China Blues Page 6

  Steelyard Blues,

  & indirectly in Five Easy Pieces.

  They have peace movements,

  sure they do, for sure.

  Sherry was like this also,

  in several respects,

  my friend the west coast film executive who gave up

  on Paramount in 1982

  & moved back to New York even though the rents

  are astronomical

  & you can’t go for coffee

  after 10, 10:30 p.m., a walk down to Union Square & west,

  without wondering about the possibility of being mugged.

  Sherry

  had a thing about logos, stamps, money, flags perhaps.

  Do you, reader, think these things are male attributes?

  I’m not sure – I don’t usually find that people

  run to stereotype, or at least cultural stereotype,

  as much as some people like to think they do.

  Sherry

  would say, “I don’t know what it is, it’s not just

  that goddam picture of the goddamn Queen lying around;

  although why is she on your stamps, David?”

  And then

  one night at a bar down in the Village after a play

  by Arthur Kopit,

  called Indians, a good title,

  but compared to Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to

  Kapuskasing, the Kopit play was a kop out, a piece of junk,

  & Sherry said, apropos of Norman Mailer saying something

  about cards, Niagara Falls, it does, it tumbles,

  postcard art, Dadaism, stuff like that,

  maybe a Duchamp card from MoMa, whatever, Sherry said,

  & I think this is the film producer speaking not the woman,

  “You know it’s OK to have John Macdonald on some of your money,

  but what pisses me off,” she continued, “isn’t a presence

  so much it’s an absence.”

  So we are into Sartre

  or Wittgenstein or something. And then she says,

  “It’s the absence of Washington OR Lincoln

  on your stamps. How can you do that? What gives you

  the right? Even southerners respect Lincoln.”

  And

  I said, Look darling, my great uncle almost saved

  Lincoln’s life, so get off my back.

  Besides I don’t

  think the majority of southerners do respect

  Lincoln.

  Harriet was a girl from Baltimore,

  she was born in Winnipeg

  but her mother was from Seattle, home of the Mariners,

  who lose games & most of whom don’t own

  sailboats. We flew to Vancouver together

  with her hand inside my shirt for most of the 4 hours

  because she said the flight made her feel “queasy.”

  She was bright.

  She had an MA from Princeton & then she switched to

  psychology.

  But she

  couldn’t tell me if B. Franklin’s parents were born

  over here. He was 3rd or 4th generation, I think,

  & she said, “I think American men are sexier

  than Canadian men.”

  And I said, What? Sexier

  than Donald Sutherland,

  or Harold Town? You think,

  seriously, that Dan Quayle is sexier than David

  Peterson?

  And she said, “O, you’re always so precise.”

  She was curled up in her seat as she said this,

  but she was married; & we were in an

  airplane, I think it was a DC 10,

  I keep track. And it turned out she meant

  sexier than this one specific hoary scotch&soda cheeks

  guy in the VP’S office where she worked

  at an advertising company

  that did a lot of stuff for General Motors,

  Canada Malting,

  BOAC, & the Liberals, they had

  the advertising budget for the Ontario Liberals. She

  thought Emilio Estevez

  was sexier than this vice-president at the company

  where she worked; & I said, Okay, Harriet,

  okay, no kidding. But life is funny

  & as it turns out

  she divorced her husband & married

  the advertising VP, slope shoulders,

  soft hands, the whole suitcase.

  BUFFALO DANCES

  Sometimes I think all these farms & highways

  & major factories are about to swallow us. I don’t mean

  physically, swallow, devour, like

  an enormous train

  accident. I mean our identity. Myself & Marcus & Evan

  & Carol.

  We will have to restructure some of our patterns,

  produce new national symbols,

  it will be raw at first,

  a little bit like those red&yellow daubed figures

  on scraped buffalo skin.

  It will have to be different

  than the specific myths of our cousins.

  We should have our own flag, don’t you think?

  And our own national animal.

  It can’t be a buffalo,

  they didn’t come this far west of Great Slave Lake,

  not very often. Perhaps a horse. Does anyone else

  have the horse as a national symbol? California, Ga.,

  Alberta? And.

  There are other dances, where you take

  off the loose black shirt & blue jeans & the Argyle socks

  & walk out in the fields just because you are tired

  of the brass rails & the Mies van der Rohe buildings

  & you are in love or you have a bottle,

  one of those 2 things, & you want to walk

  naked under the moon.

  A LOAF OF BREAD ON YOUR ARM

  When you go into Oliveto on a sunny

  afternoon there is an immediate freshness,

  the plump woman who comes to the counter has flour

  on her hands; there is a smell of olive oil in the air.

  Which makes me think,

  somebody compared love to bread

  the other day. It was Pieter, late at night,

  at the San George at 666 Manning. We were all drunk

  & talking about Vermeer & his goddamn loaf of bread.

  Oliveto has buttermilk bread but I worked hard today

  & I’m tired, so I pass it up for something more

  substantial – rich sunflower,

  flour-dusted crusty Italian sourdough,

  Italian challah in great white twists like Rachael’s

  dimples,

  sunflower-nudged bagels thick with sesame seeds,

  flat Roman paddas & the great sticks of crusty

  Calabrese baguette which is almost a Pulcinello.

