Memories of the Future, page 8
September 20, 1978
Lucy woke me last night again. She called out, “No! No!” And then after squeaking out a few high, unintelligible sounds, she said loudly in a deep voice that might have been an imitation of Ted’s, “I dreamed I killed you.” It took me a while to fall asleep again.
Perusing the notebook, I see that the second phase of “my new life” pushed Lucy Brite to the margins of my consciousness because doors opened, and I walked through them into private rooms in New York City that until then had been shut to me. I see my former self enter apartments, large and small, elegant and grubby, usually with Whitney because I arrive as “the friend.” I did not understand that the polite friend who smiles at the party and talks to this one and that one is not the person who comes home and records what she has seen and heard and smelled and touched in Mead. The writer is someone else. It is only on the page, for Page, that the beastly and cold begin to receive permission to appear. The beastly and cold arrive as small hiccoughs in the writing. It is on the page that I begin to take quiet vengeance for the master script, the script that had been dictated to me for years and years, a barely audible voice in my ear that insisted I obey.
September 25, 1978
Dear Page,
Scene: Crowded book party in dark apartment on West 100th Street.
Man approaches. Handsome face. Slightly yellowed teeth. Radiant expression. Sits down, leans in, nose to nose. Philip Hightower. Squeezed between Hightower and skinny poet in black shoes with pointy toes discussing Language School in low rolling tones. Hightower is evangelical. Multiple upward gestures, uses the word “REVOLUTIONARY” several times. No, I have never heard of Werner Erhard. No, not the faintest tinkling of proverbial bell in my brain. Shocked expression from Hightower! Mint breath. Spells. “E-S-T.” Mentions Nietzsche to no purpose. Explains to me that PAYING participants are imprisoned for two weekends. In a mere four days, Hightower has become HIMSELF! Does not respond to my comment that one does not usually have to purchase this form of becoming. More gestures. Further explanation. I glean a crucial point: NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO USE THE TOILET. The greater wisdom of this strikes me as dubious. I withdraw my head from Hightower nose. “You have to do it! I tell you, you have to do it!” Hightower palm lands heavily on my knee. I remove it. Hightower chin moves back and forth in horizontal direction to demonstrate his disappointment in my lack of judgment. After sixty hours of expensive humiliation, I will no longer shrink from Hightower’s hand. I will “cause life rather than just live it.” I wave at Gus, stand up, and “cause” my immediate departure.
S.H.
September 30, 1978
Joseph Brodsky attacked one of Whitney’s poems in class. She defended it. She says the other students in class are cowering wimps. He mocks and taunts them constantly, but after she spoke sharply to him, he smiled. She’s his pet now. Whitney says Brodsky’s poems in English “suck.”
October 1, 1978
Tonight. East 70s. Army of peons must shine brass trim in lobby daily. Doorman with epaulettes. Squashed elevator ride to penthouse on East Side with older people who knew each other in a noisy, jokey, chummy way. Sad celery sticks with peanut butter. Pretzels. Miniature hot dogs. Whitney called it “WASP fare.” They, people from rich, old, white Protestant families with grand names, don’t know any better. They prefer cocktails to food. Whitney pointed out a short man chortling and backslapping in the corner. Norman Mailer. He was talking to a tall man about “the wives.” “It’s tough on the wives, though.” Who are the wives? Didn’t he stick a knife into one of his “wives”?
October 3, 1978
Whitney and I were lying on her bed on West Broadway, and she said that when she was little and really angry, she used to go into the bathroom, lock the door, bite on a towel, and hammer the floor with her fists.
October 5, 1978
Alvin and Rosie have a bathtub in their kitchen on Second Avenue. Alvin has a starved look—torn T-shirt, protruding rib cage, leather, studs. Nattered on about television. Incomprehensible. Platinum-haired Rosie, silent as a stone on ripped sofa. Eyes closing. Before we left, she opened her palm and said, “Lude?” These people are idiots.
Whitney translated: Television is a punk band. Lude is a Quaalude, a muscle relaxant that makes your limbs spongy. These people are idiots.
Your own S.H.
