PREFACE
This story is part of a not-yet-finished book, titled “MAP.”
MAP comprises a set of long short stories that interrelate like parts of a novel but can stand as independent novellas or novelettes. MAP traces the journeys — geographic & psychosocial journeys — of a character called “Joseph,” the protagonist of the entire book. I (Leonard R. Jaffee) am Joseph.
Of MAP’s eight stories, three — “Maine,” “Philly 1 New York,” “Homeward the Ohio” — have been published in literary journals. The following (Substack-published) Philly 1 New York version is notably different from the version published elsewhere, earlier (in 1995). Maine was a winner of NEGATIVE CAPABILITY’s 1991 national fiction contest; and NEGATIVE CAPABILITY published Maine. The earlier Philly 1 New York version received two awards (one from NEGATIVE CAPABILITY).
I have published two others of MAP’s stories here, at Substack — (1) DIAMOND STREET, a True Story (which describes my early childhood, ages 2 through 7) and (2) The Cotton Country (which recounts a set of interrelated critical events of my 23rd year, adumbrates my didactic experience of a potentially toxic relationship of my 11th year, reflects significant aspects of my psychic life of my 50th through 63rd years, and includes fictionalized accounts of two actual tragic histories of the mid 19th century).
See the PREFACE of DIAMOND STREET, a True Story for an exposition of some peculiarities of my writing style (of which peculiarities Philly-1-New York bears some immeasurable quantum).
Philly-1-New York recalls parts of my childhood (1940s & early 1950s), parts of my early adulthood (1st half of the 1960s), and influences (and snippets) of my Reichian psychotherapy (Orgonomy) that lasted about 5 & 1/2 years (total) during the late 1960s, the late 1970s, and the early 1980s.
Philly-1-New York’s central/unifying thread is a 1964 motorcycle trip I ventured from Philadelphia to New York city — a ride traveling up old US Route 1, not a limited access highway, but a road of two lanes or three, rarely four, and having many traffic lights and circles, even a few stop signs.
Beyond the trip’s motivation that the story suggests, a keen motivation was my receiving an offer to take the position of Executive Chef of a lower Manhattan restaurant (which earned one Michelin star and three Mobil stars because of my substantial alteration of the restaurant’s cuisine and the dishes I designed for the restaurant’s menus).
Music is a notable ingredient of Philly-1-New York. Music informs, and utters from, the style of the story’s language and structure.
Music was an important neurology of my life of the times of the story, partly because (as the story recalls at points) I was a professional musician in the mid and late 1950s and early 1960s and a published composer of serious (wrongly called “classical”) music — my violin and piano duet’s performance being an object of a couple of the story’s scenes.
Where Philly-1-New York recounts things young-adult Joseph (my 19-26-years-old-self) said or wrote, the story tries to use the language of that Joseph, not the language of this writer of this time. Though young-adult Joseph was a master musician and a well-regarded music-composer, his prose and poetry lacked full maturity and consistent sophistication.
NOW THE STORY — Philly-1-New York
"You knew him, Leah? "I'm not sure what you mean, Bonnie. ...Biblically? Yeah. ...But I don't know what he is. ...... Except...sleek." "Yeah, Leah, sleek wind—swirling...with feathers. Feathers...winging in spin." "Whatever that means, I want his hands on my body. .......You remember his hands, Bonnie. Conquered all the brittle waves of your paintings. Made your visions vanish in your cunt. Shove the feathers. His hands still own my body. Damn that fucker! Damn his guts." * * * Back then summers heard roars of Messerschmitts, P-51s, Zeros, Hellcats, B29s, big guns of big boats. All the boys Joseph's age played war. The game didn't have rules, though most kids habituated one kind of part (commando, pilot, paratrooper, scout......), battle to battle—beach heads, forests, tank corps, dog fights, bomber raids, underwater demolition....... Joseph's father got a permanent deferment—important work, electroplating, sometimes on munitions, mostly fishing reels. He labored tough on the job, all his jobs—glazing on tall buildings, sanding in furniture plants, brick laying, plastering, stevedoring—real tough, just as at home. ........But he sweat ice when he thought he'd be drafted. Joseph always played doctor. All the other kids liked his doctoring, and Petey Simon, a skimpy squirt who captured leadership (maybe because he was English)—Petey demanded Joseph stick to the role, said Joseph did it better than any other could. Joseph kept begging to switch to fighter pilot or tank commander. Never once got the chance, not in the whole year before Victory in Europe, not even after the Japs surrendered. Petey said all the kids—Johnny Scannepicchio, Jimmy Morris, even Stevey Tagge (whose name the kids pronounced "Tay-gee," though really it was "Táh-gheh," German, like Stevey's father, a member of the German Bundt)—all the kids liked the way Joseph bandaged their wounded parts. They got wounded often, just to feel him do the wrapping—wounded in places and ways that need abundant wrapping, elaborate wrapping. They'd fall on a lawn and ask "Doc" to do his stuff. "Joey" bore the touch of a doctor. All knew he had to be a real one someday. So they never let him fight. * * * "Yeah, Sorrel, I know whatcha mean. He doesn't deserve those hands, though. Or that medieval martyr's body Bonnie keeps reeling over. He's an arch prick." "Arch, Leah? He fathered my Cathedral—the tempera vaults, the great stone arms, the forest, the clouds, the swords...." "Man, she's full of shit, Sorrel. Keeps twisting truth into stories of her 'art'—as if she doesn't do that stuff just in case he may come back and be impressed and give her a turn in bed...and another, and another. Damn, she even keeps talking that jive at school, trying to make his dumping her seem a gift of creation, some blessing from above: 'And God scourged His children, that they be cleansed and holy unto Him!' Well I admit it. I want to rip his balls off, except I'd never get his cock again. That little son-of-a-bitch." "Look, Leah, I'm not lying. I admit I want him—and hate him too. But this shit you're laying down stinks. You know damn well y'love the way he talks to you in poems about his pain, poems right out of nowhere. Those dark, warm poems that swell your dark-warm wet. And y'don't know which you want more, his real crotch or the hot crotch feeling of the reveries he tells you. And he's so forlorn and helpless—winds you every way he wants. Remember how he got Jeanie? Just standing sad, alone, brushing his foot at the rug—the way an injured beast paws the earth. You know he can't help it, and he does it so well you can't get enough. So, yeah, you're right about my paintings, Leah. But only half right. I do worship the little shit—but 'cause he's just a hurt boy poet in an arctic wolf. It's not that he's got no pity. He simply is—not like the gargoyles I paint, or the burning stallions I try to make more beautiful than he so I won't want him anymore. I want to want him. I want him to love me—just me." "G-o-o-d luck! Right, Sorrel?" "I don't know. I'm not complicated like you guys. That's why......I don't know what he saw in me. I don't have no talent. And......you two: You're like......almost geniuses—nearly in a league with him. But I think he liked me—lots—even loved me, a weird way. .......Can't imagine why." "Shit, Sorrel, I'll tell you why. No! I'll show you. Come'ere—to the mirror. Take a good look. Take—come over here too, Bonnie, and Laura—take a good look at yourself, Sorrel, next to us, next to just about any bitch you know. There's why, Sorrel!" "No, Leah. That's not all. I mean: What guy couldn't get the hots just glancing at Sorrel? But that didn't keep him coming back to her, more than any other bitch around, even Laura, or you or me—except the one he married and divorced in seven months, and still keeps moaning over, even in bed with you. That poor Saint Barbara—who walks like a duck. ......I tell you, Sorrel: If he could've handled how the asphalt tore your ass when his bike had a blowout and your bottom skid along at 50, his body riding yours, or if he'd been able to save you the way Bull did him—pull you on his back and crash the bike down under him—then maybe he'd still be shacking with you. .......And maybe I'd have another chance at him." * * * Twenty-eight degrees black. Snow and gaining sleet. Joseph didn't wear a helmet. Just a stocking hat. But he rode free. Won a "4-F" exemption Friday. Stayed up nearly three whole days on phenobarb that Franky sold him as speed. Then took LSD. Fooled the Army shrink. Diagnosed him schizo. Now they wouldn't draft him to kill or die in Vietnam. He could tolerate anything but war. And he wouldn't play doctor. Summers, he could feel hot wind nearly loose his hair, light brown, wiry—kind that flops in clumps, always the same, always erratic. But the blizzard wrought hard press: thick wool sock hat choking his brains; a ghinny T and flannel shirt, then coarse Navy sweater under denim cowboy-jacket, the layers strapping his ribs, like swaddling wraps of bandage. Joseph's trunk still had warm blood. The rest? Black cold had seeped down in 'til flesh resigned to bone. But he wouldn't stop. He hadn't stopped through all those mornings when he didn't know he'd awaken—into his father's beating him for skipping a dose of cod liver oil or not climbing the ladder "right" (to the roof above the third story), or into his mother's grabbing his skin to pull it out and twist it till he couldn't scream (because he'd demanded she return that very dollar bill, no other, the only present his father'd ever given him, the same one he'd hidden in the china closet, in the cocktail shaker no one ever used). Fresh in second grade, the winter after his parents consigned him to the state and the orphanage ousted him, Joseph hid one night and nearly two in the woodshed at the forest-edge of the dying farm the court decreed his foster-home. The farmer strap-whipped Joseph when he pissed his bed and puked the fatback, mush, and lard-fried greens the farmer's wife allotted him and three other wards. Joseph learned endurance from his mother and father and the farmer and the night-watch nun of the orphanage, the nun who burst, drunk, screaming, from the dark and bludgeoned one small boy by one, none knowing why. The cold began to burn. Sleet transmuted into crushed salt slapping into lash-wounds. Once, when Joseph was in music college, he and Patty walked a foredawn brittle in a January storm. He told her—his childishly admiring roommate, his "angel amazon" he couldn't get himself to fuck—told her cold would never grab her if she walked real tough: shoulders straight and back, chin high, chest out. He thought of Patty. And he leaned forward—carved wood figure at a clipper's prow. An old vision rose from a sea—the time the kids noticed Joseph never went to church. They interrogated him about it—after he patched the last wounded of an Argonne battle they won, won because he fixed up Petey fast, in time for him to lead the final charge. Petey asked first, then Jimmy Morris. Johnny Scannepicchio volunteered that he was Catholic and went to church in school. Stevey Tagge was silent. Joseph didn't know what to say. His family didn't seem to have "religion"—any way like what the other kids imputed to the word. His father’s grandpa was Jewish (by adopted religion), but his mom was a child of the Greek Orthodox Church. Sometimes his parents mentioned God—as in "God will punish you if...." Joseph's father read big books, thick books. They had strange symbols on their covers, symbols religious-looking, like the Christian cross or the star of David, but different—snakes eating their tails, serpent circles holding swastikas, or whirling serpents wrapped 'round a six-pointed star, its heart holding a single eye or an Ankh or a Coptic cross. Some symbols bore Sanskrit or hieroglyphs beneath or surrounding the snakes. Often his father fell into drunken sleep when he read—book on his lap, drool dripping on the book. Always Joseph was relieved his father was asleep—but afraid to wake him, and sickened and embarrassed by the sight of him. Joseph's mother was strawberry blond, her eyes diamond blue. Her voice bore a plenty of Magyar accent. Her speech must have sounded broken Russian, or a Polish-German mix, or who-knows-what to Joseph's playmates—though its music was Asian, like a Mongol’s or Turk's. His father's hair blared waves blacker than the stones of his eyes. A bent nose angled out beneath a cliff of brow and hooked toward clefts of lip and chin. His skin's tone drummed the feel of lingering cigar-smoke. His hulk remembered simian strains. And when he wore his wide-brim, flat-top hat, he looked a German “Mafioso,” like George Raft. * * * Next day, Stevey Tagge told Joseph Stevey'd asked his dad what Joseph's religion was. "It ain't religion. He's Jew—a dirty kike! A Christ-killer! A sheeny mocky! ...And don't you hang with him no more." Later that Saturday, after the broadcast of "Let's Pretend," Joseph knelt in his back yard. He was trying to fix a street skate—the other skate behind him, lying on its side. Tagge snuck in, up near Joseph's back, grabbed the loose skate, hit Joseph half a hand above the nape of his neck, and ran, and ran. Joseph fell unconscious. His mother saw it through their kitchen window. She recounted it to Joseph and the doctor. Joseph wore a slightish architecture, nothing like his mother's—except his cheekbones and forehead, high and wide. His body lacked the apish power of his father's. If he didn't arch his neck, he couldn't look into the faces of his friends. But he recovered from Tagge's hit before the next "Let's Pretend." After the broadcast, Joseph played war. Tagge absented his presence. He hadn't played since he slammed the skate on Joseph's skull. But when the game was winding down, Tagge showed up. Always Tagge's arrivals drew attention. Tagge's bulk would far-outbalance even Schannepichhio's, on any scale, and he could see over all the others' heads. Tagge went to grammar school. The rest hadn't even entered kindergarten. Joseph was doctoring Jimmy Morris. Jimmy's eyes were closed, near sleep. Joseph sprang from Jimmy like an alley cat, and darted toward Tagge, hurled his body up at Tagge's trunk and straddled it, grabbed Tagge's throat, bit his ear. The force— and shock—knocked Tagge prostrate—Joseph hard on top. Joseph pounded Tagge with the bottoms of his fists—each lank arm transfigured to a pile-driver, mighty as the limbs of flesh-devouring dinosaurs. No one could stop him. Joseph kept on pounding Tagge till his nose poured blood and his head was bruised and lacerated too many places to count—till he knocked Tagge out, deep out. Tagge's father got what he'd demanded. His son never neared Joseph again. * * * Joseph grinned, the little he could against the sharp of cold and battering of hail. For a while he'd play war again, but never doctor anymore. His street-rigged CZ 360 motocross became his Percheron, he a knight, courage graven with iron, shield to thwart the enemy wind. After time scarce longer than a tramp's booze matures, Joseph would retreat to Philly. He would radiate contentment as he left his first visit with his Reichian shrink, his new self an element of eiderdown—floating. But Dr. M would open all his brownstone's windows to air away the stench of Joseph's fear. When Joseph neared health, M told him: "The odor! My God! The reek of death from under your iron! It stifled even the smell of my cigar." Earlier in therapy, Joseph would have quailed at those words. But he'd unearthed his vast fear's whorled roots, reversed their turnings that deviled his sense and passion into armor and sword. "When I learned the sores of your beginnings, Joseph, I was in wonder how you'd survived." [Joseph felt the premonitions.] "Even half whole." [Joseph's body surged for tears.] "And sane." [Joseph's face lifted out, brows vaulting, eyes narrowing to downward arcs.] Divining torrent, M, the titan, embraced Joseph—full round. [Joseph's lips quivered after vagrant words.] "But somehow, Joseph, you got born with energy more savage than your fear. [Joseph convulsed, as if all his flesh and bone became orgasm.] "Like light!" * * * Glaring through the hard dark, Joseph wiped the cold wet from around his eyes, as if he'd been crying. He'd gone near ninety minutes out of Philly, riding US1—now just a little south of Princeton. Had to go it slow. Couldn't have a crash. Had to make Elèna's. Much too late to turn around. What about a stop—just coffee? Would the warmth cut his guts, or the respite kill his energy—plunge him deeper into ice? He had to think it through—if just to keep awake against the raking sleet, attacking ever harder—pointillism rasping out from siege. He couldn't get stiffer. Could he? ...Joseph made a drum song: "Corp-ses don't get worse. [Boom!] Corp-ses don't get worse. [Boom!] "Corp-ses don't..." He timed the music to his cycle's engine. The rhythm kept him centered, one with the bike, its power, its “Zen.” Inside his jacket he'd stashed a Beatles album, fresh released, named "Yellow Submarine," the appellation of the album's cheap lead song that repeats the title oppressively often, like a mantra of kidney stones. Joseph didn't like the Beatles. They were pretentious, like wax blood. He bought the album for Elèna. Her ignorance drew her to the Beatles' stuff, as if vacuums suck into empty cans. He forgave her that weakness. She forgave him all his. * * * "My pale steed, horse of the moon, nourish in my lust that hunts you. ..." Elèna's flower—Joseph called her vagina that—her flower smelled faintly like cinnamon and vanilla. She did not shave, anywhere. She wore nothing but stockings — black, wool, tightly knit (like the forest of her flower). Their purled leaves patterned their reaching to the middles of her thighs. She grew her hair stark like her eyes, hung it past her belly, kept its strands barbaric, all but four tiny braids draping from the edges of her forehead. Her lips bloomed as she sighed. She spanned her legs high, feet beyond her temples, arms like Christ's nailed to the cross. Night became the verdured air surrounding Joseph's bed. Elèna breathed it in, and it muted into bright and lilac, steam of rain, magnolias, summer afternoons—until her waking self dissolved into swirling blanks, waves of unconsciousness. She slipped back into awareness. And through a droning shrill like the throbs of warmth that pierces through vanishing frostbite, she felt his teeth grip her throat. Her head fell behind, yielding to the swells of her chest. She tensed. An iron stay wound round her. Her legs thrashed like victims of electric shock. She grabbed his hair, ripped his head away, shoved his body off into a floe of whirled linen. Like vines probing, his arms crossed in slow lurches, cunning as a climbing sloth's. They swaddled his body folded dully on itself, a jack-knife marred with rust. His chin pressed his clavicle, as if he had no neck. Like rocks rolling up to shut a sarcophagus, his shoulders lifted to his ears, as if to deafen them. He became an egg again, blind and wordless, nucleus of chance. "... My Pan of night. I dare not let me love you. My life belongs to big men, hulks I can control, apes I can use." Joseph wondered how Elèna failed to sense his weakness near her, his want to own her, as she'd hobble a brute, like Bull, whom she fancied a Percheron or bear-bait, or Hugo, a prize beast of burden. "You are like my father—gaunt trouvère of the sea, imp and demon-prince indentured to the waves that drive him to the haggard lusts of fleeting ports. I must purge him from tomorrow." Her bony lament made Joseph think of the maiden and the unicorn. When her purity seduces the simple creature to lay its head in her lap and fall into ecstacy, hunters sprout from hiding and kill the beast. "And mother! Gallego fury! Keltic fire arisen from the cragged fjords that thorn into the skull of Portugal, serpent witch who spreads death's chalk like silk, sweeping into childhood's breast. I pray I won't become her. I struggle to rid her sorcery from me. But it overtakes me in your spare caves, your wan and sallowing shadows. I crave bright innocence." Joseph admired Elèna's glib poetics — though he likened their mold to Beatles' songs (which he despised for their pretension). He feared to conquer her, as his Magyar forebears ravaged Europe, as his mother, Magyar fury, ravaged his innocence of trust. But, somehow, beyond defense, like sleep plunging into lakes of apprehension, his greed withered to the silent question of why Elèna's language carved such rich impersonalities, cast in mythic symbol, chill geography, lurid abstraction — no human deeds or tangible feelings, no hues or temperatures of real events, of breathing love or cruelty, kindness or hate... His inner sight could not shape the beings who bred Elèna. His experience could not detect their tones or hear their dictions. Nor was he sure he wished to recognize himself in her portrayals of his attributes, however they seemed to lure her. What must she hide? Why? What shall he conceal.......from whom? "Big hulks make me wife, make me easy, as I make them clay. I want your passion only in this half-world, Joseph, in this foredawn pooled out of blood, blood of my mother, blood of her womb." In his gullet and lungs he felt the laden hollow of surviving inhalations of brine. His skin was crusted snow. She became his silence. Clouds marshaled to annihilate the moon—Sueves in Galicia, Saxons at the River Lech—like tars that swallowed mastodons. Black devoured the green of his room. For seven heartbeats, her breath stilled. Then, as if petals of a flower that opens for the hours of absent sun, her arms spread to draw his body back to hers. "You, my wool-loined, you my goat-eyed, you my cloven hooved, come through into my deep now, to my abyss before dawn. Come through to me. Die in me..." * * * The engine's rhythms and his drum-song wrapped him in a near-trance, like the sense that warms the frozen when they yield to sleep beyond dreaming. He imagined ice-swans flaunted at wedding fests embellished by antics of kids conscripted to attend. He remembered the ending lines of a poem he composed in the morn of his last birthday, when a December passed through blizzards impervious as Nazi zeal. Now you are a muffle boundless in an orphaned womb: the vision of a child who dreamt that stiffening his limbs could make him fly. The winter earlier, he swore off Elèna and granted Sarah's wish that he live with her. He hadn't a bike then; and he envied Bull's, as he worshiped Bull's guiltless amorality, his full, free lack of care. Bull, the engineer who "let himself" be drafted so he'd either murder better than anybody or be the Army's "poet laureate." Bull, who got a psycho discharge after diving through the frosted window of the second story office where he broke his Captain’s jaw after the Captain assigned him to fixing phone equipment. Bull, a shanty Irish pug of Pittsburgh, tough from lugging pig-iron hods and fucking every cunt he could—when his dick could get near-hard (stiff enough to pierce his anger). Bull, who couldn't chance to waste those dawn erections he'd get 'cause his bladder was full. * * * Bull raced bikes—road, dirt, motocross. He fixed them, too, and rigged them for speed. Bull used to take Joseph riding on the Beezer Bull kept hopping up. Once, they went streaking somewhere over 90 on the big first curve of the Schuylkill Expressway. Joseph near-lost his whole store of urine—footpegs