What We Are (17 page)

I start to fade out from the soliloquy and I'm lucky, I guess, in one way: The guy can't see it. He doesn't need eye contact from me, nods, or gestures, he's content to go right on talking as long as I'm standing before him. What a trip: He's like a badly scaled-down version of modern American literary history through sycophancy. I reassure La Dulce with a hand squeeze that I'm not going to say anything rude (“Were you in the bombing of Dresden with Vonnegut?”) and she kisses my cheek and promptly abandons me.

I used to believe in the sanctity of poetry—before I met anyone associated with it. I can remember what I felt poring over the lovely letters Keats wrote to his brother in the throes of consumption; I used
to recite his poems to myself in the yard in Quentin. Who but the poet, I'd thought, stands on the doorstop of death and dares to ring the bell and not run? I may have been at the wrong hotbed of creativity, but the spirit of the greats appeared to be lost on these future Pulitzers, more interested in playacting and sipping wine spritzers than getting down in the pit with their demons.

But maybe it's good to enroll for an MFA so as to be daily reminded of what you don't like about people, what you don't like about yourself. After all, for every John Keats, there is someone like me, an intruder of sorts.

“... wolfing down shrooms with Kenny and Hunter S. and a Hell's Angel named Scooter in the garden of death as midnight struck like....”

Something ice-cold and wet is pushed into my hand. I notice that von Morley's students have put a ten-yard radius around us. Each of them, even the suicidal Swartie, knows that being anywhere in von Morley's vicinity means playing the prey for his big-name game hunting, and yet they stay at the barbecue, I guess, because they've bought what he's sold: the future, a $39 pamphlet copied at Kinko's, is in his hand.

I pop the can of beer, press it to my lips, the piss-water contents of Keystone Light tasting good for once, a matter of context, true relief.

“... encouraged by an itemized note from Tennessee Williams which read, ‘Yes, baby, I get a little lavish at times under the nipping influence of a warm brandy,' and thinking,
My God, heroin must do wonders
....”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” someone says.

This one's broken the radius. He's got on a white T-shirt that reads, in red letters,
UKRANIAN POET
, and his golden locks are styled into the hair-sprayed tsunami of a rockabilly. He hands me another beer, and I see a handsome tattoo of Johnny Cash on his forearm. The dean
keeps the pace of the evening sermon, now commemorizing Thoreau and a woolen sweater hand knit on the shores of Walden Pond.

“No wonder they call you Gabby,” says the Ukranian poet. He tugs on my sleeve. “You wanna get the fuck out of here, my bro?”

La Dulce is back, eyes closed, hands in the air, listening to the colonel read his poems. “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

“Follow me.”

I leave Gabby von Morley there talking, and though with a new location and victim, I bet he'll still be talking into the early morning.

We make our way to Fourth and San Salvador without a word said between us. It's rather nice, I must say, after the glimpse of MFA nonsense at the party. We end up walking through a deli on First and San Carlos amid stares from the patrons and Mexican cooks, and then we step over several Vietnamese children playing hide-and-seek by a counter sagging with frozen fish, climb over sacks of white rice that look like stacked sandbags at a flood, and at last come to a door with a sign posted on it that reads,
LUBIC'S DELICATES
.

“My undercover bike shop,” he says.

There's nothing in the room except six bicycles, a Ouija board, two candles in golden candelabra on either side of the board, and three books,
The Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
, and
The Giving Tree
. The bikes are flipped over so that each rests on its seat and handlebars, the tires in the air: five fifties-style Schwinn cruisers and a Bridgestone Trailblazer mountain bike. I can hear the noise from the deli, the walls thinner than the see-through wrap of a spring roll.

He says, nodding toward the door, “I hate those fucking people.”

I crack open another Keystone I'd snagged from Dean Gabby von Morley, hand it to the Ukrainian poet, say nothing.

“They are very lecherous. I am only twenty-one”—here he crosses himself—“but I know about people. Especially rotten fucking people. You cannot be from Ukraine and not know what rotten is. We are
stuck between two rotten fucking countries, one on the west, one on the east. Back and forth they are coming. Fuck it. First we are fighting Nazis, next we are fighting Soviets.”

