The Subterraneans (10 page)

The worst almost worst time of all when a red flame crossed my brain, I was sitting with her and Larry O’Hara in his pad, we’d been drinking French Bordeaux and blasting, a subject was
up, I had a hand on Larry’s knee shouting “But listen to me, but listen to me!” wanting to make my point so bad there was a big crazy plead in the tone and Larry deeply engrossed in what Mardou is saying simultaneously and feeding a few words to her dialog, in the emptiness after the red flame I suddenly leap up and rush to the door and tug at it, ugh, locked, the indoor chain lock, I slide and undo it and with another try I lunge out in the hall and down the stairs as fast as my thieves’ quick crepesoul shoes’ll take me, putt pitterpit, floor after floor reeling around me as I round the stairwell, leaving them agape up there—calling back in half hour, meeting her on the street three blocks away—there is no hope—

The time even when we’d agreed she needed money for food, that I’d go home and get it and just bring it back and stay a short while, but I’m at this time far from in love, but bugged, not only her pitiful demands for money but that doubt, that old Mardou-doubt, and so rush into her pad, Alice her friend is there, I use that as an excuse (because Alice dike-like silent unpleasant and strange and likes no one) to lay the two bills on Mardou’s dishes at sink, kiss a quick peck in the malt of her ear, say “I’ll be back tomorrow” and run right out again without even asking her opinion—as if the whore’d made me for two bucks and I was sore.

How clear the realization one is going mad—the mind has a silence, nothing happens in the physique, urine gathers in your loins, your ribs contract.

Bad time she asked me, “What does Adam really think of me, you never told me, I know he resents us together but—” and I told her substantially what Adam had told me, of which none should have been divulged to her for the sake of her peace of mind, “He said it was just a social question of his not now wanting to get hung-up with you lovewise because you’re Negro”—feeling again her telepathic little shock cross the room to me, it sunk deep, I question my motives for telling her this.

The time her cheerful little neighbor young writer John Golz came up (he dutifully eight hours a day types working on magazine stories, admirer of Hemingway, often feeds Mardou and is a nice Indiana boy and means no harm and certainly not a slinky snaky interesting subterranean but openfaced, jovial, plays with children in the court for God’s sake)—came up to see Mardou, I was there alone (for some reason, Mardou at a bar with our accord arrangement, the night she went out with a Negro boy she didn’t like too much but just for fun and told Adam she was doing it because she wanted to make it with a Negro boy again, which made me jealous, but Adam said “If I should if she should hear that you went out with a white girl to see if you could make it again she’d sure be flattered, Leo”)—that night, I was at her place waiting, reading, young John Golz came in to borrow cigarettes and seeing I was alone wanted to talk literature—“Well I believe that the most important thing is selectivity,” and I blew up and said “Ah don’t give me all that high school stuff I’ve heard it and heard it long before you were born almost for krissakes and really now, say something interesting and new about writing”—putting him down, sullen, for reasons mainly of irritation and because he seemed harmless and therefore could be counted on to be safe to yell at, which he was—putting him down, her friend, was not nice—no, the world’s no fit place for this kind of activity, and what we gonna do, and where? when? wha wha wha, the baby bawls in the midnight boom.

Nor could it have been charming and helpful to her fears and anxieties to have me start out, at the outset of our romance, “kissing her down between the stems”—starting and then suddenly quitting so later in an unguarded drinkingmoment she said, “You suddenly stopped as tho I was—” and the reason I stopped being in itself not as significant as the reason I did it at all, to secure her greater sexual interest, which once tied on with a bow knot, I could dally out of—the warm lovemouth of the woman,
the womb, being the place for men who love, not … this immature drunkard and egomaniacal … this … knowing as I do from past experience and interior sense, you’ve got to fall down on your knees and beg the woman’s permission, beg the woman’s forgiveness for all your sins, protect her, support her, doing everything for her, die for her but for God’s sake love her and love her all the way in and every way you can—yes psychoanalysis, I hear (fearing secretly the few times I had come into contact with the rough stubble-like quality of the pubic, which was Negroid and therefore a little rougher, tho not enough to make any difference, and the insides itself I should say the best, the richest, most fecund moist warm and full of hidden soft slidy mountains, also the pull and force of the muscles being so powerful she unknowing often vice-like closes over and makes a dam-up and hurt, tho this I only realized the other night, too late—). And so the final lingering physiological doubt I have that this contraction and greatstrength of womb, responsible I think now in retrospect for the time when Adam in his first encounter with her experienced piercing unsupportable screamingsudden pain, so he had to go to the doctor and have himself bandaged and all (and even later when Carmody arrived and made a local orgone accumulator out of a big old watercan and burlap and vegetative materials placing the nozzle of himself into the nozzle of the can to heal), I now wonder and suspect if our little chick didn’t really intend to bust us in half, if Adam isn’t thinking it’s his own fault and doesn’t know, but she contracted mightily there (the lesbian !) (always knew it) and busted him and fixed him and couldn’t do it to me but tried enough till she threw me over a dead hulk that now I am—psychoanalyst, I’m serious!

It’s too much. Beginning, as I say with the pushcart incident—the night we drank red wine at Dante’s and were in a drinking mood now both of us so disgusted—Yuri came with us, Ross Wal-lenstein was in there and maybe to show off to Mardou Yuri acted
like a kid all night and kept hitting Wallenstein on the back of his head with little finger taps like goofing in a bar but Wallenstein (who’s always being beaten up by hoodlums because of this) turned around a stiff death’s-head gaze with big eyes glaring behind glasses, his Christlike blue unshaven cheeks, staring rigidly as tho the stare itself will floor Yuri, not speaking for a long time, finally saying, “Man, don’t bug me,” and turning back to his conversation with friends and Yuri does it again and Ross turns again the same pitiless awful subterranean sort of nonviolent Indian Mahatma Gandhi defense of some kind (which I’d suspected that first time he talked to me saying, “Are you a fag you talk like a fag” a remark coming from him so absurd because so inflammable and me 170 pounds to his 130 or 120 for God’s sake so I thought secretly “No you can’t fight this man he will only scream and yell and call cops and let you hit him again and haunt all your dreams, there is no way to put a subterranean down on the floor or for that matter put em down at all, they are the most unputdownable in this world and new culture”)—finally Wallenstein going to the head for a leak and Yuri says to me, Mardou being at the bar gathering three more wines, “Come on let’s go in the John and bust him up,” and I get up to go with Yuri but not to bust up Ross rather to stop anything might happen there—Yuri having been in his own in fact realer way than mine almost a hoodlum, imprisoned in Soledad for defending himself in some vicious fight in reform school—Mardou stopping us both as we head to the head, saying, “My God if I hadn’t stopped you” (laughing embarrassed little Mardou smile and shniffle) “you’d actually have gone in there”—a former love of Ross’s and now the bottomless toilet of Ross’s position in her affections I think probably equal to mine now, 0 damblast the thorny flaps of the pap time page—

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.