The Vulture (20 page)

I.Q. Is Really Ivan Quinn

July 11, 1968

‘You were the model for my sketch,’ she said.

I took the rough-surfaced art paper she offered and stared at it. And there I was, or so I am to many, sitting on a gray-slate mantel that was formed like a chair, staring out over the small tributary that tumbles from some distant lake within the vast confines of Central Park. Dressed in a dashiki, blue jeans, moccasins, and wire-framed sunglasses – reading
Alcestis
.

‘Was I?’ I asked. ‘You have painted more than me.’

The look she had given me was somehow reminiscent of small children when first they go to the zoo and see the many animals, restless and nervous inside their steel cages. The young mind is alive, and the eyes dart everywhere at once, trying to see the fantastic before it disappears.

‘May I sketch you?’ I asked.

‘Do you sketch?’

‘Not nearly so well, nor with charcoal,’ I admitted. ‘I consider myself a painter with words. Another mere poet. I really think I’m a romanticist. I would have liked to have been around with Tennyson and Byron, but those were the days when black men were mindless vegetables, if you believe the authorities, capable of nothing more than having a plow strapped to their backs like some pointed-eared jackass, and weaving and stumbling, digging a crooked furrow in the earth.’

‘You may “sketch” me if you like,’ she said.

I took a good look at her. She was blushing, making
a great to-do about brushing the golden hair from across her eyes. This was more than anything else to keep from looking at me.

She was dressed in a billowing cotton blouse that I disliked. The wind had taken hold of it and blown it away from her breasts. The shorts she wore had once been jeans and came nearly to her knees. I was more interested in her face and skin. The face was soft, so much so that for a moment I thought it only an image of her true face. I felt almost as though I must write quickly in order to capture the impression before the breeze swept it away. Eyes, blue and set wide apart. Nose, thin and well formed, like a sculpture of some ancient Greek goddess. Mouth, sensual and tender, with just a trace of rose lipstick.

It seemed that we looked down together at her feet. They were covered with sand and mud from the bottom of the stream she had crossed to deliver my likeness.

‘I like to go without shoes,’ she said.

‘A true form of freedom,’ I said.

She stopped blushing, and her eyes read ‘danger.’

‘You’re making fun of me!’ she snapped.

‘Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.’

‘A quote from whom?’

‘Junius.’

‘I . . . see the point,’ she said.

She sat very still while I wandered over her face and limbs, discovering with my eyes what I would convey with my pen. I picked out a sheet of paper and started to taste her secrets, as she looked first at me and then quickly away when our eyes met.

‘Please remember that poets have a license to lie . . . Pliny the Younger,’ I said.

‘And will you lie?’ she asked.

‘What purpose of a lie except to fool those who come with importance?

Sweet soft something that must be only now, where were you when I was straight and cast up on the shore for God’s inspection? were you only in my mind, or truly in my eyes? with lips like fresh rosebuds, eyes like fountains of mystery, and all of life in your smile that I no longer can see, where were you when my mind was smashed like a rag doll atop a sphere of this concrete hell? . . . and

where will you be in the morning?

‘Did I make you think of this?’

‘You bring a lot of things to mind . . . What’s your name?’

‘Margie Davidson.’

‘I’m Ivan Quinn. Some people call me I.Q.’

‘Hi.’ She gave me
that
smile again. ‘I thought I was the only one in the world who knew of this spot. It’s covered on all sides by the bushes.’

‘I only found it today. Perhaps for you it’s an unlucky day.’

‘Why?’

‘Thursday the thirteenth.’

‘But isn’t it only on Friday . . . ?’

‘The general root of superstition is that people observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget the other . . . Francis Bacon.’

‘Are you superstitious?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But I sometimes like to know things like that. I read astrology to find out if the sign is right for whatever I have in mind.’

‘And if the sign isn’t right?’

‘It’s according to how badly I want to do it.’

She smiled again.

‘Do you smoke?’ I asked, offering a cigarette.

‘Thank you.’

I lit both cigarettes and took another look. She was about eighteen or nineteen. I noticed a high-school graduation ring on her finger that said 1966. Beneath us and across the stream, I saw her large painting pad, pocketbook, sunglasses, and sandals. She was watching me closely.

‘Did you get anything from Euripides?’ she asked.

‘Only that without gods walking the streets like cops, there would have been nothing for him to write about.’

I reached into the shirt pocket of my dashiki and pulled out a joint. Without looking her way, I lit it, inhaled deeply, and passed it to her. She took it and pulled hard on it once and handed it back.

‘I seldom like to read what dead people have written. I don’t mean only people who have been buried, but people who were only walking death when they lived . . . There was nothing there in the beginning, I suppose. Their lives were only struggles for the merest existence, not a battle for the difference between fantasy and reality. Where is the reality in Euripides and Aeschylus and Homer? They . . .’

‘They related what the people believed at that time,’ she said.

‘Then where was the reality within the age they lived in?’

‘. . . Where do you go to school?’ she asked.

I paused for a second. Without answering, I took a drag on the reefer and leaned against the back of my throne.

‘I’ll be entering Columbia as a sophomore,’ I said.

‘
Entering
as a sophomore?’

‘It’s really all very funny,’ I said. ‘Because I will go on being a hypocrite there as I was in high school and everywhere else. It’s a funny thing about hypocrisy. You see . . . it’s contagious. You come to a point in your life where you see the inadequacies and even the stupidity of what you are doing, but you are forced by
society to do things that cut against your soul. I would rather be dead sometimes than relating to James Joyce and Norman Mailer, but there is actually nothing else that you can do.’ I passed her the stick and lit another. Our pedestal was caught in a fog of perfume.

‘You could be a hippie,’ she said, giggling.

‘Yes. I suppose I could. But even the unorthodox has become a sign of conformity. First there were beatniks, and now hippies, and tomorrow whatever . . . They say that they’re living life the way they please, but watch them. They get high and cry. They get straight and cry. Where is the reality there?’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘What the hell do
you
want to do? . . . I mean, it’s your world. Why do white people always ask so many questions?’

‘You were the one asking the questions!’

‘Rhetoric. Not to be applied personally, I don’t guess.’

I passed her another stick. I was almost certain she was going to get up and go. I didn’t really want her to. The sun was setting, starting to drift to another quarter of the flatisphere. God’s one great jaundiced eye peering into the insanity of our tabletop world.

‘I.Q., who quotes quotes,’ she said, giggling. I giggled myself.

‘And what were you doing here on a Thursday?’ I asked.

She laughed even harder.

‘I was stood up,’ she said.

‘By a doubtless fool. Never see him again. One strike and you’re out. Imagine the audacity of the ass to leave you stranded within the boundaries of this mini-wilderness with nothing to save you but a piece of charcoal.’ We both laughed. ‘I think the swine should be hunted down like a mad dog and shot!’

‘And who will be the hunter?’

‘I will! It was I who first realized his asininity and made my disapproval a matter of public record. I think that at the next
board meeting he’ll be castrated and his family jewels set in bronze as a lesson to all those who would dare desecrate the privilege of an afternoon alone with you, disconnected from all the mores and folkways that bind us.’

There was more laughter. The marijuana was affecting us both. We watched, near hysterics, as the poem I had written was caught in a breeze and went floating over our jutting station down into the stream.

‘I’m really not amused,’ she said. ‘I’ve just – oh – lost – haha – a precious gift. I think I shall have to take my painting back.’

‘I’ll be damned!’ I yelled, still laughing. ‘I’ll write a thousand more, and all of them will come together only halfway between my ineptitude and the glory of your beauty . . . I mean that.’

‘Do you?’

‘There was a time when a girl as beautiful as you couldn’t stay near me for such a time without being kissed. . . . But I keep thinking that perhaps you are an illusion, something that my fading hope has conjured up to keep me sane.’

