Time for Me to Put Up or Shut Up

Writers are supposed to avoid clichés, but “put up or shut up” seems appropriate to my current situation. August 15 will be my last day of working at the employer I’ve been with since late 1980. The date of my upcoming corporate redundancy wasn’t chosen by me, but it seems appropriate. I discovered last year when retyping my very first novel on this site, that its action took place on August 15 and 16, 1975, and I began writing it on August 16, during what would be the last extended period (four months) with neither school nor work in my adult life. I have written in the years while I was working full time and even had a few things published, but most of my projects have been either unpublished or unfinished.

As I prepare for this period of post-corporate time ahead of me, I need to get serious.  This post is my public announcement that I’m committing myself to writing as my full-time job beginning on August 16, 2018, 43 years to the day after I started writing my first book. If I could successfully commit myself to monthly, quarterly, and annual goals and deadlines for over three decades in an office, I should be able to find a way to do the same for my own goals starting next month.

I also had almost no distractions in 1975. No television, no stereo, and obviously no internet; I had books, notebooks, pens, and an acoustic guitar to entertain myself. In 2018, I’m going to have to work harder to avoid distractions. I’ve started by canceling all but the most basic over-the-air TV. If I were home during the day in this period of history with access to 24-hour news stations, I might be too tempted to turn on MSNBC or CNN; I don’t think network soap operas will present the same temptation. I’ll also need to make myself a schedule; if I could leave for a job at 5:30 every morning, I can follow a writing and exercise schedule for myself.

I may go back to work for someone else in a few months, but while I have the luxury of being able to spend the fall and winter of 2018 doing what I want, what I want to do is write. There will be updates here, but I hope to focus most of my words on projects longer than blog posts.

Reading Myself in Exile (3.4 & 3.5) — THE END

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light?

I have been finding out and sharing the results as I rekeyed the only typewritten copy of my 1970’s novel Exile, posting chapters in serial form as soon as I got them onto a computer. The final chapters — the twenty-first and twenty-second —  follow, but click here to begin with chapter one. Unlike all the other installments, I’m not going to follow the end of the book with a postscript. However, I would love to hear comments from any readers who may have read all the way through.

4

Artie’s face was cleaner than usual. John used to kid him about the grease stains which always covered him from working on his van. His brow was often wrinkled in thought and worry, but tonight it was as smooth and placid as a beauty queen’s ass. His week’s growth of brown mountain beard was gone too.

“That’s not Art.” John’s words were choked, not spoken, as he fought back tears. “That’s not Artie!” his voice became louder with each breath.

Artie was exposed from the shoulders up in a mahogany casket with silver handles which his parents had paid dearly for. Flowers were everywhere. Flowers – red flowers, dark wood, and a wax model of Artie’s face were the only images that crossed John’s mind that night. And Artie’s mother – that woman was so strong. She tried so hard not to cry, but talking with John they both broke down and shared their sorrows in a communion of tears.

John didn’t cry when he first heard the news. He hopped into his roommate’s Volkswagen and started driving down to San Diego without saying a word to anyone. Two days after their trip, Kathy had called and cried over the phone, “Artie was killed in an accident with an oil truck along the coast. His van was totaled…” John didn’t hear much after that. His mind was exploding with thoughts and images. Images of his past, present, and future bled together at the announcement of the death. The broken bloody wing of a screaming seagull he had found at the beach…snakes, grey wooden crucifixes and the blood and tears of a red-haired friend, Chris – Chris Salmatone – he hadn’t thought of that go-kart accident in years. He experienced sharp images of a cousin he hardly knew who was filled with dirt and shrapnel at Khe Sanh – images of metal replacing blood and flesh. He felt sick. He expected Artie to reflect these images. He was surprised to see a wax face. No terror, no death, no life, just make-up. His mind focused on everything except the simple fact that Artie was dead. Artie was dead.

John saw an oil truck on his way down the coast and he wished that his car was a little bigger so he could send himself and the truck up in a burst of flame. That’d be the perfect revenge. He wouldn’t even mind spending a good portion of his life in jail if he could blow up an oil refinery and cause some executive to choke on his filet mignon at the thought of lost profits.

John saw an oil truck on the way down the coast and he broke into tears at the thought of Artie’s body becoming one with the van and engine that he loved so much. He pulled off onto the shoulder and leaned his head up against the horn until a highway patrolman pulled up and asked, “What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that the best friend I had in this whole fuckin’ world just got his guts smashed against a steering wheel, you pig!”

John was hoping he’d get arrested. Anything – anything to relieve the feelings of helplessness and loss.

The patrolman didn’t oblige him. He saw the red eyes and cheeks glistening with tears and he felt the same helplessness. The power of the dead. What could he say? “Don’t lean on your horn. You’re disturbing the peace.”?

He just drove away.

***

Tears still streaked John’s nose and cheeks as Artie’s face faded from his mind’s eye. The fat Italian woman sitting across from his wasn’t staring anymore. She was making a conscious effort to avoid all eye contact with him, as though his sadness was contagious. The other passengers all politely hid their eyes too as he glanced around the compartment. Their opinions didn’t matter. There was only one other person’s opinion that mattered to John. That person was dead. A thought crept into his consciousness which must have been known somewhere for a long time. Every day since Artie’s death was leading to this day. Fragments of Stalden and the snake and Artie popped into his dreams almost every night.

Every night he found himself sitting in front of the same wooden shed as he watched the same snake pull itself up and over the same ridge and start its descent down towards him. He always awoke at that point. Robin awoke him from his dream that morning in Paris. (Was that the same day? It seemed like years had passed.) He was mad at Robin for awakening him even though it wasn’t his fault. Like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” his dream was destined to remain unfinished until today. He wasn’t even sure that this trip would be so special when he first spent his four hundred dollars to fly over. The day before had convinced him. The fact that Robin had been there to give him directions to the place of his dreams and that he had actually caught a glimpse of the snake for the first time since Artie’s death had cancelled all his doubts about the reality of his dreams.

He didn’t know how to occupy his mind in the time before he got to Stalden. So many images had been flashing through his mind and now it was blank – the calm before the storm. He looked around the compartment again and caught a couple of people casting surreptitious glances at him. They were waiting for him to break down in tears again. He wished he could just sleep and fall into his dream. He was too wound up for that. They zipped past an isolated switchman in his glass booth and John kept his eyes outside. He was aware of the stares on his back and head. He was tired all of a sudden. His joints felt stiff and his eyes were tired of staring and moving along with every object outside his window. He let the world fade into a blur for the short ride left to Brig.

The train pulled into Brig about 6:30 and feelings of déjà vu and confusion overpowered him. He walked straight over to the ticket window and bought a ticket to Stalden (“Yes, I want to go to Stalden, not Zermatt.”), so he wouldn’t miss his train and be left sitting in the train station longer than he had planned on. The station wasn’t only familiar because he had been there with Artie three years earlier. The people were familiar too.

This was the beginning of his dream.

He saw the same people standing and sitting in the same places every night. It was almost laughable after a little while. He knew exactly when certain people would get up from their benches to go relieve themselves. He could even predict when the lady to his right in the yellow skirt would sneeze. The whole moment became much too intense and John was glad when his train pulled into the station on time. He got in through the door that he always got in and he sat down next to the man with the rucksack and the knee-length pants whom he was destined to sit next to.

John found his tiredness gone as he anticipated the end of his dream. There could be no doubt left in his mind that he was going to meet the snake again as his dream unfolded before his eyes. He predicted when the conductor would push open the sliding door in front of him and ask for his ticket. He knew that a little boy would bounce through the same door and trip and fall and call for his mother. He would’ve liked to have been able to stop the fall, but he felt like a spectator in a theatre, watching a movie he already knew by heart. Stopping the boy’s fall was as possible as changing the course of the tornado which took Dorothy and Toto toward their adventures. He was awestruck by everything as the train continued. In one supreme effort, he managed to say, “Gesundheit,” right before the man sitting next to him sneezed. John expected the man to be amazed. He didn’t even seem to notice.

When the train stopped in Stalden, John was the only one who got off. He walked down a flight of stairs leading to the men’s room under the train station and took his sole hit of windowpane acid, because that was what the moment called on him to do. This feeling of living out a dream was a good one. He didn’t feel a stitch of apprehension about tripping alone in a strange place. His memory told him how to follow the road up to the high bridge above the town. He would hike down through the woods to a lower, small wooden bridge, below the level of the town but still high above a rocky Alpine stream. He made it to the lower bridge without much trouble even though the effects of the LSD were confusing him a little. He sat down on some stones in front of an old grey wooden shed with some old grey wooden crosses and crucifixes tacked onto it. Although it was almost nine p.m., the air seemed alive with pale blue energy. The town faded as the night progressed; the pale blue sky didn’t fade at all. John knew that when the town, including the shacks behind him, faded almost completely, he would be able to look out over his right shoulder and see the snake coming over the hills and down across a high green slope. The snake was there at the appointed time and place and he started inching down towards John. This is where the dream was usually interrupted.

John didn’t wake up.

The clarity of the scene made John feel as if he’d been looking at the world through the imperceptible haze of an organdy curtain for his whole life. There was no haze now. The sky was pulsing neon blue, and the green underneath the snake was exactly the same intensity. A razor-thin line at the top of the hills separated the two colors surgically. The snake itself moved slowly and steadily towards John. As it drew nearer, John could see blood pulsing past the snake’s anointed, translucent – almost transparent – scales and fragile skeleton. The blood was pumped quickly and precisely through large streams and thin liquid arabesques. The snake’s breathing made John apprehensive. Every time the snake exhaled, the whole world pulsed and John felt his own chest and abdomen expand.

The snake pulled itself alongside John. It stopped moving and only its shallow breathing and steady blood flow broke the stillness and silence of the countryside. John was waiting for the climactic moment of his voyage – of his life – and he was left with no more than a feeling of uneasy stillness. Almost for a lack of anything better to do with his hands, John reached up and touched the glowing white underbelly of the snake. The circle was completed in the paroxysm of emotion which followed that contact. His first sensation was unexplainable. For that fraction of a moment, he could’ve sown that he was touching Caroline’s soft breast or thigh, and then his mind exploded. He relived all the exuberance of this life in the moments that followed. The smell of salt water and Sue and Kathy and musical labyrinths pulsing before his eyes…His body expanding with the ecstasy of a fulfilled phallus before being thrust against the snake’s soft scales. Women, waves, friends and mountains filled his mind, and through it all was Artie’s face – not a wax face, but a windburnt, unshaven smile. A spontaneous burst of laughter split the air and the vision was gone.

John’s mind spun as he found himself in the dark, facing the fading glow of a snake and the sound of a rushing stream. He had found the snake of Eden. He fell back onto some rocks and burning vines. His back cracked against a shed and an old wooden crucifix cracked and dug into his shoulder. He couldn’t let the moment end. He’d give anything to make it last. That must be an idle thought which crosses many minds during moments of ecstasy; John wasn’t satisfied with just the thought. One question crossed his mind twice as the bright sky faded into crepuscular hues. “If a simple distortion of my senses has brought me this far, what will their destruction bring?” Before his impulsiveness allowed him to think any deeper, he had thrust himself through the glaring residue of the snake suspended before him. He found himself hanging high in the air above a dark, swift Alpine stream. He experienced a flash of regret which manifested itself as a scream.

The scream awoke a few people of Stalden. Some people rolled over and incorporated the scream into their nightmares.

John felt cold as his body stiffened with pain against the rocks and gleaming whiteness of the shallow stream. The pain left his body as quickly as it had entered along with his life blood.

 

 

5

Robin awoke much like every morning. He arrived at the railroad station in Geneva 45 minutes before his train was scheduled to leave for Zermatt and the Matterhorn. He wrote a little bit in his journal about the fireworks show he saw the night before and how he was looking forward to seeing the Alps. He thought a little bit about his uneventful visit with Anne before the train pulled in. He tried to sleep during most of the trip to Brig. He opened his eyes a few times to catch glimpses of Lake Geneva or the Valaisian Alps.

BRIG – he read the town name on the railroad station sign as he disembarked, looking for his connection to Zermatt.  Brig – a name, a name that had never entered his mind until today. Today he repeated it over and over as he rode in the train so he could make sure that he wouldn’t miss it (imagine the embarrassment that would cause). “Anne” was another name he often repeated. Anne..Anne, the name often repeating itself beyond his control. What did he know of her? A 5’4″, 110 lb. body he fantasized about. Body topped with an Irish nose, hypnotic star blue sapphire eyes and a long trail of light brown hair which blew soft and full forever in a romantic wind which was seen – never felt. (anneanne.) Robin Jackson was his name. He had no part in its selection. It was the name of a small bird followed by the name of a town in Mississippi. Black college students had been murdered by police in that town in Mississippi on the same day that thousands of Asians were being bombed by the U.S. Air Force and four white students were killed by part-time soldiers in Ohio. Robin’s high school went on strike in support of those white students. Robin, a freshman then, had participated and invoked his parents scorn – arguing with them about parallels to the Boston Massacre and the First American Revolution.

He was excited by his memories as he boarded the train which would take him to Zermatt. The small, red private railroad cars were crowded with tourists as they inched their way up through the mountain pass. The snake was lying on its favorite ridge, totally oblivious to the surrounding world. A drooling baby on her way to see the Matterhorn looked up towards the ridge and wailed. “Was ist los?” the baby’s mother asked in a soft voice as she gingerly felt the child’s crotch. It took the baby close to five minutes to quiet down, even with the help of a pacifier and a mother’s gentle comforting.

Robin glanced to the same ridge (he had been told what to look for), but he was blinded by the sun.

Reading Myself in Exile (3.3)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light?

I’m finding out and sharing the results as I rekey the only typewritten copy of my 1970’s novel Exile in serial form, posting chapters as soon as I get them onto a computer. The twentieth chapter follows, but click here to begin with chapter one. This is the third chapter in Part Three.

One of the major advantages of books on paper over books on screen is that the reader always has a physical sense of how close she or he is to the end of the story. The photo above shows you where you will stand after you finish reading chapter 3.3; there will only be two short chapters to go. When I began retyping chapter 1.1 at the end of August, I really didn’t know if I would make it to the end of this process or if I would lose interest a few chapters in. I cannot tell you how much I’ve enjoyed remeeting a 19-year-old novelist working 42 years ago, and I hope that a few other readers have been enjoying this journey too.

3

John woke up alone and pulled the zipper tight around his neck. It took a little courage to finally expose his naked body to the cold air and get dressed. He started a fire right away and lit a cigarette in the flames. He hadn’t brought enough matches for five days either. He warmed up fast after he pulled on his long underwear and jumped around a little. John sensed the ceiling above him creaking rhythmically again. Artie climbed downstairs after about fifteen minutes and found John engaged in watching the flames jumping and licking around the split logs.

“I promised to fix breakfast for Kathy,” Artie said with a spring in his voice.

“Okey-dokey.” John mimicked Artie’s mood as his broke his pyromaniacal trance.

“How’d you sleep down here?”

“Fine. I slept and dreamt soundly.”

“What’d you dream about?”

“Nothing too unusual. I think I was with Sue, or maybe someone else, on some kind of slick metal that was tilted at a 45 degree angle. We just kept on slipping and sliding all over each other. We didn’t really do or say anything. I think that the snake was in it too, but I’m not really sure how he fit in.”

They paused for a few long seconds. John lit another cigarette. Artie started mixing some powdered eggs as he prepared to speak.

“Y’know, I’ve been thinking a lot about that snake and I don’t see how it can be real. I mean we were tripping when we were up in the Alps. We can’t be held responsible for what we thought we saw there.”

“There’s a simple reason why you don’t believe in the snake right now. It’s because of Kathy. I’ve only been able to see the snake when my connections to this reality were at their lowest. I saw the snake during the summer after my breakup with Caroline and I saw it last summer in Stalden right after my breakup with Sue. Everyone uses something to anchor their view of reality on. For some people it’s their job or money and for others it’s their home and family. For me it was just a girl and a little sex which kept my mind bound to this world.

“I have a feeling that my mind has never been too tightly bound. It took intense attachments to other people to keep my mind from looking beyond its blinders. When those attachments broke, so did the straps which were binding my mind.”

Artie listened intently, but he didn’t answer. John saw his worry – his worry that both he and John were going out of their wretched little minds.

John tried to sooth his anxiety. “What we’re going through is too real to be limited to just you and me. I think that this knowledge must be pretty widespread and people are just afraid to admit it. They’re like us. Alone and fearful of their knowledge…Only society calls it madness.”

The mention of madness didn’t sooth any anxieties.

“You explained why you saw the snake. Why did I see it last summer?”

“I think acid must be a catalyst for the mind to throw off some of its restrictions. Don’t worry about why you saw it – okay – just be glad you did. I don’t know why I saw the snake when we were in boy scouts either. It drove me crazy at the time, but I’ve accepted it totally now. There are certain things you just have to have faith in.”

“Now you sound like my mother trying to drag me to church,” Artie laughed.

“I’m not even that far out. I’m not telling you to believe what’s printed in a little black book which is only given validity through tradition. I’m just asking you to accept what you’ve seen with your own eyes. You saw it. You can never deny that to yourself.”

“But how come…um, y’know?”

