New Moon (73 page)

With unrestrained glee I thanked him, for I couldn’t myself draw a turtle. Now I wish I had let his transdimensional field stand as what it was: a gateway beyond literality.

In order to have the magazine published inexpensively Lindy and I took the work to a cut-rate typesetter in New York City and
then brought her pages to the Grossinger’s print shop. The keyboarder was so cut-rate that, after we gave her a list of her typos, she lit another cigarette, typed a sheet of amendments, and handed it to me. It was left to us to cut them out and paste them over her errors: “You want corrections in place,” she griped, “find a fancier joint.” Ninety miles away we enlisted my old friend Stanley in the Grossinger’s print shop and, with a knife, pot of glue, and steady hand during a break from laying out the next day’s lunch menu, he got us clean paste-ups. Then he promised to print the booklet when he had an opening in his schedule.

Lindy and I had planned to go together to fetch the cartons and drop the first copies at Bard, but by the time it was ready she was off at Williams, going out with an old friend from Denver. So, that Friday after classes, I drove the four hours to the Hotel alone.

In stacks beside rooster-clad breakfast menus sat
Io,
Nelson’s image on its front. It was like an occult
Chipinaw Chirp,
artwork seamlessly tattooed among words, moth-wing-and-mesh covers vaguely suggesting Minoan tablets. I kept sniffing the fresh ink as I lugged three cartons to the car. Then I drove to Bard and presented
Io
to Kelly.

After extolling the magazine and promising to submit work to the next issue, he heard out my woes and suggested that he and I go to the Chinese restaurant for a private session. As we clanked across the bridge, his body draped over the column of Bloisius, he gave the oracle’s answer: “This is life and death to you, isn’t it? At least you recognize that. You were well taught by your childhood hardships. Most people in this country think it’s all fun and games.” His words were as startling and on target as ever. “America has teeth, you know. If you rise up and become what you are, it will try to strike you down, destroy you. All the while it will smile and pretend to be innocuous. Ah yes, that great American sense of humor that someday will surely kill us all.”

I said that Lindy wanted to date other people and I wondered if maybe she was right. “Perhaps I should see other girls too.”

“Those are just notions. You don’t know where the gods are leading you. Simply follow. Forget the past. Be what you are now.
Lindy—and you likewise—are involved in an old image of ecstasy, but ‘ex’ is always outside. We need to invent a new word—call it ‘enstasy,’ the pleasure of staying within a growing form no matter how painful. The form itself will sustain you and tell you when it is time to break off. You have only the vulnerability of your being with which to face the world. Expose yourself and be redeemed.”

On a walk in the Glen the following Monday, Nelson cautioned me not to forget the angels either: “You can’t write their script for them. They write for you. They write so much better than you could imagine. When you get too involved in making things happen you get in their way. Simple prayers are everywhere—like those bird sounds. Listen.”

“Kywassik!kywassik!kywassik!” shot from distant trees. The primal obscurity of that code cut through me like a knife.

Then one evening in May, Lindy called and asked me to bring her more copies of
Io.
We went for a drive in the country and parked by a tobacco field. I looked at her face, no more anger in it, only a mirror of what my love for the world had become, my hope too, because I had cast it all into her. I kissed her teary cheeks as she said, “Okay, Rich, so we try again.”

Years later she contended that our courtship was bumpy because she was coming of age too, going through her own process of individuation, my melodramas and mythologies notwithstanding. Human beings are complex enough creatures and the universe itself is all the more complex, so two divergent stories can occupy the same space-time
and both be true.
After all, we are operating on many different levels, psychological and psychic, simultaneously.

Now the summer faced us—and how to be together. Lindy had her own quandary with her family. There was little good feeling left at home: her sisters were elsewhere, her mother and father were not getting along—a mid-life crisis. More radical and zany than the other girls, she had grown up nonetheless a cheerful, compliant daughter in a Colorado Episcopalian setting, Mayflower Society on her father’s side, Denver society on her mother’s, trappings of wealth
but not enough money to back appearances. In their own heedless way these parents had sabotaged her, keeping her powerless and eligible. She was supposed to marry a social prototype, a businessman or lawyer. They never considered who she really was herself or that she might contain dances and dreams not in the other two girls.

