Women and Men (145 page)

as you, Jim, can see when he comes into a workshop when he comes, and in that ledger of his he has place for that famous President’s black Jupiter behind him on horseback or muleback (secret overseer-without-whip)—comes up in that famous American’s account books who knows when?, when the master was meditating the source of petrified shells in the great layers of schist in North Mountain—not the ray-root mountain of the West-coming-East alluded to in the new weather of my old science-man when he writes, that will change our chromosomes and coastal precipitation not necessarily for the worse—and Jefferson recalled if not the Universal Flood those shells fifteen thousand feet high in the Andes that were said to testify to it—and this Jupiter was in unconscious connection with his famous master in ways not imagined by Willie Calhoun Jackson’s universe of black chance

: whereas you Jim boiling down my letters in your head now and the visits in between, keep us all in our places: you’ve got Juan, I bet, out in the yard pumping iron to build up strength to study chapter and verse long after lockup, after the last steel door clangs to, made by a Cleveland ironworks but not by unskilled cons but Juan isn’t hearing the clanging any more if I may speak for him, he’s memorizing contradictions between the freedom to sell that one basic valuable your labor, and the freedom not to buy it of those who made the steaks and winter coats you need, for these are nothing but
materialized
labor: but I say (wishing Ruth M. Heard was here), Listen, man, the cheap-labor market for Puerto Ricans in the early fifties, that’s past, it’s education that’s the difference (but I don’t like what my words tell me like a head I have contacted into existence outside of me)— So what happened to
you,
Foley (Juan demands), blond, white Irish-Polack (asks the red-eyed leader): Juan bides his time, regrets he was not at Attica getting strafed by a Rockefeller for what a difference a transfer makes: while hearing his own voices only sometimes because he’s studying every paragraph three times of a sacred book that found its proofs from across the ocean in England, but: Attica (I tell my friend Juan) was inevitable, then so was his not being there to get winged and anyway the day is over when Puerto Ricans were neither Americans to Americans nor Latin-Americans to Latin-Americans:

No, they’re not over, he looks up now from his book and I feel old twilights I used to enjoy outside—but (I add) Puerto Rican is internal immigrant. Migrant, you mean, he answers and don’t look up from his book: So what are you, man? Con, I answer—and he goes up in a laugh or not a laugh, and snaps the Bible shut:

You see, I come back at him, quantity of opposition between us has increased to a qualitative change.

But he reaches for the good book that’s dropped to the floor by his file crate: "Con" is right, he says: (Not "Pro," I quick-quip)
Convert,
I say.

He says, Look here (but I can’t see the long footnote he’s holding up): I should have kept up with my fuckin’ chemistry, he’s saying in somebody else’s voice. What
I
know about paraffins and fatty acids?

Baby, you don’t
need
to know that shit (I reply); Marx didn’t know much more chemistry than Lenin knew about rocks; it’s what you make of it (I act like I’m kidding, lift the open book out of his hands and see the chem footnote adapted from Hegel’s breakthrough vision and I recall you don’t need Marx to tell you a quantitative change builds up and bursts into qualitative (water heated to steam, I’ll take water any day and so would Mir’s dad’s tenants though steam is welcome in season) and mine came the morning I woke and knew my billion colloid cells were truly under suspension not solution

but I’m thinking of Ruth M. Heard, Jim—why?—I tell Juan, Look it’s all in Hegel, the evolution and obstacle quest of the spirit, that’s what you’re doing in here.

He grabs the book away, I’m still talking: Your brothers and sisters have got all they need except luxuries and freedom from worry.

But (he replies, because Jim whatever you hear ‘bout prison violence, we have a lot of time to rap in the abstract), they got (he says) freedom
not
to think
why
the boss knows more of what I need to know than I do, but I need to only because
he
knows, when neither of us really needs this business.

The light falls, Jim, through thick and thin, I hear it, actually sloshing around my vocal cords, and each sees the other in pieces. We both know who said that, Jim; I feel we both know. Though he, the gentleman from Chile, told his contact here, who passed it on to Efrain, who got to me, that he thought he had heard it said at Cape Kennedy near the coffee machine by a passing journalist or, sensitive as it was (though who knows what it means— except me and you, that is), by an otherwise menacingly ambitious photo-journalist with whom the Chilean has found himself involved.