“How come not everyone can see it?” John asked after divining Artie’s thoughts.

“Yeah.”

“That’s probably the question that bothers me the most, but I think it all has to do with the relativity of sizes. I’d guess that we’re about the same size in relation to the snake as ants are to us. If ants were constantly aware of a human presence they’d probably live their lives in a constant fear of being stepped on. Their ignorance is their only defense. When a human steps on one of their anthills and kills a few of them they can call it an act of God. Humans have the same defense – the same ignorance against things as large as the snake, or the universe. Once you get started thinking about this relativity of sizes, the snake seems tame. I mean, did you ever stop to think that the model of an atom is very close to the model of our solar system. Maybe our galaxy is a molecule of water in some unbelievably gigantic world and that everything we call a molecule is a galaxy in some other universe. Then you can picture a chain of larger and larger and smaller and smaller universes stretching out infinitely. Why not? Human science will never have the tools to prove it right or wrong. The human mind has to be stretched close to its breaking point to acknowledge anything larger than itself. Some drugs can help us with that.”

John very seldom spoke for so long, but little ideas which had been left unexpressed for a long time kept on popping into his head. “Maybe the narrowness of our minds prevents us from sensing small things too. I heard once that schizophrenics can feel insects crawling around under their skin…Remember that really good acid we had in Europe?”

“How could I forget?”

“Yeah, well I’ve also heard that LSD can simulate schizophrenia, so I shut off all the lights in my dorm room and just took a hit to feel the bugs crawling around under my skin. It didn’t work, because my visual hallucinations were too strong. Y’know, but the point is that I don’t live my life in fear of going crazy. If I’m afraid of anything, it’s just that I’m missing something.”

Artie didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to answer. He wasn’t really sure about what he thought. He finished cooking the scrambled eggs and pretended to give them all his attention. “Do you want some of these, John?” Artie asked while rubbing his ankles together and yawning. “I have to take a serving up for Kathy. I promised to serve her breakfast in bed.”

“I’m coming down!” Kathy yelled.

“Well get you cute little ass shaking before your eggs get cold!” John yelled back. His monologue didn’t upset him half as much as it seemed to upset Artie. The ideas weren’t new to him.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve to talk to me like that,” Kathy said as she lowered herself down the ladder drowsily. “Aw, that fire’s nice,” she purred, looking to Artie.

The glow in her cheeks from the fire and her soft voice, lowered an octave by sleep, definitely turned John on. He was willing to let her continue talking just so he could appreciate the timbre of her voice. “What were you two guys talking about so early in the morning? Especially you John? Your voice was going non-stop,” she asked with a yawn.

“We were talking about giant snakes and bugs under the skin.”

“That’s horrible,” she laughed.

Artie experienced a moment of anxiety as he thought that Kathy might believe what she had just been told. Letting your girlfriend know that you’re on the road to insanity isn’t exactly the best way to keep her love. He saw from her genuine resonant laugh that she had accepted what had been said as one of those funny little remarks which John often made. John often made statement which people mistook for jokes, but he couldn’t remember ever telling a lie to one of his friends.

John wished at that moment that he could speak seriously with Kathy too (with the whole world!). His inability to see others (especially women) as equal participants in his thoughts was one fault which he often reproached himself for.

“Well, if you lady and gentleman will excuse me,” John ventured with mock propriety, “I’d like to step outside and take a piss.”

John laced up his boots, stepped outside, and Artie made a smart remark about Niagara Falls.

That day in the mountains was fun. They built a snowman, they had a snowball fight, John continued with his flirting, they walked a little higher to a couple of summits for the view, they ate lunch and dinner, Art and Kathy made love and fell asleep with a glow, John stayed awake with thought for an hour or so and then he fell into a shallow sleep where he dreamed nothing but disconnected, disturbing images. There was one thing missing from the routine of his day. Besides being how on food and matches, they didn’t have any drugs. John had been to the Berkeley apartment of his local supplier, Hubbard, two days before the trip.

“Boys,” Hubbard had announced solemnly to John and his roommate, “there have been times in the past when it has been dry, but that only meant it was expensive. When I tell you that it is dry today, I’m telling you that there is no acid in Northern California. I haven’t even seen a full ounce of marijuana in three days.”

The gloom that had fallen over them was similar to the gloom that funeral parlors work so hard to cultivate. Silence.

 

John had become so embroiled in the details of his memories that he almost totally forgot that he was on a train between Geneva and the Alps. A fat, serious-faced Italian woman had taken the place of Amy Beth Wilkinson directly across from him. He acknowledged her stares by smiling in her direction. He wondered for a second where his eyes had been focused when his mind had left the train. He really didn’t want to return to his memories. He already knew their conclusion. He searched for distractions both inside and outside the train, but none were sufficient. They passed a glass booth along the side of the tracks with a switchman sitting inside. The switchman had his back to the passing trains as he watched rows of dials and red and green lights lined up on a dull grey metal console. John thought about the switchman’s isolation from the world, and even from the trains that he was guiding. He tried to elaborate on his basic thoughts, but he couldn’t. He had to follow his memories and his voyage to their intertwined conclusions.

 

John went back to his normal habit of staying in bed late after his second night in the mountains. He found himself trapped in a stage between dream and consciousness. His mind was filled with abstract, disturbed dream fragments and splices of the conversation which Artie and Kathy seemed to be having in the same room. They became so confused in his mind that the dream and conversation ceased to have identities of their own, becoming indistinguishable. Opening his eyes and facing his friends helped to relieve the confusion. He sighed as his mind stopped spinning.

“Good morning, sleepy head,” Kathy teased.

“And a fine good morning to you too, me lady,” John remarked in a poor imitation Irish brogue. “And would it please me lady to turn her fair ‘ead so I could remove me humble naked body from this lowly sleeping bag?”

“No,” Kathy dared.

“Okay!” John snapped before she had a chance to change her mind. With a quick zip and rush of adrenaline he was up and out of his bag to the accompaniment of Artie’s metallic laughter and Kathy’s delighted embarrassment.

Out of propriety (her mother’s favorite word), Kathy turned her had with a slight smile on her lips as John got dressed.

“Well, what did you two have for breakfast this morning?” John asked hungrily as he pulled his belt tighter around his waist.

“Nothing yet.”

“Good, that’s what I was hoping to hear…Well, I’ll fix some pancakes and then I’ll walk down to town for more food.”

Pancakes were John’s specialty. He cooked and ate them well. They didn’t have any imported city water left, so John walked out into the crisp air under a pale blue morning sky and scraped up a couple of quarts of snow for melting. He came back in shaking snow off his bare feet. (“You’re crazy!” Kathy yelled when she saw the pink feet now getting covered with dirt from the cabin floor. “You are out of your friggin’ mind.”) He melted the snow, mixed up the pancake batter, and ate heartily while wishing that Kathy wasn’t his friend’s girlfriend.

After breakfast, they all went outside to bid John farewell and good luck on his trip down the hill with his empty pack. Before he was out of sight, he slipped on the snow and ice with his thick, slick-soled work boots and cracked his ass against a rock. He brushed the snow off carefully before he started slipping again on the steep path.

“Get back here, you mother!” Artie called.

“Who, me?” John called back as he slipped purposely and flung himself backwards into a small pine tree with a toothy smile on his face.

“Fuckin’ clown,” Artie laughed quietly as he went to take John’s pack and walk down the hill. To John, “I don’t see you making fun of my new boots now.”

“Sorry about this, buddy,” John said sincerely as he started walking back up to the cabin on the sides of this boots.

“Hey John,” Artie yelled. “I’ll eat lunch down in town, so you two can fix some of that soup that’s in my pack.”

“Okay!…Sorry about sending your boyfriend away,” John apologized to Kathy, “but he…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kathy interrupted, aware of John’s eyes on her thick red hair. “Is that thing all right?” she asked teasingly as she patted and then grabbed John’s ass.

John was going to answer. He was going to stand up for his friend and say, “We shouldn’t be acting like this. You belong to Artie.” He didn’t – the invitation flashed by her eyes showed that she didn’t “belong” to anyone. Society says it’s wrong to make love to your best friend’s girl. He even heard that line in some of his favorite songs. (He found it easier to listen to just the music.) He did make love with Kathy, but simply because it was what felt right at the moment. Their common friend and any other third parties didn’t enter into the relationship at all (he told himself).

John envied Artie’s will power. LSD wasn’t a god to him like it was to John. He took it when he thought he’d benefit from it, but it never became a habit. He didn’t give in to habits. John saw his own passions becoming habits. Girls had been a passion for him. He let Caroline become a habit when he was in junior high and it took a conversation with Artie before he realized what type of box he was sealing himself into. He let his passion for Sue turn into a habit during his first year at U.C. and she broke it off. He only found himself squeezed into Kathy’s sleeping bag now because of a habit. He really couldn’t decide whether his passion for acid was becoming a habit or not. Acid didn’t have Sue’s strength. It wouldn’t warn John of his overzealousness. Feelings of envy for Artie welled up again in John’s mind. Artie was the only person whom John ever experienced any envy towards. He wouldn’t tell Artie that either. He almost wished that Artie hadn’t made that run to town for food and matches. If he had gone instead, he wouldn’t have had this opportunity to surrender to his passions for Kathy’s flesh.

John smiled as she continued to massage his side with her soft thigh. He was surprised that he had been completely unaware of her touch for a few moments. His passions always diminished a little, and sometimes even came into question, after they had been spent so completely. Kathy removed his passions as well as anyone.

John never regretted his actions.

Nothing was asked and nothing was said about what went on while Artie was gone. Even if John had said, “We balled our fuckin’ asses off,” no one would have believed him. The rest of their stay was nice but uneventful. After a couple of more days, they all piled into Artie’s blue and white Ford van and drove off through the rainy lowlands. John was dropped off at Berkeley, Kathy was dropped off at her parents’ house in Canoga Park, and Artie headed back toward his job at the San Diego Post Office.

 

Back in 2017

The line about Artie and John going out of “their wretched little minds” reminded me of a book and an author I hadn’t thought of in years, if not decades, another in that long list of required readings in the psychedelic age, psychiatrist R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise; the famous line I was alluding to was “If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.”  I think I read The Politics of Experience either just before or while I writing this book and Laing wrote a lot more about madness and normality (and society’s unquestioned views  of the concepts of “madness” and “normality”) that informs my understanding of and sympathy for John Matthews. I’d be curious to know if some readers have simply been dismissing John and his visions as “crazy” or labeling him with more professional terminology from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

On a minor point, I have to say that I’m still wincing at my repeated use of ‘which’ to introduce restrictive clauses in these chapters (they seem to be proliferating), but I’m still following my cardinal rule to retype without editing at all, even some of the stranger comma placements and spellings.

 

The final short chapters (3.4 & 3.5) have just been posted here on November 9, 2017.

 

 

Reading Myself in Exile (3.1)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light?

I’m finding out and sharing the results as I rekey the only typewritten copy of my 1970’s novel Exile in serial form, posting chapters as soon as I get them onto a computer. The eighteenth chapter follows, but click here to begin with chapter one. This is the first chapter in Part Three (of three).

PART THREE

Je crois à la résolution future de ces deux états, en apparence si contradictoires, que sont le rêve et la réalité, en une sorte de réalité absolue, de surréalité, si l’on peut ainsi dire. C’est à sa conquête que je vais, certain de n’y pas parvenir mais trop insoucieux de ma mort pour ne pas supputer un peu les joies d’une telle possession.* 

– André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme

1

“Your passport please?”

The French guard at the Geneva customs station was making a supreme, and somehow comical, effort to ask for John’s passport in English. John acknowledged the attempt by answering in French – “Voila.” – as he pulled his papers from a side pocket of his pack.

John wasn’t worried at all as he looked down the hallway lined with French and Swiss flags and customs agents. Robin was the one who was shaking. He was wishing that he didn’t have this knowledge about the LSD in John’s packframe. They drifted past the mundane searching faces of the customs agents without being stopped. John didn’t betray any worries, because he truly didn’t have any. Robin thought he was going to piss in his pants from fear. It wasn’t even fear for his own safety (or John’s). He just worried about everything that could possibly upset the predictability of his days.

“Why do you take risks like that?” Robin asked while flicking a drop of sweat from his moustache.

“Like what?”

“Like walking through customs with LSD on you,” Robin exclaimed half under his breath.

“You were the one taking the risk. You…”

“Me?”

“You were the one with beads of worried sweat on your brow. I’m a little surprised they didn’t tear your pack apart.”

“But they wouldn’t have found anything on me. They would’ve stuck you in jail for life. Why take the risk?…Isn’t acid sort of out of date anyway?”

“Out of date?”

“Well, nobody I know trips. I thought maybe it was just going out of style.”

“It isn’t a matter of date or style. That’s like, um..balling going out of style. It’s something that’s irreplaceable for me. It supplies me with a lot of feelings that I can only get in one way.”

“But sex is a biological necessity. I wouldn’t call LSD a basic requirement for life.” John didn’t answer Rob’s arguments, so Rob continued, “Right before I cam over here I was reading some stuff by Wilhelm Reich for a psychology course…y’know, he was a student of Freud’s and then he broke with Freud and some of his major ideas…”

John had read a little by Reich, but he just kept silent as they continued to walk through the station.

“Well Reich talks about sexual repression as a main problem of modern society. Lack of food and lack of sex can cause problems, but hallucinations just aren’t one of man’s necessities. A person can…” Robin rambled on while managing to drop three more impressive names in the process.

John kept his mouth closed as they walked. He found it a little funny for Robin – Robin – to be lecturing about sexual repression. He was one of its prime examples. They both stopped to change their traveler’s checks into Swiss francs before Robin called and asked Anne to pick him up at the station.

Anne arrived and John sat down to wait for the 4:14 train to Brig and eventually to the mountains and Stalden. He flirted with the idea of tripping before he even got on the train, but he started to think about Artie, and his willpower was bolstered. He had been trying to keep his mind off Artie for the last year or two, but Robin had brought back his memory. It was only one unimportant similarity they had. They both had the same habit of saying “what?” in the same tone of voice after every other sentence. Otherwise, they were very different. John had been thinking a lot about the trip that he and Artie had taken to Europe while on the train between Paris and Geneva. Now that he was just sitting and waiting with no distractions, his mind was wandering into the forbidden area of Artie’s death.

“Hello.”

A girl with long blond hair and a bright orange backpack sat down and greeted John in a cheerful, expressionless voice. Her face was pretty and equally as forgettable as her voice. She looked and sounded like a fashion model.

“Hi,” John replied. He was thankful for the distraction.

“Have you been in Geneva long?” the model asked.

“No, I’m just passing through on my way to the Alps.”

“Me too,” giggled the model. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“John. What’s yours?”

“Amy.”

She looked like an Amy.

“Amy Beth Wilkinson.”

She looked like an Amy Beth Wilkinson. John was trying not to laugh but he was finding it hard to take anything seriously.

“Where do you live? – California?! You’re from California? – Do you surf? – Oh my God, you’re kidding! – Have you ever seen any movie stars? – What do you do? – Oh, I’m from Indiana and I’m a senior in high school but I’m gonna go to charm school and become a model and move to New York or Los Angeles but I don’t know which. Do you think I have a chance. Most people think so and my mom says that I’m twice as pretty as the girls on the covers of Glamour or Seventeen. My parents gave me the money to take this trip to Europe. I’ve been here for a week and I’ll be here for a week more before I go back to my last year at TOHS. – Huh? – Oh, Tumbling Orchards High School…”

John did give in to his laughter as she began to sing the Tumbling Orchards fight song. He was one of those subversives in high school who didn’t even take his own football and basketball teams seriously.

Amy Beth was hoarse and smiling with an embarrassed look on her face as she stopped singing and began talking again. She didn’t stop talking as the train pulled into the station and they climbed on. The tempo of her voice didn’t slow and the tone didn’t change at all as they sat down in seats facing each other. Her voice became like the lapping of waves or the bouncing of the train. “…and my favorite subject is social studies. I like reading about wars and heroes. Did you go to college? – University of California? You must be smart! My sister when to the University of Chicago. My parents like her more than…”

She didn’t bore John, because he was finding it easy to answer her in monosyllables and ignore her altogether.

“Yes. – No. – Yes. – University of California…” John’s lack of concentration on his answers allowed his mind to wander once more.

 

John’s breath escaped in thick white clouds which seemed to hang motionless in the cold mountain air and falling ice water. John felt glad to be climbing a steep path. The cold air poured thickly and luxuriously down into his lungs. It’s always good to hike in the winter. In the summer, the hot, dusty air never comes as fast and smooth as you’d like it to. Summer air tends to stifle more than refresh. Even the cold rain couldn’t steal the pleasure of the air which John gulped gluttonously. (“With your diaphragms. Breathe down here. Breathe with your diaphragms,” as Mr. Black, his old scoutmaster, used to say. John didn’t appreciate hiking then.)

John looked up above the next couple of switchbacks in the trail and he saw snowflakes. He wasn’t sure at first, but he picked up his pace and after fifteen minutes he left all the rain behind him. He stopped at a wide point in the trail, hooked his thumbs into the hipstrap of his pack and threw his head back towards the sky. He loved the way that the snow looked black against the grey sky and white against the dark backdrop of rocks and pine trees. He decided to stop for a while to let his companions catch up. He sat down on a rock while removing his pack. He dug out his down jacket and a pair of gloves. His light sweatshirt kept him warm as long as he was walking, but he could feel the cold in his joints now that he was immobile.