At adolescence she had been transformed from a family jester into a rebellious teenager, hanging around the circle of a friend’s mom who threw weekend parties where booze, Librium, and marijuana flowed freely. On Lindy’s sixteenth birthday she tossed her clothes down from the second storey and planned to slip out the window for late fireworks, but her father surprised her in the act. It was horribly dangerous—descending safely down the house would not have worked.

Her last weeks of high school were open warfare. By the time she left for college, the rifts had healed, her behavior blamed on the boys she was dating. Her family didn’t shout so much as impose guilt trips on one another—obligatory confessions, apologies under duress. When Lindy talked on the phone about the shortcomings of Smith, her mother said simply, “Then you can transfer to CU.” She had gone to Smith herself and didn’t want it criticized.

After our visits to Kelly and the escapades of the spring, Lindy could no more return to being a compliant citizen at home—her mother dominant, her father not saying a word—than I could abide another term at Grossinger’s. We planned to spend the summer together.

We toyed with the notion of working in New York—Milty Stackel had a new shop in Queens and offered to hire us—but her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Her requirement was that she come back to Colorado. If that’s where Lindy had to be, well then so did I. We hatched a different plan, around Aspen. “It’s the most happening Colorado town,” she effused. We would each go home; then she would head to the Western Slope and get a job. I would drive out, a big journey, New York all the way to the Rockies, and meet her there.

I took her to the Hartford-Springfield airport, aware of the hurdles before us. At least we were of one mind and heart and our difficulties were tactical. We kissed goodbye, and I headed to Grossinger’s. My
mindset was sacred warrior, “Moon River,” “Gotta Travel On,”
Another Country.
My book was
Lord of the Rings,
recommended months earlier by Schuy, now critical reading material. I was setting out from the Shire with the ring, under the shadow of Mordor.

When I told my father that I would get my own job again he froze. “Absolutely not,” he barked, “This summer you’re working for me.” I nodded disarmingly, keeping my plan to myself.

The next morning I visited our old boarder Jerry thirteen miles away in Grahamsville. It seemed sad that he and I couldn’t have another summer of playing ball, sitting in the backyard with Bunny, but that pastoral was over. I told him what I was about to do. He understood my wish to be free if not the irreconcilability of my situation.

I had been under the influence of the gods for so many months now that nothing was innocent—they were hurrying me on my way. I was lucky to survive even that simple encounter with a friend. A blue car speeding past me twice (going into town and then back out at perhaps ninety) had performed a hit-and-run, seriously injuring a child. A witness said it was the one that “came back through town,” which was also me because I had overshot Jerry’s road. As we sat on the porch, he got a disquieting phone call. He calculated my degree of jeopardy—enough not to risk a constable’s fishing expedition (though my car was yellow)—and he sent me home immediately on a back road.

I felt the malevolence of the thing on my tail. Dark forces of undisclosed vintage opposed me. Some stranger, on a whim, could take away my license. I could end up in jail or a mental ward like Bunny. I could lose Lindy. And my own father was laconic, barely conscious. I had no time to spare.

At nightfall of the third day I wrote a brief note to my father, packed the Mustang: a box with a few books and records, a carton of
Io
s, and my baseball glove as well as the requisite suitcase of necessities. I set out west on Route 52. Harvey had left his Bard room unlocked for me, so I slept there, then got up at dawn and picked up the New York State Thruway at Kingston. I drove west into Pennsylvania, then across the Ohio line: virgin territory. A year ago I had borrowed Fred’s clunker with Ohio plates to take Lindy to the airport. Now I was in Ohio itself, following, at a snail’s pace and five days behind, the wake of her plane. Except for the teen tour and my flight to Denver, I had never been west of Scranton.

