Beautiful Losers Read online

  – Bow wow wow! Bow wow! Grrrrrrr!

  – What’s that commotion outside, Mary?

  – Just the dogs.

  – The dogs? I didn’t know there were going to be dogs.

  – Well, there are. Now hurry! Pull it out!

  – My hand?

  – The package! The oilskin package!

  – Must I?

  – It’s from our friends!

  With some fishlike movement she maneuvered her haunches, altering all the internal architecture of her cunt reception. Like a trout dragging the hook into the roof of its mouth, some blunt delicious shelf of miniature fountains applied the oilskin package to my hooked four fingers, and I withdrew it. Her wide white uniform shielded me from curiosity as I read the message. I am reading it now, as Mary Voolnd insists.

  ANCIENT PATRIOT

  FIRST FATHER PRESIDENT

  THE REPUBLIC SALUTES YOUR SERVICE

  WITH ITS HIGHEST HONOR

  the escape is planned for tonight

  is scribbled in invisible ink which her lubrications have activated! Tonight. – Grrrrrr! Arroooooof!

  – I’m frightened, Mary.

  – Don’t worry.

  – Can’t we stay here a little longer?

  – See the pretty lines, Mary?

  – Too late for sex, F.

  – But I think I could be happy here. I think I could acquire the desolation I coveted so fiercely in my disciple.

  – That’s just it, F. Too easy.

  – I want to stay, Mary.

  – I’m afraid that’s impossible, F.

  – But I’m right on the edge, Mary. I’m almost broken, I’ve almost lost everything, I almost have humility!

  – Lose it! Lose everything!

  – Help! Haaaaaaallllllpppp! Somebody!

  – Your screaming can’t be heard, F. Come along.

  – HAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLPPPPP !

  – Click, clickclick. Bzzzzzzzzz. Sputter!

  – What’s that funny noise, Mary?

  – Static. It’s the radio, F.

  – The radio! You didn’t say anything about the radio.

  – Quiet. It wants to tell us something.

  (DOLLY IN TO CLOSE-UP OF THE RADIO ASSUMING THE FORM OF PRINT)

  – This is the radio speaking. Good evening. The radio easily interrupts this book to bring you a recorded historical news flash: TERRORIST LEADER AT LARGE. Only minutes ago, an unidentified Terrorist Leader escaped from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It is feared that his presence in the city will touch off new revolutionary extremes. He was aided in his get-away by a female accomplice who had infiltrated the Hospital Staff. Mutilated by routine police dogs in a diversionary tactic, she is now undergoing surgery, but is not expected to survive. It is believed that the escaped criminal will attempt to contact terrorist strongholds in the forests beyond Montréal.

  – Is it happening, Mary?

  – Yes, F.

  – Grrrrr! Chomp! Arararara! Erf!

  – Mary!

  – Run, F.! Run. Run!

  – Bow wow! Hoooowwwwllll! Grrrrrrr! R-i-i-i-i-p!

  (SALIVATING POLICE DOG JAWS TEAR INTO THE FLESH OF MARY VOOLND)

  – Your body!

  – Run! Run, F. Run for all of us A——s!

  (CLOSE-UP OF RADIO EXHIBITING A MOTION PICTURE OF ITSELF)

  – This is the radio speaking. Eeeek! Tee hee! This is the ah ha ha, this is the hee hee, this is the radio speaking. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, oh ho ho ho, ha ha ha ha ha ha, it tickles, it tickles! (SOUND EFFECT: ECHO CHAMBER) This is the radio speaking. Drop your weapons! This is the Revenge of the Radio.

  And this is your lover, F., finishing the joyous letter which I promised. God bless you! Oh darling, be what I want to be!

  Yours truly,

  Signé F.

