New Moon (74 page)

In addition to being the busboy I earned $25 once a week for scrubbing the kitchen floor with commercial detergent and another $20 to come in every other morning and clean the bar.

“Why pay two rents?” Lindy volunteered. “We should get a
place together.” It was an outrageous suggestion but I gleefully concurred. Most apartments were too expensive, yet Mitchell had heard about log cabins on a road outside town. “They’re apparently really beautiful,” he said, “and in the woods.”

I drove west looking for some sort of Gold Rush encampment. Four miles out along the Roaring Fork River, I came upon the next best thing: Aspen Park Cabins.

The couple who owned the property were affable enough, schoolteachers from Denver. For $50 a month you got a one-room cottage with a wood stove (management providing split firewood), a desk, a table, shelves, two double beds, a sink, silverware, plates, pots and pans, and a refrigerator with a freezer. All the cabins shared an outhouse. They had one unit left. “My only requirement,” the educator in red-and-black plaid announced with a deadpan smile, “is that you have to be married.” I swallowed hard and wrote “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Grossinger,” then hurried back into town. It was my toughest white lie ever because it was jinxing what I most wanted, bringing it into surveillance way too fast. “Mr. and Mrs.?” I was still a child.

She wasn’t. “You did it, Rich!” she exclaimed. Collecting our belongings in two trips, we planted our typewriters on stacks of crates, clothes on shelves, the overflow on hangers along a center pole. Books were set on small half-logs we hammered above the beds and over the sink. The cabin’s second double bed served as a couch.

After arranging the dwelling, we returned to town and wheeled a cart up and down aisles picking out groceries. Felicity was to break out the cabin’s plates, cups, and silverware and make our first domestic meal.

That night Mitchell was our guest. The three of us lay on the porch at sunset listening to the music of the Roaring Fork, talking Hindu illusion, tarot, and the sacred yew tree—a fire snapping inside, boiling water for noodles. As the sky darkened, our friend blessed our cabin with an epigraph from Bachelard:

“All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those
who do not know themselves! When you felt alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!”

“Mitchell,” Lindy said, “that’s a beautiful, perfect prayer. I only hope we can deserve it.”

After the meal we walked across the road and sat on boulders over the Roaring Fork. Shooting stars pierced the starry vault.

As I drove him back to town, Mitchell and I played with the radio, hunting for ballgames. From the High Rockies we could pull in a whole continent of them.

Dressed as a Swiss-like Alaskan maid, Lindy served drinks to a courtyard—she joked—of garnished fowls, but the Toklat traineeship never materialized into a job (she wasn’t proficient at memorizing the complicated drinks), so she wrote her articles and twice a week vacuumed, dusted, and cleaned the postal clerk’s house. Meanwhile Sunnie’s Rendezvous was perhaps the least popular restaurant in town. I arrived nightly at 4:30 in jacket and tie. Chester, the grizzled chef, fed the waiter Bob and me scraps from his menu, odds and ends of fish, fondu, and assorted fried vegetables. Then we sat in the alcove and awaited customers.

My partner, Bob, a bespectacled cowboy freak from Wyoming with a healthy crop of hair growing out of both ears, was a career waiter and supporter of Barry Goldwater. Like Ralph, he had left another “situation” to launch Sunnie’s enterprise, a mistake he now regretted, for summer tips served as his year’s keep. At my level, though, the income was sufficient. After all, I was an imposter, a double agent from Grossinger’s, slumming.

On most evenings it was an hour or more before the first customer appeared. Chester stared dolefully at the ceiling. Bob dropped into a stupor. And Ralph’s witticisms left more and more empty space between them until he fell silent too. I spent the time on tenterhooks over the fate of Frodo the ring-bearer.

“… he looked eastward and saw all the land of Lorien running down to the pale gleam of Anduin, the Great River….

