The Subterraneans Read online

  For now I want Mardou—she just told me that six months ago a disease took root deeply in her soul, and forever now—doesn’t this make her more beautiful?—But I want Mardou—because I see her standing, with her black velvet slacks, handsa-pockets, thin, slouched, cig hanging from lips, the smoke itself curling up, her little black back hairs of short haircut combed down fine and sleek, her lipstick, pale brown skin, dark eyes, the way shadows play on her high cheekbones, the nose, the little soft shape of chin to neck, the little Adam’s apple, so hip, so cool, so beautiful, so modern, so new, so unattainable to sad bagpants me in my shack in the middle of the woods—I want her because of the way she imitated Jack Steen that time on the street and it amazed me so much but Adam Moorad was solemn watching the imitation as if perhaps engrossed in the thing itself, or just skeptical, but she disengaged herself from the two men she was walking with and went ahead of them showing the walk (among crowds) the soft swing of arms, the long cool strides, the stop on the corner to hang and softly face up to birds with like as I say Viennese philosopher—but to see her do it, and to a T, (as I’d seen his walk indeed across the park), the fact of her—I love her but this song is … broken—but in French now … in French I can sing her on and on. …

  Our little pleasures at home at night, she eats an orange, she makes a lot of noise sucking it—

  When I laugh she looks at me with little round black eyes that hide themselves in her lids because she laughs hard (contorting all her face, showing the little teeth, making lights everywhere) (the first time I saw her, at Larry O’Hara’s, in the corner, I remember, I’d put my face close to hers to talk about books, she’d turned her face to me close, it was an ocean of melting things and drowning, I could have swimmed in it, I was afraid of all that richness and looked away)—

  With her rose bandana she always puts on for the pleasures of the bed, like a gypsy, rose, and then later the purple one, and the little hairs falling black from the phosphorescent purple in her brow as brown as wood—

  Her little eyes moving like cats—

  We play Gerry Mulligan loud when he arrives in the night, she listens and chews her fingernails, her head moves slowly side to side like a nun in profound prayer—

  When she smokes she raises the cigarette to her mouth and slits her eyes—

  She reads till gray dawn, head on one arm, Don Quixote, Proust, anything—

  We lie down, look at each other seriously saying nothing, head to head on the pillow—

  Sometimes when she speaks and I have my head under hers on the pillow and I see her jaw the dimple the woman in her neck, I see her deeply, richly, the neck, the deep chin, I know she’s one of the most enwomaned women I’ve seen, a brunette of eternity incomprehensibly beautiful and for always sad, profound, calm—

  When I catch her in the house, small, squeeze her, she yells out, tickles me furiously, I laugh, she laughs, her eyes shine, she punches me, she wants to beat me with a switch, she says she likes me—

  I’m hiding with her in the secret house of the night—

  Dawn finds us mystical in our shrouds, heart to heart—

  ‘My sister!’ I’d thought suddenly the first time I saw her—

  The light is out.

  Daydreams of she and I bowing at big fellaheen cocktail parties somehow with glittering Parises in the horizon and in the forefront—she’s crossing the long planks of my floor with a smile.

