The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (11 page)

I.

 

reading the Dialogues of Plato when the

doctor walks up and says

 

 

do you still read that highbrow

stuff? last time I read that I

was in

high school.

 

 

I read it, I tell

him.

 

 

well, it’s a girl, 9#, 3 oz. no trouble at

all.

 

 

shit. great. when can I see

them?

 

 

they’ll let you know. good

night.

 

II.

 

I sit down to Plato again. there are 4 people playing

cards. one woman has beautiful legs that she doesn’t hide

and I keep looking at her legs until she covers them with a

blue sweater.

 

III.

 

I am called upstairs. they show me the thing through glass.

it’s red as a boiled crab and tough. it will make

it. it will see it through.

 

 

hey, look at this, Plato:
another broad!

I can see her now on some Sunday afternoon

shaking it in a tight skirt

making boulevards of young men warble in their

guts.

 

 

I wave the girl and the nurse

away.

 

IV.

 

the woman is still stunned with

drugs but I tell her

 

 

a great woman has arrived!

and make my fists into little balls and I

hold up my arms and

snarl-cry.

 

 

the nurse is fat and Mexican, has eaten too many

tortillas.

 

 

nice to have met you, sweetheart, I

tell her.

 

V.

 

then I am back at the shack. I sit down and listen to

the bathtub drip.

I go over and pull all the blinds down and fall on the

couch. all I can hear is tires on

steel streets.

 

VI.

 

there is a
meeow
from the screen and I let him

in: sober, indifferent,

hungry.

 

VII.

 

we walk into the kitchen

male, swaggering under the electric light;

4 balls, 2 heads

dominion over all the continent

over ships that sail in and out

over small female things and jewels.

 

 

I get down the can of

cat food and open

it. Plato is left in the

glove compartment.

 

 

…and all they know is kill, these pungent insects,

and as we whirl in new worlds

I am filled with space and I

am ill; I roll a child’s marble

upon the rug, then hear it

clatter off into some new corner

and I puke as the telephone rings;

MR. SPANISH, A VOICE SAYS, WE WANT

YOU TO SPEAK BEFORE THE

SOCIETY. WE FEEL IT WILL BE

VITAL. I hang up, of course,

and I find an orange

in the icebox, but before

I can peel it and eat it

I am ill again.

and

I take off

and fold my shoes, sit down cross-

legged, (like a statue I wish I

owned), and wait, at 3 p.m.,

to die.

 

 

down at the end of the bar

he used to bum

drinks, now he is a balding man and

I lean close:

you are the finest poet

of our age, you are the

only one that everybody

understands…

 

 

we drink coffee, we sit in his small

poorly furnished house, his oil paintings

are on the walls. I am going to give him

money, paper, paint, a better

typewriter. he is going to give me some

original

manuscripts.

 

 

I look at him and sense that he fears

me. he coughs, his stomach must feel

oily, dense,

ill.

 

 

I tell him:

I know all about you:

you had a cruel Spanish

stepfather, you lived with

numerous whores, drank yourself

senseless,

starved…

yeah, he

says.

 

 

I lean closer:

in my own quiet way,

I am a worshipper of

heroes…

 

 

when I leave with his manuscripts (signed)

and one of his oils plus

3 wire-coiled and unreadable

notebooks

he doesn’t come to the door with me. there is a

mirror and he sits looking into the

mirror and he

bows his head, ashamed and

finished.

 

 

“The Artist,” an ancient sage had once said,

“is always sitting on the doorsteps of the

rich.”

 

 

I swing into my caddy, throw the junk in the back and

drive off.

 

 

Seivers was one of the hardest running backs since

Jimmy Brown, and lateral motion too,

like a chorus girl, really, until one day he got hit on

the blind side by Basil Skronski; we carried Seivers off the field

but Skronski had gotten one rib and cracked another.