“‘There lies the fastness of Southern Mirkwood,’ said Haldir. ‘It is clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees rot and wither. In the midst upon a stony height stands Dol Guldur, where long the hidden Enemy had his dwelling. We fear now it is inhabited again, and with power sevenfold.’”

“I don’t care if there ain’t no customers,” snapped Sunnie. “I don’t want you educatin’ yourself on my time. At least
look
like you’re ready to serve.”

After reading was abolished, Bob and I stood in the alcove debating politics and our boss’s incipient dementia.

No more than four of the fifteen tables were ever filled, though I found our diners a congenial constituency. I made friends with two priests from Oklahoma City to whom Bob was rude because he thought they were fags and wouldn’t tip us. “Would you give the same compliments to Jesus Christ?” I asked.

My new buddies not only left a generous stack of bills but slipped me a few extras to pay for
Io
s to give away at home.

During one meal I kept a discussion going with a NASA executive about the
Mariner
satellite headed towards Mars. He took down my name and Phi Psi address and promised to send early press photos (he did). Bob thought that
this
guy was a Soviet spy. Meanwhile Sunnie told me to stop pestering the clientele with “your college-boy routine.”

I came in to clean around 10 a.m., pushed open saloon doors, turned floodlights onto the bar. Then I counted empty whiskey bottles by brand, hosed the walk, put in fresh ice chips, rotated the warm beers under the cold, swept away crumbs, polished tables, dumped ashtrays, checked toilet paper, and refilled bowls with pretzels and potato chips.

Sunnie had told me to amuse myself by playing records. She meant hers, but one day I brought in T. S. Eliot reciting the “Quartets”:

She had forgotten to shut off the speakers by which recordings of
Ralph were blasted into the arcade to lure dinner customers from the streets. I was unknowingly serenading the town of Aspen.

While I poured potato chips in the semi-darkness, unknown to me a crowd had gathered on the street.

Rumors of this performance soon roused Sunnie and, just as Eliot was intoning about
“the movement of darkness on darkness … “
(the panorama of blue sky and aspens being stripped away), she burst in.

“Turn off the sermon, boy!” she declared. “It ain’t Sunday!”

Our life in the cabin was the heart and soul of the summer. We woke into ice-cold mornings and cuddled in bed until one of us got up and put newspaper and kindling in the stove and lit a match. Black metal creaked, distributing heat, igniting our viscera like sun on two dormant reptiles. Soon smoky tree alphabets warmed the room with their sap, stirring prehistoric memories and opening another Rocky Mountain day. We hiked in bathrobes and moccasins uphill across pine needles to the outhouse to brush our teeth in glaciermelt, then take a hot-spring-like shower. Back at the hearth we cooked French toast or pancakes in the cabin’s scalding black cast-iron pan.

We collected suns: the low orange sun barely tinting the morning formica; the cold white breakfast-and-coffee-on-a-log sun; the dishwashing sun in gray-water; the hot noon sun where we lay and read in high grass; the late-afternoon forest sun, aspen leaves whirring moiré patterns and susurrus; the golden sun of supper beans … a sunset of bats and evening stars.

At night—Brakhage’s moths fluttering on the screen, an owl sang alien notes. We boarded the huge bed that seemed a raft among constellations … and sailed onto that
“river of crystal light / into a sea of dew.”

When Lindy had cramps or got a flu I brought her cups of tea and sat by her. We talked tirelessly and argued fiercely but always
loved each other again. Our original passion had been replaced by an intimacy so riveting and solid, so delicate, I hardly noticed how we had become a couple.

I grew my hair long, wore blue work-shirts and dungarees, and wrote a new style of prose—clipped syntax like that of Olson but narrative, combining images from science fiction, baseball, dreams, tarot, and rock ’n’ roll, framing them in Jungian archetypes, Kelly magic talk, and Blackburn-like
Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit
jazz. I gave my essays titles like “Aspect,” “Syntax,” “Electrons,” and “Quantum.” I was after a pop literary voice, something like Alyosha Karamazov crooning “Teenager in Love” to his brother Ivan, or Darl Bundren snapping his fingers Bobby Darin-like and then breaking into “Dream Lover” and “Beyond the Sea.”