At night there was a game to play, and we played it. The game is called Pretty Girls. The game is old, but its rules have been written and rewritten and rewritten again over the centuries:
I remember Whitney hooting loudly as she pranced around her loft in her bra and panties swinging a sequin dress over her head, shouting, “It’s Mata Hari tonight, Minnesota!” The fever hit us, and we dressed up, usually in Whitney’s clothes because she had far more of them than I did, and we painted our faces and arranged our hair, as if we were going on stage to play the parts of vixens or femme fatales or bad girls on the loose. The wilder the getup, the more hilarious we were to each other, and then we two strode into the small hours of morning and sashayed past the waiting crowd and watched as the man we called “the Discriminator,” the giant who stood behind the velvet rope at Studio 54, lifted it for us to pass and then we danced until four, two indefatigable girl-women twisting and grinding and waving our arms and laughing in the din of disco among the other masqueraders—the looming transvestites in peekaboo costumes, the tipsy models, the rich guys in Italian suits, the famous people who lounged in special zones reserved for them alone.
I never would have ventured out if Whitney hadn’t accompanied me, nor would I have known that such a place existed, but once I was there, I gave myself up to its allure. The music danced me, not the other way around. I succumbed to its thoughtless charm, to beat and sweat and thrill. And Whitney was there in my vision when I looked for her, her head back, lips parted and eyes closed, wearing sparkles or feathers or false lashes or all three. She was with me in the driving rhythms that are sex without sex, what the Greeks called ekstasis, out to place, displacement, no longer home, lifted up and out and into plurality and boundlessness. This is how we enter the mind of the many, become the beehive, not the bee. I remember feeling blind with bodily motion, and I remember the charged joy of release in the dance. Whitney and I were tireless on the dance floor, and once we fell into a Dionysian trance, we could go on and on until one of us had to pee, and then the enchantment was usually broken.
The Ladies’ Room was 54’s Underworld, and most of its inhabitants arrived there by the river Lethe. I remember well-coifed heads bent over lines of cocaine at the sink and determined fingers with brilliant nails that hitched up fishnet stockings, and I remember necks craned over naked shoulders to check for wrinkled underpants in the mirror, and I remember all the skirt yanking that went on in the crush of women, that vital adjustment to dresses so tight they crawled up your butt if you weren’t careful. Of course, those fierce downward tugs mattered only if the look you were cultivating didn’t include a bare ass. I saw several of those. The room was resonant with sobs, titters, howls, and oaths. It stank of pungent perfume and vomit and urine. For the sober, the room was more sobering, and I was always sober. It was too expensive to drink. I hoarded my money for nicotine.
We hopped up and down at CBGB and at Max’s Kansas City and at the Mudd Club on White Street, where the boys were thin but the girls were plump, and I got used to the conventions, the S&M leather chic, the razor blade earrings that must have had a safety coating because I stopped worrying about vulnerable necks in the pushy crowd. I never saw anyone bleed.
The differences in clubs, uptown and downtown, the sociology of the music and the types, carefully parsed and analyzed by some, were moot for me. When I wasn’t dancing, I saw mostly pathos, and it looked the same. Human beings are desperate to be seen and to see themselves reflected in the eyes of others, to feel the family comforts of “us,” the charmed caresses of the tribe, and back then when New York City was crumbling and Ronald Reagan and the AIDS plague had not yet begun their scourges, segments of the city’s rich and poor sought an easy route to forgetfulness in collective inebriation and fast fucking.
Whitney was a little disappointed that I adjusted so quickly to our midnight forays into urban decadence.
But my friend began to understand that life among rural and small-town white people isn’t now and never was a Hollywood movie directed by Frank Capra. I told her stories:
I had been out with my father on “calls” when I was still a child. I rarely accompanied him, but from time to time circumstances intervened, and I found myself along for the ride. I remember looking at the strips of flypaper black with dead flies that hung from the ceiling in a tiny dilapidated kitchen that smelled of cabbage and the woman with a pinched, angry face in a loose cotton dress who sat across from me and scowled while my father attended to her husband in the next room. “Scared of a few flies, are ya, little girl?” I shook my head. “Don’t see them pesky things in town, is that it?” I didn’t answer her even though we didn’t really live in town. Then she stood up, noisily collected dishes, and muttered, “Think you’re too good for us, is that it?”
