Storm for the Living and the Dead Read online

  well, we found

  one and he ordered a

  scotch and soda and I

  ordered a whiskey

  sour

  and we sat there

  looking straight

  forward

  really

  not much to

  say

  except

  some time later

  still sitting there

  drinking about the

  same

  he told me

  his wife had left

  him

  for a real estate

  agent

  who worked out of

  Arizona and

  New Mexico

  where things were

  going

  especially good

  mostly around

  Santa

  Fe.

  the world of valets

  after having my car broken into twice

  at the track—

  you know how it is: your door is

  jammed open when you

  arrive

  and inside there is nothing but

  large empty holes where the

  equipment was, nothing but the

  curling of the

  wires . . .

  so I decided upon valet

  parking

  feeling it would be cheaper in

  the long

  run . . .

  and the first thing I noticed

  my first day at valet

  parking

  was that for the extra

  price

  they threw in a little

  conversation

  “hey, buddy, how’d you get a

  car like that? you don’t look like

  a guy with brains . . . you must have

  inherited some money from your

  father . . .”

  “you guessed it,” I told the

  valet.

  the next day another valet

  told me, “listen, I can get you

  some cheap wine by the case and there’s

  a crippled girl in the motel across the

  track that gives the best head since

  Cleopatra . . .”

  the next one said, “hey, fuck-face,

  how’s it going?”

  I watched and noticed that the

  valets treated the other patrons with

  standard civility.

  then

  one day

  they wouldn’t even give me

  a ticket tab for my

  car.

  “how am I going to prove this

  car is

  mine?”

  “you’ll just have to

  convince us . . .”

  when I came out that

  evening

  there was my car

  parked at a little getaway

  lane by the

  hedge, I didn’t have to

  wait like the

  others

  and I’d always hear some

  little

  story:

  “hey, man, my wife tried to

  commit suicide . . .”

  “I can understand

  that . . .”

  day after day

  a different story from a

  different

  valet:

  “I love my wife but I got this

  girlfriend and I fuck the shit out of

  her . . . I mean, one day all I’m going to be

  doing is shooting blue smoke, so what the

  fuck?”

  “Frank,” I told him, “how you run out your

  string is up to you . . .”

  and

  like say

  last Wednesday there was an odd

  occurrence:

  there’s the head valet

  and he has these headphones and

  mike

  he used to call the cars of the

  patrons

  to the out-riding pick-

  up drivers

  and he placed the headphones

  on my dome and there was

  the mike

  and he told me,

  “Frank wants to hear from

  you . . .”

  and I saw him out there

  tooling the white

  pick-up

  and I spoke into the

  mike:

  “Frank, baby, everything is

  death!”

  and I heard him back through the

  headphones:

  “FUCKING A-RIGHT!”

  he waved and then had to

  slam on the brakes

  almost hitting a blue

  ’86 Caddy

  it was the Hollywood Park meeting

  summer 1986

  and the valets who parked the

  old man’s battered 1979

  BMW with the fog lights ripped

  away

  and the small colors of the

  German flag

  left corner

  back window

  I got into that machine and drove it

  out of there, the centuries still

  moving toward the dark

  forever and

  forever

  and I drove east down Century

  got on the Harbor Freeway

  south

  there’s much more to betting the

  horses than cashing or tearing up

  tickets.

  I live to write and now I’m dying

  I’ve told this one before and it has never gotten published so

  maybe I didn’t tell it properly, so

  it goes like this: I was in Atlanta, living in a paper

  shack for $1.25 a week.

  no light.

  no heat.

  it’s freezing, I’m out of money but I do have

  stamps

  envelopes

  paper.

  I mail out letters for help, only I don’t know

  anybody.

  there are my parents but I know they won’t

  care.

  I write one to them

  anyhow.

  then

  who else?

  the editor of the New Yorker, he must know me, I’ve

  mailed him a story a week for

  years.

  and the editor of Esquire

  and the Atlantic Monthly

  and Harper’s.

