Milkbottle H, page 7
Cross the street, lights red, cars wait. Cars wait, lights red, cross the street. Lights red you see, actually, the American people want war, shivers, Im not dressed for the job, I cant go ahead with RED, whatll the superintendent whats his. Fumbles for the slip of Wally paper Mister MacLennihan, G and Allegheny HILLS PAPER COMPANY, its in the basement I ought to have overalls RED, the plaque on the building entrance lists HILLS who? Look at the paper again. Amber. Green, have to wait for the next traffic-light nineteen years of age Levi says the least you can do is get some kind of job Lee if you dont want to work at the Yard, yes, Ill I really want to Wally, takes out the paper scrap once again its Mister MacL. Heat circulates under his clothes amber RED MILKBOTTLE H lunging across Allegheny the black unlaundered sheet flapping in his mondaymorning heatwind HILLS PAP down the metal stairs to a door with a frosted glass pane HI a steelspectacled suspendered grayhaired sixfooter purple blotches on his face standing at his desk near an open door through which on the lower level ten billion women white and negro girls jabber through the slang of pulleys and the throatcutting cutting machines, the sixfooter splotch glancing up from his timesheets Im Lee Emanuel
Whats that. You gotta talk louder over those, he shrugs at the lower level
Lee Emanuel. Wally Singer phoned
Oh yeh. Yeh. Youre the new man. Benevolently, his eye hefts the boy. Gimme your Social Security. Aint much of a job, Emanuel, but you wanna work, that it?
Thats r
Buck ten an hour, that okay?
Yes its
Simple enough job, Emanuel. Wont take you a minute to get on to it, come on down
Lee sees nothing. Girls faces swivel, laugh, giggle, chatter, their hands independent of their faces, their chatter and swivel. Their fingers deploy, turn, scurry, fold, shove, pick above tables at which they stand, bend over sections of cardboard sliding along the conveyorbelt, the factorywindows high on the wall in their blue laps of light, augmented overhead by banks of fluorescent cylinders, a blueblur glow over the long cellar and its swivelling faces laughing, chattering, giggling at the lanky Lee
HE gonna work here
miomi
aint he somethin now
All right, girls, Mister MacLennihan holds up a musclestuffed paw the cutting machines slanging through the retchhigh cardboard Lee stiffly sees nothing MacLennihan leading him to a long table opposite the line of eyerolling breastskipping girls piled high with flattened out cardboard boxes trafficlight RED, red. Mistake. Error. Altogether. Hes not dressed properly, thats the whole trouble Better get off your coat Emanuel MacLennihan Joell show you where to HEY JOE to the far end of the basement, the lithely sprung one head shorter and sprightlyfaced young negro slips and slides down the row of tables, checking the machines, spotting the work, Joell show you what you do, ever tie knots Emanuel
No I cant say I
Dont give it another thought, youll pick it up in no Joe heres your new man, Lee what was that?
Emanuel
Yah. This heres Joe Ritter, the foreman, you can pick up your card in the office, Joell take care of ya, and MacLennihans back up the stairs Lee cant see. Cant hear. Gently Joe tells him to remove his overcoat.
Yah I was going to
Ever tie knots, Lee?
No I cant say I
Nothing to it. You a friend of Wally Singers?
Yeh we went to highschool togeth
Nice guy
Yeh he the pulleys snarl among themselves. The cutting machines screech, jabber, giggle, female cutting machines, the pulleys blabber you mean he gonna work HERE
big strong man now aint he Youll get used to the noise, Lee Oh, sure
First time in a factory is it?