I remember Kari standing with me outside a trailer with no wheels in the trailer park across from the Dairy Queen one night while my father was inside. After a few minutes, a woman began to howl. When she stopped, my father came out, and we knew the boy was dead because my father’s eyes said, “The patient died.”
Once, I rushed into a house behind my father and watched him kneel beside a blue woman who lay flat on the floor of her shag-carpeted dining room. He looked at her hard, grabbed her by both arms, sat her upright, reached deep into her mouth with two extended fingers, and pulled out a long piece of beef, which he waved at the woman’s daughter who was standing above him. The blue woman coughed, gasped, turned white, then pink so fast I thought I had witnessed a resurrection. The daughter began to burble in a high, excited voice, “I thought she was dead! I thought she was dead!” My father must have stayed and examined the woman, must have talked to the daughter, but I remember none of that. I do remember that my father whistled as Clunky lurched and rocked over the unpaved driveway that led to Highway 19, and that as we drove away from the low green ranch house, he winked at me, and he told me that ready hands were a physician’s greatest tools. I received the wink as love.
I entertained Whitney with the pot-roast-Lazarus story before I told her the other story because bringing a woman back to life and breath is wondrously simple. My father had played the role of physician-magician. I had kept the other story secret, not even Kari knew it, because it made me feel bad. It still does. I think I told Whitney because I knew it couldn’t hurt her. I was ten years old, which means it was the spring of 1965. Malcolm X had been murdered, and I would guess from my memory of budding trees that the violence of “Bloody Sunday” on the Pettus Bridge in Selma had already happened. My mother cried, and she kept saying, “There were children, children!” So it may have been April, and I had just stepped out of my ballet class at the Arts Guild. My father was there to pick me up, but he was standing with a man who was waving his arms wildly.
“Don’t be frightened,” my father said to me. “We’re going to drive like the wind.”
I don’t remember the trip at all. I can see the house on the east side of town. In memory, it’s painted yellow. My father told me to stay in the car.
I studied the stains my toes had left inside my black ballet slippers and looked through the windshield at pale green branches. I recall trembling sunlight and shade under the trees and, after it seemed to me that I had waited so long I couldn’t wait any longer, I found myself walking to the house across the muddy front lawn, fully aware that every step I took was forbidden. I don’t remember that I had ever disobeyed my father before that moment. This seems impossible, but the truth is I can’t recall ever consciously crossing him. I don’t remember opening the door or stepping over the threshold either or exactly what words I had planned to offer my father as an excuse.
I have pictures in my mind that have lasted, but their accuracy is something I can’t vouch for. They may have hardened over time, because they resemble a series of still photographs. I see my father bent over Mrs. Malacek. I recognized her right away because she belonged to my mother’s sewing group, and her son Brian Malacek was one of the mean stupid boys I ignored in class. But Brian’s mother, who looked younger than the other mothers and wore skirts above her knees, had always smiled at me. Brian’s mother was leaning back on the arm of a sofa, her bare legs in front of her. She held a towel to her face, and her blouse hung open. I saw her full white breasts over her brassiere and rolls of belly flesh, and I saw blood all over her thighs and a huge dark stain on the sofa cushion beneath her, so much blood I think I stopped breathing, but I’m not sure. I knew I shouldn’t be looking at her because she wasn’t dressed. It was shameful. They would see me. And then I heard my father’s voice. He spoke to Mrs. Malacek in a voice so tender and musical it sounded like a song, but she didn’t answer him. Then she let the towel fall and looked straight at me with her red, swollen, misshapen face, but there was nothing in her eyes, no recognition, no surprise, no pain, nothing. Was that when I noticed Brian? I did see him. I know I saw him. Brian had pressed himself up against a wall in the corner, and he was shaking.
“Go wait in the car.” My father didn’t sound angry, but I turned and ran.
