Pages from a Cold Island (5 page)

“
He
’
s an asshole read by sophomore sorority girls. I put him in the same maple sugar tub with Kahlil Gibran.
”

He then went on to tell me that in two hours he
’
d slapped together a pornographic parody of
The Prophet
he called
The Profit
, that an artist friend had also parodied with
“
marvelous obscenity
”
Gibran
’
s
“
shitty drawings,
”
and that by the underground press they were now trying to get the volume published. He offered a sample:

“
On Love: Even as Prick inflames Itself/so shall he soggily wither/Even as he is cunt
’
s pleasure/so is he sod
omite
’
s ass pain.
”

Now Jack was laughing rather dementedly at something in Miss Mangan
’
s letter.
“
Jesus,
”
he gasped.
“
This is too much! This is classic!
”

“
What
’
s so funny?
”

“
She …
she …wants
to
know … oh, Christ! … whether
…
ha! ha!
…
you want to stay at Iowa House on campus or if she should rent you …beyond belief!
…
a fucking farmhouse on the outskirts of town!
”

“
I don
’
t see what
’
s so funny.
”

“
Oh. you don
’
t see what
’
s so funny, don
’
t you?
”
Jack mimicked my solemnity.
“
I
’
ll tell you what
’
s so funny. You on a goddam farm. I can just see you sitting out there in your big old-fashioned kitchen, the wood stove blazing, you with your writing tablets, your vodka bottles, peeking out the windows at the November corn stalks, the wind whistling and rattling your shutters, you with your fucking paranoia waiting for the first blizzard to hit. You
’
d be a fucking basket case in a month. A month? A
week
. Besides,
”
he added,
“
how
’
d you get to and from campus?
”

“
I
’
d drive. How else?
”

Jack laughed scornfully.
“
Shit you would. We ain
’
t even letting you take your car.
”

“
Who
’
s we?
”
I demanded. I was getting angry.

“
Everybody. The whole fucking gang! Christ, you
’
re only going up there three months. Fly up, fuck a couple coeds, stay drunk, and I
’
ll fly up and see you some weekend. When you get back at Christmas your Nova
’
ll still be here, sitting behind the hotel with the sun baking the paint off it, right where it
’
s been sitting for three years! You haven
’
t moved it in all that time, now suddenly you got visions of yourself being the proper professor, commuting from hog ranches with a goddam portfolio case on the seat next to you.
Sheeit
, man, come off it. You
’
ll kill yourself in that car.
”
He laughed disparagingly, then tried to leaven his contempt by saying,
“
Actually, we
’
re only keeping your car to make sure you come home.
”
He emphasized home.

In moody silence I pondered his words while drinking two more beers. When my hands had stilled, I rose, picked up my newspapers, the letter Jack had written for me, and the contracts—though he good-naturedly but steadfastly refused to surrender Ms. Mangan
’
s covering letter, stuffing it into his wallet pocket and for dramatic effect buttoning the pocket and pointedly p
atting his behind there to reas
sure me of its safeness. For the next two days he used it by way of an object lesson for me. Whenever I was present he removed it from his pocket, ceremoniously unfolded it, handed it to one of the regulars and said:
“
Read this and tell me honestly if anything strikes you as weird.
”
To a man the guys broke up at the prospect of me on a farm in Iowa.

On an oppressively hot evening a few nights later, having just finished one of his mother
’
s superb dinners, Jack and I were standing in front of his house nursing V.O.
’
s on the rocks when I asked,
“
Are you setting me up with the guys, telling them at what point in that letter they should laugh?
”

Solemnly Jack raised his right hand, the good citizen being sworn at the bench.
“
So help me I
’
m not.
”

“
What do you think I ought to do?
”

“
Do what I said. Go up, have a few laughs, me and a couple of the guys
’
ll fly up some weekend for a Big Ten game, you
’
ll be home by Christmas and can go back to work on the
‘
masterpiece
’
!
”

I thought for a moment.
“
Maybe I
’
ll fly up to the St. Lawrence for a couple months, sober up, and then go out to the corn country from there.
”

Unhappily, Jack offered no resistance to the idea.
“
Nobody wants you to go, but it might be for the best.
”

“
Thanks, Jack.
”

So it was decided. On going back into the house I poured myself another V.O., picked up the phone, got through to Eastern Airlines, and made the reservation for Watertown and the river.

