The Mark Inside

A sick, long lull got into the salon tonight. You couldn't even call it a lull with a straight face. It'd be like calling a blackout a swoon. The silence held and held while the instigator stared stubbornly down at the sticky table and drank his beer. He sounded like my dog tryin' to get the last scraps of peanut butter out of the jar. You could tell he was used to beer from his own era.

That was the feel of the night after he made his little speech and I made mine - every man to himself, studying the grain of the table in front of him. It seemed once or twice that the lights even dimmed in shame. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.

It started with poetry, of all things. Talking about our favourite American poets and Clancy going, "Well, Whitman never wrote no novel," and Lamb going, "No, because poets shouldn't ought to write novels. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose and if you try to mix 'em up you just get bad poetry."

"Don't you get better prose if you put some poetry in it?" someone in the back said, hopefully.

"Like Michael Ondaatje," I said. "Sure. I can see that. Some of his prose reads a lot like his poetry set to verse. And some of his poems are, in fact, prose. They enrich and colour each other."

"Like Robert Graves!" said Spencer.

The room erupted into boos and hisses. Spencer drummed his empty pint glass on the counter until I snatched it from his hand and put it in the sink.

"Why not? Why not Graves?" he yelled.

"Graves separated them," said Mase coolly, gesturing at the usual bartender who had swanned swiftly past him holding seven bottles of coloured liqueurs by their necks. "Hey, honey. How about a Beesting?"

"She's got customers in the dining room, you dope," I said, seeing her hesitate. "Get back to the outside bar, kid. I'll make you your drink, Mase."

"If you're talking poetry, you gotta be well-lubed," he put forth. "Double. Anyway, Graves' novels are well-written - no one's disputing that, Graham - but his prose doesn't echo his poetry one bit. Well, I mean, except in like general tone. And of course the prophecies in the Claudian novels. But otherwise, it's pretty unpoetic stuff, you know?"

"Then there's the other guys," said Cal. "Hey, you ever read 'Naked Lunch'? By that wacko junky whatsisname? That's some awesome shit that almost reads like poetry, by someone who probably never wrote a poem in his life."

"I read that," I said diplomatically.

"I started reading that," said someone I'd seen a few times before. Even as he opened his mouth - pale and patterned like a whitewall tire - I knew there was going to be trouble in the salon. His voice was high with hysterical loathing. Stewart something. Almost albino, twitchy sort, never had anything to contribute.

"You didn't finish it?" said Cal.

"No," said Stewart. "No. Now look. I'm not one to say there's anything wrong with you know like homosexuality. It's not something you're supposed to say. So like nobody says it."

"I say it constantly," said Father Crutchfield, eagerly.

"In sixty years you're not supposed to say it ever," Stewart snapped at him. "So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. It's just like... it's not even a book. Everyone says you're supposed to read it like a long funny poem but I don't think it's funny and it's not a poem, it's not a book, it's just a lot of homosexuals doing shit to each other that you wouldn't even imagine."

It was about then that faces and eyes began their long descent to the table. Who could speak up and defend such a thing? Actually, I knew just the dame to do it, but she wasn't in that night. She would have shut him up pretty quick. If her legendary wit didn't do it, I mused grimly, her lead-lined handbag probably would.

Stewart went on, his face contorted with hate. "It's just a bunch of disgusting shit happening one after another. There's no... morals. There's no ethics. You don't get anything out of it except for sick to your stomach. Fucking drugs all the time, that's fine, that's Coleridge for Christ's sake. But all that sex with men. And women! The women in this book, they all fuck all the other women. And it's just described in the most revolting detail. Squirt by squirt. Grind by grind."

"Hey," Cal began, weakly.

"You finished it?" Stewart said, turning on his chair and draping his arms contemptuously over the back. "You? You like that kind of thing?"

And it had been said.

The lull began to settle just about then, dimming the bulbs of the dusty chandelier, crushing the heads on beerglasses. Even hats seemed to deflate under the pressure of that question.

I said, "You're an ignorant moron, Stewart, and you oughta be ashamed bringin' that kind of talk to a literary salon."

He snorted at me, erasing me with the flat of his hand, and surveyed the room full of embarrassed men with some small satisfaction as if to cancel out my interjection. I felt the blood rise out of my shirtcollar.

I added angrily, "And for what it's worth, I feel certain you pulled the Coleridge comparison out of your ass because your English teacher in grade nine told you he'd been high when he wrote Kubla Khan. You ever actually read that poem? Or anything else in your worthless life? Lemme guess. You started on 'Naked Lunch' because someone who actually understood the Beat movement passed it onto you. They overestimated your intellect, pal."

"I like the sound of the Beat movement," said Crutchfield. "What did they use?"

"Hard drugs, Father," I said briefly. "Stewart, hey. I got one for ya. So I read 'In Cold Blood.' What's that mean in your peanut-sized brain, that I like murders? That I ain't reading it because Capote writes like a motherfucker, but because I like to read about death, is that what you think?"

I waited in vain for somebody else to pipe up with, "Yeah, and you think I read 'Lord of the Flies' because I like little boys?" or "So you think I liked 'The Gulag Archipelago' because torture makes me hot?"

No one said anything. Stewart's thin face bloated with satisfaction like a spring toad. What could I do with someone who read books for their subject? How to kill that lull without stating the obvious - that all fiction was an irrefutable amalgam of subject, tone, soul, place, character, subtext, plot, and style, and anyone who read for a single element was too dense to float in the Dead Sea? How could shut this smug toad up without launching into an English 343 (The Modern American Novel, 8 - 9:30 Tues/Thurs) lecture about the cut-up technique, Allan Ginsberg, noir spoofs, travel writing, and the delightful American propensity for self-mockery?

People began to trickle out alone, even folks who had come in twos or threes. That's what the fucking redneck had done. He'd taken the value out of an important and intense flagship book and turned it into queer porn. Cal shot me a look of pure misery as he left, his thick beer half-finished beside a pile of coins. As the doors swung open and shut for the exodus I caught blips of sound from the band - one second of trumpet, one drumbeat, one word in a song. I was so mad I had to turn around and start stacking glasses in the sink. Piece of shit comes into my salon, sits at my table, drinks my beer, shames my friends.

Piece of shit.