A. She Might Be Lonely
I am young, Nieppe is young, the world is young. Despite the wars which twist on our genders, the expectations of our lives dissolve into dark cyberspaces controlled by the underground monarchy. Poetry is an eyelash in Lucius the Wanderer's vomit: let me expectorate onto your jewelry with it, & more! Let me dream away from this charnel-lot He threatens to inveigle one & all with; we are in time and all Time from which tragedians of History embarked onto a savage cruise. I spin from the womb-web of channel one intrigue, in search of true sex and love within the bountiful preserves of being (here in the new Europa of the 21st Century), impassioned as an iris strobe-lit on plasma TV.
Yet somewhere The Burgher waits to ensnare us. Is he good, evil, or nothing? Sometimes he's little alternative to middle eastern wars my native America seeks to strongarm. Here in Amsterdam, Holland I'm a U.S. soldier on a leave without end, mocking this arrondissement of sultry heart.
I've come to write poetry on the water, not shred it with arms. Here in that gay capital traversed by the tracks of machinery and seeded by the aftermath of revel. From the train out I go, into the expanse of freshly-hued morning, having dreamed of Paris in my cramped compartment matronly madams occupied with bourgeois tenacity, plus that aging pristine fellow, black-suited, sitting by the door. Looking up, above my head there's the comforting baggage rack, and I shudder back into my leathery confines, head-tilted, eyes re-closing into a nap which brushes my thoughts with the testicles of creation, the manicure of divine yen.
I, Lucius Amaranthus, seek the truth of the original fairy tale. What was really told to the first couple in the Garden of Evil?
Opening my Etruscan eyes, I come onto this port city gilded by early morning sunlight, disembarking with suitcase in hand from Central Station, across the cobble-tracked expanse near the old church. Knowing what comes with the yen for promised adventure, some poured relic down the watery branch of a glorious mothered tree. Leaves paint on my eyelids. Walking steadfast in the attic chill, regaling all graces of being while imbibing the air and its sundry wonder. Hawked at by vendors with various wares, shaking off their brow-beaten workday grind, pausing only to smell the flowery breath of bouquets arrayed in movable stalls. Wondering whether to buy a few, perhaps pluck one stray bulb to carry in the bough of hand, dark lily for my maundering?
Somewhere beautiful girls with their whispering glances beckon. Their lips betray some hallowed secret beyond my ken. I despise the profane exposure but go on, in quiet wonder, wearing my white Levis and yellow PX-bought polyester jacket, with boots of Italian leather already scuffed.
The streets are alive with icy bustle of caress, wind songs abrade my face as sounds of being coalesce into unheard lament (a whole history here mutely remembering its turreted span) vying with traffic horns from trams and autos that stream across intersections still rubber-tongued by tire-wattled design. It's a cold Spring morning and the latent knowledge I'm pursuing some greater destiny nestles with walnuts in my brain. Nearby a street beggar is drowsing in a spate of imprecation's prayer.
Drowsing for a spate of down-falling prayer. A hotel here bears the recommendation of a friend I know well enough to despise, so I avoid it and head across the big track-filled bridge and pick one along the less accommodating confines of Canal Street. There I'll settle, more or less, for the new few indefinite days, drunk and reading a filched pornographic bore from a busy newsstand. Filched because any price is too dear for something temporarily stolen from the wellsprings of commercial insensibility. A nice small room big enough to pass for water-closet coffin, sink to boot, no view, everything vapid like some interior scheme of mindless damnation. The lights are always cell-like yellow in here, the curtains always limp with muslin foreboding, and I think this must be the dim confines for any misbegotten crime, this second story throwaway. The bed is uniquely different from a mattress-wrecked bunk, so tides of somnolent evermore are weathered in its mahogany framework perfect for punishing bones.
People outside bustle in darkness, there's a light shower descending. Having changed into clean Levis and white dress shirt, following a soapy sponge bath over every square inch of my anatomy, I'm slowly awakening, free of the strange hotel at last, and on my way to prowl the grand edificial ramparts calling me.
