Beautiful Losers

I look back he seemed to be training me for something, and he was ready to use any damn method to keep me hysterical. Hysteria is my classroom, F. said once. The occasion of the remark is interesting. We had been to a double feature and had then eaten a huge Greek meal in one of his friends’ restaurants. The jukebox was playing a melancholy tune currently on the Athenian Hit Parade. It was snowing on St. Lawrence Boulevard and the two or three customers left in the place were staring out at the weather. F. was eating black olives in a disinterested fashion. A couple of the waiters were drinking coffee, after which they would begin to stack the chairs, leaving our table, as usual, to the very end. If there was an unpressurized place in the whole world, this was it. F. was yawning and playing with his olive pits. He made his remark out of the blue and I could have killed him. As we walked through the rainbow haze of the neon-colored snow he pressed a small book into my hand.

– I received this for an oral favor I happen to have performed for a restaurateur friend. It’s a prayer book. Your need is greater than mine.

– You filthy liar! I cried when we had reached the streetlamp and read the cover, . It’s an English-Greek phrase book, badly printed in Salonica!

– Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. Study the book.

– And the English is execrable. F., you torture me purposefully.

– Ah, he said blithely sniffing the night, ah, it’s soon Christmas in India. Families gathered round the Christmas curry, carols before the blazing Yule corpse, children waiting for the bells of Bhagavad-Santa.

– You soil everything, don’t you?

– Study the book. Comb it for prayers and guidance. It will teach you how to breathe.

– Sniff. Sniff.

– No, that’s wrong.

19

Now it is time for Edith to run, run between the old Canadian trees. But where are the doves today? Where is the smiling luminous fish? Why are the hiding places hiding? Where is Grace today? Why isn’t candy being fed to History? Where is the Latin music?

– Help!

Edith ran through the woods, thirteen years old, the men after her. She was wearing a dress made from flour sacks. A certain Flour Company packed their product in sacks printed with flowers. There is a thirteen-year-old girl running through needle pine. Have you ever seen such a thing? Follow her young young bum, Eternal Cock of the Brain. Edith told me this story, or part of it, years later, and I’ve been pursuing her little body through the forest ever since, I confess. Here I am an old scholar, wild with unspecific grief, compulsive detective of gonad shadows. Edith, forgive me, it was the thirteen-year-old victim I always fucked. Forgive yourself, F. said. Thirteen-year-old skin is very beautiful. What other food besides brandy is good after thirteen years in the world? The Chinese eat old eggs but that is no comfort. O Catherine Tekakwitha, send me thirteen-year-olds today! I am not cured. I will never be cured. I do not want to write this History. I do not want to mate with Thee. I do not want to be as facile as F. I do not want to be the leading Canadian authority on the A——s. I do not want a new yellow table. I do not want astral knowledge. I do not want to do the Telephone Dance. I do not want to conquer the Plague. I want thirteen-year-olds in my life. Bible King David had one to warm his dying bed. Why shouldn’t we associate with beautiful people? Tight, tight, tight, oh, I want to be trapped in a thirteen-year-old life. I know, I know about war and business. I am aware of shit. Thirteen-year-old electricity is very sweet to suck, and I am (or let me be) tender as a hummingbird. Don’t I have some hummingbird in my soul? Isn’t there something timeless and unutterably light in my lust hovering over a young wet crack in a blur of blond air? Oh come, hardy darlings, there is nothing of King Midas in my touch, I freeze nothing into money. I merely graze your hopeless nipples as they grow away from me into business problems. I change nothing as I float and sip under the first bra.

– Help!

Four men followed Edith. Damn every one of them. I can’t blame them. The village was behind them, filled with families and business. These men had watched her for years. French Canadian schoolbooks do not encourage respect for the Indians. Some part of the Canadian Catholic mind is not certain of the Church’s victory over the Medicine Man. No wonder the forests of Québec are mutilated and sold to America. Magic trees sawed with a crucifix. Murder the saplings. Bittersweet is the cunt sap of a thirteen-year-old. O Tongue of the Nation! Why don’t you speak for yourself? Can’t you see what is behind all this teen-age advertising? Is it only money? What does “wooing the teen-age market” really mean? Eh? Look at all the thirteen-year-old legs on the floor spread in front of the tv screen. Is it only to sell them cereals and cosmetics? Madison Avenue is thronged with hummingbirds who want to drink from those little barely haired crevices. Woo them, woo them, suited writers of commercial poems. Dying America wants a thirteen-year-old Abishag to warm its bed. Men who shave want little girls to ravish but sell them high heels instead. The sexual Hit Parade is written by fathers who shave. O suffering child-lust offices of the business world, I feel your blue-balled pain everywhere! There is a thirteen-year-old blonde lying on the back seat of a parked car, one nyloned toe playing with the armrest ashtray, the other foot on the rich interior carpet,