  “this is not a submission,” I wrote

  them, “or maybe it is . . . anyhow . . .”

  and then came the pitch: “just a dollar, it will

  save my life . . .” and etc. and etc. . . .

  and somehow

  I had the addresses of Kay Boyle and Caresse

  Crosby

  and

  I wrote them.

  at least Caresse had published me in her

  Portfolio. . . .

  I took all the letters down to the corner mailbox

  dropped them in and

  waited.

  I thought, somebody will take pity on the starving

  writer, I am a dedicated

  man:

  I live to write and now I am

  dying.

  and

  each day

  I thought that I

  would.

  I stalled the rent, I found pieces of food

  in the streets, usually

  frozen.

  I had to take it in and thaw it

  under my bedcover.

  I thought of Hamsun’s Hunger

  and I

  laughed.

  day followed cold day,

  slowly.

  the first letter was from my father,

  a six pager, and I shook the pages

  again and again

  but there was no

  money

  just

  advice,

  the main bit

  being: “you will never be a

  write
r! what you write is too

  ugly! nobody wants to read that

  CRAP!”

  then the day

  came!

  a letter from Caresse

  Crosby!

  I opened it.

  no money

  but

  neatly typed:

  “Dear Charles:

  it was good to hear from

  you. I have given up the

  magazine. I now live in a

  castle in Italy. it is

  high on a mountain but

  below me is a village

  and I often go down there

  to help the poor. I feel

  it is my calling.

  love,

  Caresse . . .”

  didn’t she read my letter?

  I

  was the poor!

  did I have to be an Italian

  peasant to

  qualify?

  and the magazine editors never

  responded and neither did

  Kay Boyle

  but I never liked her writing

  anyhow.

  and I never expected much

  from the magazine

  editors.

  but Caresse

  Crosby?

  BLACK SUN PRESS?

  I now even remember how

  I finally got out of

  Atlanta.

  I was just wandering the

  streets and I got to this

  little wooded

  area.

  there was a tin shack there

  and a big red sign

  said: “HELP WANTED!”

  inside was a man with

  pleasant blue eyes and he was

  quite friendly

  and I signed on to a

  railroad track gang:

  “someplace west of

  Sacramento.”

  on the ride back

  in that dusty one-hundred-year-old coach with

  the torn seats and the rats and

  the cans of pork and beans

  none of the fellows knew that I had been

  published in Portfolio along with

  Sartre, Henry Miller, Genet and

  etc.

  along with reproduced paintings by

  Picasso and etc. and etc.

  and if they had known they wouldn’t have

  given a shit

  and frankly

  I didn’t either.

  it was only some decades after

  when I was in slightly better circumstances

  I happened to read about the death of

  Caresse Crosby

  and I once again became confounded

  by her refusal to

  send a lousy buck to a

  starving American genius.

  that’s it

  this is the last time I’m writing this

  one.

  it should get

  published . . .

  and if it does I’m going to get hundreds

  of letters

  from starving American geniuses

  asking for a buck, five bucks, ten or

  more.

  I won’t tell them I’m helping the

  poor, à la Caresse.

  I’ll tell them to read

  the Collected Poems of

  Kay Boyle.

  rip it

  when a poem doesn’t work, forget it, don’t hound it, don’t

  fondle it and molest it, don’t make it join the A.A. or

  become a Born Again

  Christian.

  when a poem doesn’t work, just pull the sheet out of the

  machine, rip it, toss it in the basket—that feels

  good.

  listen, you write because it’s the last machinegun

  on the last hill.

  you write because you’re a bird sitting on a wire, then

  suddenly your wings flap and your little dumb ass is

  up in the air.

  you write because the madhouse sits there belching and

  farting, heavy with minds and bodies, you write because

  you fear ultimate madness . . .

  when a poem doesn’t work, it doesn’t work; forget it;

  pace is the essence.

  I know of a lady who writes so many poems that she must

  arise at 7 A.M. and type until midnight.

  she is in a poetry writing competition—with

  herself.

  when a poem doesn’t work, it’s not the end; it’s not even a

  rotten banana, it’s not even a wrong number call asking for

  Blanche Higgins.

  when a poem doesn’t work it is just because you didn’t have

  it that time.

  or have it

  at any time?

  take that paper, tear it, basket it, then

  wait.

  but don’t sit in front of the machine, do something

  else—watch tv, say hello to your wife, pet the

  cat.

  everything is not made

  of paper.

