In the Shadow of the American Dream (11 page)

He took from the window ledge over the courtyard six flights up from the street a tiny package with butter and a half stick of this French bread loaf and we spread butter over it and drank coffee heated from a small stove or hot plate and it tasted like food from the banquets of Monarchs but EVEN BETTER! I loved him madly for a moment where that sense wells up under your throat and spreads like liquor through the system—uhah! We got our stuff together and split from the house in the dawning streets and hustled past the early walkers … few out at that hour … swept into the car and rode the streets toward the St. George district to pick up my things patting each other on the knees and bellies and all excited about the country common to the senses … fall leaves skittering the streets in tiny tornadoes and drifts and turns and posters flapping and a car or two rumbling over the cobblestones and really it's that time of the morning where everything has that fictional sense of otherworldliness and foreign scope of noninhabitation … the world's woes wrapped on the edge of night waiting to be freed by movements in the street of the general population and a strong sun that'll illuminate it all to the eye of head and mind. He waited in a cafe down the block from the rue Laferriére apartment while I went up and downed a couple of cups of hot coffee and brushed my teeth and ate a couple slices of bread and snatched up some clothes and necessities for the trip, journals, etc. I talked with Pat for a little while, a necessary talk concerning some personal stuff she needed to reflect on and then rushed out of the house and into the waiting auto and we were off. We stopped somewhere outside of Paris for gas and then for coffee and small rolls for energy and continued on … transcription of the resulting conversations from the ride is almost impossible 'cause of their drift from regular conversations I grapple with in America trying to convey a thought or series of spontaneous senses—and then trying to translate what is not known or understood in the two languages and then there're the word-flights and tangents one goes on to describe the sense of a word … damn just sittin' here typetakkin' with two fingers in a flush and rush to get it all down before I fall across these fuckin' keys to bemoan the fact that I'm an open vessel right now of all the erotic and natural sensations and babblings and pulls to the unknown … a frightful and exhilarating sense where all is bared and I come face to face on common ground with a sense of my own spirit and life and man there is absolutely no avoiding it … it looks ya in the eye and puts a firm hand on your shoulder and says, Kid, this is it … continue and step headlong into chance … shit … the chance to love so entirely that you merge in some sense with another head and yet that chance of being open to another knock in the head and heart if it falls through … even in the end you know that it's the gesture, that gesture towards loving that is the most important in the stream of life and consciousness and body and grace … So we're rolling along talking about the countryside which is beginning to emerge between desolate factories and civilizscapes and suburbs and now it's rolling hills of dead blond wheat and cows and sheep and moomoo animals and huge fuckin' blackbirds which give a quick example of one section of words from our mouths: He says, Ah see that bird, I like them what are they called in English? Oh uh blackbird or uh magpie … Eh? Black baird? Oui oui mugpie?… Non,
mag
-pie, like
mag
in
magazine
and
pie,
you know, like grand tart,
pie …
Oh oui, oui, well, magpie, ah! Megpie. Ah oui oui … You know those birds have special meanings surrounding them, yeah, in English they are considered thieves, voleurs, they fly in your window and steal anything shiny—rings, coins … Oh oui? Oui. Ah yes, voleurs, yes, same in French … Ah yeah? Yeah, they are my favorite birds, like Edgar Allan Poe ravens … Yeah similar to ravens … Corneille also in French … corn-kneel? Oui oui … un blackbaird … yeah … un l'oiseaux noir. Ah hmm … ah … oui oui And by this time the bird of the discussion is ten or fifteen kilometers behind us and winging off in directions of the wind and we point out other discoveries in the landscape, cows take on added pleasurable meanings and little goats and baby oinkers and the trees of soft gold floating effortlessly in the foggy distance and soon the sun has broken through the mist and I say, Yeah, a symbol, two seconds later it gets dark again with fog … secretly embarrassed at this knock at my pleasurable symbol … silly notions circling my mind … He takes my hand at times and lifts it to his mouth and sucks on my forefinger and tongues it wet chills into the palm of my hand and I'm half delirious and every time we're stuck behind a slow car on a long curved stretch, I mutter, Escargots … he giggles and says, Oui oui, and at times I reach over and caress his belly under his warm sweater and chills run through my spine and heart and my hands sweat at the palms and every so often he leans over and kisses me on the lips and I'm amazed as if it's never happened before like this … and I drift in thoughts like great collages of senses and past images of the previous