My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (16 page)

What else is new: he was horny! As he moved on he noticed the petrified landscape closely frigid under its mineral snow from the heated train window. And the Mainz professors waved goodbye to him from the sternly rooted old platform. Lunch with them in the campus restaurant hadn't been bad: but he was still hungry. Who said food was a substitute for Dancing in the Dark? Mason's response to the deepness of his cravings was a wire-cable spinning fast from the winch deep in the forecastle of his stomach: a tricked Pavlovian dog unable to salivate. With wings he could fly into the arms of romance but those shabby inherited gadgets were things of the past: he was no pretty flycatcher with a red breast although he did sport a rather brown tail. Tale? Back in the city: Frankfurt blinked its new facade so persistently that it was difficult to glimpse the buried gemstones, crusts and relics of its ancient temperament and pulse: in the hotel room he was restless—too restless to even jackoff. That night he'd speak at the University of Frankfurt,
but.
Like a politician on the trail he'd give them a pep talk, a slap on the back and pull their leg. He turned on the radio: Chopin's Mazurka in C Minor, Opus Thirty-three, Number Four. Switched it off. He had all afternoon. Shit. Why didn't they plan these things better? He went out. Outside in front he leaned into a taxi and asked the driver in an honest and unemotional voice if he knew a whorehouse. Sure. Mason got in. The cabbie drove fast. Took Mason to a residential area. Stopped. “Hokay.” The house was respectable, quiet. But Mason made the driver wait till he was sure—of what he wasn't quite sure. Then when the man at the door invited him in Mason turned and signaled to the cabbie who hit the gas. Here the game was simple: since Mason was the trick he had to sit at the bar and watch the porno flick while surveying the “girls.” The gentleman who'd let him in took his coat then served as bartender and made him a scotch. He struck a match to a fresh Camel. Soundtrack to the flick was funny: Uh ah uf oh ooooh yes guud agh! I'm coming! and the stupid inevitable withdrawal at the point of orgasm: to say see guys I did it I'm a big boy, see! It wasn't a busy night: that was clear. Young woman
in a black satin evening gown on the stool next to him. Others over on the couch. One down the bar. Black Satin with dark hair had a certain
pull.
She wasn't sipping real liquor he could tell. But her cigarette was real. He knew she knew he was shy or pretending to be. She finally turned to him. “You interested in sex?” He was. She told him it'd cost him seventy deutschmarks for a face to face fuck. Fancier action cost more. This wasn't highway robbery, so . . . On the way upstairs the intercom gave the fireworks of Tchaikovsky. Her name she said was Musa. His was Vincent Van Gogh. She laughed. Well, getting to a point earns a gold star. In the room she put out her Peter Stuyvesant. “Come.” She led him to the wash basin, unzipped his pants, fished around inside his underwear for his cock, pulled it out. She clinically inspected his organ. She wet the soap. As she washed his cock with soothing warm water and gentle strokes she wanted to know if he was American. Yes. Was he from California. Yes. Why not. He gave her a silkscreen picture of his charming past. He unzipped her dress on request and gave her the bread also on request. Musa, naked, pushed her stomach out. “I got this disgusting belly. See.” She'd been holding it in inside her satin. “Isn't it disgusting?” It was. But her arms were thin, so were her thighs. She had a pretty face too. But that belly was the pits. This Musa had earnest little dimples behind her knees. He had a semi-erection despite her dispassionate touch: wild broncos galloped along his scalp, down the veins of his thighs. He was trying to remember where this damned
washing
ritual had happened before, as he got into bed with Musa.
Ah! Voila!
