Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings, Page 3

  The blood in my not-there legs starts pinging under a million sewing-machine needles and a vision of the Clinic Director acid-etches itself on my brain. I don’t even need to look around: fat pot-belly buttoned into his grey pinstriped waistcoat, woodchuck teeth yellow and buck, every-color eyes behind the thick-lensed glasses quick as minnows.

  I clutch my notebook. The last floating timber of the Titanic.

  What does he know, what does he know?

  Everything.

  ‘I know where there is a nice hot bowl of chicken noodle soup.’ His voice rustles, dust under the bed, mice in straw. His hand welds onto my left upper arm in fatherly love. The record book of all the dreams going on in the city of my birth at my first yawp in this world’s air he nudges under the bookcase with a polished toe.

  We meet nobody in the dawn-dark hall. Nobody on the chill stone stair down to the basement corridors where Billy the Record Room Boy cracked his head skipping steps one night on a rush errand.

  I begin to double-quickstep so he won’t think it’s me he’s hustling. ‘You can’t fire me,’ I say calmly. ‘I quit.’

  The Clinic Director’s laugh wheezes up from his accordian-pleated bottom gut. ‘We mustn’t lose you so soon.’ His whisper snakes off down the whitewashed basement passages, echoing among the elbow pipes, the wheelchairs and stretchers beached for the night along the steam-stained walls. ‘Why, we need you more than you know.’

  We wind and double and my legs keep time with his until we come, somewhere in those barren-rat tunnels, to an all-night elevator run by a one-armed Negro. We get on, and the door grinds shut like the door on a cattle car, and we go up and up. It is a freight elevator, crude and clanky, a far cry from the plush passenger lifts I am used to in the Clinics’ Building.

  We get off at an indeterminate floor. The Clinic Director leads me down a bare corridor lit at intervals by socketed bulbs in little wire cages on the celing. Locked doors set with screened windows line the hall on either hand. I plan to part company with the Clinic Director at the first red Exit sign, but on our journey there are none. I am in alien territory, coat on the hanger in the office, handbag and money in my top desk drawer, notebook in my hand, and only Johnny Panic to warm me against the ice-age outside.

  Ahead a light gathers, brightens. The Clinic Director, puffing slightly at the walk, brisk and long, to which he is obviously unaccustomed, propels me around a bend and into a square, brilliantly lit room.

  ‘Here she is.’

  ‘The little witch!’

  Miss Milleravage hoists her tonnage up from behind the steel desk facing the door.

  The walls and the ceiling of the room are riveted metal battleship plates. There are no windows.

  From small, barred cells lining the sides and back of the room I see Johnny Panic’s top priests staring out at me, arms swaddled behind their backs in the white Ward nightshirts, eyes redder than coals and hungry-hot.

  They welcome me with queer croaks and grunts, as if their tongues were locked in their jaws. They have no doubt heard of my work by way of Johnny Panic’s grapevine and want to know how his apostles thrive in the world.

  I lift my hands to reassure them, holding up my notebook, my voice loud as Johnny Panic’s organ with all stops out.

  ‘Peace! I bring to you….’

  The Book.

  ‘None of that old stuff, sweetie.’ Miss Milleravage is dancing out at me from behind her desk like a trick elephant.

  The Clinic Director closes the door to the room.

  The minute Miss Milleravage moves I notice what her hulk has been hiding from view behind the desk—a white cot high as a man’s waist with a single sheet stretched over the mattress, spotless and drumskin tight. At the head of the cot is a table on which sits a metal box covered with dials and gauges.

  The box seems to be eyeing me, copperhead-ugly, from its coil of electric wires, the latest model in Johnny-Panic-Killers.

  I get ready to dodge to one side. When Miss Milleravage grabs her fat hand comes away with a fist full of nothing. She starts for me again, her smile heavy as dogdays in August.

  ‘None of that. None of that, I’ll have that little black book.’