* * * *
There was a woman in the vague trance of Friday night, stalking streets sentry-like outside a whore's quarters on that fabled, canal-locked mazeway. She had, curiously enough, the look of no common prostitute but possessed an aesthetic bearing bordering on self-conscious camp. I was shuffling, ambling about, cigarette dangling from my pomegranate purple lips, when she asked, "What you out here for, soldier boy?" In the most purely American Southern accent a quasi-foreigner could affect.
I came closer, gauging the reality of her face with its lilt of cosmetic eyebrows, and in that damp radiance saw her. Saw her cream-fine visage overshadowed by a decadent make-up. Her coiffure of auburn curls was a mess, streaked by punkish, rooster-red whorls.
"Light me." She revealed a long cigarette drooping from her puckering lips. "I'm waiting for a train."
"I can't believe that," I said, producing my ornate lighter to do the trick.
"Haven't you seen anyone like me before?" she gushed. Instead of expelling the smoke cinematically back at me, like a vapory exclamation, she appeared to be sucking it in. She crossed her spike-heeled shoes, sequined and faintly glittering around immaculate feet. And held that pose. I smelled exotic perfume, saw her long fingernails with their nacreous shade curve out like some intimidating dragon lady's. She began to curse, narrow-eyed, while encouraging me to fill the vacuum of her presence. A white trenchcoat enwrapped her stellar figure, taller than my 5 foot nine inch own.
"I've been waiting for you! Well, you know, how does it feel to have your hair, most of it, shaved like that?"
"I don't feel it anymore."
She scoffed. "I once wanted mine that short. Nun-bunny, you know." Suddenly she glanced with flitting agitation to the right and left of me, displaying a beauteous Aryan profile, her nose resembling those found on unearthed kouroi, with slender and proud nostrils too nature-perfect. "Do you think they'll arrive? Do you think they'll come?"
"Who?"
"The sex police with menace in their hearts. Is there menace in your heart?"
She ejaculated hysterical giggles, eyes orgasmically closed, head heaven-tilted. "Oh — my God!" she announced, stamping the cobblestones with her right heel. I stood, startled, expecting to be impaled — either by mace-squirting ink pen, or cunningly sharpened nail file — on the spot. "You do look like a mole, with that ethnic nose of yours. What are you, Mexican? Spade? Bastard?"
"I'm American. You're American, aren't you. You're not Dutch?"
"I'm not German either."
"Well, I've known racists before, and some of them were women."
"Was your mother a woman?"
"My mother was Jewish. My father was Greek."
"Your mother is Jewish. Your father was Greek."
"Yes, that's right."
She looked away. "I never had a family."
"I'll bet."
"I've never had anything."
"What are you, anyway?" I asked, doctor-style, trying to match her spite-
ful tone.
"I'm drunk. I'm fucked-up, honey."
"No shit."
"Well, all right. I'm an actress and I'm out here creating a part, getting the atmosphere." She glanced at me, then stared quietly, the facsimile of compassion. "I know why you're out here. You ran away from the army."
"I'm on leave."
"You're drunk and you're looking to score sexual favors. You're trying to get drunk and you're trying — you're working up the courage — to buy a woman's favors." She laughed.
I thought to myself, That's a lie. I'm out here because I'm lonely, like you're not, and there's nothing else to do on a street like this. However, if there were a cinema here, a legitimate movie house with erubescent foam carpet and roomy, high-backed chairs.
She began staring unrelentingly. Probably expecting me to decompose for her benefit. Again she crossed her feet, cocking one model-style, resuming her do-adore-me poses. "See this porch, this stoop, nearby which I'm leaning?" She was pressing against the wall. "And see the door before it — and also, angling off to the right, see the large darkened window, curtained for the moment?" Like a street punk she flicked away her cigarette and smiled. "The pro working there is out now. She's not working tonight."
"I understand."
"Oh mother-fuck-you," she said charmingly. "I know her — she's a kind, generous person. A warm, loving person." She went up the steps and unlocked the door. "Come on, baby. Do you like coffee?"
