Dhalgren

brown fist up beside her chin…' and, a few pages later, 'Fist against his chin, Stevie…' suggest the first draft of a fabulist who, having found the sharp descript for one invented character, forgets he has already used it and sticks it to a second. The rubrics running pages left or right, which we print in slightly smaller type, are marginal (sometimes rather wide) entries made along the sides of our typescript at somewhat narrower spacing; most probably they represent 'entries in quarter-sized, near illegible scrawl all over the margins' — that is, entries of a later date than the one beside them we print in ordinary sized typeface. (Note also that the rubric which breaks off marginally to the last entry in the notebook continues as the major entry just two previous to this.) Considering the lacunae that pass without comment, our transcriber's editional adieu ('Here one page, possibly two, is missing.') can only make us wonder what maddeningly special knowledge convinced him that, indeed, the ultimate and penultimate fragments once formed a breakless, breathless whole. Of course, we do not know under what pressure the transcript was made. Even if the description of conditions in the closing pages is only half true (and our transcriber were — say — the enthusiastic E. Forrest, working within the City), we can easily see his abandoning that tedious opening method to the simple necessity of completion; we must count ourselves lucky to have any document at all. For all we know, however, we have here a copy of a transcript made from the original hand-written notebook; or even a typescript made from a manuscript copy. Both mistakes or correction-marks might have come in (or fallen out) at any generation. Still, it tempers our trust of all he has done to note that on one page (!) he has committed all of the following:

'Sound[s?] like you had a reporter standing

'The[n] how did they know

grinding her palm on the greyn[?] formica. (That superfluous 'n' again suggests a typing, rather than a handwritten, error.)

Are you going to keep them here[?]'

He then has the pedantic gall to impose his solitary 'sic'—Nightmare and dragon [sic] Lady almost murdered each other. — for the mere lack of an upper-case 'D'!

We coagulate and dissolve around (not inside) the house, gathering on the front steps, dispersing for booze to the store with the busted plate-glass window two blocks away, convening again outside the kitchen door, drifting away- to reconnoiter in the yard (piling up the bottles), with maybe a stop in the front room which Lanya, when she comes around, says smells like a locker room-curious if she's ever been in a locker room, or just picked up the phrase.

I can't smell it.

This afternoon when I came out into the yard, Gladis (very black and very pregnant, she wears a basketball sized natural, sandals, and bright colored sacks) and her friend Risa (who I wish looked like something other than a chocolate cow) were there for the third day. The guys' jokes are foul, their attitude maniacally protective.

Jack the Ripper: 'Little girl, you must have been fucking on a God-damn elephant to get yourself a belly that big!' at which Denny, perched on the table's edge, laughs the shrillest.

Gladis, under Spider's arm, wriggles back against the tree where they sit.

The Ripper's laughter stops for the wine jug, and continues when he drops it from his mouth to pass it to Thruppence and Raven, knee to knee on the bench below Denny (I propped the board with a cinderblock yesterday).

Gladis leers and says, 'Fuck you—' She's fifteen? Sixteen—?—'you big cocksucker!' with the inappropriateness with which women usually appropriate homosexual vocabulary or whites use 'nigger' other than in rage.

Thruppence came back over the laughter with good-natured illogic: 'You don't get no belly like that sucking a cock!'

'Well, Jesus Christ,' Spider shouted, 'well, Jesus Christ, if I'd 'a known that—' making much to get his fly open and his free hand inside. Gladis squealed to her, feet and lurched away.

I sat down on the steps next to Risa who closed her copy of Orchids, leaned on the faded knee of her jeans, and didn't look at me.

Tarzan was going by with the wine jug and handed it to one of the other white guys (an occurrence notable enough to note); I reached way down till my knees were higher than my shoulders and snagged it up into my lap. 'You like that?' I asked Risa.

When she looked up, I put my arm around her shoulder and offered her some wine. She made her first, scared smile (she looks a few years older than Gladis, anyway: eighteen? maybe twenty?) and drank. Inside the up-ended jug, wine splashed like a small, plum sea.

'Uh-oh,' from the Ripper. 'What your girl friend gonna say when she come around?'

'Fuck her,' I said.

'What's his boy friend gonna say?' Dollar asked from somewhere else.

I said: 'Fuck him too.'

Denny leaned across the table to pull the other jug over.

Gladis, turning and turning in her loose green (they regard her as their personal catastrophe, an awesome delight; she looks as if she will foal now; claims, however, it's months away), settled, giggling, again, beside Spider.

Then Spitt came in with Glass (some argument about where a building was) and we broke up from our backyard loafing and reconvened on the front steps. Standing beside Copperhead, I looked down the street: Thirteen was coming up:

'Hey!' called with the desperate good will of the seriously bored. 'Any of you guys want to come on over? Hey, Kid, you ain't even seen my new place. You want to come over and meet some of the guy's. there?' In this city, where nothing happens, it is worth your sanity to refuse anything new.

Somehow, with the wrangling and wine and lethargy, me, the national guard (Copperhead, Spitt, and Glass), and Denny went with him.

Up a lot of dark stairs with Glass saying, 'Man, I didn't know you were this close. You're just around the God-damn corner,' and Thirteen saying: 'I told you I was just around the God-damn corner; why ain't you guys never come over to see us?' and I looked up:

Smokey stood at the head; when we broke around her, she turned with Thirteen, to follow (at his shoulder) breathing as though she'd held her breath since he'd left.

Sitting on one of the beds at the end of the loft was a scrawny, shirtless guy in jeans — holes both knees — knuckling his eyes. He'd probably just sat up when he heard us on the stairs.

Two other guys stood at the window. Thirteen started bobbing around, very excited: 'Hey! Hey, you guys, this is the Kid. Hey!' He motioned me over.

'Hi.' A black guy in workman's greys got up off the window sill and held out his hand.

His friend, a stocky blond (short-hair) in denim and construction boots, had his hand ready for seconds. 'Hear you got a thing going here.'

The black guy locked thumbs with me in a biker shake.

I figured the other guy would do the same. But he just started, then he laughed, and his hand joggled awkwardly.

It isn't that the 'heroic' incidents about me cullable from the Times are untrue (well… some of them), nor the 'villainous' ones on the gossip round that distorted (well… ditto). But the six minutes here, the twenty seconds there, the forty-five minutes how-many-weeks later — the real time it takes to commit the 'heroic' or 'villainous' act — are such a microscopic presentage of my life. Even what can be synopsized from this journal — snatches gun from looter's hands; helps save children from flaming death; lead victorious attack (Ha! They were scared crazy!) on armed citadel; hobbles, half-shod, shrieking in the street; rescues Old Faust from collapsing ruin (and once tried to write poems—) are things that have happened to me, not that I have done. What you look like you're doing and what you feel like you're doing are disparate enough to mute any mouth that might attempt description!

So I caught it up for him and smiled. He was 'Tom,' from Thirteen, 'and this is Mak. You guys rode in here, you say?'