Off the Road - 07

a jazz novel on a typewriter

7

The mountains were close in on us ass we went down US 7 in Vermont south of Rutland which was a maniac fury that was ass close to divine wrath as anything either of us had discovered in this or any other lifetime with the dogs and all of the birds scattering before us.

“Sal, we are going to stay with a woman in Bennington. She has a wicked mouth and a love for reading philosophy.”

“What kind of philosophy?” though I knew that it really didn’t matter because I got stuck with Hume and didn’t want to go any farther.

“Like the modern type: Derrida, and Foucault, and all the rest of that crowd, they call them continentals because England keeps wanting to set itself apart like the monkey who is to cool for school. She just digs the way that the Continental crowd comes to their nose at everyone else and goes their own way. It gives her ex-professors gas and then they bloat.”

“You certainly find the most interesting people to shag with.”

“You grease the knob and I supply the poor on the spigot for the grease.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way but that is the division of labor that we had come up with: I was the tubes, and he supplied the fuel. Once again caught in our fossil fuel paradigm. I knew that everyone had to escape the same black fate and go slipping away into darkness. But then I ask Dean:

“We will be okay if she sticks to the swearing, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll be any good disgusting the philsoph of Sophia.”

“Don’t worry she is in tune with crystals and taro and will find the harmony that will hold you up.”

I tried to think about the person who still held to that old age New Age paraphernalia but my mind to a blank like the shot that killed the movie. Then I cursed my lips and saw how the sun still had not reached the tops of the flade-out mountains with maple trees and white pines as their protectors, even though it was 9 AM and we had only been driving since Burlington where we stayed for a night with an old friend of Dean’s. And so, we ended up in silence through the boughs that needed pruning and the wildflowers that needed picking and the smelly garbage cans that needed scooping just outside the limits of Bennington where once they had an independent college which had been bought out by a mega-conglomerate University in Boston. There was just enough driveway to ditch the car and by the time we got out the front door had opened, and a very thin woman fitted with golden chains and silver hair came bouncing out the concrete stairs and planted on his mouth a kiss beyond kiss. The only other piece of infomazione was that her first name was Remi, that she only wore dresses or skirts preferably with flowers in blue, and that she liked the old singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billy Holiday.

 Then we were outside the inside of her boudoir, and I understood that when you go in for one thing then you are in for all things mystical and magical and secret. The walls were hung with beads and floral scarves on top of an aged tie-dyed wallpaper which was completely out of fashion and I wouldn’t know where to find it if I looked. The bed was a futon that was completely out of wear and had not been made up since at least Led Zeppelin made a tour. Perhaps one of the band slept on it and she was keeping the mattress in the same condition like they were married on it and then he got up from it. There is a small difference between sleep and death: the only real difference is that with death you don’t wake up. Who knows?

 Then she laughed because she realized I had never seen the inside of a person who was outside the outside. She picked up two the hearings off her Victorianesque nightstand and showed them to me: one was a Harlequin and the other one I did not recognize. She must have seen the quizzical look on my face and she said that the man was Pierrot and they were a set out of a French poet whose name I did not catch. On both of them there were parts that were not painted but instead were blanked in a way that seems like the present is in the painting and it was like there was the throw of the dice when a square would or would not be painted in a frame clasp of electric sheen. Then she said to me:

“Do you like it?” I was so taken aback that I managed to blurt out in soft tones:

“What are they doing in the poem?”

“Ther’re getting drunk on the moonlight which comes down in fantastical rays as if their movements were entertainment for the group that surrounds them.”

“Like warriors?”

“Could be but the thing that mirrors what the audience wants is that the sent drives them crazy so that they want to screw.”

There was a mystical rhythm to her voice and her eyes were staring out into mine and I was captured by the cryptic rhythm and tilted in words as if to embrace her. But then she stood up and looked at Dean and I saw that she was going to do with him whatever she wanted to do because that was Dean’s reason for being here.

 So we talked for a while and then the beds were allotted with Dean and Remi taking the futon and I was left taking the very small couch and I saw that they locked the door and I was on the outside of the inside like a diǎo waiting for things to happen to get because it had no stretch of its own.

We slept and in the morning before Remi was awake we got out into the heap and we on the road to New York and points beyond where there were few trees and even fewer mountains.