Algren at Sea (51 page)

“He thinks like a child,” someone remembered Goethe saying of Byron. So Norman Mailer said “Hemingway has never written anything that would disturb an eight-year-old.” So Professor Fiedler said it and Professor Podhoretz said it and Professor Edel said it and Professor Macdonald said it. First they said it one by one. Then, gathering courage, they all said it together in chorus: Now we have his number: Now we
really
have his number.

And of all our thinkers, from Paul Goodman to Ronald Reagan, who has given us a passage so certain not to disturb an eight-year-old as this:

 

“If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comfortable stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot define completely but the feeling comes . . . when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it had flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of government, the richness, the poverty, martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms
as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm-fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light-globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm-fronds of our victories, the worn light-bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single lasting thing—the stream.”

 

Call that baby talk.

Every morning of that lost summer came as a fresh surprise: a sallow youth wearing a bright red sweater practiced walking a tightwire right next door! He traversed the air from his back porch to his little garage, glided to the ground, then trotted lightly. We cheered as though the circus had come to our neighborhood. Nothing like it had ever happened on our street before.

He never spoke. My father called him “The Greenhorn”—but from what green country he had come he never told.

Yet we knew that the green country to which he went was Wisconsin. In the first hours after Friday night had fallen, when every back porch wavered, like rafts of a summer night, with the pinpointed flares of sticks of punk; that we burned, and moved as we burned them, to ward off mosquitoes, Greenhorn cranked up his Model-T and wheeled off to some county fair. I went to the backyard gate to watch him go: his taillight winked
Goodbye Forever
to me.

Goodbye to summer, goodbye to fun: goodbye to the weekday-morning sun.

Until a triumphant Monday-forenoon honking and a neighbor's cry—“Greener back! On wire going up!” brought summer back in a Model-T.

He rode the air and we rode the fence and the very air seemed daring.

Strangely, I anticipated scenes yet greater to come.

They came.

Greener soldered a pulley onto an ironworker's helmet, turned himself upside-down in it and rolled, upsy-downsy, along a cable to his garage!

A burst of applause—then he hit the ground on his face. Bashing his forehead and bending the hell out of the pulley.

“Greener's balance is so good upside-down he can't walk to the garage straight up anymore,” my mother commented—and rapped me one that spun me half across the kitchen—“let that be a warning to
you!
” A warning not to walk straight up to a garage or not to glide upside-down to it I didn't know.

Yet in that week nobody walked the wonderful wire. Greener had holed up in his garage. He was sleeping in there now.

“He hasn't come out for two days,” my mother reported to my father.

“He's
thinking
,” I assured them.

What Greener thought of was a double-cable, one length tightened from porch to garage and a lower strand drawn from garage to porch.

I saw the problem: how would he make it to the lower strand? When, through his garage window, I saw him somersaulting on an old mattress, I got an idea.

He came out of the garage somersaulting. Cheers—then apprehensive silence as he clamped on the helmet, slid on the cable straight-up to the garage; balanced himself upside-down on the wire—then somersaulted onto the lower strand and glided triumphantly home!

I stood on my head in upside-down joy. My father whacked the upside until I put it down—“Why can't you be a good boy like I like I was when I was a boy?” he wanted to know. I didn't know why, but no whacking could lessen my joy: a man had but to be foolishly daring and the world was changed, from sunlessness to sun, for everyone.

Hard times returned to the back porches of home. Greener had to travel farther, and take greater risks with his neck, for less money. One Monday the Model-T ran out of gas five blocks from home and we had to push it—half a dozen other kids and myself—to his garage. He did not wheel away to a county fair the next Friday evening: no gas.

“Greener will think of something,” I promised my mother.

“May it be to walk on his feet,” she hoped.

Greener thought of something. He jacked up the Model-T and crawled underneath it. He was converting it to a kerosene-oil burner. My father took alarm.

“The Stanley Steamer has already been invented!” he called the news down to Greener through the car's open hood—“It doesn't work out!”

Greener crawled out, looked up at my father, shook his head—yes—for
him
it would work out. And crawled back under the hood. His will
was forged of the same stuff as his tightwire cable. But it wasn't as flexible.

Now he lay against the November earth. In the slant yellow light of the last of day, coldly framing his garage door, we glimpsed the soles of his ragged sneakers, and saw his toes twitching with the cold. After dark he worked on by candlelight. It looked like the good times were over.

“If that boy had a mind he'd be dangerous,” my father felt.

“He's only saving electricity,” my mother hoped.

“He'll wind up in a room without corners,” my father decided.

“May he never lift anything heavier than money,” my mother wished.

