| the golden west volume 7 part 1 - 1996 july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
Vancouver, 2nd July 1996
3rd
4th White dawn. Eyes stinging with tears. I hurt a lot. I am lonely and despairing. The clouds are beautiful. I ache from the cleaning work yesterday. I feel there will never be love or faith again, and living is unbearable without it. I feel that everything I feel is illusory, belongs to another time. I can't trust myself, I must refuse to be myself in ways that are too complicated and bewilder me. 6th Rat in a cage - a dull uncomfortable animal - itching and aching. I have enough energy in the morning to work for a few hours, but after that there's nothing I can do. If I work in the garden I ache. When I lie down I ache. On a treadmill about Tom, if I touch, adore, sail away with him I will be happy instead of wretched, but I will be putting myself into the hands of someone who is compelled to lie to me, ignore me, refuse me, seduce me, dominate me. I should get away from him but if I do I will soon find myself in hope and fear about someone else. I'm in a quandary. The states of heart are the ones that give faith in emotional work, but the work seems to have to cut back the fantasy that brings the states of heart. This is so unpleasant a time.
8th Quarter to five waiting at the airport. Who am I waiting for. Not him with that look of snouty arrogance. Not him dragging his gut along after his sharp nose. Not him with his self-cherishing gay walk. Not that guy rolling on the soles of his sneakers as if they were round. Not Grandpa with the jutting little chin and neck sunk into his shoulders like an owl. Not comfy Mr Tan with a lot of luggage on a trolley. Not the air captain with a moustache. Not white sports jacket fur-face professor. Not friendly Polish dad introducing new wife (how did I know he was Polish). Let me guess - he'll have his leather jacket on. Mr Image. His shades. Imperialist walk. If he has grown a moustache I'll send him back. He'll be walking as if his forces have invaded this country, but he'll be hiding his eyes because there's hope and fear in them incongruous with his style. What kind of suitcase. Sports bag. I'd like it if he were wearing a tie but he'll have on either his black tee or a short sleeved cotton. Is this really going to happen? Happy and sad. 15th That is so wrong I should erase it but I will leave it to show my delusion. I sat waiting at the international arrivals bar and after many arrivals there was a thin old man dressed in boy's clothes, a man with a harrowed and dissolute face, who looked ill, exhausted, even criminal. He was not walking like an invader. I didn't jump up gladly. I was on the edge of tears on and on. He wasn't the man I left and mourned and struggled with and longed for. I was crying for loss of open heart, I mean crying but not crying - who is this man so morally wrecked he can be no one's lover? Then there was a week. My book said don't write while he's here, your intuition will know what to do. It's 7:30. I left him at the US departures gate at 4. I'm tired. There's a fine day baking around me. I'm at a loss. I don't want him to be gone. But this time I am not freaked by lies and confusions. I sat in the sun patch on the bed this morning. He sat where I sat through all the months of winter mourning and struggling. I said he seduced and exploited my fragility. I said he hooked me, I said the worst was that he was willing to see me suffering and confused, knowing what he could do to end my suffering and confusion and not doing it. He sat listening and not answering. I could see plainly the extraordinary division of his face, a hard stupid masculinity on the right, a wide numinous being on the left, almost a child, something like a woman, but not obviously a woman. Something calm, observant and maybe shamanic. Dispassionate. All week it was as if I could only see the hard stupid man. I kept saying - he's such a yahoo. He'd be shouting and cursing, formulaic, emphatic. His body was twenty years older than I remembered it. His arms were without substance. His walk was spindly. He told stories. He had come to tell them. "There are a couple of things I have to tell you. I wasn't born in San Diego. I was born in Philadelphia and lived there until I was fourteen. And I was married once before." Deanna and Joey. He was back from Okinawa a year and she tried to kill herself. Joey was three when he lost him. He gave away his rights in exchange for being let off child support. He hasn't seen him since. Dee's brother pulled a gun on him. Cheap whores in Okinawa. He slept in a bed with his mother until he was twelve. He pretended he was born in San Diego because he didn't want to get into the earlier stuff. When I left he began smoking a joint every night after work, half a bottle of wine. He doesn't have a bank account because he wrote a couple of bad checks. There are maybe $600 in traffic tickets on his driver's license. He had more jobs than he said and lost them when he'd get drunk and punch someone out. He'd won some awards and could get new jobs. He lived with Lori and her two kids for a while. He did a lot of drugs with her. He fell in love with his Uncle Joe who wrote him from Sri Lanka and sent him