I was looking down into the black-webbed recesses around the porch. The minute crevices you never notice, or never seem to, until they are monumentally electrifying. Suppressing tears I suppose, lachrymose goblets in my fishnet eyes (disappearing into her fishnet hosiery?), feeling myself cut-up and that word "baby" cutting me up more, feeling all the "love" there and wishing I really were too fucked-up to care about it. Certainly then I'd never remember it. Usually these places have no steps. You can go right in through the window. Or they can slide the glass back, allowing your entrance, and slam the sliding door back against your bourgeois head, as one did to me once, leaving it maliciously pinned for a millisecond. I went up the stairs and the piquant aroma of her trailing perfume was a reassuring, untapped answer.
* * * *
Her name was Nieppe. She said to call her that.
I said mine was basically Lucius Amaramus-ti, which it had been once, before being truncated, Americanized, into Amarathos — or Amaranthus.
Here was a place with the functional purpose of not being lived in, but homely all the same. In the corner by the far window, deep in a crimson semi-settee, a young hippie-type was drowsily ensconced. He was unmistakably Dutch, and had sensuous features bordering on grossness. He was called — oh — Frip. Nieppe and Frip. In the damask dusk of shielded, parched light she sat me down and went into an alcove of curtained beads where I could see her preparing coffee. It was nearly silent and warm, a big stove going with aromatic wood. Yet depressing was this smell amid the dried, odoriferous remnants of incense and marijuana, and perhaps even gingerberry tea on that shelf up there (she was yet to tell me about these variously fascinating teas she concocted for all occasions, inimitable brews of her own devising).
I had removed my jacket, shivering slightly, when she returned to observe me — her stray — in the more refreshingly personal home interior.
She whispered solicitously, "You're not ill, are you?"
I shook this off in a cursory way and stared warily at her. Nieppe's make-up was an alarming concoction all right. Like the most subtle vertical dividing line had been drawn down her features, leaving two incongruous, slightly non-aligned portions: the right side more darkly complected, with Afro sheen and a baroquely dangling circular ear-pendent; the other scarifyingly white, pale as the imagined skin of a held-captive-for-ten-days royal English virgin, right from Rossetti. With appropriately red-bleached curls wispily trailing off beyond nape to shoulder, resting on her mauve-sweater. Entangled even in the pearl-string around her swan neck, jewels resting in the braless, sweet musk of an unbuttoned crevice where her breasts held forth. Now that her coat was off I could see her skirt was Guatemalan rife in its colorful design, yet restrained.
Nieppe sat down in a cushioned chair across from me, leaned back and propped her feet on the small table between us. She then studied me for the next thirty seconds or so while the coffee perked. Then most gracefully she turned her profile to me, cocked her head back and closed her eyes. "No, you can't be ill. Do you want me?"
Taken aback, as was becoming increasingly usual, I only peered at her. How on earth could the great painter Vermeer have found enough true Dutch light to superbly reflect in his paintings? She rolled up her left sleeve and showed me some blue-black needle tracks. "Look. Do you want me? I need dope, more dope. Can you fix it?" She smiled mischievously, extending her tongue in a frivolously demented way. "Are you a virgin, Lucius?"
"Sure."
She went to get the coffee and, returning, served me with cloying politeness, which I rather liked. She sat down again, sipping, and observed Frip in the corner.
"Look at him, so blissful and knocked out, sleeping — sleeping!" She began to hum softly while observing. "Perhaps we can make him jealous, even outrage him. He might become enraged seeing us in a provocative position and attempt to maim you. I've seen him attempt to kill, he can become quite ugly. We've often tried to murder each other." From behind the picture window curtain a cat suddenly appeared, slinking into full view, prowling hungrily towards its mistress. "Little Devi," she chided down. With her extended toe Nieppe prodded the cat's nose, murmuring to it.
Eventually Nieppe told me there was another we'd be waiting for, the real occupant of the place, Lelica by name. She began to ask questions: Where was I from, did I enjoy the army, what did I think of Amsterdam? She did all this with perfunctory relish, treating me like an applicant for some dubious position.