Professor Sandra Pirsig in Seattle—she'd done that. Imagine that! He didn't imagine her performance had been for the purpose of detached inspection. Pirsig did it, he thought, to give him pleasure. What an egomaniac! To dawdle before his shrine!? Who's to say Pirsig wasn't a secret health conscious nut. Herpes epidemic, ya know. Negative reinforcement—or positive? Remember? They got together on his last night. He didn't especially
like
her: her manner was abrupt, she talked big city-fast, was frantic and smoked too much: when he kissed her her breath
tasted of lye and metal. For every Camel he lighted she smoked six Salems. Not in English, she taught philosophy and shared with him this: “I'm working on Kant.” He grunted his brittle interest and she went no further. Pirsig had bad skin: yellowish. She suffered some sort of affliction which claimed every inch of her body: face too. “Nerves, says my doctor.” Her hair was the color of a marmot's pelt. As she drove he sensed—feared?—he might have to
deal
with her: he
was
horny. But—. In the motel's parking lot sitting in the car, Pirsig told him her life story: she'd been a bright girl who'd grown up in Manhattan where she attended Spence. Smart as a whip she went to Harvard with honors while others her age were still in high. She earned a Bachelor of Arts then took her doctorate at Yale. Her father was a psychiatrist with a famous practice on Fifth and Eighty-second and her mother, before her younger brother was born, was a nurse. When she finished she bluntly asked: “You want to fuck?” In the room she did the warm-water wash routine over the face-bowl. He tried not to focus on the pimples on her face chest arms thighs. “ . . . he said they'll go away but'll probably leave permanent scars.” Now his erection wasn't all that terrific. It didn't help that she made a lot of lunatic noise while they fucked: she reminded him of a bad porno flick. Also while humping away with her he imagined her inflammation oozing onto his own skin and causing—certainly by morning—eruptions he'd be stuck with for life. As she flailed and screamed Mason couldn't figure why he was riveted to such a crazy act, such self-destruction. He'd die in an acne shitstorm! Pumping away in this casuality of an exclusive, guarded childhood of sharp-talk, corrosive, savvy, money and tedia, Mason remembered the crowded sadness in his own childhood of meanness. The memory swam up through his motion. After the act, she started on his Camels. All the Salems gone. “I try to stay with filters but I really prefer a
real
cigarette.” Now the talk was of her bad marriage. Hubby intended to be a professor too but ended up dropping out of Harvard in the first year of grad school. She buckled down to her studies and he went off searching for dope in Bangladesh Uruguay Malaysia Fiji and
Malagasy. Last she heard he was sane again and running a Half-Way House in Boston. After the marriage she wrote her first
real
book:
Women and Logic in the Nineteenth Century
. Her dissertation,
The Feminist Challenge to The Age of Reason
, remained unpublished. She said her biggest problem as an intellectual woman was loneliness and an inability to find a “decent” man. Trapped by her smartness, her profession, her only friends were women, other feminists. Mason was sleepy. Finally when she shut up and sleep came it was restless. She kept tossing and getting up to piss and smoke, waking him time and again. Once when he was snoring she shook him violently and asked him to blow his nose—even handed him a tissue. Jez.

Now here in Frankfurt after getting his cock washed he was led by it to the bed. Musa sat him down on the sagging side and squatted before him holding a condom.
Whhhhhat
? This wasn't in the deal! “No.” “Yes, is necessary. Is good to prevent disease.” “But I—” “Cost you another thirty-five deutschmarks to leave it off.” (She'd already put the seventy in her little purse.) His erection lost some of its headiness. Some sexual sendoff! Mason decided not to give in. She went ahead with the pre-wet membranous sheath. Cold and distracting. Harnessed, he didn't feel up to foreplay one tiny bit. Musa got on the bed and opened her thighs. Yet somehow even with the rubber wall between them the tango was intense and sweet with calm ballet-motions strangely mixed in. He made better deeper wider richer contact here than with tannic Pirsig. When finished Musa encouraged him to come again for a mere twenty more. No thanks my dear fraulein. When they returned to the bar downstairs three other men were there watching the tangle, slipping-and-sliding on the screen. In the back seat of the taxi, he felt unsatisfied, slightly depressed. A sense of futility took him.
At a certain point he paid the cabbie. Night air was biting cold. Suddenly he was in a bright winter crowd in some shopping center or a mall.

Herr Bend, a writer of perverse novels, handed Mason an autographed copy of his latest. “They made me sign a contract at gunpoint for this one.” He laughed so hard he turned into a Grosz-face in
Widmung an Oskar Panizza:
blasphemy was oozing out of his skin, red as burned crosses. “Let's be on our way. We'll be late for The Event.” Mason, pretending he remembered, slapped Herr Bend's shoulder. “I'll saddle up my sorraia. Did you come in your usual Kindl-Brauerei truck? Why'd you haul those barrels around? What's in ’em?” “Never mind. I'm doing research for my next.” Mason left the tip and the waiter, as lively as a Mendelsohn composition, thanked him as they stood. Outside on the bustling plaza a couple of giggling guys rushed up to them and playfully punched both in the mouth. Herr Bend's nose started bleeding. Mason tried to kick one of the jokers as they fled. He checked himself for broken bones. The taxi ride over to The Oyster had its merits: traffic was orderly, efficient. A crew was shooting a film in the dark park. Herr Bend kept slapping Mason's knee. “Fritz Rasp? No. I think he died. Valeska Gert? No more proletarians around?” Mason sneezed: “Was Brecht a communist?