Yes it
Sure, sure, Joe nods sagely. Dont take much sense to do this job though. Five minutes youll be picking it up. You see this pile of cardboard? Uhhuh. All right. Now you take this here twine, Lee, and you pass it under the pile. Like you was wrapping a package. Youve wrapped packages. Uhhuh, Lees mouth is trying to find his reticulated tongue, hes got to quickly find it because its flaking off, layer by layer and then bunching up in small prickly balls in his throat, hes just not dressed for the job, this is the whole trouble, his mother shouldve warned him to take a pair of overalls dollar ten an hour the cutting machines rip and screech through the cardboard, the hands of all the girls at the conveyorbelt line are cut off, they operate all by themselves, the fingers scurry, snatch, snap, pick, pull, weave, jabber, gossip, brown hands and white projecting from the factoryblue worksmocks while the girls themselves gossip jabber snatch at each other shrugging off their fingers entirely because they yield to the cutting machine, theres no reason for attachment because their mouths move happily over each other about what are you eating for lunch and mikes almost got the last payment for the car and theres a new guy by the name of gary at the church social and my goddamn sister you know i put her through college shes got a bs degree and she goes and gets married and gets three kids and dont dress up i told my other sister the beautician i just aint gonna have anything more to do with her and she aint gonna set her hair no more why you know she can play the piano shes real smart and look what she done the fingers play brown and white over the conveyorbelt
Then you tie a knot. Not a regular knot, Lee, we got one specially for this and it isnt hard to catch on to. Should take you about three seconds
three sec: under once with the short end of the twine, then over once with the long end, then a twist and one half, Lee, to the right, and then two twists counterclockwise, once over then with the short end, double S with the long and a figure 8 with the long, then you put your finger down, give a hard tug, take the scissors here and cut. Then you take the pile youve tied and stack it with the others. Three seconds and youve got it, now thats pretty simple, isnt it? Ill do it once again, slowlike, and then you can try no no, Lee, its a figure 8 with the long, a double S with the short. No, one twist counterclockwise wont do it, the bundle wont be secure, you can understand that, cant you? Sure you can. We cant take the trouble the piles getting loose in the shipment, I think youll do better when Im not hangin around, makes some people nervous, I understand, Lee, you just take it easy for a couple minutes, and Ill be back in a little while to see how youre
The tall boy screws himself to the task. What is it now. Over once with the long end of the twine, then under once with two twists to the right, then a twist and a half counterclockwise. Shit.
Here lemme showya a loopsmiling negro girl deftly ties the knot
Get back to your table Marie Joe calls, sauntering back to Lee, the screechmachines chewing at the pulleys, the fluorescent lighting in a sweating blur, Lees fingers slopping amidst the twine, his left foot a clod of spiculed flameflickers How you doin Lee
Not so
Well I think youre just a little tense. Relax, theres nothin to it, the left foot now incapable of movement, the shorts beneath his pants a bed of squirming knots, his penis shrunk and a flattenedout piece of tissue, the testicles in figure 8s and double S’s, lets try it again, Lee. See what I mean? Give it a hard tug No Im not interested in driving, pop Youve been at this for about half an hour havent you Lee
Thats r
I think MacLennihan wants to see you in his office
Im sorry Mister MacL I dont know what it is I just cant seem to
Dont give it another thought Emanuel, lets just say it didnt work out, the purple splotches curiously jag over the boy. Got a dime?
Yes I think
Well heres a buck, pay you for the hour, Emanuel, I took out the deductions. Ninety cents.
Thanks Mister MacLennihan.
Sure. Good l
The iron steps lift him to the street. The winterwind lays a flat slab of ice on the heatpooled body, the left foot a maze of hot spindles, bent and twisted, counterclockwise. Stupidly, the boy takes a streetcar. Everybodys at work. Mister MacLennihan, Joe Ritter, his father
MURRAYS ROACH DOOM
everybodys at. Not Lee. He shouldve thought of the overalls himself, he cant go to The Heel he might see Wally Singer and Wallyll. He doesnt know what to say, Ernie Chalk the Ruscomb Street idiot presses him against the Diebele garage wall, bending his forearm back, Lee the gears work this way, youve got to use the clutch when you shift do you think you could do it yourself. Id like to try sometime, pop.
Why not now?
Oh Id just rather not, now. Id like to watch you a little bit more.
Try it now, Lee, you can get into the drivers seat.
No. No, pop, Let me watch you a little
So howd you make out on the job, Rachel greets him, youre back early.
Well I didnt feel so good, Lee mumbles.
Didnt feel so good, whats the matter already, you caught cold?
I started to feel chills, he says.
Ahf mein sonim she screeches disgustedly. Why didnt you keep the muffler around your throat like I told you.
I did
Screaming: I can see its loose, what are you telling me
I dont feel so good
GET UPSTAIRS INTO BED YOU WANT YET YOU SHOULD CATCH PNEUMONIA Ill have to run up and down the stairs again thats what you get when your sons dont turn out ah fa chop, the ch the yiddish throat guttural, get upstairs right away and undressed and in bed get the thermometer and take your temperature Ill be up in a little while if its not down tonight Ill call Dr Newman
All right, mom. Quiet. But you dont have to yell
ILL YELL IF I FEEL LIKE IT WHAT OTHER KINDS OF PLEASURES DO I HAVE FROM MY SONS
In a very low whisper, Please dont yell mom, please dont, please. One week is required before the fever and coughing subside. Another week to convalesce. His father takes a look at him; grunts. Youll find another job. Sure, pop. Dont talk about jobs already his mother scolds Levi, what are you worrying him for? Whos worrying him? I just mentioned
So stop mentioning. The main thing is he should get better. Helplessly, Levi smiles down on his son, sees the pile of books on the dresser. At least you got an opportunity to do a lot of reading. Abashed. Yes.
Dont encourage him, Rachel scolds, its not good for his eyes, hell strain them and hell be in bed even longer
MURRAYS FLY DOOM
please. His shoulders hunched over the cafeteria table, dont you see, the American people want war, more than any other people. If they dont Rena get directly involved in the one coming up Rena theyll see to it theyll become directly involved in the world war thatll follow Rena Goldstein, Rena theyll.
In anger plied by smiles Silas tackles Youre out of your mind, Lee, whats got into you, that sounds like the Communist line.
The hell it is, Im as privysluiced as you, Silas, to the trials where Radek and Zinovieff were railroaded. At fifteen years of age the verbatim transcripts of the trials were sufficient to corroborate for me the Kulak slaughter and the uprooting of populations and the emergence of Stalin as a High Hangman Priest the like of which in quantity of enemies enemad into confessing the ecstasies of imminent mortality has never been equalled. Nor does Toynbee persuade me that despite the gross inequities and cruelty on a broad bureaucratic scale Russia may nevertheless be the valid matrix of socialist revolution—and you will recall that Toynbee has been attacked by Marxists for not having encased his Study in dialectical materialism though his Yang and Yin in terms of their polarity amount to very much the same thing. The Marxist and the Toynbean make the same enormous error in the formulation of opposites to produce synthesis, to which Freud and y Gasset contribute their buttressing fallacies of ego, superego and id, they, you and I; the sorry concept being that there is an Outside and an Inside. None of you can sit here and tell me he can sense whatever it is that an enclosure encloses. You have a sense of the volume of your body and the volume of other bodies, and if there is any truth at all it is that which understands that all phenomena are outside, outside Rena Goldstein outside. You may tell me that the thoughts you think are incontrovertibly within, but this is incapable of any demonstration; you will the more accurately describe the process by stating once again that as a sensing volume you sense another volume possessing the attribute of mentation. You can understand the ludicrousness of the paradox of inside and outside if for a moment you imagine the construction of phenomena as a theory of spheres, one inside the other, or, one outside the other in ascending or descending dimensions of Rena Goldsteins colored scarlet if shes out in the snow they will have become etiolated, round tits of snowflake theyre so good they melt in the mouth so that you are inevitably led to the falsity of infinity in one direction or the other like trying to tie a knot around cardboard boxes that are constantly being flattened out which is what the matter really is which is really whats the matter. Consequently in the one direction all phenomena are Inside; in the opposite direction they are all Outside one another. I say if theres any truth at all it is that which holds the doctrine of the Outside, or, if you will, altogether the Inside. But it cannot be both, Lee and Rena are incapable of performing Opposites, and if they do it will be illusory and they are in trouble as all humans are who attempt similarly I shouldve taken a bath Mark and Achille and Silas and Jay and Hoppy are itching on my flesh. A memory of Rena itches like a filigree on my skin, ten million seahorses of Rena drying and caking on my skin at ten oclock in the evening the point being theres neither Inside nor Outside first you take a washrag and dunk it in hot water and saturate it with soap and then you bend over the bathtub in which your father always takes a bath before you do at a quarter of eleven on the cafeteria clocks it is impossible that I shall ever be able to have black roman numerals absolutely clean because the time of Levilee is dirty and nothing Rena can do can clean and you painstakingly you wash away the black ring of dirt your father leaves, dirt and scales of skin because your father itches too and his flesh comes off little by little as your flesh comes off little by little at the itching memory of Renabody lying upon various areas of your skin that you must scratch and scratch till the dirty orange blood of her hair is washed off the memory of her is not in the mind, no, never, she is like a series of orange strips of insect leeching upon the flesh and all the mind is is a revolving cafeteria door
Around and
around
and
a
till the enamel of the bathtub is pristine white snowflake painted and frozen thereon do they have to have it so goddamn hot in the cafeteria when its freezing outside
You see its impossible to elude the semantic, Lee, Silas hawfully interrupts
Oh fuck, Lee dismisses the case, all one can ever sense is a series of planes without any describable dimension sliding one upon and through the other. We will have microscopes eventually capable of photographing minuscule acts of energy, and if we continue with the foolishness of ideating Inside we will be slapped on the eye by Limit: we will have to say something resides within the minutest act of energy. We will have to build space ships which will make forays into Inner Space. I can see the entire race of mankind attempting to crawl into itself Evil evil evil Achille Volpe overreaches his chortle, as evil as six sisters. Silas’ body duckwaddles with laughter, Jay shakes his head in tiny no no no, his mouth forbidding its own smiles, Hoppy sniggers and Mark Fahn displays a whole cultivated acreage of rotten teeth over vermiform inflamed gums of tickle at Lees picture
War.
War.
War
Youve got to admit youve gone pretty far afield and well get to the questions of epistemology another time, Lee, but Ill withdraw the Communist line accu
Please come back, Rena. Her knitted wool sweater in black and white horizontal stripes, a heavy gray flannel skirt, the long strong tawny legs, the feet in gray pumps 1829 Clearfield Avenue MILKBOTTLE H the Kensington El grinds and grunches and crunchsteels by a quarter of a block away, Nate her oldest brother with Hannah his wife in the kitchen background regard Lee seriously Hiya Lee howya doin he stammers and Hannah draws him back into the kitchen Come on you idiot they want to be. There is this strangeness to Rena: all over her body she appears to have black eyes, as though somebody has been punching her and then pasting her eyes over the blackandblue marks I think we can talk better in my brothers office, she says, the black eyes making her smile pulpy and unbelievable, a kind of cruel tenderness in metal staples through all of her softness Is Rick waiting to hear from you Lee cannot resist scratching at her. This is mine. Theres no Rick. He is unbelievable, he does not exist Ive seen him Nina says, I didnt believe it, I didnt believe it Norma says, hes thin and stringy and he looks like hes got dirty unwashed black hair ITCH, get it off, take a bath but the footdoctors instruments in the office are polished to a high lustre, this is the white enamel pan that he puts the comparings of his patients feet in, they sit in a barberdentist amalgam of a chair his patients swear by him they adore his stammer his boyishness the rough josh of his approach they wait in lines outside his office, two bucks a visit to have their feet treated, the factory workers that stand at the assembly lines all day, the salesladies on their feet all day, the old Irish biddies with their misshapen bogs and quicksands of feet to have them kneaded and washed and alcoholed and pared ah that feels a whole lot better Doctor Goldstein it does now, the chorusgirls that cab up from the Philadelphia downtown district to have their feet touched and trembled and tucked and tickled and smoothed by the capable boyish fingers of Doctor Goldstein Hows that arch feel now Billie but Im afraid you will eventually have to wear orthopedic shoes, we call them corrective he stutters prettily Hurry it up Rena Im due at the links so if Im going to drive you to Oh shut up you idiot Hannah hushes him What is it that you want to say Lee Rena inquires gently
