Milkbottle H, page 22
He halts, shakes his head.
Something isnt clear.
He detours to the chest of drawers on whose top rests a benzedrine inhaler. His nose is stuffed. Chronic sinusitis. Methodically he unscrews the inhaler cap and thrusts the torpedoshaped head into a nostril. Then he inhales, the sound because of the raucous ravaging intake of breath resembling the ripping of rags soaked in jelly as the acridities shear through the packed mucus till, when a passage is cleared, the sound alters to a shredded feline whistling.
He nods, satisfied. The way is clear. He can proceed.
Taking a glance through the window he immediately observes that MILKBOTTLE H is leaning precariously, a tower of white nostril. He sneezes, once, twice, three times, a fourth and fifth and a sixth sneeze. A dozen sneezes in all, his hayfever has always commenced in the spring
Dr Newman
Yes, Lee, the oriental jew quizzically regards the boy. The doctor is constructed in three yellow balloons, each smiling, face, torso and legs that, while he sits, tiptoe at the floor. Through life I shall carry three yellow balloons. Very symbolic, he nods at Lee. Though Im a general practitioner, my office is invariably filled with pregnant women. Im blown up, so to speak, into an obstetrician. My days are spent listening to foetal gossip. I dont see you often enough, Lee. I wish youd drop by whenever you like, without an appointment, Ill usher you into my office as quickly as Im through with whatever patient is in there when you enter. Let them wait. Im behind as it is. Im always behind; the perspective leads one to delay without guilt. Im a confirmed Russian, 19th Century of course. But let me get to your symptoms. Hayfever you believe? I suggest tests. Since in all probability youre allergic to but one type of pollen I dont think theres any harm in giving you right now a series of punctures, very simple, Lee, believe me, the length of your forearm. I will shoot several varieties of pollen into your system. The one you react to we can then prescribe for. Is it agreed? Good. Lets get on with it.
Lee sneezes. You see, doctor, the moment I emerge into sunlight or I find myself in a dense wooded area Joshua Nathanson my maternal grandfather inserts his entire body into my nostrils and I immediately discover that my snot is racing down my upper lip with the moos of a cow in plunging pursuit. Then a dancing ant inserts his fife into my nostril and I sneeze again. Then the ant axes off some surf with his fife and the spray makes me sneeze still once more. Then my father emerges from the Pennsylvania Station at 34th Street and 7th Avenue. As I go to meet him I see that he is walking, hobbling, with the aid of a cane. Four months before he has had his first heart attack. I can tell you why
Why, why
His blood has had to sneeze. His blood is allergic. Is that possible, doctor?
I tell you again, Lee, I miss our discussions. Please drop by whenever youre in the mood
Can blood be allergic?
To what?
To the veins and arteries, of course, doctor. To the manner in which the walls of these concourses have developed. They may be collecting dust. At any rate, the blood cells begin to sneeze. Are you denying that parts of me may not be primitive?
In what way?
Well, sir, when Joshua Nathanson entered my nostrils he did so because he had already died. All of us primitive natives know that when a man dies his soul seeks the apertures of his enemies. Once an opening is found, as Joshua found mine, it is entered by the soul who wishes his enemy dead. But Im young, you see, Im not quite grown up enough to accept my primitivism without a struggle. So, accordingly, I start sneezing. Im going to expel my maternal grandfather if its the last thing I do.
Then theres one matter you havent thought about, Lee, so I must warn you. If I succeed in curing you of your hayfever, you will cease your sneezing. How then will you expel Joshua Nathanson?
That possibility frightens me, doctor, but you must nevertheless go ahead. Ive faith in you. I feel the problem will be solved.
As you like, Lee.
Dr Newman secures a hypodermic and, successively from half a dozen ampules containing as many liquids, he punctures Lee’s arm that many times from a point just above his wrist to a point just below his elbow.
Very curious, Lee, Dr Newman remarks as his yellow balloons study the effect of the injections as they signify on the flesh of the young man’s forearm. Each puncture has begun to redden and swell. When you see your father hobble out of the Pennsylvania Station, is he alive or dead?
Oh, dead.
And your mother?
When I see her standing in the doorway at 236 East Roosevelt Boulevard calling after me to inquire if I remembered to take an extra handkerchief, she has already died, too.
