The Subterraneans Page 9

  Going thence to the Mask as usual, beers, get worse drunk, then out to walk home, Yuri having just arrived from Oregon having no place to sleep is asking if it’s allright to sleep at our place, I let Mardou speak for her own house, tho feebly say some “okay” in the middle of the confusion, and Yuri comes heading homeward with us—en route finds a pushcart, says “Get in, I’ll be a taxicab and push you both home up the hill.”—Okay we get in, and lie on our backs drunk as only you can get drunk on red wine, and he pushes us from the Beach at that fateful park (where we’d sat that first sad Sunday afternoon of my dream and premonitions) and we ride along in the pushcart of eternity, Angel Yuri pushing it, I can only see stars and occasional rooftops of blocks—no thought in any mind (except briefly in mine, possibly in others) of the sin, the loss entailed for the poor Italian beggar losing his cart there—on down Broadway clear to Mar-dou’s, in the pushcart, at one point I push and they ride, Mardou and I singing bop and also bop to the tune Are the Stars out Tonight and just drunk—parking it foolishly in front of Adam’s and rushing up, making noise.—Next day, after sleeping on floor with Yuri snoring on the couch, waiting up for Adam as if beaming to hear told about our exploit, Adam comes home blackfaced mad from work and says “Really you have no idea the pain you’re causin’ some poor old Armenian peddler you never think that—but jeopardizing my pad with that thing in front, supposing the cops find it, and what’s the matter with you.” And Carmody saying to me “Leo I think you perpetrated this masterpiece” or “You masterminded this brilliant move” or such which I really didn’t—and all day we’ve been cutting up and down stairs looking at pushcart which far from being cop-discovered still sits there but with Adam’s landlord teetering in front of it, waiting to see who’s going to claim it, sensing something fishy, and of all things Mardou’s poor purse still in it where drunkenly we’d left it and the landlord finally confiscating IT and waiting for further development (she lost a few dollars and her only purse).—“Only thing that can happen, Adam, is the cops’ll find the pushcart, they can very well see the purse, the address, and take it to Mardou’s but all she has to say is ‘O I found my purse,’ and that’s that, and nothing’ll happen.” But Adam cries, “O you even if nothing’ll happen you screw up the security of my pad, come in making noise, leave a licensed vehicle out front, and tell me nothing’ll happen.”—And I had sensed he’d be mad and am prepared and say, “To hell with that, you can give hell to these but you won’t give hell to me, I won’t take it from you—that was just a drunken prank,” I add, and Adam says, “This is my house and I can get mad when it’s—” so I up and throw his keys (the keys he’d had made for me to walk in and out any time) at him but they’re entwined with the chain of my mother’s keys and for a moment we fumble seriously at the mixed keys on the floor disengaging them and he gets his and I say “No that, that’s mine, there,” and he puts it in his pocket and there we are.—I want to rush up and leave, like at Larry’s.—Mardou is there seeing me flip again—far from helping her from flips. (Once she’d asked me “If I ever flip what will you do, will you help me?—Supposing I think you’re trying to harm me?”—“Honey,” I said, “I’ll try in fact I’ll reassure you I’m not harming you and you’d come to your senses, I’ll protect you,” the confidence of the old man—but in reality himself flipping more often.)—I feel great waves of dark hostility, I mean hate, malice, destructiveness flowing out of Adam in his corner chair, I can hardly sit under the withering telepathic blast and there’s all that yage of Carmody’s around the pad, in suitcases, it’s too much—(it’s a comedy tho, we agree it will be a comedy later)—we talk of other things—Adam suddenly flips the key back at me, it lands in my thighs, and instead of dangling it in my finger (as if considering, as if a wily Canuck calculating advantages) I boy-like jump up and throw the key back in my pocket with a little giggle, to make Adam feel better, also to impress Mardou with my “fairness”—but she never noticed, was watching something else—so now that peace is restored I say “And in any case it was Yuri’s fault it isn’t at all as Frank says my unqualified masterminding”—(this pushcart, this darkness, the same as when Adam in the prophetic dream descended the wood steps to see the “Russian Patriarch”, there were pushcarts there)—So in the letter that I write to Mardou answering her beauty which I have paraphrased, I make stupid angry but “pretending to be fair,” “to be calm, deep, poetic” statements, like, “Yes, I got mad and threw Adam’s keys back at him, because ‘friendship, admiration, poetry sleep in the respectful mystery’ and the invisible world is too beatific to have to be dragged before the court of social realities,” or some such twaddle that Mardou must have glanced at with one eye—the letter, which was supposed to match the warmth of hers, her cuddly-in-October masterpiece, beginning with the inane-if-at-all confession: “The last time I wrote a love note it turned out to be boloney” (referring to an earlier in the year half-romance with Arlene Wohl-stetter) “and I am glad you are honest,” or “have honest eyes,” the next sentence said—the letter intended to arrive Saturday morning to make her feel my warm presence while I was out taking my hardworking and deserving mother to her bi-six-monthlial show and shopping on Market Street (old Canuck workingwoman completely ignorant of arrangement of mingled streets of San Francisco) but arriving long after I saw her and read while I was there, and dull—this not a literary complaint, but something that must have pained Mardou, the lack of reciprocity and the stupidity regarding my attack at Adam—“Man, you had no right to yell at him, really, it’s his pad, his right”—but the letter a big defense of this “right to yell at Adam” and not at all response to her love notes—