Kuhle Wampe
.” But before the dirty writer could answer they were out. Herr Bend slipped immediately on a banana peeling. He slid toward The Oyster's brick wall and banged his head on the metal door as he fell, loosing his bleached wig. The Event had already started. Theatre was fun? But wait this was not German theatre: not
De Bettler
not
Die Wandlung
not the ghost-prisoners of
Hölle Weg Erde
climbing the narrow stairway from hell up to an unpromising earth. This, yes yes, was still hell: red hot and grimy. This was
Rock. And weren't those people up there on the stage the same ones he'd performed with in London? The stage was crowded: musicians with yellow or green hair played instruments that released swine-grunts and bat-farts and . . . Yes, that
was
the great Sebastian! He'd changed the color of his hair to a blazing red with streaks of yellow. He was shouting above the voices of Silvia, Cornelia and Estelle, creaming the audience: “Give me your weak, your hungry, your poor/ I'll make gunpowder out of them!/ Lend me your ear: I'll bite it off/ and stick a firecracker up your asshole!/” Sylvia was screaming one long streak of Munch-pain. At the end of it she spat blood: “I shit on the mysterious silhouettes/ of your limited warfare-bombs! I crap on your stockpiles!/” And, just like at the Young Vic, Tamara Polese, still in her Nazi uniform, was running about the stage shouting her own mean verse and swinging the butt of her rifle at everybody in sight. She knocked Cornelia's teeth out and stuck the barrel of her rifle up naked-Etta Schnabel's cunt and pulled the trigger. Etta flew all over the place, pieces of her hit the ceiling and dripped down on those still singing and dancing. Then a team of police officers entered the theatre from a side door. Mason and Herr Band leaped up. But they didn't move in time to avoid the nightsticks. Mason's head was bashed in and everything went black. When he came to he was in the back of a lighted speeding van. His head was cradled on Tamara's lap. She was stroking his bloody forehead. “Who's driving and where're we going?” “Ssssh. Don't talk.” The van was crowded. Where was Herr Bend? “He died for a noble cause. It was better,” Tamara whispered, “than going by way of ulcers or diarrhea or colitis or a ruptured thyroid.” Mason felt his swollen joints: felt like he'd fallen down a ski slope with teethgrinding intensity. He felt the humiliation of the hotel doorman demoted to toilet attendant: long live Murnau! A couple of feet away, Sylvia and Estelle were trying to put the pieces of Etta Schnabel back together. Cornelia was resting in Sebastian's arms. She was grumpy. Said she felt depressed. Hadn't had a bowel movement in days. Had a urinary tract infection. Strep throat was surely coming next. Sebastian,
bleeding from the ears, tried to soothe her. She said her muscles were too tight. Mason suddenly became conscious of his own tense muscles. Somebody up in the cab was stuttering. Mason's tension headache was paralyzing. Whiplash and arthritis had a good grip on him. Tamara said, “At least you're not on your way up some Fritz Lang-stair-way of Death. Okay Doctor Mabuse? You can trust all of us. Well take your blood pressure, tell you if you have irregular heartbeat, flutters, palpitations. Your hands are cold. Where we're going you can let blind men count your money. We're gonna make a whole new world safe for the swinging moods of a new self emerging from the old one.”

This was hectic ego work. The train along the Rhine took Mason's vermin-breath and held it somewhere inside. Snow covered hibernating vineyards and the torrid castles up the hillsides matched his own desperate frost . . . Then he arrived at the dreamy (deceptively quiet?) little city of Aachen . . . In the night he slept through the gunfire of his own plot: Clarence Mckay was after him, and this time, jack, with cannons and machine guns! Mason couldn't find a rock to hide behind. In his hasty flight he bumped into William Carlos Williams, on a beach somewhere. Bill grabbed the shaking man by his shoulders and spat these words into his face: “Nine-tenths of our lives is well forgotten in the living. Of the part that is remembered, the most had better not be told . . . / We always try to hide the secret of our lives from the general stare. What I believe to be the hidden core of my life will not easily be deciphered.” Doc's speech only made matters worse. Despite Mason's respect for the poet. His plot still had him in a fit. It wasn't simply that he was not achieving what Public Enemy “told him to do, he hadn't even yet embarked on the discovery of the basis for his complex identity. Well, he might be able to fly again but he'd have to swim, like Shine, to Greece,
to find parts of the puzzle, then, surely to Africa for the other parts. France wasn't enough. England? Forget slavery. Germany was as useless as his “false” past. And, hell, he had to do something about his own paranoia! Everybody wasn't an enemy! . . . He lost himself in a network of beach rocks. True, he wasn't driven to avenge himself any longer. No need. Since leaving the states he knew he'd changed. His needs were now different. How? Well, he got up from sleep. But it didn't make any difference. He sat in the dark and looked into a patchy bed of lights from beyond the Gaestehaus window. One had to become Somebody or Nobody. Odysseus? Since arriving in Europe hadn't he reached a murky point? He couldn't go back. He was now assigned by desperation and the sense of urgency he felt always to go on, to discover the Whole Picture. The parts were everywhere. That was too bad. Their discovery though was his only hope of building a Self firm enough to withstand the threat of “The Other.” The Other? One was driven for reasons other than one's shortcomings, one's mirror. The more he thought of it the more convinced he was that Africa would offer a way in. Why not Italy and Greece, too. Anyway, keep moving! He made up his mind to plunge, to swim . . . Without turning on the bedside light, Mason began work on his novel-in-progress. In the morning at the Technische Hochschule he wanted to give those bright German kids the best prose he could produce. The quality of his life depended on it. It was no longer just the blank page he had to face: