Some Can Whistle (7 page)

In removing myself in slow removes to Laguna Beach, Rancho Mirage, and Patagonia, I was duplicating, in high style, a self-removal I had undertaken in the sixties, in low style; in that instance I had drifted out of L.A., from cheap motel to cheap motel, East Hollywood to Azusa, Azusa to San Dimas, San Dimas to Calimesa, Calimesa to Banning, Banning to Indio, and, finally, Indio to Blythe, where, on the very edge of California, I wrote the immortal pilot to “Al and Sal.”

Once, in early life—the day after my daughter was born, in fact—I had drowned the manuscript of my failed second novel in the muddy Rio Grande near Roma, Texas. I had been in the mood to drown myself with it, but that had only been a mood, and when I imagined how horrible it would be to actually have water in my lungs I changed my mind, walked out of the river, hitchhiked to L.A., and took the Hanna-Barbera test—first step on the ladder to screenwriting stardom—passed it, and spent three years writing dialogue for cartoons.

In Blythe, ten years after I walked out of the Rio Grande, I came to another borderland defined by a river—in this case the green Colorado. I arrived in a low, almost despairing, state. The Colorado soothed me, as the Rio Grande had soothed me long before. I felt horrible, but I didn’t want to die, and I had no reason to think that I would feel any better if I crossed the flowing border into some kind of exile.

The Colorado, like all great rivers, has force as well as beauty. I walked beside it, watched it flow, skipped rocks in it, meanwhile fantasizing about recovering one or two of the relationships that I had fucked up during my decline.

The rest of my days and nights were spent in a dingy desert night stop called the Old Palm Inn, named for the one moldering old palm tree that stood in its courtyard. There I wrote the pilot which, a mere eight months later, soared into the entertainment
empyrean, to become the highest flying eagle of the ratings. Once that happened I became far too busy to walk in sadness by rivers, though I lived for a time in a riverbank condo in Studio City and from my window could see the concrete viaduct through which the Los Angeles river flows, looking like an irrigation canal that had somehow strayed into a metroplex.

When the nine years passed and “Al and Sal” ceased production and I removed myself all the way to Patagonia, Arizona, I soon discovered that the town I had chosen was only the outermost suburb of L.A. Quite a number of the glue-brained executives I had once had screaming matches with, in my imperial days in Culver City, had spacious retreats in Patagonia, too. The more determined of them raised Arabian horses and mingled freely with the fascistic old Republicans who controlled southern Arizona.

Determined to go someplace where Culver City would not be tempted to follow, I moved all the way back to Hardtop County and built Los Dolores, my mansion on a hill. At that time it had just become possible to fly nonstop from Dallas to Paris or London or Frankfurt, and I often did just that, proceeding immediately by airbus to Rome or the Riviera. I went to China, I went to India, I went to Egypt, Argentina, Sweden. The one place I did not go was L.A.

I didn’t go to Austin, Texas, either, but Austin came to me unbidden in the form of Godwin Lloyd-Jons—the university had finally managed to ease him out of the Greek chair. Godwin had never made any bones about the fact that he was in teaching for the fucking. “Boys for summer, girls for winter,” was his motto, as I well knew, my former wife having been one of his winter girls. The University of Texas, well aware that this was a litigious age, no doubt decided that a professor who held such beliefs—and
practiced
them—was a potential liability it could ill afford.

I hadn’t seen or thought of Godwin for many years until I stumbled on him one day in the customs line at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Never one to conceal his emotions, he was weeping bitterly over the loss of a young man who had robbed
him, beaten him up, and abandoned him in the airport parking lot in Rio, after having promised several times to accompany him back to Texas.

The other passengers in the customs line were horrified at the sight of a weeping man; but I had been twenty-three hours getting home from Cairo and it would have taken an outstanding massacre to raise much emotion in me.

“Godwin, is that you?” I asked—he had cried a lot in his days with Sally, I recalled.

“Why, Daniel, you’re fat now,” he said, wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his Burberry.

“I tend to gain weight when I travel,” I said, though in fact I tend to lose it.