  The pushcart incident not important in itself, but what I saw, what my quick eye and hungry paranoia ate—a gesture of Mardou’s that made my heart sink even as I doubted maybe I wasn’t seeing, interpreting right, as so oft I do.—We’d come in and run upstairs and jumped on the big double bed waking Adam up and yelling and tousling and Carmody too sitting on the edge as if to say “Now children now children,” just a lot of drunken lushes—at one time in the play back and forth between the rooms Mardou and Yuri ended on the couch together in front, where I think all three of us had flopped—but I ran to the bedroom for further business, talking, coming back I saw Yuri who knew I was coming flop off the couch onto the floor and as he did so Mardou (who probably didn’t know I was coming) shot out her hand at him as if to say OH YOU RASCAL as if almost he’d before rolling off the couch goosed her or done something playful—I saw for the first time their youthful playfulness which I in my scowlingness and writer-ness had not participated in and my old man-ness about which I kept telling myself “You’re old you old sonofabitch you’re lucky to have such a young sweet thing” (while nevertheless at the same time plotting, as I’d been doing for about three weeks now, to get rid of Mardou, without her being hurt, even if possible “without her noticing” so as to get back to more comfortable modes of life, like say, stay at home all week and write and work on the three novels to make a lot of money and come in to town only for good times if not to see Mardou then any other chick will do, this was my three week thought and really the energy behind or the surface one behind the creation of the Jealousy Phantasy in the Gray Guilt dream of the World Around Our Bed)—now I saw Mardou pushing Yuri with a OH YOU and I shuddered to think something maybe was going on behind my back—felt warned too by the quick and immediate manner Yuri heard me coming and rolled off but as if guiltily as I say after some kind of goose or feel up some illegal touch of Mardou which made her purse little love loff lips at him and push at him and like kids.—Mardou was just like a kid I remember the first night I met her when Julien, rolling joints on the floor, she behind him hunched, I’d explained to them why that week I wasn’t drinking at all (true at the time, and due to events on the ship in New York, scaring me, saying to myself “If you keep on drinking like that you’ll die you can’t even hold a simple job any more,” so returning to Frisco and not drinking at all
and everybody exclaiming “O you look wonderful”), telling that first night almost heads together with Mardou and Julien, they so kidlike in their naive WHY when I told them I wasn’t drinking any more, so kidlike listening to my explanation about the one can of beer leading to the second, the sudden gut explosions and glitters, the third can, the fourth, “And then I go off and drink for days and I’m gone man, like, I’m afraid I’m an alcoholic” and they kidlike and othergenerationey making no comment, but awed, curious—in the same rapport with young Yuri here (her age) pushing at him, Oh You, which in drunkenness I paid not too much attention to, and we slept, Mardou and I on the floor, Yuri on the couch (so kidlike, indulgent, funny of him, all that)—this first exposure of the realization of the mysteries of the guilt jealousy dream leading, from the pushcart time, to the night we went to Bromberg’s, most awful of all.

  Beginning as usual in the Mask.

