E. Doctorow: Loon Lake

But it was here I also learned about California. In California you could eat the oranges off the trees, along the seaside boulevards the avocados fell when they were ripe and you found them everywhere and peeled them and you ate them on the seaside boulevards. When you were sleepy you slept on the sand and when you were hot you went wading in the warm Pacific surf and the waves lit up at night off the shore with their own light. And off beyond the waves was a gambling ship.

I decided to go to California.

Armed only with his unpronounceable last name, he went down to the freight yards to begin his journey. He confuses this now in his mind with the West Side slaughtering plant such atomized extract of organic essence, such a perfumery of disembowelment, that in the fetid blood spumed viscera mist above the yards helplessly flew flights of gulls schools of pigeons moths bats insect plagues all swirling round and round in a great squawking endlessly ejaculative anguish.

I found a door that slid open, got it wide enough to slip through, climbed in, pulled the door almost shut behind me stood in the darkness breathing triumph. The car lurches again, almost stops, begins to roll, I was thrown into something that moved. I look around my private car my eyes accustoming themselves to the darkness, soot and pungent cinder begins to flow through the boards, that railroad tang, my eyes see all around the perimeter of my private car a cargo of youths. We are the shipped manufacture of this nation there must have been thirty or forty of us in that car gradually my eyes made out fifty sixty sitting on the floor by the dawn in eastern Pennsylvania at a siding in the chill frosted morning a hundred of us jumped and ran when the bulls came shouting ahead from the engine. Later alone in the tall weeds of another crossing a toot and leisurely around the bend bell-clanging another stately red ball my chance I make for it all around me from the weeds a thousand like me leap I thought I was alone.

I let it go. All my gaunt brothers in my own rags carrying my roped valise hopped the freight. I watched it go. I put up my collar pulled my cap down on my head stuck my hands in my pockets and headed north up the road.

Come with me

Compute with me

Computerized she prints out me

Commingling with me she becomes me

Coming she is coming is she

Coming she is a comrade of mine

Comrades come all over comrades

Communists come upon communists

Hi. Hi.

We are here to complete our fusion

We are here to create confusion

Do you confuse coming with confession?

Do you fuel for nuclear compression?

I’m for funicular ascension.

Decline all word temptation

Define all worldly tension

Deride all prayerful intervention

Computer nukes come pray with me

Before the war, the war, after the war

Before the war the war after the war the war before the war

Disestablishes human character.

Computer data composes World War One poet

Warren Penfield born Indianapolis Indiana

City of Indians in the Plains Wars after the peace

City of Indians going about their business

Indian poets in headbands walking on grid streets

Secure in their city of Indian architecture of cool concrete

Bernard Cornfield Investors Overseas Securities

Data linkage escape this is not emergency

Before the war before the last war

A boy stood on the dirt street in Ludlow Colorado.

The wind of the plain blew the coal dust under his eyelids

The wind blew the black dust down the canyons of the Sangre de

Cristo. The clothesline stretching across the plain

The miner’s cotton swung its arms and legs wildly in the wind.

A miner’s wife stepped from a tent with an infant girl

suspended from her hands. She held the child beyond

the edge of the wood sidewalk over the dirt the dust blowing

back along the ground like hordes of microscopiccreatures running.

The infant’s girl’s dress raised under her arms

she hung from her knees and underarms

so as to have her hairless child’s fruit expressed

for the purpose indicated by the mother’s sibilant sound effects

punctuated with foreign words of encouragement.

The boy standing there happening to be there remained to watch

shamelessly and the beautiful little girl turned upon him a face

of such outrage that he immediately recognized her

willing white neck companion of the old monk it’s you

and with then saintly inability to withstand life she closed

her eyes and allowed the thin stream of golden water to cascade

into the dust where instantly formed minuscule tulips

he beheld the fruition of a small fertile universe.

When the nights were bad, when the uncanny sounds in the woods kept him awake, when the crack of a twig in the pine forest was inexplicable or some distant whimpering creature sounded in his mind like a child being fucked he swore it was still better than going with the red ball. Whowhoo. Better to take alone whatever came. Soft web of night threads across the face. Something watching breathing in the dark a few feet away. He had heard of people having a foot cut off for the dollar in their shoe. It was still better. It was still better to take alone whatever came. Better to die in the open. Whowhoo. Lying in a city mission flop in the great stink of mankind was worse. Arraigned in the ranks of the self-deluding in their bunkbeds was worse.

It was the bums of the commonest conversation who angered him the most, the casuists of misfortune who bragged about the labels inside their torn filthy coats, or swore there was some brand of alcohol they wouldn’t be so low as to drink. Or the ones who claimed to be only temporarily down on their luck, en route to some glorious destination not where they had a job waiting or a family, but where they were known , where what they were did not have to be proved.

I didn’t want these mockeries to my own kingship of consciousness, with all the conquests of my life still to come. How could I hope or scheme however idly in a flophouse with a hundred others, a thousand others, a hundred thousand others where the dreams rise on the breath and dissolve one another in a precipitate element not your own — and you are trapped in it, a dark underwater kingdom fed by springs of alcoholic piss and sweat, in which there live and swim the vilest phantoms of God.

And strangely enough each morning I woke up still alive. In the lake villages and the small towns of old mills, I was moved along by the constable but a shade more gently. I didn’t feel like a tramp when I asked for work. I even had a certain distinction. We were like birds or insects, pestilential, when we buzzed or flocked in great numbers, but one sole specimen could be tolerated with a certain scientific interest. Sometimes I washed dishes for a meal. Sometimes I stole my food. Sometimes I found a day’s work at some farm.

Then in one town, walking down the main street in a manner that suggested I had someplace to go, I saw coming out of the drugstore three midgets and a heavyset dwarf who huddled over them like their father. They took their quick little steps down the street, all talking at the same time, the muscular torso of the dwarf jolting from side to side with each step. I followed them. Even when they noticed me following them I followed them. They led me to the edge of town. In a grass lot between two stands of trees was the Hearn Bros. carnival, a traveling show of tattered brown tents, old trucks, kiddy rides and paint-peeled wagons. I heard the growl of a big cat.

Ah, what I felt standing there in the sun! A broken-down carnival — a few acts, a few rides and a contingent of freaks. But the sight of it made me a boy again. I was going backward. Those ridiculous bickering midgets had called up my love for tiny things, my great unslaked child’s thirst for tiny things, as if I had never held enough toys that were small to my small hand. Holy shit a carnival! I knew it was for me as sure as I knew my own face in the mirror.