Invention was your solitude and twin, wasn’t it, Miss Nin? The calculated manner in which you spread secret pages, like silk violet capes or fringed shawls, promising an air of mystery and desire. You enabled the cause of symmetry, so as to confess. Why couldn’t a woman be a fabulous opera fulfilled nightly through shadow-call and gilded tenor? Why couldn’t many hands attend fruitfully to matters of flight and garden envy? Paradise, for you, was always one finite entry away, wasn’t it? A diarist’s mad dash and hush to engorge, inflame, and export the wilds of a soul which outgrew borders and margins, spills of ink immigrating to distances recalled. You warmed yourself in reveries and blood-let, Miss Nin, while attempting to detonate and explode your neuroses, going so far as to leave us detailed maps of your psyche’s labyrinths. Yet, like a cartographer with an interiority complex, your maps led seekers to regions well beyond you. Territories, unmarked, leading us back to ourselves. And, I, a spelunker with a hard-on for sphinxes, used your maps to my own advantage—to reveal and baffle, to veil and dwell—because you see, Miss Nin, your bones bridged me to mine, as mine will to another, and so on and so forth, an underground network of interconnected bridges and tunnels, where lusting pilgrims come to know the tenderest breaking of dawn to light.
Inferiority might have been your first memory. Though you were born on American soil, stubbornly planted there, the chinked chains of immigration clanked and rattled, Marley-style, tightening around your throat, as you butted your head against the scabby base of a totem pole. You, the little wop, the fenced-in dago, red in the face, trying to dig his way to China, or the moon, or to any form of greatness that would eclipse your undermining complexes. Out of shame and want, out of fevered desire, you created Bandini, or he you. Arturo Bandini, rising star and literary godsend of John Fante’s complicated inner world, soon to be exported and appraised and adored by thousands, maybe more. Arturo Bandini would draw blood from your history and chagrin—your philandering, boozing, gambling father … your mother, begging credit to keep the family fed … your fear and loathing of Jesus and love-hate relationship with the saints … All of it would fuel Bandini’s quest to transcend your blues, your gnawing sense of lesser-than. You would become the Joe DiMaggio of the literary world, the gold-plated pride and joy of your people, or at least go down swinging. There he is, Bandini, fire-bellied, lean days of determination and hunger, a starved mongrel digesting the pits and seeds and citrus rinds and sun-tendered fronds of palm trees in 1930s L.A., an ox-driven young man, stalking fury and sound, full of himself and words that he prayed to God would not let him down. He, John Fante, the great Arturo Bandini, gave us pages, a score of scorched pages, not enough according to him (he would go on to become a Hollywood screenwriter and malign himself as the worst kind of traitor to his soul and calling), but he left behind the Bandini Quartet, four novels, with his grit-infused masterpiece, Ask the Dust, forming its apex. Some young men mellow with age. Fante, it seemed, raged until the end. His legs and sight claimed by diabetes, Fante, a blind amputee, bed-ridden, took one last spirited dive and salutary fling into the necessary world of Bandini, dictating his final novel, Dreams from Bunker Hill, to his wife, Joyce. Bukowski, who had fatefully stumbled upon Fante’s work, considered him a god. The two became friends, and Bukowski would do his part to resurrect Fante for a new generation. It seems, after all, that Bandini upon a cross, grinning, scowling, dreaming of words and how to arrange them according to innate gospel, had amounted to a scarring glint upon so much favored dust.
To be a mother, and to double as a dark sorceress, a cleaver of dried bones, could not have been easy. Especially in the 1950s. They burned witches then, as well as reds and blacks and faggots, and other things that didn’t fit the paradigmatic slant. It was a time of burning, though televisions were new, and lawns were green and sprinklered, and men chewed cud while shaving their second faces. Also, they burned witches way back when, and now too, it seems witch-hunts belong to some fraternal order of treason, some moose club with crooked antlers, who knows.
You wrote poems. No, you fevered them. Red-hot blues, peppered shards of black. You held bits of the moon hostage, or she you. You mooned for the world, a she-wolf’s strip-tease, straight to the bone, and also, also there was your death’s head vaudeville act, juggling scythes, gargling ram’s blood and spitting it back out as flames that burned skyward, charring the fluffed bellies of clouds.
Alchemy, vaudeville, burlesque, spells brightening hollowed veins and inflaming corpuscles, spells animating petrified, rotting limbs, Lady Lazarus with a sideways grin, you did it it all, Miss Plath, and still had time to make dinner. Still took care of the kids.
