen to me, let’s be fools, love me, I love you, it’s all a mug’s game, stay close to me
 … Did he sound like this all along but I was too little to get it? I used to hear differently. Jealousy and temper, I experience them, but I mostly refuse to know about them.…
Am I girlish? Am I a saint?
He has said to me,
You save my life every night—you surely do.…
He experiences less terror if I am there. I was
protected
by the big ha-ha of art which defends such phrases as
fathers-and-sons;
but I have been aware for years that most of the fathers and sons I know are in a mess. My rank
as a boy
is high because my father’s interest in me is so great. I am a star—like Sabu, in the movies.

“Elephant boy,
howdah-do, isn’t it a fine howdah-do.
Wiley, the elephant boy? Is this a ‘Sikh’ joke?”

The water is in my face. The independence of others’ wills is part of the loss of Eden; one understands Justice in the Universe differently. I am sometimes
interested
in the thing of his being interested in me and sometimes bored by it.

“Are you a rooster?” he says. “Are you crowing? Cock-a-doodle-ooo, not a cockadoodl
e-dooodooo
—I bet the hens are laying eggs for you.” His talk casts a sexual shadow. He has no money, he can’t back up his bribes now; he can’t bully anyone: he can’t buy anyone. I don’t know what he expects: S.L. was always a Big Expecter. I start to do what boys do, some boys anyway, jack off just out of range of the strange world. An act of espionage, of cleverness, of rebellion—behind the shower curtain. I am very quiet about it. An awful sweetness, an awfulness in general, a vertiginous pre-satisfaction sets in. Sensations are in as if winged motion in a gulf of simultaneous forgetfulness and omniscience. I am as if at an altitude above the multiplicity of wills in the prison house.