scraping concrete, sparks starring the sweaty night bright as Joseph's white moon eyes could fathom. Bull's snarls poured like crackling oil racing from a parapet: "Ma-a-a-a-n, I knew you were a piss-ass when you talked me out of droppin' that cop." That was the Bull who carried Joseph home, six blocks on his shoulders, after Joseph, too deep drunk to know he had a royal flush, lost his rent in the brothel Bull dragged him to—Bull who tendered Joseph to his bed, covered him, made him morning coffee. He was same Bull who called Joseph "faggot bait"—loud enough to shake the Soho bar—that arctic night when Joseph took those twin teen virgins home in a cab when they wouldn't fuck Bull or Joseph. They'd have had to walk eight blocks of hostile turf, then ride the subway long past midnight through neighborhoods where rapes popped like corn. Bull laughed—Joseph thought ten minutes—laughed in spurts and growls adorned with "Dumb shit sucker," "Cunt-face fool" and "Ma-a-a-a-a-an, you'd even fuck up wet dreams." Joseph said dreams were irrelevant, and he didn't need wet ones. (Once, drunk in Joseph's kitchen, Bull confessed he couldn't get his joint stiff half the time.) Then in came Laura, Laura Franks—green eyes trumpeting, black hair bunned back Spanish, shoulders square as loose, wide hips round and firm, thighs lush and tightly suited with a savvy class and putting heat in every step. Laura did administration for a shrink who ran a mental ward and governed psychiatric residencies. Doyl found Laura at a Bryn Mawr party, took her to his bed for a taste, dropped her at the Soho's door, its carbon steel bright beneath a row of spot-lamps trained on yellow music notes and orange champagne glasses drifting round a pink-white script that hollered "New York Type Styles." "Gotta study Physics, baby. G'won in. You'll find a stud to shack with." The inside reeled under jagged blares knifing through sweeps of smoke. Laura had to squint and fix her balance. Just in front, and taller than the door, a nut-brown hard-hat danced the "locomotion" with a jail-bait "cracker" girl he dwarfed. He grunted as he gyred and stomped his boots. The girl kept squealing "Wow! Baby! Ghit it! Wow!"—her timbre mimicking the screeches train-wheels make on radical curves. In the alcove of the black front window and along the mirror hazing on the plaster slab behind the rows of bottles capsized into shot-dispensers, neon emblems pulsed-out beer and booze ads flickering in gold, vermillion, opal, lavender, persimmon, avocado, chartreuse....... Against a brick and concrete fire-wall, slot games (shuffle-alley, pin-ball...) splattered syncopated bell-rings that celebrated numbers lighting like novas. The rhythms joined the squall of talk and bottle clanks and jukebox rock and screams of anger and joy... Time, sound, light, and motion merged as a searing gray. Joseph saw her first. Got her before she could sit. Slipped himself between her reach and the bar stool she headed for. Eased close against her. Stroked her temple and hair, plummeted his gaze into the great wild chasms of her eyes, and declared, with solemn lust: "I must know you—you, hungering as breath." Then, his cheek hot to hers, his lips at her ear, he whispered: "Buy me a drink?" She smiled—like a Doberman, or shark. Bull pushed into the stakes, grabbed Joseph by his collar, yanked him back, snarled as he bellowed: "We'll shoot for her: 8-ball." For a torrid moment, the summons quenched all words, except of the jukebox. Manning the bar as if it were a fortress, Ed, the owner, torqued his neck to let his look, its endless hollow, assimilate Joseph's reply. Ed's face—its shapes, eyes, and hue—resembled Duke Ellington’s. Ed’s plush lips smoothed to a waxy smile. His steel eyes filled as if syphons. Bobbing like the mantis-pumps that suck up crude from flats that rise beyond the Missouri, his forearm rocked his brown mitt cupped into stroking his permed-straight ringlets glassy back across his summit. And his mouth sounded clicks of stratagem. Joseph questioned Bull's logic. Bull had downed eight double rounds of Georgia Moon, the rot-gut corn the Soho sold at four deuce-shots for a dollar—poison Bull instructed friends to drink flambé, through blue fire whorling. Bull couldn't win. Or Laura would turn him away. Over the table, half long and wide as the worn aqua billiard felt, a green-glass shade piloted a cold fluorescence downward through the dry, biting fog it illuminated. With blinks like a foreign code, one old bulb composed a dirge for its own soon passing. Above, as if pestilence brewing for a wicked land, a lime aura seeped and fluttered up around the higher reaches of the room. Ed stopped serving to watch. His voice like lovers churning in an envelope of ironed sheets, he uttered a conundrum: "Three-to-one. Joseph. Five-spot bottom. Cover twenty. Loser doubles every bank winner sinks. Odds up one if Joseph breaks and splits, two if he drops just stripe or solid, four if two of either. ..." Ed might have been seducing bids on Picassos and Persian rugs. His cadence spread the sense a passing tourist takes from fresh-white clapboard on a stream of old Maine houses harbored-in by portly elms—as if the sour sweat, the acrid smoke, the acetone, and spilled beer's gum and odor, all, like evil dreams, had dematerialized to raid a grotto of another universe. Maybe sixteen times Bull jerked the rack across the felt from and toward the spot the lead ball must cover—his compulsion fixed in lurches like a retching beast. The spheres clacked—like reciprocals of straps' scourging flesh—every instant their cluster slapped the rack's plastic. The final thrust acquitted the lead ball precisely, fit the rest tight to its rear—a solid triangle (though its tips were round and edges scalloped), its base parallel the rag. Throughout the rite, till the whack of Joseph's scattering the atoms of its product, no one mouthed anything but breath. The still rose and sharpened, perched like the portent of shrieks one's fingers might conjure by rubbing just-washed china, dripping. Bull never took a shot, but Joseph sank the 8 before its time. Bull howled victory and ordered Joseph to take Bull and Laura to Joseph's apartment—soon as Joseph could "get her juice goin' good." Joseph left Bull with Laura and drinks in the violet of his parlor and retreated down the long scarlet hall, past the white and clutter of the kitchen, to his bedroom, its forest green. He drew the black curtains, and shut the door. The dark was shattered by a crack of lightning—the percussion of Laura's hand slamming Bull from maw to ear. "Get off me, you twit!" Outside, an amber traffic signal yielded to red, and Bull burst into the bedroom, gin dripping from his grimace, crimson flashing from his cheek. "Ma-a-a-n, that bitch! Crazy! Bet she couldn't fuck anyway." Bull's eyes emptied—the way cops zip body bags. He bent one knee, pirouetted slick as in a army drill, staggered out, pounded up the hall, and roared so big you almost couldn't hear his combat boot split the outer door. He vanished through a thundering down the stairs. Laura joined Joseph in bed. She spread around him—like flesh forming a womb. * * * Joseph was using Sarah's Honda 250. He'd just met Bonnie, at the party Sarah took him to. Sarah—who gave Joseph everything she had, every way she could (chattels, work, money, food, all her body and love, a place to live in...)—Sarah told Joseph Bonnie would steal him, just by looking the way she did, "like a Gypsy dancing to the music of Hell," his music. Joseph got Bonnie out of bed to ride with him. She'd never been on a bike. He told her to hold him tight, so they and the machine would move as one being. Otherwise they'd tumble. Sharp left into side street. Like the turn Bull took that time they'd borrowed Nancy's scooter and it started fluttering and Bull pulled Joseph on his back and went down first to take the hurt so Joseph wouldn't get torn up. Bonnie got scared, leaned hard opposite the Honda's tilt. The bike skipped half sideways, splatted on a fender of a Volkswagen. The front fork bent, and Joseph's knee fractured. Bonnie flipped right past, landed on her feet, as if she'd waited at a bus stop. She rode in the ambulance anyway. In the hospital, the air felt like summer in a baker's kitchen. Crumpled against an alcove’s greenish wall, a gnarled old man kept mumbling: "Ah peein’ bluud. Ah peein’ bluud." A nurse came, handed him a bottle, sent him to the john. An orderly arrived and brought a bucket, gave it to a boy who had a gushing razor-slash across his hand, told him it was Lestoil, said to soak his wound in its unguent liquid content. Moon fell, and Joseph crutched into a morning like a tropic noon. Bonnie said he was beaming pride at the cast they put around his shin and knee. Sarah told Joseph she would not evict him but hope he'd pay the damage—someday. Joseph reaped Bull's envy, blatant as Erin's color, at that night's party. * * * "Hey, wait a minute! That twerp Joseph farted just like any other guy. And he said the only good thing his father ever said was: "Nobody shits ice cream." Last Halloween, Lesuchka found Joseph curled over Danny's toilet. He was puking out his guts because he'd mixed cheap wine with his first marijuana, and he was moaning like a cow because he wanted bad to get that wall-eyed bitch away from Doyl. She grabbed him by his hair and took him home, but our hero almost couldn't get it up and didn't last two minutes. She ditched him Christmas break. The sucker brooded deadly—wouldn't party New Year's Eve. Maybe that's why he went to New York: Lost his magic here. Looked just mortal." "I don't know, Leah. He said he went 'cause too many Bryn Mawr skirts got wind he was trying to beat Don Juan and he got a job up there." "Did you believe that shit, Sorrel? He just can't face us 'cause he blew it with Lesuchka. Man I envy her. She really got him, didn't she Bonnie?" "No! .......Or if she did, it doesn't matter—or it's tragic. It was the only time he couldn't embody what we all expected him to be. He didn't know what to do—about what we, and his mother, made most important. That might have been the first time, ever, he couldn't figure everything. I bet he was breaking inside, because he thought he might crack outside. The line's real thin for him. His girders are hard but fragile." "Well maybe he needed that. Maybe he needs more—many doses, like rabies vaccinations, so he'll be able to take being human—and be more human, to us and the rest of his victims." "If I'm a victim, Leah, I'm a willing one. He never tried to dupe me about his feelings or motives or wants. And despite what you say, Leah, I have compassion for him. I don't know whether he'll ever know where he's going more than just past moment-to-moment." "Man, he really got Bonnie sucked in, Sorrel! Bonnie, I think you want to be his fool." * * * He couldn't straighten up at first—frozen in his lean over his bike. Almost fetal, he was, but too angular for that—as when the pain told his knee its fracture, when he splatted into that Volkswagen. But then he was a baby rocking on the asphalt, groaning for help, even after the ambulance came. Now he could move himself—if just to stumble, like a rusted robot. Still, he made the diner. The diner wore a roof of quilted stainless, and painted sheet-steel sides, each with a ribbon of windows, like a train's, dressed with the always-half-drawn curtains of a real dining car. Inside, a dazing light designed implacably to wake up truckers and endow the room with a pancake-eatin' air. It blinded him at first. The sense illuminated why he gasped and thrashed so frantically—as if in brine rushing to the innards of a breached ship sinking—when that cornerback elbowed his groin and he lay writhing in mud and his fellows crowded over him and he couldn't tell them to make space so he could breathe. The dry heat burned his fingers, more than had the sleet and cold. His skin succumbed to a prickly sense, like the rasping hum your mind battles when you wake from being knocked unconscious. He recalled the time he lived in the foster home, somewhere west of Philly, on a dying farm. At the country school—Lutheran, he thought—during recess after long division, seven classmates beat him ("Jew boy! Jew...") till his apprehension tumbled, spinning, into black peace. He knew not when, but life recurred, dim yet sudden as a slip of melting floe, and he found himself beneath the seesaw's iron arch, its fulcrum, his mind not telling how, his brain abuzz like flesh rescued from a tourniquet. His body lifted, quick but lame as on a new foal's legs, and the fulcrum slugged his head empty again. * * * "Hey, you! What're you doing lying there, in the mud. Get up! You've been fighting, haven't you? I knew you were trouble, knew the first day you came here. Aw, don't tell me they beat you up. It was your fault. You just have to be different, and rub it in. This is a Christian school. And you better learn how to fit, Jew." Joseph rubbed his eyes. Miss Hankins's face was stuck at his, a thumb's length away. Her hair was tight-curled, pressed into a tumored orange rind capped around her head. She had a beak, not a nose, and her steel-rimmed glasses made her eyes like off-white beans wearing blotches. Her face seemed a photo of a crazy, patchwork birdhead—deadpan of a Frankenstein-like monster made of vultures, turkeys, ostrich hens, and crows. Her mouth looked like an ancient chicken's egg-and-shit-hole. "Get up! Get into class! Now! Right now! Move!" Miss Hankins faded. He felt the fulminating thuds of fists and knees, felt them deep in his head, belly, back, balls.... He heard the roars of Messerschmitts, the thunderings of shells issued from heavy guns projecting rabidly from panzers. He righted himself and shook-off some mud and splattered Hankins's flat, lard ass, jellying-ahead, trundly, toward the rose brick building called school. * * * Inside, Joseph closed the vestibule's internal door, shivered to a blue-topped stool, eased his body down as if an old neck fitting to the collar of a guillotine. His clothes, just short of frozen, started shedding weather—dense water and sheer ice. The near-boiling coffee didn't scald his tongue, barren of feel, and almost rigid as his jaw still jutting into sleet and wind he'd left along the road. He wondered whether he would have the iron to turn back out into the journey. But he knew he would. He'd never been able to quit his craze of perseverance, his always betting against himself and proving his gamble wrong—the harder the wager the more alluring. Harder than Ms. Hankins's voice among the bone-reverberations of the German jarrings seven Christian hay-seeds gave him in the country school’s yard. Harder than hiding a night in the farmer's woodshed, or the thrashings after and before. Harder than living on trashed bread—on the street, at thirteen. Harder than his mother's face when she pulled and twisted his skin. Harder than the skate in Stevey Tagge's hand. Harder than the smarts he learned in the House of Detention where he landed for the truancy that got him expelled from the "College Bound Block" and harder than the public beating his father gave him when the court imposed a truancy fine. Harder than the cast around the broken arm the drunk nun clubbed onto his back when she blamed him and the other orphanage boys for her drinking too much booze and tumbling down a stair. Harder than the long weeks he waited for his mother and the Sundays of the steel-wool knickers the nuns made him wear to church, and harder than the time some other poor, forsaken kid stole the "Magic Midnight" ring he'd saved ten cereal boxtops to win. Harder than the trials his father kept slamming at him. "Still too much paint! Burn it off! Get higher on the ladder! Can't do nothin' right!" Got no guts, bed wetter! I'll show you what to fear: My hand! [Whack.] My strap....... Gonna cry, bed wetter? Got no guts?" But the really hard bets were the maybe-soft ones—like Debbie. * * * Jon was Joseph's rival at music college. One time, Jon brought Debbie to the Composers' Forum. Patty, on piano, and Schlolm, a concert violinist, played Joseph's new work. The host made Joseph sketch his piece's structure. Debbie was transfixed, by Joseph's music, too—terse intricates in polyphonic atonality, clean, tender grace and subtle warmth entwined with acrid dissonance. She took him home. They made love. She became a dark wild trapped in cool learning, a feral purity caught, like a tern, in the sludge of bohemian finesse. Morning, her mother brought them tea and plums, in bed. Joseph careened into adoring Debbie. But he trusted she'd not return his emotion, even his lust that craved hers. Next night he took her to dinner at a quaint Italian restaurant in a basement near Walnut and 21st. He felt designed to be a gentleman, to make her his lady. He would transport them to a marble castle in a fantasy of jousts and Holy Grails. After, in the car, she put her hand on his thigh and said: "I enjoyed the dinner very much. Et vous êtes très charmant!" Something forced him to believe she was playing him false, saying the expected things, the sour sweets women offer when they think you're a nerd but don't have the guts just to dump you. So he asked what she thought of his music—put the query as test. "It was very interesting—compelled my attention. So...so...pure and haunting, like...I don't know...like nothing else." That was that! She was full of shit. He was her joke. Still he took her to Jon's apartment and fucked her, like a plundering hun. He wanted to trust her. That made him her fool. He came too fast. She held him. "It was good anyway, Joseph." He was good. They would get better—together. Fini! He drove her home, without speech, left her, without word, not even good-bye. One day, weeping so hard he could barely talk, Joseph remembered his parents to Dr. M. He metered out their crudenesses, brutalities, their wants of awareness, warmth, support, their failures of language, mind, manners, dress. Somehow he thought of Debbie, and found his words just measures of the doubt he'd paced, shaking, inside, all those years, in concerts and schools, through dinners and talking with friends—even as lover, in bed. He wondered how anyone liked him—whether anyone did like him...whether he disgusted M. "I don't take patients I don't like, Joseph. ...I admire you. And I want to see you free, to free all your energy, so you breathe easy. You deserve to love a woman as you passion at your work—without fear." Joseph felt proud—said M was his true father. Still Joseph couldn't carry belief in himself. And he'd lose more than half his life before he'd let himself be. Debbie'd finished college since Joseph dumped her at her door. Directly after "commencement" rites, she took a girlfriend to the Soho bar. She found Joseph, shooting pool with Bull—told him she'd wanted him ever since the night of the Italian restaurant. He took her to his pad. She brought Louise. Bull nudged in. Joseph carried Debbie to his bed, raptured her until her whole body lathered—the hair his fingers played, as if dolphins toying warm currents, her neck craving his bite, her flesh that seemed, against her hair, so raven, the hue of milk her chest would render to a child her blood had fed, her breasts, of texture and geometry that drew his cheek as if a hungry infant's, her arms and shoulders, structures in a glass menagerie, her waist, of corresponding measure, burgeoning in jungly loins, her thighs, clasping him, like anacondas. But her eyes—caverns—commanded him. Bull fucked Louise in the parlor—as if sex were pocket billiards and she a nine-ball game. At the finish, he scraped on his clothes—the way some rodents rake dead leaves around themselves, for hiding and shelter—and he split like a gambler fleeing a lost borrowed bet. Noon brought a hot sun. Joseph phoned Debbie, asked her for Louise's number, said he needed to have her to make his week's quota, lest he slip behind Don Juan. His words appalled him. They proved him tough—harder than Bull. But he would have cried if he could—confounded by the whirling pulls of fear and kindness, want of love, want of giving love. He could rest in Debbie's sure affection, thrive on her passion and anatomy. But his mother's object-lessons taught him: Trust will axe your dick, kill your power, feed you torment, cloak you with chagrin, gag you with your scorn. He would be greater than Don Juan. He was not his father. Debbie yielded the number, cut the connection, wept, phoned Louise, warned her. When Joseph called, Louise invented commanding occupation. And so she did each later time. Sunken by defeat, he descended more, to inertia—until he saw Beth, in the lobby of an art-film theatre. She resembled Debbie. He lured her desire. "Please pardon me. I beg you." His voice softened, grew airy. "I am Joseph. And you have captured my eyes, the rhythm in my veins." He stared, blinkless, into her, and waited, not speaking, while his pulse counted moments of discerning he'd disarmed her instinct for flight. He judged that her bearing spelled bewilderment, and he plied her more, with mists of whispers. "I couldn't keep from you, for dread that if I didn't tell you, now, my enchantment—if, like broken soldiers, I'd march decorum's waste, its crust of denial—I'd never learn you, though you, alone, may be completion of my marrow. Instantly I saw you—surely as beasts foresee—I felt that you, too, sensed our draw to each other." His stare continued penetrating her. He perched two fingers on her cheek and brushed them to the edges of her lips. Their tips crossed her skin as if a slip of breeze rising, evening, from a flowered lake. She did not flinch, but sighed—mute. Through a span of breaths, he performed impelling silence. Then, in wizard's timing, he dealt the coup de grâce. "Think how many times our breeding veers us from passion's truth to sad, shy pretense of disinterest, when courage might deliver us to full life, transport us to joy. Obey your darkness, its flames. Do not resign chance to dominion." He knelt before her, his arms out wide. "Open—as I have risked, vulnerably. I must know you—and you, me. Do not relinquish us to fright." He spread his touch on her hip. "Take my rapture. Permit yours." He offered his reach to hers. "Feel my wanting you." Coming from nearly any other man to most young women, such pseudo-Shakespearian performance would beg loud disdain or the nervous ridicule of reflex propriety. But Joseph had a keen knack of delivering lines to fit the quarry, and with primordial sincerity—like an aikido master's foiling knife-attacks with tiny quarter-turns, forward gently into harm's way, as if paying credit, politely, en route to lunch. Beth was promised home. Still—eyes huge and simple, mouth quivering ajar, searching for a shape of smile—she agreed to dine with him next night. She did not notice the stares and sour comments and pointed fingers of the exiting crowd. "I've never met anyone like you. I ought to leave—running! But I can't. You stop my heart. Please don't hurt me. I lack your compass. You know I'm naïve." He waited at the restaurant. Dusk passed. Dark lumbered on. The restaurant near-emptied. Endlessly her phone was busy. His fancy surveyed a galloping horde of reasons—each he sabered with wit of discomfiture. Midnight, he left, hysterical, disheveled in disbelief. Morning, he phoned Beth again. Debbie answered. "I can't punish you well as you deserve, Joseph. But I can have the pleasure of giving you my sister's rejection." Even leopards lose prey. * * * Joseph's sister turned a long-division ace when Joseph dawned from seed and ovum. She progressed to occupy the mercy of confoundment past the rape and shame with which their father cored her reason. But she stood, in magic, the protectress of Joseph the infant and Joseph the child, despite her mind's gutting became mote, then site, before the blink of Joseph's conception. On the evening of his second birthday, Joseph sat beneath the kitchen table in his slum-abode in North Philly. Aunt Tillie talked, above, with his mother. He was playing with the modeling clay Tillie'd given him. He wasn't aware of his sister. But she was watching over him. The door nearly broke open, slammed against the party wall. His father entered with two women, one at each arm, all drunk. He grabbed Joseph's sister, shoved something at her hand. "Go out and get me beer—now, or I'll show you the real beating you never had." He stumbled to the table (Joseph gasping to quell his breath). Hell broke through earth, as if the building were volcanic. Screaming, so raged his language was inaudible, his father grabbed his mother's hair, threw her to the floor, and bludgeoned her, a hand's breadth from Joseph's quaking face. But she tore free and battered him back. The strange women staggered out, belly-laughing. Meek, and scales beyond fat, Aunt Tillie crawled to Joseph and hugged him, much from her own fear as for his safety. Sober, Joseph's father could open a horseshoe with his hands. Once, arm wrestling, he broke a man's wrist—snapped it, as if a chopstick. When he got drunk, he got stronger, because he felt little then, and cared less—though booze nurtured his fury. But Joseph's mother was a big-boned farm girl, one among her father's work-beasts. And she was flesh of the warring race of Magyars, the "Ogres" who slaughtered German hordes, ravaged Italy, scourged France, and pounded back the Turks. Winter had borne her pubescence, and when, next, that season returned, she crossed a continent and sea, alone, from Hungary to the Allegheny range. Alien to English, and treading the Depression, she resumed hard work, and never after wanted for it. From childhood to the vestibule of death, she drudged as her forebears sieged—with whole body, which she granted no pardon. She ravaged Joseph's father as he pummeled her. In brute strength he bettered her, four times over. But she was a Magyar warrior, fighting to the death, against whatever odds, everywhere against her father, whose cruelty taught her well to match a fist with tooth and claw, pay bruise with blood. Joseph's sister didn't return. She couldn't buy beer. She spent the night in the tenement's basement, huddled near a coal furnace, till the morning's school-bell. Joseph took courage from his sister—the night he spent in the woodshed, the weeks he spent on the street. He took courage also from the beat of Tillie's heart, and from the rhythm of his Magyar blood and the resounding vigor of the always-child of him. So, through all the horror of his parents' house and the orphanage and the foster parents' farm, Joseph could keep his eyes wide to the future. * * * Joseph swivelled on the diner stool, began to feel his pulse in his temples, asked for another coffee. The waitress said he ought to shed his hat and coat, to let more warmth in and make those covers have more meaning when he went back out. Tenderly, like Tillie, like sis, she reached across the counter and took his hat. He was cute, she admitted, even if he was crazy. He rubbed the last shock of light from his eyes, blinked them open, big as they could beneath his chill-stiff forehead, and examined the waitress—looked into her, through her uniform, the stolid of its white. She seemed warm and giving as his sister—much better built. He remembered the time he was walking down Walnut by the U of Penn nursing school. From the dim of an alcove, a student emerged, blooming under bleached cotton starched like her cap and trim as her gait. The sight (much her anatomy) halted him, breathless—paralyzed, save the blinks of his eyes. In the great west Square of Locust Street (the Rittenhouse), noon last Maundy Thursday (in the coming of the vernal sun), he stood as if a lighthouse—but suited like a dandy, with matching carnation and tie—when he saw, across the fountain pond, a Nordic goddess, strolling, lithe, ivory in silk, toward the Clairidge, where she lived. He felt ordained to snatch her notice—instantly—lest she dissolve to the devouring past of future. Her air and carriage told him she was old money and lived, a goddess, above it, and he spied an opening with that counsel. Cast of smooth, dark pebbles and cement, a squat balustrade demarked the rims of the central pavilion, where a statuary fountain sprayed into its concrete pool the same water always, eternally in wide parabolas that arched, that moment, his sight of the goddess. Beyond, against the southwest margin of a walk that angled out a straight broad path to black streets meeting squarely far below her rose brick penthouse, a maple stretched a web of limbs above the top-most plane of the balustrade, the southeast corner of its latitude. The goddess saw him splash through the pool, race to the maple, leap onto the summit of the balustrade, rebound to half and more his measure higher, grapple a branch, hoist his body skyward, whip both calves between his arms, hook his legs atop the bough, and dangle by the pits of his knees, head beneath toes, hands beneath crown, eyes close-neighboring the line the goddess’s destiny would trace descending granite steps into the green and arbor of the Square. The feat took all Joseph's courage, not for its threat of corporal harm, but because he lacked gymnastic skill to ply it with grace. She might think his awkward trick not alluring but inept. Though able to down booze legally just the few months since his last anniversary, already Joseph could touch the heel of Don Juan's attainment. But he lived under leaden doubt of his image. He worked each day to straighten his hair, make it drape his temple to the edge of his eye—as if Aryan, free, like Petey Simon's, or Bull's. But its waves stuck where wind thrust them. Even now, a winter's growth stayed wedded to his skull, though his trunk hinged earthward, his head upside down. His body swirled around the succulence of the limb, and came to rest, hanging. The sun raged through gaps among leaves and branches, a chiaroscuro forming on the pale of the goddess's skin, the ivory of her dress, a play of silhouettes (ragged webs, warping hands) scattering on her bright. Joseph recalled a childhood day he spent at Dr. Cohen's mansion, his mother a household servant there. He sat, crosslegged, by a pond of darks—blue and green. Sycamores hogged the bank, lavished in its soil. Their flesh composed itself of mottles—olive, ash, shiitake, lead—strewn upon an underlay of khaki, like segments of aborted pastiche. But the great branches—their masses' shapes, their reaching curves—appropriated Joseph's sense of his mother's limbs, their succulence enveloping. And as sun and arbor painted her dress and skin, the goddess stood a sycamore transmuted to a womanly nymph. Joseph's goddess laughed like an infant spring as she neared him—he still stationed like a bat, foul water dripping from his costume. Her vision fixed, helpless, on his spectacle. His pockets yielded coins to gravity, and silver plummeted and fluttered elliptics on the granite stair, bumbled off its ridges, rolled away in drunk meanders, vanished in the ivy spread beneath the tree. He lifted his hands into prayer tolled to her radiance. "Goddess! Extend me three dimes, to buy you coffee. Your beauty captures me—in this snare." She served him claret while he learned her flesh. The nursing student got into her car, started the engine. He had no time to think. He might never find her again. Her old Chevy looked escaped from a demolition derby. He threw his body on its hood, salvage from another wreck, and slapped his hands on the pitted windshield. His face nearly pressed against the glass. He mouthed an imprecation that she not depart because her beauty stole his soul in the first microscopic instant of his sight of her. She cut the engine. He went to her door. She opened her window. He offered worship of her eyes, her hair, her lips, her neck, her belly—their celebration with wine. She guzzled Beer. He took cognac. They drank each other's lust—till sleep. Now, in the diner, as he sipped caffeine and mapped the snowy bird attending him, his mind saw Saint Bernards that tote little brandy kegs to skiers downed on Alps. But he was in New Jersey, and this "nurse" was a nasal-slanging, gum-jawing, short-order hop, her plumage netted in a "do." * * * "Maybe he did, Leah. Maybe he sucked me in real bad. But maybe that was good. "The first time we fucked I was having my period. I'd had only one lover before, and that guy didn't know more than I, just stumbled through our few errant tries, and neither of us felt much—except gauche and nervously frenzied. "But I looked tough, always have—like a Milanese whore. And Joseph thought I knew what I was doing. So he didn't imagine I'd not have taken out my Tampax first. "He tried. His face contorted from puzzled to bewildered to embarrassed to pained....... He worried aloud that he was hurting me—told me I was strangely tight and dry, and something was rubbing him—rough, like thick wet canvas. "He hadn't ever fucked a girl wearing Tampax in. So he didn't know what to make of what he felt. He looked torturedly stupid-feeling when I told him I believed that that was what he expected me to do, specially since he hadn't asked me to take it out. "Then, a couple of weeks later, when I'd overdosed on sleeping pills and one of my asshole friends discovered me and took me to hospital, Joseph brought me fresh clothes and pet my head, dusk till morning—and hospitals always made him ill. He took me home and tended me, held me through the next night too, endured my mumblings and tears—and half the time with an erection, but not trying anything, 'cause he knew I was hurting too much. "Now that was something! "Joseph's always relished me. ........ Wait. ........ Here's his letter. See? 'Deft bones,' 'eyes full of darkness, of Gesualdo's music.' And my walk, and dressage, 'Patrician,' he calls them. And how I paint 'savage dreams,' 'delicious,' he says, like my "Ghinny food," like what Vince Speranza's mamma cooked, at Vince's, where Joseph stayed the time he left home. Did you know he left home at thirteen?" "Listen to her, Sorrel! Listen to her drool on herself. Do you hear that crap about her eyes and bones? Patrician? Shit! The queen has come—though she can't come—so she gets high telling herself how ravishing she is." "But Leah, Joseph does think Bonnie's that beautiful, and special. And she is. "And you're wrong about how I look. Guys just like my tits and ass, and the way I do their things. That's what Joseph liked about me. That's all I have. I look common. And I don't have brains." * * * Half hour down. Have to get gone. Have to make Elèna's by seven—or she might be at work, and her boss may get pissed if she stops just to give you the key. Besides, if you don't get on soon, you'll resign to the warmth, the way the dying yield to the cold. Dickinson said it: "first chill, then stupor, then the letting go." He put on his hat and jacket, stood, and opened the door to the storm. He wasn't surprised. The cold felt far worse now. He wasn't so stiff, though. Up, out the chest, chin into cold. Kick down your starter. Mount. Turn to the road. Wheel faster, 'cause you might not hold on long, and at any speed above 20 you're braving Antarctica. Road's not iced. Near empty. Cops won't be watching, not for bikers, in this blizzard. You'll make good time. But all's so dark and empty, ahead—through the white flakes and peppering of sleet. Could be the final moments of eternity. Like the final time you held Lesuchka, among the outside arches of that cloistered church on Locust Street, December, in rain. * * * Her bright hair, black, fell long beside her drawn face and over the frail bones of her shoulders. Her throat hummed that tune she'd always whistled through her teeth, the trumpet line of a Clark voluntary. (Sol......fa-mi-re-do. Do, re-mi-re-mi-fa..........) Her head tilted forward and her foot kicked backward shyly at the grass, her mouth emitting little muted grunts between the tune's periods. Then she turned fast toward him, said she was quitting school, going back to her mother, atop an Adirondack mountain. Straining to comprehend as not to weep, Joseph wondered: Was she pregnant? But she wouldn't say more. She put her arms around him one last time, then turned, and walked away, soon to be lost in torrent and shadow. * * * Lesuchka made substance in mystery. He knew, now, she'd traded on it, created it to fill a void. But what void? Bonnie was full. Too full—fire and sight pressing to emerge, too much promise. He was hers though fleeing her—in fleeing her. If he stayed put, anywhere, with anyone, gave in once, he'd die—as if he hadn't lived in the streets to get away from home and hadn't, barely a shaver, backed up strippers, club to club, up and down the East Coast, he guitarist of a house-rockin’ group slapped together by his gone friend Vince Speranza, Vince of little Italy, Vince of fourteen siblings and the big warm mamma and the good soft patriarch, the little man whose nerve made Joseph's father shit his pants when he came to grab Joseph. "Try! ...And I slice-ah you gut!" And Joseph's father lurched into a resignation like a penny falling down a well. Joseph remembered the year before his father would have put him through Bar Mitzvah, despite his father wasn’t a Jew. He revisited the morning he righted his body on the sidewalk at Broad and Market where his father beat him bloody for earning a fine for truancy. Truancy? His belaying himself in bed, past many noons, a boy seized by terror of what his flesh had learned and might yet know. That morning, he yielded neither sound nor tear against the poundings of feet and fists and strap against his face, belly, ass, and back, even against the stranglings. As he would learn to answer cold with stalwartness, he endured the brutality as if a non-event, as if impotence. Each occasion of assault, he waited his father's tiring out. Then, eyes wide, still silent, he walked off, buoyant, like a sloop cutting into wind—for a week, a month, a month again, years, till that final time, when, visiting his mother a Thanksgiving afternoon, he kicked his father down the stairs his father (drunk, slavering, strap in hand) had chased him up. * * * Nape hit. Body flipped again. Knee collided. Neck snapped back; then arced hard forward. Forehead slammed a wooden tread, and torso pulled skull downward, sliding, bouncing, downward, bouncing down the ridges of the steps—the body parts so many basketballs heard dribbled in warm-up just before a game. Why didn't Joseph like that game? His height—just five feet nine? No. Speed. Oh, Joseph was swift, agile—and lionhearted. (He learned to dodge his mother's knife. He'd scampered to the top of the stairs in time to spin around precisely when his father's head would be a drop-kick dream that hovered to be slugged for a field goal.) But basketball behaved too quickly, in too many spurts, with too many scores, and it depended on animal prowess. It resisted complex strategies and tactics, exquisite ironies, like the gridiron's—Tom Landry's—its balletic living chess that humbles brute force, that stymies the solo trick and reflex roundball requires. Light intensified, as through a storm or when the reel stops at a movie. And Joseph descended to his father, still, prostrate, drooling. And Joseph proclaimed: "If you ever threaten me again, I'll rip your gargoyle head from your throat." His mother saw and heard. She said nothing, did nothing. * * * There, across the median, an accident. A man stood staring, scratching his head. A girl lay in the road. A cop put his coat on her face. Joseph wondered: Would he ever see his parents' home again? Would they be dead? Would that they be dead! * * * "Why did you slap Bull, Laura? Damn. Even threw booze in his face. I thought you're cooler than that." "That bastard said he won me from Joseph, won me, in an 8-ball game. Sorrel, he's lucky I didn't make his groin-equipment fit his emotional development—forever." "But if you knew about the bet, why'd you sleep with Joseph?" "Because he really wanted me, and so he had me won that first moment, when he entered my eyes and made me his hunger. And I knew Bull muscled him to bet. And Joseph knew I knew and would reject Bull, his whole kind. And when I went to Joseph's bed, he told me he lay there waiting for me, and knew I'd come. "That's all. Except....... The thing about Joseph...he truly loves women, loves making love to women, not just pumping and coming, like jacking off with cunts, or getting cheap kinks that give no more than hard drugs do. He wants to share lust, whole lust, even if not real love. "I know his game, or what he wants us to think it is. But when he's with me, he's really with me, and I own him. "But I cannot understand one thing: He actually loves Bonnie—so much he has to run from her. Why?" * * * Joseph reached the stretch of scrub flats just before the ground turns marsh with saltwater. Nothing around, no lights, even on the road, except his CZ's single eye. The dark was Bonnie embracing him. Her violence, her depression, the black light wakings from drunks to riveting visions, ruthless love. Like night, she had the power and grace of Arabian mares. Her sickness drove her boundless. She could do anything, everything, except relieve her desire to die. What was the source of Bonnie's ill? Her life without had been pure. Her parents weren't violent or cruel. They let her do as she wished. She had old wealth, even title—a Baroness of Denmark. Her ancient forebear, Thor, was a mercenary knight. People called him "hammer." In a battle with Poles, he saved the Danish king, but lost his arms in the act. The Queen made him baron, said he was gold, dubbed him Gylden-Thor. The family escutcheon shows a steel-clad warrior, armless, straddling a lion, a crown hovering before. Her mother was fine Italian stock, sophisticated as the Medici, but without their care for poisons. Her mother's line gave Bonnie color, frame, and style, her father her dark inside, despite his fair Nordic colors. He—her father—invented things, mechanical things, useful things that won patents. But he had a Dane's abhorrence of yielding open warmth—abhorrence like armor fixed around his life-or-death desire for his wife, Bonnie's mother, whom he couldn't, in any outward gesture, admit he loved. So he drank as he invented, day and night, in the tomb-like basement of their Connecticut home. Bonnie rebuilt old cars, designed and fabricated haute couture, built furniture. Her serious prints and paintings sold for thousands. She marketed her own commercial art. Throughout, she patronized rare scotch, invented a nouveaux gallows humor. Joseph couldn't hold coffee nearly well as booze—even Georgia Moon. And after a second cup, his gut was percolating acid. His mouth's innards were bitter wool. He tried to rid the taste, as he'd worked to lose his mother's diction and his father's usages. He tried to spit it out, to substitute some sleet and snow, as he'd tried since puberty to moult his parents' vulgar, wrecked society, to don the affects of the highborn and private-schooled, the airs of three piece suits and Harvard voices. Always Joseph wished his name were "Reginald Carr," not József (his real first name) Nyushuvinsky. And he would starve rather than renounce his vintage port or cognac accompaniment of books. Yet, he envied Bull—Mick peasant, hustler, pugilist, hod-bearer. Admired him more than Rob Goulèt, the Exeter grad who cultivated Joseph back in music college, the boy who mirrors Prince Charles, and languors in a mock chateau on vast "estate" replete with paddock, butler, chamber servants, prize stock, tenant farmers, lush of a mother, father made of absent sand. Bull had abandon, spirit, flare. But Goulèt had class! Was it irony? Or bestial instinct? Joseph's mother, turning 50, spoke a broken English thicketed with Magyar—spiced, purled inflections—wild, primal, like the churnings of his CZ's savage torque. Yet, for all the Magyar markings of her cadence and diction, she'd forgotten how to talk, even read, her native tongue. But Joseph's CZ didn't contemplate the source of its ferocity—sublime, rude elegance, terse, limber frame, spare two-stroke heart. You kicked it into life, and it became the passion of a cheetah, the wolfhound's valour, the mettle of a war horse, the pluck of a goat. Joseph adored his bike, as if his lover. But he never fucked a woman like his mother, though he sometimes had affecting visions of her mountain hips, primeval thighs, inviting belly, great round breasts that fed his infant self, and stark, peasant face, lips rose without rouge, eyes that blazed without mascara, cheeks, tender on their mongol-like bones, pink without false color. She was the avatar of warrior maids who crave bold men to mount their loins and sire their wild breed, to make and be the children of rapture. But how his father? * * * "Yeah, Laura, and he cooks you exotic delights that look like painted bas reliefs. He teaches you the secret truths of high musics, like Josquin's and Bach's. You see sounds breathe as moving shapes and colors, as the math of passion. "Once he took me deep inside an organ he was fixing and tuning, showed me the magics of its voices. We did a pas-de-deux among the pipes and bellows. We were caught in the reverberations of its bones. And we fucked to their curves and rhythms. "His whole body stroked me, smoothly, roundly, till my lust made his sing. It was a slow, religious dance, but ravenous, like the kind in Bali. I ascended to an ether where devils have the wings, where the Whore of Babylon is Mother Mary. "I knew it couldn't last. He might be in another bitch's bed the next day, or even after supper. But while it happened....... Beats pissing life away with Mister Fine Upstanding Jerkoff, a closet mama's-boy who never had the feel of sex and loses all sight of yours three weeks after you marry him, the first week Father, the second Son, the third Holy Ghost, and then oblivion—girlie magazines, trading lies with other larding pigs, beer to wash-down basketball on television..." "I dunno, Bonnie. You may be the only one who can keep him." "Your talking crap, Leah. Besides—he might go flat as last night's half-drunk brew if he stays with any bitch too long. And why don't you see him anymore, Laura?" "Well... It happened after he jilted Anna. Know her? Thick, blue-onyx hair, past her knees, huge, black eyes and Renoir body, ballet walk, and cardboard brain. Liked it only doggy style, he said. The neighborhood gave 'em a pre-wedding bash. A Saturday evening. She wore tight white, a jersey dress, like a second skin, nothing under. An angel trollop. All the hotdogs there were drooling. Their eyes were feeling her up—her bulbous curves." (Anna's body was a complex system of luscious globes—tender, firm, sumptuously drawing toward the hot, soft crotches of their deep intersections.) "I envied her her breasts. They were......commanding, like her heart-shaped ass that stuck out back...like a Hottentot's, but wider...and much rounder." (After he got his doctorate, Joseph drove the northern California coast down state route 1. He thought of Anna's body as the smooth, grass hills that slip bare into the sea. He saw a Minoan fertility idol. Was it Gaia, or the Lady of the Snakes? It was distilled femininity, the primitive essence of fecund earth. And he lifted one hand from the wheel and made it search the figure's surfaces, as if God praising the soil for its bounty, as if a Magi admiring Mary as she nursed her infant son.) "But I danced a John Lee Hooker blues with him. Got him liquid, steaming. 'How ya gonna give it up, Joseph? How ya gonna stand it—stuck to just one cunt? ‛Don't ya wanna fuck me, fuck me now, plunge in my slime, wallow in my flesh, feel your naked gut against my bare pink belly, feel it winding, gyring, grinding...?' "I kept rubbing on him, grabbing his ass—my thigh in his crotch, his thigh in mine, our bodies meandering delirious on each other. When the music stopped, he staggered to her, to Anna, and called it off, right there, in the middle of the party. "We went to his bed. It would have been their bed." In his forest green boudoir, black curtains opened to darkness, and, resounding in sly currents, like frenzied holy rollers, candle lights and shadows rendered crazed polyphonies that lashed out chaos against the throbbing lines of Tomas Luis de Victoria: O.......mag-num...mys-ter-i-um...et ad-mir-a-bi-le........ Unmolested by the brief, weeping pleas Anna whimpered from the arid red hall that leads to the violet parlor where Laura neutered Bull, Joseph and Laura shared lusts—and wines and chocolates marked for Anna's taste—from dark beyond dawn. "When he conked out, the sun was piercing—shrill. Anna was slumped beside the fridge. She lay silent, strewn like debris, her face a dead electric sensor fixed at the bedroom wall, her eyes red but void. I slipped past her, out the parlor door. As I got to the street, the midday siren blared. I bet it didn't wake them. "That was the last Joseph saw me. I hung up every time he called. It felt like beheading an infant over and over—eventually boring. "Oh, I admit I might've hooked up with him—for a while. But my boss's High Episcopalian cock was hangin' on my line, and his money was good, and he wouldn't truck my sleeping with Joseph, a little mongrel half his age and from a working-stiff suburbia. "It was like just after the Second World War. My father had died when MacArthur kept his promise to return to the Philippines. Mother got hot about our bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima. She raged into protests against atomic weapons, back in the late forties, way before we knew the full effects of radiation or the atrocities of our government's tests. She determined to make the issue fashionable. When she got rabid, I left home. "Then I made a personal statement of reconciliation with the beaten Nippon Empire. I married a Jap psychiatrist who set me up an overflowing bank account and wanted to give me a kid. I was fresh into college. He knocked me up. And when the brat was born, Jap as she could be, he took her, split, divorced me on the ground I was a slut—and he moved to the Apple. But he left me with the bank account, and even paid me extra to forget. "Last month, he sent me a letter and a picture of the kid. She looks his sister. He put her in a private high school in the Village, somewhere west of Sixth Avenue, down below the Dago part, past the tourists, where it's rich. In the picture, she wore the school uniform—Catholic. "But she ain't no nun. I can tell just seeing her, the way she stands, the look on her face. She's Joseph's type—the kind he'd whine after, like a new little terrier. I mean she seems porcelain, translucent, pure, too breakable, but she's really enameled steel and ocher clay—dangerous, from the oven." * * * Once, just a boy, Joseph put his mother's girdle on. He thought he'd feel what he'd feel pressed tight against her, in groin-to-groin embrace. The conception was ill, the idea foreboding. Her breasts were pink-white perfect rounds that no one hand could hold. She'd fed him their milk everywhere—on trolleys and buses, at dinner, on the stone front stoop of the slum dive he was born in, even while she waited to serve at work.... And some moments of his race to Manhattan, he tried to remember that feeling—hoped it would help him through the cold. But once he heard his mother screaming at his father: "Get off my tits you filthy pork. What do think I am, a sow?" Joseph's father, Vendl, was, some ways, a pig—not really like that fine animal, but like the vile thought people want to evoke with its name, or what they do to the creature, and what they force it to eat. If Joseph's mother was a CZ, his father was a "hog"—an old Harley Davidson: engine a too-big cast-iron side-valve, skeleton a thick, hard, undersprung frame. Vendl claimed the station of the firstborn of an Estonian pseudo-Jewish butcher/junkman and a corpulent, wart-faced cast-off of the Ukraine. The two played virtuosos of embarrassment, cruelty, failure, and dross. Vendl stood a minor hulk that housed a once-exquisite brain slightly demented by old, piled angers, frustrations, disillusionments, paranoia, and booze....... For Joseph's mother—Nän—work, hard work, pure work, gave joy, her being. Vendl worked hard too, but for his ego, which, early, resolved into a swooning complex of heavy refuse that kept on generating—as methane does in garbage dumps—without a good why. Garbage dumps. Sanitary land fills. Soon these names would foul the salt-marsh meadows passing fast around him, obliterate their vital source. But now, for speeding moments of a time suspended free, the CZ's rigor, its logic, spent itself in form still spared corruption, form oblivious to pathologic shrill, like toxic stench, or Vendl. Here the sea's eggs still could incubate—here, the staple of myriad birds and furry beasts, here, the essence of replenishment, of earth. But Joseph's birth predestined him to farther worlds, virulent plains, where rude life's elements could barely hold him whole. * * * "I wanted that part of him. But I couldn't compete with Laura or Bonnie. I had the same trouble you had, Sorrel, only different in degree. I liked to taste some moments others find evil. But only few, and just moments. I have to live in sun. You, Sorrel, are sun! And don't let anybody tell you the sun's a man. Joseph would've gone dead blind if he'd stayed around you. But Bonnie......." "No, you're wrong, Leah—just like you're wrong about Joseph. Bonnie's good—just in pain, that's all. And what they say about Joseph and Elèna? That's not true. Elèna's letting Joseph stay with her at her expense. She convinced him the Village is where he belongs. And Hugo..." "Yeah, sure, Sorrel. And you didn't pay Joseph in booze and board so he'd hang around and fuck you, right? And how did he get his stake to get to the Apple?" "But Elèna loves Hugo, and she and Joseph are just good friends now." * * * Coming nearer, the distance held the lights of big small towns of North Jersey, and the oil refineries, and the sounds of boats in the many rivers and inlets and bays that drew so many waves of immigrants and their industries and hopes. Close beyond was New York, where his mother landed from the desolation of her youth, where she began her stour through a nation's depression. Nearest was Manhattan, where Joseph would immigrate and find his higher fortune, if not his heart's peace. * * * "And let Bonnie be, Leah! She couldn't help......." "Well think about this, Bonnie! While you're here moonin' over Joseph and your irresistible self, he's freezing his balls off racing to New York, racing away from used-up you, chafing to beat Don Juan in the big time, the Apple. My only solace is he's gonna stay with Elèna. What a platonic pair! How pathetic." "Let her be, Leah! She's crying. She's got it tough enough without......" "Oh, sweet Bonnie. Remember, Bonnie? Remember how he wanted Elèna, wanted to steal her from Hugo Gargantua, even from Bull, craved to get between those long, slim legs, in that honey-flower twat, smother himself in her melons? He risked getting kicked to shit for her. He got her, alright. Got twisted in her web." "You're mixing metaphors, Leah." "Peut-être, O grande Bonnie, reine de la poésie. But she wouldn't let Joseph fuck her, except Thursday nights, before dawn, and he followed her everywhere, the way my Bassethound follows me, or anyone who feeds it, and she called him her 'Pan of the night'—fake poet that she was. And Joseph was dying half a year when she locked him out of her cunt and slithered back to Hugo, through Bull. And Joseph still helped her move her stuff to Hugo's place..." "Damn it, Leah! Stop..." "Now Bonnie. Now your Joseph's gonna stay with her and Hugo and listen to him fuck her. And she's gonna mother Joseph, as if he were her bad infant boy and Hugo were his father—when Joseph's not off trying to find replacements for you and her, or just racking up more score. What a circus! What a freak show!" * * * About 15 minutes from the first small city, and the sleet began to melt to light rain. Joseph heard an owl. And he thought: "The owl proves night hollow. Her bellows auger screams of prey, through dream of night into day......." The rhythm danced a gnarled minuet decaying to necrotic falters. Its beat deposed the corpses' drum song he invented just before he stopped at the diner. The rain warmed and diminished. The marsh grass became the beard of a hobo. The hobo mumbled stories of the little birds and furry creatures hiding in the reeds, life nonexistent to the civilized Man who, soon, would commit the meadow to his mechanized Satans, supplant its biology with steel and Portland cement, the way tourists turned the awesome solemnity of Mont-Saint-Michel into a refuse heap of rip-off restaurants and inns and gaudy shops that sell Kewpie dolls and ill-bred souvenirs of somewhere other, or nowhere. The whole terrain transmuted to a furry creature, a mammoth awaiting extinction. Joseph reveled in dreams of ancient times, of Van Eyke and North Sea wetlands that spoke old Flemish, of troubadours and the tidal plains of Languedoc and Roussillon, of Josquin Desprez and summer warming the Papal palace of Avignon, arid like the time when Joseph lodged a night at Elèna's parents' house. Elèna's father worked a freighter heading toward Marseille, her mother at the Jersey shore. Elèna's brother, Alejandro, joined them at dinner. Elèna fondled Alejandro often, deftly, as with the love she'd stroked on Joseph's baby goat, spoke to Alejandro in Gallego, softly at his ear. Often Alejandro snugged his head onto Elèna's shoulder, at her neck, or fit his cheek to hers or to the cleavage of her breasts—his eyes closed. Alejandro brooded much, even then, beyond all Elèna's gentle efforts. He was much Joseph's image—small, slight, inexplicably alluring—but lacked the implacable energy that ushered Joseph through a life of light, even in his awful darkness. Now Joseph could chart the forces of Elèna's mother, the colors of her father's absences, the grids of Elèna's self-consignment to the hulks. Joseph aligned Alejandro in the pity Joseph had reserved his sister, Magdalènya. Alejandro, too, was a poem doomed, another brown bird God would kill before it could die. But Joseph envied Alejandro Elèna's Gallego and French and her breast, her lips at his ear. Horses—pale horses, baby horses, frightened horses—they love soft French whispered in their ears. Joseph knew—as mothers know their sucklings' sleeps and hungers. Once Joseph worked on a Valley Forge farm. The owner raised jumpers. He gave Joseph the care and training of a grandson of Man-O-War, a huge, delicate, chestnut two-year-old, whose silkblack mane and tail lavished his body, the way lace stockings vent a grown woman's succulence, or an elegant whore’s. His eyes resembled Joseph's—dark, and shy as strong, full of unknowables and bright unknowns. Joseph believed in slow, tender training, the learning-from-love he never had but knew right. He made his bed in the colt's stall, put the colt to sleep with French whispers, hugs about the throat, pets about the temple and jaw. Once, just once, Joseph's mother stroked him through an infant's fever, and the memory guided Joseph's hand. Patiently, Joseph earned the stallion's trust, then his love. He'd do anything for Joseph, and Joseph for him. Joseph named him Jonah. Always spoke French to him. The training glided well, each step learned perfectly. Then time came for Jonah to jump. Joseph dressed Jonah in hackamore and weighted cinch. Sometimes he lay across Jonah's back, at right angles to his spine. Sometimes he added training saddle, but never harness and bit, which Joseph abhorred as torture. For a while, when Joseph led Jonah round the training ring, he jumped the same hurdles Jonah jumped— so Jonah would feel they were friends playing together. Soon, though, the jumps got too tall, and Joseph had to go under. Joseph apologized in French. Jonah understood, jumped ever higher. But the owner wasn't pleased. "It's too slow," he graveled that day he came into the ring and started whipping Jonah at the ankles. "That's how you get the job done! ....... What? You fool! It doesn't hurt, just scares 'em into action." Joseph grabbed the whip, lashed it at the owner's ankles. "What? Hurt? It doesn't. You told me." Knowing the end, Joseph rendered just four strokes, dropped the whip, gestured good-bye to Jonah, and left the farm, his job, his pay. That was the only time he ever hitchhiked. And he thought: "I am not an exit." Still black, and yet the rain's few last specks grew invisible against the splashes of street lights and window lamps splattering the maze of small cities just ahead. The night was warming, perhaps from the rising spread of industrial combustions and pungent airs. At least he wouldn't go through Secaucus, where the atmosphere could be a decaying corpse for the stench of it. Even here, though, oil refineries and chemical plants made him long for old perfumes he loved, the mushroom-luring scent of horse manure and hay, the nose of winter leaves burning at edges of virgin meadows. Bonnie's childhood home had such smells. So did Bonnie, despite her painful sophistication. Remembering, he felt more alone than in the woodshed, or the orphanage, or in his parents' dwellings. Though the air was warming, he felt more chilled than before he stopped at the diner. Was Bonnie his home? Could he believe he could have a home? * * * No use to hold your breath! Doesn't matter whether he can hear you. He's bound to come. At least the waiting's over. * * * "Bet you can't. Dare yuh. Double dare yuh!" Could he resist? Withhold? The creek was high, the falls seemed Niagara. Johnny Scannepicchio hadn't joined in the dare, but, stiff, shaking, whispered not to go. Summer passed thrice since Stevey Tagge's father called Joseph "sheeny mocky" and "dirty kike" and Stevey slammed a skate into the back of Joseph's head and Joseph pounded him unconscious. All Joseph's friends, all Christians, had grown. Joseph stayed little, still a pseudo-Jew, still a bungler when his father was around. But he'd out-jumped everyone in class, some older kids, too. Flat, polished rocks lined the edge, straight across, except two breaks, big enough to make you leap. The morning had burst with rain, and the rush was fast and slick. But Joseph couldn't let them see him tremble. He had new sneaks. His parents didn't buy him shoes often, and his toes were misshapen. He'd begged his father for these. So he took them off, tied their laces together, hung them around his neck. The first three steps went easily, then a gap. Bend knees, steady, right-foot lead....... Now, jump! Okay! Two more easy ones. Here's the test. Bend knees, steady....... Oh, God! You didn't tie them tight enough! Grab! Oh, God. One's gone. Grab! Grab the other! No! You're falling! God! Grab that rock! Get down! Hold anything—everything you can! * * * "Joseph!" [He called him Joseph then.] "Joseph!" [Joseph lay in bed, as he did every morning, unable to get up, pretending he could hide, waiting for another of the inevitable.] "What's this, Joseph? One sneak, hidden in the basement! Where's the other? Don't lie to me, you ungrateful brat! I work hard for my money!" Down fell the sneaker. Down went Joseph's underpants. Off the bed with Joseph, grabbing hold of anything, anything he could. Off came the strap. Hard onto Joseph—hard on his butt, across his thighs, against his back...and hard all over, and over, and over, and over, again, and again....... "I'll teach you to waste my money. I'll teach you to disobey me. I'll teach you to do things right......." Where was mother? Mother! Oh God, your sister's screaming! Where was God? * * * Finally! Manhattan! Just a few blocks. Sixth and Houston. Look for the Italian restaurant, bottom of an old yellow high-rise. There! Joseph pulled to the curb, stopped, shut down, tried to drop his arms and relax. How had Elèna been this past year, here with Hugo? She'd thought they'd get married. Got a straight job. First time in her life. Not much time to dance. Okay, can you stand up now? Ought to be easier than at the diner. All you gotta do is walk across the sidewalk. ........ No! Take the bike over. Lock it. Mount the curb. Cross the sidewalk, to the wall. Now six flights up and sleep. Tomorrow you'll scout the Village, take the territory. The Love Samurai! Master of the sword of passion! Still, that night he couldn't sleep—thinking about Bonnie. He'd been her knight. She had been his home! Joseph fought himself most before sleep, and in his dreams, and in the first minutes of awakenings. Getting up always was hellish as the thought of sleep at night. But if he could just drag himself from bed, into a new theatre of war, into the Village....... That night was the worst—like what everybody says about the moment before you die, how your life will flash before your eyes, except it became a surrealist horror movie, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. All those women and adolescent girls, each lost as he, each needing home. All those ineffable pulls and propulsions—torn guts, tears dried up before they could form. Each leaving—worse, each withholding—manifested, each a new monster in a sleepless dream. Oh, some had done the same to him. But he couldn't see beyond the huge wake of his own bitter licenses, searing disregards, none he could repair. He'd have allowed himself guilt, but his parents would wish that. After Vietnam reunited, Dr. M. would help Joseph free himself from his rage seething toward his parents, the rabid anger that strangled his life. Screaming beyond decibels, pounding the therapy bed harder than he'd bludgeoned Tagge's body, Joseph would kill his parents many times. Then he would sense his way through the question of forgiveness. In muscle and bone, he would suffer recognition that his parents had been crushed by the same hard heel they put him under. They, too, were only acting out the ravages of their childhoods. So he would forgive the beaten children in them. But he'd have to find his freedom despite he could never forget what destruction they had done the child deep in him, their long demolition of such measureless expanses of his could-have-been. Now, this first Manhattan night, he felt just sadness, a violet sorrow more punishing than all the stuns of all the fists and brutal words and cold abandonments — both theirs and his. He called it remorse. If he could not forgive, how could they? If they could not atone, how could he? What was the way? * * * "First snow, clouds fallen, scattered, sown, deep dream blooming: August hears the loon. Yes! That's it! .......Oh, I didn't hear you come in, Elèna." "Been in the Village again, Joseph?" "I was struck numb. She was porcelain—but walked as if an antelope immune. Japanese, she was, Elèna. And young, so young, but noble—noble as an April breeze that bows green rice. She's what I need. But I'm afraid to near her, as I'd frighten to touch iced violets, or early frost." "Aw, Joseph! Want a beer?" I'll carry one white rose. Wait at the corner where I saw her. Same time, tomorrow. (She was going home from school, I'm sure. She wore a Sacred Heart uniform. And the Academy was letting out.) I'll stand still. Look obliquely. When she arrives, next to me, I'll turn, slowly as in tai chi, present the white rose, wrapped in my haiku, tell her how she makes my pulse quake, invite her to tea, tilt as I extend my meek hand. ...No! She's my Zen. I'll learn her first in my deep awareness, study her, months, from afar. I'll sense her as a Zen archer, sitting, within, makes then polishes bow and arrow over and over, till, eyes shuttered, blindfold, he looses shaft to mark. When my soul can't bear more—then, just then, I'll offer rose, and poem.......and.......saké! * * * "In the Village again? Watching that Jap girl, Joseph?" "Don't mock, Elèna. You'll see. Tomorrow. I'll ask, and she'll come." God, will I faint? Go dumb? Stumble? Drop the rose? Wreck the poem? Will the light turn green? Will she've seen me watching? Take fright? Scream? ...Here she is. Light's red. She's stopped. Now! Turn! "Sweet lady, don't be afraid. This is your rose. I've waited for you. You're my Zen. Here—a haiku. First snow, clouds fallen..." Her mouth writhed, exploded: "Fuck-off, muhv-fuckh!" Her fist clubbed his hand. The rose careened to the gutter, and a wind-swirl fixed it to a clump of debris collected at the sewer near the take-out pizza joint across the street. The paper followed, carrying the haiku with it, toward the rose, among the wet, crumpled bags, and broken glass, and beer cans, smoke butts, bottle caps, sludge... * * * Slowly, the sun rode down across the Hudson past the saltmarsh plain below the Palisades, and Joseph stopped comparing that sidewalk with the one in Philly where his father beat him for truancy. In the sky, the dark was blank. The light had changed—red to green—how many times until the dank of cold reached beneath his sweating skin. He noticed the neon "PIZZA" sign blinking in the runt window of the dive across the street. A middle-aged, blond, Eastern European woman pressed her face a wren's length from his, and her lipstick-scarlet mouth inquired: "Are you okay? Can I help?" He shook his head, as a dog will when it gets its inner ears cleaned. He deduced he couldn't answer "yes" or "no," so he mumbled: "I'm okay. Thanks anyway." The bright red lips smiled briefly, till the mouth said: "Have a good evening, then." And the blue-eyed, big-boned, angled face and thick blond hair turned jaggedly away—as in a tango. And the woman's body glided resolutely toward the blinking "PIZZA" sign across the black-top, past the sewer and drifts of smoke butts, bottle caps, torn and crumpled paper, beer cans, broken glass...and one, white rose. Tonight, Joseph thought, the sanitation men would come, and at their vanguard, intrepid as a Sherman tank, a yellow juggernaut of water sprays and giant whirling brushes. And for some hours, under lamppost lights, the tar would take on clarity. The woman's figure blurred. Fog appeared, in wisps, above, beneath a thorough cloud-umbrella. Dismay turned Joseph to the sound his feet created on the gravel path at the church where Lesuchka departed him, to the waves of heat rising from the asphalt of the road where he fled his parents house forever, to the hollow wet of the cold dirt floor of the woodshed where he hid from the farmer at the foster home. In the air, Joseph's fingers reconsidered Earth. They discovered tiny worms and furry mosses. Clouds broke. The heavens rained harder than when Joseph came to the Village, harder than God's heart. And Joseph's inner sense resolved into the frost glazing the grass that feathered the ring where Joseph gestured adieu to Jonah, the innocent grandson of Man-O-War. And like the crack of a whip, meaning reached Joseph's apprehension: "I am not an exit." Months later, when a shrouded sun touched its zenith above the Village, Joseph sold his CZ. He had a shot of Georgia Moon before he rode the Pennsy Railroad down the snowy eastern seaboard. At Philly's northern edge, among the darkly lit and wildly furnished rooms above a simple, quiet Irish bar, among contorting sycamores and struggling shops that lined a trolley-tracked and cobbled street, for a time, and then again, in random seasons, Bonnie was his home.