Her washing was whipping whitely in the bright blue winter weather when a long, low, dripageous pall of coal-oil smog, sufficiently light to clear fences but too soggy to clear a clothesline, emerged from the hood of the Model-T, enwrapping sheets, shirts, petticoats, panties and pants, blankets and handkerchiefs, pillowcases and flannel underwear, leaving line after line dragging blackly toward earth.

Some Stanley Steamer.

Through this belching pall two policemen groped, with flashlight and gun, ready for anything. When Greener did not respond to a billy rapping the soles of his sneakers, one cop seized one naked ankle and the other seized the other, and dragged him forth, looking more like a miner coming up from a cave-in than an acrobat. Under the coal-oil his face was ashen. On the step of the hurry-up wagon he stumbled. I laughed.

It was like seeing a cat trip over itself.

Ten days later he returned, with a shuffling, brokenhearted walk. The Room Without Corners had done for that pale youth.

For neither upright nor upside-down, Greener never walked another wire. Nor wheeled off to farewells waved by small pinpointed flares from back porches on either side of his steering wheel. Nor ever in honking triumph returned.

Greener went to work in a neighborhood factory that manufactured endless belting for other factories. The acrobat stood at an endless belt making belting endlessly. He grew thin.

First he worked on wide-belt belting, but, as he grew still thinner, he was transferred to narrow-belt belting. There he began to gain weight. Greener had begun drinking.

He began drinking as soon as he had finished making belting endlessly,
and his drinking went on all night without end. When he began drinking as endlessly as he tended to belting, he was replaced by a beltless machine that makes machines for manufacturing endless belting.

Greener never tried anything again. His summer had been brief, the applause only fleeting, the good times soon done. The first heavy frost split the kitchen pane of the house in which he had once lived. One of the cables, that he'd drawn so tightly, snapped under its burden of ice; entangling itself with the lower cable. At last both wires hung uselessly dangling. I felt disappointed in everything. In March I shattered the window of his garage.

From time to time, in winters that followed, I saw Greener, diminished to a beer-drinking fly of the tavern corners, again. On the kind of night when cats freeze on fire escapes, I watched him shuffling about a bar with a shot-glass of whiskey on his head, inviting somebody to knock it off and make the whiskey run into his eyes, because some of it ran into his mouth. Once a bartender put him down on all fours and rode him across the floor, standing up in the saddle and then bringing his full weight down on his horse. Greener sprawled, rolled over laughing, onto his back, and lay with his mouth wide until the bartender paid for his ride with a shot of bar whiskey; that he sloshed down Greener's throat.

There was simply no end of the fun when Greener was in good form. People don't know what good times
are
any more.

Wandering about a Mammoth Cave of the paperback trade, through a fluorescent basement mist a few days before I boarded this ship, was what had brought the memory of Greener back. For it returned a phrase I'd read long ago—“We don't even know what living is now”—as though, watching men and women adrift through an underground glow, it wasn't titles of books we were seeking, but the names of our true selves.

Even the titles seemed adrift:
The Quest of Meaning, The Quest of Man, Man's Quest, The Quest of Being, The Meaning of Man, Meaning and Existence—
they began revolving as on some endless unseen belt. I closed my eyes and held on.

When I opened them the titles had steadied, yet they were still there:
Man's Destiny, Man's Hope, Man's Fate, Man's Place, The Past of Man, The
Path of Man, Hillbilly Nympho
—now how had
that
gotten in Man's path?—
Be Glad You're Single, Be Glad You're Neurotic, Be Glad You're Ugly, Be Glad You're Paraplegic, Be Glad You're White—
isn't anybody
pleased
to be black anymore?
Be Glad You're You, Be Glad You're Absurd, Growing Up Absurd—
is Paul Goodman arranging our booklists? What is more absurd than to be so grown-up that the Meaning of Man concerns you more than men and women? Since when does abstracting the life from the poetry of living entitle a hollow hack to the honorable name of thinker?

I saw three biographies of Melville but not a copy of
Typee
; four studies of Dostoevsky but where was
Crime and Punishment
? About D. H. Lawrence the safest statement anyone can now make is that yet another “definitive edition” of his work will be issued within the year, although eleven of his books are out of print—definitively. Who hooked
that
tightwire up? Would their publication dump all “definitive editions” onto the remainder tables? Who's standing on his head now?

“
Where are they? Where are they?
” were Dylan Thomas' last coherent words.

They went thataway.

Our most daring minds, from Mailer to Murph the Surf, are now so high above ground with no net below, that the only people still looking up are those on pot.

“What I really object to,” one Home Ec thinker claims, “is the writer who offers me the world's horrors without offering a solution”;
¹⁹
thus advising us that Flaubert behaved badly in sending
Madame Bovary
to the publisher without appending a solution to small-town adultery. (That the world offers hardly a horror more deadly than a bourgeois antiquarian imposing a merchandiser's morality upon all art not subserving his personal comfort, he is too complacent to suspect.)