What Is All This? (18 page)

Dirk was on his way home when a girl stopped him on the street and said “Can I crash your pad? I'm alone, in real trouble, it's just me and I won't be any bother, I swear. The pad I was supposed to flop at won't let me in. These four guys I was living with there all of a sudden split for Los Angeles—ran off with my records and clothes while I was sitting it out in jail. Look at this. The creepy keeper gave it to me this morning as a sort of graduation diploma and safe-conduct visa out of Nevada.” She showed him a paper that said she'd been arrested and released after five days for vagrancy, loitering, wayward minor, accessory to crime, resisting arrest. “Resisting arrest, bullshit. They just clamped on the cuffs, felt my tits and dumped me in a smelly van. We were selling speed, made our contact, two cats and myself in Carson City—America's worst dump. Ever been there? Don't ever go. The creepy keeper said ‘Now I'm warning you, sis, don't be turning back.' And when we left the diner with our contact, twenty Feds jumped out of the shadows with guns cocked like puny movie gangsters and threw us against our truck, arrested us all.”

While they walked to his place, she told him she thought she was pregnant again. “I had a kid in Hartford last year, gave it away. My rich German-Jewish father told me the baby was very ugly after he told me how much he was forking over for my bills. Best of hospital service, never had it so good. And he was kind of sweet too, like an overconcerned expectant father expecting his first child, and then, with my society-minded momma, had me committed. But the state released me after four months, though my folks wanted me in for at least a year but were too cheap to pay for a private crazyhouse, when they found I was still getting pills and grass and was caught balling one of Connecticut's prize mental deficients behind a bandstand during a Saturday-afternoon dance. Ever been to Hartford? Don't ever go there, either. That's what they told me in Carson City. Said ‘Don't come back for six months minimum,' and I said ‘Six months my ass, I'm never coming back, none of my friends will ever come back, you lost a good tourist trade with us when you locked me up, and this giant Swedish matron, she was very congenial when she wasn't forcing my box open every ten minutes to see if I was stashing anything inside, she just laughed, laughed and laughed.”

Dirk gave her one of the two tuna fish salad sandwiches he made. She said “It looks so pretty and sweet, lettuce flouncing out of it like a dress, and sourdough's my favorite of all nonmacrobiotic breads, but no, thanks. With the last kid I gained 46 pounds, I'm ten pounds overweight as it is, so I'm only going to start eating again when and if I find I'm not pregnant. Look at that view. Golden Gate from your own place. Do you ever really look outside—I mean, really? Too much. You ought to raise your mattress to window height, make it with a groovy chick while you're both stoned on hash and eye-popping the moon. You do all these paintings? Do them on pills? Well, don't ever get on them, don't even hold them, they're worse than anything besides junkie's junk, which can actually be a good trip the first time but the shits when you have to start paying forty bells a high. You're a real housekeeper. Just look how clean this place is. You ought to wear an apron—a clean flowery one. I'll make you one, if you get me some thread things and paint and an old clean sheet. Floor recently mopped, books in place, bed made, not even a curly body hair on the rug, and pardon me for all my luggage”—she lifted her average-sized pocketbook with her pinkie and reset it on the floor—“but I feel utterly helpless if I have to travel light.”

They drank tea, she showered and said she was sorry, but she had soaked his bathroom floor and then drenched a few towels in trying to wipe it up. “When I was living in Hartford, I wasn't such a slob. In fact, I was a real housekeeper then, also: cooked, cleaned, deveined the shrimp and cracked the crabs, just obsessed with ridding my place of flecks and specks, as my mother is and you must be. But now I haven't made a bed in eight months, no, nine, except for the five days in Caron City's most depressing jail. You have kids? You look like you have a half dozen. That you and your boy in the sailboat? Is your wife as blonde as he? I never want kids, never want to get hitched. Marriage is for con men who give charm for money and that Mongoloid I balled who'll always need lots of help and love. For everyone else, it's me me me me. My childhood was the worst. My mother's a hysterical bitch and shrew. My dad's got a gripe against because he always wanted to screw me and now because he bought me a thousand dollars' worth of clothes to keep me in Hartford just two days before I split for the Coast. Two cats came by the place I was staying at and said ‘Let's take you away from all this,' meaning my apron and housekeeping chores, and I said sure, anything; there wasn't anything happening in Hartford since I gave that ugly baby away. So I packed those clothes in two valises I stole from the college boys I was living with—they did much worse to me in the past, so don't even begin to twinge and twist—and we made it across country without a bit of flak, never for a moment being anything but high. I've now been in every state but Alaska and Hawaii—Carson City, Nevada, my forty-eighth. And I have no clothes, maybe two dimes in my wallet, my father would just piss if he knew and my mother's aching to put me away for life. And most everyone who knows me says I'm wasting my time. That I've more than a one-forty I.Q. and ought to use that natural intelligence in writing about all I've seen and done, but with a humorous aspect to it, as there's far too much sad seriousness in literature and the world as it is. And one day I will. Just as soon as I land a pad of my own.”

He offered her a sleeping bag on the floor and she said that was exactly what she needed for her rotten back. They went to bed. “Hey, look,” she screamed, “I can see the moon. It's getting a little past the half stage. My God, it's being eclipsed by the earth—our earth. What do astrologers say about eclipses of the moon? Are they special nights, do any of the signs undergo any change? I bet you're a Gemini. Geminis are the worst. Yes, I'm sure you're a Gemini. Well, I'm a Taurus, we'd never get along, and my name's Cynthia Devine.”

The room was very dark when he awoke a few hours later to Cynthia talking about her magnificent view of the totally eclipsed moon. He put his hand on her knee and she felt his chest. “You have a very interesting heartbeat. I've never slept with a man with such a rapping heart.” Her hand moved down his body and she said “Ooooh, now I know why it's rapping so fast. But stop, will you, because then I can say tomorrow that it was a lot better sleeping here than in jail. There I got a crummy mattress on a wooden plank with no privacy. I wasn't even allowed to see daylight till they traipsed me across the yard for a health exam. The doctor gave me these pretty blue antibiotic pills and blood-red capsules for what he said was my venereal disease. I told him ‘Vaginal infection, Doc, not V.D. A vaginal infection I've had for a month,' and which I still have now, till he finally apologized. Prison doctors are always trying to stick you with the worst. But he was fairly nice, all told. And Sheila, the matron, wasn't half bad, either, when she wasn't trying to get into my pants.”

Someone knocked on the door. “You get your share of telegrams,” the deliverer said. “When this one came this morning, I was sure it was my fault because you didn't get the two I slipped under the door and this one was trying to find out what was wrong.”

“I started out this evening,” Chrisie wired from San Luis Obispo, “and then returned home. Let me know if you think I should really come. Call. Love.” And her phone number.

He walked Cynthia down the hill, to show her where the public phone booth was and to cash a check at the drugstore for himself. “Goodbye,” she said, shaking his hand. “I think we—no, I'm glad we didn't—oh, maybe it would've been fun if we had, as it's always a crazy farce with somebody new, though it's also nice sleeping peacefully, for a change, without someone's hands tearing into me. I've got to call some guys I know. They were staying at a flat around here before I got busted, and if they've already split, then I'm truly screwed. Maybe I could phone my dad for cash. I can get him at business now, just after he's returned from a three-martini lunch. He's really quite beautiful when he's smashed, and thanks.”

The druggist smiled. “You made the year 1968 on your check instead of 1969.”

