A Moveable Famine (20 page)

“Dart,” Stanley said. “For D’Artagnan, one of the three musketeers.” He continued to stroke the purring cat. “But one day my mother phoned and said, ‘You must come home, Stanley! Right away! It’s Dart!’ She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong and I imagined the worst. I took the next bus and when it pulled into downtown, there was a big commotion, sirens, horns, policemen everywhere. The city in knots! In the middle of the intersection was Dart, larger than I ever thought possible, surrounded by drawn guns! I begged the driver to let me off, and he said he could only make regulation stops, but I told him about my cat, and it turned out he was a cat lover too and he opened the door. I ran to Dart, right through the police, and he rolled on his back—he had grown immense because he was, and we didn’t know it, he was a mountain lion!”

“Oh my god!” Jeanne said as Stanley’s eyes blazed. “What happened?”

We had finished our beers in the rush of the story and Porter brought another round.

“Well,” Stanley continued. “He followed me home.” He giggled and said, “I built a pen and he stayed with us for years.”

“Then what?” Jeanne asked.

“When he reached adolescence, he leaped over the fence and went back to the wild.” He made a farewell gesture. “Where he belonged, really.”

Dugan looked over but said nothing.

A loud moan came from Post-Elliot. He had nodded off with the clock in his lap and the screwdriver upright in his hand, so his face plunged onto the point, catching the side of his eye. The bartender gave him a wet rag, which Post-Elliot held to the wound as he left for the Drop-In Center, the town’s free clinic.

The cat sprung from Stanley’s lap and Stanley sprung up at the same time. “Good-bye, my darlings,” he said, and Porter and Kurt followed. Dugan trudged off with the others but I stayed behind with Gail and Ted. The whole time, Gail held Ted’s keys in her fist. Their two tanned faces and blond hair, fresh from Arizona, almost lightened the dim bar. Ted said, “I’d like to take a walk on the beach, okay, babe?” And they, too, left the Fo’c’sle.

I moved to Dugan’s place by the window. A thin parade continued—fishermen, tourists whose children held balloons, and then someone I recognized but not someone I knew. He dragged a knapsack, his shirt unbuttoned, a pair of glasses hanging from a rope around his neck. I couldn’t place him, a poet, a beatnik, a hippie or a yippie? Then I got it—Gregory Corso. He was shorter than I thought and his face was like a gnarled root. I had read everything of his, and everything Kerouac wrote about him and Ginsberg. They were mythical to me, and I never thought of any of them doing something as simple as walking down a street, especially a street in a town where I lived. Post-Elliot returned with a gauze strip over his eye and sat next to me. The bartender brought beers. “You can fix the clock another time,” he said. I told Post-Elliot about Corso, and he quoted, “ ‘Should I get married, should I be good?’ ” We agreed what a great poet he was and I said I hoped to meet him.

“Not me. I’m not wild about meeting poets,” Post-Elliot said. “They have a bad effect on me. Stanley Kunitz, for instance,” he said. “Do you know that whenever he’s around, something bad happens?”

“Really?”

“I could feel it the minute I spotted him at your table.” He pointed to his eye. “Two summers ago, I saw him looking in the window of the bookstore, and just then a madman on roller skates jabbed my neck with a knife!” He showed the scar.

“Why?”

“Don’t know. Just zipped through the crowd and kept going. I walked to the Drop-In Center with blood running to my shoulder. I’m not crazy about being around poets, like I said.” Then he looked at me.

“Well-known ones, I mean.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

OLD MR. BOSTON AND HAFFENREFFER PRIVATE STOCK—PARALYZED—IRON MAN—EDDIE BONETTI AND JACKIE O—DEAN MARTIN—AN UNMAILED LETTER

