Keep The Giraffe Burning (15 page)

But after all, as the magazine indicated, life is what you convert it into, what you Bild-UR-Self. The radio played the opening chords of a song about a hot rod, and Jeanne’s girdle s-i-g-h-e-d.

Nothing to Buy

‘It don’t make you – you know – sterile, does it?’ asked the grinning sheriff.

The Astronaut shook his head, then turned its profile to the older man and bent over his coke.

‘That’s all right then.’

In the rear of the store the druggist, Bud Goslin, his glasses glittering, moved among his glittering bottles of vitamins. He hummed a tune the Astronaut could not identify.

The Kind of Girl Tab Hunter Wants

Jeanne picked at the polish on her toenail. At home, the water in the pool would be turning brown and filthy, like the ook in the bottom of the golf bag in the garage. Nola has the key, she thought. Nothing can possibly happen. I’m getting a cold.

The radio gave a recipe. Jeanne wondered how Fritz, her dog, was getting along.

She saw what she had done and took out the bottle of polish remover.

Sodium Propionate Added, to Retard Spoilage

The Astronaut’s gesture took in rubber syringes, steel nail files, lavender soap, paregoric, kleenex, comic books, morphine, green stamps, and the hidden drawer of condoms.

‘There is a certain poetry in all this,’ he said. The grinning sheriff nodded, and he went on, ‘a certain poetry. Yes, a certain poetry. You know?’ The grinning sheriff and Bud Goslin both nodded.

Teen Queen Screen Dream
was the magazine the young girl held. Dropping a quarter in Bud Goslin’s hand, she glided toward the door.

‘All the nice young nooky come in here,’ said the sheriff, grinning at his lemon phosphate.

‘I know, I know.’

Bud Goslin came from behind his counter and rushed at the kids sitting in the floor.

‘If you kids don’t want to buy any,’ he said, ‘you can’t sit here reading them all day.’ He snatched the comics from them and herded the boys out the door. The air-conditioning made a faint coughing sound.

‘Christ, I wish I was thirty years younger. All the nice young nooky come in here,’ said the grinning sheriff.

What am I doing here? the Astronaut asked himself. This is not my town. I was not raised here, only born here.

But he felt the same about the town in which he was raised. This is not my town, what am I doing here? he thought, in London and New York and Menominee, Wisconsin.

In front of the courthouse stood a raw wood platform, from which the Astronaut would ‘launch’ his speech, as the mayor put it. Jeanne would not be there, for reasons of her own. They would give him the key to the city, and the poets of Millgrove would read poems in his honour. He would give his speech, and then they would hang him, as in
Untamed Town
, the innocent man they hang, and all day he listens to them building the raw wood scaffold …

He stood up and reached in his pocket.

‘Your money’s no good,’ said the druggist.

Count the Number of Beans in this Jar

I’ll kill him, thought Jeanne, painting her toenails Kotton Kandy. The right foot smeared on the bed. Going on and leaving me without anything to read.

When the polish had dried, she slipped on her sandals and the peasant skirt and the acetate blouse, and went next door to the Sof-Top Ice Cream stand. The rays of the setting sun made her white blouse glow pink. She drank a cup of coffee at the picnic table and watched the sunset. Mosquitoes clung to the warmth of her arms. The girl behind the counter read
The New Liz
, wetting her thumb to turn the pages. A motorcycle went by, and the rider waved to the girl behind the counter. She did not look up. It was dark enough for Jeanne to remove the sunglasses she’d bought
in Paris, but she left them in place. Fritz is at Nola’s, she assured herself. Nothing can possibly happen.

Astonishing and Unbelievable!

The parade came by the bunting-draped platform slowly at first; a file of doll-buggies draped in bunting. Little girls dressed in white pushed bunting-draped buggies containing plastic dolls past the platform of wood, draped in bunting. Some of the little girls cried, and their mothers removed them from the parade. Others glided smoothly past, walking to an invisible rhythm, pushing buggies past the mayor, the grinning sheriff, the grinning wife of the mayor, the sheriff’s wife, Bud Goslin, and the Astronaut.