evening and projected scenes of later and I get hot in the forehead almost like fever and in the midst of all this at the end or near end of the three-hour drive I get struck by this sense like some great revealing section of his mind and body has suddenly merged within my bloodstream and I'm breathing a sense of him in such a way that we are just about indistinguishable, this is all in silence in the car with landscape drifting and what I suddenly feel is that he is mine and in some sense possessed within my coarsing blood in my pores, not a selfish owning sense but just a total merge within and at that exact moment in comes arrowlike a realization that he is an entirely separate person and living independent of me and my blood and that it's a subtle unknown thing that has drawn us together that is by no means certain or everlasting and from that I feel a striking and sudden faintness, a fever in my throat and forehead and my hands tremble invisibly and I'm about to black out in this fever and wanna grab onto something for all the frightening bareness I feel like a solitary kid drifting through all this time and space and landscape searching for connection and a vast unexplainable feeling that has a tag called love … it's all here in front of me and I have fears of it ending at some indeterminable point in some future and yet feel that this has taken place as it's meant to be and whatever comes of it, continuance or ending at any time, it still has to be felt in the blood 'cause in that I have no choice … we arrive home in Hauteville la fuichard and stop in Mesnil la vigot grocery and gas station for supplies and rush on home and light a fire and there's letters waiting from Janine Vega/Charlie Plymell/Alex Rodriguez/Harold Biddle … the letters are beautiful so fuckin' great they warm an already warmed heart and Alex makes me wanna cry for the New York scenes and Charlie thrills me with his genuine talk of my manuscript having shown it to Anne Waldman and in the process of putting me in contact with German publishers for maybe my prose and he seems to enjoy my letters and look forward to 'em and then Janine with her fuckin' beautiful heart-talk of her life and sense of it and things that correlate to things I feel and don't articulate and a great poem and talk of Dennis and his lover and good commonheart sense and Harold dear Harold with his sensitive eye and heart and need for contact like all of us saying he might now go to hairdressing school 'cause bookies closed up and he's working on stories to send out to mags having not written too much before and I'm glad things have taken on perspective for him … he's going to school for high school diploma and it's weary-sad but I love him for his senses …

I let Jean-Pierre read Janine's letter he gets stuck on the slang and purposefully misspelled words, which I try to explain to him as an earthy quality and a communication removed from the bourgeois social structure, language of the street and the working class, language of the heart moving out to communicate with someone in the distance … he has difficulty understanding the letter anyway and gives up on it after a page but that's okay 'cause someday I'll speak français well enough to translate for him the deliriously beautiful content of these messages across the waters … we take a tumble on the couch and get sweaty but break it off for a long walk before sunset to the soccer field scene of glorious desperate fantasies and down into the town past the three guerrillas on the hillside rusted and popping in the elements past the gas station where the ragged little mutt yaps and squeals at us and further down around the church of that town to where a bridge crosses a stream and in the distance is green green long grass fields … Jean-Pierre says, Valleys, and Yes it is … with great forlorn cows dotting the lines of hills and meadows and small tucked farmhouses and low rolling traces of mist and sun breaking through clouds illuminating like the colored plates of magic books and we turn to this fenced-in area by the bridge with a very weary watchdog who calmly walks over to the fence, just doing my duty folks never you pay me no mind but don't be foolish enough to try and take my fish 'cause he's guarding a trout breeding pool where there's incredible high leaps of fish into the air and underwater scurrying movement of the whole load of them fighting for drifting insects and we walk all the way back up the long steep hill tossing a green apple back and forth in leaps and bounds …

We stopped on the road to ask the price of fresh-killed chicken and agreed to return and buy one in an hour after the farmer's wife kills and cleans it for us and we head home to clean veggies and drink coffee and talk and I try to explain my manuscript to him, my life and senses in a series of words and scenes and contacts and interests that takes very little time and is compact full of truths and revelations and for that I am glad for wherever this goes it will at least go openhearted …