Being one-wordish in reply and habitually monosyllabic, at least for the occasion, I felt liquored nausea begin to carry me into the swift fold of long-standing oblivion. Darling of my days, to whittle all sensibility so, precarious as it is.
"I'm really an artist," Nieppe confided blithely. And yes, scattered about the room were various pencil sketches and boutique art objects. Sadly these dreadful works were haphazardly and carelessly strewn about, like old newspapers.
I allowed that I, too, had an interest in art (painting) which I might pursue after the military. She became puzzled by this while leaning back, having lit an eminently piquant cheroot, eyes glued to ceiling. She was back in the private recesses of unapproachable what? The very behavior which pierces my ethnic sides, removes hope from the crucible of my lungs. "Oh silly, silly rot. Bloody silly rot. I want to know all about myself. I was born in the gladspell climate of North Carolina, later moved to Northern California. My parents were bourgeois itinerant nobodies, my dear, common hard-working depressing stalwarts. I resolved to become a ballerina, to move to some great city, to involve myself in the affairs of state. Do you know what I did? I let some half-distant non-male cousin ravish me at a very tender age, and crawled forever into the arms of limbo. I became — yes — a waitress in Los Angeles, then a barmaid, then a dancer in devious dives, a shaker of boobs, a mover of parts. Then I euphemistically slept with numerous individuals of all stripe. I threw myself into a river once. I hustled greybeards with tinder in their loins. I'm enraptured by the fear of death, you know. I love fear in all its magnitude, I love to distress people, to reduce them to the trashy milieu of an existence they think they can pay their way in and out of."
I sat, coffee now cooling, pensively rubbing my forehead. "I'm just a drunk G.I. trying to buy very expensive sexual favors." And appended a false chuckle.
Nieppe shot me a furious glance, resuming her odd smoking habit, whereby she inhaled — or appeared to inhale — smoke into her lungs without ever exhaling, until its residue trickled in tenebrous strands from her nostrils all over her half-asphyxiated face. The cheroot remained propped between her lips, tilted upward.
"How did I come to Europe," she asked herself. "Well, what's an ocean? I've always been travel-prone, yet never would I dare plug into a connection without adequate redress." She laughed ecstatically, gauging my reaction. "Do I appall you, Lucius My Warrior?"
I assured her it was only my present condition that appalled me: being in already such hungover straits with the evening not half-over.
"Then perhaps you are the appalling one. There's someone or something appalling in the air, don't you agree?"
I was knocked back inside my cranium, drifting in purblind eternity for I don't know how long, when a striking blonde entered the room from the chilly dark, and that was the first moment I saw Lelica. It might have been a minute or a month since Nieppe had last spoken. Lelica scrutinized us both for a dour second, slightly cross-eyed (her most perplexingly ugly yet beautiful flaw), and went to the corner where Frip snored. She lifted up his right eyelid with a thumb, studying his bloodshot orb. "He might be comatose for all you care," she said for Nieppe's benefit.
"He crashed, Lel."
Lelica averred that Frip was nearly unconscious, stroking his forehead and brushing back his hair frizz.
Nieppe shrugged, feeding herself cashews. She introduced me then, but Lelica was still concerned with Frip, her back to us. Finally she turned to glare at Nieppe. The look said: Another Of Your Jokes? Nieppe ultimately stretched, recrossing her propped-up legs, and became languorously insolent.
Slowly Lelica began approaching me, and an immemorial recognition flirted between us — or at least for yours truly. There in the flickering candle light (no, there was also a small table lamp with a purple shade radiating that tint) she came forward with inestimable gravity.
"I'm Lelica."
"He's Lucius something-or-other," Nieppe prompted.
She was alluring, with an immaculate austerity about her, as if all the beauty of her sex had been transmuted into an effort of intelligence, and could only be revealed — that paradoxically oozing sensuality — should she will it. Her face half-shadowed, she was leaning contrapposto-perfect, wearing a calf-length beige coat and Italian shoes. "Listen to darling Nieppe at your own risk. She's an incredible schizoid, and likes to play siren roles for her own selfish benefit. Don't you, Nieppe?" Nieppe made a thumb-and-forefinger O.K. sign at me. "Has she burned you yet?"
