A Moveable Famine
Authors: John Skoyles
O
THER
T
ITLES BY
J
OHN
S
KOYLES
POETRY
A Little Faith
Permanent Change
Definition of the Soul
The Situation
PROSE
Generous Strangers
Secret Frequencies: A New York Education
a MOVEABLE FAMINE
John Skoyles
A Moveable Famine
is an autobiographical novel. While the narrative follows the timeline of my life, it is not an exact record of events. I have collapsed several characters into composites, and have created others from my imagination. Where I have related stories concerning known persons, I have used their real names because the incidents described are as I recall them.
Copyright © 2014 by John Skoyles
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
For information, address:
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Skoyles, John.
A moveable famine / John Skoyles.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-1-57962-358-6
1. Authorship—Fiction. 2. Identity (Philosophical concept)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.K6564M68 2014
813’.54—dc23
2014006118
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE
W
e were hell-bent to become poets and all poets stood in our way. We had been outcasts in high school, stars in college and had graduated from finishing school in the art of verse. We drank and smoked and fucked as much as we could while bemoaning our middle-class upbringing and the wasted lives of everyone who did not see the world through the lens of poetry, a lens cloudy with the jizm of jerking off in furnished rooms, which we called suffering.
We contemplated suicide when our thoughts were ineffable. We contemplated suicide when we transformed our thoughts into bitter poems. We contemplated suicide when the world ignored our poems, and we committed suicide when we were ignored by the world of poetry.
With women, we were sensitive, bearing the burden of witnessing our nation’s militarism, the savage effect of the Dow Jones on the poor, the illusion of the comfort offered by religion. We pitied our parents, our siblings’ scrounging existences and two-week vacations. We pitied their ignorance of the human heart and their refusal to rake the bottom depths of the soul.
And in those depths, we forged friendships with poets who loved our poetry. Poets with whom we would tap, knock, bang, and finally demolish the doors of poetry’s academies, societies and foundations.
We were hell-bent to become poets and all poets stood in our way.
C
HAPTER
O
NE
POEM IN THE BATHTUB—WORD POWER—GREENWICH VILLAGE—FRANK O’HARA—MATER CHRISTI—THE CHIEF PROSECUTOR OF GALILEO
M
y mother recited the same poem every night when she gave me a bath—the ballad Oscar Wilde wrote while imprisoned for sodomy, a poem in which he envies a fellow inmate, a murderer sentenced to hang, for having the passion to commit a real crime. Part of the long narrative of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” goes like this:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
The bells of the Good Humor truck, children shouting and occasional police sirens drifted into our Queens railroad flat. By the end of each week, I learned a new stanza. Although I didn’t understand it, it intrigued me. There were knives and wine and blood, just as in our church, Saint Bartholomew’s, named for the martyr who had been flayed alive. Led by nuns, we paraded single file under a statue of that saint who held a blade in one hand and his skin over his arm like a suit. My mother, Olga Bertolotti, grew up in that same neighborhood in a large Italian family. Her sisters became nurses and secretaries and her brothers joined the transit authority and fire department. The men on our block prized close haircuts and shaves; their wives wore heavy foundation garments. Every sofa and armchair was fitted with a plastic cover. My mother graduated from Newtown High, whose most famous alumnus was Don Rickles, where she won a contest for putting the words of the school anthem, “Sing with a Will for Newtown,” to the tune of “Glow little glowworm.” The prize was a poetry anthology,
A Quarto of Modern Verse.
The summer I was twelve, I found that book on the knick-knack shelf next to Hummel figurines of girls swinging baskets of daisies, but ignored it in favor of my father’s paperbacks,
Increase Your Word Power
and
Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary.
My father didn’t finish eighth grade, but had gotten a job as an envelope salesman and wanted to keep it. The office manager gave him these books and told him to read the
New York Times
. He became the sole white-collar worker on a block of policemen, longshoremen and steamfitters. His story imbued the books with a magical promise—they had
power
in the title, the power to transform a man.