I say, “Well, then. You're kinda like the Vietnamese of Europe.” He does not smile. “First the Japanese in the thirties and forties, then the French in the fifties, us in the sixties, Chinese in the seventies, the Cambodians and Pol Pot in the eighties. Now all of those nations gone, forgotten. Millions dead.”

“And now!” he shouts. “Look at me. I am surrounded by jerkoff who think they are poets because they like to talk in the trees with birdies. And they like to make fuck like rabbits. Everyone there is fucking everyone else.”

“Even von Morley?”

“I don't know the man.”

“He's your dean.”

“Nobody knows that fucking man.”

“Never met anyone so heavy into nomenclature.”

“What is that?”

“Names, man. The dean's a big name-dropper.”

“My friend, the only thing he drop is fucking acid. Lots and lots of that, bro, trust me.”

I say, “For someone who lives in the fifties, you sure have a dirty mouth, dog.”

He raises his beer. “
Nastrovia
.”

I nod, pop the other Keystone I'd lifted, sip the bubbles, toast, “
Nastrovia
.”

Our cans crash together and after the first chug he lifts the beer high again and says, “Fuck it.”

“Okay,” I say, mimicking his actions. “Fuck it.”

I sit there in the fuck-it-ness of his toast and look around at the nearly empty room with for some reason no despondence at all, wondering how someone who speaks such bad English can be working
toward an MFA in Creative Writing. I don't say anything, of course, but find a picture behind a shattered frame of a slender Vietnamese girl arm-in-arm with—
guess who?
—the Ukrainian poet. She has stars in her eyes and, in the possessive apathy of a primadonna, she's looking at the camera, though he isn't. He's turned toward the girl, looking meekly at the top of her head, as if it's intrusive to have his arms around her in the first place. Before I can ask him what happened to the frame or the girl or his apparent fondness for a member of “the lecherous fucking Vietnamese people,” he stands up and walks over to the frame, throws it against the door, and says again, “Fuck it.”

Incoherent shouts in Vietnamese rise up from the kitchen, and several times I catch in a piercing voice, “
Du ma mai!
” which I know means
fuck you
in Vietnamese, and since we seem to be stuck on the crudest term in every world language, I decide to ask him if he's ever seen
The Deer Hunter
. I want to talk at once to show him that his temper tantrum doesn't scare me, which it doesn't, though it annoys me. He lives in an elevated range of the quietudes, which is to say his cynical head, and while I'm not sure I like what I'm hearing, I'm also not sure, from my own little island of cynicism, if I have that right at all.

He looks at me as if I've insulted him. “Why do you ask me about that movie? Only because I am Ukrainian? They are dumb Polacks.”

“No,” I say. “Because the Green Beret toasts De Niro exactly the way you did. They're at that big wedding and he lifts his glass to De Niro and says, ‘Fuck it.'”

“Who is De Niro.”

He's not looking for an answer. “Who is De Niro,” is a statement in the way you'd say, “De Niro is a nobody,” or “De Niro means squat to me,” and so I gladly say nothing and return to my Keystone. He starts setting up this giant bong the size of an elephant trunk, and when he has the purple weed that looks like Russian cabbage packed
tight into the bulb and lit, he offers me the first official hit. I like that. Under advisement from Mr. Shel Silverstein, he's gonna give me the green from his tree.

I say, “No, thanks, I've enough vices as it is, bro,” and slam the Keystone.

We don't say a word to each other for almost an hour. He keeps blowing his bubbles like an eager bugler in the high school band, repacking and relighting, and I just keep finding more and more Keystones in my pocket. Finally he says, “You want a fucking bike?”

“How much?”

“No, my bro. Come on, man. It's free, of course.”

I shrug. “All right. Sure.”

He shrugs back—“Pick one”—and, leaving him the five identical gray Schwinn cruisers, I ride back to Silver Creek Estates on the Trailblazer, swerving through the streets of San Jo and shouting, “
Mea culpa! Mea culpa!
” I realize I forgot to give him my name, and that it's at bare minimum both our faults, though probably as a native speaker mostly mine, but because I won't ever return to his under-cover bike shop—or Silicon University of the Valley, for that matter—it hardly fucking concerns fucking me.