  Always putting her to a test, which goes with “doubts”—doubts indeed—and I would like to accuse myself of bastardliness—such tests—briefly I can name two, the night Arial Lavalina the famous young writer suddenly was standing in the Mask and I was sitting with Carmody also now famous writer in a way who’d just arrived from North Africa, Mardou around the corner in Dante’s cutting back and forth as was our wont all around, from bar to bar, and sometimes she’d cut unescorted there to see the Juliens and others—I saw Lavalina and called his name and he came over.—When Mardou came to get me to go home I wouldn’t go, I kept insisting it was an important literary moment, the meeting of those two (Carmody having plotted with me a year earlier in dark Mexico when we’d lived poor and beat and he’s a junkey, “Write a letter to Ralph Lowry find out how I can get to meet this here good-looking Arial Lavalina, man, look at that picture on the back of Recognition of Rome, ain’t that something?” my sympathies with him in the matter being personal and again like Bernard also queer he was connected with the legend of the bigbrain of myself which was my WORK, that all consuming work, so wrote the letter and all that) but now suddenly (after of course no reply from the Ischia and otherwise grapevines and certainly just as well for me at least) he was standing there and I recognized him from the night I’d met him at the Met ballet when in New York in tux I’d cut out with tuxed editor to see glitter nightworld New York of letters and wit, and Leon Danillian, so I yelled “Arial Lavalina! come here!” which he did.—When Mardou came I said whispering gleefully “This is Arial Lavalina ain’t that mad!”—“Yeh man but I want to go home.”—And in those days her love meaning no more to me than that I had a nice convenient dog chasing after me (much like in my real secretive Mexican vision of her following me down dark dobe streets of slums of Mexico City not walking with me but following, like Indian woman) I just goofed and said “But wait, you go home and wait for me, I want to dig Arial and then I’ll be home.”—“But baby you said that the other night and you were two hours late and you don’t know what pain it caused me to wait.” (Pain!)—“I know but look,” and so I took her around the block to persuade her, and drunk as usual at one point to prove something I stood on my head in the pavement of Montgomery or Clay Street and some hoodlums passed by, saw this, saying “That’s right”—finally (she laughing) depositing her in a cab, to get home, wait for me—going back to Lavalina and Carmody whom gleefully and now alone back in my big world night adolescent literary vision of the world, with nose pressed to window glass, “Will you look at that, Carmody and Lavalina, the great Arial Lavalina tho not a great great writer like me nevertheless so famous and glamorous etc. together in the Mask and I arranged it and everything ties together, the myth of the rainy night, Master Mad, Raw Road, going back to 1949 and 1950 and all things grand great the Mask of old history crusts”—(this my feeling and I go in) and sit with them and drink further—repairing the three of us to 13 Pater a lesbian joint down Columbus, Carmody, high, leaving us to go enjoy it, and we sitting in there, further beers, the horror the unspeakable horror of myself suddenly finding in myself a kind of perhaps William Blake or Crazy Jane or really Christopher Smart alcoholic humility grabbing and kissing Arial’s hand and exclaiming “Oh Arial you dear—you are going to be—you are so famous—you wrote so well—I remember you—what—” whatever and now unrememberable and drunkenness, and there he is a well-known and perfectly obvious homosexual of the first water, my roaring brain—we go to his suite in some hotel—I wake up in the morning on the couch, filled with the first horrible recognition, “I didn’t go back to Mardou’s at all” so in the cab he gives me—I ask for fifty cents but he gives me a dollar saying “You owe me a dollar” and I rush out and walk fast in the hot sun face all broken from drinking and chagrin to her place down in Heavenly Lane arriving just as she’s dressing up to go to the therapist.—Ah sad Mardou with little dark eyes looking with pain and had waited all night in a dark bed and the drunken man leering in and I rushed down in fact at once to get two cans of beer to straighten up (“To curb the fearful hounds of hair” Old Bull Balloon would say), so as she abluted to go out I yelled and cavorted—went to sleep, to wait for her return, which was in the late afternoon, waking to hear the cry of pure children in the alleyways down there—the horror the horror, and deciding, “I’ll write a letter at once to Lavalina,” enclosing a dollar and apologizing for getting so drunk and acting in such a way as to mislead him—Mardou returning, no complaints, only a few a little later, and the days rolling and passing and still she forgives me enough or is humble enough in
the wake of my crashing star in fact to write me, a few nights later, this letter:

  DEAR BABY,

  Isn’t it good to know winter is coming—

  as we’d been complaining so much about heat and now the heat was ended, a coolness came into the air, you could feel it in the draining gray airshaft of Heavenly Lane and in the look of the sky and nights with a greater wavy glitter in streetlights—