The Astronaut wore a dress uniform and saluted when the flag went by. The Millgrove High School band went by, playing ‘Them Bases’. The Astronaut, seeing his country’s flag, saluted it, and the flag was carried by, along with the flag of Millgrove High School, green and red. A woman across the Street wore Jeanne’s french sunglasses, the Astronaut saw.

A series of antique cars passed, each one exactly like the one before. Then came a float depicting the Harvest Festival: corn and pumpkins spilling out of a cornucopia held by Betty Mason, queen of the Harvest Festival. The American Legion followed, marching to some invisible, inaudible rhythm of their own, and the Astronaut saluted his country’s flag.

The crowd gathered around the bunting-draped platform, while the mayor raised and lowered the adjustable microphone several times.

‘Testing,’ he breathed cautiously into it, and an unearthly howl went up from the loudspeakers. Bud Goslin dropped to one knee beside the amplifier box. Light blazed from his glasses. He stood up.

‘Testing,’ said the mayor once more, and his amplified voice shouted from the speakers. Chuckling, he added, ‘Five, four, three, two, one.’ The crowd laughed.

‘Well, I hope everyone is having a good time, here,’ said the mayor. ‘I know I am.’

A hundred pairs of silver sunglasses tilted to look at him. ‘Yes, we’re here to celebrate our tenth annual Harvest Festival, and if you ain’t having a good time, I say it’s your own darned fault!’ The crowd smiled.

‘We have with us a young man I’m sure all of you know. A boy who was born right here in Millgrove, a real down-to-earth fella –’ He paused, while the crowd laughed very hard.

‘– seriously though, a boy who represents all that is fine about our town, a boy who has done more, seen more, and I guess travelled more than any of us ever will: Our Astronaut!’

The crowd clapped.

‘Bud Goslin here – Bud Goslin – ’ said the mayor over their noise, ‘– Bud has written a little poem in Our Astronaut’s honour. Bud?’

The druggist stood up, looking ashamed, and read rapidly from a paper:

Our Astronaut

He soars far upward in the night,

He comes back safe, to our greatest delight.

He’s the finest boy that Millgrove has got,

So let’s give a big cheer for our Astronaut!

Bud sat down amid mild applause.

‘And now, Mr Fenner, Hal Fenner of the High School English Department, has another poem for our boy,’ said the mayor. Mr Fenner was quite young, but had a moustache. His poem was untitled.

‘Hail to thee, blithe astronaut,’ it began. After a number of puzzling references to the Confederate dead, it finished, ‘… blazing a heavenly trail!’

‘And now a word from our guest of honour,’ the mayor announced. The Astronaut walked militarily to the microphone and waited until the applause died.

‘I don’t know what you came out here to hear,’ he said. ‘Let me start like this:

‘All this pigshit you hear about astronauts is so much fucking – uh – shit. What the fuck, a guy goes up inside this little metal room, see, it don’t mean a fuck of a lot. Any fucking body could do it, you see what I mean?’

‘Look out, mister,’ said a hoarse voice at his feet. ‘There’s a lot of women here.’

‘They put you through a lot of fucking tests and all, but what the fuck. Any fucking asshole with two eyes and two hands could operate the cocksucker. Fucking A. All you got is this fucking little –’

‘You tell ’em, captain,’ said a young man in a motorcycle jacket. He had his arm around the woman in the french sunglasses. The grinning sheriff was no longer grinning.

‘– this fucking little board with some motherfucking little red and green lights on it, see? And you just throw switches to keep the green lights on. Christ-all-fucking-mighty, even this cocksucking fairy teacher, with his blithe fucking spirit, could operate the fucker.’

The sheriff stood up, as a man in mirror sunglasses yelled, ‘We don’t talk that way in front of ladies, Mister.’ The entire crowd was murmuring, not listening now, but only trying to see what was going to happen to him.

‘He’s drunk!’ a woman screamed.