  Fast as I run around the high white cot, Miss Milleravage is so fast you’d think she wore rollerskates. She grabs and gets. Against her great bulk I beat my fists, and against her whopping milkless breasts, until her hands on my wrists are iron hoops and her breath hushabyes me with a love-stink fouler than Undertaker’s Basement.

  ‘My baby, my own baby’s come back to me …’

  ‘She,’ says the Clinic Director, sad and stern, ‘has been making time with Johnny Panic again.’

  ‘Naughty naughty.’

  *

  The white cot is ready. With a terrible gentleness Miss Milleravage takes the watch from my wrist, the rings from my fingers, the hairpins from my hair. She begins to undress me. When I am bare, I am anointed on the temples and robed in sheets virginal as the first snow.

  Then, from the four corners of the room and from the door behind me come five false priests in white surgical gowns and masks whose one lifework is to unseat Johnny Panic from his own throne. They extend me full-length on my back on the cot. The crown of wire is placed on my head, the wafer of forgetfulness on my tongue. The masked priests move to their posts and take hold: one of my left leg, one of my right, one of my right arm, one of my left. One behind my head at the metal box where I can’t see.

  From their cramped niches along the wall, the votaries raise their voices in protest. They begin the devotional chant:

  The only thing to love is Fear itself.

  Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

  The only thing to love is Fear itself.

  May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere.

  There is no time for Miss Milleravage or the Clinic Director or the priests to muzzle them.

  The signal is given.

  The machine betrays them.

  At the moment when I think I am most lost the face of Johnny Panic appears in a nimbus of arc lights on the ceiling overhead. I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory. His beard is lightning. Lightning is in his eye. His Word charges and illumines the universe.

  The air crackles with his blue-tongued lightning-haloed angels.

  His love is the twenty-storey leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.

  He forgets not his own.

  America! America!

  I went to public schools—genuinely public. Everybody went: the spry, the shy, the podge, the gangler, the future electronic scientist, the future cop who would one night kick a diabetic to death under the mistaken impression he was a drunk and needed cooling off; the poor, smelling of sour wools and the urinous baby at home and polyglot stew; the richer, with ratty fur collars, opal birthstone rings and daddys with cars (‘Wot does your daddy do?’ ‘He don’t woik, he’s a bus droiver.’ Laughter). There it was—Education—laid on free of charge for the lot of us, a lovely slab of depressed American public. We weren’t depressed, of course. We left that to our parents, who eked out one child or two, and slumped dumbly after work and frugal suppers over their radios to listen to news of the ‘home country’ and a black-moustached man named Hitler.

  Above all, we did feel ourselves American in the rowdy seaside town where I picked up, like lint, my first ten years of schooling—a great, loud cats’ bag of Irish Catholics, German Jews, Swedes, Negroes, Italians and that rare, pure Mayflower dropping, somebody English. On to this steerage of infant citizens the doctrines of Liberty and Equality were to be, through the free, communal schools, impressed. Although we could almost call ourselves Bostonian (the city airport with its beautiful hover of planes and silver blimps growled and gleamed across the bay), New York’s skyscrapers were the icons on our ‘home room’ walls, New York and the great green queen lifting a bedlamp that spelt out Freedom.

  Every morning, hands on hearts, we pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, a s
ort of aerial altarcloth over teacher’s desk. And sang songs full of powder-smoke and patriotics to impossible, wobbly, soprano tunes. One high, fine song ‘For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain’ always made the scampi-size poet in me weep. In those days I couldn’t have told a fruited plain from a mountain majesty and confused God with George Washington (whose lamblike granny-face shone down at us also from the schoolroom wall between neat blinders of white curls), yet warbled, nevertheless, with my small, snotty compatriots ‘America, America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.’

  The sea we knew something about. Terminus of almost every street, it buckled and swashed and tossed, out of its grey formlessness, china plates, wooden monkeys, elegant shells and dead men’s shoes. Wet salt winds raked our playgrounds endlessly—those Gothic composites of gravel, macadam, granite and bald, flailed earth wickedly designed to bark and scour the tender knee. There we traded playing cards (for the patterns on the backs) and sordid stories, jumped clothes rope, shot marbles, and enacted the radio and comic book dramas of our day (‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows—nyah, nyah, nyah!’ or ‘Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!’) If we were destined for any special end—grooved, doomed, limited, fated, we didn’t feel it. We beamed and sloshed from our desks to the dodge-ball dell, open and hopeful as the sea itself.

