The Runaway Soul: A Novel

NATURAL HISTORY1930

I WAS SLAPPED AND hurried along in the private applause of birth—I think I remember this. Well, I imagine it anyway—the blind boy’s rose-and-milk-and-gray-walled (and salty) aquarium, the aquarium overthrown, the uproar in the woman-barn … the fantastic sloppiness of one’s coming into existence, one’s early election, one’s senses in the radiant and raw stuff of howlingly sore and unexplained registry in the new everywhere, immensely unknown, disbelief and shakenness, the awful contamination of actual light. I think I remember the breath crouched in me and then leaping out yowlingly: this uncancellable sort of beginning.

The other birth—of a mind shaped like a person—all that skull buzz and mumble—a mind starting up, a mind that wants so much to know the truth that it makes the effort and takes the shape of a boy—and comes into existence: only a first draft at first, sketchy, watercolored, clichéd—cardboard air, a symbolic wrist, a painted eyebrow—a tattered, half-real boy as proud as a mind: an apple-eater in an unspecific light: two differently born creatures, one guy. Imagine the twists of suspense in being in two different autobiographical narratives at the same time. Think of all the myths of single meanings … of there being a single line of one’s own history.

And then to be born in two sharply divergent ways, if I humor the hypothesis of two births, if I admit I sense MYSELF as a consciousness, a more or less consciously alphabetical gesticulating shadow—but real-seeming—and real, as real as real, but as only partly filled in, not to others but to myself, two days old, two years old, five years old, fourteen, fifty, sixty … Well, imagine a shadow-consciousness imagining itself a sleeping fourteen-year-old boy, real in St. Louis County in the month of May. That would be 1944. A boy, ill once, who in his delirium felt himself to be triply born, quadruply born, to be a son of illness, nutty with delirium (and near death), and a son of luck and recovering to be a body and a mind, a difficultly born descendant of Adam born once more …

LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI

1944:

6:12 a.m.

SOMETIMES WAKING FEELS PIGGISH: you know? Rooting and snuffling and snouting around? Do you think dreams are elegant? I do. I think they are—sometimes.

Anyway, sometimes it seems a shame to leave one’s dreams. Maybe it’s because real life is hard. I don’t, as a rule, have strong opinions about those matters any more than, when I first awake, I know quite who I am or where I am; I don’t remember what I am supposed to look like. The unfixity—well, I was adopted into a new family when I was two. Waking up was weird then. I don’t remember waking with confident expectations about the color of the hair I had; in life, my hair has changed color often—I was white-blond until I was five, dirty blond for a year, then reddish-blond ever more reddish; and then I had brown hair, dark in midwinter, reddish in spring, blondish (again) in high summer, and so on. And people talked about this, so I erratically knew it was so while it was happening. As a question it was something like a kite attached to me—Wiley’s hair as a subject of conversation and of reality. His aura, sort of. My mother, ill in 1944, lately makes scenes about how I look like something the cat dragged in and shame her by not being sane, clean, semi-Godly, sensible, the rest of it; she wants me to be kempt, groomed, whatever the term is.

Hi, I say snidely to the pillow, to wakefulness … to the morning.

The tone of snotty self-address is adolescent, upperish-middle-class … wartime. I can place social class and physical setting, the era and me—I mean my age and size, my physical condition in terms of sports. A suburban fourteen-year-old in wartime 1944, Middle Western and large.

—Who are you, Kiddo?

—That’s for me to know and you to find out …

—Ha-ha. You’re as funny as a crutch …

I’m Wiley Silenowicz … I am real, a fate for others … I am real … God, what a mess.

In one sense, waking is like leaping from a boxcar into roadside gravel, into the realities of your own waking breath. The night’s long jostling in the runaway actions of dreams (which insisted they were plausible) fadingly echoes in the unstable, living-in-a-weedy-ditch-among-old-fading-pictures shaky moment waking up (in bed) when I hear my own breath. My monkey flesh … flibbertigibbet electricities … me … I’m here classically—in the physics sense: life-size—in the almost always unreportable actual scale of the world. Not a dreamer, I have lasted to this age, this moment. I am colossal in the mistaken sense in which consciousness tends to feel itself and its reality first as an image of all that is real—this is in the remaining and drenching sense in which it was the universe for my dreams and the landscapes and the inhabitants and machinery in them.

But now one has a side, daylit, leaning and lit at the edge of the unknown future, at the very edge of an unknown logic—a day with others in it—every one of them independent of my mind and ungoverned by my consciousness. The not quite daylit world. Science was different in 1944, not so scientific, not so widely popular. In my morning confusion, I am a Jew suspended for a moment in no real order of things. Boy, did I love everything. It’s odd to have the beginning of not being young, of my being flesh and blood in my pajamas. I feel battered by waves of the barely albino pallor of the air. The vague lightedness of the air: objects in the room had dim outlines, not clear ones; and the air outside the window screens is translucent. Inside the room the darkness is more complete, although, as I said, things are visible at their edges. My outward senses, like butterflies newly out of the chrysalis, do a slow monochromatic fluttering. I am deeply patterned for the moment by the night’s introspection.

I have to take a leak. The I-have-landed-on-a-new-planet thing, the realities of the room ticklingly hardening, the all-that-is-here, the slow, pale—half-dark—roses of the actuality of sight, the thing that nightlong was not lifelong although it seemed it while it was happening: this stuff means my nighttime gullibility aches and fades. Here is a real windowsill. The upper edges of real trees, the real leaves there, lightly scratch at the window screens. The sounds in the variably shuffling Middle Western air joins with the sound of my breath in the pillow: I pay attention to one and it predominates and drowns the other. Then I switch. I am the-voice-that-matters and I have risen to the day—fascist—image-drenched—fantastically nursed. The sensually factual present tense after so many chapters of images (from the flesh-pool), so many episodes of dreaming—in it are no figures from my dreams. The onetime seemingly actual people have been erased, massacred, obliterated … Waking is pitiful—my father used to say (S.L.)—it is naked and republican for me now; the weight of tousled hair on my new skull is grownup hair after the years of having a child’s fine hair up there. I stare, a fourteen-year-old boy, at my own wakefulness. I am no longer a dreaming tyrant who can command and match the light. I am geographically placed here with my head at the foot of the bed, where air from the windows in two walls flows … It is May. In St. Louis, Missouri. The window facing me as I lie here looks down into a walk-trisected, flower-bedded, U-shaped courtyard. We live on the third floor. The courtyard is empty in dim light. My skull, boulderishly heavy, is farther from my feet than I remembered—I have grown more than twelve inches in two years. I have gained thirty pounds in that time … If I loved you, this is the creature who would love you.

When I sleep, I breathe outside the mysterious circle of my attention. I breathe on another planet, far from the stories in front of me. I start in now on a male flirtation with my breath. In a blurry alertness, a sort of embarrassment, I feel my new skinny neck—my Adam’s apple … my height: my toes down there: gosh … And I breathe.

Actually, to be tall does feel like a ladder that I escape on … perhaps this is unforgivable. I had not been confident that, if I slept, I would wake. I am conscious of being erect sexually—my father sleeps in the other bed in the room. Then I remember that my father is dead … Daddy’s dead. The breath-scraped, ribby, itchy sexual heat and then the weird memory-thing of my father’s dying four days ago, a thing which has its own heat, shakes me like two currents of steam pushing in different parts of a machine.

Then I am weirdly still. Then I shake. Then I am weirdly still.

I stretch out my arm and hand to touch the wire-mesh screen on the window. My fingertips. My rustling consciousness is stilled, light-tropic—a broken-domed, lightly hissing observatory—an aspect of light itself. In this broken-domed thing I perch in the hawkish miracle of attention. Part of what I like about girls—and my mother—is that they say, Don’t go crazy and embarrass me. I stay sane to show off to them that it’s okay to like me. In the at-the-moment-ill-lit actual congresses of the consecutive physical world, tiny particles in me, tiny Noah’s arks, carry me between now and darkness. In a kind of Goddishly faintly rolling, somewhat roiling now, silent, more or less quiet, and more and more lit, the smell, the morning smell has a blasphemously moral thing to it—freshness, I suppose. It stinks of God, kind of—stinks as in stinking, dirty Jew, rotten goy. I ask the Powers of Prediction—they’re in me, mounted in such a way they can see things approaching from farther away than my toes can feel things—Will the war eat me up? Will all the Jews be killed? Am I all right even if my Dad is dead? Do I have to die, too? Do I have to die soon?

I apologize to myself in the real air now for having dreamed nightlong: I’m sorry I was stupid … The inconsecutive, lovely wildness of the mind in the huge present tense of the morning now, the morning head and my bony spine form material low wild angel stuff with death and a sexual fall in it. The mind pokes up blackly, snaggingly—witlessly—I have a queer sense of personal defect—and I take my hand from the screen and tuck it into the warmth under my chin—Samuel Silenowicz, Samuel Leonard (S.L.) Silenowicz, my dad (by adoption) is dead … Is absent from the drifting, thuggish real. The mind’s caterwauling whisper is: THERE’S A WAR ON: LEAVE ME ALONE. I snuffle at the air: an electrical feat of consciousness: a snout-tic … Then Venetian blind passages of grief and some self-concern and wake-up peerings—water wiggles of perception, glints, flashes, and semi-mechanical off-and-ons of trying things: if I don’t blink, I see spots; if I roll over onto my side, the bed will creak; if I touch it in a certain way, the window sash will grunt. Look, look-a-here, look for yourself, see, rays of absurdly pale light out the window are touching fat, gray, low clouds and some leaves in the treetops.

The pale light—the false dawn—a diffuse grayness—do I want to live? Blind emperor-boy, Gestapo agent in his nosiness, so Gestapoish cock-a-doodle, the whisperingly breathing fourteen-year-old boy, I am alive so far—So what? I more or less want to die with this curious pain of actuality; but that is almost clearly part of the border of how wanting-to-live defines itself in me.

In a glamour of obscure distortion, I remember my face as his face from glances in the mirror—a little scared—as those glances were—with the reason-to-live stuff, the reason-to-die stuff in the silent mirror. This becomes embarrassed amusement, taut-nerved, fattened with uncertain and embarrassed recollection: imbecile. My temper: what I look like … who gives a fuck … is contentiously male. In the liquor of the blind-sightedness of recall of one’s circumstances first thing in the morning when one awakes, I remember that, on the average, he (I am) is odd-looking but okay. My looks are not a torment to me.

The Masturbation

IN THE STRANGE-FOR-ME new privacy in the room, my (maybe) okay face first and then a lot more of me, but not all of me, takes on the temperature (the temperament) of heated and mercurial permission, deadened with caution and reluctance: Sir-Kamikaze-Fleet-of-Carbon-Compounds Little-Cutie-Little-Cutie-Wants-to-Die-Love-All-Used-Up does this other stuff.

At the touch of my hand on me, in the tremble of relief, of sensation, I promptly entered a territory of sexual hallucination … masturbation is a plenum of hallucination; my solitude fills promptly with hallucinatory fullness—love is now naked in the world. Isn’t it deathless here now, for a while? Aren’t we all gathered here—anyone I want? Hallucination—and sexual will—clobber me with softly ravenous wingbeats. The heft of things and the cawing of nerves (here, where gesture is soliloquy) becomes a tautening balloon of sensation. No one has told me how sexual reality tugs and pushes at a sane sense of things. I find out for myself. The morning drama and the insanity of pleasure and the overripe silliness of pulls-pushes, yanks-presumes—I move without moving. Hallelujah—semi-Wowee … The moment, unbridled, boy-bridal, is loathsome, racked: exaggerated, and grotesque—and okay. Disgust, fear, bitterness, horror, boredom, pleasure—it’s of a puzzling enormous interest to me.

