Demonology (31 page)

$1,500

21. Straw, Syd (Harris, Susan).
The John Cage Story.
New York: De Capo, 1999. First novel by the singer/songwriter and former lead vocalist for NYC’s Golden Palominos. Not a
story of John Cage, the composer, in the conventional sense at all, but rather the story of Straw’s thirteen months caring
for her ailing father (song-and-dance man Jack Straw) as he relinquished himself to lung cancer. What’s reliable in the fluxus
of grief? Nothing, and the twittering of birds, the wind chimes on the snowed-in porch, the sound of a leak in the basement,
the notations for her own wordless canticles at her father’s bedside nonetheless
suggest
the inadvertent beauty that was so essential to Cage’s work. Those of us who have now outlasted our own parents will find
this a worthy investment at an attractive price. This reading copy signed, in a fascinating association, for short story writer
Amy Hempel, author of the influential
Reasons to Live
and
Tumble Home:
Thanks for the week at the beach, you are my idol, love Syd.

$350

By Jerome David Salinger

22. Salinger, J. D.
The Diamond Sutra: A Cookbook.
Unpublished manuscript, typed on a Royal, from the late sixties or early seventies. Mimeographed, not photocopied. Contains
no mention of the Glass family, but does meditate at length on vegetarianism, Taoism, baseball, and the electric period of
Miles Davis. Includes some mournful anti-war poems that are quite moving. Signed by the writer to a friend,
Tom,
rare as such.

$30,000

23. Vidal, Gore.
The Diagnosis of Collectors.
Providence: Burning Deck, 1983. The title here alludes to the pathology of collection, and not only that pathology of book
collectors, clearly the most disturbed of the breed, but also to hoarders of antiques, of miniatures, ceramic bears,
Star Wars
paraphernalia, Kiss action figures, early video games,
Gidget
novels, Jell-0 molds, LPs of progressive rock acts of the seventies, garments worn by Elvis Presley, and so forth. Vidal,
the author among other things of a masterpiece entitled
Myra Breckinridge,
correctly posits collecting as a
pathology of the amorous in a Capitalist economy;
it is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute. I loved words when people
were nowhere on the
horizon and having begun to have a taste for them, for all that was summoned by words in my skull —a wealth of imaginary comforts
—the world with its people seemed but a discount substitute, Anna Feldman with blond bob has goslings now, trailing after
her on the beach at Nantucket, no doubt, where the sun this week is bright and plovers scatter at her feet. Little Dee Dee
and Marie and Liza, each carries a stick with a length of kelp spiraling around it; each makes hearts in the sand, writes
names; am I the bad guy from some videotape that Anna puts on in the living room so that she might kiss her husband, the tax
lawyer, before repairing to the garage to call her lover on a cellular phone, her lover never to be possessed but in motels
and hotels, and in her imagination; who has conceived of whom, Anna or her collector, and from which book did they get the
idea?