“Breathe with your diaphragms, shitheads!” John bellowed as Artie and Kathy came panting around the corner of a switchback. John had enjoyed his short wait. He watched the snow starting to stick to the pine branches and needles as he just smoked and serenaded the clouds with a cappella acid rock.

“Unh…look at the snow,” panted Kathy.

Artie and John both laughed for no special reason. They definitely weren’t laughing at what Kathy said. As kids who were born and raised in Southern California, none of them had ever lost any of their amazement or curiosity when confronted with snow. The combination of the snow and his five-day vacation from school made John feel and act like a kid. He skipped up the trail far ahead of Artie and Kathy as if his legs and lungs never felt a strain. He ambushed them at every corner that had enough snow to make snowballs, and when it became deeper they began to have full-fledged battles. John won every fight out of sheer energy and playfulness even though he was outnumbered.

“Truce!” Artie screamed in the heat of battle. He stood up and started walking toward John as a snowball shattered against his chin and collar. “Come on. You’re acting like a kid. I have to talk to you about something.” Artie feigned annoyance partially to impress his girlfriend. John sensed it and laughed. Artie was glad to be the one with the girlfriend for a change. He enjoyed taunting John with the fact that he was “the one who’s gonna get laid on this trip.” He was risking the loss of his letter-sorting job with the Post Office to take this trip while John had his Thanksgiving vacation from U.C. and Kathy was taking a break from her freshman year at San Fernando Valley State. Artie met her there, at a party with old friends, back in September.

This was John and Artie’s first combined camping trip since their excursion through the Alps in August. John had talked him into taking time off from work for this trip and it hadn’t taken Artie very long to agree, despite the risk. Relatively, his job wasn’t that important.

“What did you want to talk about?” John asked as he threateningly molded another snowball in his grey-gloved hands.

“Do you think we should go on in this weather?”

“Huh?” John drew his whole face up into a look of mock confusion.

“Seriously…the snow’s falling pretty steady now and I don’t want to get stuck up here with just our tents and a propane stove for warmth.”

“I didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Just as he finished asking his question, Artie swung around and caught Kathy trying to stuff a snowball down behind his collar. Artie grabbed her by the ends of her long red Irish hair and she threw her arms around his waist and they kissed for two or three minutes. Aware of contrasts – freezing skins, warm mouths.

John answered as though nothing was going on between them. “You mean I didn’t tell you that there’s a hiker’s cabin at the end of this trail with a fireplace and old mattresses and shit? Someone at school told me that some French guy built four or five of them on his own in this part of the Sierras. Remember that…”

“What?” Artie gasped as he finally freed his mouth. He had only been half-listening to what John had been saying.

“I only mentioned that there’s a cabin at the end of this trail with…”

“You mean I’m fucking carrying eight pounds of tents and storm flys and poles and stakes for me and Kathy and you were planning on us staying in a fuckin’ cabin with a fireplace the whole time?”

“Yep,” concluded John. He had been speaking calmly throughout the entire time that Artie was losing his temper and control of his words.

The way that they spoke to each other always struck Kathy as funny for some reason. The sight of Artie yelling and John embarking on one of his matter-of-fact monologues simultaneously was enough to send her into hysterics.

John ignored the laughter and the echoes of the yelling as he continued, “Remember that cabin where we stopped in the French Alps, with the loft filled with mattresses and the room downstairs with the benches and fireplace?…Well, the one up here sounds like it’s pretty similar.”

Artie made a last attempt to assert himself against John. Not because of John (although John’s constant refusal to raise his voice did annoy him), but because he always felt this need to assert himself in front of “his” girl. Artie hadn’t been able to hold onto a girlfriend for more than a couple of weeks in the two years that separated him from high school. Sometimes John worried about him. Artie worried about himself a lot. There had been no reason for worry.

They all laughed after Artie’s final outburst. John laughed because he was happy for Artie. Kathy had been laughing at all of them all along. Artie was laughing because of the wet freckled face smiling up from his shoulder. The rain and snow on his skin camouflaged his tears of joy. He couldn’t remember being so happy as they began to hike again.

Kathy began to talk to both of them. “I’m so happy to be in the mountains. – I’ve never been in the Sierras before – never – How do you like school, John? – Me too. Valley State is boring. – Drop out? I don’t like it but I wouldn’t drop out…”

 

Kathy didn’t talk like that at all. Amy Beth Wilkinson did. Sometimes John’s memories blended with his present.

“I’m so happy to be in Europe. I’ve never been in Europe before – never – How did you like school?…” And so on. That was Amy Beth speaking.

Kathy wasn’t brainless by any means. She was intelligent and strong despite her love for Artie. She reminded John a lot of Sue. He hoped that Artie wouldn’t have to go through the same thing that he did.

A dog somewhere up the hill bayed through clouds and fresh snow. John barked ferociously and Kathy and Artie imitated him before breaking into hysterical laughter. Artie started laughing a second too late. John noticed right away and he thought that Kathy must’ve noticed too. (She didn’t. Their infatuation was still fresh enough to obscure things like that.) Artie thought that John’s dog noises were genuinely funny. He would have laughed spontaneously if he and John were alone, but he looked to Kathy first; he was only laughing because she was laughing. Artie was eager – much too eager – to avoid any mistakes. John sensed that Kathy was too independent to put up with games like that. He was right. She wouldn’t have put up with it for very long.

John became more tired from slowing down to their leisurely pace than from hiking at his own, so he sped up. “Meet you at the cabin,” he called back as he turned a switchback and faded into white. He could still hear them laughing and talking when he was two or three switchbacks ahead of them – glad he left them alone. John stopped in snow that was about three inches deep and kicked his old work boots against a fallen trunk. A thick cake of compressed wet snow fell off onto the ground. He stood and smiled and listened for a minute. He heard the dog bark far up the hill. He didn’t hear anything but the falling snow and an occasional gust of wind from down below, so he let loose his ridiculous dog imitation. “Rooof – roooof – arooooo… Rooof…Rooooof…Aroooooo…” He listened in the silence following his calls. No laughter. The voice from up above responded with a coyote-like howl and John just laughed inside his head.

The snow continued to fall almost silently and John felt a deep surge of satisfaction from leaving his footprints, and only his footprints, in the first snow to fall on this path at the beginning of a new winter. Every time he finished a long straight stretch of path, he stopped and turned back towards the row of tracks which exposed the brown and grey trail under a field of white. He became conscious of his breathing again. It was even deeper than before. He tried to feel the diaphragm that his scoutmaster used to talk about. He couldn’t. He concentrated on his breathing to the extent that he was able to synchronize it with his footsteps. Every time his right brown boot hit the snow, he could feel his throat, nose and imaginary diaphragm being soothed and recharged by gallons of cold air.

All of his senses became extremely sharp despite (or because of) the fact that the snow and the low clouds limited his field of vision to nothing. He became of a gradual brightening in the sky as the afternoon progressed. Every sound was amplified. The creaking of his packframe was the most prominent sound along with the rubbing of his jeans and the sound of his shoes striking hidden rocks. When he stopped and listened carefully, it wasn’t hard to hear the falling snow, especially the small piles of snow which fell from the pine branches to the ground. The occasional barking of the dog up ahead erased the more subtle sounds for a moment or two.

The falling snow became louder as John neared the timberline. The snow had changed texture too. The flakes were smaller and fell faster past the stunted, high-altitude pines. The snowflakes farther down were large and wet and they began to melt and lose their individuality as soon as they hit the ground. This new snow kept its form even as it lay on the ground. It had a sting to it when it hit John’s eye and nose too. John didn’t try to put this change in the snow into words, because it wasn’t that important to him. An eskimo from one of those tribes that John studied in anthropology would have made the distinction almost unconsciously. They have a separate word for each type of snow because they live with it for such a large part of the year. John found it intriguing that the mother tongue and society of a person could completely alter the way in which she or he looked at something as simple as snow (or as complex as snow, depending on the vantage point of your ethnocentricity). John became absorbed by his thoughts as he continued hiking. He saw, despite his visions, that he was still a captive of society – his society. He wasn’t aware of the falling snow or his creaking pack or even his exhausted legs as his mind stayed active.

Deep thoughts and introspection often seemed to flow more easily in direct proportion to the altitude. It was above these short trees that John first consciously thought of extremes in diagram form – as arrows pointing towards the same spot.

His thoughts of the snow enabled him to provide labels for the arrows and the missing arc. If the missing arc was Beauty (not the beauty of this or the beauty of that, but Beauty), then the arrows could be seen as extreme complexity and extreme simplicity. Both awed John. Both shared the example of snow.

A pure white snow field could be seen as the representation of the One and the monism of the world’s (East and West) earliest (and best, in John’s mind) philosophical traditions. He was humbled by the fact that “I am all and all is I.” His words were awkward; they were no more awkward than the attempts of those old great minds to express the inexpressible simplicity of the Truth.

Great complexity met the challenge of the simple pure white field admirably in the contest to propel John into the missing arc of Beauty. Snow could be seen as the one white mass or as an infinite number of complex crystals produced in infinite variety.

“And isn’t that a model of the universe?” John’s mind raced, “Each component so complex and the whole so simple.” John’s thoughts progressed quickly from a bottomless pit of spiraling complexities toward a state of thoughtless bliss. He was deaf to the outside world until he met a barking German Shepherd and his master in a cabin at the end of the trail.

 

Back in 2017

After the introduction of Anne Jenkins in the last two chapters of Part Two, I’m not proud of the cartoonish Amy Beth Wilkinson and the roughly-sketched Kathy in the first chapter of Part Three. It’s not just the one-dimensional women; all of the minor characters seem like mere outlines to me (take, for example, Anne’s parents who seem little different from the adults in an animated Peanuts cartoon with their disembodied trombone voices).  But this isn’t a multi-generational family novel, or a plot-driven adventure or mystery with a cast of thousands. This is a Bildungsroman written by a nineteen year old, so the solipsism is almost a requirement of the genre, isn’t it?

 

---

*Translation of the Breton epigraph at the beginning of Part Three:

I believe in the future resolution of these two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am aiming, certain that I won’t reach it but too carefree about my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.

(I don’t know why I didn’t come up with an epigraph for Part Two, because I love quotations. Fire Answers Fire has an epigraph before each chapter.)

 

Chapter 3.2 has now (November 3, 2017) been retyped and posted here.

 

Reading Myself in Exile (2.7)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light?

I’m finding out and sharing the results as I rekey the only typewritten copy of my 1970’s novel Exile in serial form, posting chapters as soon as I get them onto a computer. The seventeenth chapter follows, but click here to begin with chapter one. This is the seventh and final chapter in Part Two (of three).

If you haven’t been following in sequence, the first-person voice in this short chapter is Anne Jenkins, writing in her journal.

7

16. August. 1975

Genève

I notice little things at night. I always notice so much more at night when there is so very little to disturb me. Before midnight I could hear buses driving down the street and shifting gears just as they pulled even with my window. Now an occasional car goes by and throws a square of light across my wall and ceiling. Robin breathes heavily as he sleeps. I can just about make out the dark noises of his nose and mouth on the other side of the wall. There’s not enough in Robin’s breathing to keep my attention riveted there…my eyes usually tend to drift out my open window. Past the now familiar solitary tree top that reaches up past my third floor window, I can see the few bright stars which struggle to reveal themselves despite the light blue city sky. The Milky Way and the mountain and desert stars are always erased by the city lights. Haven’t seen a trace of those Perseid meteor showers which are so prominent on a clear country night this time of summer. The sole tree that shoots up between me and the stars is a birch. I didn’t notice that when I stared out the window last night and it took me a few minutes to figure it out here in the dark. I’m pretty sure it’s a birch now. The leaves are small and triangular against the bright sky and the branches seem to be white, but it’s hard to tell under mercury vapor blue light. Now I find myself disturbed by noises. Someone in another apartment is running water. That stopped as soon as I became conscious of it. I can hear my stomach and throat bubbling – heart beating – and the minute creakings of my bed. I started to fall into the rhythm of my heartbeat but a car just zipped by and flashed its lights across my ceiling – it drowned my whole world.

I usually abandon myself to one thought before I fall asleep. When I was a little younger, I always asked myself, “What’s the last thing I think about before falling asleep?” I could never isolate that thought, although I tried hard to grasp it at night and tried hard to remember it in the morning. You don’t fall asleep; it isn’t an exact moment. You just gradually lose touch with this world. That’s all that exercise taught me.

Tonight, I’m just thinking about this friend who’s sleeping in the other room and the paths that our lives are taking. I don’t believe he’s still acting the same way around me. He can never understand why “the weight of his devotion” doesn’t bring about positive results. He emphasizes “devotion” in his favorite worn cliché. I find myself emphasizing the “weight” of his possessiveness which I can feel physically when he parades his depression for me. A part of me wants to help and a part of me just wants him to leave. I guess there are a lot of expressions that we both use but which we interpret differently. Like last spring when we had a long talk about his feeling and why he had to stop thinking about me that way. Same old things. And I asked him what he thought love was and he talked about lots of things that weren’t clear in his own mind; he returned at least twice to the idea of “self-sacrifice.” He sees this as some altruistic virtue which I’m supposed to love and admire. I do believe him when he says that he’d do anything for me. “I’d give up the things you don’t like about me.” That statement epitomizes what I can’t love in him. He negates his self just in the mere thought of sacrificing something he holds dear or by creating something in himself which is no more than an outgrowth of my whims and desires. I can’t understand why he holds onto me when he’s willing to sacrifice everything else. Does he really seek total dependence through love? It all confuses me but I’m afraid sometimes his life seems almost lost. Society has him by the balls already and he has nothing to hold onto but broken dreams. I shouldn’t really condemn him so easily. I feel the tug of my school and government trying to drag me down all the time. Isn’t that why I decided to take this rest cure in Geneva? I used to vow that I’d never become part of the machine – never oil the gears of the combine with my sweat. I’m changing. Once in a while now I find myself dreaming of a comfortable job and a comfortable man – one I can depend (be dependent) on (is that any different than Robin?). It was really hard for me to leave Ed last month; my fingers flirt with my clitoris at the thought of his love but I must grab this pen instead – tackle some of these problems which forced me to leave him. It’s frightening to think that comfort and security have taken up such an important place in my head. In moments of lucidity (like the present) I tend to condemn my weak longing for softness. I’m not sure what this other part of me wants. I don’t think it really has long range goals. When it’s in control I don’t worry about what I’ll be doing five years from now and whether or not I’ll have the guarantee of a strong warm body to sleep by my side each night. Things like that should take care of themselves. It’s this stronger, non-worrying part of me which made me temporarily penniless by deciding that I should make this voyage to Europe. When it’s in control I do almost anything it tells me. Mostly, it tells me to reject the machine and its worries about comfort in favor of life.

The part of me that strives for comfort also worries about my grades when I’m in school and gets ridiculously depressed about me. (They’re both part of my future in society.) It worries about a lot of things. Besides worrying about me, it worries about other things and makes me feel guilty about things which I have no control over. It worries about famines in India. It doesn’t let me sleep well. It makes me choke when I’m eating too well. It tells me things…

“Become a vegetarian. Eating beef is wasteful.”

“Whatever happened to your anti-war years? – No causes? – Why aren’t you out in the streets with your sisters instead of getting off on your own egocentric trip? You certainly have become an apathetic motherfucker at the ripe old age of nineteen. At least Robin has some political commitments left.”

If this part seeking comfort and avoiding challenges was writing in this journal it would put itself down. Something like, “here I lay on my side, head propped uncomfortably on one hand. The other pushes a pen quickly across paper. Trying to write like Breton suggests in his first manifesto with the unceasing movement of my hand paralleling those of my brain. Failing miserably – taking too long to think between paragraphs and sentences – even words – thoughts escaping and lost. And I call myself a writer..”

And so on…

It tells me other things too. It basically makes me feel guilty about who I am and what I’ve become. When this part of me is in control I feel helpless. I feel a tired hollowness behind my eyes and in my throat. I feel burnt out.

Then there’s the other part of me. There’s that other part of me that took part in anti-war protests with a passion. An unquestioned passion, not of love, but of anger and concern. It was a good feeling in many ways to have something concrete to aim anger at. A war against independence is evil. The government was a monster which had to be met with a stronger passion. Richard Nixon was a George III of the seventies and the Viet Cong and Tom Paine and kids like me were all governed by the same passion – a victorious passion which ruled me for a little while, and is now just resting in the afterglow which has manifested itself in my current apathy.

This same part of me doesn’t worry about my apathy. It has accepted it as a matter of course. It has found new passions for my mind and body – drink, men, my piano and voice, my traveling, my writing – I treasure my talents – my ability to fill empty space with harmonies and empty pages with words – my thoughts. Sometimes I’m surprised that I do any worrying at all. When I’m not careful though, I can easily find myself fretting about this apathy or my present lack of scholastic activity or my present lack of a steady loving man.

