In the Shadow of the American Dream (18 page)

February 23, 1980

Standing in the waterfront bar, having stopped in for a beer in midafternoon, smoky sunlight fading in through the large plate-glass windows and a thumping roll of music beating invisibly in the air … Over by one window and side wall a group of guys hanging out playing pool, one of them this Chicano boy, muscular and smooth with a thin cotton shirt of olive green, black cowboy hat pushed down over his head, taut neck rising out of the cut of his shirt, strong collarbones pressing out, a graceful curve of muscles in his back and a solid chest, his stomach pressed like a slightly curved washboard against the front of his shirt, muscles in his arms rising and falling effortlessly as he gesticulates with one hand, talking with some guy who's leaning into the sunlight of the window, in his other hand the pool stick balanced against his palm, a cigarette between his fingers. He leaned back and took a drag and blew lazy smoke rings slow one after the other that pierced the rafts of light and dissolved within the shadows. The guy he was talking to looked like some midwestern country boy straight from the fields of gathered wheat and dusty back roads traveled by pickups with beer cans in the backseat and a buzz in the head from summer. He had dark eyes and a rosy complexion, a roughly formed face made of sharp lines and his hair cut short around the sides and back of his neck. Standing there drinking from my bottle I could see myself taking the nape of his neck in my cold white teeth, a shudder of eroticism as he turned and stared out the window for a moment at the traffic. Light curved around his cheeks and the back of his head, the shaved hair having left bristles that I could feel against the palm of my sweating hand, all the way across the room. He looked around after turning away from the window and set his eyes on me for a long moment, studying me for indiscernible reasons, and I felt the bass of the music tapping in on some center where my emotions or passion lies, I tilted my head back and took another swig from the beer, humming gathering from my stomach and rising up around my ears. He turned away and the Chicano guy leaned over the pool table for a shot, his back curved and taut like a bow, arm drawing back to clack the balls softly on the table, a couple dropping into side pockets and for a moment the two of them were lost in a drift of men entering the bar. I moved over a few feet to bring them back in view and some sort of joke had developed between them, the country boy reached into the bottom slot of the table and withdrew a black shiny eight ball and advanced towards the Chicano, who drew back until his buttocks hit the low sill of the window. He giggled and leaned his head back letting a hardness come from his eyes. The country boy's face turned a slighter shade of red, and he reached out with his hands, one hand pulling the top of the Chicano's shirt out, and the other deftly dropping the eight ball into the neckline. The ball rolled down and lodged near his torso and the two of them laughed as he reached in, hand sliding down his chest and stomach I would have readily laid my forehead to, and retrieved the ball. I took a last swig from my beer, overcome with the heat that had been gathering within my belly and now threatened to overcome me with dizziness, barely managed to place the bottle upright on the nearby cigarette machine and push open the doors into the warm avenue winds, push open the doors and release myself from the embrace of the barroom and the silent pockets of darkness and the illuminating lines of light thinking it was Jacques Prevert who said, Why work when you have a pack of cigarettes and sunlight to play with, and listened to the horns of ships along the river, far away over the fields of buildings and traffic, turned a corner and headed crosstown. Pleasure derived as much from the witnessing of lovely images as from any sexual embrace. Remembering how when I was younger and was rejected by the sturdy rogue men ten years older than me whom I met within the dark avenues of the river, how I came close to telling them it didn't matter, I had their images, their faces and bodies and all the associations in my head to go home at leisure and lay down upon the warm sheets of a summer room and lay my hand to myself and have them anyway.