butterflies under glass. We began the stories here in the kitchen after dark, was it Tuesday night? Left on Wednesday, were in Lytton Wednesday night in a hotel looking over the river, at the Bavarian Ranch site Thursday and Friday, at the BC Hydro Seton Lake campsite outside Lilouett Saturday night, back here last night. I heard stories in the room in Lytton, and then all Thursday afternoon beside the stream on High Bar Road. Last Monday is so long ago I don't remember much. Last night he said, Dress me, and I said wear this and this, green pleated pants and a pink-br (phone rings) pink-brown tee-shirt with a washed sheen like skin and a color close to his. He said with that he had to wear a brown belt and polish his loafers. He jumped out of bed this morning and ran into the kitchen holding the front of his sweatpants and climbed into the armchair with me to push his morning hard-on against my ribs. Stretched out the front of his pants to show it to me very naked at eighty degrees. At Lytton standing below the hotel looking at the river we heard a local man explaining to a Dutch couple the confluence of the Thompson, which has flowed through granite, and the Fraser, which is carrying tons of canyon silt. Tom was taking note in his way, I discovered later, of something about the confluence of different natures. We squabbled equably - is that the word? I was tough and stern and twice briefly irritated, and that was possible, not hard. He backed down. Hardness in the time was in the form of sadness. Sometimes I was bored, stopped listening, didn't cooperate. He wanted me to sit in the heat watching him scale his mountain. I got up immediately and went back to camp and water, though looking back to see how far he'd got. You weren't even watching! he said. Mommies do that, I said. He brought me a rock and a daisy from the summit. Okay boy let's see you do it for real. The first night lying beside him to fall asleep I was seeing things in the way I do beside a man and rarely otherwise. Up in the dry country nothing hurt. I walked and didn't ache anywhere though it was very hot and I didn't sleep enough. At High Bar there were twilights and white dawns that seemed a couple of hours long. The night we slept on the road and were lying with our heads together on the pillows with the sky immense, there was a small saskatoon tree in a blown-sideways shape on the horizon. It seemed already to have been settled night but the stars kept getting clearer, the Milky Way kept forming more clearly into separate clumps. I explained the galactic horizon. My friend was pursuing something about human perspective - without the human perspective the universe is neither large nor small (and therefore could be small - something like that). He was ranting. I fell asleep to the sound of his voice. He woke me to apologize. 16 Could talk about ordeal. I took him camping. He didn't want to go camping. We got on the road Wednesday afternoon. Heavy traffic on the freeway. That's an ordeal for me. He wanted a motel. I took him into Lytton. I didn't tell him I was on the tracks of myself two years ago when I was on a quest to recover from Ken Sallit. Ken is obliterated in me though the places I saw are not. I wasn't particularly feeling that I was with a man I'd been given because of the work I did then. I wasn't in wide perspective. But now that I think of it, I was lying beside the fence that's down now, praying to be given an able heart, and my heart with Tom Fendler has been able. Thursday afternoon we'd driven west from Clinton, taken the left turn at the Jessup Road intersection, and were coming through the forest. He was excited about the forest. "There are little glades down there." I was waiting for the moment he'd catch sight of the canyon through the trees. We came down the hill. I rode my brakes and they smoked. Just as we got to the Bavarian Ranch gate they went. When I'd begun to smell them, I told Tom and he coached me down the rest of the way. Hit them here, let them go. I didn't want to let them go. I was in first gear but it seemed too fast. There were two horses at the log barns. Tom liked the barns. It was earlier in the year than last time. The apples and plums weren't ready, the apron of watered green smelled of clover. He got out the beds so he chose their spot. He dove for cover, a spot under saskatoons arching like olives, like olives hung with little black berries, and next to the sounding stream. Everywhere he looked for water, I looked for dryness. We had the stove set up on a board by the plank bridge. He made coffee. I don't have my usual recall of what came after what - I never stopped being with him. He was alternately loud and silent. Telling his stories he smoked one cigarette after another. His malapropisms and mispronunciations. I wasn't in love. I was physically unmoved, until yesterday morning when I let myself touch his arm, his shoulder, feeling that he was so soon going, and started to cry. Up in the canyon and on the trip when he had the green bandana on his head, so strange a bony flat face. We'd stare at each other. Always his eyes like other than human, silver reflectors. What a strange old bird, I'd say. He'd look like Samuel Beckett. We were slipping down through Whistler