Do we all live alike in here? I ask Juan; and Ruth M. Heard, who I saw maybe ten, twelve times during my formative years, is with me and against me (I’m excited)— Man, did you ever have raps like this Outside?

You’re getting silly again, Foley, says strong-man friend Juan, What are you putting off? go away and leave me alone (and well it isn’t as if I don’t have letters to spirit out of here!). And Jim, I remember how Ruth Heard said how her father believed in speaking out and would pack a Thermos of Indian tea (how she learned to drink it without sugar) for the two of them on London Sunday morning and a cheese sandwich each, and her sister going up and downstairs every minute while her mother sat by the radio; So Ruth and her dad went off on a double-decker for hours with two changes to get to Hyde Park where royalty’s galloping around—you have been there, Jim, I am sure. And here her father would get on a box at Hyde Park Speakers Corner and talk, and talked even when they turned away because he believed in a new all-purpose tax, and in changing the time standard for England, and in experimenting with having every area in the world on the same time. He wore a dark brown suit, red tie, gray felt hat like a labor leader, and he could interrupt his address to catch the attention of someone, tourist or resident— speaker-shopping—but he kept talking even against ultimate noise interference, like if the machine you’re driving is working O.K. you forget what a jerk you are, but if you bust a fan belt in the boondocks (and the car is "borrowed" at that) it all comes down on you, what you are.

Juan says he wants to get to the bottom of why things happen. I say you can’t blame it all on Monopoly or Race. He’s thinking I know about his little baby brother, no baby now. There’s a lot of water under the wall between him and me and I’m going to leave him now and go around the corner, it’s time to eat, he bides his time, his food and roof, his heat and light are free but he must work overtime for that one corn as the Good Father says that’s only Juan’s
subsistence
before he begins to even think of his family’s, which he does not.

And Jim, take Charlie with his animal eyebrows, who’ll always listen and bring you together with someone you don’t know and even he is coming to think the Education Programs maybe sedate you, and knows the Colloidal Unconscious is neither powerful nor a drug. And Smitty will never tell you but he knows he’ll never be a journalist but comes to the workshop to stay out of his cell till eight-thirty and to add to his tape collection while trying to go on closing his eyes to his little woman (with the highest heels that make her taller than he is broad); and you, Jim, see Efrain, soon to be released, going up and down in that elevator because he put up a curtain across his cell bars and wouldn’t take it down, only the beating he took on the way to the Box is in his head now and his dreams shared with his Iroquois lady who can massage even his fingertips-fingerprints and nobody laid a finger on him for a long time I think (though sometimes I think every guy in here knows news I don’t); and nobody kids around with Smitty lately, but he’s got his tapes with guys sharing their thoughts and feelings (you don’t get that on the Outside so much), so you know that these guys are not just (as the foreign gentleman was heard to say to his contact here) vacuum-packed for burial in space, that even if in the cemetery here where you don’t want to wind up alone, on the headstone they got a number (that’s
all)
so let’s face it, they’re not dealing with death’s sting even at the end when, whether felt or not, it comes, these guys rapping on tape are just as alive, Jim, as you saying (also on tape, where I first heard you), that it was maybe just due to your chemistry that you were unconscious all these years which I don’t quite believe you, these guys they are not vacuum-packed for burial in space, that’s what our mutual acquaintance the South American said who we both know though how well is like why you’re here—he said the astronauts look alike, and a man he met there in Florida called them all sealed up in their suits unknown soldiers which made an impression on the South American and on me because the astronauts aren’t typical at all. Yet in your head it’s mainly me I hear talking (smile) and the time we had a Visitors Hours visit as private as such can be with the waste product at the high desk on the platform catapulting butts every twenty minutes depth-charging over the desk to be swept up (no waste/make work) by some half-visible con, not to mention in the corners above the junk dispensers the two closed-circuit videos scanning the room as if you would steal me and my annual value of fourteen thousand five hundred dollars when at best you rent my heart, friend, and all you can get at except to reach across the steel counter to press the flesh is the dispenser’s white-flour sandwiches (crisped by time) in their lighted windows and the no-cal leukemi-aid and the potato curls which they hold down inflation by filling the bag less up but then they rethink the price two months later, which I owe you thirty cents for: we spoke so little of the Chilean economist that I wondered was he our connection after all, though I figured you had come to your own discovery of the Colloidal Unconscious as well as through our economist-exile who had mentioned it to you.