And there’s a third part of me, of course. It’s the part that’s speaking now. It analyzes my life and thoughts. Sometimes it tries to weigh the worries against the passions and do a little nudging in one direction or the other, but its role is mostly observatory. This part of me asks questions like, “how many of these characteristics are really ‘me’? How many of these characteristics (especially the worries) are merely reflections of a sexist society’s conditioning processes? Ridiculous. I can’t track down the source of all I am. Scary. Am I no more than a synthesis of a complex, incomprehensible labyrinth of experiences and memories. Is the role of the individual ego really so malleable – negligible?” It’s a part of me that’s in exile from my actions; it’s just watching the path I take.

Back in 2017

Going back to my notes after the last chapter, it now seems even clearer to the 21st-century reader who is retyping this that the 20th-century writer was definitely laying out a schematic dialectic in which the conflicts between Robin and John ended in the synthesis of Anne, who is the true voice of the author. The last paragraph of her journal entry makes that clear, even using the word “synthesis” and tying herself to the title of the book in her final sentence.  That being said, I don’t remember having that master plan in the writing. But the writing took place forty years ago and Anne does not get the final word. This is the last chapter of Part Two. Part Three (the final, and shortest, section) will start with an epigraph from André Breton and reintroduce us to John Matthews as we pick up his story when he leaves Robin at the Geneva train station.

 

Chapter 3.1 has now (Nov. 1, 2017) been retyped and posted here.

 

Reading Myself in Exile (2.6)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light?

R.D. Mumma, with his mother and sisters, at the Fêtes de Genève on August 16, 1975.

I’m finding out and sharing the results as I rekey the only typewritten copy of my 1970’s novel Exile in serial form, posting chapters as soon as I get them onto a computer. The sixteenth chapter follows, but click here to begin with chapter one. This is the sixth chapter in Part Two.

6

Sunlight steadily collected in pools of light around the soft mattress as the whirring of appliances and voices from other apartments grew louder and as the hours slipped by. But Anne slept late on the morning of the sixteenth after running errands on her first full day in Geneva. Her father’s diplomatic corps duties had led him to this city for the second time in six years and Anne was not at all unfamiliar with her present surroundings; she had spent a year of high school here. A feeling of contentment greeted her as she found the apartment empty upon awakening at noon. She fixed herself a sandwich and a cup of black coffee.

A light cloud of disappointment partially eclipsed her contentment as she dropped her newspaper and answered the phone at three.

“Hello?”

“Anne?”

“Yeah?”

Initially she had no clue as to the identity of the caller. She certainly hadn’t been expecting any calls.

“This is Robin. I’m in Geneva.”

She remembered an invitation which had been extended in the spring. “Where are you?” she asked, “at the train station?”

“Yeah. How do I get to your apartment?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll come pick you up. Just stand in front of the taxi stands.”

“See you.”

“I should be there in a few minutes.”

As she hung up the phone and searched for the bulky wallet which contained her international driver’s license, the cloud of disappointment thickened around the room. She had been looking forward to the trip as a rest from the continuous social obligations of school and work. She didn’t see herself as anti-social, but she did need to be alone with her own thoughts. She saw many problems in her life which needed contemplation. They were problems which had to be solved from within. Constant conversation, especially that advice which others seemed so eager to dispense, only obscured self-knowledge.

Robin’s visit seemed inopportune simply because he figured prominently in some of the problems Anne sought to contemplate without pressure. There was an obvious tension whenever they were together largely because of their conflicting interpretations of love, friendship, and sex.

Self-confidence and even heartlessness were feeling which Robin sometimes applied to his image of Anne merely because she had a little more sexual and social experience.

However, confusion was the emotion which was most often present in Anne’s mind. In some of her experiences she saw sex as analogous to a fresh thin coat of paint which covers the errors in a hasty repair job. The rough edges of a relationship show more clearly when that relationship is platonic and problems which are encountered must be faced directly or consciously ignored. In a sexual relationship, sex can be used to overwhelm these problems…problems which are inevitable – problems which can then ruin such a relationship without ever being acknowledged.

Ironically, it was precisely because of the lack of sex in their friendship that Anne sometimes felt closer to Robin than to anyone else. At other times they were separated by a palpable, cold tension. She was undoubtedly confused about their relationship to each other.

His visit would not help.

While walking down the sunlit spiral staircase in the center of her apartment building, she ran into a cute little girl with short blond bangs.

“Bonjour,” said Anne.

“Bonjour Madame. Pourquoi…something?” asked the little girl.

It sounded like she asked about the patches on Anne’s jeans, but Anne wasn’t sure. She did manage to get to her family’s BMW without any other little girls hopping out of cracks to test her knowledge of their native language. Anne had been feeling comfortable – settling back into this French-speaking city after six years. She had been reading the newspaper without even resorting to the use of her French-English dictionary when robin had called. In a moment, she felt like kicking that little blond-banged kid for destroying her self-confidence so simply and deviously.

She drove up in front of the train station after fighting some heavier than usual city traffic. It was the time of the Fêtes de Genève and a few of the major thoroughfares along the lake were blocked off for parades and fireworks. She recognized Robin right away in the crowd by the Gare. The suntanned guy with Robin also stood out (the Europeans all looked slightly pale). No attraction was present between Anne and John although Anne was generally recognized as beautiful and John was the sort of guy who Robin saw as “attractive to women” in general. In his view of men and women as groups instead of individuals, Robin saw himself as “unattractive to women” and Anne as “attractive to men.” His thoughts on the arbitrary nature of love consisted of the fact that he was fated to live with this “unattractive to women” characteristic. He didn’t think much more deeply than that about his own problems. He tried to make Anne feel guilty because she did not make a superhuman effort to surpass this obstacle he had been cursed with.

Instead of leaving the station in a tense silence, Anne decided to start a conversation.

“Who was that?” she asked. It was obvious that she was referring to John. He continued to wave at their departing car.

“Oh, he was just a guy I met at a hostel in Paris. He’s a little strange, but I spent most of the day yesterday with him.”

“How long have you been in Europe now?” Their conversation seemed about as awkward as a long silence would have been.

“Since the end of June.” He thought for a few seconds. “Almost two months. I’m heading back before the end of this month so I can move into my dorm on the first or second of September. When are you going back?”

“December or January.”

“You’re not going back till spring semester?”

“I’m not even going back then. I’ll just work during the spring. I’ll probably be going back after I figure out what I’m doing there. Maybe not.”

“That could be a good idea, I guess. You’d better watch out though. That guy John, you know, that guy with the blond hair I was talking to?”

“Yeah.”

“Well he was going to the University of California for two years and he took some time off and never went back. His life seems pretty messed up now.”

“Messed up?”

“Well, he’s into drugs – hard drugs, not like you and me – and he’s working in jobs where he doesn’t use his school at all. He really seems to be wasting his brain. It’s a shame.”

“Yeah.” She really didn’t know enough about the guy to pass judgement on him.

They drove for a little while and found themselves hopelessly tied up in traffic. The city looked fine to Anne. The sun was shining brightly off the lake and the jet d’eau, and the banks and bridges were covered with red and yellow city flags because of the festival.

“Is something going on here?” Robin asked.

“Yeah. They’re having a festival. I’m not sure what it celebrates, but it sounds interesting. They’re gonna have parades and fireworks, amusements, refreshments, bands. I hear they sell confetti and soft plastic hammers and everyone attacks each other harmlessly.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Yeah.”

“Is that going on tonight?”

“I’m not sure. What’s today’s date?”

Robin glanced at his silver calendar watch. “It’s Saturday the sixteenth.”

“Today’s Saturday?” She really thought it was a weekday for some reason. “This must be parade traffic we’re trapped in then, and the fireworks are tonight too.”

“Are you planning on going to them?”

“I guess so. I’ve heard that this is one of the best displays in the world.” Anne really enjoyed the loud fireworks that sound like cannons and reverberate off the apartment houses and mountains before attacking individual abdomens.

“Good, that sounds like fun.” The first mutual smile of their meeting.

“Yeah.”

The traffic finally unclogged and they drove back to Anne’s empty apartment. Anne enjoyed the lack of conversation and the high-revving engine attached to her body through the quivering clutch and gear shift as they zipped back to her apartment on clear streets.

When they walked into the apartment and sat down, Robin picked up the copy of Le Journal de Genève which Anne had been reading when he called.

“What kind of paper is this?” Robin asked.

“Huh? It’s just a newspaper.”

“No, I mean is it leftist, conservative, middle of the road? What?”

Anne couldn’t answer because she wasn’t sure. She had only been reading the extensive literary supplement. But memories of Robin’s constant concern for politics and political images flooded her mind. Anne saw the “image” as the foremost thing in Robin’s mind. It started with his personal appearance and extended to the fact that he would not be caught holding a Daily News, but would display a New York Times or a Village Voice as if to say, “Here I am. I’m a fashionably not-too-leftist New York intellectual.” Images.

In her own life, Anne tried to think that the realm of images was relegated to a back closet of her mind. Even “serious” politics remained at a lower level in her hierarchy of thoughts. Levels of social interaction progressed toward the high level of her intensive personal loves and friendships. In her present state of mind (this hierarchy had many variables), the personal search for knowledge took precedence over all, and the poetic, esoteric search was taking precedence over her formal academic duties. In each one of these levels, Anne saw infinite complexity. To understand these categories of thought and feeling in her own mind would only mean that she was coming to an understanding about one part of her life. It all seemed so complex and confusing. She wondered if anyone really understood anything. It became more confusing when these levels entered into practical considerations about her own life’s future. So much worse for a woman where a choice of love and marriage can mean an end to many choices made freely about career, travel, friendships, education.

Robin’s presence in her living room did not help the flow of her thoughts. He smiled a sad smile across the room and she felt a flash of guilt for not loving him; in the same instant she felt anger directed at the lack of control he seemed to have over his emotions. She realized that the anger was as wrong as the guilt. Asking him to stop loving her was the same as his plea for her love. She couldn’t manufacture an emotion which didn’t exist and he couldn’t destroy an emotion which seemed so strong. She recognized their problem as a simple dilemma; that recognition did not lead directly to the problem’s resolution, and she realized that her own alternate emotions of anger and guilt were usually stronger than her intellectualizations about them.

It was eventually her guilt which forced her to break the silence of that Swiss living room. “Where have you been this summer?”

“All over. I went to Paris and Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome, Florence, Madrid, Sweden, Norway…um…the Riviera. I really saw a lot.” He wished the list was longer. They often had to search for things to talk about because they rarely talked about the thing which was most on their minds, that ever present dilemma of two strong opposing emotional premises.

They spoke of the European cities which were familiar to both of them and then the conversation replayed itself as Anne’s parents arrived.

“Hi,” Anne smiled.

“Hi.”

“Mom? Dad? I’d like you to meet Robin. He’s a friend from school.”

“Hi Robin.”

“Hello.”

“Have you been in Switzerland long?”

“Just got here this afternoon. I’ve been in Europe for two full months though.”

“What’ve you seen so far?”

“I saw a lot. I’ve been to France, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Italy, Sweden, Norway, all over.”

“You should really see the Swiss Alps,” her mother suggested. “They’re really beautiful.”

“I will. I’m planning on going to Zermatt tomorrow to see the Matterhorn.”

That visibly disappointed her parents, especially her mother. You see, they worried about her sometimes because she was not as socially active as her older sister. When one of her friends from school, or anywhere else, dropped by, they’d try to coax him or her into staying for a little while to insure Anne’s happiness (or theirs). They didn’t understand that she could feel content sometimes (often) by just sitting and reading or writing or discovering a new tune on a piano. She tried not to sit and do nothing at all (although she was perfectly capable of it), because they’d invariably ask her what was wrong.

Predictably, her parents tried to talk Robin into staying a little longer.

“You know you’re welcome to stay more than one night.”

“Yes, we have plenty of space. There’s an extra bedroom. It’s no hardship at all for us.”

“Don’t feel like you’re putting us out or anything.”

Robin showed more backbone and independence than Anne gave him credit for. He answered politely that he had two weeks of travelling left and he wanted to see the Alps and parts of Germany before he returned to Paris to catch his plane back to New York. He answered all her parents’ questions and requests clearly and easily. He didn’t stumble over words the way he used to whenever he was alone with Anne.

She was more than a little turned off by his structured attitude toward travelling though. He seemed to see it as a touring business where timetables had to be made and kept.

“Yes,” he explained to her father, “I want to spend two days in Zermatt and then I’m going to Zurich for one overnight. After that I’m heading for Munich, where I’ll stay for three days. After that…” And so on.

She grabbed a couple of sheets from the closet and made up the bed in the extra room for Robin. She hated making beds. That and folding and ironing clothes always seemed to her like two of the biggest time fillers ever devised by civilized man. She went through the ritual of tucking and folding sheets anyway as she listened to some American music on the radio. The news came on and she translated parts of it for Robin. The airwaves talked of political problems in Portugal and on Corsica and then they broadcast an editorial about the constantly explosive situation in the Middle East. A meteorologist came on to explain how hailstones are formed and she turned the selector knob until she found some scratchy Beethoven.

As the piece was finished and she reached for the knob again, her mother called in that dinner was ready.

“Okay, we’ll be right there.”

Dinner was short, simple, and quiet for the most part. Anne’s parents voluntarily undertook the task of keeping Anne’s guest occupied.

“So you go to school with Anne?” her mother began.

“Yes,” Robin answered. “I’ll be starting as a junior in two weeks.”

“Oh, the same as Anne,” her father added as he glanced in his daughter’s direction. They didn’t like the idea that she was taking time off from her studies.

“What’s your major?”

“History.”

“Anne’s a philosophy major, but I guess you must have shared some classes.”

“Yes, one or two.”

Pause.

Anne’s contribution to the conversation was delivered in the form of silent glances toward her father and mother, “I was a philosophy major. I lost my interest in formal studies sometime last year and I haven’t found anything to replace them with yet. I let you talk about my school and grades because it keeps you happy. (I know too many kids who are only in school because it keeps their parents happy.) I love you but you should know that I’m not about to structure my life around the framework of your expectations. If I go back to school after working for a little while, it will only be because I’ve become interested in something that only college can teach me.”

“Great dinner,” Rob said with a politician’s smile as everyone started getting up from their chairs.

“Annie, are you going to the fireworks with us tonight?” her mother asked.

“I think so.”

The fireworks were good.

But Anne could never figure out why some people compare orgasms to fireworks. Fireworks don’t directly affect any of those pleasure synapses in the brain that sex and drugs cause to spark and pop. Once in a while there was a loud bang which bounced off the apartments surrounding the lake and it punched her in the abdomen. She enjoyed those, but an hour of uninterrupted light and sound started to get a little tedious. When she saw that Robin shared in her developing boredom, she suggested that they walk back to her apartment rather than waiting for her parents and their car. She led him over the Pont du Mont Blanc; beneath them Lake Geneva was officially changing its name to the Rhone as it progressed in its voyage from mountains to sea and in the sky above the colorful explosions continues without hint of cessation. They were halfway up the hill leading to her apartment on Route de Malagnou when she began to talk. At first, only comments on how the fireworks were even more impressive when they could only be sensed through echoes and red reflections between stone walls – war images. Then she asked him how he had been feeling. Hoping, of course, for the response that his feelings had changed – that he would stop harassing her with his love. She hadn’t sensed anything like that in his letters. “I’m feeling the same,” he answered. “I have my ups and downs. I do think I understand myself better though now that I’ve had a little bit of time away from school or work. I mean especially in my overwhelming concerns about you and women, you know.” He added quickly, “You don’t mind if I talk about this, do you?”

“No.”

“Well I think a lot of my problems come from the fact that I’m overly concerned about sexism and the whole idea of women being sexually exploited by men. I mean, how could I make a pass at you or any other woman, when I’m so aware of these issues?”

They both paused as they stopped to cross a street and think. “No,” Anne said. “I really can’t see how the Women’s Movement plays as big a role in your motivations as you’d like me to believe – and as you’d like to believe yourself.”

Robin’s voice showed, “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t want to say anything that might hurt you.”

“How can I change if you don’t tell me what you’re thinking.” (Vague hopes for sexual success and happy love and life lurking in the back of his head in the anticipation of the clues and keys she may now drop.)

“Did you ever stop to think that your lack of action isn’t tied to any modern political concern at all? Maybe it’s just good, old-fashioned timidity – just a self-serving defense mechanism which saves you the embarrassment of being rejected and hurt.”

He shrugged his shoulders without making any commitment to her words. The sting of her attack hurt him more deeply than she could guess. “Sensitivity” – that’s the word he preferred to “timidity” in describing himself. The word sounded more unselfish. Anne and Robin defined “sensitivity,” like many other words they both used freely, from two different points of view. For Anne, the word shared its meaning with “compassion.” It was the faculty which she called upon in a situation like this, where she sought to put herself in Robin’s place in order to figure out why he held himself back – to find out what frightened him. In its simplest terms, Robin saw “sensitivity” as a description of his ability to be hurt easily. He also held normative considerations about the word; he considered it a virtue.

Their pensive silences were broken by the whistles and bangs of the fireworks’ finale, which left the sky glowing and ears ringing all over the city. “That would’ve been real nice if we were high,” Robin commented, trying to lend a lighter air to their conversation. It worked; they heard nothing but small talk on the short remainder of their promenade.