Now, tell me, Lee
I will tell you that my heart action seems to have increased those are stirrups are they not for your genitourinary examinations of women
Yes
And thats a sterilizing cabinet and an ultraviolet lamp
Yes
Apparently youre a doctor I see you have a prescription pad and a diploma from the University of Pennsylvania Medical College. A lacecurtained window. A bookcase filled with volumes on obstetrics gynaecology diseases of the eye ear nose and throat the pathology of the endocrine system apparently
I want to ask you whether
But its not true. Actually you want us all out of the way. You want all the sick to file through your office so that finally the office will be empty and you will take your place with the healthy. But you dont believe the healthy really live out there until you rid yourself of all the sick. I wonder, even, if thats the case. I wonder perhaps if you do not put yourself here as the one healthy individual by whom the sick file by, so that you derive pleasure from being the isolated healthy one. You hardly leave your office, Dr Newman, isnt that so? You want to be surrounded by disease. You laugh at the sick. You prove to yourself again and again that you can remain healthy even though the sick forever parade by. True, you undergo peril at all times, which only gives the proof more zest. You expose yourself to danger and death innumerably more times than any big game hunter or mountain climber, but theres no courage involved; what is involved is the superior wit of your whole body against the dullard bodies of the sick
You forget my practice is composed mainly of pregnant women
No, I dont forget. Youve been rerouted against your will, doctor. Your wit has been spoiled by an even more witty antagonist: money. Your superiority has been levelled: by money
I have simply wanted you to tell me, Lee, whether or no you envision all the men and women you know in scenes after they have died
My hearts pounding, doctor, at rather a furious rate. I feel very hot.
A smile balloons at the comer of Dr Newman’s mouth and yellowly ascends to a comer of a yellowly ballooning eye. Apparently, he says
A fantastic adverb
Whenever youre on Wyoming Avenue, Lee, I want you to drop in from the line of double cartracks, I want you to come down from your steeplejack position atop Milkbottle H, I want you to tear yourself away from Rena and come in and talk with me, take a walk down A Street and enter my door. Ignore the drugstore across the street. Ignore the knitting mill adjacent. Ignore the maple trees and the Wyoming library. Cancel everything and come in to talk with me, Ive hardly anyone with whom I can have a decent discussion the doctor gently wafts his yellow balloons back forth across Lees face buy a balloon for your daughter your son buy a balloon for every organ of your body and tie the balloon to your organ and watch it float gently aloft the kidney undulating into the blue, the heart translucently crimson against the sun, the stomach blue against the moon, the genitals disappearing behind a cloud, Ive balloons for every organ
Im finding it difficult to breathe
Well now here you take this balloon and let it lead you to my waiting room apparently youre allergic to just about every pollen encountered on the eastern seaboard
youve made an error
but youve been using apparently all along the yellow balloons guide Lee into the sitting room the balloons lifting Dr Newman to a height precisely that of Lees, six feet two and a half inches. Now you simply sit down and lean your head back. Yes
My head is blowing up, doctor, blowing, and I can hear my heart how many times is that child going to whirl that hoop around her
Youve a child around your heart, Lee, Dr Newman comments sweetly
My father doesnt want to leave me, doctor
My mother doesnt want to leave me, doctor
My wife doesnt want to leave me, doctor
My grandfather doesnt want to leave me, doctor
Apparently, apparently, apparently, apparently
Nobody wants to leave me, doctor
Apparently
My grandmother
Yes, she too apparently
Sam Abrams the painter doesnt want to leave me either I cant breathe doctor my heart is diamondshaped, one piece of anthracite squeezed into the other