February 26, 1980

Walking down by the waterfront this morning I met the old guy who looks like Jean Genet, grizzled and dirt lines in the creases of his neck skin, vaguely handsome, red print worker's hankie around his throat, shorn hair, white and stubbled. He invited me up to look at his room in the Christopher Street Hotel. Climbed three flights of stairs after passing a clerk's glass booth with a radio playing and no one inside. He turned the key in the lock and the door swung open on a gray dim-lit room about twelve by twelve feet, all over the walls were various gray newspaper photographs torn from dailies and taped up to the peeling paint. Most were photos of President Carter and his wife, and a couple of Carter's mother. Other photos were of American flags, and he also put stick-on flags over each picture, some on a wall calendar, a flag on each month, and a couple lost somewhere in a paint-splashed collage left behind by another tenant. On an old stained mattress which lay on the floor he had his biggest flag, one that covered most of the mattress like a blanket. He showed me a greeting card with some seminude woman like a Vargas
Playboy
painting, over which he'd written a letter to Carter's mother: How do I know if she didn't look like this when she was younger? See, I figured she prolly did … that's what I tell her in this letter … He gave me a Xeroxed stapled piece, one of his street-Steinian discourses on being an American and loving the country for what it could be. He started rambling about language and writing, how one should write what they speak rather than play with imagination: You stand up and write, ya know … standin' up is good for writing because you don't use your imagination, you let come from yourself what would come if you were speakin' to someone … when you sit down to write, it's no good 'cause the whole weight of your body centers down in that position, the weight carried by the head, through the head, so you end up writing with imagination instead of natural speech. He kept asking me to sit down, cackling afterwards and saying, Whatsa matter you afraid I might try and rape ya … heh heh. Later he tried explaining some stuff he realized when he smoked weed: When I smoke I get real intense things going on in my head and it wants to bust out so I start writing, that's how it comes out … People should sing all the time … ya know … if you say five words very very slowly then you end up singing … if everyone were to speak very slowly then everyone would be singing … then things would be nice. How can you be fucked up when you're singing?

February 28, 1980

He had a tough face, square-jawed and barely shaven, tight-cropped hair, wiry and black, intensely handsome like some face seen in old boxer photos of Rocky Marciano, a cross between him and Mayakovsky, a nose that might've once been broken in some dark avenue barroom in the waterfront district of a distant city, a slight hump to it, that curved down towards a rough mouth, beautiful lips. Sitting in a parked car by the river's edge he leaned over and placed the palm of his hand by the water, and then placed the palm of his hand along the curve of my neck and stroked it slowly, his hands and arms brown like the skin of his face, a slight tan slowly receding to a blush. The heat was pumping in the car, the waves turned over and over by the coasting wind that shot across the river beneath the darkening clouds. Some transvestites circled down from the highway going from car to car leaning in the drivers' windows to check for business. A couple of trucks from out of state, probably Kansas or Montana or Wyoming, idled near the abandoned warehouse, the interiors cleared of the beef carcasses and the drivers sitting up high in the cabs, the last cowboys with their wives or girlfriends sitting next to them, beehive bouffants and flannel shirts and Saran-wrapped sandwiches and a bottle for comfort. So this guy eases his hand down towards my legs and slides it back up beneath my shirt, says, Take it off, and I reach down and lift the sweaters and sweatshirts up together and pull them over my head and drop them to the floor where my pants are straddling my ankles. He pulls off his olive green army sweater revealing a T-shirt of ice blue, reaches down and lifts that off afterwards, revealing a gleaming torso, thick chest with a smooth covering of black hair, two brick red nipples buried inside the down. He turns and bends over me, licking me softly with his tongue, tonguing smooth circles around my nipples down my sides, his hand massaging slow between my legs, his other hand wetted briefly against his mouth and working his cock up till it's dark and red and hard. When he lifted away from my chest I saw his eyes, the pupils, the irises the color of lapis lazuli dark chips of circular stone, something like the sky at dusk after a clear hot summer day, when the ships are folding down into the distance and dreams are uttered from the lips of strangers and white jet streaks are etched against the oncoming darkness, connecting whole cities with a single line. I could feel myself falling into them, populating them with dense mythologies and histories, quiet green neighborhoods of tree-lined streets and dusty fields left abandoned and long dirt roads that led into time unknown and secrets loosened by the faint roars of sixteen-wheel rigs barreling over the horizon. Whole dark winds rattling over plains behind those eyes. Yeah, and he had said he was from the West.

