Three from Shaving

Iowa

When I think of it now I still see just how ugly and dirty the place was, just what a bare unprotected monk-like life it was that year, living first in the old tire warehouse on the outskirts of town, no toilet or sink, no furniture, nothing except two ratty mattresses, fruit crates, blankets from home, unfinished splintery lath walls, gobs of oozed gray mortar hardened between the bricks, and everywhere the bitter acid stink of tire rubber, the acrid air of dirt and dust, everywhere in high black stacks truck tires, car tires, hundreds, except for one small room, probably an office once, where we slept and read. The teeth-like treads gleamed in the dark. Some nights I’d choke with asthma from the filth, from rage, from how far away home was. Some nights we’d lie in our room reading by the sallow light of the small bulbs of the bed lamps we got at a junk shop and nailed up on our walls. Outside the fields of Iowa went on forever, a ditch of yellow mud bordered the north wall. Some nights Bob and I would bundle up in everything we owned and go out and stare at the shoals of stars, pale surfy light blotches pulsing slightly, go out half-drunk and stand in the lampless city-less darkness rambling about poetry, family, sex, loneliness, about almost anything. Once, I remember, I took out an old silver Bach cornet I had picked up in a pawnshop in town for 15 bucks and tried to play the thing, stood on the edge of the ditch leaning back and pointing the horn straight at the sky, but all that came were a few squawky mewing fart-like tuneless wails, jagged held notes, and at one point—the horn against my lips—I took a wrong step into the ice-crusted watery slough and stumbled and fell and almost broke off my front teeth. For months I carried the mouthpiece in my pocket, fondling it, taking it out to heft, practicing on it to build my lip, fweeting a few raw notes when I felt like it—walking across campus, on the street, anywhere. I kept myself company like that, I became somebody else, mostly Bix, because I envied his sweet pure tone, the steadiness and range, his quick, condensed phrasing, the direct brevity of his style, a miraculously articulated, clear, triumphant sadness. But before long we took an apartment in the heart of town—had cleaner mattresses, desks, a couple of chairs, book-cases built with cinder blocks and boards—two rooms, a big double door between them, where we’d each write, often at the same time early in the morning or late at night. It was wonderful being serious about writing, seeing oneself as capable as the stars of moving someone, of holding a human gaze, wonderful feeling haunted, if you were lucky, by lines, impulses, hot unformed combinations of phrases that led your hands over the keys at a speed beyond understanding, beyond experience. Then out would come the paper with words on it and you’d begin again—chop, change, shift, hack, put something back or stick it somewhere else, anything seemed possible in that mood—to hear the necessary mind of the poem. Otherwise it was classes and the usual college shit: football games, parties, gossip, worry about grades. Then the snow came and everything was lost under it, everything slowed. Sometimes it fell hip-deep. People wallowing through it would plow paths along the sidewalks and across the streets at corners. The quads and fields were cratered and scarred with ruts like a moon map glowing blue-white. It’s hard to give you the mood of Iowa City after one of those big snows but I think I was happier then than I knew, trapped there, purified of choice by isolation, schedules breaking down, the roads out of town impassable for a day or two. We’d stay up till three or four in the morning, playing pinball machines in an all-night diner a few blocks away, or reading and trying to write. The vividness of words on a page in a book, the sound of the human voice on a printed page was never more compelling and intense than on those long nights of immense peaceful silence while the snow under the street lamps simply lay there, consolingly white and quiet, going on for miles. The Workshop Quonsets looked like sleeping animals, down by the Iowa river. You could walk across it and not step through; you could see, you believed, the wide gray street of water underneath roiling past. It made my scalp prickle to see the uncountable rows of footprints crossing and recrossing (“lovely wounds in the snow”), blurred intersected patches embellishing the snow-riddled lid of ice. It looked eerie, too meaningful—why I still can’t figure out—the bright, pocked, luminous crust scored by those shadowy all-alike holes. And nothing came there, not at night in the bleak Midwestern cold, unless an animal happened by. The still, dry cold drove people together, inside. But that was only one thing it was good for. By day or at night, if you were out of town (after the roads were plowed) where it begins to seem nothing exists but fields, endless open fields, if you looked across the sugary land, blindingly flat by day, serene and muted at night, you might say that the silence and the peace you felt had always been and always would be, even the three black wires overhead threading out of sight in both directions couldn’t disturb that belief; you might also come to see that the simple two-lane road and the spare sharp gray houses and silos and barns and little scattered buildings had been placed there by people who do not care where they live so long as it rests in the midst of such deep quiet—farms cleanly fenced to hold animals and mark property lines, so far from many people, so far from needing you. I never sensed all that, exactly, when I was out there, that far from town. And another thing that sticks with me I can’t quite shape with words was one night borrowing a girl’s red Jaguar four-door sedan, belting down a few then leaving town to pick up the interstate, rifling away, and, aware I was feeling nothing, aiming down the endless chute at the point where houses and trees stop and almost nothing is left but the road and dark, and a few faint shapes, a few houselights are visible, just there where the world seems to peter out, slapping down my foot on the gas pedal, flooring it, keeping it there until I was absolutely sure I was alive, still alive, seeing the long white shining walls spit from the snowplow, risen on each side of the road higher than the car, rush by, go through me into infinity.