K
urt had invited the fellows to stop by anytime, so the next morning I walked west to his place on Cottage Street. The entrance was through the garden, and I stepped over enormous zucchinis, tripping on the tangled vines. His wife Penny, a former visual arts fellow, sculpted in papier-mâché. I had to squeeze between a six-foot crucifix holding a dying German shepherd, the words above it saying,
The Last Dog to Shit on My Lawn,
and an equally tall lady lobster, claws raised like castanets, nipples adorned with clamshell pasties. They had just returned from the liquor store. Penny held a bottle of burgundy and Kurt a six-pack of Haffenreffer Private Stock, a malt liquor. That, and a pint of Old Mr. Boston gin would float him into the evening. Penny’s friend, Carole, knocked at the door, and she, too, carried wine. The women began drinking at the kitchen table among shredded newspapers and a gallon of wallpaper paste. A gray cockatiel whistled in a cage, and Penny poured birdseed from a huge bag into a small feed dish and it splashed across the floor. She opened the cage and dropped the bird to the linoleum, trusting he would devour the mess.

Bookcases surrounded Kurt’s desk, a door propped on saw horses. I joined him in a glass of Private Stock, which he served in a mug smudged with fingerprints. He wore a heavy sweater with moth-eaten holes on the sleeves, and wide-wale corduroy pants thin at the knees. An old phonograph played scratchy Mozart. A big dog snoozed on the rug, its square head on Kurt’s boot. When it rolled over, I saw a stomach of scabs and scales. Kurt called it autumn eczema, and scratched the dog’s belly, causing his glasses to fall from his nose. He grabbed them from the rug and adjusted the pipe cleaners. In the next room, Penny and Carole loudly affirmed that each should drink from her own bottle of wine and not try to share, a pact made from experience.

I looked at a copy of Pound’s
Personae,
a former library copy stamped
Discard.
Every book in Kurt’s library was damaged and every book a classic. He had the best of everything in the worst condition. When I remarked on some arcane volumes, he said, “Many books are unjustly forgotten, but no book is unjustly remembered.” He was working on a first collection of poems, some of which he had published in the
New Yorker, Harper’s
and
Poetry.
He wrote every day, rising early, but expected little attention. He felt poetry had no place in shaping the world, and yet he made a world of it. When I asked him how his work was going, he said, with the happy cynicism of the creative mind, that he was already ahead of last year.

After an hour, Kurt walked me to the door and told me not to miss the upcoming brunch at Hester’s, which overlooked the bay. He complained to Penny, “That mineral oil you put in the dog’s ear got onto John’s pants.” I hadn’t noticed the stains on my knees and said it didn’t matter as I edged past a five-foot swordfish standing on its tail. Back at the Bull Ring, my ankles began to itch, and black dots on my cuff bounded toward the rope rug. The result of my first visit to a house in P’town were oil stains from a dog’s ear and a family of fleas.

I spent the next week watching the tides come and go, and leaves fall from the slender oaks outside my door. I walked through town, browsed the shops and crossed the breakwater at land’s end. The beauty of the town hypnotized me into paralysis, but there was something else. I felt I had to write significant work to justify my time there. I finally placed my typewriter on the glass table. With each clanging keystroke the machine inched away from me. I moved to the bed and filled a few pages of graph paper with gobbledygook, which made me feel I had done something. I heated a can of Campbell’s clam chowder. The label said you could use water or milk. I had to make the stipend last, so I chose water.

I tried typing a letter to Ridge, but the metallic thudding on the glass felt like banging out a bad drum solo. I wrote again by hand, describing the coast, the people, and my plans for a long poem. Each section would focus on a part of P’town: the bay, the wharf, the boats, the fishermen, the dunes, the beech forest and more. I would pattern it after Galway Kinnell’s
Book of Nightmares,
as he had followed the
Duino Elegies.
Happy with the accomplishment of defining the architecture of my poetic sequence, I left to mail the letter.

Post-Elliot urgently waved me in from the Fo’c’sle window. I approached his table, but he rose and walked to the bar, ordering me a beer. The bartender yelled, “Wait till you hear!” Post-Elliot couldn’t stop grinning as the bottle was opened.

“You know that poet you like?” the bartender asked. “The one from the beat generation? He was knocked stiff at the Governor Bradford. The bouncer tossed him out the door, and he stayed there all night, curled on the sidewalk, wearing a jester’s cap.”