on the way home when I asked him whether he remembered when he realized what kind of power he was going to have with women. "I remember exactly. I was in ninth grade having my hair cut in a barbershop. The woman who was cutting my hair said, You are really going to have the girls after you because you are so tall dark and handsome. If you were a little older or I were a little younger I'd be after you myself." "Maybe she said that to everybody," I said. "I don't think so, because of the way she was massaging my neck." "And the next time after that was pretty much connected with losing my virginity." Dancing with Gail at a house party. She was a sophomore in college, he was a junior in high school. It was not long before his mom died. She wasn't a virgin. She took him into a bedroom. The mysteries of the vagina. "When I was younger, if I had a hard-on it was really rigid and ...." "You found a place to put it." "I found a place to put it. It slipped in easily." Later she had a kid she thought might be his but it wasn't. A couple of years ago he bumped into her in Horton Plaza. She was living with a twenty-eight year old who wasn't treating her right. He felt she was at the end of her road. On the Lilouett-Mount Currie road, driving through emerald intensity of grass, leaves, everything burning with light in the floors between high peaks, I thought I'd been riding him so hard I should be willing to ease up, so I asked what had been his happy times. He said when he was a child it was a ferry trip they'd take up river every year to an amusement park. He'd stand in the prow. Then there was a place in the woods he'd go to read books. There was a time with Rebecca. "We were past the dating stage but we didn't know what we were doing. We were going out. She had on a white angora sweater with a ..." (he gestures a scoop neck). "She was freshly showered" (he was going to say freshly made up but checked himself) "and had on a little make-up. She was kind of ..." (he gestures fresh and eager, sitting forward in the car). "There was once with Lori when we were living together in ----, we were out in the backyard hanging out sheets, there was a fresh smell." "There was the first time I held you." "You mean above the ocean?" "Yes. I could feel your heart going. And the time I cried. It was the way you were touching me. There was something about your touch." A lot of times when he was working on newspapers. Hitchhiking between San Francisco and San Diego. At the Seton Lake campsite when it was dark and I was crying because I'd wanted my love to be true because it was so beautiful, but it was deluded, he was holding my face holding on in himself. "Are you still in love?" "Not to my knowledge," I said. That's the end, he was thinking. Next day we read Estes' chapter that I'd xeroxed for him, the heart as a lonely hunter, deaths accepted. Reading it I was convinced I was on the journey with him but then he said something that as so often on the trip demonstrated the soft sleazy habit of his mind, some little sidestep. I got up and took the black rock wrapped in my Grandma Konrad's red and white dress fabric - the Del Mar rock that meant my marriage - but incorrectly, since it was unilateral - smooth and heavy black oval that had been hot in my palm when we'd come out of the cold ocean - the rock I didn't throw into the ocean when I sent back his stuff. I set that rock into the edge of the violent green creek he liked, where water the color of southern California ocean broke backwards onto itself in small waves he could imagine large. He liked its violence, its speed, the way he like the waterfall at Kane Creek. I set the stone into the fast stream in a spirit of bitterness, giving up the beauty of the open heart I gave him in delusion, angry that it was delusion. But I was the deluder, because it could not be a marriage rock if he didn't choose it with me. After that there were two rocks he gave me, insisted on giving me though I was ungracious. One was the multicolored rough little rock from the summit of the excursion he said he made for me, his trial, walking on his dangerous legs in great heat without water. On the way back he feared he'd cramp, collapse, die. He was dehydrated and overheated. The road was longer than he thought. He went to look for me under the tree and I wasn't there, he hadn't looked back to make sure of which tree he thought I'd be under. Maybe it is the altitude, any slope in that canyon is hard, I find too. I drag myself. The other was the rock he'd scrubbed the macaroni and cheese pot with. It was an ordinary blackened little rock he handed me yesterday when we were packing. You keep it, it's your rock, I said, irritated. Why should I hold rocks for this guy that are not my choice. He went into the other room and I threw it out the window. This morning I see why it was those two rocks and that he doesn't trust himself to hold them. I'm correct to dislike being asked to hold things for him, but in fact I hold a lot for him - all the work I've done thinking it through for him. I've held his judgment. Please come, I want you to come, he said twice. [to San Diego] His violence. The kid at the lights at Terminal and Main who jumped toward the windshield with a squeegie. No thank