  Spring comes into Québec from the west. It is the warm Japan Current that brings the change of season to the west coast of Canada, and then the West Wind picks it up. It comes across the prairies in the breath of the Chinook, waking up the grain and caves of bears. It flows over Ontario like a dream of legislation, and it sneaks into Québec, into our villages, between our birch trees. In Montréal the cafés, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montréal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “The winter has not killed us again!” Spring comes into Québec from Japan, and like a prewar Cracker jack prize it breaks the first day because we play too hard with it. Spring comes into Montréal like an American movie of Riviera Romance, and everyone has to sleep with a foreigner, and suddenly the house lights flare and it’s summer, but we don’t mind because spring is really a little flashy for our taste, a little effeminate, like the furs of Hollywood lavatories. Spring is an exotic import, like rubber love equipment from Hong Kong, we only want it for a special afternoon, and vote tariffs tomorrow if necessary. Spring passes through our midst like a Swedish tourist co-ed visiting an Italian restaurant for mustache experience, and they assail her with ancient Valentino, of which she chooses one random cartoon. Spring comes to Montréal so briefly you can name the day and plan nothing for it.

  It was such a day in a national forest just south of the city. An old man stood in the threshold of his curious abode, a treehouse battered and precarious as a secret boys’ club. He did not know how long he had lived there, and he wondered why he no longer fouled the shack with excrement, but he didn’t wonder very hard. He sniffed the fragrant western breeze, and he inspected a few pine needles, blackened at their points as if winter had been a brush fire. The young perfume in the air produced no nostalgic hefts in the heart beneath his filthy matted beard. The vaguest mist of pain like lemon squeezed from a distant table caused him to squint his eyes: he scraped his memory for an incident out of his past with which to mythologize the change of season, some honeymoon, or walk, or triumph, that he could let the spring renew, and his pain was finding none. His memory represented no incident, it was all one incident, and it flowed too fast, like the contents of a spittoon in recess jokes. And it seemed only a moment ago that the twenty-below wind had swept through the snow-laden branches of the second-growth fir trees, wind of a thousand whisk brooms raising tiny white hurricanes between the dark of the branches. Beneath him there were still islands of melting snow, like the bellies of beached and corrupted bloated fish. It was a beautiful day as usual.

  – Soon it will get warm, he said out loud. Soon I’ll begin to stink again, and my thick trousers which are now merely stiff will become sticky, probably. I don’t mind.

  The obvious problems of the winter he hadn’t minded either. It hadn’t always been that way, of course. Years (?) back, when some fruitless search or escape had chased him up the trunk, he had hated the cold. The cold seized his shack like a bus stop, and froze him with a fury that was positively personal and petty. The cold chose him, like a bullet inscribed with a paraplegic’s name. Night after night he cried out in pain during the freezing appliance. But this last winter the cold had only passed through him in its general travels, and he was merely freezing to death. Dream after dream had torn shrieks from his saliva, imploring the name of someone who might have saved him. Morning after morning he rose from soiled leaves and papers which comprised his mattress, frozen snot and tears in his eyebrows. Long ago, the animals fled each time he broke the air with his suffering, but that was when he screamed for something. Now that he merely screamed, the rabbits and weasels did not frighten. He presumed that they now accepted his scream as his ordinary bark. And whenever this fine mist of pain made him squint, as it did on this spring day, he stretched open his mouth, torturing the knots of hair on his face, and established his scream throughout the national forest.

  – Aaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh! Oh, hello!

  The scream switched into a s
alutation as the old man recognized a boy of seven running toward his tree, taking great care to wade through every drift. The child was out of breath as he waved. He was the youngest son of the keeper of a nearby tourist hotel.

  – Hi! Hi! Uncle!

  The child was not a relative of the old man. He used the word in a charming combination of respect for the ancientry and a rubbing of the forefingers in Naughty, Naughty, for he knew the fellow was shameless, and half out of his head.

  – Hello, darling boy!

  – Hello, Uncle. How is the concussion?

  – Climb up! I’ve missed you. We can get undressed today.

  – I can’t today, Uncle.

  – Please.

  – I haven’t got time today. Tell me a story, Uncle.

  – If you haven’t got time to climb up you haven’t got time to listen to a story. It’s warm enough to get undressed.

  – Aw, tell me one of those Indian stories that you often swear you’re going to turn into a book one day, as if I cared whether or not you were successful.

  – Don’t pity me, boy.

  – Shut up, you filthy creep!

  – Climb up, oh, c’mon. It’s a short tree. I’ll tell you a story.

  – Tell it from up there, if you don’t mind, if it’s all the same to your itchy fingers, if it’s half a dozen and six, I’ll squat right where I am.

  – Squat here! I’ll clear a space.

  – Don’t make me sick, Uncle. Now let’s hear it.