When I did pick up the quarto, I found the words of Wilde I’d memorized, the poem printed across from a photograph of the flamboyant poet with cape and cane. Kipling held a pipe under his brush mustache. Poe scowled next to the outlawish Stephen Crane. I hid the surname of dapper John Masefield with my pinkie and imagined my own name there. If I read a poem twice, I had it memorized.
It never occurred to me that poetry was still being written until one afternoon, sitting in front of the TV eating chocolate snaps, I watched Art Linkletter hold a microphone to Big Eric, a bearded beatnik tapping a bongo drum and reciting in a Greenwich Village coffee house. Women with straight hair and black leotards clicked their fingers in applause. I asked my parents to take me to Bleecker Street. Surrounded by Le Figaro Café’s dark mahogany, men smoked pipes and played chess. I ordered a Himbersaft for the strangeness of the name. It turned out to be a simple raspberry soda, but I savored it because a Himbersaft in Le Figaro Café was different from a Coke at Woolworth’s.
Most weekends I sat on the lip of the fountain in Washington Square Park listening to folksingers. On Eighth Street I bought a print of wide-eyed children behind a torn chicken-wire fence. I associated these waifs of Walter Keane with the Beats simply because they showed emotion. I listened to anyone who wore a beard and swayed under a tree declaiming from a sheaf, and one afternoon I stood before a toothless old man who lisped a long litany, every line of which began, “Hear my heart.” I found a discarded
Village Voice
on the Number 7 train to high school. The front page printed a poem by Frank O’Hara called “To the Harbormaster,” and I placed it in the frame of my bedroom mirror. Searching for more of his work, I learned he died that week in 1966, the poem surrounded by a black border of mourning. Poet Ed Sanders ran the Peace Eye Bookstore, a former kosher butcher shop, with hand-printed signs on the shelves that called for the legalization of pot and cunnilingus. On my first visit I left with a mandrake root and a copy of
Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
I saw poems by O’Hara in an issue of the
Evergreen Review
at my neighborhood newsstand, Admiration Cigar. The cover showed a naked woman jogging through the autumn woods. I paid the dollar and eased it into my book bag, walking home carrying a forest where girls ran nude.
Mater Christi, my high school, three stories tall, was shaped like a horseshoe and divided down the middle into male and female. The genders mingled only in the center of each floor: gym, cafeteria, and the library, where my two desires fused—books and girls. Leafing through magazines, I watched the plaid skirts, knee socks and blouses tied at the neck by bows, and met no one. In the stacks I found
The New American Poetry,
with Kerouac’s dizzying line, “Love’s multitudinous boneyard of decay.” Jack Spicer’s biography said to write him at THE PLACE in San Francisco. I sent a letter, waited months, and then I learned he was dead. I revered a photograph of Ezra Pound’s lined cheeks and pointed goatee. I stared at his ancient face and imitated “The Cantos,” asking the gods of poetry to send Pound’s ghost, the powerful voice of antiquity, into my soul. Then I learned he was alive.
Many of the poets met friends and lovers at college. Gary Snyder roomed with Lew Welch and Philip Whalen, so college became a path to poetry. No one in my family had gone beyond high school, and my investigations discovered poet Richard Wilbur at Wesleyan. Bard College interested me because the cover of its literary magazine showed a biker on a Harley kissing a bikini-clad girl in a jungle. My application essay, cribbed from
How to Be Accepted by the College of your Choice,
began, “Our small family has always been a happy one.” I took a guidance counselor’s advice to apply to the all-male Jesuit college he called a safe bet. I enrolled at Fairfield University of Saint Robert Bellarmine, whose mascot was the stag and whose namesake was the chief prosecutor of Galileo.
Four years later, I entered the master’s program in English at the University of Iowa, which I found in the college rankings of
U.S. News & World Report
. My parents had the same response as everyone in my apartment building: “Couldn’t you get in anywhere around here?” My Aunt Linda called to congratulate me, but before she hung up, she said, “By the way, John, I think it’s pronounced
Ohio
.”
C
HAPTER
T
WO
ADVISING APPOINTMENT—THE GANGBANGER OF IOWA CITY—MEETING McPEAK—SMOKE RINGS—ALLEN GINSBERG—“RIBBLE”—PAYMENT IN THE LOW TWO FIGURES