Gradually my excitement waned into a boredom of the road, its boding of the long miles ahead. The radio became tiresome. Only currents of memories held any interest. Ceaselessly they bubbled up, contacted my mind, and fell back away: punchball in the P.S. 6 yard, Dr. Friend opening his door to start a session, Callicoon Creek, June Valli singing “Applegreen.”

I was driven by rage for all that had been done to me, but also by the tenderness I felt for Lindy and the immensity and mystery ahead. The morning was cool. A big sun cleared the last stars. Little by little, daytime’s progression of hues permeated the landscape, gradually maturing into bright Midwestern p.m. as traffic increased. Repetitive thoughts raced, disappearing, returning, subsiding. I became quicker and more coordinated, darting in and out of lanes clogged with trucks, breaking loose again and again, into the clear.
By early evening when I pulled into the driveway of my old roommate Greg’s house in Hudson, my Mustang was a racing shell. That was the first day of my journey: 490 miles under my belt.

I arrived during an all-out locust invasion. Aliens were crawling across the ground, flying up and buzzing in swarms, crashing against the window as I showered and fell asleep in the back room.

Noon awakening brought Sherwood Anderson Ohio balm, floating in zephyr-fragrant blossoms, inviting me (through Greg’s parents) to stay on a few days
(“And all the world seemed applegreen….”).
I wanted to. I saw kids lined up at an ice-cream truck, an adult softball game in choose-up phase. There was so much unlived life for which I felt nostalgia: things I had been thinking of and those I hadn’t, all the same now. I wished I could disappear into their sweet opacity, stand in the village gaggle, ready to be someone’s left fielder, smash vigilance and lie exposed and anonymous, a frog in the nameless sun. But I was in a leap and there were no respites mid-air.

I left the next morning and set out west on the Ohio Turnpike.

I crossed the line into Indiana, then Illinois. My average speed increased. My mind ground miles into pebbles, then loam of broken thoughts. I began to notice police cars as I fantasized my father collaborating with my Grahamsville accuser to bring me back—a spell of paranoia that gradually faded. Moods came and went in a tedium of driving; only the mileage made progress, now less than a hundred to the Iowa line.

Habitation became sparser, landscapes more rural—farms scattered in near and far distances, corn dust in the air. Crossing the Mississippi at Davenport, I was surprised to find Iowa Highway 80 posted for seventy-five, a new high. Wow, I could zoom!

Nightfall Iowa City, 562 miles notched on the second day. Sitting in a restaurant with a slice of pizza I sank into
Lord of the Rings:
“Whether the morning and evening of one day or of many days passed Frodo could not tell. He did not feel either hungry or tired, only filled with wonder. The stars shone through the window and the silence of the heavens seemed to be around him…. ”

Having left the Shire, Frodo was travelling through outlying
districts, each of them fraught with dangers human and other, also allies he had yet to identify. He was led by a gray magician named Gandalf.

I chose a motel on a sidestreet; signed the register; then lay in fresh, stiff sheets, reading till I couldn’t keep my eyes open:

“When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside.”

Yes, the Dark Lord … immanent yet so long ago.

In the morning I explored the town, the Iowa River, houses on its banks, children in their yards. I imagined Lindy and me living there someday. I even found the campus offices of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where a British faculty member spared a half hour, let me babble about my work and, shaking my hand on parting, encouraged me to apply.

Revived by that fantasy I returned to the speedway and hurtled through cornfields. “Salt flats, salt flats,” I encouraged myself as the expanse of stone whipped beneath, syncopated by blips of cars in the other direction. At sunset I came into giant Nebraska, swept past Omaha, then tapers of Lincoln at dusk. One more state to go.

Through the night, old farm teams Sam Rosenberg assigned us in Bunk 9 (Kearney and North Platte) approached at fifty miles, dwindled to digits, exited with the locals, and passed. I blended with the road’s drama, an outlaw fleeing through badlands, dependent on my steed. I slept in the car at a road stop—525 miles on my third day.

