HAROLD BRODKEY
385
"You don't talk like
a person,"
he said.
"That's so. I don't talk like a person. But, Johnno, listen: part of
what is between us when we talk are our physical differences: I live
inside a body and feelings and sensations that are mostly unlike
yours all the time, and you think they're mistaken ones, fascist ..."
He shook his head,
no, no, no .
"This is hard to think about: I want to
believe people are alike, that I share things with everyone, the same
evidence of the world. I do and I don't. Mostly I'm not typical. Well,
listen, I think you are fabulously wrong, too. When you think you're
being impressive, I think you're too jittery, too beset ... Come on,
tell me, J ohnno , are there really any good
poems
about sexual
content–
ment,
Johnno?"
He said, "No, there are only my tears which I am going to send
to the Vatican for safekeeping and perhaps for display in the Borgia
apartments. Or the Raphael
stanze."
In those days I talked more elaborately than I wrote; I gave
myself up to it-to talking. I used him, he was the occasion for some
suicidal flights in which I found out what I thought. "Is it an ar–
chitectural or is it a watery sense of
things
that you get through your
tears? When you're in tears, do you see everything as an architecture
of water? Is it more like Hokusai or hocus-pocus -"
"I may use 'architecture of water'."
"I'll make you a gift of it. To make up for other things."
"I won't take it as a gift, if you don't mind. I'll just take it." He
was half-snide - half-stilled which is to say half pure listener for a
moment. He meant a good poet steals . T. S . Eliot had said that. I
smiled at him and he burst out: "You are only a dirty picture but I
am important ."
He had feelings, you see, where I had none. And he was op–
pressed by the fight of language and rivalrous - and maybe he was
aroused by it - and he was half not-listening so he could steal and
not be oppressed. But he was special because of the way he added,
"But you are a very, very important writer."
I was drunk, and - I don't need to tell you - I was stupid: I
sang, "'Somewhere, under the Rimbaud .'"
"Ran-boh," he mocked. "Listen, don't ever masturbate, don't
ever even touch your prick, just remember there are others who need
it : others need your nice cock more than you do."
"That's a nice thought," I said startled. "Is it true?" I blinked.
"Maybe that thought will change my life."
"You're naive. You know nothing," he said, drunkenly acidulous