$350

24. Wittgenstein, Ludwig.
Coded Remarks: 1919-1920.
Not a manuscript so much as a series of remarks written in a simple code that the author used occasionally in all his many
diaries (a=z, b=y, et cetera). Sometimes this cryptographically rendered manuscript took up matters of philosophy, sometimes
not. The significance of the period described here, however, is that it concerns Wittgenstein’s
lost decade,
during which he mainly taught elementary school in Austria. (Later, he was driven from this his homeland by
the
Anschluss.
) The coded remarks contained in these pages, however, most often concern themselves with Wittgenstein’s fantasies about working
class men, the
angelic and brutal boys,
who inhabited a park nearby, creeping from copse to meadow on the prowl; or, at least, remarks on these boys, some quite
lengthy, are interlarded with exacting and unyielding truths of Wittgenstein’s daily life after the First World War,
Ate Dover sole. Stupefied by the continuing manifestations of sensuality in myself. That the lion should speak is by no means
guaranteed, though possessed of a tongue.
Commentators are at loggerheads, as commentators always are, as to whether the boys in the park actually existed for Wittgenstein
in the carnal sense, whether he possessed them, knew them, saw them frequently, or whether, having occasionally observed them,
he merely imagined a sinful compulsion, in his view, thus engaging in what was hardest to admit to himself, the need for a
physical articulation of a love he felt strongly,
If my body should sing the perfect round tones of an oratorio across a forbidden boundary of shrubs, is it not inevitable
that its cry should be unmistakable?
Of course, there are parallels here, and not only in that Anna Feldman was also of Jewish ancestry, somewhat assimilated,
married
goyim,
thus diluting whether intentionally or by happenstance her bloodline. I’ve already intimated, moreover, the possibility
that your bibliographer has exaggerated the tone and frequency of contacts with Anna, because, as with Wittgenstein, his experiences
with the sweet mayhem of
intrapsychic libidinous exchange
are limited to a few meaningless couplings, after which he found himself suddenly alone. In conclusion, there is a mystical
level to this collection of excerpts torn from the famous
lost decade
of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as in the inscription on the title page, in his elegant but somewhat florid cursive. Am I correct
in how I decipher the words? Perhaps it says
To any friend who would labor here for my full and complete confession I bequeath herewith the force of my affliction.
When I showed it to my friend Don, the U.P.S. delivery man who comes to visit occasionally, his interpretation was as follows:
To any fiend who lives here in complete decomposition of beneath hereafter the fast forward of my afterlife.
We argued strenuously about it. I told Don that his high school education wasn’t up to the task of handwriting analysis.
Then I signed for the packages he’d brought. The final word on interpretation I leave for myself, unless some institution
is willing to pay the absurd price I suggest below. Wittgenstein’s inscription does not say
To any friend,
nor does it say
To any fiend.
Actually, as you should have guessed, it says,
To Anna Feldman
—
who should labor here for my full and complete confession
—
I
bequeath the price of my affection.
Of course, it’s anachronistic,
this signature, unless Anna is a
condition of the universe,
a condition of all language, a condition of nighttime in Springfield, MA, unless Anna is merely an aspect of longing, the
longing I have always felt, and therefore an inscription in all the books ever produced. How I miss her.

$ 100,000

T
hey came in twos and threes, dressed in the fashionable Disney costumes of the year, Lion King, Pocahontas, Beauty and the
Beast, or in the costumes of televised superheroes, protean, shape-shifting, thus arrayed, in twos and threes, complaining
it was too hot with the mask on,
Hey, I’m really hot!,
lugging those orange plastic buckets, bartering, haggling with one another,
Gimme your Smarties, please?
as their parents tarried behind, grownups following after, grownups bantering about the schools, or about movies, about local
sports, about their marriages, about the difficulties of long marriages, kids sprinting up the next driveway, kids decked
out as demons or superheroes or dinosaurs or as advertisements for our multinational entertainment-providers, beating back
the restless souls of the dead, in search of sweets.

* * *

They came in bursts of fertility, my sister’s kids, when the bar drinking, or home-grown dope-smoking, or bed-hopping had
lost its luster; they came with shrill cries and demands —little gavels, she said, instead of fists —
Feed me! Change me! Pay attention to me!
Now it was Halloween and the mothers in town, my sister among them, trailed after their kids, warned them away from items
not fully wrapped,
Just give me that, you don’t even like apples,
laughing at the kids hobbling in their bulky costumes —my nephew dressed as a shark, dragging a mildewed gray tail behind
him. But what kind of shark? A great white? A blue? A tiger shark? A hammerhead? A nurse shark?

She took pictures of costumed urchins, my sister, as she always took pictures, e.g., my nephew on his first birthday (six
years prior), blackfaced with cake and ice cream, a dozen relatives attempting in turn to read to him —about a tugboat —from
a brand-new rubberized book.
Toot toot!
His desperate, needy expression, in the photo, all out of phase with our excitement. The first nephew! The first grandchild!
He was trying to get the cake in his mouth. Or: a later photo of my niece (his younger sister) attempting to push my nephew
out of the shot —against a backdrop of autumn foliage; or a photo of my brother wearing my dad’s yellow double-knit paisley
trousers (with a bit of flare in the cuffs), twenty-five years after the heyday of such stylings; or my father and stepmother
on their powerboat, peaceful and happy, the riotous wake behind them; or my sister’s virtuosic photos of
dogs
—Mom’s irrepressible golden retriever chasing a tennis ball across an overgrown lawn, or my dad’s setter on the beach with
a perspiring Löwenbräu leaning
against his snout. Fifteen or twenty photo albums on the shelves in my sister’s living room, a whole range of leathers and
faux-leathers, no particular order, and just as many more photos loose, floating around the basement, castoffs, and files
of negatives in their plastic wrappers.