  – Be careful! Look at the way you’re squatting! You’re ruining your little body like that. Keep the thigh muscles engaged. Get the small buttocks away from the heels, keep a healthy space or your buttock muscles will overdevelop.

  – They asked me if you ever talk dirty when the children come across you in the woods.

  – Who asked you?

  – Nobody. Mind if I pee?

  – I knew you were a good boy. Watch your leggings. Write your name.

  – Story, Uncle! And maybe later I’ll say maybe.

  – All right. Listen carefully. This is an exciting story:

  IROQUOIS ENGLISH FRENCH

  Ganeagaono Mohawk Agnier

  Onayotekaono Oneida Onneyut

  Onundagaono Onondaga Onnontagué

  Gweugwehono Cayuga Goyogouin

  Nundawaono Seneca Tsonnontouan

  The Iroquois ending ono (onon in French) merely means people.

  – Thank you, Uncle. Good-by.

  – Do I have to get down on my knees?

  – I told you not to say bad words. This morning, I don’t know why, but I informed the Provincial Police about us.

  – Did you tell them details?

  – I had to.

  – Such as?

  – Such as your cold freakish hand on my little wrinkled scrotum.

  – What did they say?

  – They said they’ve suspected you for years.

  The old man stood by the highway, jerking his arm in the hitchhiker’s signal. Car after car passed him. Drivers that didn’t think he was a scarecrow thought he was an outrageously hideous old man, and wouldn’t have touched him with your door. In the woods behind, a Catholic posse was beating the bushes. The best he could expect at their hands was a death whipping, and to be fondled unspeakably, as the Turks Lawrence. Above him on the electric wires perched the first crows of the year, arranged between the poles like abacus beads. His shoes sucked the water out of the mud like a pair of roots. There would be a mist of pain when he forgot this spring, as he must. The traffic was not heavy but it scorned him regularly with little explosions of air as the fenders snapped by. Suddenly, as the action freezing into a still on the movie screen, an Oldsmobile materialized out of the blur streaming past him. There was a beautiful girl behind the wheel, maybe a blond housewife. Her small hands, which hung lightly from the top of the wheel, were covered with elegant white gloves, and they drifted into her wrists like a pair of perfect bored acrobats. She drove the car effortlessly, like the pointer on a Ouija Board. She wore her hair loose, and she was used to fast cars.

  – Climb in, she spoke only to the windshield. Try not to dirty things.

  He shoveled himself into the leather seat beside her, having to shut the door several times in order to free his rags. Except for footwear, she was naked below the armrest, and she kept the map light on to be sure you noticed it. As the car pulled away it was pelted with stones and buckshot because the posse had reached the edge of the forest. At top speed he noticed that she had slanted the air ventilator to play on her pubic hair.

  – Are you married? he asked.

  – What if I am?

  – I don’t know why I asked. I’m sorry. May I rest my head in your lap?

  – They always ask me if I’m married. Marriage is only a symbol for a ceremony which can be exhausted as easily as it can be renewed.

  – Spare me your philosophy, Miss.

  – You filthy heap! Eat me!

  – Gladly.

  – Keep your ass off the accelerator.

  – Is this right?

  – Yah, yah, yah, yah.

  – Come forward a little. The leather hurts my chin.

  – Have you any idea who I am?

  – Ubleubleubleuble – none – ubleubleubleuble.

  – Guess! Guess! You thatch of shit!

  – I’m not in the least interested.

  –

  – Foreigners bore me, Miss.

  – Are you quite finished, you foul stump of rot? Yi! Yi! You do it wonderful!

  – You ought to use one of those anti-sweat wood ladder seats. Then you wouldn’t be sitting in your juices in a draft all day.

  – I’m very proud of you, darling. Now get out! Clean up!

  – Are we downtown, already?

  – We are. Good-by, darling.

  – Good-by. Have a magnificent crash.

  The old man climbed out of the slow-moving car just in front of the System Theatre. She rammed her moccasin down on the gas pedal and roared into the broadside of a traffic jam in Phillips Square. The old man paused for a moment under the marquee, eyeing the huddled vegetarians with two slight traces, one of nostalgia, one of pity. He forgot them as soon as he bought his ticket. He sat down in the darkness.

  – When does the show start, pardon me, sir?