  All of these breads have that subtle touch

  of almost nutty olive oil. The breads

  light up the store. I can hardly make up my mind,

  they’re all so good. A faint purple white glow

  like the inside of certain flowers after the rain.

  The air in this store is cool & sweet. I take 2 loaves

  of multi-grain, 1 challah, 1 crusty baguette

  & a number of cookies made with ground almonds.

  What Aboud said in the restaurant was that

  Dali’s loaf of bread is more real than Vermeer’s;

  & I,

  I said, How would Marquez describe a man

  sitting with his back against a wall

  eating a loaf of bread with a pocket-knife

  & a piece of Parma cheese?

  There is a touch of flour on one of the bills

  as she gives me my change. Outside I rest the bread

  loosely on one arm. Hector looks up at the sky

  & sees a huge circle

  of infinitely pure blue sky through the
belfry aperture

  of St. Paul’s rainwashed granite across the street.

  The philosopher who compared love to bread probably

  didn’t know very much about crops or weather. Bread is

  bread; blue sky is blue sky; love is – in the eyes

  of whatever person sinks their teeth into the other

  side of this crusty challah & has enough restraint

  to save me the remaining half. These entities all

  complement each other, sure; but so would wet black olives,

  tomatoes, morning doves, & Basque children running

  through a field of wheat waving a burning fox

  above their heads, and crying out Death To Franco.

  DAVID BOWIE’S IMAGE

  My friend Jean said she couldn’t stand

  David Bowie,

  it didn’t have anything to do with his voice,

  or the songs he sang,

  [I thought “China Girl” might have

  upset her, because she’s a literary feminist,

  but she said no, she liked “China Girl”],

  it was his

  appearance, she said, especially the face.

  We’ve just

  finished, I think, coming through a period where men

  have been all-out enthusiastic about beautiful women,

  even if they do have careers, like Debra Winger,

  or jobs,

  like Barbara McDougall; but women,

  especially if they’re career-conscious, tend to dislike

  good-looking men

  especially if they’re successful.

  I don’t know if gay guys like Bowie

  but a lot of regular guys do,

  especially if they listen

  to a lot of music in the first place, &

  are not heavy

  metal fans, or if they’re guys who have walked out

  of their MA courses.

  Guys who have completed their MA

  & are contemplating a doctoral thesis

  generally regard

  any form of pop except for the Beatles

  that name alone would drive me crazy/songs that come

  in a breakfast food box,

  as being too superficial

  because the songs are wildly unlike a textbook.

  So what is David Bowie’s image? Or

  perhaps we should say,

  What is the mystique,

  or the debate

  or the specific twist or bend

  in David Bowie’s image? Our friend Jean, & Jean

  is both very beautiful

  with classic moss-green eyes,

  but she’s also a very bright professor of sociology,

  & she says, No way, nada, no,

  she doesn’t like him.

  On the other hand millions of fairly intelligent

  people buy his albums,

  & his concert last year

  at the CNE white elephant grounds here in Toronto

  was a smash sell-out success with good

  reviews.

  Sally, a friend of mine in Alliston

  & a talented writer,

  once felt a touch depressed

  about something & she spent 2 days & a bottle of wine

  listening to Bowie’s song “Heroes” over & over

  again.

  GORGEOUS FALLACIES

  A recent feminist writer from Texas says she thinks the penis is very much like a banana. She has, she says, seen quite a few in her time. Not as many, I guess, as most women doctors. Rick’s wife Dahlia got bored after the first 25, of course they weren’t humping, they were patients, general examinations or something like that. Cocks are sort of amazing, but there isn’t a lot of room for individualism. Cocks are not as individual as men’s feet, for example, or their shoulders; or women’s backs or their buttocks; faces generally take the individualism title, although several times in my life I’ve met a person who looked almost exactly like someone I knew. Hey, I said, you’ve got Robert’s face, I wonder where Robert is right now and what is he doing? The comment about seeing quite a few, basically a lift from the dozens of Frank Harris types with their comments about

  seeing quite a few puds, okay, and men sort of like these comments sometimes, more or less; gets a brief laugh from the audience. The laugh allows her to move on without really saying very much about her own image. I thought her image was in the direction of A woman and Arnold Banana. Hard-ons look pretty much alike also, I think, depending on the light, and some guys are a little bigger. But what’s interesting about cock, apart from all the names for it, and sure, black guys have chocolate-coloured cocks and Indian guys must have reddish-olive and so on, is the variety of perhaps 20 or 25 different stages of tumescence. They are in that sense a bit like weathervanes plugged in with a special current to what’s happening at any time, even in sleep, in the male body. Banana is a nice conceit, a wonderful colour: but that would leave out the most female part of cock, that almost blatantly pink bland glans penis. Mine has a small pale brown circle about the size of a piece of confetti, relax, it’s a birthmark. The first guy I ever slept with was fondling it and then he looked up with a disingenuous expression on his handsome face, and he said, You didn’t tell me you got married this afternoon, you’ve got a confetti mark. Hey, that’s funny; hello, Ned, how the hell are you?

  PIANOS

  Learning how to dance when I was 15

  was fairly easy – there are no complex steps

  except in your mind, and your mind is a dark space;

  although some of the older kids were pretty fancy –

  they would slide forward, put their weight

  on the ball of one foot

  and just sort of lift

  up into the space moving with the music.

  Some of my

  favourite songs were by the Commodores,

  Lionel

  Ritchie’s old group, and some of my favourite songs

  were by Credence and The Band – “Up on Cripple Creek,”

  that got us all moving.

  And some of the parties

  I went to would have a Fats Domino album

  from time to time,

  the same way I guess that you go

  to a party sometimes and somebody brings out an Elvis

  album, one of the ones where he sings “Heartbreak Hotel,”

  or “Rip It Up,” or “Blue Suede Shoes.”

  The Domino songs

  are masterpieces of dialectical simplicity – one clear

  staccato line perfectly balanced against another.

  He was easy to dance to, there’s no two ways about

  that;

  you would just fly into the air

  and do a weird swing

  with your outside foot or a double boogaloo or something

  on the last beat of each of those lines,

  they were

  that punchy. And then somebody would play Led

  Zeppelin, and somebody else would play Bonnie &

  Delaney,

  and then around 2 o’clock in the morning

  Joan Baez would sing that song by The Band

  beginning with the line, “My name is Virgil McQuaid …”

  But you couldn’t beat those Domino songs to dance to

  – they were so precise you could alter your own beat

  and dance slow motion if you wanted to,

  and then you

  could speed up and dance faster than Muddy Waters &

  The Stones. These songs never die never

  die never die.

  So play it again,

  O sweet hero of my childhood,

  I was thinking of you,

  one foot on the pedal

  a bunch

  of yellow flowers in your hand/ Like a torch.

  THE FLOWERS

  The red&yellow flowers sit on the clean oak table in a circular white bowl. These flowers illuminate the whole room. Okay,
I exaggerated a touch, I pushed a little too far on the verb. There is an overhead light, a tall blue Art Deco standing lamp & a large table lamp that a friend gave me some years ago.

  I take a walk down to Bloor Street & buy 2 multi-grain rolls & a copy of The Life of Isabelle Eberhardt, a book which Whitney, the girl in my novel, is very concerned about. Then I go for coffee with Jake at Dooney’s. A strange name for an Italian café, don’t you think. Jake says, “The world is changing so fast that it’s upside down. You would probably be much happier if you were at the University of Chicago.”

  I am not an aesthetic person. Not really. I was born in a large house with trees in the backyard. Pheasants walking half-circles in winter. Yesterday we watched a film about 2 detectives in Paris.

  Last night I had a dream about walking naked, I was comfortable in the dream, in a large tailor shop with bolts of dark blue & light grey cloth on the shelves.

  I saw a fire once that almost blinded me. It was an enormous fire. It was several blocks long & the fire trucks looked like red & yellow helicopters, red & yellow whirlygigs. I know nothing about the Soviet Union except that they have polar bears in Siberia, huge white animals that stand on their hind feet & nibble at carrots & potatoes.

  SHOPPING

  Robert’s not a gay guy and neither am I, but what does that mean? We’re both straight guys, but we’re not completely straight. These words are almost amusing. It’s possible that they were thought up by rabbits in a think tank.

  He’s about 30, he’s a television cinematographer, we meet each other while shopping, he lives a few blocks away.

  He has a friend who worked on the Darryl Wasyk film, H, which is a truly amazing film; I’ve seen it twice at the Carlton Cineplex; it was shot over at Lansdowne & Bloor, Toronto is slowly coming to realize how good it is. It’s good like half the time Fassbinder dreamed of being good.

  He has a great face, almost a touch horsey but amiable with startling blue eyes.

  I’m a writer, we’ve talked about that a couple of times, he reads non-fiction, At Play In The Fields of the Lord, and detective novels. He likes Chandler; he bought my book about Galbraith after the first time we met.

  His girlfriend Karin is across the street buying supper; everybody’s buying stuff: I’m buying tonic and both papers, I’ve been working all day. He’s just bought cigarettes.

  Pork chops as it turns out. I give him my recipe for pork chops – Smear them with Primo spaghetti sauce, a shot of lemon juice, and pour some white rum. Bacardi Light is good. “Do it in the oven,” I tell him, “it’s a lot easier.” He thinks it sounds good and invites me to come over for dinner on Friday or Saturday, and invites Sharon, we’ve met him a couple of times while we were out shopping or at the Liquor Store. His girlfriend’s an actress, or a model, I’m not sure. I say, Terrific, that sounds great. We shake hands the way guys shake hands after Bell hits a triple, except that George Bell doesn’t play here anymore, he plays in Chicago now. Our eyes are very intent. His are blue. I’ve already said that. I try not to be repetitious. Mine are dark as the bloody night, but I’m attractive, so people say at least.