She drank the
demon rum,
and she taught me how to do it, too, when we were kids; she taught me how to drink. We stole drinks, or we got people to
steal them for us; we got reprobates of age to venture into the pristine suburban liquor stores. Later, I drank bourbon. My
brother drank beer. My father drank single malt scotches. My grandmother drank half-gallons and then fell ill. My grandfather
drank the finest collectibles. My sisters ex-husband drank more reasonably priced facsimiles. My brother drank until a woman
lured him out of my mother’s house. I drank until I was afraid to go outside. My uncle drank until the last year of his life.
And I carried my sister in a blackout from a bar once —she was mumbling to herself, humming melodies, mostly unconscious.
I took her arms; Peter Hunter took her legs. She slept the whole next day. On Halloween, my sister had a single gin and tonic
before going out with the kids, before ambling around the condos of Kensington Court, circling from multifamily unit to multifamily
unit, until my nephews shark tail was grass-stained from the freshly mown lawns of the common areas. Then she drove her children
across town to her ex-husbands house, released them into his supervision, and there they walked along empty lots, beside a
brook, under the stars.

* * *

When they arrived home, these monsters, disgorged from their dads Jeep, there was a fracas between girl and boy about which
was superior (in the Aristotelian hierarchies), Milky Way, Whoppers, Slim Jim, Mike ’n Ikes, Sweet Tarts, or Pez —this bounty
counted, weighed, and inventoried (on my nieces bed). Which was the Pez dispenser of greatest value? A Hanna-Barbera Pez dispenser?
Or, say, a demonic
totem pole Pez dispenser?
And after this fracas, which my sister refereed wearily
(Look, if he wants to save the Smarties, you cant make him trade!),
they all slept, and this part is routine, my sister was tired as hell; she slept the sleep of the besieged, of the overworked,
she fell precipitously into whorls of unconsciousness, of which no snapshot can be taken.

In one photograph, my sister is wearing a Superman outfit. This, from a prior Halloween. I think it was a
Supermom
outfit, actually, because she always liked these bad jokes, degraded jokes, things other people would find ridiculous. (She’d
take a joke and repeat it until it was leaden, until it was funny only in its awfulness.) Jokes with the fillip of sentimentality.
Anyway, in this picture her blond hair —brightened a couple of shades with the current technologies —cascades around her shoulders,
disordered and impulsive.
Supermom.
And her expression is skeptical, as if she assumes the mantle of Supermom —raising the kids, accepting wage-slavery, growing
old and contented —and thinks it’s dopey at the same time.

Never any good without coffee. Never any good in the morning. Never any good until the second cup. Never any
good without freshly ground Joe, because of my dad’s insistence, despite advantages of class and style, on
instant coffee.
No way. Not for my sister. At my dad’s house, where she stayed in summer, she used to grumble derisively, while staring out
the kitchen windows, out the expanse of windows that gave onto the meadow there,
Instant coffee!
There would be horses in the meadow and the ocean just over the trees, the sound of the surf and
instant coffee!
Thus the morning after Halloween, with my nephew the shark (who took this opportunity to remind her, in fact, that last year
he saved his Halloween candy
all the way till Easter, Mommy)
and my niece, the Little Mermaid, orbiting around her like a fine dream. My sister was making this coffee with the automatic
grinder and the automatic drip device, and the dishes were piled in the sink behind her, and the wall calendar was staring
her in the face, with its hundred urgent appointments, e.g.,
jury duty
(the following Monday) and i?
& A to pediatrician;
the kids whirled around the kitchen, demanding to know who got the last of the Lucky Charms, who had to settle for the Kix.
My sister’s eyes barely open.