In the act, my skin feels like warm cloth on me—a privacy of heat like being rolled up inside a smouldering mattress, in the stuffing. Tickled, sweaty, blotched with heat—IT’S HOT, I’M GETTING HOT—I feel self-contempt; and I stop. Self-contempt cools me.

But I remember—and am oddly unsettled—that the rhythms and touch had been blowsily explosive. I refeel some of the sensations scatteredly. And piercingly.

Then I remember being a little kid and my wet bathing suit coming off me, the bareness and hurtful readiness of the self back then—ignorantly alight; and my dad, too, but unignorant, him.

Pleasure now, in some almost childish sense, means that a childhood sense of something odd is rectified.

Then, in a trance of exaggerations I begin again—giant breasts on a giant woman, giant prick, I have giant hands—as if I were nostalgically in or half in the scale in which childhood is set. I ache. God, this is foolish. Other boys seem to me to be professional, expert and well instructed—and practiced—in this stuff and in being boys generally whereas I am unprofessional … uncertain and capricious, goadedly unsteady … personal … (this was tied to the age I was).

I had tried to remember, but pleasure is not knowable by memory with anything like its passionate convincingness when it is directly gained and present. Reality has a monopoly of real pleasure. A lad and his lamp. The alluring, imaginably dimensioned dementia of meaning tucked into the animal bribe with its hint of favorable apocalypse: I have to fight it off, this sense that the conclusion is ALL. Masturbation is nutty with idealism, with hallucinations, with self-induced finalities.

The boy has big red convulsed zeroes and pallid ones that moo or mow at him: mad doorways: this is his sense of sexuality for the moment. It is so interesting that, as he denies it, some of the stitches of the self break at odd seams. It is a killing sense: it strains him and it feels like it is shortening his life.

I proceed in a sensible or greeting-death way, a little shocked, a little resistant … Bits of throbbing and twitching sweetness—motionful, honied—storylike pricklings. I can see where advertisements come from. Odd and loony with lapses and collapses, I avoid the jerking dance of coming—I lie here and let it die away. Nothing can undo your life. I am in a lurching and shoving, half-breathless gauntlet-labyrinth of mind and body in the morning. I am in a state of sensationalism and puzzle-ridden semi-discontinuous attention.

The not-stayingness of pleasure hurts oracularly—and intimately. Heats and oils, exudations and flares of consoling and BRILLIANT renderings of pleasure become a momentarily irreversible knowledge that pleasure exists ON ITS OWN TERMS. This chimpanzee reality and the light, I have been in love with these Tarzan doings, these animal carryingson, since I discovered them two years before; it is almost true in sex that easiness and lies rule the world. Some people are good at this stuff. Some are against it. Christ, the beauty of what some people know. I am homemade flesh, I am sincere—I am a sincere jerk-off. I miss my father.

I turn over and move; my hands are under me on the linen sheet; I move in A KIND OF anxiously flinching recklessness—in a pathos-tinctured heat of the body … As in the bony hand of a girl. Of a boy.

The sensations, good, bad, dry, moist, effective, ineffective, irritating, inside a clouded mass of hallucinations, and then, at the edge, neural and a thing of the flesh, and then outside and watching but half-painted with the oddity of the aching intoxication of onwardness—as if one were in love with time and the future—actually the boy was—and with the foolish shamefulness of such a complex state calculatedly brought about and yet partly accidental, the increasing number of more and more serious seizures and the abrupt passages of decline as a kind of meaning (of refused sobriety), I laugh at myself and this stuff (pleasure and absurdity), I laugh out loud but under my breath, I laugh at the world’s history as it is known by boys.

Sarcastic, mocking, and dizzied, hoo-ha—okay?—holding myself and fucking my hands and the bed, I keep my mind on this matter long enough and completely enough that length and completeness are felt as dimensionally sexual things—maybe the only sexual things—the half-witless, the neurally witty, biologically universal thing of the whole thing … my scandalous attention to it … I love this … I love this bed—ha-ha … Love can be extorted. I laugh some more, hotly, under my breath the scandal of close attention in a state of whitelit, repetitive shock, pausing only to spit, childishly, on the palms and fingers of my hands which I promptly reinsert and I start being tender with little motions of my fingers while I inhibitedly fuck in the face of death and of youth—I mutter, Oh you DARLING—and hallucinate rhythmically … in a junior or juvenile brute romanticism … I wouldn’t want anyone to see me like this. Who, seeing me, would forgive me? Who would join me? Who would like me? Whooo-ahhhhhh-eeeee: the world is dangerous … The unsystematic twists of the lips and blurredly mad eyes and the pantomimic jerkings, the sporadically blabbery pseudo-boneless writhing of sensation—OH FUCK and OH YOU DARLING and KAZOW, KAZOWIE. And OHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh. How strangely worded A Book of Fucks would be. Whatever is gathered in the body, the sibling—the congressional—the running mind feels as gathered force which spurts, not in orgasm, but still in unexpectedly sensible ways in further spasms. It spurts like light and seems to be thought-and-vision giving answers now, musical answers, substitute compensations and apings to improve one’s sense of THE REAL.

The mental spurtings of light are a kind of explanation of the world, realer than a dream, but it is wakefulness of a sort. And this is only a corner of the world although it feels like a center. But nothing is more beautiful or commanding than this light. It is dreamlike and real both. I thought I saw why it was that male virginity was not widely praised except in special instances. This self-enclosed stuff involves an irreversible alteration, a mysteriously and tentatively ripening sense of a glory—a personal beauty of that sort. Fear and attention sheathe me in a weirdness of sexual discretion, however. The unease is pretty complete. I think it is scandalous. I think it is scandalous to be a real person alone in a room. I think this is a scandalous attention to pay to anything.