The sheriff got a hammer lock on the Astronaut and eased him away from the microphone. The mayor came forward and adjusted it several times, saying, ‘Well, folks, I guess our boy was still flying too high, heheh.’ He was preparing to entertain them with a few imitations, when he discovered he still held the large, wooden, gold-painted key. He walked
back to drop it disgustedly on the empty seat, and stood for a moment, watching the Astronaut and the sheriff descend from the platform. The mayor returned to the microphone, saying, ‘Speaking of high flyers, have you ever heard a chicken hawk? I guess most of you have, and he sounds something like this:’

Then the mayor screamed.

1.
The Lost Wind
, by
Stefan Berg

Reviewed by Lionel Eps

Berg loved word-play. As his diary shows, he fiddled with intricate word-games through his last days at San Esteban prison. The diary itself remains to be published; perhaps when it is, some light will be shed upon the ‘conspiracy’ theory so beloved of Mr Grice.

The Lost Wind
plays not only with words, but with itself. Joycean paronomasia is one thing, but what are we to make of lines like these:

shine handy donor fucks, halters,

coarsely talls

A Mr Oops laminates set animal spoor,

Ma.

No authory tease are so convincting as

the evidunce of I’s i’s.

The decipherment effort is often not worth the result, the games not worth the tangle.

We are in no better luck in understanding the story. Presumably it is someone’s journal (whose?) though we never learn whose (mine?). The narrator is imprisoned, or waiting to be born, or locked in a mental ward, or one of the other tiresome excuses for a long, boring ‘experiment’, and he is of course a novelist. This is supposed to be his diary (and how much more to the point it would have been to have given us Berg’s actual diary!), and it contains several scrappy novel plots and even plots within plots.

One loses the whole thread amid surreal nonsense, anecdotes about some pre-posthumous tribe called the Iructu, fake ‘reviews’ of unwritten works, and of course a dream. Nowhere is it explained what the title zephyr is, if anything. The whole is so filled with empty puns, misprints and weak jokes that finally one is tempted to call the lost wind a sparrow fart an afflatus to retitle it a Breaking Wind not to care if it is a hurricaine or a sparrow fart.

2.
The Lost Wind
,
by Steven Burg

Reviewed – by H. Truice

It is surprising that so eminent a critic as Mr Eps cannot understand this novel, and that he pretends to be perplexed even by simple palindromes and lines such as

thine sandy honor ducks, falters,

hoarsely calls

The Lost Wind
is a chinese box of a novel, a tidy though intricate palimpsest, a cry of hope and despair, mouthed by a man condemned, as are we all. The wind that blows through this thinking reed can make it sing. Far from a bit of literary self-abuse, this is a darksome mirror, a foil-etched overview of mankind – here symbolized by the Iructu tribe. As we all know, the Iructu have no word for ‘man’, but use a native vegetable word in its place.

Appropriately enough, the novel ends in the prison cafeteria, where everyone is eating dessert.

3.
The Lost Wind
,
by S. Burke

Reviewed by C. Grice

Through the lens of a handful of comic reviews, Burke reveals his well-wrought and deep-running novel, the story of an imprisoned writer known only as G.

G, condemned to death, plans a last novel, though there will be no time to write it. The story is that of a disturbed man, a writer named Garber. The significance of this name becomes apparent at once; Garber dotes his fantasies as a dream from which he awakens and begins to write. We are not told what the dream is until the end.

Garber’s novel,
The Conspiracy
, concerns three writers who meet at a seaside convention: Eps, Griver and Barge. Griver is very old and very famous, yet somehow unsatisfied. He has long dreamt of creating an artificial historical event, a ‘history within the interstices of History’. Eps is a middle-aged hack and amateur anthropologist who wishes to someday write a book about a fictitious tribe called the Iructu. Barge is a young poet with a correspondingly larger dream: the invention of an undiscovered land, complete with flora and fauna (‘he could see bowers of red frimsia, fragrant parson’s shoe, and the ancient ground-clinging bridesblood’).