I awoke at dawn. Light revealed a Western landscape: brown and sparse, occasional farms, pigs and cattle, brief azure ponds. The kid who had never driven west of the Delaware River had crossed the continent, from the Catskills to the prairie, and was headed for the Rockies. At a gas station I rapped on the car’s yellow alloy fondly.

The nearness of Colorado, recalculated every few minutes, kept my brain engaged through the tedium of the western corridor of Nebraska. By the time I crossed the state line the sun was on top of me, as the miles to Denver melted into the plains. The last two hundred were nothing at all.

Mid-afternoon I came in through ranch suburbs, urban radio; found my way to Lindy’s street, parked in front of her house, and emerged like a snail from my four-day shell.

Her parents regarded my arrival with suspicion. Did I plan to spend the whole summer with her? Where would I live? They didn’t want a premature courtier, and certainly not me. I tried to be matter-of-fact.

Lindy was already in Aspen and, since they had the switchboard number of her lodging, I called. To my relief—she hadn’t vanished over the continental divide into the anonymous Rockies like some apparition—she answered her line right away. She was both astonished and delighted: “I knew you’d try, but I told myself you might never get out of there.”

She reviewed her situation. She was staying in a dormitory motel and had gotten two part-time jobs already—one writing for the
Aspen Illustrated News,
the other as a bartender-in-training at a restaurant called the Toklat. “Decorated with dogsleds and igloos,” she laughed. She could begin for real on July 4th when she was 21.

I stayed overnight with her parents and left early the next morning, assuring them I would get my own place. From Denver it was a gradual ascent into the mountains, curvy roads up and down passes, occasional straight runs through high-altitude valleys. Woods became evergreen, sky spackled with cream-puff cumulus that descended tantalizingly to timberline. Finally, almost 200 miles (and five hours) west of Denver, I came out the steep chute of a Rocky Mountain pass into a small resort town, its late-afternoon main street teeming with college-age kids, a sobering glimpse of the reality for which I had traded the plushness and protection of my father’s hotel. I was on my own.

I got directions to Lindy’s apartment complex, found her door along a dim hallway, and knocked. The flight from Grossinger’s had brought me home.

Her face and presence were famous by now, but I was surprised by her actuality. In the days since parting I had frozen her mien, forgotten her three-dimensionality: wide Modigliani brow, eyes in profile like accent marks, intelligent clear-as-a-bell voice ringing
with assurance. Standing there in person, she was so real, a still picture come to life. For a moment, I found it hard to respond; then we hugged and sat together on the bed telling our tales. I relived my journey for her: imperiled escape, locusts, Iowa City. Then I heard about the exigencies of Aspen employment. After a while she pointed out the obvious: I needed a place to stay, and a job.

She knew of a ski chalet on the eastern side of town where there might be inexpensive rooms. In fact, she had thought of living there herself but couldn’t without a car. We drove to look, and I snared the last room for a few dollars a night. It was a gloomy basement cubicle without a window, but I unpacked: typewriter, clothes, books, baseball glove….

For the rest of that week and Monday and Tuesday of the following one I hunted for a job, answering ads (with Lindy slipping me the classified before it was printed) and going door to door on the main drag and sidestreets. Competing with the roving horde of college students, I was routinely turned down at restaurants, the other newspaper, the bookstore, two rock-and-mineral shops, and miscellaneous storefronts. In order to get away from the throngs I offered to tutor Latin at a private school Lindy knew about in Carbondale. They thought about it for three tantalizing days before declining, “Sorry, come back in the fall.” Meanwhile Lindy found a third job, cleaning house and babysitting for a postal clerk with a new baby.

I was running out of money, so I called my grandmother and started to give her an account of my situation. She didn’t need testimony—she wired $200 the next morning.

From a poster on a lamp-post Lindy and I discovered that we had unexpected literary company: there was a writing program including two poets we knew of from Kelly: Paul Blackburn and John Taggart.