We rush out after two hours of lolling around and talking and realize we're late for the blasted chicken and we roll down the road the air so damn crisp it frosts the windows and freezes the vision and we're alternately wiping and rubbing the windows and making turns and swerves and yeah the chicken is ready for us we yaktak with the farmer his wife and beautiful clear-eyed kids at the kitchen table and ride back and the chicken's popped into the oven and later when it's done all brown and roasted in cloves of garlic and carrots and potatoes and onions and my mouth drops at this incredible meal Jean-Pierre has come up with and we eat humming and umming and ah yeah oui oui great slurp and a li'l wine to freshen the spirit and cheese and yogurt for dessert and after that we talk about bats and owls and get into bed … so fuckin' cold without the heater working that the skin almost freezes to the sheets … he undresses quick and ouch ouch jumps beneath the sheets moaning at the freeze of them and I undress and … ah … ah … inch my way beneath the covers and we rub and warm each other up breathing hot breath on each other's bodies to chase the chill away and soon that becomes frenzy and we're getting on in the heat of delicious sexual contact the sheets go flying off it doesn't matter anymore the heat has come up from the heart into the surface of flesh and eyes glowing we roll back and forth and finally there is sleep … long restful uninterrupted smooth warm exterior interior sleep where dreams chase the hedges and dogs wheel around the sky and not a river or snake or any sexual image but the strongest one of all and its rhythms of life itself ah yeah …

Wake up this morning with him kissing my throat and ears and nibbling on my lobes and breathing warm sounds in me like life into deflated heart and it's rosy-colored sky breaking in the windows and sun soon to come around to us and coffee gets put on the stove … a hustle into warm clothes and an attack in the direction of breakfast: ham sliced up and eggs laid out over the ham till there's a delicious crispy edge to 'em and hot eye-jolting coffee and kisses across the table and we get into the car to go to the sea, chickens running about clucking crazily and we ride off windows open smoking on cigarettes and getting lost at times backtracking and finding the right directions and finally after a long ride around we get to the sea, not the same areas as I've been to before but a new one further up the coast and it's beautiful we're the only ones there in sight surrounded by huge cliff-dunes and the sandy shore curves like a serpent around for a few miles … we dodge the tides sinking in sand at spots leaping over mysterious rivulets and collecting interesting rocks. I'm looking for white rocks and smooth ones for rock paintings and he brings me some every now and then and at one point has to take a wicked piss so he says it's poetic pissing in the ocean … I say yeah it's a defiant confrontation between man and nature … watch the tide will roll away when he pisses, retreating he whizzes into the ocean and I think he looks beautiful he comes towards me and takes me in his arms and we kiss silent long and slowly lingering on the tips of tongues and the warm wind from a hidden sun behind the gauze of thin clouds comes bristling our hairlines and I remember earlier there was a phone call to his parents and he has to return to Paris this evening or early early tomorrow morning and I suddenly miss him already as I'm standing there in his arms with my mouth against his throat … with the jagged tip of a broken shell I draw Aztecian turtles and serpents and crabs and phallic shapes and he makes comments on each one according to a language composed of a series of delighted grunts and ahs and ums and we return slowly to the car after an hour of sea breeze and ride slowly home through tiny towns with smiling families and kids in French yards playing solitary games of mythological importance with themselves and great rosy handsome faces from toil and sea air and flashes of shell white teeth and we're at the turn into Mesnil la vigot having come from a different direction and there we stop again at the gas station grocery for some veggies and fruit and we head home where he transforms the chicken from last night into a great hearty stew with fresh salad and he says he relaxes when he's cooking so enjoys it and that's evident when ya sink your mouth into a forkful of this stuff juices brimming to the edge of your tongue … in the wait before it was finished he came out and sat and watched me drawing a thick serpent in India ink and water-colors on the most perfect stone in the enormous shirtful I dragged back with me about twenty-five stones and this one was round and smooth and the serpent on it was coiling in squirmy thrusts and with colors of a sad rainbow that'll never be shown in the sky in my lifetime … one area a color where I painted a thin glaze of orange around the bright red spots and then coated the orange with a thin thin layer of indigo blue so a strange and remote color like the color of the desert in its final angle came up and the bright red spots of the markings of the snake within this color were enough to make the snake wriggle right off the stone and I sprayed it with shellac and called him over to the open doorway where the sun shone strongest and showed him the finished piece which he liked a lot and then told him it was for him for a souvenir of the last two days and he smiled embarrassedly and kissed me quickly and we sat down with coffee and I told him how strange it was