have a balloon
RINGLING BROTHERS BARNUM AND BAILEY the bearded woman yells at Lee your heart has a beard your body is a succession of circus colored posters the elephant of possession sways dangerously from side to side
Pop I didnt know your hand is an elephants long nose
I stick my nose down into my body and I smell sawdust and shit and
my spine is the skinny man
the skinny mans hurty feet tall and my eyes peer out from atomic reactors
my father roars he is a lion
my mother chatters she is a monkey
and the seesaw at Atlantic City is the aerialist over the immense net of nerves pop
CORNpop
CORNpop
CORN
munchmunch, I hate cereal for breakfast the trumpeting elephant of the wind tramples over the top of the big tent confess:
the sideshow wants Lee dead STOP
the pounding on the big bass drum of the heart I need air, air, air outside my body smelling of sawdust and shit I will not go to the end of the hallway the little boy vows to himself but the circus is in town all the years of his life the animals in their cages at the opposite end of the hallway snarl and spit their claws flash in the black stillness of the summer night I want to stop now now I want to stop I dont want to hear them
why should they want me dead the little boy crouches on the hallway carpet the lisping breeze liltingly stammering against his ribs
I dont do anything to them I never do any harm
NINA NINA NINA
sssshhh, Lee, sssshhh, take your bath
But now the most difficult part of the maneuver presents itself Dr Newman Im burning up
Lee must twist his torso over on its side in order to apply the harsh scrubbing brush to his thighs and calves while at the same time he fans the scumthickening water towards the foot of the bathtub so that neither his chest nor loins nor back will be polluted. Fortunately, he congratulates himself, scum sticks to the surface of water
Oh Lee thats great thats positively great Nina practically does a backflip in her studio, howling about scum insisting on clinging to surfaces, best thing to do she screamingly laughs at Lee, best thing you should clean yourself underwater put on a fucking diving suit and go down to the bottom of the sea and give yourself a bath oh Lee Lee Lee she reels back against one of her paintings holding her teats to prevent herself from total collapse now look what youve gone and made me do she whoops my fucking paintings going to come off on the back of my dress like a goddamn decalcomania the great art of the future Lee dont you see Rembrandt manufactures decalcomanias Modigliani doesnt jump
ahahaahaahaa she cries
Modigliani doesnt commit suicide by jumping into the street but by painting himself into a decalcomania
PYROMANIA MRS SHERMAN THE YELLOW BALLOONS ARE ON FIRE AND THE YELLOW SMOKE SPREADS THROUGHOUT HER BEDROOM IM WAITING FOR MY HUSBANDS PHONE CALL
NYMPHOMANIA HEY RENA IS THAT WHAT
DECALCOMANIA THE NEW PSYCHOSIS
poor Lee
thats what hes got
he sees himself coming off from all mankind on somebody elses flesh
THE DECALCOMANIAC
what are the psychiatrists going to do with this new psychosis the museums are filled with decalcomaniacs
the walls are hung with them
the mirrors have all gone absolutely lunatic my fathers heart is coming off in decalcomanic patches
quick quick quick:
get an impression
mothers waving handkerchiefs
fathers with canes hobbling across streets
a little child peeling off from himself
NINA YOU LOUSY FART
NO IM A YELLOW BALLOON IN THE CIRCUS
MY HEART IS A THOUSAND ANTHRACITES FILLED WITH EARTH FROM WHICH MY MOTHERS GERANIUMS GROW ON THE PORCH WATER MY HEART DOCTOR NEWMAN PISS BRIGHT SUNLIGHT ON MY HEARTS RUBBERPLANTS
wear your rubbers, lee
dont get cold feet
put two pairs of socks on, lee
here Ill put on a mustardplaster
wear a hat you shouldnt get a cold in the head
Im giving you a shot of adrenalin, Lee.
All right, doctor.
Better?
Yes, but Im very weak.
Ill drive you home myself.
Yes.
I want you to stay in bed for a couple weeks.
Yes. My right nostril, doctor, each time air strikes I go into a sneezing paroxysm.
Im going to stuff it with cotton, Lee. Youll have a fever for about a week.