I had seen what I was not supposed to see, but I didn’t know exactly what I had seen. I waited in the car for a long time. People came and went. But the coming and going is not articulated in my mind. When my father finally returned, his white shirt was bloody under his jacket. He slid into the car, and I felt the horror of the reprimand I thought would come, but it didn’t come. It was as if I hadn’t disobeyed him, as if I had not been inside the house, as if I had seen nothing. I could feel the tension in my father’s body, could feel his knuckles tighten as he drove, and he hit the brakes so hard at stop signs, I wanted to cry. Instead, I concentrated on the white line in the middle of the highway, and we turned onto Old Dutch Road, drove past the Swansens’ barn, and took a right into our gravel driveway. He stopped hard and fast outside the garage and, just after he shut off the motor, he bent his head over the steering wheel and muttered to himself in a low, choked voice, “The son of a bitch.”
* * *
Around this strong memory there is nothing immediately before or after. I have no recollection of the ballet lesson or what I did after I came home. But I know that on one of the days afterward in school, I caught Brian eyeing me in class, and pity and embarrassment welled up in me, and I smiled at him, not a big smile, just a small one I imagined was compassionate. But soon after that, he launched his vendetta. Brian’s malevolence, which had once been broadly disseminated toward just about everyone, found a single target. For weeks the skinny boy with a crew cut, cowlick, and fingernails rimmed in black followed me in the halls, haunted me on the playground, and, as he shadowed me, he imitated my every word, gesture, and expression. Brian became my exaggerated mirror image, a reflection that turned me into a mincing nitwit.
The day after I told Whitney the story, I wrote in the notebook:
Whitney and I discussed my error at length: the smile. She said Brian had fought for his dignity the only way he knew how. He attacked the girl who had barged into his house and not only seen his bloody, half-naked mother, but seen him, Brian, shivering in a corner. Whitney wondered if my smile hadn’t been touched by superiority. She called me “Saint Minnesota.” It made me feel like moral mud, but do I really know what I felt when I was ten years old and smiled at Brian Malacek?
And then she asked, “Who was the man?”
I said, “What man?”
“The man who brought your father to the house. Who was he?”
Fourteen years after the fact, I realize that I have never taken the man properly into account. I scrutinize my memory for his presence. His arms wave outside the Arts Guild, but he is faceless, ageless—all grown-ups seemed old to me then. We must have followed his car. He had run into the house, hadn’t he? Do I actually recall him running into the house? Or am I supplying an image for the question?
Whitney said, “Do you think it was Brian’s father?”
Page, there is something uncanny about Whitney’s thinking. It never occurred to me that the man was Brian’s father, but then, I had never seen Brian’s father, only his mother. According to Whitney, the waving, desperate man may have beaten, maybe raped his wife in a rage and then, frightened by his own violence, run for the doctor. On the other hand, the man could have been a neighbor or a friend who heard screams, a man who, once he had brought the doctor to the poor bleeding woman, had vanished from the scene. Or maybe, Whitney said, turning the plot again, the man was her lover. “Maybe Mr. Malacek had discovered that Mrs. Malacek was having an affair.”
A man runs through a door and disappears. Does he let himself out by the back door? If someone had come out the front door, I would surely remember, wouldn’t I? Or, does the man retreat to a bedroom in the house because he lives there?
“Well, she didn’t beat up herself,” Whitney said to me. “Where were the police?”
Where were the police? Page, where were the police? There was no police car, was there? Did she refuse to press charges against the man? Whitney thinks I should call my father now, ask him about Mrs. Malacek, and find out what happened.
I never did.
Years later, after my father died, I reminded Whitney of the story, but she didn’t remember anything about it.
My silence was fear. I was afraid of heroes and villains and fools, afraid of who was who.
And who is the little girl who stands in the hallway and looks into the room at the bleeding woman wearing no underpants and eyes that can’t see and the boy shaking in the corner? Speechless witness? Ghost? Nobody? “I’m Nobody—who are You?” Can Nobody write the story? “The Case of Brian Malacek’s Mother” by a Lady. By a Little Girl. By Anonymous.