Robin and Anne said good night and went to their bedrooms without having said too much which seemed truly important to them. That wasn’t unusual.

As Anne fell asleep she jotted down random thoughts in the notebook next to her bed. She didn’t bother to turn on the light; she had started writing in the halflight of moon and streetlights out of courtesy for college roommates. Now she found these night hues to be the best soil for the germination of her ideas. She had reached a point in her writing where the movement of the pen did very little to obstruct the flow of thoughts and words.

The reasons for her writing were varied. Basically, she wrote short thoughts which she thought might stimulate personal revelations. “Sparks” was the term and image which she consciously applied to these ideas. Sparks of self-enlightenment.

Back in 2017

The next chapter, the last in Part Two, will consist entirely of Anne’s nighttime writing and will be the only chapter in the manuscript written in the first person. I wish she had appeared earlier in the book. I like her.

The line about Anne trying “not to sit and do nothing at all” reminds me of one of my favorite albums of the last few years, and definitely my favorite album title, Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.

That unsolicited musical plug out of the way, I have some serious things to say about this chapter. When literature professors and critics talk about the “meanings” that authors put into novels and stories and poems, I’m always skeptical. I never know how much is done intentionally by the authors and how much is the overlay of the critic. In this case, I don’t know if my dialectical composition of the three main characters was conscious or not in the 1970s, but it’s crystal clear to me now that Robin is the thesis, John the antithesis, and Anne the synthesis. As Flaubert said about Emma Bovary, “Anne Jenkins, c’est moi!” While I shared parts of my past with Robin and John, I was the one living with my parents in Geneva and taking a year off from college when I started writing this book. In the flashback in chapter 1.6 I even have Anne talking about dialectics with Robin, so it seems clear to me, as the 2017 reader and critic, that I, as the 1975 author, must have planned this consciously and schematically. Maybe I did, but I don’t remember doing so.

Chapter 2.7 has now been retyped and posted here.

Reading Myself in Exile (2.5)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light? 

I’m finding out and sharing the results as I rekey the only typewritten copy of my 1970’s novel Exile in serial form, posting chapters as soon as I get them onto a computer. The fifteenth chapter follows, but click here to begin with chapter one. This is the fifth chapter in Part Two.

5

Robin’s attempts at conversation with John hadn’t been going well. Robin couldn’t keep John interested in anything long enough to start taking his mind off his own problems. The conversation about girls had only served to depress him. The day before, John had only seemed interested in one subject, hallucinations and his private worlds. Robin had never experienced much natural curiosity about drugs, but he viewed this as his last chance to get an involved conversation started.

“John?” Robin began timidly.

John was still peering out the train window. When Robin didn’t get an immediate answer, he tried to pretend that he really hadn’t said anything. His eyes drifted down to the little chrome plaque under the window which warned him not to lean out in French and German. “Nicht hinauslehnen. Ne pas se pencher au dehors.” He tried to pronounce the words in the voice of his mind before glancing at the resting Moroccan family and at the girl standing outside their compartment with her head out the window on the opposite side of the train. Then he attempted to start a conversation again.

“John?” He spoke louder this time.

“Yeah?”

“What’s it like to trip?” Robin didn’t get an immediate response, so he tried to explain his question. “I really am curious about hallucinating. I guess you were right yesterday when you said that my mind was closed about hallucinogenic drugs.”

Rob really didn’t think that John was right about his mind being closed. Rob did want to start a conversation and he had exhausted many other possible openings.

“You really don’t think I was right. You just want me to talk. Okay. I hesitated before for a very simple reason. I don’t think that tripping is something I can talk about. It’s something you have to experience for yourself…When you talk about it you start giving the impression that it’s no more than distorted vision and intense pleasures and shivering and laughing. It is more. You look at the world differently – worrying about things loses all importance… And for me, acid can be a catalyst. It helps spring me into other worlds. It doesn’t create worlds. It just helps me throw off the blinders of this world and see others more clearly.”

“That’s a pretty far-reaching statement. I don’t really buy the idea that there are other worlds or that acid is a means of reaching them.” Robin was sure that this would strike a responsive nerve even though he made his challenge without any feeling in his voice.

“It’s not that far reaching. I’m just talking about a personal thing. For me, acid is a catalyst. It doesn’t create these worlds. I glimpsed one a couple of times before I tripped. Maybe it’s only in my mind. Okay, I told myself that too until a friend of mine saw the same world.

John’s mind shifted to Artie for a second. (He had seen the snake too. It existed.)

Robin was still trying to think of more questions. He realized that it was an awkward conversation so far. It didn’t seem to have any direction. He tried again.

“I was interested in the physical effects of acid too. I know some things like the trip lasts about eight hours but I really don’t…”

“I know what you want me to tell you,” John interrupted sharply. “You want me to tell you I see liquid walls and rooms that dance to music and I have eight hour orgasms. I could tell you about all that as well as seeing my face melt in a mirror and my body becoming a rocket while I was balling. But that stuff isn’t important.”

The idea of an eight hour orgasm intrigued Robin.

“What is important are the rare times when I’ve been given the opportunity to gain knowledge. That’s what I’d like to tell people. I don’t anymore, because nobody believes me. You won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“It’s worthless because you won’t believe me.”

“I’ll listen.”

“A world of giant snakes.” John challenged Robin with words and his tone of voice.

“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

“I knew you wouldn’t. You’re tied to this world too completely. You’re tied to your girl and your course of study and you feel that there are no other choices for you. There is such a clear choice of worlds that I can’t see why more people don’t realize it…I don’t know, I think maybe schizophrenics realize it; that’s why they get themselves locked up or keep themselves quiet.”

“You mean you agree with what R.D. Laing says about schizophrenia?” Robin always tried hard to draw examples from books that he’d read whenever he had a discussion with anyone.

“I don’t know. I do know that I have the ability to see what you can’t see.”

Robin thought about a previous conversation in the short silence which followed John’s statement.

“You mean you really thought you saw a snake yesterday when we were at the Eiffel Tower?”

“I know I saw it yesterday,” John corrected.

Pause. The steady rhythms of the train filled the gaps of silence. John tried to think of new ways to express his position. He had never expressed these ideas to a stranger before, because he never had enough nerve to start this conversation. There were lots of things that his mind accepted without the use of words. Words were insufficient to relate his experiences. If anything, they tended to confuse.

John continued, “I’m going to try to put this in terms that you’ll be able to understand. Try to imagine your world as an airwave. Your whole world is like a complicated television signal. Instead of just transmitting light and sound, it transmits texture and smell and perspective. Okay…” John had to pause often as he balanced his words; he preferred understanding to explanation. “…so…um, so you’ve been tuned, through your upbringing and schooling, to only receive one airwave – the airwave you call ‘reality.’ Okay, so now try to imagine an infinite number of airwaves, all projecting different sights and smells.”

“I’ll accept that,” Robin interrupted unconvincingly.

“If you did accept it, you’d be able to see that LSD and mescaline are just tools to help us change the station.”

“That’s absurd,” Robin concluded after he took a little time to sort out what had been said.

“Maybe.” John seemed to be deep in thought. “I have to use this metaphor though, because it’s the only way I can think of to visualize these ideas. It’s really wrong for me to use words to explain what I go through. These words themselves are all part of the grid which patterns your view of the world.” John realized that his thoughts were well-patterned along a petrified grid too. He was seeing Robin as a point on the center of a straight line segment. John was an arrowhead nearing the apex of an incomplete circle.

John paused for a little while as the talk again surrendered to the train sounds. He lit up as he thought of another example.

“Do you remember how the world looked when you were first born?”

“No?”

“I don’t think anyone does, because that jumble of worlds and signals is drummed out of us in order to insure our survival.”

“You’re crazy,” Robin decided that it was time for the conversation to reach its conclusion.

“Maybe, but there’s only one way you’re ever going to change your mind. You’re going to have to see for yourself what I’ve seen. I have acid on me – in my pack frame. You’re welcome to a hit of it if you really are curious. I have to go take a shit.”

As John excused himself and squeezed past the legs of the other people in the compartment, Robin found himself staring at the ass of the girl standing in the hallway, right outside their compartment’s door. She was wearing a pair of soft black corduroys which perfectly outlined the curves of her hips and thighs. When she got her fill of the wind and sun streaming in through the open window, she walked away and left Robin’s eyes staring at a wall of glass and military green steel.

“You are American?”

The voice startled Robin. The Moroccan man who had been sitting next to John noticed the break in their conversation, and he saw it as an opportunity to test his rusty English.

“Excuse me.” Robin really hadn’t been able to make out the question through the heavy accent.

“Are you American?” Every word was clearly annunciated and separated.

“Yes, I’m a student on vacation.”

“Where in the United States are you from?”

“New York, very close to New York City.”

“Oh yes. I know. My brother was there once. And you go to school in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Oh yes.”

The man wore dark grey glasses because he was walleyed. His left eye was staring right at Robin and right eye was pointed towards the door. Rob had a hard enough time looking people in the eye as it was. His eyes strayed up to the mirror above the man’s head and he found himself admiring the new growth in his own beard. His eyes tried to avoid the quarter-sized bald spot on the left side of his chin. He was sure that it would be pretty full by the time school started in two weeks. He told himself the same thing every summer and every spring he told himself that his beard would look full and manly by the time the summer rolled around. It never quite made it.

“And what do you study?”

Robin had forgotten that he was in the middle of a conversation.

“History.”

“Oh yes. That is very interesting study. You study chemistry also? You and your friend were speaking of ‘acid’ and ‘catalyst’.”

Robin didn’t know whether to laugh or shit in his pants from fear. Did that guy understand that they were talking about LSD? The question seemed innocent enough though. He just wanted to continue speaking English.

“Yes, I studied some chemistry. I was just discussing the properties of sulphuric acid as a catalyst with my friend.”

The Moroccan man understood about half of what Robin said but he continued to nod his head encouragingly.

John returned after about twenty-five minutes with a beer in his hand and he sat down gracelessly.

“There’s a guy two compartments down who’s selling all kinds of drinks and sandwiches. I finished my first beer while I was talking to a girl in the corridor.”

Robin was jealous. He knew that John was talking about “Rob’s girl” with the tight black corduroys.

John continued, “She’s from Michigan and she likes my tan. Then I got on line again and got another beer. You want a sip?”

“No. Is there a long line?”

“Maybe ten people.”

“I guess I can do without.” Robin knew that if he got at the end of a loosely organized line of ten people, he’d let twenty people go before him. He wasn’t very assertive.

“What did you do with yourself while I was out flirting with that pretty Michigonian?”

“Oh, I was talking with…” Rob didn’t know how to introduce someone he didn’t know. “…uh, this gentleman,” he said while pointing.

“Hello,” John said in the Moroccan’s direction. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes.” He replied mechanically perfect, but without the feeling which accompanies a mother tongue.

They spoke for a little while in English and then John discovered that they both spoke Spanish. Robin didn’t understand a word they were saying from that point on so he found himself watching the hallway for signs of his girl. She never came by and the Moroccan family got off the train at the town of Culoz.

“What were you talking about with him?” Robin asked curiously.

“We started off by talking about the differences between his Spanish Spanish and my Mexican Spanish. Then he asked what you and I were talking about before so I told him about tripping. He seemed pretty interested. He never met anyone who took acid before. Then we talked for a little while about the quality of hashish coming out of Morocco these days.”

“Oh.”

***

“I think you’re wrong,” John said loudly without raising his hand.

The classroom stirred at his outburst. Eeryone had been sitting quietly as vegetables while the professor in front of the lecture hall talked about the Pueblo Indians. John liked anthropology during his freshman year, but he found the sponge-like accepting nature of this class and the arrogance of the professor to be suffocating. The lecture had drifted onto the Snake dance of the Hopi Indians. The professor described the breakdown of the Hopi into clans and he spoke accurately about the Snake and Antelope Clans’ participation in the Snake dance – a dance which had become a tourist attraction in the twentieth century. The professor’s own theory about the dance (which he stated as fact) was that the Hopis simply paid homage to the snakes because they were awed by the snakes’ poisonous powers.

“I think you’re wrong.”

John was surprised at the effect that his statement made on the class and the professor. The floor was his for the taking, but he didn’t take it. He didn’t explain that the Hopis once had knowledge of a giant snake that roamed the world, and they had lost that knowledge but they continued worshipping the only snakes they knew. He didn’t mention that Judaism and Christianity had the same roots. The giant, knowledge-giving snake of the Garden of Eden had been changed unbelievably over the years into a small evil snake and a snake pushed from its proper role as a deity by a group of deified people who preached ignorance and organization. John didn’t say anything.

***

“How much longer to Geneva?” John asked.

“About an hour more I guess,” Robin guessed. “Why did you have to tell that guy about tripping? You didn’t know him that well.”

“So, I don’t know you that well and I tell you things that I’ve never told anyone.”

“Why?”

“I really don’t know. I think I just want someone else to have this knowledge.”

“What about your friend?”

“Huh?”

“What about your friend who saw the snake?”

John started thinking about Artie, but he avoided Robin’s question.

***

John was a champion. Along with his red-haired, Italian friend, Chris, they built the best go-kart on the block. They didn’t build real go-karts with motors, but theirs was almost as good. The body was basically two new orange crates (taken from their local supermarket) nailed to a frame of two by fours. The wheels were the former property of John’s baby carriage. The whole thing was finished off with a couple of little cans of sewing machine oil for lubrication and a nice sanding job done by John’s father’s electric sander. Chris put their names on one of the orange crate slats with the woodburning set that he got for Christmas. They were both proud.

There was a hill near their houses where they could race. Most people called it Tarantula Hill because of the tarantulas who made their homes there. Sometimes people would pour water down into their holes and hold glass jars over the openings to catch the tarantulas. John only did that once. He caught a tarantula, but he didn’t know what to do with it. He felt sorry for it as it rubbed its massive dark brown legs against the inside of the peanut butter label, but he didn’t feel too secure about dropping it down on the ground right next to his feet either. He eventually put it down and it scrambled back into its soggy hole. To avoid making that decision again, John decided not to catch anymore tarantulas.

In late September, Tarantula Hill is completely dried out and an orange crate go-kart can roll easily over the hard ground and dry grass. People in other neighborhoods raced on streets and sidewalks, but they always had to look out for other people and cars. Dry grass got caught in your wheels sometimes while racing on Tarantula Hill, but at least you could race unobstructed. There were about ten or twelve go-karts in the neighborhood, and on a warm fall afternoon most of them would be ready to race. Chris and John were the youngest (they were in fourth grade and everyone else was in fifth or sixth), but they were the best.

One Saturday afternoon when they raced, John and Chris got off to a late start because Chris tripped as he was trying to push the car off the crest of the hill. They lost time as Chris jumped on the back. They passed one car right away, but that was only Joe’s car. He always came in last. They seemed to pick up speed as the wheels bounced over a few small stones. John was proud of this car. His front wheels were sparkling and running straight and fast. The wheels on the cars in front of him were wobbling like the wheels on orange crate autos were meant to wobble. They passed cars on the left and right as both began to yell.

“Come on!”

“We’re gonna win!”

“Come on!”

They did win. They passed the last car just as they hit the bottom of the hill. They usually both jumped off and pulled the car back up to the top, but Chris hopped out right away and started laughing with his full small torso. John laughed too as he kept steering the car with his feet along the sidewalk which ran around the edge of the hill. Chris’s red hair was gleaming in the sun and the spokes of the spinning wheels were gleaming even brighter. John could feel the sun’s warmth penetrating his own sunbleached hair. The whole day was shining.

John started fooling around by steering the car in zig-zags along the sidewalk. He accidentally steered the car’s left front wheel into a little ditch and they stopped. John began to laugh again when he saw Chris on his knees behind the car.

He stopped laughing when he saw a spot of blood on an orange crate slat’s corner and saw the blood coming from the corner of Chris’s closed eye.

John was unaware of the fact that such joy could transform itself into such undiluted terror in such a short time. John wanted to be able to touch the eye and heal it, but he felt totally useless as he led Chris, screaming, back to his house. He felt his heart skipping beats as Chris yelled.

“I’m going to sue you!” he cried through tears of blood.

The anger of a friend pierced John as badly as if his own eye had been cut.

John called Chris’s mother a couple times during the night, shaking as he hesitated by the phone; he was glad to hear that Chris hadn’t injured his eye. He only needed two stitches in the lid.

John wasn’t even very upset when he heard that their car had been stolen from the side of Tarantula Hill.

***

As the train pulled away from the station at Culoz on its way to Geneva, Robin remained quiet. A group of people had piled onto the train – glad to find the large spot vacated by the Moroccans. They were a French family on their way to visit relatives. Robin didn’t want to talk and risk the chance that one of them might understand English. He just hummed a tune to himself while watching the silver railroad tracks blur beneath his vision.

John looked out the window, but he was tired of sitting so he walked out into the hallway and stood by the window on the other side of the train. Robin put his feet up on John’s empty green seat and kept watching blindly out the window as the conductor came around to ask for the tickets of the quiet French family.

“Chaussures,” the conductor asserted as he pointed at Robin.

“What?”

“Chaussures!”

“Your shoes,” a little French boy translated instantaneously.