Aspen Writers’ Workshop was located in a ski-lodge basement. After attending a reading there, we introduced ourselves and passed around copies of
Io.
Though we were not paying members, Blackburn invited us to join his seminar. That happily grounded us in a college-like scene. With Lindy working and me hunting for
a job, we couldn’t be daily participants but, when able, we lay in the grass of a nearby park and listened to student poems followed by Paul’s playfully brilliant critiques, almost poems themselves.

We also met clusters of the Workshop crowd for lunch and dinner at an open-air restaurant in the center of town. On our meager budget we developed a passion for bowls of soup mixed with oatmeal or Wheatina—the house specialty—followed by after-dinner banter over tea.

Our best friend was Mitchell, a tall, spacy kid with curly black hair and glasses. A onetime student of George von Hillshimer at Summer Lane and a graduate of Music and Art in New York City, he presently attended funky Antioch College in Ohio, the antipode of Amherst and Smith. As intellectual as he was hip, Mitchell was a maestro of deadpan cosmic comedy. His favorite topics were Jungian synchronicity, sacred alphabets, and an avant-garde philosopher named Marshall McLuhan who had recently turned the world inside-out by placing the medium before the message. From topic to topic Mitchell had to clarify whether we were talking lineal typographic reality, phenomenological reality, tribal reality, or radio-TV electromagnetic waves. As he peppered his riffs with McLuhanesque
achtung
s and reality detours, he soon had me reading
The Gutenberg Galaxy.

Aspen was surrounded by huge, very close mountains, an ever-present reminder that I was on a new planet, as unfamiliar in its way as Mars or Blueland. Then McLuhan fissioned the picture-postcard landscape, breaking it open its true oneiric immensity, casting four-dimensional diamonds of focus throughout the dialectics of space.

I had long sought an intellectual companion like Mitchell—a gentler, less magisterial version of Chuck Stein—someone who, like me, wandered from science fiction and alchemy through baseball history, pop songs, and New York subway stops. Mitchell and I regularly sat in the grass by the Workshop, riffing back and forth: projective verse, pre-Giotto Christian paintings, the totem poles of audio-tactile cultures, Little Anthony, the 1958 Yankees.

Chuck was far-out cuckoo too but cuckoo-sober; Mitchell let
everything
hang out.

From Kelly’s original reading list I had brought along Gaston Bachelard’s
The Poetics of Space,
which deepened the phenomenology of every breeze, alcove, and shadow, and Robert Graves’
White Goddess,
which tracked the origins of alphabets back to primeval tree names, not only the aspens and birches around us but the original apple trees of Wales and Breton, the “querts” whose “Q” was shaped from the enigmatic apple of Eve’s first question. The rune “Q,” Graves proposed (perhaps even apocryphally), came from the wild crabapple whose pome-and-stem design it replicates (hence the questions
quis?, quid?, quam?,
as well as the quest itself). “Q” was the mysterious fruit, in Celtic dialects, that Adam and Eve ate illicitly to get to the bottom of things at the beginning of time. Behind the alphabet, behind the origin of speech, lay only an atomistic chaos, not unlike the moments of sleep before dream.

This was great stuff, but I still needed a job.

Toward the end of the second week Lindy met me at lunch with a hot new listing that hadn’t run—I could beat the crowd. A restaurant named Sunnie’s Rendezvous was opening underneath the bookstore in the arcade—they needed a busboy. “Say you worked at Grossinger’s this time,” she advised. It wasn’t honest, but it worked.

Sunnie was a platinum-blond ex-showgirl from Manhattan. On the magic of my surname she hired me at once, and I began the following night. It was an intimate dinner-only saloon—menu on a blackboard (trout, sirloin, fondu, etc.). The whole room was serviced by just one waiter and a busboy
(moi).

Sunnie featured the live jazz of her boyfriend Ralph Sutton, who I would think of years later when I met the musician Randy Newman; he had recently left his wife to be with her. A serious bespectacled man, he sat at the piano all night, playing whether there were patrons or not. I imagined him equally celebrating and doing penance for his illicit romance and, in any case, he had nowhere else to go.