 

 

the next year Seivers wasn’t even good in practice, gun shy as a

squirrel in deer season; he stopped contact, fumbled, couldn’t even

hold a look-in pass or a handoff—all that wasted and he could go the 100 in 9.7.

 

 

I’m 45 years old, out of shape, too much beer, but one of the best

assistant coaches in the pro game, and I can’t stand to see a man

jaking it. I got him in the locker room the other day when the whole

squad was in there. I told him, “Seivers, you used to be a player

but now you’re chickenshit!”

 

 

“you can’t talk that way to me, Manny!” he said, and I turned him

around, he was lacing on a shoe, and I right-cracked him

right on the chin, he fell against a locker

and then he began to cry—the greatest since Brown,

crying there against the locker, one shoe off, one on.

“come on, men, let’s get outa here!” I told the gang, and we ran

on out, and when we got back he had cleared out, he was gone, his

gear was gone. we got some kid from Illinois running his spot now,

head down, knees high, he don’t care where’s he’s going.

 

 

guys like Seivers end up washing dishes for a buck an hour

and that’s just what they deserve.

 

 

the phone rings and it is usually the woman with the

sexy voice from the phone company telling me

to please pay my phone bill,

but this time a voice says quietly,

“you son of a bitch,”

and it is the editor of a dozen magazines,

everything from religious pamphlets

to do-it-yourself abortions,

and he asks,

“why haven’t you called?”

and I say, “we don’t get along.”

“catalysis,” he says,

“dig?”

“dig,” I say,

and then he tells me that he has seen me

in issue No. 5 of
Crablegs and Muletears

and that I am getting better,

and I tell him that I am a slow starter

and being only 42

I still stand a chance to spread sand

in Abdulah’s garden,

and he says come on over

I want you to meet a friend

and I tell him I will give him a ring

after the track…

 

 

it is Saturday and hot

and the faces of greed rushing past

pinched and dried and impossible

want to make me kneel amongst the lilies and pray

but instead I go to a bar

where I can get good vodka and orange for 70¢

and people keep talking to me,

it is one big lonely hearts club,

people lonely for a voice and a million dollars

and not getting much of either,

and by the 9th race I am one hundred dollars in the hole

and a big colored guy walks up to me

and spreads the tickets of the last winner in his hand

like violin music,

and I say

“fine, fine,”

and he says, “I am with a couple of old broads

and now they are trying to find me,

but I am ducking out, I am going to lock the doors

and get drunk.”

“fine,” I say, and he walks off

and I keep wondering why so many colored people

talk to me, and then I remembered

I was in a bar once and a big black guy swore me into

something called the Muslims;

I had to repeat a lot of fancy words and

we drank all night,

but I thought he was kidding:

I am not out to destroy all the white race—

only a small part of it:

myself.

 

 

“who you like?” another guy asks me

and I say “the 3rd horse,” and he says

“the 3 is out,” and walks off

and that is all I want to hear

and I put 20 to win on the 3,

get a screwdriver

and walk down to the last turn

where if you’ve been around long enough

you can pick out the winner

before the stretch drive begins.

and I’m there when the 3 drives past

a length and a half behind the 6,

the others are out,

and it looks close, both are running hard

without signs of tiring

but I have to close the gap

and I look up at the board and see that

the 6 is 25-1 and I am only 7-1

and with a little luck I might make it,

and I did by three-quarters of a length

and the frogs of my mind lined up and

jumped over death (for a little while)

and I walked over and got my $166.

 

 

I was in the tub with a beer when the phone rang,

“bastard, where are you?”

it was the editor.

“see you in 30 minutes,” I told him.

“I don’t want any stuff outa you or I’ll lay

you out,” he tells me.

“fine,” I say, “30 minutes then.”

which gives me time for a couple more beers.