you, my friend, no thank you, he said. The kid touched the glass with the squeegie. Tom's hand flashed out and caught his wrist: I said no. I didn't hear you, sir, I didn't hear you. The lights change. Nobody fucks with me, says Tom. I remember the kid's face. "He said he didn't hear you and I believed him." Feeling for what to say. It was hair-trigger violence directed at someone more helpless than himself - not good. What I find to say is territorial. "It wasn't your call, it's my car." I was angry. What I was saying was plausible but not quite right. He apologized. We were on the way to Vietnamese soup with Louie. What I meant was more like, Don't use violence to enforce with me. I liked the suddenness and intensity of it. Something suddenly happened. The sight of his hand on the kid's wrist. An eruption implying something out of sight. I called him partly because I liked it and was countering with strength of my own. That was happening a lot. I used leverage. It was interesting. I'm fascinated with you, he said. I was holding back very little. I carried the cooler. I wouldn't let him drive. I rode his sleaze with iron in my eyes. I insisted on my program. I snapped at him a couple of times - that impresses me. When he was frantic with the heat in Lillooet and wanted a motel room with cable I said, You want to watch TV? The heat didn't bother me. I rode roughshod. We drove west. There was a campground and he liked that it was forest and high mountain not desert. I liked best the colored rock and blazing sage of high country. Saskatoon in copses, with twining stems and berries hung in sparse pretty clusters. At the Bavarian Ranch he lay on our good beds looking up at the shape of those trees, saskatoon, vine maple. I listened to his story of two Irish families in West Philadelphia, lace curtain Irish and pigshit Irish. Isabel McElvey's family new immigrants. The father buys and runs bars. The mother socks it away in real estate. On the Fendler side the family is American back to the Civil War. A German dodging the army marries in Ireland. Thereafter the blood runs Irish except for the steadily decreasing German fraction. Down to a sixteenth in Tom but visible still. Vic Fendler's dad is a drunk and a womanizer. His wife kicks him out. Vic, Thomas, Joseph, Mary. Vic takes responsibility for the family. In his teens he takes a job shoveling coal for a printing shop boiler. He goes to the Art Institute meantime and studies with Eakins who is an old man by then. Isabel sees him at a dance with his brother Tom. She doesn't know which is handsomer but it's Vic who's more aggressive. Her family doesn't like him. His father dies. He gets a scholarship to study in Paris. Gives the cash to his mother. Works for passage money and goes to Paris anyway. Isabel writes him that she's in trouble with her family. Then he gets passage money somehow for both her and his brother Joseph to come to Paris too. They have a couple of years in Paris in the twenties. They go home. They're all very young still. Joe studies to qualify for the Jesuits. Mary joins a convent. The mother dies. [The brother Tom has died somewhere in there.] Everyone is accounted for. Vic and Isabel move to Niagara Falls. She makes good money as executive secretary to a New York company. He is working for a printing house. He affects the style of a gangster, fedora and profanity. When they drive anywhere it is Isabel who drives. Vic was in an accident and someone died - more is not told. Something happens in the marriage. She leaves him and goes back to Philadelphia. He is on the road for a couple of years selling typewriters. He comes home. They live in one of her mother's townhouses. The mother lives upstairs. Tom is born when Isabel is forty. His nursery is on the ground floor. He remembers a rocking horse on his second birthday. A black family moves into the block. Vic is outraged. They sell the house and move to a new tract house ten miles out in Haddon Heights, New Jersey. There are woods across the road and further down the street. Black Horse Pike and White Horse Pike straight as a die for ten miles into Philadelphia. The house is small. The grandmother has one bedroom and Isabel and Tom sleep in one bed in the other while Vic works nights as a pressman for the company that prints Time, Life, Argosy. He brings the magazines home. "We printed these." Vic feuds with one set of neighbors so Tom isn't allowed to be friends with that boy. Isabel disapproves of the slovenly grass widow on the other side so Tom can't play with the girl in that house either. When Vic buys him a bicycle it is a huge heavy model he can't ride. He leaves it on the lawn. It's stolen. Then he can get the kind he wants. He's happy on the bike. Vic is making good money and spends it on the garden and the rec room. He has to have the best house in the tract. It has never occurred to Tom that Vic could have built him a room in the basement. He doesn't have his own room until his grandmother dies when he's twelve. He remembers sitting under the white desk in the living room hearing his first rock'n'roll song. What they'd had on the dial were things like How much is that doggie in the window. This was bumpa-bumpa. True love for all etern-a-tee, a boy's voice. Meantime there'd been the miseries of boxing lessons, art lessons, altar boy service. 