I
SOMEHOW KEEP
my balance swerving up the driveway. Gotta be three or four in the morning. The garage is wide open. The Silver Creek Estates Socialist Council of Wellness charges $20 for this infraction if it occurs longer than five minutes; $50 for the misdemeanor of parking your car in the driveway; $100 for the felony of breathing too loud. I can see La Dulce in the shadows next to her parked car, spread out on a lawn chair reading a book.

I jump off, say, “Like my new ride?”

She doesn't look up. “Why'd you leave like that?”

“Let me see that thing,” I say.

She hands me
Impotent Yet Proud, Unknown Yet Grateful
, and I walk over to the garbage can, listen to it tickle the plastic on the way down. “At least recycle it,” she says.

“Some things are irredeemable.”

She looks me up and down. “Tell me about it.”

“You gonna owe these Silver Creek people a lot of dough if you don't close down shop.”

“Shut your mouth and listen.”

“At least you got some clothes on. That's a start.”

“You didn't like the
artistes
, did you?”

“True.”

“You could just as well do without 'em.”

“As can you.”

“You hate 'em.”

“I'm like Bukowski beating back doom on his bar stool: I hate them all the same.”

“You ain't beating back shit. You
feeding
it.”

“Equal opportunity, baby.”

“Your hate-crimeing ass don't like nobody!”

“Keep it down,” I say. “I like a few people. Just that they're mostly dead.”

“You crazy.”

“They've been cleansed by
the long grains beyond age, the dark veins of their mother
.”

“Why you talking that limey bullshit? In that stupid deep voice of yours.”

“The oracular of my boy Dylan Thomas.”

“Just answer the question, nigga: are you saying I gotta die before you take a shine to me?”

“Shine? Let's not use words like that. You from Haiti or Mississippi?”

“Just answer the damned question.”

“I mean, what's next? Hoss? Gumption?”

“You don't even like me.”

“That's not a question.”

“Do you?”

“Let's not do this, lucky one. We'll destroy the fuckship in six seconds' time.”

She snaps her fingers across her face. “Fuckship?”

“What else is it?”

“And what about
Beatrice
?”

I can't tell her the truth, that she is nowhere near the book. That thinking about her would destroy it, and maybe destroy more than just the book. And that it doesn't matter at all in the end, since the book is just a game. The image of a teenage Mishima clutching his novel manuscript on the tracks of the oncoming train does not here work. I'm just flossing my teeth, Q-tipping my ears, the creative impetus as thoughtless and abysmal as the wipe.

Instead I say, “I won't desecrate the terms of love—if it still exists—just to get into your panties.”

“Oh, you one noble nigga, ain'tcha?”

“And if love dies with my generation, just like everything else, I'm not gonna make it worse by calling this thing we got exactly what it'll never be. That's like telling everyone you just won the Lotto when you ain't even bought a ticket.”

“Well hell, nigga, how's this? I never liked you none, anyway.”

“That's fine. We may have consensus for the first time. I'm not so sure I like myself, either.” I slap her hard on the ass and say, “This is good-bye, La Dulce. Don't trip. You'll make out like a bandit.”

She says, a little paranoid, “Well. Shit. Just one more for the road, home skillet?”

Vows of pointless purity out the window, out the garage, or whatever. “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

She pushes a fifty spot into my hands, says, “You can get a couple motel nights outta this.”

This means no more fellowship. “Thank you,” I say.

“You all right.”

“Just turn around, if you'll be so kind, ma'am, and put your hands on the hood. Don't take it personally, but I don't want to see your face in the arrest.”

“Likewise. Ditto. All that mess.” The garage door is going down on us. “Hurry your ass up and get in there.”

I
TROOP UP
the steps of the County Transit Line 22, say, “What's happening?” to the morbid-eyed driver in her long-sleeved sweater with a brand new red-white-and-blue county authority patch sewed to the side of the shoulder, drop sixteen quarters into the slot, and after they're all in the box the lady says, “That wasn't necessary.”