“He’s clever,” Post-Elliot said. “He’s already moved in with Connie who owns the New World Deli.” I had gone there once for a sandwich, the sticky hardwood floor grabbing the soles of my shoes as I approached the register. Connie rose lethargically from a booth where she sat with friends, and said, “I can’t believe you want to order something . . .”

Post-Elliot continued talking in a dreamy way, “He’s all set, got plenty to eat, a place to stay.”

“John,” he said, as we moved to a table, “Corso is the only poet who makes me want to take up the whole poem again.” Before I could reply, he continued, “He caused a big ruckus at the Bradford, insulting women. Howlin’ Jack coldcocked him. Either him or Crobar.” I had seen Crobar and Howlin’ Jack, huge bearded fishermen, through the Bradford’s window, holding forth at its circular bar amid loud music and bustling pool tables.

“Uh oh,” Post-Elliot said. “Here comes Iron Man. What’s he carrying?”

Porter had pointed out Iron Man, banned from every bar in town, a swarthy mesomorph walking a bicycle whose handlebars sported a row of American flags. He got his name from the time he found an abandoned boat engine on the wharf and asked his longtime friends to help him load it onto his truck. When no one volunteered, he lifted the huge hunk of metal himself and threw it into the payload. His family said he was so hurt by the incident that he went to the liquor store that afternoon and kept drinking for thirty years.

The bartender was washing glasses and didn’t notice Iron Man enter holding a large wooden top painted with a map of the world. He sat down grasping the toy by a cord in his left hand and spinning it with his right. Post-Elliot told the bartender he had a customer.

“Okay, Iron Man, you’ll have to leave,” the bartender said, lifting mugs from the sink. “And take your world with you.”

On his way out, Iron Man dangled the top between our faces and said, “It’s not funny. I can send you to the cemetery.” He spun the top. “I have nothing to lose, you know.”

Post-Elliot and I watched him mount his bike. “He’s harmless,” Post-Elliot said. “Unless he drinks, that is.”

Vince Leslie and Eddie Bonetti walked in. Eddie, a short dark man with a broken nose and bowlegs, shook my hand heartily. He was a writer friend of Norman Mailer’s. He went to the bar and came back with four tumblers of Jack Daniel’s. He downed half his drink, said he had just finished a story about killing a lesbian on the beach with a shovel, and left. When I asked where he went, Vince said, “He keeps drinks in each bar. He’s got one at the Bradford and one at the Old Colony.”

“And fights too. Last month he got in a fight at each place, ” Post-Elliot added.

“You know that big brick house in the east end? That’s Mailer’s. There’s a boxing ring in the basement,” Vince said. “Eddie was a pro. He once fought Willie Pep. Now he spars with Norman.”

A pretty woman walked past the picture window wearing a white rabbit fur jacket, tight white pants, and a red wool hat. Her skin seemed whiter than her pale clothes.

“There goes Lint,” Post-Elliot said, as I leaned forward to get a better look.

“Who’s Lint?” I asked.

Vince said, “I crowned her with that nickname last year when she came to town. You must have met her by now. Hester.”

I said I hadn’t.

“She stopped in a few times with Porter,” Post-Elliot said. “She didn’t take to the place.”

“I went to her reading last year,” Vince said. “And I never go to readings, but she’s a good looking woman, so I thought what the hell, but how can I listen to any poet after hearing Alexander Scourby read Whitman!”

“She’s a good writer,” I said.

“She didn’t care for Vince’s moniker,” Post-Elliot said.

“She’s not lint,” Vince yelled. “She’s more like virgin wool.”

“She outran the shepherd!” Post-Elliot said.

Bonetti passed the window and, as he did, he dropped lower and lower, as if walking into a hole in the street until we could see just his head and shoulders. Everyone laughed as he entered.

“Descending imaginary stairs!” Post-Elliot explained. Eddie swallowed his drink, walked to the bar, again lowering himself with each step, and returned with another round.

“Whoa, Eddie,” Vince said as he stared happily at the full glasses, their fragrance lifting toward us.

I hadn’t eaten anything. I had been reading the soup can labels and I learned that each had three grams of protein if you made it with water, and nine grams if you made it with milk. I decided to just drink a glass of milk.