‘And . . .’ I didn’t let her say anything at all. I reached for her and gently pulled her to me, until I could crush her cotton blouse beneath my palm and feel her pressing her lips to mine.

Her mouth was wet against my neck, and her tongue darted in and out of my ear, flashing a signal to my loins that sent swift shivers up and down my spine. Still, somewhere my mind was outside, cruising objectively along, snickering and taking notes at the funny-looking black-power advocate and skywriting the word h-y-p-o-c-r-i-t-e across my glasses with indelible foam. Where is the reality here, I wondered. What new games will I play now? I knew all along what she had in mind when she came trotting up here with her silly-assed interpretation of a giant penis charcoaled across that goddamn sandpaper. Here was another blow against the
establishment. In the arms of a black man equals running through Central Park without shoes equals wearing cut-off blue jeans instead of Wanamaker’s Queen Wardrobe at only a million dollars down and a million a month for the rest of your life. I was all caught up in the whole trip. And the winner of the Miss I-had-a-better-nigger-than-you-did contest that will be held in the girls’ dormitory at Miss White America University on the day that school opens. And the reason is because my nigger not only had a tremendous dick, but quoted Junius and other famous people that I had not even heard of.

Here we have, ladeez and gentlemen, the main attraction of the ages. The dainty flower of the Western Hemisphere and crowning feat of world femininity – Miss White Woman! Applause. Whistles. And in this corner, wearing only an XL prophylactic – BIG BLACK BUCK! Boos from the white men in the audience. Right before your very eyes, this beauty, pale as snow, will be ripped to shreds by that incredible instrument that you women are feasting your eyes on between our specimen’s legs. He will place it right at the mouth of our fair maiden’s sexual opening and plunge it into her very bowels. She will at that time scream. Oh, my God! I’m coming! I’m coming!

In my mind I had to deal with the fact that my discovering a flaw in this new relationship, another ulterior motive that made our frantic involvement still synthetic, was nothing new. I had often related to the ideas of Sartre and Genet as to the basically banal nature of women and my lack of realism when near them. After all, the true nature of existence was one of pure independence, if you believe the Bible. There was no Mrs God, who shared all of her husband’s problems, trials, and tribulations. There was no Mrs Jesus to wear black when her man was nailed to a cross. Even without my relating myself to the deity, I could see
where men of certain natures would not be able to resolve themselves to sharing all of their innermost thoughts with a woman. The basic nature of a woman is emotional, so how could she possibly be able to relate to an intellectual dilemma? This was a part of the reason for my sneering at women in professional positions. If for no other reason than for the fact that once a month they
had
to deal with these internal issues that would make them sick to their stomachs.

On the block I was constantly engaging in the hypocrisy of daily living, simply trying to find an object or a theory that I could say was something I shared with others. The little girls I knew were incredible. They stared at me as though I were a freak, and when I got high I wondered if subconsciously I didn’t perpetuate their images, because I couldn’t understand them either.

‘Let’s go down there,’ Margie said.

‘Right.’ I was talking to her and getting up and walking with her, and mad at myself.

Perhaps, I thought, sex is the link between men and women. It’s possible that Western civilization has created a monster by giving women the same rights that men have. This way, they relate to each other in all phases of existence, and this exterminates the mystery that was once involved with romance and the word ‘love’ itself. If this is the case, then American society has prostituted everything by building up artificial sexual boundaries between black and white. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. White women wanted black men because they saw them treated like animals and responding like animals. Chained and beaten, living in a shack without even the vaguest of sanitary props. They wanted the black man because they saw no tenderness and gentleness, and their masochistic tendencies were brought vividly in their own minds. The white man had brought civilization into the
bedroom, and black men could not afford the luxury of an inhibition.

Margie and I lay out next to each other in the high grass. I lit a reefer, and we smoked in silence, watching the rainbow colors attack each other as the sun sank and the leaves on the trees swayed gently in the wind. The only signs of the life we wanted to leave behind us were the blaring of car horns out in the street and the laughter and chatter of other people that reminded us that we did not exist alone.