 

 

the place is in the back in South Hollywood,

a small cell with a water heater

in the bathroom, and a rack of books take up

half the room: much Huxley (Aldous), Lawrence

(not of Arabia), and a lot of tomes and vessels

of people halfway in the playground

between poetry and the novel

and lacking either the motivation or the discipline

to write straight philosophy,

and he had a woman in there

in the last peach fuzz of her youth,

pale orange, a little spiritless,

but quiet, which was good,

and he said, “baby, get the man a beer,”

and I threw him my latest book

which I inscribed, “to a connoisseur

of vagina and verse…”

and he said, “you are getting fat, bastard,

but you are looking better than the last time

I saw you.”

“was that in Paris?” I asked.

“Pasadena, Calif.,” he answered.

“Faulkner’s dead now too,” I said.

“how do you like the bitch?” he asked,

“look at her.”

I looked at her and thanked her for the beer.

“fair stand the fields of France,”

I said.

“I need a hundred and a half,” he told me.

“Jesus,” I answered,

“I was just gonna ask you for the same thing.”

“I hear Harry is back with his old lady.”

“yeah. looking for a job. painting furniture, baby-sitting.

he was even a bartender one night.”

“Harry? a
bartender?
”

“just for 3 hours. then he said he got tired.”

“tired?”

“‘tired’ is the word he used.”

“I need a hundred and a half.”

“who the hell doesn’t?”

“Faulkner doesn’t,” he said.

“I wonder what he mixed in his drinks? I’ve got to slow

down…”

 

 

the bitch had some poems she wrote and I read them

and they were not bad considering that she was built for

other things, and the rest of the night was fairly dull,

no fist fights, too old to tango, tiger asleep in the shade,

and I promised I would write an essay ON THE MEANING OF

MODERN POETRY which he promised to print unseen

and which I knew I would never write.

the night was full of promises, an old tiger

and a peach. I drove home down the side streets,

swinging wide around the police station,

smoking king-sized and humming parts from
Carmen

because it was very dark and Bizet drove better than

Ludwig who had his mind on more important things.

 

 

I parked out in front and no sooner did I get the car door open

than the rummy downstairs said,

“hey, ace, how about a cold one?”

I took a beer out of the bag and slipped it in through the screen.

“I need a dollar,” he said.

“now, ain’t that a bitch? I was just gonna ask you for the same thing.”

“you’re in a bad mood,” he said.

“sure,” I said, “haven’t you heard? Faulkner’s dead.”

“Faulkner? wasn’t he a bullring jock? Pomona Fairgrounds?

Rudioso? Caliente? you knew the kid?”

“I knew the kid,” I said

and then walked on upstairs.

 

 

the rest of the night was no-account, as the Arkies say,

and there were a couple of numbers I could dial,

4 or 5 numbers, some black, some white,

some old, some young,

but I kept thinking of white hospitals

and palm trees in the shade,

and it was quiet, at last it was quiet,

and there are times when you have to come back

and look around, there are times of Ludwig,

there are times of walls,

there are times of thinking of Ernest

and that shotgun raised to his head;

there are times for thinking

of dead loves, dead flowers,

of all the dead, dead people who give you a name,

from Florida to Del Mar, Calif.,

all the sadness like a parade

of gentle fools gone,

water running in sinks,

stockings washed,

gowns worn, thrown away,

the ugly duckling world

quietly slipping away from me

and myself slipping away,

an old tiger,

sick of the battle.

 

 

the next morning I was awakened by a knock on the door,

so I ignored it, I never answer the door,

I don’t want to see anybody,

but it kept up with a kind of gentle persistence

so I got up and put on my old yellow robe

dead voices from bedrooms

and opened the door.

“I am here to help the handicapped people,” she said.

“do come in,” I said.

she was a young girl 19, 20, 21,

her eyes as innocent as the map of Texas spread

over the clouds,

and she walked across the rug and sat down

and I went into the kitchen and took the cap

off of 2 beers. my goldfish swam like crazy.

I walked out with the beers, I said,

“love must be always

because stones gone flat with leaning

take ships to sea

take cats and dogs and

everything.”

 

 

she laughed and the day began without

error.