  Nights that begin so glitter clear with hope, let’s go see our friends, things, phones ring, people come and go, coats, hats, statements, bright reports, metropolitan excitements, a round of beers, another round of beers, the talk gets more beautiful, more excited, flushed, another round, the midnight hour, later, the flushed happy faces are now wild and soon there’s the swaying buddy da day oobab bab smash smoke drunken latenight goof leading finally to the bartender, like a seer in Eliot, TIME TO CLOSE UP—in this manner more or less arriving at the Mask where a kid called Harold Sand came in, a chance acquaintance of Mardou’s from a year ago, a young novelist looking like Leslie Howard who’d just had a manuscript accepted and so acquired a strange grace in my eyes I wanted to devour—interested in him for same reasons as Lavalina, literary avidity, envy—as usual paying less attention therefore to Mardou (at table) than Yuri whose continual presence with us now did not raise my suspicions, whose complaints “I don’t have a place to stay—do you realize Percepied what it is not to even have a place to write? I have not girls, nothing, Carmody and Moorad won’t let me stay up there any more, they’re a couple of old sisters,” not sinking in, and already the only comment I’d made to Mardou about Yuri had been, after his leaving, “He’s just like that Mexican stud comes up here and grabs up your last cigarettes,” both of us laughing because whenever she was at her lowest financial ebb, bang, somebody who needed a “mooch” was there—not that I would call Yuri a mooch in the least (I’ll tread lightly on him on this point, for obvious reasons).—(Yuri and I’d had a long talk that week in a bar, over port wines, he claimed everything was poetry, I tried to make the common old distinction between verse and prose, he said, “Lissen Percepied do you believe in freedom?—then say what you want, it’s poetry, poetry, all of it is poetry, great prose is poetry, great verse is poetry.”—“Yes” I said “but verse is verse and prose is prose.”—“No no” he yelled “it’s all poetry.”—“Okay,” I said, “I believe in you believing in freedom and maybe you’re right, have another wine.” And he read me his “best line” which was something to do with “seldom nocturne” that I said sounded like small magazine poetry and wasn’t his best—as already I’d seen some much better poetry by him concerning his tough boyhood, about cats, mothers in gutters, Jesus striding in the ashcan, appearing incarnate shining on the blowers of slum tenements or that is making great steps across the light—the sum of it something he could do, and did, well—“No, seldom nocturne isn’t your meat” but he claimed it was great, “I would say rather it was great if you’d written it suddenly on the spur of the moment.”—“But I did—right out of my mind it flowed and I threw it down, it sounds like it’s been planned but it wasn’t, it was bang! just like you say, spontaneous vision!”—Which I now doubt tho his saying “seldom nocturne” came to him spontaneously made me suddenly respect it more, some falsehood hiding beneath our wine yells in a saloon on Kearney.) Yuri hanging out with Mardou and me every night almost—like a shadow—and knowing Sand himself from before, so he, Sand, walking into the Mask, flushed successful young author but “ironic” looking and with a big parkingticket sticking out of his coat lapel, was set upon by the three of us with avidity, made to sit at our table—made to talk.—Around the corner from Mask to 13 Pater thence the lot of us going, and en route (reminiscent now more strongly and now with hints of pain of the pushcart night and Mardou’s OH YOU) Yuri and Mardou start racing, pushing, shoving, wrestling on the sidewalk and finally she lofts a big empty cardboard box and throws it at him and he throws it back, they’re like kids again—I walk on ahead in serious tone conversation with Sand tho—he too has eyes for Mardou—somehow I’m not able (at least haven’t tried) to communicate to him that she is my love and I would prefer if he didn’t have eyes for her so obviously, just as Jimmy Lowell, a colored seaman who’d suddenly phoned in the midst of an Adam party, and came, with a Scandinavian shipmate, looking at Mardou and me wondering, asking me “Do you make it with her sex?” and I saying yes and the night after the Red Drum session where Art Blakey was whaling like mad and Thelonious Monk sweating leading the generation with his elbow chords, eying the band madly to lead them on, the monk and saint of bop I kept telling Yuri, smooth sharp hep Jimmy Lowell leans to me and says “I would like to make it with your chick,” (like in the old days Leroy and I always swapping so I’m not shocked), “would it be okay if I asked her?” and I saying “She’s not that kind of girl, I’m sure she believes in one at a time, if you ask her that’s what she’ll tell you man” (at that time still feeling no pain or jealousy, this incidentally the night before the Jealousy Dream)—not able to communicate to Lowell that’s—that I wanted her—to stay—to be stammer stammer be mine—not being able to come right out and say, “Lissen this is my girl, what are you talking about, if you want to try to make her you’ll have to tangle with me, you understand that pops as well as I do.”—In that way with a stud, in another way with polite dignified Sand a very interesting young fellow, like, “Sand, Mardou is my girl and I would prefer, etc.”—but he has eyes for her and the reason he stays with us and goes around the corner to 13 Pater, but it’s Yuri starts wrestling with her and goofing in the streets—so when we leave 13 Pater later on (a dike bar slummish now and nothing to it, where a year ago there were angels in red shirts straight out of Genet and Djuna Barnes) I get in the front seat of Sand’s old car, he’s going at least to drive us home, I sit next to him at the clutch in front for purposes of talking better and in drunkenness again avoiding Mardou’s womanness, leaving room for her to sit beside me at front window—instead of which, no sooner plops her ass behind me, jumps over seat and dives into backseat with Yuri who is alone back there, to wrestle again and goof with him and now with such intensity I’m afraid to look back and see with my own eyes what’s happening and how the dream (the dream I announced to everyone and made big issues of and told even Yuri about) is coming true.

