Landscape With Traveler Read online

  And this isn’t just idle conjecture, either. I’ve tried it and it works. Tried it not in the way of testing out a theory, but because it once was forced on me. That was with Ilya in Greece (a three-volume novel in itself!). But when I realized that it was a one-sided affair I thought about it for a couple of nights in a very concentrated way (I couldn’t think about anything else!) and rather than become bitter and vindictive and bitchy as I might have done, I decided (really consciously decided) to love him just the same for as long as I did love him. (Though a question arose as to whether “love” was love, but anyhow . . .)

  That went on for a couple of years and got calmer and calmer and actually almost more and more beautiful, and that one experience—the blossoming (and going to seed, I suppose) of a lot of experiences in the then past—turned out to have taught me one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned.

  Anyway, this friend of mine took it up and apparently has been thinking a great deal about it. He has his doubts, but I have now passed the point of merely believing it. I know it, and it’s part of me.

  I’ve been accused so often and by so many different people of being a bad influence that it scares me. We can know, it seems to me, almost anything except how we affect other people. No, that’s not true. We can know nothing. It seems to us that we know certain things, but only because they are so unimportant to us that we never think about them enough to realize that we don’t know them. But important things, like what people think about us, are frustratingly inscrutable. We can learn what are called “facts”—we cannot learn what we want to know.

  In my own way, I’m very stubborn, which I can see in my way of dealing (in my own mind) with the world at large. I have decided how I like it and live in it as though it were that way.

  3

  Paradoxes

  Spring

  Up

  on

  All

  Sides

  Paradoxes spring up on all sides, it seems. It becomes both easier and more difficult to write, though the focus becomes finer as I go deeper into things that I am not used to talking about and so don’t know how. For Jim, my response to his friendship, there is of course a lot more to be said. It will take me the rest of my life to say it.

  If just one little thing had been different I’d probably never have known Jim. I wouldn’t have known the difference, naturally. One could go mad thinking of the friends, the perfect lover still unmet because on a certain evening in 1953 one decided to turn down Fifth Avenue instead of going on to Seventh as originally intended. And I do believe the old adage about suffering being good for the soul—if, as it should, it produces understanding, which it has in his case even though it often does not. I’m sure he knows that—but who could blame him if he’d have preferred somewhat less understanding! The trick is to understand how much everybody suffers—to understand it and keep from going mad, that is. At the same time I’m saying all this I am blissfully aware it’s all so much meaningless chatter. Saved again!

  4

  When

  I

  Was

  a

  Child

  When I was a child, six or seven years old, I used to sleep on a daybed, as they used to call them, in the dining room of my Grandmother Morgan’s house, where my parents and I lived during the Depression. My parents’ room was off the dining room, and I had to go through it to get to the bathroom. Early one (probably Saturday) morning I finally gave it up and got out of my cozy bed, my mind full of goofy, gleeful little child thoughts and decisions about what to do with the wonderful day that lay ahead—a whole eternity it seemed—and went absently into my parents’ room to go and pee. They were awake, my father leaning against his pillows, smoking a cigarette, so I delayed my peeing and went to kiss them.

  My father smiled and said, “Who do you love the most, Francis, your mother or me?” Both of them smiled, waiting for my answer. Tears came to my eyes and I mumbled something about “I don’t know,” and he pulled me over and hugged me and said it didn’t matter and that I should love my mother the best. I knew he was ashamed of his question and understood that he was just as confused by it as I was, so in my own little pitiful way tried to put him at ease and went on into the bathroom finally to pee and get on with my day, which was ruined now anyway.

  That was my first remembered emotional confusion, and however innocently my parents had inflicted it, my trust of them was changed forever, as was my whole personality, I guess, because I became less open, more guarded in general. And I learned, as we all must, how to answer such questions.

  I don’t reproach my father for it, and know these things happen, but I wonder even now how I’d have turned out without that question. Still it was a satori of sorts, and without realizing it at the time, I saw a great deal of what there is to see about people. For a long time now, years and years, I seem to have felt that silence is the only way to keep from hurting people. I guess catatonia was only a step away.

  5

  My

  Earliest

  Memories

  I was born in Baton Rouge in 1930. My earliest memories are from about 1933 or ’34, a mixture of how good it felt to lie in bed on damp, cold Louisiana winter mornings, fighting for every second before I had to get up for breakfast (and, three years later, school) in the old-fashioned kitchen with the refrigerator with the big round motor on top, the rain outside making inside seem so safe and cozy, or in summers scraping up ice chips from the floor of the ice wagon (pulled by a gray and white horse, who was always pissing, so that eating ice and smelling horse piss are still mixed up with one another), playing “Doctor” with the little girl next door in my grandfather’s stringbean patch or under the house, where we had a whole city marked out for our little toy cars and airplanes with Log Cabin Syrup cans for houses.

  Actually, most of my childhood memories are sensual, like the warm bed and eating the ice, or overtly sexual, such as the Doctor game at three. And then, at about four or five, my hero of the moment, a big kid of about thirteen or so named Douglas who lived across the street, accepted my attentions on the condition that I would let him put “it” in my mouth. I was quite happy to do this, but it led to a lifetime of puzzlement because he had a foreskin and I did not, and therefore found that added luxury most fascinating indeed, sometimes to Doug’s irritation, as he was not interested in anything but coming (which he’d thoughtfully explained to me before we began—“Don’t worry, it’s not piss, and you can swallow it.”) and my skinning his cock back and forth to the verge of self-hypnosis wasn’t getting us anywhere to his way of thinking. Why had mine been cut off? (Doug explained circumcision to me.) I remembered my father’s question. Now this.

  6

  I

  Can

  Remember

  an

  Old

  Ford

  Coupe

  I can remember, also at about age three or four, an old Ford coupe my father had, one of those very tall, squarish things, in which I’d go happily for Sunday drives with my parents and an elderly Boston terrier named Bob, who was always farting and filling the little car with evil smells and great merriment.

  But when my father would go around a corner too fast—about twenty-five miles per hour—the car would turn over and we’d have to climb out the top side and get somebody to help push the car back aright before we could drive on. Actually, that happened only once or twice and was probably due to rolling over the curb or something like that more than to velocity. But I was convinced that we were going at frightening speeds. It never seemed to hurt the car at all, even to dent it. And my father was known as a rather rakish driver thanks to these little incidents.

  Another favorite Sunday afternoon entertainment was for my father and me to go down to the Mississippi and ride the old paddle-wheeled ferryboats back and forth for hours between Baton Rouge and Port Allen, eating Crackerjacks
and drinking Delaware Punch (I switched to Dr Pepper much later). I can still remember the smell of muddy water and tar from those boats, and the way the wooden rails smelled, and tasted.

  In all, I have only the happiest of memories about those days—except that I had no brother. Rather early on I turned off to my parents, but I had two wonderful grandmothers and one very nice grandfather who would tell me endless stories, which I have now unfortunately forgotten, about his own boyhood during the Civil War.

  During the summers I usually went with my father to visit his mother, my Grandmother Mabel Reeves, and his two sisters and their husbands and sons in San Antonio, which I loved—and them, too. Mabel was a Presbyterian minister’s daughter who went from the rectory directly to her first husband’s ranch, where she learned to cuss and laugh with the ranch hands. It was she who taught me how to shoplift, and we had great times trying to steal things so each other wouldn’t notice it, our technique being such that there was no worry about clerks and floor walkers ever catching us, or so we thought at the time. It is possible that, in those decorous days, our immunity came merely from the fact that the thought of a respectable-looking elderly lady shoplifting with her angelic grandson was inconceivable.

  7

  I

  Can

  Recall

  My

  First

  Orgasm

  Quite

  Clearly

  I can recall my first orgasm—at six or seven—quite clearly. I had just seen the movie Lost Horizon, and that night in bed I pretended I was flying an airplane over the Himalayas, searching for Shangri-La. Actually, I was Nelson Eddy searching for it! As I moved in the bed my penis rubbed against the sheet, and it felt so good that I kept rocking and dipping the plane. As I got more and more excited I imagined I saw it and started shouting “Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-Laaaaa!” until my penis exploded, as did my imaginary airplane against the mountains.

  At about age eight or nine, I pondered that ejaculation (for which I naturally longed) might possibly be more a matter of suction than of age. Being one day alone in the house and having no friend handy to provide the suction, I turned to the vacuum cleaner hose. I carefully determined that it contained no grinding, cutting, or biting mechanism, inserted my poor little penis, and switched the motor on—an altogether hair-raising, terrifying experience as my tiny organ was violently whipped back and forth in the suction. I admitted defeat and set myself to wait a few years.

  There was also that unforgettable time, when we were twelve, when my friend Timmy, as full of self-importance, I daresay, as he has ever been, took Rick and me out to his uncle’s farm to initiate us into the ecstasy of fucking a cow. We were an odd triumpuerate, the school’s two star jocks and I, but the relationship was one of three equals and not at all one that hindsight might have expected. But to that Saturday—we rose early and biked the ten or twelve miles out to the farm to rouse his cousin. He brought a box (“the” box, I guess) and we went to look for a suitable cow, Rick and I, the awestruck innocents, trailing behind the two masters. Having secured the beast to a fence and placed the box just right, Timmy mounted it, dropped his jeans to his ankles, and, with Rick close in on one side and me on the other to observe (the cousin was at the cow’s head), inserted his ready prick into the flabby and rather filthy slit and started ramming.

  It was as though his cock pushed a button in the wrong place. Immediately a huge flood of liquid shit poured out of the cow over Timmy’s belly, cock, and legs, filling his dropped jeans and overflowing to the ground. Timmy’s face, Timmy’s face! Rick and I collapsed in laughter, as did the cousin when he saw. Timmy reddened for every possible reason—except where he was brown—but mainly fury.

  The three of us stripped, picked Timmy up, and threw ourselves into the nearby creek. Our ardor was cooled, but soon revived, and we soothed it in the more usual way, which even the cousin, I believe, preferred to the cow.

  8

  I

  Wonder

  Sometimes

  I wonder sometimes whether everybody has his own quiet, peaceful 1930s, even though they were the 1940s or ’50s. They must, though I can’t believe they were really as quiet and peaceful as mine were!

  Before the war I was taken to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but the whole thing was a bust for me because my sole object was to catch as many trinkets that the people on the floats threw to the crowds as I could, and I ended up catching nothing. Nobody in our crowd did, in fact, and when my father found one on the ground later on and gave it to me as a consolation, I threw it away in great indignation, thinking—as I still do—that if you didn’t catch it yourself then it wasn’t any good.

  That was my first acquaintance with New Orleans, at about age nine or ten, and I saw absolutely nothing but all those baubles flying off the floats in every direction but mine. It was my only acquaintance with that city until after the war, and since most of the “important” things of that period of my life happened during the war—not because of the war, but because it was during the war that I climbed into the great clamshell of puberty—New Orleans was not very interesting to me.

  9

  In

  the

  Period

  of

  Best

  Friends

  In the period of “best friends” there was the normal business of spending the night at each other’s houses, soul-searing arguments, riding bikes out into the country, stealing watermelons and ripe tomatoes, and playing with our “ding dongs.”

  Up till puberty I was omnisexual, and extremely so! Genitals were the most fascinating things I’d ever known about—my own, the little girl’s next door, those of all the other boys and girls I knew, even the dog’s and cat’s. After I was twelve or thirteen, girls suddenly decided we boys could no longer be their doctors, so we had no choice but to turn to each other. This pleased me.

  I had perceived quite early that girls’ “things” were hollow in roughly the same proportion as mine was protuberant and precociously suggested to Sadie Sue (the little girl next door) that we try sticking mine into hers. “Don’t be stupid!” she huffed—”Yours doesn’t belong in mine.” She was exactly nine months older than I, and I believed whatever she told me (if I didn’t, she’d hit me), and this was no exception. I wonder at times, only half-facetiously, whether I don’t still believe her.

  At puberty, I entered my “romantic” phase, suffering through Wuthering Heights and such like, writhing in ecstasy (with real tears) over Shelley’s more maudlin efforts, though at the same time building ship models, reading Treasure Island and the Bounty trilogy over and over again, and dreaming of adventure.

  Team sports never interested me in the least, though I liked swimming and track quite a lot, and was good at them in an offhand sort of way, as long as they weren’t on a competitive level, which turned me off completely. I never cared about winning. In fact, the only ambition I ever had was to be happy.

  I was also taking piano lessons and tended naturally toward the most severely classical pieces, like Bach, and the more lyrical things, like Mozart, etc. I heard my first opera—one of the first Met broadcasts, I guess—one Saturday when I was in bed with measles, and liked it right away. Rigoletto, I guess it was. So I became a devotee of the opera broadcasts—the only opera Baton Rouge offered at that time. Though Huey Long had brought down one of the old Met stars, Pasquale Amato, to head the opera department at the new Louisiana State University, and they gave a couple of operas a year, which I didn’t see.

  I remember the flap when Long was assassinated. It meant nothing to me, but I was fascinated by the marks of the bullets in the Capitol walls and kept going back to look at them. People talked of nothing else for ever so long.

  My first acquaintance with anything like jazz, other than what we heard on the radio, came from a maid who worked for us (seven days a week, including laundry and c
leaning and cooking, for $4.50 a week!). She was always singing jazzily away in the kitchen and taught me some of her songs, mostly spirituals, true to the stereotype. She also, at my insistence, once showed me her breasts, which I evilly pinched.

  And when I was twelve there was the incident of “Sweety,” the ice cream man, who would give me and my friends free ice cream and invite us up to his room for sex. We went gladly and thought nothing of it—after all, it was what we did all the time anyhow—the novelty being the ice cream! He also unknowingly provided more data for my foreskin file. Then he was arrested and we were all taken down to the police station to identify him. He was naturally packed away to prison, poor guy.

  This was all taking place against the ghastly backdrop of World War II. I see it only now as ghastly. At the time I found it merely exciting or, at times when the discussions at table took a serious turn, tedious. Whereas life had been, before the war, comfortable (despite the Depression) and peaceful and nice, it was still all these things but was now charged with an energetic excitement, to me ill-defined. I never questioned things anyway, but, as usual, gathered in the result for its own sake. I sensed what is now called a polarization, a unity in aim, as much of a feeling of “patriotism” as either I or the nation were ever to feel. Everything separated into a series of neatly defined pairs of opposites—good and bad, right and wrong, us and them—which have more or less remained with us ever since. (Perhaps they had always been there unnoticed by me?)

  The rationing coupons made us feel needed and virtuous. Sunday drives were given up. Fudge was rare. There were blackouts and air-raid drills. I wished my father were an airraid warden, but during blackouts we gathered in safety and comfort all together close to the gas heater in the dining room (my bedroom) and listened to the radio, curtains drawn, our favorite programs interrupted at times by news bulletins “from the front.”