"No."
"Her last companion had his pompadour burned off. Do you think I'm lying? It would be to your advantage to leave now. She'll hurt you, my friend."
"Listen to her," encouraged Nieppe.
"I'm a little weird myself," I chuckled stupidly. Lelica eyed me coldly while I continued. "It runs in the family. Such violent activity is a form of repressed love, I've been told." I kept up my solo laugh, savoring the yuk of it all.
"You misunderstand," said Lelica. She was unnervingly portentous. "With Nieppe everything is defunct to begin with. She takes pleasure in trying to right an impossibility, which further excites her. You, being ‘right,' will in effect be stood on your head. With Nieppe, this is an act of goodwill — it balances her wayward measures."
"Nursemaid Lelica!"
"To right conversion you must wrong the norm. That's clear enough, isn't it, Mr. something-or-other?"
I nodded, coffee-sipping. I was too groggy at the moment to remember where the right measures got off, but I agreed emphatically. "Right the wrong, wrong the right," Nieppe was singing, delighted with new lyrics. She was humming a Cole Porter then Elton John accompaniment of slovenly sorts. "'Cause baby you better right that godawful wrong, shoo-bee do."
"This is strong coffee."
"It's altered, baby," said Nieppe, again giggling.
"Well, a little bourbon."
"Anacin plus Listerine!"
"Well, maybe some bourbon on top?"
Lelica became further repulsed by this. "Isn't he just aghast?" she demanded accusingly, hanging up her coat in the pseudo-foyer closet. "No one will ever equal your morbidity." Returning, she sat on the small couch facing us. "Where's Nils?"
"He's out staying the execution of a friend."
For a mini-second my being swooned looking at Lelica. Nieppe was relating what I'd said earlier about my ambition in life, which was to attain my own sense of inner peace. She continued carrying on, all guffaws. "He's in the army and he's looking for peace, ha-ha."
Was Lelica American? No, but she had lived in America briefly — New York — during those three formative years.
Well, I said, then they'd both had a go in the States?
No, said Lelica, her friend Nieppe had never really been born there, being all jive, "all Dutch."
I can't say that such revelations debunking my faith in Nieppe upset me terribly. I was far too taken with this newcomer. She sat there almost demurely with legs crossed, wearing a magenta scarf around her alabaster throat, and — of all things — a man's red-lined vest, under which the silken folds of her blouse deployed the ample thrust of her breasts. And, of course, she wore slacks — quite often, I was to learn, though she possessed astonishingly lovely legs, the match for Nieppe and more. ("It's her bullshit feminist period," Nieppe told me later. "She's camping the memory of her dead dyke sister, murdered in the raw by an agrarian gypsy.")
I've no idea how long we conversed in such fashion, but the restful ambience soon had me drooping within the cushiony yield of chair, and I remember Nieppe shrilly insisting — perhaps to the ceiling — that without doubt I was to stay the night, and I recall a conspiratorial feel to the final exchanges between the two.
When I awoke, it seemed amazingly that I might not have slept at all — perhaps ten minutes at the most. I was in the same chair, struggling for alertness, trying to resume my part in the conversation, if need be (though Nieppe had made it clear my able contribution was that of an "attentive voyeur," more than enough). Was I alone?
The lamp still burned, but it was morning, I wagered, since brilliant white glints of sunlight cut widening beams into the carpet, slicing in between the curtains. I sat back, listening to the calming tick of the wall clock across the room (it said 7:13; and, to my mild surprise, the sleeping Frip was still askew in the chair beneath it), pondering the nearly eccentric nature of my situation. Several minutes later I heard another presence stirring in the room, felt its distinct footfalls approach my chair.
I was wide awake, and Nieppe was leaning over me, grinning mischievously. The garish S & M paraphernalia she held became an offering I wouldn't resist.