1960. Vic tells him one day out of the blue that they are moving to San Diego and that his mother's health is very bad, she has maybe a couple of years left. They ship their stuff and take the Greyhound across the country. Tom is sulking. Vic is raging at drivers who try to enforce the no cigars rule. They move into the beach house in San Diego. Vic gets a job in Las Vegas, comes home weekends. Tom's mom is in hospital a lot, he's alone at home. He drinks. The music is good and getting better. He's getting laid. Summer jobs at June Lake in the mountains. It's falling apart. Falls apart at greater and greater speed for the next three decades. He loses Joey when he's three. Loses Mathew when he's three. Rebecca steadies him enough so he keeps jobs for a while. She's making inceasing amounts of money rising in the Y hierarchy and that cushions the times he's out of work. Drinking every night, drugs, speed for years. In his early forties, disaster, which has come often but singly, lets down a landslide. Rebecca finds out about Lori, Lori loses her kids of account of him, Rebecca moves back to Iowa with Mathew, he goes bankrupt, runs his credit cards out on renting fast cars and gets so many speeding tickets he loses his license. Writes bad checks. "I needed the money." And so on up to the time when he's been drinking and repenting in Mexico. Has ulcerated feet that are diagnosed as vascular insufficiency - his mom's disease. Is impotent. His father dies, he walks away from the nursing home saying, I'm free. Gets the job at the Golden West. Today he woke in his room happy and confident. Somehow my generosity of spirit is bailing him out. He's back on the road. He's grateful in a perfunctory sort of way but basically he thinks he deserves it, his luck comes back because it loves him. He is not moved, as he would have been younger, to give back, take care of. This is what Louie said: I thought he's frozen. He's sweet. He wants not to be frozen and we feel that as sweetness. I wanted you to be able to be with someone who could give you more. I reserved my judgment about whether he is unintelligent. I am not sure he has enough left to be able to use what you give him. I didn't feel an intimacy between you but I thought that if he were healthier there might be a physical match. He has soul. You told me that already. Is that enough? Have I run it off? He sat in the red chair with the ashtray on the balcony rim in the dark. He lay on my bed looking from the east window to the west window. The corner chair at the table was his spot. He looked at the houses, at the lane. Played tapes with the player on the floor in the kitchen. Had his clothes strewn on the yellow rug. Bought cigarettes in the corner store. I sat on his lap in the green chair. He stood with the red towel around his waist shaving at the blue framed mirror. My head played his songs. Heart / Takes you / Back / On / That / You can / Rely-y I ain't / Telling you / No lie-ies. He put on B-b-b-b-bad / To the bone. Let's rock, he said. Wednesday morning. Hearts of space. I was safer not letting him fuck me, much safer. If I do that I lose my judgment, I said, every frog's a prince. He was a poor old thing, tight, bent, varicosed, with loose skin hanging on his bony old behind. He looked seventy and scrawny. His fine broad arms were gone though they came back on the last morning. I had many pangs of pity. I was safe. But crying with loss of Leucadia's heavenly love. Where is the man I believed. Was he there, was he never there, is he gone. You look as if you've had a hard time, I said kindly. You too, you were rigid, he said. Yesterday summing up our work. He sat while I gave him the whole of my anger and then what was left. Then we went to the book. I read him my book notes on addiction and AA and he kept sighing.
He wants to test it by trying the first question again:
We'd come a long way but he's still doing it. He isn't sending Mathew a card because he's afraid Rebecca will get him for child support. Is there a question? I've given myself a year, I don't have to know whether he or anyone is good for me. A delicious smell of smoke. Burns Bog is burning. At breakfast in Lytton I told the long story of Julia Jansen in Hell's Gate Canyon, ending at Phil Jansen in East Van. A hot story with three fires and then a fireman. He listened closely to my story about coming home from the hospital for the first time. I was giving him instructions and later he followed them. A really hot fantasy, he said, is three women stacked up so he can slip from one to another. One on top of the other, or three in a row, in the same or alternating positions. I told him about the space man and his two friends. "It's romantic to get me into it but when I've got there it changes." "I wanted to find an intelligent woman but you are so intelligent it kinda cancels my reason for wanting an intelligent woman." It was so odd to have him there looking like someone I'd never met. The
plane of his face with his green bandana wet on his head - leaning against
the bridge rail staring at his wonderful waterfall. About to forget his
shades.
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