Beautiful Losers

can’t pick and choose, and watch her silver evening gown dampen at the crotch. I wanted to fight against the Secret Police takeover, but from within the Party. I wanted an old lady who had lost her sons to mention me in her prayers in a mud church, taking her sons’ word for it. I wanted to cross myself at dirty words. I wanted to tolerate pagan remnants in village ritual, arguing against the Curia. I wanted to deal in secret real estate, agent of ageless, anonymous billionaire. I wanted to write well about the Jews. I wanted to be shot among the Basques for carrying the Body into the battlefield against Franco. I wanted to preach about marriage from the unassailable pulpit of virginity, watching the black hairs on the legs of brides. I wanted to write a tract against birth control in very simple English, a pamphlet to be sold in the foyer, illustrated with two-color drawings of shooting stars and eternity. I wanted to suppress dancing for a time. I wanted to be a junkie priest who makes a record for Folkways. I wanted to be transferred for political reasons. I have just discovered that Cardinal —— has taken a huge bribe from a ladies’ magazine, have suffered a fairy attack from my confessor, have seen the peasants betrayed for a necessary reason, but the bells are ringing this evening, it is another evening in God’s world, and there are many to be fed, many knees yearning to be bent, I mount the worn steps in my tattered ermine.

11

The long house of the Iroquois must be clear. Length: varied from one hundred to one hundred fifty feet. Height and width: twenty-five feet. Lateral beams supporting a roof made from large pieces of bark, cedar, ash, elm, or pine. Neither window nor chimney, but a door at each extremity. Light got in and smoke got out through holes in the roof. Several fires in the cabin, four families to each fire. Families arranged so that there was a corridor running down the length of the cabin. “La manière dont les familles se groupent dans les cabanes n’est pas pour entraver le libertinage.” Thus le P. Edouard Lecompte, S.J., wrote in 1930, whetting our sexual appetite in his expert Company manner. The long-house setup did little to “hinder licentiousness.” What went on in the dark tunnel? Catherine Tekakwitha, what did you see with your swollen eyes? What juices mixing on the bearskin? Was it worse than a movie theater? F. said: The atmosphere of a movie theater is a nighttime marriage of a man’s prison and a woman’s prison; the prisoners know nothing about it – only the bricks and gates have combined; in the ventilation system the mystic union is consummated: the smells absorb each other. F.’s extravagant observation coincides with something a clergyman told me. He said that on Sunday morning the odor of semen hangs like a damp cloud above the men gathered for chapel at Bordeaux Jail. The modern art-cinema house, made of concrete and velvet, is a joke, which, as F. said, is nothing but the death of an emotion. No marriage in these stark confines, everybody sitting on their genitals because: silver genitals on the screen. Bring back hidden sex! Let cocks again rise and twine like ivy round the gold projector beam, and cunts yawn under gloves and white paper bags of candy, and no naked flashing breasts lure the dirty laundry of our daily lives into the movie palace, deadly as a radar signal, no neorealist patent fucking hang the impenetrable curtains of possibility between each member of the audience! In the gloomy long house of my mind let me trade wives, let me stumble upon you, Catherine Tekakwitha, three hundred years old, fragrant as a birch sapling, no matter what the priests or plague have done to you.

12

The Plague! The Plague! It invades my pages of research. My desk is suddenly contagious. My erection topples like a futuristic Walt Disney film of the leaning Tower of Pisa, to the music of timpani and creaking doors. I speed down my zipper and out falls dust and rubble. Hard cock alone leads to Thee, this I know because I’ve lost everything in this dust. Plague among the Mohawks! In 1660 it broke out, raging along the Mohawk River, assaulting the Indian villages, Gandaouagué, Gandagoron, Tionnontoguen, like a forest fire powered by the wind, and it came to Ossernenon, where lived Catherine Tekakwitha, four years old. Down goes her warrior father and her Christian mother, croaking out her final confession, down goes her little brother, his little prick useless as an appendix forever. Of this doomed, intermarried family, only Catherine Tekakwitha survived, the price of admission gouged in her face. Catherine Tekakwitha is not pretty! Now I want to run from my books and dreams. I don’t want to fuck a pig. Can I yearn after pimples and pock marks? I want to go outside and walk in the park and look at the long legs of American children. What keeps me here while lilacs grow outside for everybody? Can F. teach me something? He said that at the age of sixteen he stopped fucking faces. Edith was lovely when I first met her in the hotel, where she sold manicures. Her hair was black, long and smooth, the softness of cotton rather than silk. Her eyes were black, a solid depthless black that gave nothing away (except once or twice), like those sunglasses made of mirrors. In fact, she often wore that kind of sunglasses. Her lips were not full but very soft. Her kisses were loose, somehow unspecific, as if her mouth couldn’t choose where to stay. It slipped over my body like a novice on roller skates. I always hoped it would fasten somewhere perfect and find its home in my ecstasy, but off it slipped after too brief a perch, in search of