  —and that life will be a little more quiet—and you will be home writing and eating well and we will be spending pleasant nights wrapped round one another—and you are home now, rested and eating well because you should not become too sad—

  written after, one night, in the Mask with her and newly arrived and future enemy Yuri erstwhile close lil brother I’d suddenly said “I feel impossibly sad and like I’ll die, what can we do?” and Yuri’d suggested “Call Sam,” which, in my sadness, I did, and so earnestly, as otherwise he’d pay no attention being a newspaper man and new father and no time to goof, but so earnestly he accepted us, the three, to come at once, from the Mask, to his apartment on Russian Hill, where we went, I getting drunker than ever, Sam as ever punching me and saying “The trouble with you, Percepied,” and, “You’ve got rotten bags in the bottom of your store,” and, “You Canucks are really all alike and I don’t even believe you’ll admit it when you die”—Mardou watching amused, drinking a little, Sam finally, as always falling over drunk, but not really, drunk-desiring, over a little lowtable covered a foot high with ashtrays piled three inches high and drinks and doodads, crash, his wife, with baby just from crib, sighing—Yuri, who didn’t drink but only watched bead-eyed, after having said to me the first day of his arrival, “You know Percepied I really like you now, I really feel like communicating with you now,” which I should have suspected, in him, as constituting a new kind of sinister interest in the innocence of my activities, that being by the name of, Mardou—

  —because you should not become too sad

  was only sweet comment heartbreakable Mardou made about that disastrous awful night—similar to example 2, one following the one with Lavalina, the night of the beautiful faun boy who’d been in bed with Micky two years before at a great depraved wildparty I’d myself arranged in days when living with Micky the great doll of the roaring legend night, seeing him in the Mask, and being with Frank Carmody and everybody, tugging at his shirt, insisting he follow us to other bars, follow us around, Mardou finally in the blur and roar of the night yelling at me “It’s him or me goddamit,” but not really serious (herself usually not a drinker because a subterranean but in her affair with Percepied a big drinker now)—she left, I heard her say “We’re through” but never for a moment believed it and it was not so, she came back later, I saw her again, we swayed together, once more I’d been a bad boy and again ludicrously like a fag, this distressing me again in waking in gray Heavenly Lane in the morning beer roared.—This is the confession of a man who can’t drink.—And so her letter saying:

  because you should not become too sad—and I feel better when you are well—

  forgiving, forgetting all this sad folly when all she wants to do, “I don’t want to go out drinking and getting drunk with all your friends and keep going to Dante’s and see all those Juliens and everybody again, I want us to stay quiet at home, listen to KPFA and read or something, or go to a show, baby I like shows, movies on Market Street, I really do.”—“But I hate movies, life’s more interesting!” (another putdown)—her sweet letter continuing:

  I am full of strange feelings, reliving and refashioning many old things

  —when she was 14 or 13 maybe she’d play hookey from school in Oakland and take the ferry to Market Street and spend all day in one movie, wandering around having hallucinated phantasies, looking at all the eyes, a little Negro girl roaming the shuffle restless street of winos, hoodlums, sams, cops, paper peddlers, the mad mixup there the crowd eying looking everywhere the sexfiend crowd and all of it in the gray rain of hookey days—poor Mardou—“I’d get sexual phantasies the strangest kind, not with like sex acts with people but strange situations that I’d spend all day working out as I walked, and my orgasms the few I had only came, because I never masturbated or even knew how, when I dreamed that my father or somebody was leaving me, running away from me, I’d wake up with a funny convulsion and wetness in myself, in my thighs, and on Market Street the same way but different and anxiety dreams woven out of the movies I saw.”—Me thinking O grayscreen gangster cocktail rainyday roaring gunshot spectral immortality B movie tire pile black-in-the-mist Wildamerica but it’s a crazy world!— “Honey” (out loud) “wished I could have seen you walking around Market like that—I bet I DID see you—I bet I did—you were thirteen and I was twenty-two—1944, yeah I bet I saw you, I was a seaman, I was always there, I knew the gangs around the bars—” So in her letter saying:

  reliving and refashioning many old things

  probably reliving those days and phantasies, and earlier cruder horrors of home in Oakland where her aunt hysterically beat her or hysterically tried and her sisters (tho occasional little-sister tenderness like dutiful kisses before bed and writing on one another’s backs) giving her a bad time, and she roaming the street late, deep in broodthoughts and men trying to make her, the dark men of dark colored-district doors—so going on,

  and feeling the cold and the quietude even in the midst of my forebodings and fears—which clear nights soothe and make more sharp and real—tangible and easier to cope with