  – Are you crazy? And get away from me, you smell terrible. He changed his seat three or four times waiting for the news–reel to begin. Finally he had the whole front row to himself.

  – Usher! Usher!

  – Shhh. Quiet!

  – Usher! I’m not going to sit here all night. When does the show start?

  – You’re disturbing the people, sir.

  The old man wheeled around and he saw row after row of silent raised eyes, and the occasional mouth chewing mechanically, and the eyes shifted continuously, as if they were watching a small pingpong game. Sometimes, when all the eyes contained exactly the same image, like all the windows of a huge slot machine repeating bells, they made a noise in unison. It only happened when they all saw exactly the same thing, and the noise was called laughter, he remembered.

  – The last feature is on, sir.

  Now he understood as much as he needed. The movie was invisible to him. His eyes were blinking at the same rate as the shutter in the projector, times per second, and therefore the screen was merely black. It was automatic. Among the audience, one or two viewers, noting their unaccustomed renewal of pleasure during Richard Widmark’s maniac laugh in Kiss of Death, realized that they were probably in the presence of a Master of the Yoga of the Movie Position. No doubt these students applied themselves to their disciplines with replenished enthusiasm, striving to guarantee the intensity of the flashing story, never imagining that their exercises led, not to perpetual suspense, but to a black screen. For the first time in his life the old man relaxed totally.

  – No, sir. You can’t change your seat again. Oops, where’s he gone? That’s funny. Hmmm.

  The
old man smiled as the flashlight beam went through him.

  The hot dogs looked naked in the steam bath of the Main Shooting and Game Alley, an amusement arcade on St. Lawrence Boulevard. The Main Shooting and Game Alley wasn’t brand new, and it would never be modernized because only offices could satisfy the rising real estate. The Photomat was broken; it accepted quarters but returned neither flashes nor pictures. The Claw Machine had never obeyed an engineer, and a greasy dust covered the encased old chocolate bars and Japanese Ronsons. There were a few yellow pinball machines of ancient variety, models from before the introduction of flippers. Flippers, of course, have destroyed the sport by legalizing the notion of the second chance. They have weakened the now-or-never nerve of the player and modified the sickening plunge of an unobstructed steel ball. Flippers represent the first totalitarian assault against Crime; by incorporating it into the game mechanically they subvert its old thrill and challenge. Since flippers, no new generation has really mastered the illegal body exertions, and TILT, once as honorable as a saber scar, is no more important than a foul ball. The second chance is the essential criminal idea; it is the lever of heroism, and the only sanctuary of the desperate. But unless it is wrenched from fate, the second chance loses its vitality, and it creates not criminals but nuisances, amateur pickpockets rather than Prometheans. Homage to the Main Shooting and Game Alley, where a man can still be trained. But it was never crowded any more. A few teen-age male prostitutes hung around the warm Peanuts and Assorted machine, boys at the very bottom of Montreal’s desire apparatus, and their pimps wore false fur collars and gold teeth and pencil mustaches, and they all stared at the Main (as St. Lawrence Boulevard is called) rather pathetically, as if the tough passing crowds would never disclose the Mississippi Pleasure Boat they might rightfully corrupt. The lighting was early fluorescent, and it did something bad to peroxide hair, it seemed to x-ray the dark roots through the yellow pompadours, and it located every adolescent pimple like a road map. The hot-dog counter, composed mainly of bells and pits of aluminum, exhibited the gray hygiene of slum clinics, which depends on a continual distribution, rather than elimination, of grease. The counter men were tattooed Poles, who hated each other for ancient reasons, and never got in each other’s way. They wore the possible uniforms of an infantry of barbers, spoke only Polish and a limited Esperanto of hot-dog conditions. It was no use to complain to one of them over an unanswered dime. An apathetic anarchy mounted OUT OF ORDER signs over the slots of broken telephones and jammed electric shooting galleries. The Bowl-a-Matic habitually divided every strike between First and Second Player regardless of who or how many threw. Still, here and there among the machines of the Main Shooting and Game Alley a true sportsman would be losing coin in gestures that attempted to incorporate decay into game risk, and, when an accurately blasted target did not fold away or light up, he understood it merely as the extension of the game’s complexity. Only the hot dogs had not declined, and only because they have no working parts.