FIRE SALE
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books. I guess I wanted to be as light as possible so that a wind
could take me. I knew that I couldn't create the experience I wanted,
so that like any motorless craft I had to depend on emptiness.
I forget the name of the cafe; it was on the left walking down,
chrome-trimmed, mirrored, a jukebox full of American tunes. Ray
Charles was favored and
his
hurt triumphant presence in the smoke
seemed to sponsor and dignify the nocturnal sunglasses masking many
of the young clientele. I was 29 that morning, a little older than
everyone, and I knew that the 20-year-olds were better than I had
ever been.
Senator McCarthy, Eisenhower, and Liberalism flourished when
I was at college; we thought we were great just to resist, just to get
laid.
So
much has opened up in those ten years, so many governments
discredited. We hated ideology, but the discipline was stilI hatred.
I'm still moving so I meet a lot of people younger than myself, and
sometimes among them I feel like Margaret Sangster at an orgy,
noble and irrelevant. I was glad to be hungry and light as I chose
a leatherette bench and a round table that gave me a good view,
glad that I had done my work and had nothing to tell anyone.
Because of the music and because I was American (albeit from
Montreal), because I was curiously in need of comfort, I congrat–
ulated myself on being an emmisary of the dominant world culture.
They were
all
wearing American sun-glasses, they were
all
trying to
sit in the loose way Americans wait for violence in bars, they had
all bought Hollywood and it served them right for 400 years of
cultural intimidation. These heavy consolations ended my fast and
my
sense of lightness even before I ordered the tomato juice. It was
all
ego luggage and adventure avoids the ego, especially the little
adventure of flesh which I knew could not happen while I drew these
tedious maps. I knew but could not learn that the suffocation of
armor is too high a price to pay for protection. There was some
pain in these moments, and I must have displayed an attractive
spiritual poverty, for when I looked up from the torn book, there
was
a
girl
staring at me.
She wore a black and white checked suit, white gloves, wide–
collared white blouse, over-dressed for the place. Her hair was blonde
but not the startling kind. She was sitting with three Algerian men,
sitting rather at the edge of their conversation like a precarious prize,