  Henry Miller and Burroughs

  you mean, you don’t like them?

  I am asked again and

  again.

  no.

  what is it?

  just don’t like.

  I can’t believe this. why

  don’t you like

  them?

  oh, god, crap off.

  you like anybody?

  sure.

  name them.

  Celine, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, early

  Gorky, J. D. Salinger, e. e. cummings,

  Jeffers, Sherwood Anderson, Li Po,

  Pound, Carson McCullers . . .

  o.k., o.k., but I can’t believe you

  don’t like Henry Miller or Burroughs,

  especially, Henry Miller.

  crap off.

  ever met Miller?

  no.

  I think you are kidding me about not liking

  Henry Miller.

  uh uh.

  is it professional jealousy?

  I don’t think so.

  Miller opened doors for all of

  us.

  and I am opening my door for

  you.

  why are you upset with all

  this?

  not upset, but you ever fucked a

  chicken in the ass?

  no.

  go do it, then come back and we’ll

  talk about William B. and especially

  Henry M.

  I think you’re a weird prick . . .

  move out or I’ll punch you

  out.

  you’ll hear from me.

  if you’re ever heard from it will

  be because I write of

  you, now move

  out!

  good night.

  good, I said as the door

  closed,

  night.

  family tree

  not much in my family tree, well, there was my uncle

  John, wanted by the F.B.I., they got me first.

  Grandpa Leonard, on my father’s side, he became very

  kind when drunk, praised everybody, gave away money,

  wept copiously for the human condition, but when he

  sobered up was said to be one of the meanest

  creatures ever seen, heard or avoided.

  not much else except Grandpa Willy on my mother’s

  side (over there in Germany): “He was a kind man,

  Henry, but all he wanted to do was drink and play his

  violin, he played it so very good, he had this fine

  position with this leading symphony orchestra but he

  lost that because of his drinking, nobody would hire

  him, but he was good with the violin, he went to cafes

  and got a table and played his violin, he put his hat

  on the table upside down and the people would put so

  much money in
there but he kept buying drinks and

  playing the violin and soon he didn’t play so good

  anymore and they would ask him to leave but the next

  night he would find another cafe, another table, he

  wrote his own music and nobody could play the violin

  like he could.

  He died one night at his table, he put the violin

  down, had a drink, placed his head on the table and

  died.”

  well, there was my uncle Ben, he was so handsome it

  was frightening, he was too handsome, he just radiated,

  you couldn’t believe it and it wouldn’t go away, all he

  could do about it was smile and light another cigarette

  and find another woman to support and console him, and

  then find another woman to do the same, and then find

  another.

  he died of TB in a sanitarium in the hills, the pack of

  cigarettes under his pillow, dead he smiled, and at his

  funeral 2 dozen of the most beautiful women in Pasadena,

  Glendale and Echo Park wept

  unashamedly as my father cursed him in his coffin: “You

  rotten son of a bitch, you never worked a day in your

  life!”

  my father, of course, was one I could never figure out—

  I mean, how he could have ever gotten into the family

  tree.

  but I was feeling pretty good up to here, there’s hardly

  any use making this a depressing poem.

  well, sometimes you get a strange monkey on a branch and all you

  can do is forgive if you can and forget it, if possible,

  and if neither of these works, then think of the others

  and know that, at least, some of your blood is not without

  hope.

  being here

  when it gets at its worst, there is nothing to be

  done, it’s almost to laugh, putting your clothes

  on again, going out, seeing faces, machines,

  streets, buildings, the unfurling of the

  world.

  I act out motions, exchange monies, answer

  questions, ask few, as the hours toil on,

  following me, they are not always constantly

  terrible—at times I am stricken with a wild

  joy and I laugh, hardly knowing

  why.

  perhaps the worst trick that I have learned is to