Doing all these things while crossing the River Styx on a paper boat must not have been easy. But the poems, papered heartbeats, glistening with sap and resin, as if torn directly from dream-womb, and left behind for us to ponder, digest, fill our bathtubs with and swim in.
Your silver, vagabond, winterkissed drops, pressed between the margins of an unyielding sea, will not be forgotten, for the moon holds the tides accountable for all its parceled beauty.
It was a matter of helium-speak, and tomorrow-talk, and bright ribbons of noise amounting to nothing.
We, hanging out on the street-corner, conducting ping-pong volleys and raps, ferocity and verve, building ourselves up—who we were and were not, what we would do or had already done. We erected fragile monuments to ourselves, and asked others to pay their respects, perhaps even worship the idols we had carved out of thin air.
Yet, in knowing one another’s monuments to be false, and plastered with shit, we tore each other down, behind shoulders, glances, sarcastic jabs and cuts.
Danny Dazer, who you kidding, you’re not moving to Florida to work at Club Med and screw a new babe every night.
And Mike Chichamimo, we all know there is no hot girlfriend who lives in Staten Island, which is why we never see her, right, but she is real with big tits and a tongue she can’t keep out of your mouth.
We talked big because that was the racket, because we were kids on a street-corner, emotional asthmatics stealing helium from the lungs and lives of others, prospectors mining for hot air.
Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow was our ally, and we charted its petty course, full of sound and fury, our tongues turning tricks and teasing value, out of nothing at all.
Beckett spoke about it: the inability to keep quiet. The inability to not say stories, to not make stories, to not find oneself shaped according to stories fitted to shifting forms. Beckett, with gallows irony, talked plenty about silences. He tried to reach silence, outline silence, through words. He amassed spools of verbiage in his quest to penetrate silence, to not say anything. I will say a lot in not saying anything, or, I will say nothing in many words saying nothing. Everyone dreams differently. Everyone dreams according to their own silences and motives, their own sphinxes and disciples. Whether or not you want them to, the stories go on. Inside me, they never stop. The narrative is ongoing. The narrative splinters into multiple narratives which splinter into more narratives, a hyper-exponential proliferation of narratives wrapped in recursion. In it, I see myself and lose myself and find myself and wonder about myself: the music of solipsism to the nth degree. We give voices to our silences because so much of us lives there unspoken. We long to birth the unspoken. We do this in words on pages. Marks on canvas. Notes in music. Abstractions hosted by masks. We supply ourselves with oxygen through ritual acts of creation. Beckett attempted to reach the end of language through language. His long sonata of the dead was the revival and impossible task he set for himself. Similar to that Einstein creed: You can’t use the same type of thinking that created your problem to solve your problem. Something different was needed. Beckett attempted to go beyond words by using words, tried to corral silence by making silence the domain of language. To not say anything, to ultimately embrace silence, would mean (gulp!) putting the pen down, and placing a moratorium on words. The only way Beckett imagined that would happen, could happen, would be through death. Death, flexing dominion, would have to pry the pen from Beckett’s cold stiff hand. Death would have to impose the gag order that Beckett could never attain by choice. From out of the silence comes words, only to immediately plunge back into the silence. Perhaps, a bit like catch-and-release fishing. The words, secured from the dark, from the silence, and briefest exposure to light, before descending back into the dark, the silence. We come out of silence only to return to silence. A lot of words and stories in between.
It is the winter within, the writer dying, the chaos bible scored in ice, texts of veins, I mean, I think I mean, veins of text, veins and bulging whorls of text embedded in ice, and your body moving through space and time is a glacier, or so you imagine, but then you realize (at some point you will realize) that you are entombed within the hulking chrysalis of glacier, a slow-moving behemoth, a blue-white mausoleum, you are awed by its size and silence—and you are existing within it. Crazy. To realize you are cargo and passenger of this vessel, the ship on which you are traveling is a glacier, which makes sense, now that you consider the shape and texture of your perception glassily blurred, as if projecting through sheafs of warped and mumpy cellophane. There is no discipline in this. There is nothing for you to practice, to do. The glacier, densely benumbed in godlike grandeur, drifts along icy waters—your ship, your home, houseboat, that’s it, the glacier is your houseboat. Far, far away from tons and cities, from society’s pall and viscous scrim. Where are all the rapacious gazes? The rapists? No evil people, the philosopher once opined, only evil revelations. None of these recollections from your previous life, or previously imagined life, amount to anything. You have moved beyond the confines of memory. In other words, in different worlds: the government and its legislative capacities that Memory sets up in the self is now defunct. Or, your moving distance, defaulted you from its jurisdiction. Regime change can be as simple as dislocation.
