China Blues (9 page)

bread; blue sky is blue sky; love is – in the eyes

of whatever person sinks their teeth into the other

side of this crusty
challah
& has enough restraint

to save me the remaining half. These entities all

complement each other, sure; but so would wet black olives,

tomatoes, morning doves, & Basque children running

through a field of wheat waving a burning fox

above their heads, and crying out Death To Franco.

             My friend Jean said she couldn’t stand

David Bowie,

              it didn’t have anything to do with his voice,

or the songs he sang,

                         [I thought “China Girl” might have

upset her, because she’s a literary feminist,

but she said no, she liked “China Girl”],

                                             it was his

appearance, she said, especially the face.

                                                       We’ve just

finished, I think, coming through a period where men

have been all-out enthusiastic about beautiful women,

even if they do have careers, like Debra Winger,

or jobs,

      like Barbara McDougall; but women,

especially if they’re career-conscious, tend to dislike

good-looking men

                      especially if they’re successful.

            I don’t know if gay guys like Bowie

but a lot of regular guys do,

                                  especially if they listen

to a lot of music in the first place, &

                                               are not heavy

metal fans, or if they’re guys who have walked out

of their
MA
courses.

                       Guys who have completed their
MA

& are contemplating a doctoral thesis

                                                generally regard

any form of pop except for the Beatles

that name alone would drive me crazy/songs that come

in a breakfast food box,

                             as being too superficial

because the songs are wildly unlike a textbook.

           So what is David Bowie’s image? Or

perhaps we should say,

                               What is the mystique,

or the debate

               or the specific twist or bend

in David Bowie’s image? Our friend Jean, & Jean

is both very beautiful

                         with classic moss-green eyes,

but she’s also a very bright professor of sociology,

& she says, No way,
nada
, no,

                                      she doesn’t like him.

On the other hand millions of fairly intelligent

people buy his albums,

                                  & his concert last year

at the
CNE
white elephant grounds here in Toronto

was a smash sell-out success with good

reviews.

       Sally, a friend of mine in Alliston

& a talented writer,

                       once felt a touch depressed

about something & she spent 2 days & a bottle of wine

listening to Bowie’s song “Heroes” over & over

again.

A recent feminist writer from Texas says she thinks the penis is very much like a banana. She has, she says, seen quite a few in her time. Not as many, I guess, as most women doctors. Rick’s wife Dahlia got bored after the first 25, of course they weren’t humping, they were patients, general examinations or something like that. Cocks are sort of amazing, but there isn’t a lot of room for individualism. Cocks are not as individual as men’s feet, for example, or their shoulders; or women’s backs or their buttocks; faces generally take the individualism title, although several times in my life I’ve met a person who looked almost exactly like someone I knew. Hey, I said, you’ve got Robert’s face, I wonder where Robert is right now and what is he doing? The comment about seeing quite a few, basically a lift from the dozens of Frank Harris types with their comments about

               seeing quite a few puds, okay, and men sort of like these comments sometimes, more or less; gets a brief laugh from the audience. The laugh allows her to move on without really saying very much about her own image. I thought her image was in the direction of A woman and Arnold Banana. Hard-ons look pretty much alike also, I think, depending on the light, and some guys are a little bigger. But what’s interesting about cock, apart from all the names for it, and sure, black guys have chocolate-coloured cocks and Indian guys must have reddish-olive and so on, is the variety of perhaps 20 or 25 different stages of tumescence. They are in that sense a bit like weathervanes plugged in with a special current to what’s happening at any time, even in sleep, in the male body. Banana is a nice conceit, a wonderful colour: but that would leave out the most female part of cock, that almost blatantly pink bland glans penis. Mine has a
small pale brown circle about the size of a piece of confetti, relax, it’s a birthmark. The first guy I ever slept with was fondling it and then he looked up with a disingenuous expression on his handsome face, and he said, You didn’t tell me you got married this afternoon, you’ve got a confetti mark. Hey, that’s funny; hello, Ned, how the hell are you?

            Learning how to dance when I was 15

was fairly easy – there are no complex steps

except in your mind, and your mind is a dark space;

although some of the older kids were pretty fancy –

they would slide forward, put their weight

on the ball of one foot

                            and just sort of lift

up into the space moving with the music.

                                                       Some of my

favourite songs were by the Commodores,

                                                       Lionel

Ritchie’s old group, and some of my favourite songs

were by Credence and The Band – “Up on Cripple Creek,”

that got us all moving.

                           And some of the parties

I went to would have a Fats Domino album

from time to time,

                      the same way I guess that you go

to a party sometimes and somebody brings out an Elvis

album, one of the ones where he sings “Heartbreak Hotel,”

or “Rip It Up,” or “Blue Suede Shoes.”

                                                 The Domino songs

are masterpieces of dialectical simplicity – one clear

staccato line perfectly balanced against another.

           He was easy to dance to, there’s no two ways about

                        that;

you would just fly into the air

                                      and do a weird swing

with your outside foot or a double boogaloo or something

on the last beat of each of those lines,

                                                  they were

that punchy. And then somebody would play Led

Zeppelin, and somebody else would play Bonnie &

Delaney,

        and then around 2 o’clock in the morning

Joan Baez would sing that song by The Band

beginning with the line, “My name is Virgil McQuaid …”

But you couldn’t beat those Domino songs to dance to

– they were so precise you could alter your own beat

and dance slow motion if you wanted to,

                                                      and then you

could speed up and dance faster than Muddy Waters &

The Stones. These songs never die never

die never die.