It was an unpromising reunion, but Godwin didn’t notice. The customs line was long. Once Godwin had dried his eyes he launched into a long and detailed account of his lost Brazilian lover’s endowments and proclivities. I wasn’t really listening, but I must have been the only one who wasn’t, because the line immediately grew shorter as people fled from his revelations, and before I knew it we were out into the bright Texas sunlight, blinking like owls.

The last part of any trip through the moonscape of DFW, as that airport is called, is a ride on the rumbling, computer-driven airtrans that takes passengers from terminal to terminal. It also takes returning passengers to remote parking lots, so remote that they seem to be in north Waxahachie, a town some thirty miles south of the airport.

On the lengthy airtrans ride we shared I became slightly paranoid about Godwin’s intentions. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, but he followed me in puppylike fashion, as if there were no question but that now we were together. He got in the same airtrans with me, though I doubted very much that he had a vehicle waiting in north Waxahachie.

During the long bumpy ride he regaled me with the sexual highlights of his trip to Rio and Buenos Aires. A hardened priest who had heard a million confessions might still have blanched or blushed at hearing the things Godwin told me.
Godwin, the renowned classicist, made no distinction between sexual and textual; he spoke of butt-fucking as lengthily and casually as he might have discussed some emendation of Euripides. I was too tired to mind particularly, but many of the passengers traveling with us had not been deadened by twenty-three hours in an airplane; when the doors of the little train opened at each stop, passengers bolted like rats. After six or eight stops Godwin finally noticed.

“What’s wrong with these people?” he asked. “You’d think we were contagious.”

“Well, Godwin, after what you’ve just been describing, maybe you are,” I suggested, as gently as possible.

“Oh, rot, perfect rot!” he said, glaring at the remaining passengers, all of whom were huddled warily at the far end of the car. At the next stop, South Remote Parking A and Auto Rental, they all converged on the door, obviously planning to bolt the second it opened.

The sight enraged Godwin; he had always had a short fuse. Just before the train stopped he leaped up and began to jerk and twitch, as if he had Saint Vitus’ dance. Then he lurched into the passengers and began to pant in their faces.

“I have a new disease,” he shouted suddenly. “It’s called omniplague. It’s a fungoid disease which combines the worst features of leprosy and lupus. It’s transmitted by human breath—soon whole populations will be wiped out by it. I caught it in the jungles of the Amazon while fucking a monkey.”

He panted at them some more.

“Terribly sorry but we’re all doomed now,” he said, just as the doors opened, allowing the terrified passengers to spill out.

One burly passenger, who was wearing Levi’s and a dozer cap and looked as if he had just come off rig duty in the Gulf or perhaps Alaska, didn’t take his doom casually: he swatted Godwin in the face with a small tote bag. The tote bag must have had rolls of silver dollars in it, because it knocked Godwin down and broke his nose. He sprawled on the floor at my feet, bleeding like a stuck hog.

“Omniplague! Omniplague!” Godwin yelled, just as the doors closed. The passengers were safe, but what about me?

“I hope you were just making that up,” I said, offering a handkerchief. “I hope you didn’t really fuck a monkey.”

The whole front of his suit was covered with blood, but his mood was much improved.

“Wouldn’t attempt it, they bite,” Godwin said.

Eventually we got to my car. Godwin’s nose was still bleeding freely; his condition was beginning to alarm me. He was weaving around the parking lot in a glassy-eyed fashion, but his mood was euphoric.

“Odd how the flow of blood energizes a man,” he said. “It must have to do with evolution.”

“I think it has to do with insanity,” I said. “I think you’d better take it easy. You’re losing significant amounts of blood.”

“Nonsense, I have quarts and quarts of it,” he said. “Would you like to go to a bar? It’s been decades since we talked.”

Ten seconds later he collapsed on the asphalt. I began to hyperventilate—Godwin always had that effect on me. My memories of first aid methods were sketchy, but I knew I had to do something. Fortunately he was a tiny man, easy to drag. I stretched him out on the little sidewalk in front of my Mercedes and dug a dirty T-shirt out of my luggage. I used the T-shirt to attempt to stanch the flow of blood.

Then, when it seemed to be slowing a little, I raced over to the rent-car counters, which proved to be farther away than they looked. By the time I actually reached them I had slowed to a walk and was so out of breath I could hardly stammer.