What is the difference between memory and fiction? What are the intersecting policies of their tenuous and subjective relationship? For example: You have a woman, a mother recalling her dead daughter. She sees her daughter playing on the beach, she is viewing this scene and relating to it as archived footage catalogued under the auspices of Memory: Once upon a time, my daughter played on the beach, and I watched. I witnessed her. Except … this never happened. The mother’s daughter died when she was three days old, she never had a chance to substantiate and affirm her life through the continuum of memories, memory-building … there was no projecting the self repeatedly into scenes, incidents, episodes, that one day would be recollected. The beach scene never happened, yet the mother, in her time-hunted eyes, was watching it happen, again … she was recalling vividly what for her was a bittersweet memory, with narrative attached—My daughter was so happy that day, playing with the sea, the waves. The mother is not experiencing her daughter and the beach as an invented story, an obliging fiction, she is re-membering, re-calling, not fabricating … this happened and is happening now, all at once. You have to wonder how much of what we’re remembering is what we want and need and are compelled to remember, how much of memory is fiction masquerading as factual imprints, or impressions based on phantoms, the publication of haze, the fever-dreams of want, the lingering spells of haunt. How many memories are sketched from outlines of what never happened?
None of it was going anywhere. It had been a while. Both things were true. Both could be beginnings. So let’s go with both: None of it was going anywhere. It had been a while.
I felt like a dehydrated man wandering aimlessly in a wasteland of publishing. To clarify: the publishing industry being the wasteland. Then, a chance. A dehydrated man wandering aimlessly in a desert lives for chances. Which is why the tease of mirages prove to be the death of many.
Anyway, a chance: I had an appointment with the V.P. of the big publisher C.C. Burton. My friend, Lana, a fellow writer, who always backed and supported my work, had wrangled the appointment with Elaine, the V.P., who was an old friend of hers. Elaine, like myself, was of Italian-American heritage. Elaine, like myself, was from Brooklyn. And because my novel was a crooked valentine to the Brooklyn of my youth, Lana thought that it might be a perfect fit for Elaine’s sensibility. It sounded promising. Most mirages do. They glitter in the daytime and disappear in the twilight. Of course, it’s always twilight when you arrive at the mirage. I’m sure Einstein could explain it. Anyway, the meeting.
I stepped into Elaine’s posh office. I saw a smallish woman dressed in a pale lavender suit seated behind a massive desk. Her hair was sculpted high. I wondered if she had sculpted it with Aqua Net. Was there still Aqua Net? Had it been banned by the Ozone Commission? My grandmother had petrified her hair on a daily basis with Aqua Net. My grandmother was long dead. Not because of the Aqua Net, mind you. Elaine appeared to be in her late fifties, early sixties. Definitely of the Aqua Net generation.
Mister Fillameno, Elaine said, please sit down.
I sat down in a wooden chair, facing her. I felt as if I were at the principal’s office, and was about to be reprimanded for something I had done wrong in class. Which was often how I felt. Especially when seated across from vice presidents with sculpted hair and lavender suits. Which was not often.
Elaine and I chatted. About Brooklyn. About no longer living in Brooklyn (I had expatriated to Nine Peaks, a small town in New Mexico, twenty years ago). We chatted about this and that, a casual volley, which led to my novel. And why she was passing on it.
You’re obviously a very talented writer, she said, and then highlighted what she loved about the book—the characters were incredibly nuanced and layered, particularly Anya in her tragic sadness. Yet, and it was a big yet—YET—the novel is too short to publish, especially by an unknown author. She needed a novel with more meat on its bones, more heft and bulk, if she were going to peddle it.
I don’t remember if she actually used the word peddle but that’s what I heard—peddle. Which made me think of hot dogs peddled by vendors at Yankee Stadium. Or a BMX racer with glow-in-the-dark-pedals. Elaine went on about pacing, character development, length, which then tied into prevailing marketing trends, and that’s when I cut her off.
I don’t write for the market. I write for the angels. And for God.
Where had that come from? I had never thought of myself as writing for the angels. And God. But it felt true when I said it. I could tell Elaine didn’t like being cut off, especially right in the middle of her dissertation on prevailing marketing trends. She pursed her lips tightly. They grew ashen, then pallid. Mortuary. I thought a touch of lipstick could revive them.