The boy’s head, as if in a kind of a pointless accident—as with a land mine—jerks upward in a baffling noise of breath, torn spinally by sexual sensation, large and jolting, and accompanied by a beautiful whitish light spread out in neural marvelousness. The bleached solar pleasure, if one persists in searching out this disappearing and then reflaring light, one comes. One is a gateway away from the world in an almost silent furnace. An explanatory light. To pause in astounded denial of this shit—to resist its power is independence that causes a kind of nervous, thin-fibered throbbing, also some laughter at the soul’s throbbing now, the soul’s readiness (to die), the will’s unwillingness to die. How can it be that one is sheltered by that shelterless stuff? Nature—and any easy idea of God—is a swindle.

Among boys, practicing this stuff is a virtue. The shaking escapee’s is in a spasm of denial that spreads through his spine, buttocks, neck, the insteps of his feet. The tuneless physical hilarity and its shadow of deep (and yet minimal) omnipotence has a matching but confusing element of an omnipotence of modesty, of shame—I guessed this was normal. I wondered about it—normalcy … the category of the really human or maybe not … (This is part of the retreat from the nowhere which is a somewhere briefly of as-if-explanatory light.)

It is a game like hopscotch to catch bits of sensation in memory and to advance in knowledge of the sensations while backing off from them. It is like some weird sport that isn’t a famous sport, MY BIG FEET and skinny legs brace themselves; and then, stringent and vigorous jerks and tics of the torso, of the torso muscles and of the muscles at the backs of the thighs, and in the muscles of the behind are sex, the memory of the recent sex, and me backing off from sex—dick and hands and mind.

All ordinary shocks—as of swallowing—are amplified and are clownish in the actual light now. Alternate and quieter attention gapes, semi-scientific, quick-witted (in a way), at the novelties of illumination in the morning. My mornings are partly a matter of engineering my masculine citizenship. But I don’t want to be forceful, fully grown, opinionated yet. I don’t want to be known and final. Voluptuarial—polyphonic—boyish knowledges: almost a first movement of a piece—after a fallen childhood.

Genital size and one’s courage and one’s right to breed; and the piercingness, the quality of okayness, of duty—the pain in this thing of being a recruit (for natural increase), I stare at it now, I guess, helplessly. I am almost lunatic with mourning, the foredoomed obscenity of this essentially nameless state—my adolescence in St. Louis … I hate being dumb. The after-echo of two departed physical realities—of my father and of sex—have the hilarity of presence, of after-echoes. I want to survive my grief. Shrewdness in a neurally tense moment is because I feel how prompt madness and disorder might be if I don’t do something such as be shrewd. They appear anyway, madness and disorder. I am poignantly addled. I can hear fragments of all my weeping in childhood and since. I reexperience, almost as if in synopsis, what seems like all the pain I ever suffered plus the recent grief. I seem to remember tensely every moment of difficulty that I ever had. It seems that way in the pangs of agony. One has such a grotesque need of consolation that one understands the semi-masturbation retroactively. In the agony, presences flicker, and I contort and constrainingly, and partly surrenderingly, hug my fatally bent self, groaning a little, murmuring under my breath: It’s okay, Kiddo … It’s okay … canoodling around … It’s all too much for you … Big deal … All of it, all seems MASTURBATORY. The grief is slowed, elevated, private, kind of inspired in its recurrent flare-ups of heat, then in its chilled rushing fall. I realize I have made A MISTAKE in waking up, in having a second father …

The grief is a muddle of electricity, joltingly without a conviction even of a limitedly favorable meaning in my world.

The clasping, warm agony, the visceral heat, do not explain themselves … I am tired of being young. The last is a familiar reality. The phosphorescent heat of the grief and the mirror soul have elements of an aesthetic arrangement to them. Some bandit-deserter-like element of the soul goes running away into shadowy territory saying, This is the way to evade grief. The moment: its whole name is What-my-life-is. Hey, Wiley, bullshit causes cancer …

It hurts to remember the size of my dad’s hands. You have to get up, Kiddo … Dad in the past said that.

I want to be unawed and unpersuaded by grief (or sex). I am a kicking captive, sort of, of grief … I want to enter that state that Daddy used to describe as Can’t complain …

It’s sad inside me … the willfulness and the intensity of feeling. If I looked in the mirror at this point, I might think, I don’t want to be shallow but I don’t want to feel this much either … I suddenly imagine my own face here a sharp dark-whitish blur of emblematic and compromised presence. Not real. I am very still. Oh, the tight-balled grief … I have a rictus-smile. On my palely sweating face. I’m ashamed of my dad’s death. I feel shame that death exists. I feel amazingly lost and wrong—muscularly and electrically jangled. This grief—I am adopted. It burns, the thing of being awake and real: it burns. Daddy sometimes said when I was in pain about something, JESUS GOD, LOOK AT YOU; and I would blush and try to be deadpan.

The blaze of supreme heat behind my eyes: juiceless and hot, ironic, lunatic—the lostness—one’s flammable breathing edged hoarsely with upset at absence, loss—a noticeable sound: one knows oneself this way from before … Peekaboo, Bad Times; whoop-de-doo …

The fear of the wild world, this partly obliterated world (by grief, the continuums of grief, of griefs of all kinds) I am cheatingly ashen and sweet, tense-nerved, stinking—and secret. I don’t like the force there is in grief. I stare blindly in the weirdly lit lightlessness, the whitening real moment. One piece of pinkish light is on the window screen. I smile wryly. The tastes I had that year were foul and rough—tender and sincere—childish and hidden—but wartime-fashionable, all in all. I don’t know about others but I want to be able to be a brave soldier. I compare my reserves of strength and my state now. I oppose the anguish, if that is what it is, to my morning strength and my chances of living through the day and lasting to tomorrow. I don’t really know about tomorrow or if I’ll make it until then and be sane, I don’t even know about the next few minutes, but I’m not going mad in this grief just now.

This part is over and I’m safe for a while …

A Brief History of Being Loved (and Unloved)

THE FAINT EARLY MORNING illumination is shimmying in the room’s emptiness when the boy-bride of grief sits up. I swing my legs over the side of the bed. It’s a thing of being alive AFTERWARDS … very stark and clownish. Daddy asked me not to say Kaddish for him: Fuck the Jews … My heart is bad … I have to go bye-bye because the Old Ticker won’t work no more … it’s all iffy-andy-butty for me … His big-deal, baritone, snorting voice. Come on, Willsy-Wiley-poop, be PHILOSOPHICAL. Or DON’T BE PHILOSOPHICAL, which meant the same thing: Be human, let me talk … Bear up. Let my mood dominate …

He used to complain, I wasn’t saying something for the ages, for God’s sake. Don’t pay so much attention to what I say … Understand me. Have a heart, be human. Let me have the last word, do you mind: BE PHILOSOPHICAL … Or: Don’t be philosophical … Just listen to me …

He didn’t want me to like famous philosophy …

Let it go. Let it go. Be of good cheer, smile and show your dimples. Have a good time—is that all right with you? It’s all right with me. Let’s have a little peace, is that all right with you? It’s all right with me. He said, Every man is a great philosopher. Every man has GREAT THOUGHTS: that’s what it is in America … Dear Dad the dear doodad. Don’t stand near the window: you’ll drive all the girls MAD … Be nice … Keep it up for a while … (Being nice … )

I was a little kid, undiapered, standing on a bureau. I felt the light on my short legs … Daddy was wounded in the First World War … a good-looking blond rajah of a man: Lila said that of him. My mother. By adoption. Daddy said of the First World War, That war was filth … And life went on afterward anyway. He said to me, in an odd tone, when I was little, You like being reckless no matter who it kills: you’re the Wild Man of Borneo. I don’t know what age I was. He said it when I was a lot of different ages … You look like the Wild Man of Borneo (from third grade to sixth grade). You are one hell of an ugly kid—you are goddamned ugly: they call you Mutt-puss at school? The Hunchback of Notre Dame? We should put you in the movies: you could be the child Wallace Beery. I am famous for my sense of humor. Don’t pay any attention to me …

He said things over and over, but he said them differently each time. It wasn’t me being nuts that I thought he was cold-and-sad, or affectionate or really affectionate (which was very different from affectionate—like night from day) but all in the same words when he spoke. Sometimes this made me laugh when I was little—especially when he meant the opposite of what he said—Oh ho ho ho, I’d go helplessly when he said, You are one hell of an ugly kid, and kissed me and said, You are a hell of a tearing beauty of an adopted kid, you know, even if you are retarded. He did think I was retarded for a long time. Sometimes he was deranged and as if shell-shocked … Male. Sometimes other people upset him, but sometimes it was me. He could say stuff like the above and mean it was sad that a kid’s looks mattered when kids’ looks wouldn’t matter if this were a better world and people were really kind. Or he was addressing himself to the merit in plain boys, sometimes to the conceit of pretty boys … Or of smart ones. In the same words—not the same voice. It was the voice of idle grief, of him feeling sorry for himself, of him feeling sorry for me: you’re some ugly kid. Or it might be a tearing rage—God and Christ, the range of the different ways; he didn’t like me when he didn’t like me; and the split ways, as when he didn’t like what I looked like but he still liked me—or not, as the case might be, as the case was. I would just sort of throb sometimes with the mad, I guess grammatical and inflectional, the emotional excitement of talking to him. I would go deaf, just looking right at him, hearing, in advance, some wild thing coming from him: Are you a sparrow on a branch? Are you a sparrow or a branch? That was nonsense. Are you as happy as a bird coasting up in the air so high? Ironic and vaguely dirty lyricism cleaned up for the kid who was of a different species—morally—from him.

Staring at him, I often kind of half thought I knew what he was saying, and partly I did know, and partly I didn’t pay real attention—just as he often said. It was too hard. But if I did pay attention, it seemed clear to me that what he was saying wasn’t what he wanted to say. After all, there’s the stuff he better not say to a kid; and there’s the stuff he can’t say, that he isn’t able to say; and there’s the stuff he just won’t say to me that he maybe says to Momma, or to women. I don’t know.

You can see how well or poorly he thinks he’s doing when he talks. I got into the trick of playacting comprehension even when he wasn’t comprehensible (to me) because I hated it when he looked sad. Also, I learned he didn’t like my opinions of what he said. I was supposed to appreciate everything. It was like a game: I had to guess what he wanted me to feel and then I feel that but I don’t ask for too many instructions or footnotes or anything like that. And if he didn’t really want me to know what he was saying when he was talking dirty or about lousiness, how much should I show patient incomprehension or hint I might understand some of it—some of what he is hiding from me? We are all dressed up as father and son but what we are is two blond guys out on a binge … How much does he want me to understand?

He has an aimed-at meaning and half-aimed-at meaning and the unwitting (giveaway) meaning: You can’t get it right: I can’t. Being a good listener and a good son is impossible if you’re not a blood son. and maybe not then: someone has to like you anyway before they like anything at all that you do in the way of listening …

He had a tone of voice that went: Do you wander in the desert of the details of a face … the musical (and unmusical) detailing of a voice … the arc of manner and of mannerism … Is it beyond you … Well, here is a smile and here is a glance of the eyes and here is a hug and here is a kiss to go with it … He said the last thing.

My soul’s vocabulary is a mess of his musics—natural or not … And much of me is an immediate meaninglessness of shocked attention. A kid with its father.

Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you. Well, I am four years old and pretty (You was famous for your coloring. A number of people said that to me later. [Oh,] Where did your pretty coloring GO?)

Then, when I’m ugly, Dad is odd—and ugly in another sense—when he goes on saying, Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you … God, you’re a mutt-in-the-manger: let’s hope it’s a phase—you believe in prayer? Maybe you ought to pray, Kiddo. Have a little pity … after all, we adopted you because you was good-looking—and you changed!

Daddy was making a song and dance of his feelings …

Daddy comes from a Jewish tradition—one that has existed since the seventeenth century—of being Jewish by being not Jewish. By believing in evil and in such notions as that God is embodied in this or that man, Jewish, and sometimes the devil, similarly … And in Christ. He hated piety—except in really sweet priests and ministers. He said it was vaudeville. He said of himself that he was modern, sensible, a man of breeding, sometimes deranged, shell-shocked. He believed in lying—Daddy was that sort of Wild Man of Borneo. I’m not a smarty-pants but I’m no fool, Kiddo …

He liked to lie … He liked impostures …

When I was six—just before I turned ugly—Daddy when he dressed me would brush my hair with his hands and shape my curls while I leaned against him. It was at such a moment that he would say. Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you.

It was also a sort of real information about something unclear to me.

Lila said, I don’t know who lies more, S.L. or my sister … It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other … My sister Beth is a REAL liar.

When I was nine and Daddy called me Ugly Little Dog and The Hunchback, I used to walk tensely with my head down between my shoulders, partly ready for a fight; and he would put his balding blond head at an angle measuringly and he would say, You’re an ugly mongrel … Well, arf-arf … Ain’t we arf-witted? What do you think …

If I was standing straight and was neatly dressed and peaceable and was holding his hand, and if he said the same thing and wasn’t looking at me, it had a different meaning, it had to do with me being dressed up and an impostor in love’s chambers: he sometimes said, You look like Wiley Silenowicz but you’re not him: I think you’re an impostor … Little Stone Elf. how’s your sense of humor … I believe I did resemble certain squat, scowling, mass-produced garden sculptures of that period, sculptures of gnomes.

Lila said to him. Be careful, S.L., little pitchers carry grudges, S.L.

Do you have a grudge against me, are you a mean little elf—or are you a friend to me—what sort of good child are you?

I don’t know yet …

Ape-Child, the one and only Tarzan of St. Louis, Missouri … the Jewish Wild Man of Borneo.

(Momma said of S.L.: One thing I’ll say for S.L., he may have misled me by saying he was sweet and a lover, and he led me on to think he was rich, but he always was ready for a GOOD joke together—it may not sound like much, but I HATE a man who has no humor, I can’t stand a gloomy man—I have enough troubles of my own … )

His humor sometimes had a desperate insistence, a lunatic tic quality.

My mother and father imitated each other in talk. They did variations on almost anything the other ever said, vocabulary or grammar. They imitated their friends and movie stars and comics. They imitated enviable neighbors. They add and mix and blend—they use stuff from parts of their lives I never saw or knew. What they knew was so far from me as a total thing that it moved in them at moments like some strange beast of farsightedness caged in me that was also a human blindness toward a child …

And it becomes a wiggle of their eyebrows and a movement of their nostrils; and then that stuff that I had no personal idea of comes near me in their glance … like the hippos that stink in the zoo … or the slither of snakes in a dream, in the zooish heat of attention like an encompassing embrace—which is how I felt it for a while …

They say personal things to me, but it may not be their own remark: they may be jealous of some person they know who loves a child more than they love theirs. They may conceal this with a slow mocking blink—Daddy winks a lot … Momma does, too, more excitingly.

A hidden sense of other romantic lives may cause their voices to mean stuff oddly if either of them says, Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you already … Put your pants on … Or: Don’t stand there near the window half-undressed, you’ll drive the girls in the neighborhood over the edge.

Sometimes it’s a love speech, but I don’t get it that that is what it is right away. It can feel indirect even with them looking at me … Sometimes maybe it’s a recitation, a joke, an incarnation—an evocation of the past when they made that remark and it was nice maybe … You know?

The air, the light, the clothes I wore, the ways I was deaf, a Wild Man of Borneo immune to civilized speech; sometimes Daddy’s emotion is a jealousy of me and sometimes he is jealous about me. He speaks in longing, or in a glum, sweet, teasing tone, or like someone in a movie, and it is about him getting older more than it is about me. Listen, Pisherkin, you know about the nature of girls? Does it concern the nature of girls? Of old women? My dad’s genital chronicles? I remember looking outside to see the mob of crazed neighborhood admirers, but no one was there, just a woman from across the street who did sometimes tell me she liked me but who wasn’t looking in our window that day. She was weeding a bed of tulips and not looking toward our house.

Was he grieving, saying that thing, grieving a little, a lot? Do we have a family language—him and me? Them and me … yes and no. It depends on what my mind and heart and soul have some linguistic grip on … Immediate, intimate love—and personal and emotional—usefulness, family meaning, that sort of family meaning does have something to do with stuff being said a thousand times—the skill in saying something anyway, that comes with practice, the knowledge, so that each time adds to and constrains what-is-meant until you get so expert that when you leave home, you float off in haze of local linguistic expertise, never quite to be repeated outside the house.

S.L. says, I don’t want to do anything for the first time ever again: I’m no beginner; no thank you. It’s not good news for me to start over at anything … I’ll tell you what it is: I don’t want to be a DUMB beginner. I’d like to think my life meant something … I’d learned a thing or two—is that all right with you? I like having had a little practice. I like having a little experience under my belt … I’ll tell you about me: I’m an old cowhand …

He said, when he was ill, I’m the sort of man likes two-toned shoes; if I got to wear one-toned shoes, I wear me some spats … I’m a dandy, a jim dandy … You know what that is? I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, stuck a feather in my cap and called it macaroni. Well, what can you do? I was a pretty man—you know how it is? If you don’t I’m not a-goin’ to tell ya. I’m no William Shakespeare—or his daughter … ha-ha-ha. This thing about the daughter had to do with all the best-selling women novelists of that time and with Lila’s having such a large, if unstable, vocabulary.

The mind longs for clarity, but clarity in relation to reality is peculiarly forced, often. I like it that it’s hard to guess at what he intends when he speaks. I like it in a sad way that so much of what he did is over my head. We’re almost rich … You know how it is … You will never have the luck of being one thing or the other. His friendly and complicitous sarcasm … you want to play keep-away with your kiss, you and that come-hither coloring—shame on you—dost thou knowest about gathering rosebuds, you little Cupid. Come on now, give me a kiss … How could I know what he really meant?

Or when he spoke like that in a totally other pitch of voice—sarcastically—either when I was ugly or when I hadn’t been paying attention to him for a while—at certain points in listening to him—face-to-face (or in memory)—I go into a kingfisher’s or a dive-bomber’s dive, staringly but skimmingly and erratically over a glare of his face and of the sounds and music of the voice and then of the light in the room and of a hundred times when he talked: I dive and race along in order to have a context for what he says, a wheel of translation, whatever …

I hear so variably, so untamedly, that it is scary—the abrupt floppy carrying off of a meaning—or the drill bit boring into what he is saying—or the deafness and my giving up, my escape from him and from love in the world. The varieties, all of them changeable, of being unloved, and of the thing of being Jewish and of the thing of having money, and of being American, and then the thing of the politics of listening … I am afraid of how rambunctious reality really is and how limited the reach is of my wit … my interpretations and translations of my father are.

Sometimes—always?—he is talking in rivalry, to see who loves better, him or someone else, him and everyone else, which one is the better man, which one do I like best …

He is rivalrous toward silence—toward books—toward movies. Some people he’s enjoined (or constrained) to look up to, and the fates of the kids of those people he is careful of; but he wants to be better than them and to make up for the respect he unwillingly feels. Or he goads me with how wonderful some other kid is … Boy, it’s dangerous to be somebody’s kid. Isn’t it dangerous to be his child? Anybody’s child?

And not just because of him but because of what people do to you because of him … Or Mom … Mom and Dad do things to me because of other people—it is an odd light in their actions. Also, Lila’s mother liked Lila a lot and was jealous of me, or was friendly to me because of Lila and S.L., and I disliked her for it so much, for not caring about me directly, that I wouldn’t go to her funeral when, at last, in her eighties, she died.

Both my parents liked to say that where there was smoke, there was fire.

My dad had images for feelings. You’re as nice as a dog and twice as clean. And: I defended you yesterday. Beth said you wasn’t fit to sleep with hogs, and I said you was. And: You’re the one I want to kiss: come on over here and he my merry sunshine for a change … And don’t ask me for any change; keep your greed to yourself, tonight. Darling-kins …

I am in a wild woods of memory. Voices speak and hands and expressions and movements of the lips fly around. I-am-lost-here. Memories in a bunch never happened that way. In relation to driving the girls in the neighborhood mad: I have to catch on in order to be their son, but I don’t have to catch on all the way. It might be creepy if I did that. Anyway, am I their son? Sometimes, in the years when it was agreed I was startlingly ugly, My God, look at you, either of my parents might say, but so might even kind strangers say it: I would pray at night, Keep me ugly. Dear God: make me a little uglier, if it’s all right with You—it was for the freedom, the semi-invisibility of it—but they, my parents, my parents by adoption, long for me to be a knockout, a killer-diller—as in the old days (when I was little). You was such a beauty … they say to me …

It was a more interesting story for me, Momma said.

It makes me no never mind, Daddy said—but he didn’t mean it …

Each idea of things in him is a specialized focus of his eyes, I think … I peer at him, this year, some other year. In me is a Grand Army’s worth of specially focussed eyes, each with a different kind of gaze—my inner mind has odd legs and strange wings for travel—its slow shovelling, its scratching … its weird hands … the weird efficacy. Its rebelliousness. I use it. I remember Dad saying stuff when I was ten but by then it is not just him: it is the whole world and my fate—sort of—that is speaking; he and Mom brim and leak over with stuff different from what I know of public and schoolish prose and from the kinds of English in newspaper stories and in the books I read. But I hear them accordingly, in line with that stuff and in line with the past. They thought I was a scandal … weirdly shameful: a smart aleck, a traitor, treacherous kid, a snot, a moral engine gone wrong, a rogue machine of pissy moods, wrong actions, vandal acts, stupid dialogues … a humor of independence … The neighbors liked me sometimes when they didn’t like my parents. Or if I was in trouble, I was someone that some of the neighbors HATED—do you know how it is when you’re ten? People say I was good for the Jews, bad for the Jews … good for my sister, bad for my sister … good for the neighborhood, bad … People spoke of this stuff that concerned me in tones with or without lyricism, and mean as shit or nice-nice—the bloodbath of the measurements—You’re not practical, Daddy said; you’re a standout as a’ impractical man.

Then I am fourteen and Daddy says, Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you. The immediate history may be of him glancing at my eyes and knowing I’m thinking dirty or romantically and me noticing what he is doing and him noticing my noticing. Maybe his attention is drawn to my being taller than he is; and he is vastly irritated by that … Or amused and sad. Then it might be like he is reproducing the tone of a children’s book, one where a little kid is in the jungle and meets Mr. Elephant and now he is the kid and I am Mr. Whatever. If I slouch so that our faces are on the same plane, I can see how Daddy’s eyes and lips and throat and tongue go wading out and then dive in and swim into syllables of what he says … stuff which I can’t see at all, after I’ve gotten to be six feet, if I don’t slouch. He is used to talking to me. I am used to hearing him when I was a different size, so that I hear him with a weird temporal echo as if I were in a well and his voice reverberates but not meaningfully except in terms of the distance between us. I am so used to his voice and his speech that it is almost as if he were breathing in a legible way and then that shrinks me or pushes me back to Fourth Grade, say, when he breathes dramatically or restrainedly or with a systematic intelligence in front of me in a way that is, or that merely seems to be, familiar … to be similar to stuff in the past that I knew in one way and now have to know in another.

When I am older, his talk might, indeed, be anything, even a tone, a zone of silence. This morning, grief-stricken—or at any rate struck down in some ways by grief at being solitary in my room—Daddy slept in my room the last four years of his life—I think about things and I decide I can’t remember voices and what is said in a real way. I deny the confusion: I won’t admit it comes from reality: for a few seconds, I remember only in a school way, usefully: bookishly: accusingly …

To remember in a real way is too emotional—too rending. I don’t want to live as someone who loved his father a lot. Maybe I don’t want to live at all. I am something of a prima donna of being reckless (Daddy’s view). Momma’s theory is that I died when my real mother died and that I was brought back to life but then I still had a yearning to be with my real mom and to give up, and so I am not to be trusted in life-and-death matters since, she feels, I prefer recklessness to caution, and death to politic kinds of living. A Drang to recklessness … A Nazi policy is the Drang nach Osten, the pull-to-the-east. Dawn is real now outside. Any grief I feel is linked to the primal grief at the disappearance, actually the death of my real mother and my near-death then; my dying and my reunion with her or my punishment of her or my weakness—reunion wanted and unwanted but reunion anyway. I’m saying a wild limitlessness of infant grief underlies my sadness when it occurs … I’m up shit creek without a paddle. I tend to try to suffer limitedly, without remembering. I remember oddly; I go around voices and real moments and remember my dreams and opinions and conclusions about people, not letting myself be partly eaten by the beloved darkness or whatever the fuck it is that makes life into pure shit. I try to live …

Everyone likes you. Daddy said, although he is just as likely to say, No one likes you, no matter what YOU think. I’m not supposed to say anything back because you don’t know how to talk, Wiley, and you hurt people, you don’t know what a man’s real feelings are, you aren’t good with people, Pooperkins.

When Poppa talks, I’m expected to listen, to be purely a listener and not to answer back. I’m not to be fresh or conceited or simple—or simpleminded. I’m supposed to pay attention to his wittily ironic and deep complexities of meaning and intention. He says, I like the strong, silent type in men, myself. I’m supposed to admire him. One of the reasons he lies so often is so I will admire him …

Momma has said she doesn’t like blind men—blindness in men—but she has also said that she likes a man she can depend on, one who is blind to my faults. And, I think, blind to the world for the sake of loving her. She said once—she was drunk—I would have put Samson’s eyes out: I’m that type; when he was blind, if you ask me, he was a real man. If Daddy is saying stuff about old women and young women and me, he is taking many, many, many things into account; he is trying to hold his own with a growing boy.

He is living up to the situation. But, also, I saw he was saying stuff about his philosophical powers of penetration: Look-how-I-have-managed-to-show-MEANING—see-what-an-artist-I-am … I-am-an-artist-of-real-life.

He is being a dream of a father (when he says that stuff, nice stuff to me). He is challenging me to have grown-up (complex) values about masculine performance in real life—and in my family existence with him. He is telling me to be careful (with women) without really expecting I will be … I might kill him with my carryings-on, my carelessness. I might ruin my life … I might kill myself … I might kill some girl (of the neighborhood) or an old woman (he said that). He also said, Daddy did, of one old woman: To flirt with someone like that, you might as well take an ax to her and hit her in the head, Wiley: it’s not good for her now that you’re a big guy. He was lying … It was an intelligent woman he was talking about and not one who was sexually fond of men. I don’t think he was merely wrong.

He sang part of a song called Only a Gigolo. He said, Don’t be a fool and Don’t be a gigolo; don’t be someone people can wrap around their little fingers. He says stuff in ways that please him because what he is saying is and is not quite true and is attractive in his eyes in that mixed-truth-and-whatnot form. It is dreamlike to speak anyway, with anyone, but it is especially dreamlike for two men to talk to one another, I think, and even more so if it is your father you are talking to.

It is a myth, a dream to speak to your adoptive father …

Him on sex: BEHAVE-or-you-will-die …

Yeah but then I think. You die anyway.

He laughs and laughs, a dying man; he laughs carefully as a matter of fact, and then he says, looking me in the eye: But you don’t want to be someone who dies too soon, Wiseguy …

Daddy likes to soothe people: the power to soothe soothes him. And it soothes me to soothe him by being soothed by how he talks … Ping-Pong and yo-yo, all the echoing stuff in the soothing line of intention …

If it is true that he knows what life is like for me, then he speaks to encourage me, to keep me alive and less suicidal—or more cheerfully suicidal—and not too blatantly, patently unhappy, ill, confused, silent. He was famous (locally) for his looks. By real-life standards he has a good sense of humor. Daddy, when he says. Don’t stand near the window: you’ll drive the young girls mad, he is using his sense of humor. He is of various sizes; it is in different periods and styles: pudgy-waisted or thin-waisted, almost wasp-waisted. And he isn’t always only talking ordinarily—he is talking as a great philosopher—a visionary lecher. With a sense of humor. A girl across the courtyard, who is older than me—seventeen—and strictly brought up—she’s a strict Catholic, Daddy has said ruminatively—she’s a girl I lied to about my age for a while … She undresses and dresses in front of windows that face those of my bedroom. Sometimes, half-dressed, she stands near the window. I have wakened from naps and seen her across the courtyard in her window looking toward me in my clothes twisted in my sleep, at me motionless on my bed. One time she did that, she was naked … I remember the astounded excitement in my LOINS—you know?

Is she after me or you? Or do you think she just likes windows!’ Daddy asked.

Across the street lives a publicly lesbian teacher who is much admired locally … seriously admired … a woman with white hair—fine-faced, proud and just—famous locally for being just and for being pretty—she has made speeches about being a lesbian and about women’s needs and about the nature of freedom for a woman. Daddy has a crush on her, on that just and good-looking woman, although I think she has made it clear that he gives her the creeps. I mean he knows that he gives her the creeps. That bothers him, and so he pursues her to try to get a better grade from her. He waves to her. Sometimes she waves back. She remembers me from third grade. She has her ups and downs about me. Now that I am a half-grown male or whatever, she is distant with me, but she was good to me the year I had her as a teacher. Distant? Now she smiles tensely and talks to me weirdly-weirdly—and once she said, Are you driving all the girls mad? Was it from a song they all remembered from the 1920s? I fainted in a way when that happened. I stood there but I went dead inside and was obtuse and was white-minded and didn’t know where I was