Throw Your Hat in the Damn Ring

I believe, on the one side of my brain, that to go on writing about my life, its violence, savagery, immensity, love, beauty, it’s ugliness — in fact, the whole damn saga of misadventure and drunken escapades, is futile, while on the other side the idea of gentleness, contentment and my lifelong dream that somewhere magic was always waiting in the darkness. An unspoken word waiting to change everything but instead waking to the realization I was only marking time to my next drink; that realization then given up to dance with you, your scent lingering on my shoulder. When that scent disappeared, there was, of course, only drink to hold.

I’ve been a squatter, sometimes a gypsy, content anywhere, a long-time wanderer, my early life rootless, not collected at birth — but since collected. I became adept at conjuring up people’s love for me, carrying only what I wanted of their affection, or supposed, from place to place.

Feeling rugged as hell, I knew there was always somewhere I could get through the day; a place where night wouldn’t make me nervous. It does, still. The night makes me nervous. Not for any reason except that it catches me unaware and follows me the way a woman once did when she wanted something.

I waited, sometimes in hotels, on sidewalks, on faraway beaches, laundromats, or sitting in bars where the temptation to drink seemed a better prospect of happiness than waiting out my life for a new face to love. You know the kind, fresh and scrubbed, encircled by a halo of cascading hair. The beauty of it passing without a hello would break any man’s heart, stop his breath.

I know that life sometimes hangs on, if only long enough to get through the day’s lies.

So, it seemed important that the savagery of my life put into words should stay largely private and unrecognized, except by those of us to whom, with age, truth has become a way of reconciliation.

It’s never easy to leave home, at any age, but lately there are things I didn’t think I would miss. The morning heather of Scotland, the lochs and the sea and the mountains and the sheep and the wooly cattle and the road map of a woman’s face drawn in spilt sugar, her hair made just so, and the coaxing of the old car to start. For Christ’s sake. Shit, just thinking this way…shit.

But — London. Going to the corner pub for a pint of bitter, then back to the bedsitter. The long silence I kept between the two armchairs, pen to paper, the scratching pen. Nights warm and snug with a lonely landlady, her arms and mouth and legs open to me, only to wake up in the morning sexually undernourished but still, happy to be warm and close to her enormous breasts, then tiptoeing back to down the stairs to my crummy digs, picking up my note book and pen and slipping away to find some chocolate for breakfast.

At least I got to keep my rent and later stopped in a wayside inn at lunchtime to escape the wintry streets drink bitter and eat potato and bangers. Sitting inside a pub, tobacco smoke filled, thawing in front of a fire, I couldn’t help but think about the act of selling myself for rent. Her body was plump and surprisingly silky, but not as clean as I would hope. I imagined, while in her narrow bed, the smell of brooks and streams tumbling through the Scottish Highlands. But the smell of an unclean woman never left me after London. I didn’t pay rent again. She wasn’t a whore. I was.

The Italian was hairy, but God her soft mounds were as needed as paddles with a canoe. She was clean and her wide mouth fresh smelling, breathless grunts and wriggles and struggles, rounded thighs, orange coloured panties and black bra in a heap. Como was a place of celebrities, but the hotel had maids far more spectacular, skins that glistened, bodies that in the night seemed to keep the heat of the noon. With one I fought. Why? Because she called me a dreamer, but I am not a dreamer, she said. I do not understand your dreams, what is it you want? I lived a week with a small time adulterous Italian suburbanite. I can only be patient with women while they are available to me. Suddenly there was nothing to talk about. Unhappy eyes. Unhappy silence. She wanted me to stay, work on myself, stop drinking. Fuck that while the world passes me by. But the world has passed me by. I was no longer young, no longer vibrant, not clever, only full of frustrations. And all the time I was lonely.

Fuck — London again. I only mention Jackie’s name because she didn’t want to fuck me, and she wasn’t gay. My life this last two years was surely a sorry end to a sad beginning, with nothing real to thread my story through the morass. She sat on the floor in her shorts with her strong shapely legs tucked under her and her pretty face screwed up in a frown, her jaw working on the gum. Why should I worry what she thought?

She was not good for me. Not at all. She was not good for me because I was afraid of her. I just want to get the damned thing finished and off my back, I said. She was only an office typist, but she was intelligent. She said, Look, who am I to judge, I’m not a highbrow. To be quite honest I don’t understand it. I like the story, that’s what I read a book for — then a long pause, long enough for an author to die without fame — Don’t spoil it by trying to put more story into it. What does it matter if it’s not published. It’s for you, you said.

You see it right there. It’s the lies we tell.

But fifty was and sixty too. These years ought to be the royal years when people seek me out, either in the bedroom, or about town. To those who feel they have failed too often I hope you’ve been collecting the hats along life’s runway.

If so, throw another into the ring.