“Hey, you’re a little out of shape, ain’t you, mister?” said the bright young girl at the Budget counter. “Have you had that cholesterol level checked out lately?”

After flying all the way from Cairo, the last thing I wanted to deal with was a health freak. Unfortunately, all my women
friends were health freaks; the day scarcely passed without criticism of my cholesterol level, my indifference to exercise, green vegetables, and other presumably healthy things. Thousands of times I had pointed out to women that medicine—not to mention nutrition—is a soft science, and that things such as vitamins and cholesterol are merely the reigning health myths of our age, no more scientific than the theory of humors that prevailed during the late Renaissance.

None of my women friends enjoyed hearing my little speech about health fads; they believed that the current orthodoxies exalting exercise, vitamins, and the like were unassailable truths. Health theories (and I insisted that all statements about health were no more than theories) were a permanent bone of contention between me and several women, and
I
certainly didn’t enjoy having to deal with health issues at a rent-car counter while for all I knew Godwin Lloyd-Jons’s lifeblood was draining away in the parking lot.

“There’s an injured man in Remote Parking B,” I gasped. “He may be bleeding to death.”

“Oops, better get that ambulance right over there,” the young lady said, grabbing a phone.

By the time I managed to stumble back across several acres of asphalt to where Godwin lay, the ambulance was there, red lights whirling, and Godwin was having what could only be described as a seductive conversation with the two young attendants who were trying to strap him onto a stretcher. Both of the young men looked as countrified as the young woman at the rent-car counter; I doubt either of them realized that the diminutive, demented Englishman drenched in his own blood was making a pass at them.

“It’s rather like bondage,” he said happily when they finally got him tied to the stretcher.

“I guess I better follow you to the emergency room,” I said. “You may be sicker than you think.”

In the emergency room, somewhere in the hideous labyrinth of subdivisions and amusement parks that constitute Arlington,
Texas, the blasé emergency-room staff soon made it clear that they didn’t consider Godwin sick enough to treat.

“It’s a slow night, though—I guess we’ll condescend to stop your nosebleed,” a cool young intern said condescendingly.

They brusquely sponged him off, stuck a bandage on his nose, and relieved me of one hundred and fifty dollars. Godwin, of course, had arrived back from Brazil without a cent, a fact that didn’t dampen his spirits at all. The young nurse who sponged him off caught his fancy to such an extent that he began to try to impress her with his scholarly accomplishments.

“Look, I’ve done a little book on Catullus that you might enjoy,” he told her. “It’s a trifle, but it might amuse you for an hour or two. If you’ll just give me your address I’ll send it to you at once.”

“Is he the one who wrote
Jonathan Livingston Seagull?”
she asked.

I didn’t think Godwin had ever heard of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. He looked bewildered.

“No, the man he’s talking about was a poet,” I said.

“Oh,” the girl said. She wore a good deal more eye makeup than you usually see on nurses. Hers was silverish and was probably meant to coordinate with her frosted blond hair.

“I write poetry sometimes,” she said. “I don’t read much, though—I doubt you ought to waste your little book on me.”

Godwin was not quite ready to give up on the notion, absurd on the face of it, that reading his book on Catullus would cause the young lady to plop right into his arms.

“It’s really a very quick read,” he said hopefully.

“Naw, mostly when I read I just get a kind of depressed feeling, you know,” the girl said. “It’s that feeling you get when you realize you’re kinda missing out on life.”

“I often get that feeling,” I admitted. I was beginning to like the young nurse, but Godwin merely looked perplexed. I don’t think he could imagine missing out on life.

“A little book on Catullus can’t hurt you,” he insisted. “It received excellent reviews.”

“Naw, you keep it,” the girl said, squinting briefly up his nose. “I’m gonna give you some cotton to take with you, but I don’t think you’ll need it. You ought to be coagulatin’ any time.”

“You haven’t changed a bit,” I said to Godwin as we drove hopelessly around Arlington—hopelessly because municipal Arlington contains one of the largest numbers of suburban cul-de-sacs west of the Mississippi. Once you penetrated far enough into that city it was almost impossible to find your way out without a native guide: cul-de-sac followed cul-de-sac in an intricate but discouraging procession.