Dissident Gardens (31 page)

Consummate New Yorker, she’d no driver’s license, no aspiration for one. It was just the day before taking residence at the Chelsea that Tommy ferried her to the retreat, in summer rain, highway maps crumpled across her lap in the passenger seat. Kerhonkson, when they found it, was tucked into the disconcertingly named Ulster County. As if he’d never gone anywhere at all, only conjured the mystic Jewess to his father’s Opel, on some teenage excursion from gray Belfast. No matter that he held the wheel, Tommy felt himself a teen beside her. Why not follow her inside? But Warren Rokeach had with magnanimity bestowed the Chelsea room; Warren Rokeach had brushed off Tommy’s half-assed tape of the teach-in songs; Warren Rokeach had said it was time for Tommy to write a love song, a memory song, something “sensual,” something “cinematic,” something “groovy.”

So Tommy had released her from the car. He helped her with her bags to the door, there greeted by the hosts. The center was run by amiable Quakers who had, Tommy suspected, no grasp of what was about to hit them, what amplitudes of reefer smoke they’d soon involuntarily ingest. She’d taken her bags and kissed him and wished him luck and he’d turned back to the humid mercies of the island in August, to the hotel from whose lobby he’d by this point phoned and left her messages four nights in a row, not once speaking with anyone who could locate her, though those he spoke with were
groovy
, they
were
cinematic
, they were even
sensual
in their willingness to pass along his messages.

He wouldn’t call tonight, bless the sepulchral poet for standing as an emblem of the pay telephone’s uselessness. The pay telephone nothing more than a device for ridiculing human solitude.

Without doubt Kerhonkson was where the action was. In contrast to this bogus bohemia. So far as a lobby detective might care, the morose human specimens arrayed here appeared disastrously unthreatening. Supposedly some kind of creative hothouse, the Chelsea felt instead like a desultory station, a place where insolvent pretenders washed ashore or were like Tommy installed by their managers. Tommy wondered how many other failed singers were entombed upstairs. He should tour the upper floors and take depositions. His second album,
Chelsea of the Soon-to-Be-Forgotten
. Or,
Chelsea of the Forgettable: A Sob-Cycle
. Tommy’s talent was, he’d begun to suspect, a load of bricks. He was growing exhausted at not being permitted to set it aside.

A man possessed by the spirit of sheer prose.

The clerk, weary of negotiations with the Factory girl, snapped on a transistor radio to drown her out. “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The summer’s first inescapable song, it had lately been overtaken by Dylan’s own electrified vitriol. The Byrds, another false-Beatles, softening up the world for Bobby’s rant. Dylan’s psychedelic weariness was now rendered amazing, apparently, even to teens who’d never heard an honest folk song in their lives. Tommy’s own weariness amazed only himself, and then only a little.

For two weeks now the new Dylan had poured from every radio in Greenwich Village, from parlor windows thrust wide as if to draw the last shreds of oxygen from the suffocated sidewalks, the track’s sound mercurial and seasick, its scorning inquiry forcing each lonely person to give account, if only to themselves: How
does
it feel? Tommy suspected Bobby hadn’t a clue in this case, for Dylan had never, like Tommy, been married and felt his wife’s attention slip away. Whatever Dylan’s qualifications for being its author, or lack thereof, the despicable song seemed to magnify loneliness: Each time you heard it, it acted as a mirror bringing your face disastrously close, forced you
to study gray-fleshed sockets, to encounter the red-threaded yolks of your eyes. It did this, even as it declared its listener, officially,
invisible
.

Was this, at last, Tommy’s woe, his grievance? Only if he kidded himself that his art reached deeper into his life than he presently suspected it did. He was disgruntled less on his own behalf than on that of Van Ronk, Clayton, so many others, all swallowed and disgorged, all eclipsed, all savaged by the splenetic fusillade pouring from the radio. For, what was it to believe yourself part of a cadre of voices, a zone, a scene,
a field of engagement
defined by its range and relevance—for what was it to be a
folk
? If not, well,
what
? What, that wouldn’t frighten Tommy to put in words, even to himself?

