| Author: |
Robert Ziegler |
| Dated: |
Wednesday, July 14 2004 @ 04:33 PM EDT |
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2197 times |
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It all seemed like only moments had elapsed, and when I came down from the acid trip, I was standing on a Montreal street corner, wearing an orange tie, carrying a toothbrush in one pocket, spare change in the other. A short man with devilish eyes and a red goatee was talking to me in French. I don’t know why he picked me, nor how I understood enough to follow him home to meet his wife (whom he said could speak some English) but he did and I did.
Recently immigrated from France, they had rented a run down heritage house on Rue St. Denis and were looking for boarders to share the rent. They showed me a high-ceilinged room with a one-legged washstand and a window which looked out onto a tangle of criss-crossed washlines in the trashy adjacent courtyards. They gave me a mat and a blanket, and I slept for ten hours. That night we ate crusty bread dipped in olive oil, slathered with sardines and feta cheese. I gave them all the money I had left and promised I’d pay rent as soon as I landed a job at Expo.
As it turned out, there were no jobs available at Expo; they’d been farmed out long ago; besides, I didn’t speak a word of French. Because I had no money to spend at Expo, I went there only twice all summer. I came down hard from the LSD into the gradual awareness of the tear I’d rent in the family fabric and the sudden nothingness into which I’d flung myself. That summer I learned to lean heavily on the bottle.
Jean-Louis Lamarche, a burnt out, abstract painter with a drooping moustache and rotten teeth, lived in the same rooming house, just across the hall. It had rained hard one night, and I’d ducked into a coffee house near Rue St. Denis. Jean-Louis recognized me, and, with his skeletal fingers around my arm, guided me to a chessboard. We managed a little conversation, then he jerked his thumb toward a wall mural he had been commissioned to paint.
“It was a *censored*ing nightmare,” he says. “*censored*ing weeks I am stuck trying to finish but no, I can find no answer. Den one night I sit straight up in bed and dere it is: dots! Big *censored*ing orange dots. An’ dats it. C’est fini! *censored*ing voila! Den I get my pay, buy new brushes and paints. Da rest I drink up an’ get some new ideas. What you tink?”
I say I like it. Mostly shades of blue, some black trapezoids, green geometric shadows and gestalts that hooked into my irresolution, convincing me that I know something about art, and Montreal, rainy nights on neon avenues and cavernous cathedrals, afloat in the slipstream. And, of course there were those explosive, eye-opening orange dots. Not academic jargon and research papers, no Haight-Ashbury grooves and vibes, no Pennsylvania Dutch pragmatism; just decisive, French-beatnik, orange, *censored*ing dots. We were companions, drifting in the shallows of madness. He’s so happy about something, he’s swamped me at chess, and by the elbow he drags me to a tavern to meet his friends. They sit around a table with trays of beer in those tall slender glasses, hard-boiled eggs, smoking. His friend Jean-Marc grabs him and they hug and slap each other as if they’ve just returned safely from the “Nam.” Tangled dirty red hair, long beard, waist-length, paint-splattered army jacket and a rope holding up the torn bell bottoms of Jean-Marc. I sat, throughout the summer, on the outskirts of their conversations, understanding only their laughter.
Expo and the tourists faded, job search faded. A back cheque from my teaching assistantship arrived, so I paid my back rent and two weeks in advance, bought a mattress and rattan chair from the Sally Ann, extra clothes, some feta and fruit, and began buying rounds of beers for the artists. Beer in the morning, beer and cheese and pickled eggs in the afternoon and evening, wine or gin late at night with Jean-Louis, who has begun painting “cheesecake crap” for a rich man who wants art in his motel rooms, and art in his home. Jean-Louis is depressed that he has to paint shit to stay alive: women in fishnet stockings, horses in a thunderstorm. He gets drunk and morose, confesses his girlfriend is stripping again and not coming home at night. He weeps in my bedroom then drags me to the usual tavern. Jean-Marc is sleeping on the sidewalk outside, but before I can shake him, Jean Louis yanks back my arm.
“Don’t wake him! He’s sleeping. He’s working on his sculptings for Expo. Sacrament! He put dem out dere on da revolving *censored*ing wheel display, which has da wrong *censored*ing turn speed, and it has breakin’ up da visual lines cuz dat wheels moving too fast, those pigs, which has piss him off so he’s *censored* dem an’ jus’ falls asleep. Don’t wake ‘m. He’s tired tonight.”
We step gently over him and into the light of the tavern.
Some days I would ride the buses all day. I liked the Botanical Gardens, the cactus rooms all in dome-shaped glass. The dry heat, and the sandy smell of the earth. I’d yearn for LSD, imagining it would transform the gardens into a Mexican desert. I’d talk to Marta and Denise, two friends of Jean- Louis’s, hassle them for some grass. They kept saying there’d be some soon, and I began to realize I was spending a lot of time obsessing about it, wanting something to ease things, to soften up the edges, flesh out the time.