  We pull up at Mardou’s door at Heavenly Lane and drunkly now she says (Sand and I having decided drunkenly to drive down to Los Altos the lot of us and crash in on old Austin Bromberg and have big further parties) “If you’re going down to Bromberg’s in Los Altos you two go out, Yuri and I’ll stay here”—my heart sank deep—it sank so I gloated to hear it for the first time and the confirmation of it crowned me and blessed me.

  And I thought, “Well boy here’s your chance to get rid of her” (which I’d plotted for three weeks now) but the sound of this in my own ears sounded awfully false, I didn’t believe it, myself, any more.

  But on the sidewalk going in flushed Yuri takes my arm as Mardou and Sand go on ahead up the fish head stairs, “Lissen, Leo I don’t want to make Mardou at all, she’s all over me, I want you to know that I don’t want to make her, all I want to do if you’re going out there is go to sleep in your bed because I have an appointment tomorrow.”—But now I myself feel reluctant to stay in Heavenly Lane for the night because Yuri will be there, in fact now is already on the bed tacitly as if, one would have to say, “Get off the bed so we can get in, go to that uncomfortable chair for the night.”—So th
is more than anything else (in my tiredness and growing wisdom and patience) makes me agree with Sand (also reluctant) that we might as well drive down to Los Altos and wake up good old Bromberg, and I turn to Mardou with eyes saying or suggesting, “You can stay with Yuri you bitch” but she’s already got her little traveling basket or weekend bag and is putting my toothbrush hairbrush and her things in and the idea is we three drive out—which we do, leaving Yuri in the bed.—En route, at near Bayshore in the great highway roadlamp night, which is now nothing but a bleakness for me and the prospect of the “weekend” at Bromberg’s a horror of shame, I can’t stand it any more and look at Mardou as soon as Sand gets out to buy hamburgs in the diner, “You jumped in the backseat with Yuri why’d you do that? and why’d you say you wanted to stay with him?”—“It was silly of me, I was just high baby.” But I don’t darkly any more now want to believe her—art is short, life is long—now I’ve got in full dragon bloom the monster of jealousy as green as in any cliché cartoon rising in my being, “You and Yuri play together all the time, it’s just like the dream I told you about, that’s what’s horrible—O I’ll never believe in dreams come true again.”—“But baby it isn’t anything like that” but I don’t believe her—I can tell by looking at her she’s got eyes for the youth—you can’t fool an old hand who at the age of sixteen before even the juice was wiped off his heart by the Great Imperial World Wiper with Sadcloth fell in love with an impossible flirt and cheater, this is a boast—I feel so sick I can’t stand it, curl up in the back seat, alone—they drive on, and Sand having anticipated a gay talkative weekend now finds himself with a couple of grim lover worriers, hears in fact the fragment “But I didn’t mean you to think that baby” so obviously harkening to his mind the Yuri incident—finds himself with this pair of bores and has to drive all the way down to Los Altos, and so with the same grit that made him write the half million words of his novel bends to it and pushes the car through the Peninsula night and on into the dawn.