I wondered how much he was our connection because—let’s be frank at least in heart-to-heart—when I asked if you had an address for him better than mine which is a "Care-of " that just isn’t where a man with a dignified manner and a head like that hangs his hat (not even an apartment
over
the deli in question), you paused to let, I know, those sub-microscopic half-knowing mirror-particles face me a message: which was, Can’t
you
give
me
an address?

Hey, when you going to bring Larry, I faced back an answer. College and from Outside.

Someone inside me knows more than I, and that’s the one you needed to ask. Unless it’s yourself, these later weeks, Efrain getting out, Smitty missing workshop one week, then not taping us the next, and saying little but keeping his eyes open now, telling me he did not believe in suicide.

Yourself, I said, for you said that sometimes going out on assignment you’d have this dumb idea you already had the facts. Was this to warn me of what I knew already from the tape, oh and from the capability of those colloid surface faces we share more than you may know, Jim—that you brought a message in units only I might put together from that fated man—his name you know; and he, as I told you on your last visit (not the most recent when you were not admitted) I have been in correspondence with—and he hinted Danger he is in from a journalist.

But these letters of his had begun again only after our workshop had gotten off the ground so there was something there between the two, a connection though not through the Colloidal unConscious with him—only with you, if you are not yet much of a chemist, so that in the evenings in this multiple dwelling while Charlie and others on Honor Block are watching the seven-o’clock news, I am catching the two of you—I’ll explain—there’s three Honor Blocks here—it’s not so easy to concentrate on Honor Block—but what I am explaining (since you and I accept no substitutes) is that you and the South American aren’t all I see, but it’s on not one but two screens, sounds like the latest thing, Jim, two separate screens you don’t tell the guard about, but he wouldn’t hear anyway up at the head of the tier reading the paper.

Two screens—separate but overlapping. It’s always that way—neither one complete, and I’m about to catch on one screen you and him both.

There’s his face listening at me like a window, but I know it is you he is facing even if you don’t know, and on the other screen there you are but not face-on (like a window) or back-to, instead in profile and you just finished talking, say to our mutual acquaintance who’s on Screen One, and there’s other stuff on each screen, women and children (I didn’t say "innocent" but you heard the after-image), an orchestra (I’m looking back and forth) and a stage with singers and some people I feel I know in the audience near me offscreen, a barmaid grinning straight up (with her kids yelling in the apartment upstairs, off-screen), an apartment furnished only with one unbaited mousetrap vacant for one and a half socially necessary love-hours, an arm in a sleeve I’ve seen on two men before and a hand swinging close-up back and forth, on-screen off-screen like it’s making the background of walls and stairs move, and then on the other screen as if I’m the owner two forearms and hands fitting a galvanized aluminum lid snug down over a garbage can so I know who it was in the other screen going downstairs, but whipping back I see the sleeve that’s going downstairs pull up above the wrist and there is undoubtedly the blue toe of my old man’s tattoo; then here’s a window full of shirts and jackets and when a bus passes I see me and Miriam in the glass and an out-of-state Dodge parked in a towaway zone and want to look some more—she takes my picture at the beach with her mother’s old box camera—but I’m seeing the other screen and a table with a million winged particles of steam above three bowls of real chicken soup I wish I could smell and we’re sitting watering at the mouth until her father’s hand comes up and grabs his spoon but before I can do likewise I’m back to the other screen but I’m in prison, not my head, and what else needs to be proved, you jerk you—and I don’t get to see me and Miriam but a familiar hand half in the dark reaching for a switch which is dark enough so it could be my father turning on the light on a Friday afternoon in spring when he’s home from the garage—but I know it isn’t, it’s someone else and the switch is for the garbage cans.