March 6, 1980

Went down to the river tonight speeding again. Had dropped the Eskatrol in the Silver Dollar sometime in the late afternoon before the sun began fading. It was a mixture or rather overlapping of seasons today, almost but not quite mild weather, a cool breeze circling in from the river and enough of a sun to leave my coat open and flapping. Before I dropped the speed I went for a walk along the river, the light so bright in reflection off its surface that I had to continually shield my eyes to avoid being run over by the stray cars cruising for drag queens. They were out in force, done up in choice colors and makeup and pacing the parking lots, dipping up and down before the windshields of parked cars looking for a horny laborer or businessman on his lunch hour. Half the cars with Jersey plates, making me wonder how far they've come, what distances traveled and how they saw New York from that other side, realizing Jersey will never change, the symbol of change at some future point will be recognizable when the tan plates stop showing up along the waterfront.

Some guys in the early afternoon in the warehouse were shouting among themselves and stepping forward in the musty interior. I realized they were scavenging the place for pipes containing copper wiring—a few sawed-off pipes jutting from the torn upstairs wall. Down on the main floor they were arguing, three of them, about which pipe length in the maze attached to the dark shadowed ceiling held the power lines for the place. One guy up in the rafters, scaling pipe lengths like a gymnasium, was hanging by his arms with his muscles cording beneath his short sleeves, the front of his sweatshirt riding up his belly and revealing a rippled stomach. From his soot-blackened pants hip he unclipped a hacksaw and began drawing it over a length of the pipe like a violinist, his strong legs swinging back and forth in time to the sawing, almost imperceptibly.

Upstairs some queens were walking amid the charred refuse, picking their way over blackened beams that hung out of the sky alongside twisted iron girders. They had a large black and chrome radio carried by one of the younger members of the group who twirled the station selector back and forth while at high volume so a strange series of voice and music and static bounced in and out of the rooms.

Later at the Silver Dollar restaurant, I sat at the stool counter and ordered a small cola and let the pill ride the tip of my tongue for a moment and then swallowed it. As usual, just as I drop some stuff I have a sudden regret at what will be the disappearance of regular perceptions, of the flat drift of sensations gathered from walking and seeing and smelling, into a strange tremor like a tickling that never reaches a point of being unbearable, a slow sensation of that feeling coming into the body, from the temples to the abdomen to the calves. And riding along with it in waves, I feel the marvelousness of light and motion and figures on the streets. Yet somehow that feeling of beauty that comes rising in off each surface and movement around me always has a mask of falsity about it, a slight sense of regret I feel at the recurring knowledge that it's a substance flowing through my veins that cancels out the lines of thought brought along with my aging and seriousness.

So there's that feeling of regret, a sudden impulse to bring the pill back up, a surge of weariness, then the settling back and waiting for the sensations to begin, wondering what they'll bring. So I dropped this pill and sat there for a while, smoked a fast cigarette and the door opened in the front of the place and some young guy in his midtwenties with racing sneakers and a boomerang curve of red adorning them comes in slinging a small backpack to the floor beneath the counter and slides onto a stool and orders the same as me. Handsome guy with strong cheekbones recalling France and the
jardins
and faces in the slight rain towards evening in the summer. Old images racing back and forth and I'm gathering heat in the depths of my belly, flashes of a curve of arm, back, and the lines of a strong neck belonging to some character among crowds in train stations and I get up, pay for my drink, and start through the door for the first of many walks to come that day. Restless walks filled with coasting images of sight and sound, cars buckling or bucking over cobblestones down quiet side streets, trucks waiting at corners with swarthy drivers leaning back in cool shadowy seats and windows of buildings opening and closing, figures passing within the rooms, faraway sounds of voices and cries and horns that roll up and funnel in like some secret earphone connecting me to the creakings of the city. There's a discreet pleasure I have in the walking of familiar streets, streets familiar more because of the faraway past than for the recent past, streets that I walked down odd times while living amongst them, seen through the same eyes but each time the eyes belonging to an older boy, spaced by summers and winters and geographical locations. Each time different because of the companions I had previously while walking those streets. I can barely remember or recall the senses I had had when viewing the streets years earlier, my whole change in psyche, I mean. Yet there's still a slight trace of what I felt left, a trace filled with the unconcerned dreams and tragedies and longings that make up thoughts before the seriousness of age sets in.