Many an afternoon Lindy and I sat on the front porch, glasses of ice water on the ledge, rapping on our electric keys. At five she drove me to work, came and got me at ten.

One morning I rescued Ralph’s bored eight-year-old son from Sunnie’s basement while his father practiced the piano and drove him to the cabin. I tossed him pitches and pop flies in a clearing—Lindy was at her newspaper job. Afterwards he looked up at the dresses and sports jackets hanging together on the pole and asked, “Does your wife live here?” Tears welled as I nodded. Male and female clothing mingled magically to make a home.

Perhaps it was not such a lie after all.

Our other close friends were Welton and Elsie, a black poet and his Jewish wife who lived otherwise on the Lower East Side. Welton was a scholarship student, star of the workshop. A smallish squat trickster with twinkling eyes and quick darting movements and lingo, he liked to tease Mitchell and me.

“I’m a street poet,” he declared, “a man of the people. I’m Malcolm X and Che Guevara. I don’t go for all this crazy shit about angels and alchemists and electronic higgledy-piggledy.”

“Welton’s a closet sorcerer,” Mitchell whispered, “but we’ll keep his secret.”

Welton smiled in collusion. “We’re at Yankee Stadium,” he said,
“waiting for the word. Maher-shalal-hash-baz. Will the real Martin Luther King please sit down.”

Mitchell and I could not stop laughing.

“Hey, I’m writing this poem for you guys—Dar es Salaam, Key West, Antigua, Azimuth. The number of conditions required to determine a curve is equal to the number of independent constants in the equation of the curve.”

“What else, Welton?” I managed.

“What else! Sinai, Phoenix, Zajecar, Paoting, Harlem, Toulouse, Minsk. The case, the gender are irrelevant!”

In mid-July Lindy answered an ad for “kittens” and came back with a gray tabby we named Frodo. She tore around our room and pounced on our bed in the morning, chasing the covers as we shifted. Hobbit-like, she climbed on hind legs and poked her head under the curtains to track birds and rippling branches, her attention a moving bump of fabric.

On weekends we drove to lakes, wildflower meadows, and mining towns. In mid-summer, we bought tickets to an outdoor performance of Holst’s
Planets
at the Aspen Music Festival. The orchestra tuned in the pavilion, then burst into melody. Mercury darted among fireflies; Mars pranced with ghosts of Indian warriors; Saturn brought fullness and old age. Uranus arrived as a magician; Neptune finally settled the revelry, a mystic and sea captain accompanied by fairy-tale sprites, nymphs, and brownies.

“If we lived on Uranus,” I wrote that night, “there would be five moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon. Imagine wandering in a gaseous body in a methane breeze, Oberon setting, having nothing to do with Holst or a midsummer night, except the sound ‘oberon,’ pulling green spouts back and forth across a green sea.”

Above timberline, meteors scraped the astrological sky.

That Sunday I imagined the thumping jollity of Jupiter in thunder and rain, washing mud and leaves, twigs and pine needles into gullies while Frodo hid under the bed. I had never suspected Earth could be this pleasurable—kitten-cat, chortle of the fire, meals together,
evergreen spices in the air, a big night sky—my memories of childhood resolving through their ancient melancholy into the joy of bottomless presence. There
was
finally world enough and time. I needed no other planet, no spaceship or supernal clan.

The summer is preserved in a single image: Lindy and I with our cups of coffee on the porch or in the high grass and dew after breakfast. Frodo runs from tree to tree, grasping the white bark with her claws and pulling herself up like a lemur. She drops, dashes again. I lie back against the sky.

Life had lost its narrative structure and become a timeless dance, a waking dream.

Lindy’s poems followed the path to the river, Hans Christian Andersen, the magic of children actors … and Lindy-Rich: