Clarence Major - My Amputations

But soon he really got lost. The streets didn't make sense. He'd followed his own “logic”—along a certain alley then suddenly the cobblestones spread in a concentric pattern. This was a circle, a circle of mysteriously gloomy buildings (museums? churches?) casting mid-morning shadows into the half where he had now stopped, puzzled, unwilling to retreat or go on. He fingered a folded lottery ticket in his pocket. Straight across the circle, on the stairway of one of the larger structures, was the figure of a person. Man or woman? At this distance, he couldn't tell. Nobody else in sight. Mason started out toward the person. Hesitantly. Halfway across the circle he was able to see that the person was male. Or seemed so… When Mason was within ten feet of the unusually still figure he felt a slight murmur of the heart. Then the man flung his cape back, whipped out a sword, and flung it toward Mason. The thing clanged on the stone before him, only inches from his toes. Mason strained through his sunglasses trying to focus the face. It was a face. Yet something was wrong. The face wore a mask. Rubber? Deer skin? Did it matter? “This is a private matter,” the stranger said. The voice was gentle, almost sweet. “Pick it up.” Mason hesitated. Why should he? Although he felt compelled to obey without understanding why, he continued to stare at the figure and didn't move. The sword-carrier then jerked another sword from beneath his cape and flashed it in steep sunlight coming down through marble arches. The order came again, this time more forcefully: “I said pick it up!” Who was this, what was this? One of his beloved friends coming back into his life with dramatic humor? A son, a disguised daughter? John Armegurn serving as a hit man? or perhaps Mister Berdseid? No. It was only when the strange swordsman started rushing down the stairway, leaping, skipping, with his sword-tip pointed directly at Mason, that Mason picked up the weapon at his feet, and stumbled back, trying to escape. But the caped-figure advanced too quickly and Mason was obliged to defend himself. He flung wildly and awkwardly — lashing out at his opponent. The dashing figure propped the fist of his left hand on his hip and with sword and body he made unmistakable gestures of invitation. Mason, still retreating, stumbled on the cobbles. The swordsman continued to rush him, to feint — expertly. Mason's foil was dangling. He kept swinging it back and forth before him to keep the saberman off. Then Mason fell on the wet stone and found the tip of the other's sword pushing against the skin of his neck. The victor spoke gently: “I have a contract for you to sign. Either you sign it or I kill you.” As he spoke he dug the paper from a pocket beneath his cape. He dropped it on Mason's chest. “You may read it first.” The first thing Mason noticed about the official-looking document was its letterhead: Magnan-Rockford Foundation. The swordsman meanwhile pitched a Bic down to the ground at Mason's left. Mason made an effort to read the damned thing. He couldn't concentrate. “Sign it!” The tip of the sword dug deeper into Mason's throat. “But—” “Sign!” He signed Mason Ellis . The moment he wrote the name he realized his mistake. But it was too late.

Mason was up — as he rapped to students of Florence. “ My Apple, as they say, was not theirs: I smelled whisky on breaths. Gwen, my oldest sister, my mother too, wrote to me rarely. I was alone: in isolation: as though in a country where I didn't know the language. Casual affairs clung to me like fish-smell in the beard. Appletrees nowhere in sight. I screwed married women on kitchen floors: pale fire, pale leeway: possessed with keys to their own dark places these women went mad, on their knees before broken or drunk husbands, clutching Lower East-side yellow rent-stubs and smearing their red, red blood on Flea Market and Klein's furniture. They stayed hidden in First Avenue-deadness even when there was a Way Out. Their Deadness was equal to my own. And of course there were the young women so different from the older, married ones. How different? They were not shut-in damsels waiting to be serenaded below their windows. No eighty-miles-per-hour jerk was going to climb the vines of their castle-wall to get an axle-grease-coated finger on the elastic of their Bloomingdale-bloomers. My concern was also still Chicago: for the boogie-woogie oobop-shebam girl with sweat under her arms. They were doing the Twist, the Pony, the Cakewalk, the Superman — a dance I invented. The pill later did not rhyme with castle. Such a rich history: I'll never know how I spaced-out in Amesville on a John Deere, up to my nose in wet cowshit: I couldn't even see that Cezanne's Portrait of Henri Gasquest wasn't really Rod Steiger posing. Although gnatcatchers and beetrappers were after my sanity from the start, I turned out to be Somebody. Wesley could have, too, but he had no need. I took issue with the ache of my own body. Rather than leaning against my own death or ecstasy, I — Pokerface, Boston Blacky, Wild Dick, Holy Joe, Fingers, Mister Zilch — discovered Stein's American space and in that terrain sweated my way along the floor (ground, desert) of an orgy of heavy laughter, dry tongues; voiceless friction, dry areas, yellow eyes, red skin, sharp fingernails; breasts uneven and staccato teethprints in shoulders and necks; climbed into frowns, broke my way through polka-dot shame and awkward, uh, long sentences, twisted rhythm. In other words, I made direct contact. I pried open and entered salient spirits: slept well while growling, yodeling and chewing sounds surrounded me: as confusing as that scene where Florence played a bonyleg-squaw shielding the infants as the braves sent arrows into General George Armstrong Custer. She must be twice my age, eh? Never mind… Had I been the pilot of a two-engine I might have gotten a wider view of Stein's American space: from the aircraft I might have watched the wavers below wave at my waving propellers — might have thrown artful kisses to those poor suckers stuck to the terra cotta: those Goldilocks, Big Bens, Fatsos, Molls, Babyfaces, all of ’em! Innocence fun-crushed by tangy sadness, eh? From up there, ohboy … the shadow of my craft bewitching the pink earth with its purple shadow: tits for mountains. I might have looked, from on high, into my own darkness, my potshots, my wild guesses, my calls, this bamblustercated fear, my own—: not for perception or higher wisdom but for the oceans, seas, deserts, cities beyond Celt, that were surely in there. Know what I mean? But, like everybody else, I was stuck by gravity to the spongy earth: in birth action death. Framed. So by the time I first drifted to The Apple — with unreliable Celt just above my head — I needed quick solutions: to the mystery of married women; Deadness; being spaced-out; the problem of wild oats; unfaithful muses; the elusiveness of Stein's space; orgies; but more particularly I wanted a formula to solve the problem of the inherent muddle inevitably found at the bottom of, in the final stitch of, any given perspective. This was not to say: the world, history, couldn't be changed. People made it all up: it could be remade. But how, when and where. I played a lot of angles: for lack of an answer I got together a gang of shadows and captured the black angels, let them down into the slow waters of my own bad eyesight: Albert Ryder was back there riding a white horse against the dawn. The angels were supposed to protect: yet they could not prevent dancing devils from lynching my father at daybreak. I found pieces of my mother's flesh and hair in my bowl of soup. I tore open the chest of history and hundreds of years of blood, gall, acid, crossed-wires, frazzled brain tissue, broken promises, disremembrances, killings galore, starvations, diseases rampant as—. It all poured out. Too much for the normal eye. Terrible: sentimental, romantic. I'll never escape. Times when the hard, cold precise word, thing, refuses to make your point. Poor Amygism. I tried once being the king. Prayed for goodness but kept doing all the wrong things. Love? I gave up: it was hopeless. Wore a shabby beard, carried a tall staff — befitting my rank, spoke to everybody I met about the possible solutions to perspectives, and, uh, about other matters, too. I'm getting long-winded. Don't want to bamboozle you. It's just that I'm still sorta… Never mind… ”