3

I hadn
’
t seen Bob Tompkins, who delivers the local six o
’
clock evening news on WWNY-TV, Channel 7, the Carthage-Watertown station, since the last time I
’
d visited my mother four years before. In that time long hair had become fashionable (so
de rigueur
that like Yul Brynner I
’
m contemplating having my hair shaven from my pate) and he seemed another person. His hair is thin, he has quite ordinary though pleasant looks, and he wears glasses that reflect the relentless studio lights. In the old days he appeared balding and eyeless, little more than a thin mouth forming and issuing mellifluously enunciated words from out a chubby and nondescript face, and I couldn
’
t help re marking how much character the long hair gave him, making his face thinner and sharpening his features so that he was handsome, even though—I guessed because of the glasses—his eyes still shyly, almost furtively avoided a confrontation with the camera.

Glenn Gough preceded Tompkins with two minutes of national headlines, informing us that at 6:30 Walter Cronkite would have
“
further details
.”
To my chagrin he said not a word about Edmund Wilson, though I hoped that this foretold Tompkins
’
devoting the entire ten minutes of local news to his death. Gough mentioned that Air Force General John D. Lavelle had testified before a House Armed Services investigating subcommittee that between November of last year and March of this, he
’
d ordered twenty unauthorized raids against what he said were military installations in North Vietnam and had been demoted and retired for doing so. My first thought was
“
Splendid, and fuck the doves!
”

In
The Cold War and the Income Tax
and elsewhere Wilson had for years maintained that bureaucracies were destined to be America
’
s ruination; the civilian-controlled military was the most monstrously horrific of these bureaucracies; and if the politicians could not be made to see the wholesale homicide they were perpetrating in Southeast Asia, they might at last get a glimpse, and hopefully shudder queasily as they did so, of the elephantine unwieldiness of the Pentagon.

In my mind I
’
d already written and produced Tompkins
’
local news. In stillness we
’
d open with a long shot from the south or Boonville side of Wilson
’
s white-balconied, black-shuttered stone house (the view made famous on the dust jacket of
Upstate
). Very slowly we
’
d dolly toward the front northeast window behind which Wilson wrote at his card table, and as we did so our voice-over would speak these words:

“
Edmund Wilson, seventy-seven, one of the great men of the twentieth century, died this day at six-thirty this morning in this old stone house at Talcottville.
”

To my utter incredulity Tompkins
’
lead story had to do with a dispute regarding the tax assessor at Massena, a far northern and perhaps fantasy village in St. Lawrence County. There were two or three other local stories, then TV star Ben Gazzara was on screen being interviewed by Joe Rich, an amiable guy who
’
d once interviewed me.

I thought,
“
What the fuck is going on? Where
’
s Wilson?
”

I
’
d always believed Gazzara one of the most shamelessly affected actors in the business, employing all the oppressively heavy and glacially tentative gestures of Brando without in the least owning Brando
’
s genius or sensitivity (and how galled over the years Brando must have been rendered by these legions of shoddy mimes!), so that he made walking to the sink for a glass of water appear the end of an exhausting quest, as though in lieu of approaching a nickel-plated tap faucet with a jam-jar glass he
’
d just dragged himself into a cloistered crypt of Tuscan marble and was reverentially crawling—stricken arm and clutched hand extended outward, breathing labored, music rising exultantly—toward a gilt altar on which sat the Holy Grail bathed in Hollywood moonglow.