Yet the thing that had just now collapsed was also a sketch for a better world that might be. Tommy did believe it, however appalling to confess. And so, to think yourself defined, however cursory one’s own talent, by immersion in a collective voicing deeper than that of which any sole practitioner could be capable, and then to have every third remark be did you ever open for
Dylan
, did you ever meet
Dylan
, was
Dylan
there is
Dylan
coming was it like
Dylan
I think I saw
Dylan
he’s a second-rate
Dylan
he’s no
Dylan
at all and why don’t we just pull down the signs and rename all the streets here
Dylan
. The corner of
Dylan
and
Dylan
where I first saw
Dylan
but you never see him anymore, do you? Not the likes of you. Was it better or worse, to have been there at the princeling stumblebum’s invention? To recognize the communal property embedded in Bobby’s every utterance, or to be blissfully ignorant of all he’d devoured?

“We Didn’t Open for Him, He Opened for Us (You Cunt)”

Yet even antipathy was beyond Tommy’s range. He found in himself no conviction that this vanished world—one he’d entered merely as the recipient of Good Brother Rye’s summons to Greenwich Village to partake of beatnik pussy—was his to enshrine or defend. To be so affronted might be Phil Ochs’s prerogative. Not that of a Boy gone wrongheadedly solo. The situation was simple. Tommy had purchased a ticket. Tommy had been granted admission. Now the show was closing. Tommy Gogan was twenty-seven years old and simply needed a new gig. His next might as soon involve bricks as guitars. He heard nothing of what others did in the new music, and suspected
they were pretending to hear it. The raw-scraped sonic travesties with which Bobby himself was now complicit. All commitment was gone from the songs. The poetry flayed out, too. As he sat watching the two Animals or Swine snickering behind their shades Tommy felt a certainty come to him: Their strength was numbers. The plural form, Byrds or Weasels. Now he saw the answer to the folk scene’s collective riddle, as to why Bobby was cluttering up his music with Mike Bloom-field and whoever was brutalizing the electric piano. Rather than a sincere musical epiphany, the choice revealed the hunger for mates, a Beatles of one’s own. Dylan, having shrunken an entire world to his sole person, was terrified by the isolation.

It shouldn’t take
a complete unknown
to see it, but Tommy had an advantage in his power of recognition: He was lonely. He should have stayed a Boy. A phrase of Rose’s drifted now into his thoughts. It had never, since his hearing, been too distant from them. A phrase enigmatic, or perhaps he only wished it so: “The true Communist always ends up alone.” Rose had left the motto unexplained. It explained itself. Tommy left his pen in his pocket, for he couldn’t wish for even an instant to sing those words, nor form them with his script, not even to cross out like the rest. There were no second albums in Tommy Gogan’s notebook.

There was, first, always, this unbearable production of self: Cicero’s return to the scene of the crime. The seminar room—excel too much in there and be incarcerated, be lifetime painted into the corner of your scholastic habit.
Those who can’t but teach
,
do
. Cicero preferred to get them out of bed in the morning and get on with it, so ran Disgust and Proximity in the generally abhorred nine a.m. slot. He’d become a connoisseur of their morning odor, unshowered bodies sheathed in clothes they’d worn the night before. Cicero liked to get into what would otherwise typically be the Baginstock College undergraduates’ hangover dreams, giving them the simplest reason to assassinate him on RateYourProfessor.com, sparing them the difficulty of casting around for something more esoteric.
He schedules class earlier than anyone else and then berates us for being tired
. This put them in a more receptive state than they knew, sleepy haters lashed to the mast of their Starbucks.

“Good morning, everyone. I think we’re all here who are going to make it here today, so let’s get under way. I intend to hijack today’s class but let us first get some of the syllabus material addressed, keep this silly bus on its course. I know we have ready among us Mr. Seligman—yes? good—with his presentation on the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
article, that along with the chapters of Aurel Kolnai and the Hilton Als formed this week’s assigned reading.
You are all keeping abreast of the reading, I hope? Just now in my idle time before class I was poking around on the blog and didn’t see jack shit on the Kolnai or Als.” This elicited a ripple of nonsemantic utterances, distant moans, and choked giggles. “Are we not turning the pages or is there some other problem? Are we finding the material difficult? It’s too early in the semester for coasting to the finish line.”

