CREEP
BLOCK
239
Frappe did I remember the cane. But by then it would have been
risky as well as too late to do anything about it.
But the next day I wanted to go out again. I got an old cane
with a crook from the Salvation Army, carefully painted it white,
made a broad band of red six inches up at the bottom, and out of
some raffish impulse added two red
rings
on the handle. Then I laid
out all my regalia: cane, heavy dark glasses, an old and ulcerous
white enameled cup, and the sign that hung around my neck. On
dirty yellow cardboard, lettered
in
labored Gothic script was the
announcement "BLIND, BUT VERY MERRY." Fully turned out,
I was free to work any well-crowded street with my most penetrating
stare.
For a full, fIxed, frank gaze is the moral equivalent, in public,
of the private glance that steals visions through keyholes. In any open
crowd of strangers, a certain kind of candid but relaxed staring is the
most ill-advised of acts. It must be camouflaged to be effective. Walk–
ing, waiting, milling, hurrying or dawdling citizens meet your open
gaze with various reactions; but the blushes, the raging, the sudden
twitch of terror or sneer of resentment have in common one thing.
They are the same signs of inner disturbance that the recipient of
your stare might evidence when, sealed
in
his
bright, tiled bathroom,
fresh from the indulgence of some private and idiosyncratic little
ritual, the medicine chest were to fly open, and a face (yours, or
Harpo Marx's, for instance) were to appear through a sliding panel
in its back, wearing a bland look of studious concentration. Even at
best, the citizen would tum away and then you would have to work
up the stare
all
over again. Ronnie Gocart, who
in
my late childhood
would share with me two blocks of homeward walk after school, used
to advise me with confidential seriousness: "Always look 'em right in
the snatch and then they can't tum away." I remember taking the
advice very seriously, but it was some years before I realized that the
young ladies in question probably thought,
if
anything, that I was
staring at the ground as I trudged sloppily along. I mention this now
only as an object lesson: here intention was thwarted; that it was
successfully disguised was insufficient consolation, that they didn't
turn away became unimportant.
But
in
Los Angeles I learned to see much through the mask of
darkness. I never pretended to be blind in New York, for reasons that
I still don't fully understand; but within a few weeks after I'd come