Theres an uncontrollable tickle in my right nostril
parts of the body have the faculty of laughing isolatedly when other parts may be quite grim his hand grimly takes the gleaming cleaver from the bedspread, he faces the mirror, protrudes his tongue, places a heavy block of wood directly under it and brings the cleaver down upon it in a ponderous slashing motion to slice off half his nose and half his tongue. The apertures to his nostrils now are considerably enlarged, though somewhat more vertical in their appearance, and the blood thinly streaming down to make scarlet oriental mustaches from his chin has its course gummily impeded by snot. His tongue now more closely resembles a squareheaded shovel, the crossectioned nerve borings and muscle striation, aquiver momentarily from the severance, instantly obscured by red tendrils dripping on his yellowed teeth and then overflowing his lower lip. The severed portions of tongue and nose, prettily bouncing as they strike an uncarpeted flooring near the mirror door seem now, quite unbloodied as they are, throughly anonymous,
if, for example, you observe Dr Clifford Gratz, a Philadelphia dentist married to Nadine nee Schonfeld (the sister of Guy Schonfeld, professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University, the first husband of Jennifer Hazlitt who permits Lee to make abortive love to her during the early hours of the evening so that she can proceed during the later hours to be made love to by the more advanced years of Guy Schonfeld, the comparative youth and lesser status of Lee a necessary initiatory prelude to her acceptance of the total cynicism of Guy whose lovemaking progresses beyond the abortive, Jennifer observing a multiple amatory protocol in a graduatedly heightening glee, I have just sloughed off my callowness she informs herself as she slips into the practiced arms of Guy, the male of the species to Jennifer a sort of escalator clause, I want this at eight oclock at night she refers to Lee, and I want this at midnight she refers to Guy in the grand department store of her choices, all her men chromatically illuminated at her own bazaar, Jennifer a prototype of the afternoon television programs in which a brash type of talking woman magically concocts an already prepared dish while she explains ingredients and their very best commercial sources, Lee the best source for early evening and Guy the finest for later all the while as she whips them up together in the high polished bowl of the camera self, a vast unseen audience looking on, the greatest possible audience that of the unseen, Jennifer opines to herself, congratulating herself on her cookery already conceived by another, all her actions justified by her conclusion that she herself has been prepared by others and that she is doing her duty by a vast unseen audience of preconceivers by talking from the condition of one preconception to another, a talking escalator so to speak, her white buck teeth the escalator steps as her lips move up and up and up), in whom, we speak of Dr Gratz, may be injected Jennifer Hazlitt, since she is a tall girl who may occupy the considerable length of spine characteristic of Clifford Gratz, underscoring that male escalatorism, itself impossible of course without the infusion of the female without which it cannot ascend, and which Clifford must conveniently borrow since Jennifer is transitorily related to him by virtue of her husband, Guy, the brother to Clifford’s wife, Nadine, though Jennifer is not present at Sy’s and Nina’s party at Sy’s mother’s house on Wellens Avenue, though Lee and Red (Rena) are. In Lee himself is the extrapolation of Flikker, that petite boyman, that grinning figurine who, though distinctly unotterlike, possesses the low forehead and nihilistic sans communistic commentary of Barry Handler, the nihilism more sweetly done and therefore more tolerable to the possession of Lee, so that, when Lee encounters Clifford Gratz, it is matter of unconscious solicitude with which he offers, so that it is most equably accepted, that boyman nihilism, that bowed sly upwardmerry destructive teethgnash of Flikker which, as it enters Clifford, partakes then both of the fanatic skepticism of Clifford Gratz himself lashed about by the dark skeptical fanaticism of Barry Handler while Lee’s innate shyness, finding itself congruent with the physical height of Clifford Gratz, is reduplicated with considerably more incisiveness in Clifford Gratz who sits longlegged and darkly smirking by his wife Nadine whose beak, inordinately convex, tends to disfigure an otherwise noctumally handsome visage and tends, too, not to disfigure but to be drawn into the very spine of Clifford, her husband, so that, while often enough he stands straight, his attitude is one of vexed and scimitarlike convexity that, as it cuts into his body, must accordingly continue on its way and slice into other humans as well. The unique banality and the banal uniqueness of the matter is that Lee and Clifford so closely resemble each other; and it is that profound sympathy of Clifford’s to his resemblance to another that he must find, as indeed he has, a tomboy girl shorter than Jennifer, and as brunette as Jennifer is blonde, but as brunette as the man Lee, or any other male so colored, with that gnashing teethlikeness of Jennifer which has been incorporated into Nadine nee Schonfeld’s nasal structure, a structure duplicating her brother’s. Obviously, she must have a brother. A brother is not dispensed with. Consequently it is to her advantage that she feed her nasal structure into Clifford as a characteristic, a connection malodorously gratifying, to say the least, and one can observe the essentially thin, pinched nostrils of Clifford attempting to flare and never quite succeeding, but the intent is there, and that suffices, so that they talk with each other as two in a cage and from