Lipstickless, Elaine sniped—That is all well and noble, Mister Fillameno, but I can assure you that God isn’t running the market. And he isn’t the one who will publish your books.
I didn’t know what to say. Elaine had me over a barrel. Was that the right saying? Had me over a barrel? Why a barrel? And wasn’t there something about monkeys and barrels?
Good luck to you, Elaine clipped, letting me know that our meeting was officially over and I should exit her office.
I stood up to leave, disoriented. I was still thinking about God and the angels. And monkeys and barrels. I hadn’t yet caught up to the present moment, to what was happening. I was leaving. Was meant to be leaving.
Good day, sir, Elaine said, as a sort of nudge to get me moving.
I left Elaine’s office. Walked the length of the carpeted hallway. To the elevator. Took it down to the lobby. Walked the marble floor to the glass revolving doors. And stepped out onto the teeming daytime sidewalk. I felt as if I had just vacated one dream, and entered another.
It felt good to be back in New York. It had been a while. And none of it was going anywhere. I started walking. I thought of previous rejections of my work, filing through the internalized catalog. Too short. Too long. Too obscure. Too much this, not enough that. It’s always something, as the late great Gilda Radner would gripe. Yes, sir, back in New York. Just another pinballing speck in the shadow of anonymity. In the shadow of monolithic buildings. This made me happy and sad. I wasn’t a young man anymore. Expect I was. Einstein could explain it.
You’ve got plenty left in the tank, kid. I often referred to myself, in the third person, as kid. It was a Babe Ruth thing. He called everyone kid, no matter wat their age. Apparently because he could never remember anyone’s name. Babe Ruth. There was a man who defied the odds. A cigar-smoking, hot dog-gobbling, beer-swilling giant who announced himself to the world as legend.
Who cares about age, I told myself. There’s no such thing as time anyway. Live as if you’re already dead. Then, and only then, will you come to fully embrace life and experience truer freedom.
What had happened to me? Somewhere along the way I had lost my nerve. My moxie and chutzpah. Parts of me, perhaps a bit punch-drunk, had gone into hiding. They didn’t want to get hit anymore. I understood. I sympathized with those parts. I had become a dormouse on a ledge. Or a vagrant Buddha standing on the street corner in the rain. Parts of me had.
Yet today, today something in me, something that had been walled up and dammed, had broken open. I owed it to Elaine. Her passive-aggressive assault on God and the angels. Her faith in prevailing marketing trends. Her use of the word peddle. I walked the streets of New York that afternoon, feeling pissed off. Feisty. Ready to take on all comers. I felt completely ready to let all my monkeys out of their barrels. Just to see them dance.
John Fante splashed vinegar into the eyes of the world. The vinegar was house-made, from his mama’s trusty cupboard. Mama’s cupboard contained a lot, an old-world apothecary glutted with cloves of garlic, deceit, shame, bones, crucifixes, oregano, thyme, rosary beads, dried insults. Fante swallowed Mama’s cupboard whole, and inherited deep red measures of his father’s bladdeerblown rage. The world was a stage set for Arturo Bandini to take his place. The role of a lifetime. Fante wouldn’t disappoint. He’d play Bandini like a sword thrust, like a jittery grenade. Desperation would become the pack of wild rabid dogs nipping at his heels—he’d outrace them, stay out in front, he would last, and in his gritty perseverance, the dirty greasy no-good name of Bandini would become golden and catered, marquee in its flashbulb pop. Fante could see it all, spread before him like a soft warm blanket in which the gravest of psychic wounds could be swaddled. He, third-class citizen and immigrant louse, he, John Fante, would beat the world into submission, and eternity would vouch for him.
Jean Rhys was a bedraggled feline. She’d slink through cobbled alleys, lap up Parisian rainwater. High sky glance the glittering harem of stars, and long. Cats are the masters of longing. Spiders are patient, but when it comes to longing, cats are unparallelled. Jean Rhys carried the swell and salty blessings of sea in her breasts and ovaries. She palpitated, regularly and religiously, the ocean as mirror, as window to the past. Cherish. If only cherish could find her longing, treasure it, then the two would harmoniously mate and spit out frothy sea babies, glistening baubles of agate and coral. If only… If only was the hymn that Jean spoke to sing herself to sleep, she undeserving of scorn and rape, would cover herself warmly beneath a bedspread of shadow, a most favored cocoon.
John Biscello 