  After all, we could be anybody. If we worked. If we studied hard enough. Our accents, our money, our parents didn’t matter. Did not lawyers rise from the loins of coalheavers, doctors from the bins of dustmen? Education was the answer, and heaven knows how it came to us. Invisibly, I think, in the early days—a mystical infra-red glow off the thumbed multiplication tables, ghastly poems extolling October’s bright blue weather, and a world of history that more or less began and ended with the Boston Tea Party—Pilgrims and Indians being, like the eohippus, prehistoric.

  Later, the college obsession would seize us, a subtle, terrifying virus. Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmers’ college. The book first, then the work. By the time we (future cop and electronic brain alike) exploded into our prosperous, post-war high school, full-time guidance counsellors jogged our elbows at ever-diminishing intervals to discuss motives, hopes, school subjects, jobs—and colleges. Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury. Eccentricities, the perils of being too special, were reasoned and cooed from us like sucked thumbs.

  The girls’ guidance counsellor diagnosed my problem straight off. I was just too dangerously brainy. My high, pure string of straight A’s might, without proper extra-curricular tempering, snap me into the void. More and more, the colleges wanted All-Round Students. I had, by that time, studied Machiavelli in Current Events class. I grabbed my cue.

  Now this guidance counsellor owned, unknown to me, a white-haired identical twin I kept meeting in supermarkets and at the dentist’s. To this twin, I confided my widening circle of activities—chewing orange sections at the quarters of girl’s basketball games (I had made the team), painting mammoth L’il Abners and Daisy Maes for class dances, pasting up dummies of the school newspaper at midnight while my already dissipated co-editor read out the jokes at the bottom of the columns of The New Yorker. The blank, oddly muffled expression of my guidance counsellor’s twin in the street did not deter me, nor did the apparent amnesia of her whitely effcient double in the school office. I became a rabid teenage pragmatist.

  ‘Usage is Truth, Truth, Usage,’ I might have muttered, levelling my bobby-socks to match those of my school mates. There was no uniform, but there was a uniform—the pageboy hairdo, squeaky clean, the skirt and sweater, the ‘loafers’, those scuffed copies of Indian moccasins. We even, in our democratic edifice, nursed two ancient relics of snobbism—two sororities: Subdeb and Sugar ’n’ Spice. At the start of each school year, invitation cards went out from old members to new girls—the pretty, the popular, the in some way rivalrous. A week of initiation preceded our smug admittance to the cherished Norm. Teachers preached against Initiation Week, boys scoffed, but couldn’t stop it.

  I was assigned, like each initiate, a Big Sister who systematically began to destroy my ego. For a whole week I could wear no make-up, could not wash, could not comb my hair, change clothes or speak to boys. By dawn I had walked to my Big Sister’s house and was making her bed and breakfast. Then, lugging her intolerably heavy books, as well as my own, I followed her, at a dog’s distance, to school. On the way she might order me to climb a tree and hang from a branch till I dropped, ask a passerby a rude question or stalk about the shops begging for rotten grapes and mouldy rice. If I smiled—showed, that is, any sense of irony at my slavishness, I had to kneel on the public pavement and wipe the smile off my face. The minute the bell rang to end school, Big Sister took over. By nightfall I ached and stank; my homework buzzed in a dulled and muzzy brain. I was being tailored to an Okay Image.

  Somehow it didn’t take—this initiation into the nihil of belonging. Maybe I was just too weird to begin with. What did these picked buds of American womanhood do at their sorority meetings? They ate cake; ate cake and catted about the Saturday night date. The privilege of being anybody was turning its other face—to the pressure of being everybody; ergo, no one.