time to time they dart their sugars through the bars to lick up the characteristics of those on whom they must feed to sustain their own incestuousness, black and bitter sugars, the two, Clifford and Nadine, the better to spit at each other with, the spitting evident even as they put their very mouths together and hurtle their sugars into each other with the most twisted of smacking of bellytongues, Clifford’s tongue of course owning one advantage: it can sort out the cavities and decays in Nadine’s teeth since Clifford is the more professional dentist of the two. So, Clifford Gratz is constructed of Lee, of Flikker, of Barry Handler, of Jennifer Hazlitt, of Guy Schonfeld and of Nadine. But, at the same party, he encounters Harry Ring for the first time, and at the contact with such a freebooter as Harry is, such a commodious cavalier, Clifford senses the flapping of his own concealed freebooterism; but it can only flap; there is no room in Clifford for the real thing, so that the sensing of expansiveness must torture him, he cannot really span its width, but what Clifford Gratz can do is mimic Harry Ring and construct the illusion to others that he, Clifford, is cavalier, is an actor of such proportions, for he is after all so much of womanmangirlboy that he believes he can make these characteristics assume the aspect of Harry Ring’s lordly shrug. To Sy the ensemble is inevitably a painting. Lee quite thoroughly understands that when he telegraphs his objection to Rena (Red) against her posing in the nude for Sy. Lee knows that this entire ensemble is present in Philadelphia while he is an element in the Second Armored Division at Fort Benning in Georgia. The problem is compounded by Lee’s realization that Sy is familiar with his hatred of Jennifer; it is further compounded by Lee sensing that very probably the offer to pose in the nude comes from Red herself; still further compounded by the realization that Lee has frequently touted the greatness of Sy as an artist to Red; yet further compounded by the fact that Lee has tacitly implied that he himself would wish himself female to pose for Sy in the nude, and that if it were possible to extract from himself his femaleness he would gladly establish it in a naked pose for Sy; more compounded by virtue of the fact that, in Lee’s absence, Red is a surrogate and, further, takes over by her femaleness Lee’s femaleness so that it becomes wellnigh a commandment that, while Red perhaps never voices the offer to pose in the nude, Sy hears it nevertheless and insists on painting Lee in the guise of Rena; compounded, too, by the element of Sy himself as the nude, just as, in his watercolor of Lee, Sy calculatedly infuses it with his own selfappositeness; it were vulgar, sure, for Sy to paint himself naked; this he has never done; but to paint Red thus, were acceptable, his own guilts thereby assuaged—so that the compounding as well involves Sys ridding of his own guilt, divesting himself via RenaLee, the more magnificently convenient and the more acutely esthetic by virtue of Lee absent some fifteen hundred miles away, which provides Sy a splendid perspective, the very naked body of Lee removed from the scene so that Sy in the hours of Rena may conjure it up with all the thrill of teat and mount of venus that could be ascribed to Lee, an inordinate magnificence, a richness of triune duality perfectly safe, the very sumptuousness of LeeRena pedestaled yet beckoning, a paradox holding the potential of assault for all of Sy’s objectivity, for when is objectivity objectivity when in a moment of Sy’s supreme hauteur he may very well enclose the poser, herselfhimself, within Sy himself. The lure of self is certainly the most seductive lure of all, and when it is projected on another it is wellnigh irresistible. To throw one’s self on one’s self is a sumptuous selfimmersion. True, the casting involves the application of paint on canvas; but when the paint on canvas is done, the self is not done; the curve of the action continues its arc; the esthetic completed, the body follows, just as the body completed, the esthetic follows. Besides, the canvas is the painter. You do not deny the artist once you have not denied his brush. Rena could well welcome the enormous distance of the Lee thrust in the presentness of Sy— the force of the distance itself a goad, a fantastically deceptive phallus, and what more glee could possibly ensue in Red than that engendered by the fantasy of the projection within the brevity of Sy’s presence, a phallus that Rena could shake, could chastise for the agony Lee costs her, for the anger he has so often visited upon her, for the NadineCliffordLee sugars he has so often injected into her, and yet, yet— with the pleasure of the chastisement is the ecstasy of the brief reality itself, Sy’s prick—drill, drill, drill, you painterdentist in Philadelphia. Come now, come now, Lee, Clifford Gratz issues the kind of vocal order that implies that the resistance to his specific reasonableness might well constitute catastrophic fatuity, the kind of tone that lusts after a world directed by Clifford Gratz himself in which must exist a whole genuflecting brotherhood of nastily sweet reasonableness, dont you think we can tackle the problem of Rena’s posing or not posing in the nude from the angle, for example, of her mother, Esther Goldstein. I mean this way, he smiles indulgently and annihilatively at Hany Ring who while Rena strikes the basic chords on the Tarassoff piano thumps his own chest in time to the rhythm of a ribald Yiddish song whose stanzas Clifford has long ago assimilated, dehydrated and referred to the vault of his own crinkled quaintnesses that figuratively cuckold him with generations long past, generations that he cannot approach, so that in his Americanism he is rattled from time to time by the ancient ring of Harry Rings dancing derisively around him