One night, Louise, the wife of Michel-of-the-boarding-house, maneuvered me to an outdoor concert. Michel worked night shift at an aircraft hanger, a metal worker. Louise was younger, like a child, impulsive and loud and flirtatious. They argued a lot at night, downstairs. They didn’t seem to care who heard them screaming, slamming doors. It was pouring down rain so hard that our clothes were clinging to our skin, and the sewers couldn’t handle all the water and overflow, so we were knee-deep at some streets. When we got to the concert we had no tickets, but Louise just climbed around the black, wrought iron bars. I followed her, and we slid onto slippery bleachers. It was a hot night, humid, and the musicians played crazily right through the downpour, then we all rose in a steaming mass, cheering wildly: Encore! Encore!
When we got home we were dripping, so Louise stripped to her undergarments, then burst into my room, where she sat, huddled and shivering, under an old brown army blanket. I wanted to change too, but she was laughing and teasing me in her childish way, sitting on my floor mattress, when the downstairs front door opened, and Louise began to scream,
“Michel, Michel, quick, he’s boddering me.”
And she let fly a stream of French which sent Michel flying through the door and at me. I’m suddenly protesting, saying I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but I’m speaking in English while she’s saying things in French. Michel grabbed her by the wrist, glared at me, then out they went with a slam of my door. After that we seldom spoke.
Mornings I found myself in the Parc La Fontane watching the fountains, dozing off on the park benches, wandering around in the same clothes, watching people, feeding pigeons, content with nothing. I took out a membership at the public library and read Tolstoy and Chekov. Sparse prose felt right for such emptiness. Nights I sat and stared at the colored lights that played across the fountains. It was as close to drugs as I got, and as I was usually hungover, I found that the fountains, the dark little lake and shadow-canoes, the lovers’ silhouettes in the street lamps, held me like a figurine in a glass-ball shake-up toy.
But, I wasn’t ready for formlessness and anonymity yet, and by late summer I’d become very sick, with fever, chills and sweats, and long delirious dreams. Days drifted by, and I couldn’t seem to get up. Never a thought to find a doctor. My money was low and I was strung out. One afternoon, my course books for next September’s classes at the Maryland college arrived. My parents had forwarded them to me, along with $110, the last of my savings account. I moved my rattan chair nearer to the window and opened Hemingway. A breeze blew across me; there was sun on my skin. The criss-cross washlines were now fascinating; the clothes were colored; the black fire escapes zigzagged up and down the backs of the old brick buildings. Shadows leaned against sunlight. It was an abstract painting, and I wanted a bottle of wine to celebrate.
By mid August, my time in Montreal was up. My room was too empty to hold me any longer, yet exactly how and when I’d leave remained a mystery, as I still seemed to have little volition; had I not had the college job, anchoring me into the future, I may have drifted on indefinitely, with Jean-Louis, every third word becoming the nail of Tabernac!
One night, my brother-in-law grinned from my doorway with his backpack. He’d come to visit Expo, and Montreal, and me. For three days Jimmy and I toured the small circle I’d circumscribed: the orange dots, the park of colored fountains, Expo and the sidewalk cafes, Jean-Louis’s coterie of bohemians. They performed for him, making hilarious assemblages from pyramids of beer glasses, chicken bones, and grapes; flung themselves across parked car hoods; and howled with laughter at baby shoes dangling from mirrors, hood ornaments, and parking meters. Their contemptuous chagrin at bourgeois culture would have made Marcel Duchamp erect, as they toured us down any avenue, erasing the boundaries between the gallery and the street, re-defining what art was, unchaining ordinary forms, and performing one-time-only responses, as they staggered back into their garrets and passed out.
In the morning we shoved leftover sausages and Portuguese rolls into our backpacks and walked one last time through the Parc, and, lo and behold, seated by the fountain, a beatific grin spreading slowly across his face, then rising and mouthing a silent hello, was my brief friend, the Mormon, bubbling about the conference and Joseph Smith, and what a miracle we should meet again in a city so big, and when I extricated myself from the jubilation, Jimmy and I caught a bus to the edge of town and stuck out our thumbs. It took us nearly three days to hitch to Cape Cod, winding our way through the network of rural dirt roads, where farmers drive short distances slowly in old trucks, with baby shoes and crucifixes dangling from their perfectly acceptable rearview mirrors.
I was jaded, drained from too much of nothing, and though I’d worked several summers on the Cape and had many friends there, I split from Jimmy after only two days of visiting and caught a New York-bound bus, planning a transfer on into Allentown from there. As I forked down the remains of a slice of blueberry pie in the New York City bus station, I heard a woman’s voice calling my name. It was Mikey Mindlin, a girl who’d graduated two classes behind me in high school.
She introduced me to her friend, Bunny, whom she’d met at the University of Hawaii, and the three of us rode together back to Allentown. There was an immediate attraction between Bunny and I, and we spent the next two weeks together, sharing pitchers of beer and steamed clams, kissing in the Rose Gardens, falling in love. Ironically, she and Mikey were heading up to Montreal for ten days, to visit Expo, and I was leaving for Maryland. Bunny promised that she’d come down and stay with me for two weeks when they returned, before leaving for the West Coast. I was elated, and within the following year, Bunny became the first of my four wives.
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Editor's Note: Chapter one previously appeared on Scroll in Space. To read it, scroll down or select from the novel category in the left menu on the home page.
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