For two years he
’
d been in a TV series called
Run for Your Life
. It had to d
o with a young attorney who dis
covers he has a year or two (the latter, I guessed, in case the sponsor decided to renew the lunacy) to live and who having nothing to lose
“
runs
”
about the earth and para
chutes in free fall from airplanes, at intrepid rpm
’
s races automobiles and speed boats, skin-dives to the formidably scary depths where squiggly monsters are thought to reign, skis abandonedly down ninety-degree slopes, confronts Mafiosi and Hell
’
s Angels with haughty disdain, and copulates with beautiful girls who find themselves hopelessly mushy-kneed in the penumbra of his Thanatos-ridden charm. As the show served as a vehicle for the introduction of those vernally humid s
tarlets—one wondered if the pro
ducer were also a dirty old man—of the type featured in
Playboy
centerfolds, I
’
d randyishly watched it a few times and always especially liked the scene where the
ingénue
dis
covered (though the stoic Gazzara never told her) that death was in the offing, which always deranged her more ever than it did Ben.

For every predicament he had one facial expression: a flickering of his long dark lashes and the petulant lowering of his lower right lip, which is meatier at that side than at the left, an expression that fell somewhere between a sage smile and a wry sneer and was meant to convey—or whi
ch Gaz
zara wrongly believed conveyed—everything, in this case a nineteen-fortyish what-the-hell, everybody-dies sort of thing that was so well done by Cagney and Garfield. Invariably this eyelash batting a
nd resigned mouth shrug was suc
ceeded by some silently protracted, poignant looks between Miss Frankheart and Gazzara; then before the fade-out came close-ups of some well-spittled, cavernous-mouthed kisses, at which point I
’
d celebratively shout at the tube:

“
Atta girl! Atta way! Blow him! Ream him! Give him a head job that
’
ll make that paradise he
’
s going to look pale by comparison! Give him one that
’
ll send him to his maker sooner than anticipated and let
’
s make an end to this fucking nonsense!
”

The New York State Democratic primary elections were to be held the following Tuesday, and
Gazzara was in Watertown stumping for Senator George McGovern. He wore a pair of impeccably pressed lightweight slacks held up by an old-fashioned thin black leather belt; a pastel sport shirt open at the collar; a double-knit wrinkleless jacket of blue and white, wide candy-striped seersucker;
and he answered Joe
’
s questions with a head-on articulation that made one see how effective he might be as an actor if he abdicated all his blo
wsily moody mannerisms. He natu
rally hoed the McGovern row and talked about the need to weed ourselves from Vietnam and concentrate on rebuild ing our cities, depolluting our waterways and atmosphere, assuring equal education for all, and erasing the stigma of impoverishment emanating from our various and damnatory Appalachias. He said that what was needed in America was a
“
reversal of priorities,
”
to which I
’
d wholeheartedly assented by thinking,
“
And let it begin by getting your joy less mug off the screen and on to the death of America
’
s last preeminently civilized man!
”
Then Gazzara said some
thing emetic. Asked about McGovern
’
s proposal to erase the tax loopholes so cherished by the rich and the powerful, he not only backed McGovern but by implication suggested to amiable Joe and the rest of us out there in TV Land that as he was one of the rich and the powerful with a good deal more to lose than we, this should serve to make his proselytizing of the Senator all the more arresting.

“
Ben, baby!
”
I shouted.
“
I love you! From out of your pores there sluices the milk of human neighborliness.
”

Ben said he had a daughter he didn
’
t want growing up a militant revolutionist; he said that Mama and Papa Gazzara had been born in Sicily and had emigrated from there to the United States; that America had been kind to this immigrant
’
s son and he in no way resented assuming a higher tax burden for a country that had been so nice; and though—thank the small decencies!—he didn
’
t say so, we were definitely left to infer that he was brighter, more talented and more worthy than we hayseeds, but that if we
’
d take McGovern and his proposals to our bosoms he would—out of pocket!—see to it that we got a couple breaded porkchops with our evening cans of Genesee 12-Horse Ale and a new Ford Pinto every other year.