“Some of it is difficult,” said Yasmin Durant, one of Cicero’s lovely defiant ones, a repeat customer. Sticking up for the groggy team, yet only as adjunct to her deeper strategy, that of positioning herself as Cicero’s echo and sister, his call-and-response partner in this room. Nominating herself for discipleship, Yasmin’s head was beginning to cultivate its own little goat-horn nubbins, dreadbumps threatening to take up some space.

“Well, you likely are understanding more than you realize. Stick with it and we’ll sort it out in here. But the more you lay down some responses, the greater your traction on the texts is likely to be. It’s just a blog, people. You’re not going to be graded on the language, I don’t care if you comment in emoticons or Harry Potter rebus, Muggle-speak or whatever, just offer some evidence of engagement. Put your footprints on the thing.” The September light fractured through tree-tops on the other side of the room’s tall windows, and across the big chestnut table, punishing those students who’d lined up on the wrong side. The slant was changed. The heat had broken overnight, breeze like a tide coming in, and where the coolest streams had touched the oak trees they were tainted with irreversible yellow, Maine’s seasonal hustle. Cicero might have only a few more weeks’ congenial swimming. After that he’d have to go in for some uncongenial swimming. It had become part of his job here, to be the ineradicable blemish on the New England horizon. In the seminar room, Cicero had to unfurl pedagogy, make something occur on a weekly basis. Other days, he taught by merely existing.

In the seminar room, an incumbency. A pregnancy, even. Cicero was here to birth something each time. A secret part of him never failed to glimpse terror in the seventy-five minutes laid before him, as if he’d not destroyed such intervals successfully at least a thousand times previous. Actually, it was not so unlike contemplating the cold sea before immersion, then stepping off to remember he belonged
there, would not dissolve there, was something the damn sea had to deal with. In fact, in the seminar room he taught by merely existing, too. Cicero was adequate simply as an exhibition, a subject for contemplation, and lately he had come to consider the production of awkward classroom silence as an alternative pedagogical implement. Say less and less. Let them plummet into that abyss of the inexpressible where the truth lies, where the action is. Telling himself this, the words always then came in a brutalizing flood. He hammered their bodies with his language and as ever the seventy-five minutes were destroyed in an eyeblink. The cream of the nation’s preparatory schools limped out the door crippled by the onslaught of him again. Cicero’s silence was mostly theoretical. Fuck actually sparing them, life was too short.

“You’ll have noticed we have a visitor today. Sergius Gogan—welcome, Sergius, to Disgust and Proximity. These are my best and brightest here. Sergius isn’t a spy from the administration, people, so you don’t have to tighten up. Just an interested observer. Now, I’d like to open with a reading from the Kolnai. Page sixty-seven, if you want to follow.
‘Thus disordered sexuality represents for the sense of disgust, above all what is disorderly, unclean, clammy, the unhealthy excess of life. Even spirituality in the wrong place may to the best of our knowledge arouse something like disgust. There is something disgusting in the idea of everything on earth becoming pasted over with musings and broodings …’
Let me skip down here:
‘… there exists here the danger that intellectual dallying and raking about may itself come to form part of sexual life, on the strength of the enormous capacity for inflection and amalgamation with alien spheres which the sexual drive possesses … It belongs to the total disgust reaction that it is a matter of an essentially cumulative, infectious process, of something which lacks … restraint or hold, something which hones in on everything, something putrefied, and at the same time still undirected, undynamic, swirling about in its own dank atmosphere.’
 ”

Cicero allotted a measure of gravid silence.

“Anyone going to weigh in? Too early for you? Well, don’t let it get too late. We’ll keep this passage in the background for now.” Next Cicero cued the student who’d prepared a ten-minute capsule for the others and leaned back in his chair. The text in question detailed a study in which volunteer subjects were made to confront their sensations
of disgust at being asked to don a series of woolen sweaters ostensibly tainted with either physical or moral corruption. Cicero interrupted after the student’s paraphrase became unreasonably labored. “Very good, thank you, Mr. Seligman. So what’s the
point
? Is anybody surprised that these people didn’t want to put on the sweater that they associated with the cockroaches or the tuberculosis even if it was steam-cleaned, even if it was
boiled
. Who here doesn’t relate to this kind of magical contamination anxiety?”