His 85-year-old landlord was pulling out weeds from around one of the fifty or so signs he'd painted and then erected in the front yard. The sign read: Stop Being An Accessory To The Crime Of Fratricide—Don't You Know All Wars Are Silly? “I've just come from distributing my peace pamphlets downtown,” Mamblin said, “and you wouldn't believe the wonderful reception I received from so many of our courageous lads. ‘Peace first,' I told them—‘love, learn and grow. Jewish and Christian wars must end,' I said—‘gardens, not battlefields. A mental revolution, not a physical one.' One young man from Santa Monica, of all places, said that after listening to me, he would think about resisting the draft. He said I was a man of God, which I disproved scientifically—a walking institution to peace, he tried to make me, which was nearer the truth. But I've unfortunate news for you also, Dirk. Mrs. Diboneck dropped by much too early this morning and complained that you've been coming in at all hours of the day—playing the radio too loud, waking her. Having wild parties, orgies, she said, and that you're also running a hippie haven in your apartment downstairs. She's old, a good woman, knew my wife, been here close to twenty years. And you know I had trouble with the tenant before you, he being a bit queer with men in a sexual manner and shooting out all my lovely leaded-glass windows and causing a mild heart attack for Mrs. D. But what do you think of my latest sign?” He pointed past a couple dozen older ones to a new one with gold-painted letters bordered by red; I Have Arisen From The Dead. “Did it yesterday, after a long stimulating conversation with a young Welsh lady who happened by while I was weeding. It has no Christian significance, of course, other than its possible mockery of mythological Christian belief—but the symbolism's what I like. I have arisen from ignorance, mediocrity, mindlessness, myths, lies, half-truths, superstitions—I have arisen from the deaf, dumb, blind and spiritually dead. And being you're one of the truly good people in this city and a disciple of mine, I think—I don't precisely know what to make of you yet, though you're being carefully studied, Dirk, phrenologically and every other way, so be on your guard—why don't you work matters out with Mrs. D. yourself? I only don't want her waking me up again before nine.”

Mrs. Diboneck's typewritten note in his mailbox read: “I would appreciate if you would not slam the door so vigorous. It shakes everything and scares me to death. I accomodated your wish last week ago by using my T.V. and Radio allmost never. So be a Gentleman and hang on to the doors!! Thank You.”

Using Magic Markers, he made a quick small drawing of the view from his room. Red towers of Golden Gate Bridge, gold spires of St. Ignatius Church, green park, blue bay, yellow ocean, purple sky, brown, black, orange and pink hills and mountains of Marin County, and rolled it up and was about to stick it into Mrs. Diboneck's mailbox when he saw her watching him through one of her lower door panes. She stepped onto the sidewalk, clutching her house dress together at the chest. “I'm sorry I complained to Mr. Mamblin before, Mr.—but what is your name? But the noise, dear Lord, one would think a children school down there directly below with what I hear and you make. Why, why? I ask myself an old woman without any answers, and the radio, so loud I can't hear myself phone talking when it isn't waking me out of sleeps and naps I need and all such things, or is it your TV you own? But is it not possible, may I ask, that people live in this building, too? I don't want to speak about it more than now and never again to Mr. Mamblin if I must, so be reasonable, please, a nice young man and your blond boy so sweet, and we will remain kind friends. Otherwise, I must one day call the police if Mr. Mamblin does not, which to me even with my illness seems cruel but no matter can I help taking this being forced by you,” and she dropped a small bag of trash into the garbage can standing between then and returned to her apartment. He put the drawing into his billfold and went to the post office.

“Five cents a card is still quite the bargain,” the clerk said, “what with all the other postal rates raised and the cards staying the same. A two-dollar bill? Where you been hiding it? And a John Kennedy for your change.” He made a drawing on one of the cards of a laughing man running through a forest followed by a galloping sixtailed five-horned four-eared three-tongued two-nosed one-eyed horselike creature called The Multimal and addressed it to his son in San Jose. Beneath the address he wrote “Attention: Love to you and Mommy,”

“I arrived at the exact instant this thing was being delivered,” Chrisie said, holding out a telegram, as she and her girls cautiously walked down the long steep rickety flight of outside wooden stairs.

“Decided not to come after all,” Chrisie had wired from San Luis Obispo this morning. “Why not drive down here instead, Love,” her address and the number of the main connecting highway, 101.

“Remember Dirk, Caroline?” Chrisie said to her older daughter, and Caroline said “No, when are we going home?” “Remember Dirk, Sophie?” and Sophie, two in a month, said “Dow? Dow?” and painted her hand with his purple marker. “Remember Chrysalis, Dirk?” Chrisie said, and he hugged her, made bacon and eggs for the girls on his two hot plates, gave them juice in clean paint glasses, set up Sophie's portable crib, unrolled a sleeping bag for Caroline, later placed a triptych screen between the section of the room the girls were asleep in and his mattress on the floor.