Thomas McGuane - Panama

But what I line up ahead of time is an imaginary stroll with him through some unsuspecting neighborhood, the old man’s face suspiciously Indian, blunted with vodka, turning to every detail in the street, nothing missed, no gaiety lost for knowing that it all ended badly.

Sometimes the stroll is down in the Casa Marina with the plywood gothic facades and the terrible sigh of air conditioning in the jasmine. Yet at the end of a street, the ocean will roll toward you hauling its thousand miles with a phosphorescent pull. I note an odd detail here and there, but my old man would be the one to spot the banker’s wife staring in an upstairs mirror, waiting for the scream to start in the shag carpet. Nevertheless, it was all acceptable to him; he would shrug. Drunk enough, he would turn his head between his upraised shoulders and look for the next instance of the disease, something crooked, the smell of a child’s run-over puppy hidden in the garbage, beginning to turn in the heat. Or simply the suddenly unkempt lawn of a young couple learning to watch the dream vanish. As my life quiets down, menaces begin to appear, and whether I’m inventing them or they are real doesn’t matter to me.

I stand for those who have made themselves up.

I am directly related to Jesse James. That is true. We were out of Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and hid him in our barn more than once. I have played in that barn, and in fact, it is within the gloomy space beyond the hay mow where Jesse James is supposed to have hung upside down, with his percussion Colts in his trousers. Cole Younger didn’t have his black impracticality, and while Jesse disappeared mysteriously with his beard in the nineteenth century, Cole Younger shaved every day and timed quarter horses on the brush tracks of Missouri when nobody knew what a quarter horse was. Everybody in my family lived on the edges of the Civil War, Key West, and the bloody borders; we couldn’t live on the main line. But we fought shit-suckers whenever we found them. My maternal connection, on the Jesse James side, owned an interest in a foundation horse still talked about, White Lightning, stolen out of Reconstruction Tennessee and taken to Missouri. If any of this is not true, I will say so. Two men came out of Tennessee to reclaim White Lightning and were not heard from again. There was a cloud on the title forever. All of this horse’s progeny were running fools, sorrels and chestnuts. My grand-uncle said that when they would come into the barn out of the rain to shake themselves dry, it sounded like thunder. And that was how you knew they could run. He said that if Jesse James had had colts out of White Lightning instead of just grade horses and plugs, he would have been governor of the state of Missouri. I personally think he was someone who could not live on the main line any more than me or my fairie uncle. And I’d like for nobody to find that out the hard way. White Lightning’s get came to one hundred thirty-six live foals; and the prettiest one, a chestnut with a blaze face, kicked him to death in a Missouri corral.

They could all run.

* * *

We want a little light to live by. A start somewhere. Little steps for little feet. Or even something commanding, scriptural or mighty. I myself am discouraged as to finding a hot lead on the Altogether. Like every other child of the century deluded enough to keep his head out of the noose, I expect God’s Mercy in the end. Nevertheless, I frequently feel that anybody’s refusal to commit suicide is a little fey. Walking about as though nothing were wrong is just too studied for the alert.

* * *

There was a writer on Elizabeth Street who had had some success and broke down or burned out. We drank together once in a while in a bar whose owner had nothing more to say for himself than that he had thrown Margaret Truman out for disorderly conduct. He enjoyed needling the writer on crowded nights when the writer liked to stand up to watch the band playing.

“Down in front!” The owner.

“I can’t see sitting.” The writer.

“I said, Down in front!”

“Get fucked!” The writer.

“Line up!” The owner.

The writer fired a beer bottle at him and the owner put the bouncers on him and unloaded him on the sidewalk. The writer and I walked toward Captain Tony’s in the meringue night amid the social terrors of our epoch. The writer said, “I’m not going through with it, this work of mine. No one believes in it, least of all me. You’re a mess too.” I told him it was the age.

“Well,” he said, “the age is breaking my balls. I’m going home.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I said.

“I had a friend, he took the scissors to his face. My sister’s a dead zombie in her twenties because of your fucking age.”

“If you picked me to stand up for the Republic, you got the wrong Joe.” I thought this was hideous, railed at as though I wanted any of this frightful shit-heel madhouse.

“I been thinking about you,” says the writer. “You and your trashy friends laying waste to our mythology. You’re gonna choke on it, you smut-mongers.”

“Keep it up, I’ll tear out your windpipe.”

“Let me buy you a drink.”

The Whistle Bar: the bartender is talking into mid-air. He’s an old friend and won’t let people bother me. Also, he keeps pushers off me on a specific basis. He won’t let them give me coke; whereas a Percodan or Eskatrol guy can get through. The next week, the diet changes. “I’m glad the college girls have gone back,” raves the bartender, “I don’t want any more pussy. I don’t want it, I don’t like it. I’m fuck-foundered. I’m to where if I was with Miss World, I’d lose my hard-on over a barking dog. I’d rather dynamite shellcrackers on the Caloosahatchee.”

The hotel across from the post office burned down that night and we watched the inferno from the balcony drinking straight Lemon Hart on ice. I filled my mouth with one-fifty-one and hung out over the tourists and blew a flame into the night, a flame from my mouth to encourage the burning hotel to leap the street.

The writer said, “I’m a goner, see. So, I’m willing to help a new guy.”

“I’m not a new guy,” I said. “I’m Swiss cheese.”

“Shut up you mouth. You might write someday. Your memoirs. The overnight sensation. You may turn to immortality to keep from looking down the street. The immortality of an artist, you should know, consists in the lag between his death and the time his collected works are flushed down the loo. I got the title for your memoirs, chum, and I been carrying it like a hot potato till I could run into you. I want you to call it Eleven Ways to Nigger-Rig Your Life. ”

He had a piña colada in his bony surgical hands and he held it up like a chalice attempting to watch the burning hotel through the milky glass. I went home and wrote a letter to my brother Jim on the Olivetti. Then it seemed that I couldn’t read what I had written. And hours passed. I don’t know, you just drift away. Then you can’t wake up. It’s the middle of the night, no-man’s-land. They’re all laughing at your handwriting. It seems like a small thing but you suspect that it will kill you. One thing leads to another; daytime arrives on an evil wind. You can’t get your hand off the doorknob, your teeth out of the girl’s teeth. Increasingly, you can’t remember anything and you are suspicious that perhaps you shouldn’t. In the end, your only shot is to tell everyone, to blow the whistle on the nightmare. It will work for a while; no one knows how long. The worse the dream, the more demonstrative you must become.

I took to the stage.

I CAME HOME Wednesday night loaded, having had enough of the writer. An isometric bull with the jaws of a wolf was guarding the door to the patio. So I knew I needed coffee. It was raining.