China Blues Read online

  extrovert. What else can I say?

  I am sitting

  right in front of you. My hands are folded

  on the formica table, relaxed, at ease. Every thing

  in the world should be this simple.

  What

  can I tell you that you don’t already know?

  TAN

  Amy Tan is one of the most gorgeous new

  American writers presently at work. What I like

  best about her work is its effortlessness, the way one detail

  leads with a completely natural grace to

  another detail about a young girl’s choice of wardrobe

  for travel. She has stories, in other words,

  a number of stories contained

  within a single box perhaps a white cardboard shoebox

  sitting beside another shoebox that still contains

  wrapped in white tissue paper of the kind you get in stores,

  a pair of glossy red shoes. The stories are on loose

  sheets, they are not bound together by an obtuse plotline;

  rather, they have so much in common

  that they simply touch on each other & develop their own

  persuasion.

  The work I am up to my elbows in at present is more

  centred. Tom’s story, with Tom, even indirectly,

  as the constant centre of reference; and the world,

  like innumerable photographs, swirls at one or another

  speed or F-stop in Tom’s camera.

  So Tan’s work,

  listening to her read from The Kitchen God’s Wife, is more

  than good art or refreshing. I am actually liberated

  by watching her concentrate on the good stuff, the fresh peas,

  yellow corn, soft petalled artichokes,

  & she casually throws the husks over her shoulder. The

  beans & the corn are as fresh as if it had just rained.

  GREAT LAKES

  Ontario is gorgeous in the summer. Northern lake fish like sturgeon are flown directly to the coast. With daisies in their mouths. We have a lot of manufacturing lay-offs, and more unemployed Phds than you can count. > Caribbean shrimps are supposed to be better than the ones from Louisiana, tastier, the man says, eat them in 2 big bites and suck the last sweet bit right out of its shell. > A pink elephant by Tom Thomson floats past on a street parade, Kate talks about some Steiglitz photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. > We are sitting around a long table against the morning glory yellow wall at Britoli’s, Frank and Paulo have their arms around each other’s shoulders reviewing baseball, the bread is good, Carol is reading a letter to someone from her friend in Amsterdam. > Red Hot Chili Peppers are still a zany and classy group, this thing they have about playing with their dicks hanging out of their pants is wild. O’Keeffe’s desert flowers are great. Innovative musicians, sure; but maybe a tad too aggressive. > We’re splashing wine and eating soup. There are about 9 films out of 75 in Toronto at the moment that are worth seeing. > There are 100s of problems in the world. More. There are millions. People don’t solve problems so much as they respond to challenges. > Paulo turns down a piece of chocolate raspberry mousse cake. We have all the elements we need. We are in the process of discovering a package. > Well, something more radical than warehouse sound or wide lapel suits. Caribbean shrimps are supposed to be better than the ones from Louisiana, tastier, the man says, eat them in 2 big bites.

  WHAT’S SO EASY ABOUT 17?

  I don’t know what it is about youth

  except for an honest desire to concentrate on textbooks

  of infinitesimal calculus,

  & at the same time a great love

  of carelessness,

  a wanton energy,

  throwing their shoulders around as if ecstasy is movement

  or motion is ecstasy,

  a wantonness, a carelessness so

  beautiful that like a warm summer breeze you lift

  your hand up to your red hair

  in amazement & open your mouth to taste the fine grains

  of copper magnesium cobalt in the summer air.

  In Tobacco Heaven my friends are killed

  on freeways. Smoking dope perhaps, or a fifth of cheap liquor.

  They are about 17, tall & slim,

  usually wearing t-s

  or sloppy shirts;

  except for Carson who was short & plump

  the class clown, with a flat-top haircut,

  who went through a guard rail in a red Mazda

  & fell 135 feet.

  A boy with the body of a

  perfect high school basketball star

  long torso no waist & the smile of a sardonic angel

  my name is John,

  call me Johnny Slow Hand,

  driving

  with a large unadulterated jumbo of Coke

  Joan Crawford’s favourite drink.

  It makes me nauseous, she once said,

  between his long legs,

  radio blaring Elton John

  that song about how the blues will always come back

  with brass in the background

  a lift from LA Express

  caught the tail of a grey Plymouth

  making a lazy turn no tail-lights onto a country side road

  & was then clipped by 3 cars & a truck

  & flipped

  on the boulevard.

  Saturday night

  the cars have to be cut open with an acetylene torch

  to lift their once perfect Adidas-shod bodies

  out of the wrecked car the way you would lift an egg out

  of a crushed bird’s nest.

  Mostly boys,

  the girl was an exception, & under the age of 29.

  Boys have the big A-stat. A for accident

  & A for a sort of hyper-tense anxiety

  backed up by a tumultuous review of hormones.

  Boys are expressive, sure, okay,

  & also aggressive drivers.

  Jerzy Kosinski

  snuffed out with a plastic bag.

  Surely you weren’t trying to do anything like that?

  When you’re 17½ the world is a huge 6 / 5ths.

  6 / 5ths of a gigantic moon.

  Cut throat of the sun.

