Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Page 6

  “The wheel, Jesus, you don’t remember?”

  A smoky recollection. “What wheel?”

  “You won over a hundred bucks. Proctor Slug’s probably got a warrant out.”

  “You’re not serious? Roulette? From who?”

  “What does it matter who? Some spic in a cowboy suit and a guy from the Mentor Daily Sun. Now try getting up, man, you look like spoonfuls of warmed-over death.”

  “Hundred bucks? Ohhhh.”

  “Now what?”

  “That woman at the checkout.”

  “Hey, all this expiation is a drag,” Heff pulling on a pair of stiffened socks from his laundry bag. “Why don’t you go to Confession or something.”

  “Penance the wrong sacrament, baby, only add to the pain. Need myrrh for the injured cells. You’re putting me on about Monsignor Putti, right? I mean, what would I do that for?”

  “You even left an instruction note. You want to see it?”

  “Prayer is all. Fasting, Satyagraha. Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord—”

  “Look man, would you please get up, I want to find out if I’m still in school.”

  “De Profundis, semper hangovum—”

  “Oh shit,” Heff dropping into a rocking chair, socks collapsing on his ankles. Long bone of a quadroon body gangling with the remnants of Watusi blood, almost close enough to pass, not quite. But blue eyes, unlikely, gets the girls.

  “You’re beautiful, Heffalump, I ought to marry you.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Ohhhh, my neck. Always worst in the neck, have you noticed? And the left eye.”

  Heff flipping idly through the Anatomy of Melancholy, whistling some Randy Weston, asking casually:

  “You going to make Cuba with me over spring vacation?”

  “Please no mother-organizing. You should have grown out of that adventure syndrome, anyway. This is ’58, not 1922.”

  “At least things are happening down there; talk about a revolution, getting rid of this Batista maniac.”

  “You couldn’t grow a beard, where’s the percentage? Ohh, this is all too much for the head. Will you play a little Miles? You got any Miles? Something to mollify my bruised cortex? Oof.” He scrambled to a sitting position and found his swollen reflection in a cracked mirror on the other side of the smelly room. Don’t look. Mortality. Mornings always hardest. Heff was dutifully settling a record on the spindle of his borrowed turntable, fondling the Heathkit preamp knobs with a free hand. Next to the lamp which had been used to dry the previous night’s joints were a half-empty vial of paregoric and the eye dropper.

  Gnossos stood unsteadily and aired his tongue. He removed the slovenly remains of the lint-coated suit he’d slept in, then shuffled naked across the room to the sink, scratching his scrotum. He flicked some cold water from his fingernails to his eyes, blinked painfully, and set about replacing everything criminal in the rucksack. Got to cool Mother Church, too much irony in getting busted by a priest. As he turned toward the speaker, snapping his fingers, he found the image of a wrinkled penis looking back at him. Only after it moved did he recognize the reflection as his own.

  “Jesus, put some clothes on,” from Heff, who also saw, tossing him a black terrycloth robe. “Your body is obscene after a debauch.”

  “Meaningless word, man.”

  “Lewd, then. How the hell you ever get women to make love to is way past me.” Traffic noise from the street, a world functioning on.

  “I don’t. I bang them is all. I’m still a virgin. Have yet to make love, right?”

  A polite rapping at the door.

  “Jesus, the Man.”

  Heff leaping up from his rocker, “Lie down somewhere, quick. And for Christ’s sake, keep that robe closed!”

  Pappadopoulis pulled the terrycloth around him and jumped onto the pathetic leather couch, its skin peeling in jagged strips. Heffalump threw an army blanket over his knees, tucked him in, and waited until hands were locked in reverence before going to the door. Monsignor Putti was waiting nervously, carrying a black pigskin satchel in stubby fingers. He entered and stood to be helped with his heavy coat.

  “Is this the patient?” he asked with a twitching smile. Wound around his splendid frock was a scarlet sash. Swollen belly, balding scalp, hair combed back to front in a foppish attempt to conceal. Eek, a concave sternum.

  “He finds it difficult to speak,” explained Heff cautiously.

  “God help us. Has the doctor been here already?”

  “He refuses all medical assistance.”

  “Dear me, is that wise?”

  “He has faith only in, well, you know.”

  From the couch a hand groping weakly into space: “Father. Father, is that you?”

  The monsignor bending curiously toward Heff, “Perhaps you’d better ring the infirmary, after all—”

  “And movements, you see, sudden movements give him great pain.”

  “Yes, yes . . . ” shakily opening the pigskin bag and removing the delicate cruets of holy oil. Plump pink fingers. Jesus, that Miles.

  “Father?”

  “Yes, my son?”

  In a whisper: “More treble, we’re losing the highs.”

  “What’s that? What’s he saying?”

  “He wanders now and again, Father. It happens every half hour or so,” Heff going over to the amplifier and adjusting the controls.

  “Better,” from the figure on the couch.

  “My son, I’m, well, I’m moved that you sought the blessing of the Church first in your infirmity; but perhaps a doctor—”

  “BUTCHERS,” called Gnossos violently, thrashing under the army blanket, “ATHEISTS!”

  “Oh dear.”

  “You see, Father, that’s how he becomes.”

  Then, in a lower tone, inviting them closer to hear, clutching the monsignor’s retreating sleeve and staring at him with one eye closed, breathing Bromo Seltzer, whiskey fumes, and hangover in his face: “I know what they do, Father. These doctors, these men of learning, I know what they do, all right. They cut open your belly and look inside for a soul, that’s what. They look inside for a soul and when they don’t find any they say, ‘HA! No soul! Pancreas maybe, but no soul!’” Releasing the sleeve, falling back against the couch with a gasp, “I’ve got one though, haven’t I; I’ve got a soul, tell them I have a soul.”

  “Yes, my son, yes,” brushing his sleeve unconsciously, glancing for support at Heff, who just in time suppressed a choking giggle.

  “Fix me, Father, I’m a sinner. I’ve done wrong. My mortal soul is in danger.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, try and calm yourself, I’ll be only a moment.” With shaky gestures and an odd glance around the mildewed room for security in some familiar object, the priest annointed the senses with holy oil. He squinted as he prayed hurriedly for the sins each perceptive organ had under its jurisdiction.

  There was a pause, then a startling, erotic sensation on the soles of his feet. Looking down, he was astonished to find them being annointed and prayed over.

  “What are you doing that for, man?”

  The priest was silent until he had finished, then answered with a weak smile, “The sins of the feet.”

  “Of the feet?” Big toe right in there. Blakean fetish.

  “They carry one to sin.”

  “Ah.” He stared down at his great paddles, the ankles jutting out absurdly, Mr. Right and Mrs. Left, the hermaphrodites. Introduce them again, annointed sinners. Hello there, you handsome thing. Hello there yourself; wanna tickle?

  “Well then.” The priest stood and replaced the cruet in his bag. “We’ll certainly remember you in our prayers. It’s so seldom we’re called out to administer this lovely sacrament. So many think it’s reserved for the dying, you see.”

  “Ohhhhh,” pressing both forefingers to his temples.

  “What is it, my son?”

  “The dregs of the pain, ohhhh.”

  “My, my. You really must not negate the val
ue of secular medicine,” looking to Heff for corroboration.

  “Symptomatic claptrap, Father; they fail to treat the disease. But here . . . ” he motioned for his rucksack, fishing out two of the silver dollars, “here; for the poor.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you. My. But what are they?” Turning them over cautiously in pink fingers.

  “Silver, Father. Sow and ye shall reap.”

  “Yes, well. Well then, I’ll just be going. When you’re healthy again you must come along to the Newman Club. There are so few members.”

  “I certainly will, man. And may I bring this fallen angel as well?” Heffalump twitching at the reference.

  “Of course, you might even be interested in the little choir we’re getting up. Well then, I’ll just be on my way. Lovely sacrament, this. Pleasing to give.” He squirmed into his heavy coat and turned to the door as Heff rose, “No no, I’ll let myself out. Thank you.” And was gone.

  “Weeee,” squealed Gnossos when the footfalls had faded, “Dig me. Dig where I’m at. Annointed, cleansed, purified.”

  “Your feet are all greasy.”

  “Infidel. Know ye not the fury of the Lord profaned?”

  “I do, man, but it sure looks like you don’t. C’mon, get out of the sack. You want another drink?”

  “Only sacramental wine. Oh, listen to that Miles. I’m cured, right?” Creeping off the couch, hobbling to the speaker on all fours. “Dig how pure, how clean. Dig the control.” His hangover still tapping.

  “Dig it later,” said Heff, turning off the turntable. “It’s the middle of the goddamned afternoon. You’ve got to register and I’ve got to see if my appeal did any good—”

  “What appeal, man?”

  “They busted me out at midterm, I already told you, but I appealed.”

  “They can’t bust you, Heff.” Gnossos rolling over on his back. “That puts you out in the world.”

  “Cuba.”

  “Yeah, I heard you once. It’s the wrong generation, baby, you’ll be purged. Anyway, your spade blood is where it’s at.”

  His face flushing. “Bullshit.”

  “Don’t put it down. Twenty-five parts out of a hundred itching for the white-man’s scalp. You’ve got problems.”

  “They ain’t your problems, gumbook. And moving out is one hell of a lot better than chewing cud at Guido’s Grill.” He picked up an envelope of forms and appeal material, then wheeled around, pointing a finger. “If I stayed, I’d end up like G. Alonso Oeuf, ten years on the academic scene.”

  Gnossos blinked at the name and sat up. “Oeuf? You’ve seen him?”

  “In the infirmary is all. Scheming to take over the university, from the look of his little headquarters. Talk about short-sighted vision!”

  “Anyway,” from Gnossos, finally pulling on a pair of crumpled corduroys, “you don’t have enough bread to make New York, let alone Havana. Did you show anything on the wheel last night?”

  “Your buddy Aquavitus will set me up, don’t worry.”

  “Who?”

  “Aquavitus, man, you heard me.”

  “Giacomo? From the Mafia?”

  “I used your name; he’s operating out of Miami now. And let’s not make a big thing out of it, I’m not exactly free to talk.”

  “Oh intrigue, Heffalump, beautiful. I saw your picture in some photographer’s last night. Very dramatic. And what about that little dyke chic with the Joan of Arc look?”

  “Goddammit, I’m in love with her.”

  “No.”

  “Oh shit, I’ll see you later,” and he stomped out the door for Anagram Hall. Has it bad, all right. Conjures up cafes with back rooms full of anarchists, smoke thick over crowded tables. Dens for impregnating rebel minds, conceiving attitudes, ferment, brush-fire wars. Heff, he hears his khaki commander telling him, an arm clasped to his own, this is no longer a time of waiting. Take this zircon to Foppa and tell him we move tonight. One fourth of his blood French. Corpuscles of his reason. Needs some Greek plasma. Feed him dolma, more goat cheese. Biochemical transfer. Alter his mind. Must find a hothouse, plant pot seeds.

  Hours later, at the end of a tangled spool of red registration tape, Gnossos was in the office of the dean himself. A roomy, leather-chaired kind of library, filled with mineralogical specimens. Obscure varieties of limestone, quartz, shale from the gorges, chunks of coal from Newcastle seams, spongy layers of igneous Hawaii, silica, granite, semiprecious stones. All the wrack and refuse of a ridiculous career interrupted by colleagues who sensed incompetency. Instead of dropping him into Maeander with a slab of Carrara marble tied to his leg, they made him a dean. Molder of men.

  But they forget me.

  “Yes sir, mister,” Dean Magnolia was saying, “that is correct. Five dollars.”

  “Extraordinary amount of money. You realize that being trapped on this ice floe I was telling you about, it was difficult, to say the least, to get back to Athené on time.”

  “I understan’ your situation, naturally. But nevertheless the administration has its regulations, an’ we must abide by them.”

  “I’ll have to give you silver dollars.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “United States silver dollars. Good at any Federal reserve bank.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Where they can be given in exchange for silver.”

  “Ah yes, of course.”

  “I trust you’ll take them?”

  “Don’t you have any paper money, Mr.—”

  “My last employer never used it. Germs.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You’d be surprised the amount of parasitic corruption gets spread through the handling of dollar bills. Osmosis. Still a theory, of course.”

  “You seem to have a great interest in medicine, Mr.—uh—”

  “I am going to be a cancer surgeon.”

  “Ah.”

  “Dig down, find a little disease, cut it out.”

  “I’m pleased to see you’ve come to a decision so soon. Many of your fellow students, they—”

  “Oh, I understand. They take so long making up their uncertain minds.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Drifting aimlessly down the many separate trails of youth, irresponsible, failing to choose the Proper Path in time. It must be frustrating to men such as yourself, having to put up guideposts, show the way, and all that.”

  Dean Magnolia swiveling in his chair, fondling a piece of petrified Saratoga Springs, “It is refreshing to have someone understand my position. Why, you’d be surprised, truly surprised, the number of unsympathetic young boys pass through this office year after year.”

  “I am not surprised, sir.” Distract the cat, cool the five bucks. “It is the symptom of the times. Unrest. Indecision. Waiting for Things To Happen. What the first Dr. Pappadopoulis called the Largesse Syndrome.”

  “First Dr., um—” rimless spectacles slipping down on the potato nose, leather chair creaking with shifted weight.

  “My father, sir. Died in the steaming jungles of Rangoon. UNESCO experiment. You read about it, perhaps, in the special Times supplement dedicated to his memory.”

  “I remember it well. Must have been a blow to you and your mother.”

  “She died with him, sir.” Look at the floor. Blink.

  “Ah. I’m certainly sorry to hear that.”

  “Quite all right, I was prepared. May I go now? Ought to be hitting the books, really. Time is money.”

  “Course, my boy. You drop by sometime. Whenever you want to talk about your future again. That’s why I’m here.”

  It sure as hell is. “Thank you, sir.” Walking across the room, rucksack slapping against his shoulder, almost to the door.

  “Oh, unh, Mr. Pappadopoulass . . . ”

  “Yes sir?”

  “We, unh, forgot the matter of your fee. The one fo’ late registration.”

  Be cool, you’ll get revenge. “Of course. Terribly sorry, must have been dist
racted.”

  Look at him. Benevolent smile. White hair of the sage. Actually looks the part. Playing with pebbles. Wonder will his penie calcify, break off?

  4

  But at quite another level, marking an entirely different breed of university time, right there on the listing top floor of Polygon Hall, he found the lean, ever-esoteric figure of Calvin Blacknesse. Gnossos discovered him where perhaps he’d been waiting all the while, posing beneath a grand mansard skylight in his lambent whitewashed studio, the very walls of which were impregnated by the odors of linseed oil, turpentine, paint, sizing, incense, and rosewater. Old Blacknesse, the only advising buddy who had paused, then failed to give his teacherly blessing on the voyage out across the asphalt seas; who had cautioned against the plotting friendship of G. Alonso Oeuf; who alone had warned him to beware the paradoxical snares of Exemption. In failing to subscribe or bear approving witness, he had become Gnossos’ only ear, the single object of introspective phrase. To him alone could the wanderer speak secrets.

  Now he stood with serene but ambiguous late-afternoon patience, wearing his linen mandarin jacket, sketching an eye in the hand of the dark goddess. Out of many thousand lines of light and gloom emerged small heads and skulls absent of some otherwise requisite feature: a mouth, or a nose. Here and there fanged monkey-demons hovered, the Eastern brethren of the gargoyles, who had been driven screaming, holding their horns, from all the celestial majesty of the Christian West. Around him were his stacked canvas, never static, always in flux, sections being painted out and annihilated with the same pitch and rhythm as the ones taking on substance. The demolition of self. A sucking vortex, Gnossos always reasoned, the diameter of which narrowed over the years, pulled closer to the pinpoint when creation and destruction were one. Then, with any luck, he’d die.

  “You’re all right?” came the easy question.

  “Hung, man. And constipated. How come you didn’t answer any letters?” Gnossos taking a seat on a fish-shaped stone. Its pocked surface was dappled with dyes.

  “They were more epistles than letters, yes? And we knew we’d see you again.”

  “Come on, you didn’t think I was dead? Along with the rest of Mentor?”

  Blacknesse laying the delicate graphite sticks on a piece of dried cobraskin: “No, Gnossos, not really. Your end could hardly have come in the rumored manner. A little at a time perhaps. By your own hand?”