“Merci,” Robin said as he moved his feet from the seat.

Robin looked out into the corridor and John was gone.

As he wandered past the train compartments filled with people, John found himself thinking of war refugees because of the families with their battered suitcases and screaming kids and the young middle-class tourists in their self-imposed poverty and exile with their backpacks and sleeping bags. When he left the second class cars and walked into first class, he found his mind drawn towards second-rate murder mysteries. They always took place on trains like this with their luxurious compartments filled with businessmen in suits and old ladies in white gloves. The difference between first and second class was amazing. The SNCF put on equal nubers of first and second class cars although there were at least four times as many second class passengers. “Robin was right about that,” John thought to himself. “Classes are wrong and outdated. For all of this new European leftist rhetoric they even lag behind the U.S. in a couple of areas. This grasp on classes is one thing. They talk of equality like all nations and they try to condemn inequality and injustice wherever they spring up, but they don’t even notice the economic inequality practiced on their subways. Political talk is just that – political talk. Robin doesn’t realize that, I don’t think. He places hope in those words before actions. He praises revolutionary words and curses reactionary words. His praises and curses have the same intrinsic worth as those words. They don’t mean shit unless they directly cause or represent actions.”

***

The Saturday sun reflected brightly off the Capitol dome as the crowd of half a million sang and got high in a supreme effort to end the war. Robin was in that crowd and he wanted everyone to know it. He wore his blue button with the dove that said “April 24” for two weeks before the demonstration.

“Robin, what’s the button for?”

“I’m going to Washington to demonstrate against the war on that date,” he’d reply proudly.

He really did feel that he was working hard against the war when he handed out buttons and hung posters in his high school. When he finally made it to Washington, he was sure that the war was going to end. How could the government fail to respond? How could the government ignore those sweet illegal clouds of marijuana smoke in the Washington air? How could the government ignore the fact that half a million people were singing “Give Peace a Chance” along with Peter, Paul and Mary and chanting “FUCK” right along with Country Joe McDonald? How could the government ignore the fact that Robin Jackson was marching hand in hand with a girl he had a crush on while screaming, “Peace, Now!”?

Nixon watched TV.

***

John’s mind wandered to other things as he walked through the train. He thought about what he’d see when he got to the mountains. He had a pretty good idea. He dreamt about it most nights. The sight of the growing hills made him anxious and apprehensive about finishing his journey.

As the train entered a stone-walled tunnel, John found his stream of thoughts broken again. He stopped walking and his eyes tried to follow the black rock walls which were flying by two feet from his face. The train passed more workmen on scaffolding who were in the process of chipping away at the rock. The sound of the jackhammers, along with the intensified, echoing rumblings of the train, surrounded John’s ears and brain until he found the sound carrying him away. The goggled, dirt-covered faces lit up by naked light bulbs looked more than a little like something from another planet, but John left that planet as quickly as he had entered it when the train found its way back into bright August sunlight.

John continued walking until he ran into the locomotive. On the walk back he looked into the same compartments and smiled at the same children. He counted twelve cars between his and the engine. Riding on a train still reminded him of a game.

“Hi Rob,” John sang as he squeezed back towards his seat.

“Where did you go?”

“Just for a walk.”

“Where?” Robin wasn’t aware that he could walk farther than the end of his own car.

“To the end of the train.”

“You’re allowed to do that?”

“I guess so. Nobody stopped me.”

“Anything interesting?”

“More of the same.”

They paused. John smiled at the little boy sitting next to him and then turned back towards Robin.

“You want to talk about anything?”

“No.” Robin mumbled. Keeping silent was better than having another argument about drugs.

“Okay.”

 

While sharing the train compartment with these two American travellers, the French man, his wife, and the older of their two sons, all decided that John and Robin were the same. Just as the Minnesota farmboys and Frenchmen fit Robin’s stereotypes, he fit theirs. He and John were the typical young American travellers. They both carried backpacks and wore jeans. They were both unkempt. It didn’t matter that John was just unshaven because of a lack of concern for such things and that Robin saw his rough edges as a symbol of… They were both drug users. They didn’t see the difference between Robin’s occasional social smoking of marijuana and John’s quest for other worlds through mescaline and LSD… They had both demonstrated against the war. It wasn’t important that Robin’s involvement was centered around mass peaceful gatherings and that John’s short involvement had been caused by his intense rage after his cousin was killed at Khe Sanh. He had flirted on the violent edges of the Weathermen, but he made a point of never joining groups. He really didn’t agree with them ideologically (he didn’t believe in any ideologically). He just used them as the vehicle for expressing his rage at a system which spread death and money.

It didn’t matter that their minds were worlds apart; John and Robin were the same.

 

The compartment lay silent until the train passed into a built up area and John spotted a Swiss flag.

“I think we’re here.”

 

Back in 2017

This chapter seems to jump around a little, but I spend a lot of time riding on trains — literally thousands of commuting hours since writing Exile — and I’ve found that they are conducive to letting thoughts run freely. A long train trip like the one from Paris to Geneva could allow for lots of internal time traveling.

John’s incident with the orange-crate car was an experience of mine in fourth grade. I was the driver and the friend with the bloodied eye (whose name I don’t remember) really did threaten to sue me as we ran back to the apartment house where we both lived. The hill we drove down was a sidewalk in Bergenfield, New Jersey (where I lived for one year), but Tarantula Hill was a real location too. It was behind my sixth-grade school in Woodland Hills, California (where I lived for three years). Lately I’ve been hearing about writers whose books are tied to a specific area of the country that their family has lived in for generations and that they know extremely well; there’s also a common American experience of having no roots in a specific place, especially for many who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s certainly the experience of these characters, and of this author.

Robin’s experience in Washington, D.C., on April 24, 1971 was my experience as a fifteen-year-old peacenik. I was my high school’s coordinator for the Student Mobilization Committee (in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where I went to school for three years) and I did get to hold the hand of a girl I had a crush on as we believed we were ending the war with songs and chants.

I’m getting a little tired of the back and forth (or lack thereof) between Robin and John. I peeked ahead and I’m glad that we finally meet the elusive Anne at the very beginning of the next chapter.

 

10/29/2017: Chapter 2.6 has now been retyped and posted here.

 

Reading Myself in Exile (2.3)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light? 

I’m finding out and sharing the results as I rekey the only typewritten copy of my 1970’s novel Exile in serial form, posting chapters as soon as I get them onto a computer. The thirteenth chapter follows, but click here to begin with chapter one. This is the third chapter in Part Two.

3

“Monsieur?”

A silent mood had overtaken Robin along with all this talk of death from boredom, and only the conductor coming around and asking for his ticket was able to draw his mind away from it. He reached into his wallet for his railpass and passport, and the conductor left him peacefully to drown in his musings.

He began to carry on a structured conversation with himself.

“John’s father wasn’t an intellectual. He was an engineer. An intellectual gets more stimulation from his work.”

“Why?”

“Because he uses his mind.”

“An engineer uses his mind.”

“But that’s only figures and computations. You can’t call that creative thinking.”

“Why is designing a new plane less creative than writing an article or teaching? Are words less abstract than figures?”

Before Robin answered any of his own questions, he let his mind become absorbed and soothed by the humming that generated deep in his vocal cords. He settled down as he stopped thinking. He was glad he didn’t come to face his own death. He knew that that would have been the logical conclusion to the train of thought that he had embarked on.

He tried again to start a conversation on a simple level.

“John?”

John was still looking out the window, but Robin continued anyway.

“We must be getting closer to Switzerland. It looks like the beginning of some foothills out there in the distance.”

***

John and Artie finally finished their hike to Mont Blanc just as the sun was setting and the ice of the glacier was glowing pink and orange. John ran with full pack up a short grassy ski slope towards the snowline. He planned to make a few snowballs and pelt Artie as he walked up the hill. Snow always made John feel like a kid. Disappointment fell over John as he reached the white and discovered that it was all clear and hard and wet. He reeled backwards as he pulled off one piece of ice and Artie finally caught up with him.

“Shit!” John bellowed. “This looked so soft and inviting from the road.” He still held the chunk of dirty ice in his hand. “I wouldn’t throw this at anyone I didn’t intend to kill.”

“Unh…Unh.” Artie was still out of breath from chasing John up the hill. “Unh y’mean I risked a heart attack…just so we could sit next to this ice?”

They were just beginning to relax as a man ran up the slope a few yards and yelled something in French. John waved and they ran into a wooded area below them to the left. The man stopped when he saw that they were gone, and they spent a little time just sitting, laughing, and recatching their breath.

John started cleaning large twigs and stones from a place between the trees.

“What are you doing?” Artie had leaned back against a tree without bothering to remove his pack – ready to move on.

“I figured we’d sleep here tonight, right on the slope of Europe’s tallest mountain.” He patted the ground.

John’s voice didn’t show any strains of running as he talked and pulled a rolled-up tent from the bottom of his pack. Artie’s voice was still tied to a panting rhythm.

“Do you think it’s safe to stay here tonight?”

“Sure, no one will see us, plus I think this might even be legal in France. Why are you so worried now? We camped in Switzerland last night and I’m pretty sure it’s illegal there.

“That guy just got me a little jumpy. The fact that you’re a walking drugstore doesn’t make me feel any better either.”

“That’s fuckin’ ridiculous. How many times have we been hiking in California with marijuana or LSD on us? It doesn’t make a bit of difference to me whether I spend a few years in an American jail or a French one.”

“Thanks for putting is so optimistically.”

“No – really – don’t worry. All the drugs are hidden deep in my pack frame. Besides, even if someone does find them I’ll get the blame.” The words didn’t sooth as much as the slow dancing rhythm of his voice which he accompanied with gentle movements of his hands.

Upon finally standing up and catching his breath, Artie agreed, “I guess you’re right. I’m still excited about…”

“Do you want to trip now?”

“What!?”

“Let’s trip now.” John’s impulsiveness was definitely getting the best of him.

“No – not now. Definitely not now. I’m still feeling a little paranoid and I don’t want to freak out…I’m sure you don’t want that either.”

John stopped taking his pack apart. He had to take the pack off the frame to get to the stash of drugs. His face had been lit up a second before, but Artie pulled a plug from the source of his enthusiasm. Artie saw the instant change in attitude and he tried to repair the damage that he’d done.

“Hey, cheer up Bozo. You look like a kid who just got his lollipop stolen. I’ll trip when we get more settled, but I just can’t handle it yet. I don’t adjust as fast as you do to new situations, so just hold on for a day or two.”

“Okay.” John was relatively silent as he concentrated on replacing the clevis pins which held his backpack on its frame.

John finished stringing their tent between a couple of trees and he rolled out their sleeping bags inside. He pulled out an old harmonica and started to play Dixie while waiting for Artie to finish boiling the water for their freeze-dried beef stroganoff.

“Don’t you know any other songs?” Artie sounded like the impatient parent of a kid who was just starting piano lessons.

“No.”

“Nothing?”

He asked again as John made a feeble attempt at Old MacDonald and failed. Maybe Artie was better off if he just left John alone. At least he hit the right notes when he played Dixie.

John got tired of his own limited playing long before dinner was ready. Artie relaxed when he saw the harmonica drop back into its blue plastic case.

“Hey Art, how much food do we have with us?”

“I have enough dinners to get us through a week and then we should find a store that sells camp food somewhere.” His eyes didn’t look up from the pot he was stirring.

“Shit, with all that food you brought…and that pot and stove and everything, I’m surprised you made the plane’s weight limit.”

“Forty pounds on the button,” Artie exclaimed as he proudly patted his green Kelty pack on a side pocket.

“And you try to run up mountains with all that weight. You are fucked in the head. My pack only weighs eighteen pounds. The heaviest things in it are my harmonica and a box of rubbers.”

John was glad that Artie had come prepared, because he did enjoy eating more than playing Dixie. He volunteered to carry the pot and a tank of propane fuel when they broke camp the next morning.

“Art, tell you what. Since you’ve cooked dinner every night so far, I’ll cook some powdered eggs tomorrow morning.”

“You won’t wake up tomorrow morning.”

“You’re probably right.”

***

The mountains out the train window had both Robin and John pretty well hypnotized as they rolled farther into central France. Robin found himself simply humming again as John watched.

“Do you want to talk about something?” John broke the silence in perfect anticipation of Robin’s desires.

“Yeah okay.” Robin thought he did a good job of controlling his emotions this time. He didn’t seem visually overanxious, but he was and John sensed it.

“I didn’t mean to upset you last night when I walked into the hostel and made that remark to you about being hung up on that girl you were thinking about. I wanted to add some more to what I said, but when I came back you were already in bed and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Although Robin wasn’t aware of it, his light brown eyes were emitting a faint stream of happiness in John’s direction. This was what he really wanted to talk about. “Go on. I’m usually interested in getting advice about girls, but last night I guess I was sort of down.”

Robin was expecting the kind of advice that he got from his friend Aaron at school. Answers to questions like, “When should I kiss her?” and “What should I say to show her that I want to go to bed with her?” John sensed the type of talk Robin wanted. He could’ve obliged Robin’s desire – he had his share of knowledge about effective methods – but he had something more important on his mind.

“You know there’s an old saying about misery loving company?”

“Yeah.”

“Well I just wanted to tell you something that I thought would ease your mind a little bit. You just finished your freshman year in college right?”

“No, sophomore.” Robin was a little puzzled by the way their conversation was beginning.

“That’s close enough. When I was a freshman at UC I went through just what you’re going through now. I met this girl, Sue, from a little town just outside of Fresno. She was petite and she had long brown hair and light brown eyes and white skin. There wasn’t an imperfection in this woman’s face or body and I loved her with all my heart and soul. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to keep her by my side and you know what she did?”

Robin remained silent.

“She left me. One day she just got up and said, ‘I can’t stay here anymore.’ She just stood up and walked out my door. My mouth opened but I couldn’t say anything. I sat there with my mouth hanging open for hours.”

Robin wasn’t convinced of the parallels between his life and John’s story. He had never slept with Anne and he couldn’t look any deeper than that. He was as close emotionally to Anne as John had been to Sue. The rejections they received were almost identical. They were both “too intense” in their professions of love.

John continued, “You know, after she left me I thought I’d never be the same again. I used to lie in my room sometimes and get lost in notes that sounded sad on my harmonica – just like the convicts in the old movies – ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.’ I really thought that I was the most pitiful character on earth. Then you know what happened?”

“No.”

“All of a sudden I realized that I was a fool. I had no reason to feel sorry for myself. One day I found myself lying in bed trying to cultivate a depression that simply didn’t exist anymore. When I first met Sue I fell in love with her voice and shoulders, her hair and eyes. I had this intense desire to lay a finger on her lips. This moment, that laying of my finger as her tongue slipped through to greet me – and that first warm smile. That moment was a greater pleasure that the rest of our sex. It was all anti-climax. I tried violently to hold onto a moment which was no more than that, a moment. (Did I suffocate the moment by trying to apply an overlay of more experience? thinking faintly and quickly as his spoken words embarked on a life of their own – beyond his control. What relationship did Sue and I really have to each other? What relation is there between ‘me’ and my memories? Do they exist out of space and time out there – in here? That initial coordination of feelings between us was never totally destroyed by my possessiveness, was it?) I learned my lesson well too. The summer between my freshman and sophomore years I came to Europe with a friend of mine. I haven’t been depressed over a woman since.”

John paused to see Robin’s reaction. Rob was sitting silently letting the words soak in. They were passing without understanding. Robin had felt the same depression during his freshman year too, but that’s where their similarities ended.

Robin often said that he was interested in history because he could learn from history’s mistakes. For all his far-reaching opinions about the world’s mistakes, he couldn’t turn around and see his own mistakes repeating themselves. He went through the same depression two years in a row. He caused it himself but he blamed it on Joan in his freshman year and on good ol’ Anne Jenkins in his sophomore year. When his depression finally caught up with him, he let it sink in until he felt it festering in his stomach and nerves. He’d been depressed in one way or another because of Anne since December and he’d been jealous of her new boyfriend Ed since the first day he saw them smile at each other back in March.

“Don’t let it eat away at you just because you don’t have a girl by your side. It’s no one’s fault if you don’t get laid regularly. It has no importance at all in itself.” John could sense the depression overtaking Robin as his mind drifted away from the conversation. John raised his voice drastically, drawing visible astonishment from the Moroccans who’d been who’d been sitting quietly through the whole trip. “Shit! It’s more luck than anything else. Just don’t give in to your feelings so easily.”

Robin had never experienced the death of a close friend or relative. He had never gone a day in his life when he wondered where his next meal was coming from or where he was going to sleep. However, he had come to the conclusion a couple of years earlier that he was the unluckiest person alive.

***

John struggled for a little while with the zipper on his sleeping bag before it zipped up around his shoulders with a jerk. He enjoyed the warmth and confinement of the bag as he pressed his head against the nylon hood and ran his fingers across the relaxed muscles of his bare chest and stomach. His hand could feel the beating of his heart between his ribs when the wind died down. He could feel the same beats a split second later through his left temple pressed against the ground.

The rhythms contained within his body kept John engrossed until big raindrops started hitting the tent slowly and powerfully. He thought that he had to get up and cover the packs that were leaning up against a tree outside until he remembered that he had tucked his poncho around them right after dinner.