But why
really
!
I wondered.

Fifteen years before in my
“
insane
”
period when for months I
’
d lain on the davenport reading Wilson for the first time—and I score this reading as having no less than saved my life—I
’
d often watched Walt Disney
’
s kiddie show
The Mickey Mouse Club
, and I now found myself thinking of one of its stars, Annette Funicello. Some years later she
’
d developed an inspiring set of lungs, and in numbly touching bewilderment, her publicist—one could almost hear the poor fellow thinking,
“
Zounds! Annette Funicello with tits!
”
—had milked her booby boundary for all it was worth, almost as if he
’
d expected that, like Mickey, Donald and Pluto, Miss Funicello would remain forever frozen in Disney
’
s milieu where mat
urity, aging and death are eter
nally inimical; and in trying to plumb Gazzara
’
s motives all I could call up was the preterite, the titless and knee-dimpled Annette leading the other Mousketeers into inquiring of the viewers their familiar and rhetorical Why? and in singsongy lachrymose unison shouting their own answer:
“
Because we
luuuhhfffff
you!
”

What grated was that only days before Shirley MacLaine had said the same thing to Barbara Walters on the
Today
show (two days later Watertown would be visited by Dennis Weaver, Matt Dillon
’
s erstwhile gimpy sidekick Chester on
Gunsmoke
, and I surmised that whereas national TV was graced with movie stars like MacLaine, the lesser TV people were sent out to cowsheds like Water-town), and though MacLai
ne was more attractive, intelli
gent and sincere (she
’
d made her opposite number, Patty Duke, who was backing Humphrey, appear an ebullient idiot) than Gazzara, this mouthing of the same
“
party line
”
made me wonder if these stars weren
’
t being force-fed by McGovern advisers, a possibility I found reprehensible even allowing that the better part of acting is little other than an interpretation of other people
’
s lines.

For a flashing instant I thought of writing McGovern
’
s top political strategist, Frank Mankiewicz, and telling him how insufferably patronizing I found this whole
“
star
”
seg
ment of the campaign. But a man who knew Mankiewicz well had told me he was extremely well-read, devastatingly witty and unredemptively cynical (of necessity the latter goes hand in hand with the former). Politics is the art of accommodation, and I suspected Mankiewicz found the use of these people as distasteful as I and if anything would be curious as to why I hadn
’
t exercised my simple option of turning off the boob tube. And this would have necessitated explaining my anxiety in awaiting Tompkins
’
obituary of Wilson, which in turn would have involved conveying to Mankiewicz my tenuously emotional
“
relationship
”‘
(as in deed every American writer had) with Wilson over the years, which again would have involved my setting the scene for the momentousness of his death by relating that for three years prior to its disruptively cataclysmic jolt to my languorous existence I
’
d lain perspiring on a white Naugahyde couch at the Seaview Hotel at the hot bottom of the world in southern Florida, would in effect demand putting down the words I
’
m here putting down.

Now, however, and with no little petulance, I said to the unhearing screen,
“
C
’
mon, Tompkins, get that Siciliano off the fucking camera and let
’
s get on to Wilson!
”

Of course no such eulogy as I had either hoped for, actually composed, or wh
ich Wilson merited was forthcom
ing. When at last Tompkins got around to Wilson he gave him three or four lines, twenty seconds perhaps, and in mentioning what he said was Wilson
’
s most notable work— it was certainly his most
“
notorious
”
—he pronounced Hecate
“
Heck-it,
”
which I thought was wrong, wrong, wrong but which I later learned from Wilson
’
s daughter Rosalind and his publisher Roger Straus, Jr., was indeed Wilson
’
s preferred pronunciation, no matter that I
’
d never heard a literate person
(not that I knew that many) em
ploy it.