  Lately I peered through the plate-glass side of an American primary school: child-size desks and chairs in clean, light wood, toy stoves and minuscule drinking fountains. Sunlight everywhere. All the anarchism, discomfort and grit I so tenderly remembered had been, in a quarter century, gentled away. One class had spent the morning on a bus learning how to pay fares and ask for the proper stop. Reading (my lot did it by age four off soapbox tops) had become such a traumatic and stormy art one felt lucky to weather it by ten. But the children were smiling in their little ring. Did I glimpse, in the First Aid cabinet, a sparkle of bottles—soothers and smootheners for the embryo rebel, the artist, the odd?

  The Day Mr Prescott Died

  It was a bright day, a hot day, the day old Mr Prescott died. Mama and I sat on the side seat of the rickety green bus from the subway station to Devonshire Terrace and jogged and jogged. The sweat was trickling down my back, I could feel it, and my black linen was stuck solid against the seat. Every time I moved it would come loose with a tearing sound, and I gave Mama an angry ‘so there’ look, just like it was her fault, which it wasn’t. But she only sat with her hands folded in her lap, jouncing up and down, and didn’t say anything. Just looked resigned to fate is all.

  ‘I say, Mama,’ I’d told her after Mrs Mayfair called that morning, ‘I can see going to the funeral even though I don’t believe in funerals, only what do you mean we have to sit up and watch with them?’

  ‘It is what you do when somebody close dies,’ Mama said, very reasonable. ‘You go over and sit with them. It is a bad time.’

  ‘So it is a bad time,’ I argued. ‘So what can I do, not seeing Liz and Ben Prescott since I was a kid except once a year at Christmas time for giving presents at Mrs Mayfair’s. I am supposed to sit around hold handkerchiefs, maybe?’

  With that remark, Mama up and slapped me across the mouth, the way she hadn’t done since I was a little kid and very fresh. ‘You are coming with me,’ she said in her dignified tone that means definitely no more fooling.

  So that is how I happened to be sitting in this bus on the hottest day of the year. I wasn’t sure how you dressed for waiting up with people, but I figured as long as it was black it was all right. So I had on this real smart black linen suit and a little veil hat, like I wear to the office when I go out to dinner nights, and I felt ready for anything.
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  Well, the bus chugged along and we went through the real bad parts of East Boston I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. Ever since we moved to the country with Aunt Myra, I hadn’t come back to my home town. The only thing I really missed after we moved was the ocean. Even today on this bus I caught myself waiting for that first stretch of blue.

  ‘Look, Mama, there’s the old beach,’ I said, pointing.

  Mama looked and smiled. ‘Yes.’ Then she turned around to me and her thin face got very serious. ‘I want you to make me proud of you today. When you talk, talk. But talk nice. None of this fancy business about burning people up like roast pigs. It isn’t decent.’

  ‘Oh, Mama,’ I said, very tired. I was always explaining. ‘Don’t you know I’ve got better sense. Just because old Mr Prescott had it coming. Just because nobody’s sorry, don’t think I won’t be nice and proper.’

  I knew that would get Mama. ‘What do you mean nobody’s sorry?’ she hissed at me, first making sure people weren’t near enough to listen. ‘What do you mean, talking so nasty?’

  ‘Now, Mama,’ I said, ‘you know Mr Prescott was twenty years older than Mrs Prescott and she was just waiting for him to die so she could have some fun. Just waiting. He was a grumpy old man even as far back as I remember. A cross word for everybody, and he kept getting that skin disease on his hands.’

  ‘That was a pity the poor man couldn’t help,’ Mama said piously. ‘He had a right to be crotchety over his hands itching all the time, rubbing them the way he did.’

  ‘Remember the time he came to Christmas Eve supper last year?’ I went on stubbornly. ‘He sat at the table and kept rubbing his hands so loud you couldn’t hear anything else, only the skin like sandpaper flaking off in little pieces. How would you like to live with that every day?’

  I had her there. No doubt about it, Mr Prescott’s going was no sorrow for anybody. It was the best thing that could have happened all around.