“John? Did you cover the packs?” Artie had been engrossed in his own pre-sleep reveries before the rain started to fall.

“Yeah, my poncho’s wrapped around them.”

He paused to yawn.

“It better not be raining like this in the morning or I’m never gonna climb out of this bag.”

Artie was too tired to say anything other than good night.

“Good night.”

John listened to the varied sounds of the rain. It beat hard and violently against the plastic of their tube tent. The pounding on the plastic poncho which protected their packs was just as violent but it was separated from him and it didn’t seem as loud and insistent as the rain right above his head.

The rain on the leaves was relatively peaceful. It was no more than an intermittent pattering high in the trees which filled the silences between the crashes on the tent. Before sleep finally held John, he was able to make out the outlines of leaves sitting on the tent under the light of a full moon that managed to break through the clouds momentarily. It rained sporadically throughout the night.

John surprised Artie in the morning. He awoke early and alert and he began mixing a package of powdered eggs with water. A look of astonishment glazed Artie’s eyes when John tapped him on the shoulder and handed him a plate full of scrambled eggs.

“Good morning.” The air was as crisp as it always is in the mountains after a night of showers. John’s face was creased with a smile that reflected the same crispness.

Artie yawned and joined him at breakfast. John finished eating before Artie. John finished eating before Artie even lifted the fork to his mouth twice.

“Shit, this campsite is a mess.”

“What?” Artie was in the process of wiping the sleep from his eyes with the knuckle of his index finger when John broke the silence of the morning air.

“Just look around you. Look at all the mud and shit that splattered up on my poncho and the sides of the tent.”

Artie took his first good look around and yawned wide when he thought of the cleaning which lay ahead of them. “What time did you get me up anyway?”

The sun hadn’t risen high enough to throw a clear light on their dawn-shrouded campsite.

“How should I know what time it is? You know I’ve never worn a watch.” Artie really should have known this. He’d seen John display genuine anger at people who lived their lives by a clock.

As he walked back to the tent, Artie stepped uncomfortably into piles of wet leaves and twigs with his bare feet. He had been too tired when he first climbed out of bed to let the dampness bother him. He tried brushing some of the muck off his feet as he sat down on his sleeping bag and groped through the coins and socks in his boot in search of his watch. He finally pulled out a luminous skin diver’s watch with a corroded black band.

“It’s not even 6:30,” Artie exclaimed with an air of disbelief as he held the watch to his ear.

“Really?” John didn’t seem concerned.

“6:30 in the A-M!”

“So, you know I don’t live by a schedule.”

That was true. But Artie had been camping with John since the sixth grade when they both joined the scouts. Artie had never – never – known John to wake up before nine or ten o’clock. John was the troop’s bugler too, and he made a habit of forgetting his bugle every time they went camping despite Mr. Black’s (the scoutmaster’s) constant reminders. Artie attributed this rare early rising to the excitement about the trip and he enjoyed the fact that he wasn’t the one to prepare breakfast.

“Shit!”

“What?” Artie was surprised by John’s sudden outbursts although he had them often.

“I hate breaking camp after it rains.”

“I know.”

“huh?”

“I know. Everything gets all covered with mud and you have to wait till it dries to do a good job of cleaning it off.”

“I know, that’s what I meant.”

John finished squeezing his sleeping bag into its stuff bag as they were talking and he started rolling up the muddy tent after Artie had removed his sleeping bag. John’s hands were covered with rich mud and decayed leaves and twigs when he finally dropped the tent into its bag.

“Shit!”

“What?” Artie said “what?” even though he knew exactly what John was complaining about. He paused – as though a revelation of the problem had just taken place – then he continued, “I hate getting that stuff on my hands too…What do you think we should do today? Do you want to head for the Swiss Alps, the Matterhorn and all that?”

The idea appealed to John and he grasped onto it as if it were his own. He agreed quickly and added another suggestion.

“Yeah, that sounds perfect, but why don’t we try climbing a little way up Mont Blanc as long as we’re here.”

“Okay.”

“What?”

John perfectly mimicked the way that Artie mechanically responded to every statement with the same monosyllable, and they both fell over laughing. At Artie’s suggestion, they raced out of the wood and up the ski slope that they were chased off the day before. Artie’s inhibitions about being in a strange country had vanished. John saw this for himself as they smiled at each other through pantings of a race well run at the foot of a field of dirty summer ice. John didn’t especially like the term, and he never used it, but he knew that Artie was his “best friend.”

The next chapter, 2.4, has finally been retyped and posted here.

Reading Myself in Exile (1.10)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light? 

I’m finding out and sharing the results as I retype the typescript of my 1970’s novel Exile in serial form, posting chapters as soon as I type them onto my computer. The tenth chapter follows, but click here to begin with chapter one. This is the last chapter in Part One.

The first handwritten manuscript has now been found as well.

10

Robin returned to the hostel without incident. He hopped right into a second class subway car and found an empty seat. He gave it to an old woman who got on at the next stop and he started to feel a little faint from standing. He seemed blind to the world around him as he dragged himself out of the ground and back onto the street. He stopped and had a beer at a café near the hostel. He was trying to think about what he’d write in his journal and what he’d say to Anne when he saw her the next day. There was a pinball machine in the café. He played a few games, because he liked doing things which kept his hands busy and allowed his mind to wander.

He nursed his beer for about ten minutes and then he walked back along a familiar side street to the hostel. He stopped into the office of the guy in charge to ask about leaving early in the morning to catch a train. They communicated to each other, in a combination of broken French and English, that John and Robin wouldn’t have to do any work around the hostel in the morning if they had to leave early. The guy who ran the place was the kind of guy who appealed to Robin instinctively. He had hair about as long as Robin’s but a shade or two darker. Robin was jealous of his beard; it was thick and a little darker than his hair. Robin’s was barely thick enough to cover his face; he wanted a bushy beard more than anything else. (That would attract girls for sure.)

He climbed up the stairs to his room. He talked to a couple of tall blond-haired kids from Minnesota as he pulled his pack from his bunk. They looked like they were straight off the farm. They were on their way to visit relatives in Sweden. Robin was glad. They matched his stereotypes perfectly.

He stopped talking to them as he located a couple of big spiral notebooks with school seals on them in his pack. He kept a journal of his trip (following Anne’s example) in one and he wrote letters on the paper in the other. He rolled out his old green sleeping bag and lay down with a pen and the thicker of the two notebooks.

 

8/15/75 9:30pm

I didn’t write anything about Anne this morning. I was distracted when I first got up. However, I’ve been thinking about her most of the day and I guess I’ll write about her now. I’ve been thinking about what I’ll say when I see her tomorrow. I saw a girl over by the Eiffel Tower who looked like Anne to some extent, and I also saw a girl on the Boulevard St. Michel with a great body who gave me a big smile. Maybe my main problem is simply a lack of self-confidence. Sometimes I get the feeling that girls are attracted to me but I turn them off with my timidity. I’m pretty sure that’s the way Anne felt anyway./ I was able to use some French today. I’m sure that I’ll be ahead of the rest of the second year students when I go back to school in two weeks. It’ll be good to see Joan and Aaron and Paul and Mary and everyone else. This trip has made me appreciate my friends more./ Tomorrow I’m taking the train to Switzerland. I’ll only spend one overnight at Anne’s apartment in Geneva and then I’m going to head for the Alps. It’s going to be good to see some high mountains and beautiful countryside. Cities, especially French-speaking cities, are starting to get on my nerves./ À demain.

 

Robin didn’t write at all about John. His entries usually focused on his problems with women. This one was surprising in that it contained some plain facts about what he was up to. As he started to put the first notebook away, he was distracted by the two young Minnesotans again. They asked him lots of questions about where he’d been and what he’d done during his two months in Europe. He felt at ease talking with them. They both seemed friendly and they didn’t disturb his ideas regarding the accepted behavior for farmboys.

“How long have you been in Europe?” Robin asked.

“Oh, we landed this morning.” The one who answered appeared to be the oldest. He answered with a perpetual smile on his face.

“How do you like Paris so far?”

The other one answered, “It’s okay, but we haven’t seen any of the monuments. We walked down to a little park not too far from here. It was pretty nice and there were some fishermen and these big rocks with tunnels carved in them. They’re like on this island that you have to walk to on a hanging bridge and there are…”

“I know the place.”

“Well anyway, someone pissed on all the rocks and the whole island smelt like piss. We got away from the rocks and sat down on a bench next to this Tunisian guy who told us his life story and asked us for money.”

“He spoke English?”

The older one answered again, “No, I spoke to him in French. I had French in high school and a year of college French. I speak almost fluently.”

That disturbed Robin’s preconceptions. Everyone knows for a fact that Minnesota farmboys don’t speak French, let alone speak it fluently. They’re supposed to speak Swedish or German if they speak anything at all. Robin excused himself by saying that he had to write a letter. Robin really couldn’t think of anything he wanted to write to anybody at that point, because his mind was firmly riveted on his visions of the legendary Anne. She lost all human proportions in Robin’s expectations about the following day’s trip. John walked in as Robin was lying on his mattress and thinking. “Hey Rob, what’re you up to?”

“Just writing a letter…or trying to anyway. I have things on my mind.”

“You’re really hung up on her, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“I said you’re really hung up on her. I could see you staring at every girl that came within ten feet of us today. You weren’t enjoying them though. You were staring at comparisons of your lost love back in the states. Or is it that girl you’re going to see in Geneva?” Robin was annoyed because of the matter of fact tone that John had adopted. He was annoyed that his emotions had become so visible.

“Well, I have a little more loyalty to my girl than you’ll ever have. At least I don’t go running off to whore houses the minute I’m alone.”

John never mentioned that he didn’t make his planned trip. “That’s true. But you don’t enjoy yourself either and I do. I try to… As for commitment, I found myself so committed to a girl back in college that the intensity of her telling me that she didn’t love me almost killed me. I don’t know if I could go through that again for anyone. I’ve had women give me my greatest pleasures and my deepest pains. We all get hurt but I’m just looking for pleasures now.” John was still calm and Robin fell silent. He didn’t feel like this argument. John excused himself, “I have to take a piss.” Robin took this as his cue to unzipper his sleeping bag and crawl in. He just finished getting undressed and lying down when John came back into the room. He honored Robin’s desire to be left alone as he climbed into the top bunk and decided to start on some correspondence of his own.

 

Artie,

How’s tricks buddy? Big first day in Gay Paree, I’ll save the big news for last. I woke up this morning and met this college kid – pseudo-hippie, preppy and very political. He’ll be a rich lawyer someday. He was friendly though which is a change from most people I run into lately. Even this kid’s friendliness scared me at first. I’m ashamed of my first reaction. I figured O, he’s friendly and he’s probably gay. I assumed it simply because the only male strangers who’ve been friendly to me lately have been Sunset Boulevard gays who praised my body as I looked for drugs and those bus depot and street corner robotized messiahs who inform me about the world’s newest religion which they’re trying to finance with my money. This kid didn’t have the glazed donut look of religious zeal in his eyes so I figured he was gay. But he’s just normally mixed up. Confused by women like you and me. But that initial apprehension of mine would have turned me off totally to this new acquaintance if he hadn’t mentioned Zermatt and the Alps. We ended up spending all day together despite those first doubts. I see those fears of mine in others. Like those women who pass by without slowing down on the highway for their fear that every male hitchhiker is a rapist. And those fearful looks we got back in high school when we had our long hair and patched jeans and dilated pupils and anti-war buttons. We represented those things grown-ups were afraid of in their own children. Drugs and sex. Peace. (Am I grown up Art? I am 24 now.) There are so many examples of this fear which keeps us all apart but this aerogramme is so small and I tend to ramble. I still have to tell you the big news. The Snake’s in Paris.

                               Your friend, John Matthews

 

John folded the sky blue aerogramme neatly and simply printed “Artie Sultan” on the envelope – no address. He placed it carefully into a mailbox as he walked with Robin to the train station on the following morning.

As he drifted off into sleep, Robin became engrossed in watching the springs of John’s bed and the windows on the other side of the alley behind the hostel. It looked like the windows belonged to a factory or something and there was a night watchman turning lights on and off as he walked up the stairs. Robin found himself wondering what the place looked like on the inside. He was twenty years old but he had yet to see the inside of a factory. As the lights in the factory went off and stayed off, he found his eyes drifting to the inside of an open window and around the room. They rested on a sign written in English on the side of an old wood stove. “Do not touch. DANGER.” The words were accompanied by a primitive hand-drawn skull and crossbones. He looked around at all the shiny nylon packs and sleeping bags. His old canvas pack and cotton sleeping bag really needed to be replaced. His feet were cool because his bag was worn so thin. An emptiness in his groin reminded him of Anne. Thoughts of her kept his mind active and awake for a little while even though his eyes were closed. He eventually dozed off. He awoke a few times during the night. He dreamt vividly and erratically.

 

He was a traitor. He wore the short blue uniform that all traitors wore. The green-uniformed men were right behind him. They rode two-legged horses and sported blue and green plumes in their iridescent helmets.

He came to a ravine. He stopped. A two-legged horse pushed him down and the green-suited soldiers, who were Indians now, laughed and chanted in their slow, sticky voices. He was afraid of the Indians and their strange language. He started rolling in the ravine. It really wasn’t a ravine. It was a slight, soft grassy slope. Spears landed on all sides, but the Indians didn’t charge.

They looked afraid.

Robin sat with his back to a haystack. He watched the Indians gallop past. A jeep followed them and stopped before the haystack.

The haystack was no longer there. The jeep was no longer there.

Robin was on top of a grassy knoll. Nothing in sight but grass and a man in a grey business suit. He arrested Robin and they walked into a house. The man’s wife was preparing dinner. She smiled at Robin. The man said that Robin would be shot and hung in the attic with the laundry after he’d been interrogated. They were in the man’s study. Animal heads on the wall. The man’s hair was an oozing black liquid.

The man turned on a bright light and the room went dark…

 

Robin woke up. He had been sleeping with his face towards the ceiling when someone had walked in and turned on the bare light bulb. Robin turned his face towards the wall after he realized that he was awake. He liked his political dreams. He hadn’t had one in awhile and they brought back old memories. Most of the old memories were no more than memories of books and worn daydreams that had become more real with the passage of time. He hoped he could fall back into the same dream.

 

The zipper on his sleeping bag melted into a roadbed. He and his mother, father and brother were in the family’s Buick on the way from their home in Garden City to his aunt’s house in Rhode Island for a wedding.

He wasn’t in the car anymore. He was in a cramped hotel room and his suitcase was open on the floor. He dreamt that he was ejaculating into Anne’s mouth but he was pissing into the suitcase. His family walked in. He turned around and pissed on the bed and wall. His mother looked at the floor and asked if he had pissed on it. She didn’t speak a word, but he understood what she was asking.

“No, a dog did it.” His pants were at his knees.

Only he and his mother were left in the room. A girl walked in to sleep in the room. More people came into the room. It was a big room in a hostel now. Everyone piled up there new green shiny nylon backpacks in one corner. He was alone with one girl now. They were reading each other scenes from pornographic classics printed on the sides of golf balls. She was lying on the bed and he was standing – balancing on two golf balls.

A golfer came in to examine the balls. He turned out to be an anthropologist too. He gave Robin an anthropology lesson from a giant book filled with color pictures of wild animals. Robin saw one picture of a witch doctor and a voodoo doll carved in his image.

He was a woman waiting for himself to come fuck her. He, in his masculine form, opened the closet and gasped. He, in his feminine form on the bed, started screaming. All this time a police car was pulling up the long driveway to the hostel. The policeman heard the screams and came running up the stairs. They (he) were (was) scared of a picture in the closet which looked like a picture of the secretary of state at first, but was actually a picture of a torn window shade, a picture hook and an empty frame. The policeman – no face – said that it was a rare portrait of the secretary of state at his birth and that the secretary was a national hero. He took the picture.

Robin was restored to one body again. He found himself walking down the hallway of the hostel looking for a bathroom. The hallway was longer than he remembered it. It was endless. He saw a door that said “rest rooms” and he walked in. It was a secretarial pool with fluorescent ceiling lights which practically blinded him. A bald, sexless, white-robed secretary told him that the bathroom was past the hallway filled with vending machines.

In the hallway he passed vending machines that sold dogs and candy. He bought a German Shepherd and a pack of spearmint gum. The hallway led into a giant department store.

Everyone in the store stared at him and his dog as they chewed their gum. They were naked…

 

Robin woke up. The sunlight brought an end to his sleep this time. He thought a little bit about the strangeness of his dream. He wrote down parts of it in his journal. He wrote a lot about the gum-chewing dog from the vending machine, but he left out the parts about pissing on the floor and making love to himself. He was mortally afraid that someone might read his journal after he was famous, and they might determine that he was crazy (or a sexual deviant unfit for academic and public prominence) after interpreting something like that. He made a vow that he had to try to interpret his own dreams one of these days. He meant to do some reading on dreams for a while, but he never got around to it. John would have told him that he was crazy just for wishing to interpret such dreams. Nonsense is nonsense whether it takes place in sleep or in full consciousness.