  Slashed wrists of the moon.

  You just put your foot

  on the gas a little too hard with one arm out the window

  & leaned back like a lazy greyhound on the comfortable

  seat.

  Cut throat of the sun.

  Slashed wrists of

  the moon.

  6 / 5ths of the dark night.

  Tobacco Heaven lays out

  the coloured highway signs from Thunder Bay to New Mexico.

  Life is almost always beautiful

  or at worst a bit of a down.

  The upside on the girl is that she wasn’t decapitated,

  unlike the Hispanic kid who was

  driving with his feet just to prove he could do it.

  Can you do it Jaime can you do it Jaime can you do it Jaime?

  Si,

  it is easy, I can/

  do it.

  And if you lose control

  then the night road is wrong because

  it has imperfect highway seals under the asphalt

  some designs don’t breathe the way a highway

  should breathe. Some axles lock, & some don’t.

  Driving with your knees only is strictly forbidden

  while eating pizza

  turning over a tape cassette

  or changing your shirt.

  The Buzzcocks should never have broken up

  when they were so so good. Some curves

  in the highway are actually a dark blue parallel.

  Some high schools have good basketball teams

  with cheerleaders & some don’t. All highway signs

  should be *illuminated*. Some windshields

  break more e
asily than others.

  TAPIOCA

  Mrs. Matisse, I say, when I get her on the telephone, Is it ok if I take Henri out for coffee? I know this is a different time period, time has borders also, but what the état, I think we can do it. Tell him we’ll have a big plate of sweet arrabiata and I won’t mention Claes Oldenburg’s bright-coloured canvas hamburger sculptures even once. We’ll just talk about Henri’s Jazz Portfolio and questions of general focus.

  He’s out, David, she says, He’s paying a bill and having some shirts made.

  I wanted to talk to him about tapioca. I’ve decided that tapioca is the opposite of style. Obvious, I guess. Love is such a sweet bowl of tapioca. But it needs character. It needs wit. Something the French masters were good at, Pascin with his endless drinking, Dufy with his crême brulées; and it needs colour, the advertising photographs for style should be of baseball players and models.

  So I go out for lunch around 2:30 – rare roast beef sandwich as usual, but with a slice of honest dark chocolate cake on the side. Dark w/ hazelnuts, I might add, and I like to lick a little salt off my hand before I eat the cake.

  Well, stupid, my mother says, I didn’t tell you to eat nothing but tapioca.

  COMFORTABLE SHOES

  It’s amazing how easily I can turn the most

  embarrassing remark around as long as I’m wearing

  comfortable shoes,

  Clark’s wide last or Nike’s court shoes,

  whatever. For example, Grant walks over to me at a party

  for Gord Raynor & says, Sorry to hear about your losing

  your job with the Waterloo Arts Council. He has a nice

  smile on his face, & he obviously thinks this is a good

  bit to do.

  And I simply smile at him, very relaxed, & say,

  I’m working on a new book, or I’ve just discovered a great

  recipe for chicken with pistachios & red onion. And

  I tweak his cheek, & give his collar a jerk,

  as if to say, Why don’t you buy some new shirts, fella?

  How do I know he’s being insincere? Because he’s not even

  vaguely concerned about me, we’re not even real friends –

  he just wants to make the commiseration & get the scoop

  on how it happened. So why should I waste my time

  telling him how it happened. It was nothing anyway,

  it was just a wastebasket, so to speak. And I stroll

  away to get a drink. I’m not a great writer,

  & I don’t put very much stress

  on having a perfect history of proprietry,

  although yes, I do like to have a shower every morning,

  clean socks, a little talcum powder in a pair

  of comfortable shoes. Personal information,

  I mean a bite that corresponds to a sensitivity

  you may have, goes for a sentence or two, sure; but

  it doesn’t redefine your good stuff. I’ve got a good

  curve on the outside, that’s about all I need.

  But listen closely: you should never go out for

  the evening without wearing a pair of comfortable shoes.

  THE SKY BLUE HEART OF ONTARIO

  for Ed Grogan

  Here in the sky blue heart

  of Ontario

  I am sitting on a battered wood&canvas lawn chair

  out on the beach at Hanlan’s Point

  without a Citizenship. Behind me

  to the north there are the lush Muskokas

  & west there are the rugged boonies & farms

  that begin before Great Slave Lake.

  I am happy &

  useless in my rumpled chinos

  with a large double scotch

  not reading because I would need a 5 × 8 portable

  red plastic box light. After all,

  this is an island in Lake Ontario.

  The sun

  is coming up orange; there are trees,

  & the great smoke of Toronto is in the distance. I have never

  believed in the Iroquois that much. In my heart

  I have always believed the Sioux

  to have been kinder

  & to have had a larger concept of glory

  preferably

  sitting on their horses.

  There is a bright 86°

  for today. The sun is coming up orange. I have always

  believed you want

  to kill me with your stupid ideas

  about Canadianism, but relax, I don’t hate you for it.

  I am healthy despite these attacks,

  talented, & stronger than 2 average people.