in the house with him because the three weeks I had spent alone I had fantasized what it'd be like to have a person with me there, a warm body to sleep with and warm heart to communicate with … I realized when we first arrived how the whole fuckin' house was stretched and hung with an enormous load of fantasy from my periods of solitude—whole images colliding in the corners of the ceiling and windows and along the grass fields outside and so I was nervous which I didn't convey to him but I think was transmitted subtly in the jerks of my hands and legs and now there was a warm fire in the fireplace and we made love on the couch and afterwards ate dinner in the kitchen talking about so many things and my French had actually improved so much over the last two days I was speaking sentences to him with occasional English thrown in when I didn't know a word. We talked about Eastern religion and I told him I didn't know much about it but had I ever the desire to get into such a thing it would indeed be some form of Eastern religion as Western ones were too prostituted and controlled and distorted by papal and clerical creeps and it was interesting what came from the conversation as he was surprised I realized certain things about the spirit and the vibrations of the spirit in all things animate and inanimate and there came that point where he had to leave and I kissed him long and slow and he left in the night out in his car me standing in the porch below the incredible freeze of stars in the sky the clearest night in a long time and the semifrozen moon bright and clear no bats wheeling around too cold for 'em and he finally backed the car out and turned waved and rolled out onto the road and I came inside and put on some music and made some coffee and sat down at the typewriter to record all this not just for posterity's sake but to fight off the woeful sense of his leaving which hits hard in the chest and the head and to keep myself doing something so I don't sink and because it's so cold in the house I'm feeling it suddenly more so now that he's gone and silence has invaded every corner and the past days have been drifting in through my head down to my feet each little moment of illumination of what he is to me suddenly coming clear and sharp and I finally broke down wailing over these fucking keys 'cause I have reached that sense where I feel a strength suddenly alive in this ol' heart of mine so new and strong and here to stay that relief brought it all out in saline water and I'm afraid to get into bed with all the senses it now holds and before he left in the silence of the dinner table he said he felt funny about leaving so soon and I tried to make him feel better by pretending it was completely understandable and that he had to go and it's been really nice that he was able to be here the last two days and then as he sat there in silence he suddenly said, Well I think of how difficult it is for you not to be able to speak to anyone around here … I said, Yeah, in the three weeks I was here alone I only spoke seven times, four times to people and three times to myself, just to hear the vocal cords buzz after an incredible period of silence where the body calms in such a way as to make you aware of sounds you never noticed before, sounds and rhythms of the woods and trees and unseen animals day and night and the hum of the ground in walking and that for those reasons I had to occasionally break the silence and exercise my own audible form of communication and he nodded in agreement and now it's late night and there is a silence composed of both the night and the absence of a fellow that I have somehow connected with so's to feel the emergence of a viable sense in my blood and bones and all I can do is lay down and rest this head and gather energy in the sleep of things and understand it all in such a way as to feel the thanks for it regardless of any outcome … and I still have the sense of him around me the taste of his flesh on my tongue among the sheets among the cool interiors of the house and the moon develops a thin haze around its shell curve and riding to the sea this afternoon I repeated slowly the sections of his body and mind that sent chills through my system until everything was covered, his face cheeks the flat rippled stomach the legs the mind the slow utterance of words the ideas that surface in loose talk the arms and thin wrists and the taste of him and the awarenesses of things going on the warmth of his brown eyes the crow black hair tattering down the sides of his neck the warm spot in the wells of his shoulders the feet and the toes and the chest and the teeth and the warm breath that tickles my sides and neck and the forehead which holds so much and the explanation he gave me of having majored in philosophy in school and how it means nothing in terms of the walking working world and I laughed and said a friend in New York took philosophy and someone once asked him what he would do with it after school was over and he said, Drive a cab … and falling into the cold cold bed alone I realized how quickly it would have been warm had he been there to touch me and talking aloud to myself to calm my senses the words coming slow from my lips saying: my hands my arms my thoughts and all I can do is write yes that's all I could do …