               So play it again,

O sweet hero of my childhood,

                                       I was thinking of you,

one foot on the pedal

a bunch

       of yellow flowers in your hand/ Like a torch.

The red&yellow flowers sit on the clean oak table in a circular white bowl. These flowers illuminate the whole room. Okay, I exaggerated a touch, I pushed a little too far on the verb. There is an overhead light, a tall blue Art Deco standing lamp & a large table lamp that a friend gave me some years ago.

I take a walk down to Bloor Street & buy 2 multi-grain rolls & a copy of
The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt
, a book which Whitney, the girl in my novel, is very concerned about. Then I go for coffee with Jake at Dooney’s. A strange name for an Italian café, don’t you think. Jake says, “The world is changing so fast that it’s upside down. You would probably be much happier if you were at the University of Chicago.”

I am not an aesthetic person. Not really. I was born in a large house with trees in the backyard. Pheasants walking half-circles in winter. Yesterday we watched a film about 2 detectives in Paris.

Last night I had a dream about walking naked, I was comfortable in the dream, in a large tailor shop with bolts of dark blue & light grey cloth on the shelves.

I saw a fire once that almost blinded me. It was an enormous fire. It was several blocks long & the fire trucks looked like red & yellow helicopters, red & yellow whirlygigs. I know nothing about the Soviet Union except that they have polar bears in Siberia, huge white animals that stand on their hind feet & nibble at carrots & potatoes.

Robert’s not a gay guy and neither am I, but what does that mean? We’re both straight guys, but we’re not completely straight. These words are almost amusing. It’s possible that they were thought up by rabbits in a think tank.

He’s about 30, he’s a television cinematographer, we meet each other while shopping, he lives a few blocks away.

He has a friend who worked on the Darryl Wasyk film,
H
, which is a truly amazing film; I’ve seen it twice at the Carlton Cineplex; it was shot over at Lansdowne & Bloor, Toronto is slowly coming to realize how good it is. It’s good like half the time Fassbinder dreamed of being good.

He has a great face, almost a touch horsey but amiable with startling blue eyes.

I’m a writer, we’ve talked about that a couple of times, he reads non-fiction,
At Play In The Fields of the Lord
, and detective novels. He likes Chandler; he bought my book about Galbraith after the first time we met.

His girlfriend Karin is across the street buying supper; everybody’s buying stuff: I’m buying tonic and both papers, I’ve been working all day. He’s just bought cigarettes.

Pork chops as it turns out. I give him my recipe for pork chops – Smear them with Primo spaghetti sauce, a shot of lemon juice, and
pour some white rum. Bacardi Light is good. “Do it in the oven,” I tell him, “it’s a lot easier.” He thinks it sounds good and invites me to come over for dinner on Friday or Saturday, and invites Sharon, we’ve met him a couple of times while we were out shopping or at the Liquor Store. His girlfriend’s an actress, or a model, I’m not sure. I say, Terrific, that sounds great. We shake hands the way guys shake hands after Bell hits a triple, except that George Bell doesn’t play here anymore, he plays in Chicago now. Our eyes are very intent. His are blue. I’ve already said that. I try not to be repetitious. Mine are dark as the bloody night, but I’m attractive, so people say at least.

It makes me think of Gerald Stern’s poem where he talks about swimming off the coast of Babylon, and stretching out his hand to someone who knows a lot about the desert. The desert is very beautiful, all that sand. We’re both serious basketball fans, so I’m not sure which one of us does/does know/does know a lot about the desert. But what did Zane Grey know about the desert? He was a fairly sensitive guy, and intelligent, and he made it up as he went along.

           We sit in a large open bay window

in a summer living room on Indian Grove

drinking chilled white wine

in the middle of about 40 people we know vaguely.

I watch John acting like a Hathaway ad

for What kind of man
would
buy
The New Yorker?

Welcoming guests & introducing people,

saying, Come and eat my chicken salad,

drink of me,

in his light blue shirt & pleated white slacks.

             “Look at John acting like Harry Christ,

now that he’s got the assistant’s promotion,”

I say to my friend Bill,

“they don’t realize that he’s just a Xerox salesman.”

You look at me & raise one blond eyebrow,

“Yes, but it’s definitely a fucking colour Xerox.”

And we both start laughing until our faces turn red.

Life is easy.

Tanned & athletic & young

slapping our thighs our legs spread like cowboys,

I have $3.45 in my pocket but the B&G tastes good,

you have a new Jeep outside but it’s not paid for yet.

            We laugh until our ears burn.

Our eyes almost burst with bizarre tears.

“Jesus,” we say simultaneously,

“he does look just like Christ, doesn’t he?”

Until our hearts flutter like turnips.

Neither of us is the new 4800 computer of sincerity,

but these people are
all
like automatons.

They all say –
Really
;

the girl can’t help it;

the opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings;

never give a sucker a Perry Ellis suit;

that’s too bad, darling;

why don’t we just go home and take a shower?

But they don’t do anything except model expressions

& flaunt their 5 sentences about the weather.

          Maybe we’re buddhists & we don’t know it

but our big hands show it.

We
just want to go to Tom’s, put on some pasta,

smoke some dope,

& watch
Saturday Night Live.