  I don’t

  hate you for it; I just think we should bring

  our horses down to swim in the Lake. It’s warm

  this morning, & I regard you & the cicadas

  with a bemused & moody eye.

  WARHOL

  for Kathy Melanson

  We think of Time generally as being abstract, although Time is the condition in which these cultural periods happen, which is funny, don’t you think, because we say that Wittgenstein and Heisenberg are abstract, whereas they’re actually very tangible; and then we’ve got De Kooning, who is senile now (Warhol copied him, well, he tried to copy his face, he couldn’t very well copy his memories, Dutch, Amsterdam, hetero, adolescent lusts for French schoolgirls, the importance of Hans Hoffman, anti-Nazi, the sturm troopers in Berlin squares, where Alban Berg used to walk, trying to destroy the German people whom they said they loved, when, in reality, the reality of real time, they were nothing but a National Rifle Association in power; how could Warhol even copy his face, that gorgeous thick-browed innocence & those eyes), well, he’s senile now & there’s going to be a lot of litigation over the paintings. And of course De Kooning, being senile, doesn’t know … well, what doesn’t he know? Imagine if we could take a sortie into De Kooning’s mind, sort of like taking a dune buggy into the desert, what sort of blue & rose & grey flowers we might discover.

  A girl sitting in the front row of an OAC class where I’m doing a workshop this afternoon. I ask her if she thinks Joan Baez is a great singer. She’s about 17, bright, high forehead, good eyes, attractive. She says, Joan Who? I say, Baez. Bi Ezz. She smiles, not defensively, let’s not attribute things, but with a sort of natural mechanical amusement, and shrugs, looking around, reflexively, to see if there is peer group support. There isn’t support exactly, but a sort of curiosity. These kids, it should be pointed out, especially since we touched on events in Europe in the 1930s, listen to 1000s of groups in a given year, most of them trash, some of them outstanding. Then a boy at the back of the class, in a black motorcycle jacket, says, Yeah, she’s terrific, she’s really important. He has status. He knows a lot about The Smiths, and that Stephen Morrissey isn’t nearly as cool as he’s supposed to be. They all turn and look at Jod, that’s his nickname, and sort of nod. The attractive girl in the short-sleeved dark blue sweater sort of shrugs and slides down a bit in her seat. The class turns back to me with increased interest.

  Don’t you think it would be more interesting than our average boring, Here’s a new writer from Belgium, and he’s going to read to you from his new unpublished boring Belgian novel, to have an evening at Massey Hall, or Thomson (Thomson really needs to be liberated a bit, don’t you think) with De Kooning sitting on stage, white coveralls etc. against a background of his paintings and some large blow-ups of black holes & red dwarfs, and to have Baez in the middle of the stage singing that song O when the angels come out in the morning and blow their trumpets?

  SOMETIMES MEN BURN WITH A CRAZY FEVER

  “Honey,” she says, “do you want to dance with me?”

  We are in

  the dark meadow outside the Mackenzie farm,

  there’s a clear yellow full moon & she’s standing

  with her hands on her hips & her head back.

  I’m sitting down on an empty box,

 
she’s being cocky,

  here in a dark meadow

  out on the Cedar Road,

  under this harvest red copper hinge in a cobalt sky

  not far from where we used to play as children.

  I know what she means. She means just slow

  at first then fast then really slow

  – like that couple in Badlands

  dancing beside the parked car on their way west

  one bank after another.

  She undoes her tomato red blouse

  & her breasts catch the light like flowers

  5, 6 minutes from the river where we used to smoke

  brown leaf golden tossed crumpled cigarettes

  & talk about each other’s bodies

  & why Paul wouldn’t go to the school dance

  with Esther.

  “No,” I say, “I don’t,”

  feeling my balls turn upside down

  like a picture in Gray’s Anatomy, Erasmus reflecting

  on the history of Holland,

  old Haarlem,

  Jan Steen’s painting Girl Eating Oysters

  my balls turn upside down in my faded jeans

  & go into my throat like a chicken bone

  or a big piece of crusty bread. I have some

  matches in my pocket. I get up & walk toward

  the Mackenzie’s blue & grey barn.

  Tomorrow I want to reread Day of the Locust.

  Tonight I want to set fire to this barn.

  She turns

  away in the moonlight & looks back her face looks

  like a famous painting or a great perfume advertisement

  in a glossy magazine but subdued by shadow.

  Her sweet

  brown nipples ache in my throat like bitter elm buds.

  Her blue eyes singe the back of my throat.

  I put the bottle back in my jacket pocket & keep

  walking, head way back, toward the barn. Her skirt rips

  at my stomach like a dark blue knife.

  KISSES

  For example last night, it was Thursday, I said to Paula, “I just can’t make the good things happen here.” I was speaking of Tobacco Heaven, the city with the big stock exchange on the north shore of a lake. There was a large pot of soup on the stove. Paula is an old friend. She was sympathetic and made drinks. I told her I thought it would be better in New York or Chicago; New York is pretty gay, and I have always had romantic ideas about Chicago, because of Sandburg perhaps, that one poem.