John had fallen asleep right away and passed directly into a recurring dream occupied by a snake with scales the size and shape of Volkswagen hoods. He knew what his dream meant for him and he didn’t have to interpret it. He was still asleep when Robin touched his shoulder. “Time to get up.”

“Fuck! That makes two mornings running that you woke me up in the middle of my dream. You’re as bad as my mother was when I was living at home.”

“Don’t blame me. We have to catch a train.”

“I know.”

Back in 2017

Congratulations and thank you if you’ve made it this far. We’re on page 101 of the manuscript and we just finished Part One (of three). It has more structure than I remember it having; I like the way that it begins and ends with John and Robin waking up in Paris 24 hours (or slightly less than 24 hours) apart. When I started typing the first chapter a month ago, I mentioned that I didn’t think the manuscript would mention the year, let alone a specific date. I was wrong. We found out from Robin’s journal entry that all the action in the first ten chapters took place on August 15, 1975. That got me curious, so last night I went up to the attic and opened some boxes. In a old yellow and blue Löwenbräu carton whose limp cardboard sides seem ready to disintegrate, I found what I was looking for, a pile of old notebooks, one of which was my journal covering most of 1975 when I was living and going to school in Europe.  August 15, 1975 was the day I saw the woman I loved (and love) off from Le Bourget airport in Paris on a flight home to her boyfriend waiting to meet her at JFK in New York. It may not be up there in literary history with James Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s famous first date on June 16, 1904, but her departure was significant in my life. On the following day, I took a train to Geneva.

I also found in the box another notebook that contained, in minuscule illegible handwriting,  the very first  draft of Exile. Rather than beginning  with a quotation from D.H. Lawrence, the quote on the endleaf was from a Carlos Castaneda book I read during my first weeks of writing.

“You see, people tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world the way people have been telling us it is.” –Don Juan, Journey to Ixtlan”

That’s a little too spot on. I like the mystery of the D.H. Lawrence epigraph better. My journal tells me that I had just read Castaneda’s A Separate Reality and Le Tour de Gaule d’Asterix, and was in the process of reading Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund when I started writing the novel.  I read Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico,  and Peter Reich’s Book of Dreams during  the first couple of weeks of writing.  The book’s original working title was Rêvelations. Get it? That circumflex makes the title a portmanteau of the French word for ‘dream’ and the English word ‘revelation.’ That’s just a little too clever, and I’m very glad I changed it. Also, the dreams seem to take up a larger part of the first handwritten draft; I’m glad I cut down on those as well. Few things can be as boring as someone else recounting the details of their dreams, or as John puts it as the end of Part One, ‘nonsense is nonsense.’

 

The first chapter of Part Two has just been posted on 9/27/17.

 

Reading Myself In Exile (1.8)

What happens when the clichéd “novel left in a drawer” is exhumed and exposed to light? 

I’m finding out and sharing the results as I retype the manuscript of my 1970’s novel Exile in serial form, posting chapters as soon as I retype them. The eighth chapter follows, but click here to begin with chapter one.

8

John finally turned to the silent Robin and said something about being hungry. “Hey Rob, I’m almost dried off now. How about going to look for someplace good to eat?”

Robin had been planning on buying some bread and ham or something, but he was only going to be in Europe for a week and a half more and he couldn’t see any arguments against splurging a little this one time. He still had a hundred and sixty dollars in traveler’s checks left and he knew he’d be living a lot cheaper now that he was on his own. He had wanted to return on the same flight as his friend but they were the victims of some bureaucratic errors. His friend didn’t complain about his earlier flight because he was anxious to see his girlfriend after two months without her. Robin had been jealous – it was an emotion he found easy to indulge in.

“I’ve heard that there are a lot of good restaurants in the Latin Quarter,” Robin finally responded.

“Is that far from here?”

“Yeah…well it’s far enough that we’ll have to take the Metro.”

“OK.” John’s hunger was visibly wearing his patience.

“I only have one Metro ticket left so we’ll have to buy some more.”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll get them. How much are they?”

“They’re nine francs for ten tickets. I’ll pay for half.”

Once they descended into the subway station, John had a lot of trouble communicating his desires. The woman behind glass selling the tickets gave him strange looks to begin with because he was still visibly wet around his pockets and collar and in the depths of his hair. Robin thought for a second and then he stepped in to rescue his companion. “Dix billets deuxième classe, s’il vous plait.”

“Thanks a lot.” John usually handled himself pretty well just about everywhere, but this language barrier was his downfall.

They figured out the changes they’d have to make before they headed for the trains. The wall map explained it simply. They only had to change trains once. Robin liked these Metro stops. They were clean and modern. The stops that weren’t covered with new tiles were in the process of being redecorated. John didn’t like these tunnels at all. He was always intensely aware of the fact that he was underground. The rush hour crowds only made matters worse.

A train pulled up after a couple of minutes and everyone headed for the second class compartments. John bounded onto the empty first class car while Robin hesitated on the platform (But we only have second class tickets!).

“Hurry up and get on!” John yelled. Robin hopped on after he decided that the sure scorn of a peer was worse than the possible scorn of a gendarme. Everything was a balancing of the opinions of others.

They rode in first class without any problems and when they changed trains, John bounced into first class again. Once again Robin followed and they rode without problems. When they finally got off at St. Michel and emerged into a crowd of tourists, they started talking again.

“Why were you so anxious to jump onto a first class car?” Robin’s heart was still beating a little faster than normal because of the risk he had been forced into taking.

“What do you mean, ‘Why?’. You saw how people were packing themselves like sardines into the second class cars. Besides, I thought you were a Socialist or something. Aren’t you against classes?”

“Of course I’m against classes.” He didn’t feel the need to add anymore.

They walked along the Boulevard St. Michel looking at the menus in front of all the cafés. John had his heart set on real French onion soup with real French onions in it and the bread and cheese on top and he said he wasn’t going to stop until he found it. Robin was looking at a French Playboy cover in a newsstand between the sidewalk and the street. He would never walk into a newsstand and buy a magazine like that, but he would devour his friends’ issues. He was so engrossed in looking nonchalantly at the covers that he almost tripped over an old lady who was bending over to pick up a dropped coin.

***

Robin’s first real “date” with Anne was about what he had expected. The lack of hard physical contact between them rivaled that which takes place between an explosives expert and his precious bottles of nitroglycerin. He took her to a movie where he almost put his arm around her. Sometimes he felt that girls were surrounded by a thick layer of invisible cotton which repulsed all of his feeble advances.

“Do you want to come to my room and listen to some music?” Robin expected a polite refusal of his request, but she surprised him and accepted.

“Yeah sure. It’s not too late yet,” she smiled.

(She smiled.) Robin saw himself entering Amida’s Pure Land. A girl was following him up to his room. The thought crossed his mind that he didn’t know what to do with her when they got there, but he was convinced that something had to happen sooner or later. (I’m a nice guy.) It was unnatural to have such bad luck with girls and it was bound to break with or without his help. He felt that his room was ready for this evening. His desk and dresser top were always neat. He pictured time in boxes so it wasn’t hard for him to find a box for straightening his desk between study blocks for different subjects. Stray books were a rarity on his desk when he wasn’t working. All the mess that was there was specifically there for Anne. He began by downplaying the relative importance of his many political science volumes by tightly packing them near the ceiling on the top level of his wall shelves. He arranged them even straighter than usual in an attempt to present the illusion that they had been untouched – only obligatory purchases made to satisfy course requirements. The attempt to lie about himself through a rearrangement of his room extended to other areas. The conspicuous placement of his few novels and editions of Plato and Aristotle were meant to appeal to Anne’s own talk of independence from political arguments in her search for more personal and universal values. A search which Robin paid lip service to. His search at present was for sex or a secure companionship; he linked the two unconsciously – him motives were rarely examined in the light of his conscious mind.

He walked into his room before Anne and released a sigh of relief. (Thank God, at least Paul isn’t here.)

Paul walked in about a half hour later, but it didn’t make any difference. Rob and Anne were just sitting on opposite beds as a record serenaded them from Paul’s new quadraphonic system. They were talking about school. Paul came in drunk and danced around for a little while with no regard for the music. “Hey, you two want to smoke?” He was already rolling a joint.

Robin was mad now because he had convinced himself that he was going to make a pass the second that Paul burst in. That wasn’t true, of course. He wouldn’t have tried to do much more than put his arm around Anne if she had stayed the night. Robin wasn’t bad looking, and he was intelligent, and there were a few girls who did like him. A few very much. However, they weren’t about to read his mind and satisfy his desires without any input from him. He had to make some gestures and advances. Robin tended to dwell too much on this shyness which he saw as a deficiency in himself simply because it made him a little different from his acquaintances.

He walked Anne back to her dormitory without incident. He thought about kissing her when they got to her door, but that’s as far as that went. They said goodnight  and agreed that they’d probably see each other then next morning in their philosophy recitation. Robin was humming on the way back to his dorm. He stopped in and talked to his friend Aaron for a little while and then he went back to his room to do a little reading before hitting the sack. He was in a better mood than usual.

Paul walked in again. “Rob, you want to smoke?”

“Yeah, alright.”

***

John was excited. He had just found a menu with French onion soup on it.

“Hey Rob, look at this!”

Sure enough, there it was as big as a Daily News headline, French Onion Soup written in English. It was part of a 25 franc fixed price menu, but neither John nor Robin could remember seeing it anyplace else. Robin hesitated for a moment as John walked in. They got a table right on the inside of the glass so they could look out on the sidewalk. The waiting walked over and they both ordered right away. They decided on the steak and fries along with their soup.

“You know, this place is pretty expensive,” Robin started.

“I didn’t think so. It’s about six dollars.”

“Yeah, but I’ve been eating in places that were two or three at the most.”

“Really?” John looked like he was ready to leave before their order even came. “Do these places have French onion soup?”

“No, I never saw any.”

“Well, that’s the reason we came here. I had my heart set on it and you said that you really liked it too.”

“Yeah…it’s okay because I have some money left over now…How much did you bring with you?”

“Oh, I guess I have about eighty dollars left now.”

Robin was shocked. “How long are you staying in Europe?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a return flight yet. Probably a couple of months though.” John made his statements in a totally matter of fact tone of voice. He didn’t see anything wrong.

“You mean you only brought a hundred dollars to…”

“A hundred and thirty.”

“You only brought a hundred and thirty dollars to live for a couple of months and you’re spending six for a bowl of soup? You’re crazy!”

“You’re the one who’s crazy. You have this great opportunity – living in a foreign country – and then you deny yourself things you enjoy because of something as transient and unimportant as money.”

“It may ultimately be ‘transient and unimportant,’ but it has kept me alive for the two months I’ve been here.”

“Don’t you see what you’re doing to yourself? How you’re killing yourself? You’re living your whole life for tomorrow. You’re living your whole life in vain, because someday tomorrow just isn’t going to come.”

Robin was sitting quietly again as his hands fiddled with a spoon. He couldn’t figure out how their conversation had made such a jagged transition from a discussion of the cost of living in Europe to a statement about man’s mortality (Robin’s mortality). He understood what John meant though. He was always worried about having enough money to get through not only the next day, but the next few years. Wasn’t everybody? The whole idea of going to college was to prepare him for his future too. He usually agreed when people intellectualized about the value of living every day on its own, but John was the first person he ever met who actually lived his life that way. Very disconcerting.

“Your soup, Messieurs.”

John was too engrossed in eating to do much more than compliment the chef, and Robin was glad. His mind needed the rest. He thought the discussion that he and Aaron used to have at school were deep. They talked mostly about women, and once in a while they’d talk seriously about their futures after college. They never talked about death. Not even Anne would bring up questions like that when they talked about philosophy. Death and the possibility that it can come at any time isn’t something one talks about with their friends.

“See,” John began after finishing his soup. “Now that was delicious and that’s why I paid for it. I can see that you a little worried, but don’t worry about me ’cause I’m not going to let a lack of money kill me. I might end up living off the land or begging, but I’ll enjoy that too.” John really didn’t seem to be worried at all as the waiter took their soup bowls and gave them their steaks. Robin assumed that John was either lying about how much money he had or that he really was crazy. He suspected the latter.

John relished the steak as if it was his last meal. Of course, that was the way he wanted it. He jumped into fountains because each time might be his last chance to jump into a fountain and he made this trip to Europe even though he was a little short of money because it could be he last chance to take this trip. Robin saw that John was enjoying himself as he ate and that made him feel better. Rob was enjoying the view out the restaurant window too. This was a big street for American tourists and a lot of the young women walking by were beautiful. He found himself lost in fantasies as a braless girl in tight jeans and a pink T-shirt walked by.

“Hey Rob, will you hurry up and finish your steak so we can order dessert?”

***

Robin walked into his philosophy class a little late after his big date with Anne. His mind was still a little glazed from the marijuana that he and Paul had smoked right before turning in. Anne noticed the redness and heaviness in his eyes as soon as he walked in. Robin was disappointed because Anne wasn’t staring at him. He thought that they were so close because of the one evening they’d spent together. Now he was imagining that she hated him. (Look at her. She flirts with the teacher, with other guys in the class, but she acts as though I’m not here.) She did like Robin, but his chances of becoming her lover were remote so long as he refused to take risks by showing his feelings.

“Robin… you made an interesting comment to me about Professor Grossmann’s lecture on Kant’s Antinomies of Reason. Could you share it?”

Robin hadn’t been listening; his attention had been focused through his eyes to Anne’s desk. He almost forgot that he was in class. Embarrassed, he asked the instructor to repeat the question and then he proudly repeated some of his ideas. He knew that Anne would be impressed by the confidence which their teacher showed in him. The recitation continued about the same for another half hour or so. Every time the instructor would ask Rob a question, Rob would have to ask him to repeat it because he was daydreaming. He was extremely restless; he wanted the class to end so he could talk to Anne.

Although it seemed like an interminable stretch of time, the class finally ended. Robin slipped into his field jacket. It was a cool, windy October day. He stood near the door waiting while Anne slipped into her sweater and spent a few minutes talking to their teacher. Robin stood like a dog stands when it has to take a shit, but when it also has to wait for its master to attach the leash first – begging to be bound. For all his talk about being free and seeing a lot of girls, he was already following this one like a little puppy. He felt that his devotion should bring out the same feelings in her. Anne sensed some of this as she stood talking and she hated him for it. If it just wasn’t for his sad eyes shining through his shaggy face. (In his need to be bound he wants to bind me too!) His eyes screamed at her. They said, “You can shit on me if you want to. Do anything. I just want you as my girlfriend.”

Robin saw nothing in Anne’s eyes. No emotions anyway. In light of his earlier, mistaken opinions about her eyes he began to doubt if they provided any clues into her personality. Hers were beautiful. They were bright blue, but they were different from most. Instead of just one color homogenized through the whole iris, it was two distinct shades. Her eyes were basically deep blue, but there was a starburst of light blue right around the pupil. This had hypnotized Robin the night before. His big advance of the night had been to make direct eye contact with her. He told her, “You have beautiful eyes.” He meant it, of course, but it came off sounding like a line from a 1950’s musical. It had taken a supreme effort on Anne’s part to keep from laughing.

Anne finally finished talking to the teacher and Robin felt like a fool when he realized how he looked, standing in the empty doorway. Anne seemed very cool and they didn’t touch at all as he walked her to her next class. (Anne had her invisible layer of cotton on today.) They said maybe five words apiece to each other through the morning and they parted without letting their words betray an emotion.

Robin went back into his dorm room and dropped onto his bed for a little while just to think about Anne. He did a little homework and turned on the stereo and hummed along for a little while as he let himself drift away in feelings. Before he left for lunch, he decided that he was in love.

Back in 2017

This chapter brings back memories of the real “Robin” and “Anne,” but I’ll ignore that for now.

I was struck by John’s attitude about traveling with no money in light of the book I just finished reading, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. I know, I’m about five years late to that party, but I was struck by how Cheryl felt free to hike the Pacific Crest Trail specifically because she was penniless — which is almost literally true as she hikes one long section with her last two pennies in her pocket. John Matthews in this chapter would clearly identify with Cheryl’s attitude toward money.

I also thought about a cultural shift that seemed to be taking place at this time. Like the characters in this novel, very few people I knew starting college in the early seventies had a careerist attitude toward their education (at least that they were willing to admit publicly). By the time we graduated, that seemed to be changing, and younger students spoke openly about career ambitions and some even majored in a subject called “Business Administration.” Those of us who started college in the early seventies identified with late sixties icons such as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate and his horror at moving into the lucrative plastics industry. Defining oneself by one’s career (especially one’s successful career) still seems like a nightmare scenario to me, probably largely because of the era in which I grew up. The best recent description of this attitude comes from the 2013 novel of a novelist most strongly associated with the early 1970s, Thomas Pynchon. In Bleeding Edge, a young New York private school student  is described by his grandmother this way: “They’re sending him to Collegiate. Where fuckin else. They want him seamlessly programmed on into Harvard, law school, Wall Street, the usual Manhattan death march. Not if his grandma can help it.” (p. 130 of the hardcover) Ever since reading that novel, I hear the words “Manhattan Death March” in my head at least once a week when dealing with certain people at work or on streets around New York. That’s one thing all good novels should aspire to do, give you a key word or phrase or frame that helps you describe your world.

 

Chapter 1.9 has now been retyped and posted (9/15/17).