Clarence Major - My Amputations

Greece was winding down. He stood in the center of the circular theatre at Epidauros with raised arms — hearing the cheering of thousands seated on the stone benches. They loved him. That love became his bridge. It nourished him. Blackface Hermes the clown was happy! Celt CuRoi should see him now! A group of American tourists arrived and jolted him out of his itinerant glory. He then jogged around the place. He bought a basket of figs from a peasant and drove on…. At the walled city of Tiryns, the one Homer wrote about, he met a stone worker who was hiding in the shadow of an archway. Mason squatted with him and chewed the fat. They agreed that there were thirty-three million, three-hundred-and-forty-thousand people in Thailand and eight million, eight-hundred-and-sixty thousand in Ghana. They agreed on many other important points. The guy had stone dust in his woolly red hair. Mason liked his leathery skin and sharp rat-eyes. But agreeable masons and the ruins of walled cities had their limits…. As Mason drove toward Corinth he remembered that that old stone cutter back there in Tiryns indeed had connections back in Twenty-five hundred B.C…. On the way back to Athens, Blackface Hermes stopped at Sounion. The sky was ice. He climbed a path to the Temple to Poseidon. Vanity. All was vanity. Tourists since way-back-when had chiseled their “glorious” names into the stone foundation of the restored structure. The insistence of it! (bringing one's own chisel and mallet up was a bit much)! And wouldn't you know it: Byron too had left a sign of his own desperate arrogance and insecurity. Graffito was a chisel….

In no time he was back in Athens. The minute after he checked into the King George he was out exploring. At a cafe, workers were singing rebetika songs. A couple of tough young men started dancing. Beer was spilled. Mason finished his Robola and squeezed out just as a table loaded with octopus, macaroni, keftedes, souvlaki, pastitsio, mousaka and fetta was accidentally knocked over. The bartender got his hatchet…. At a sidewalk cafe, in shadows, he heard a violent argument: The Greek War of Independence was not over! Yes, yes it was! Ecclesiastical hymns somewhere in the dense background chopped by traffic noise…. Mason restlessly moved on. He became a dolphin in the sea of Greece. What bullshit! Yes — Mason reached out now to the Hellenistic Koine and felt the click of the testament inside his own mouth: one exslave knew another exslave. Stress was right. The Benaki? It was the next morning — and he hadn't understood what'd happened to the night. He got the drift of ancient wealth — before the Akritic cycle. Turk rule. Then in the park he was dazed by a man balancing chairs and bottles in a high fortress on his own head. Nothing toppled…. A snatch of conversation: “My cousin in Chicago got the niggers to hassle. We still got the Turks. It's all the same.” His erection woke him — when he didn't even know he was asleep. He opened the anthology. George Seferis: “The stranger and the enemy, we have seen him in the mirror.” Mason wandered the night market around Sofokleous and Klistohenous and Athinas: veal was glossy, so was lamb; whole skinned pigs hung upside-down from iron hooks. Tripe bloomed under glass. Each black olive emitted one glowing cuticle. Plush tomatoes winked their red lights. Dates in brown profusion, soft as plastic wood. Then the dried fish with its salt-covered skin. Crates. Boxes. Cries. Crowds under electric bulbs. While asleep — again — Mason was in great distress. There was no place to sleep. Dream within a dream? He entered a furniture store to buy a bed. Decided to test the mattress on one. It was comfortable. He slept. Then something woke him. He jumped up, greatly alarmed: he'd to get to the party. Everybody was surely already there. He'd probably missed everything. Painted Turtle would be there. He knew if he tried to penetrate her his thing would turn to paper, fold up. It was raining. Where was Athens? Which city was this?… He got in his rented car. He had to decide between driving up a washed out dirt road and getting stuck or missing the party.

Word came from Signard in Paris that Africa was all set but Mason wasn't. He was caught in a Nice maze: he'd gone again for guilt-treatments to Doctor Wongo. While enduring the Saint Sabastian Redemption Method his mudfrog had gotten ruptured. It was like this: Mason saw the arrow coming. It was coming for a long, long time. He knew where it would hit. It was the kind of experience seemingly without end that suddenly ended with flash and shock and pain between his eyes. Then Mason found himself chewing on some woman's ear till the cows came home to roost. Life these days was crazy and rough. With some of his Arab friends he went to a party in the foreigners' ghetto, L'Ariane, east of Nice, where pretty sober-looking dudes were into some terrible actions and plots. Lights were blue and low. The music was out of Cairo then Syria then Algeria. Mason loved the strangeness of it, the smell of yellow candles and green incense. Conversation? Not heavy: “… and it's like zat nowadays, I tell you…. ” “Z places ’ere ’ave changed!… ” This was the night Mason met Habib Imed Maherssi, the gentleman who decided to get all of Mason's books published in Arabic. First, Maherssi would urge a friend of his in Morocco to write a big story about him for the biggest newspaper in the country. Then, hey , look out…! Mason was eating dinner with Habib and Hassan and Baraka at a couscous joint in Old Nice when the kitchen blew up. They were lucky. They got out with only their hair, faces and mouths filled with plaster and smoke and ash and dust from the ceiling — which was falling down around them…. Then there was the trip to Musee National to see the Chagalls with Chantal and Monique. The guards (according to Chantal) thought Mason was Arab. Mason joked about it: “Should've brought my Arab friends with me… ” But Chantal wasn't amused. Mason went away from Chantal here, lost himself in the museum: it became a place of unfolding possibility. Moons and cows and plush pink underwater plants and shimmering fabrics and trembling virginal couples floating near the edge of space turned him around, pulled him under their spell. Put him on an insane spin up through mountain roads of canvas, down through sea-level pathways of suicide-fears. A mermaid's scaly skin rubbed against his naked arm. Mason stepped up into the canvas and entered the home of an old rabbi. The rabbi's daughter was a plump girl in a flaky strawberry red nightgown with plump virginal breasts and hips. Her bridegroom waited in the doorway, trembling with expectation. “Who are you?” asked the rabbi. “I am Haze, I am.” An alarmed group of monks entered the cottage. They too wanted to know what the hell this devil wanted. Why was he here? They threatened to send a messenger to the king if he didn't spill. Moon-eyed cows gazed in through the windows. “I am here,” Mason said, “because I feel a sense of kinship: which I suspect you deny.” “He's an impostor!” shouted one of the monks. The others raised voices of agreement. The rabbi's daughter bravely went to Mason's side. She leaned against him. Everyone in the room was horrified. The virgin spoke: “You all know me as Edith. I welcome this stranger to my father's house. He will break bread with us. Are we not all the children of the same plant shoot, the same husk?” Before they could answer, bells (with an inner echo of water-music) sounded from the nearby cathedral. Shooing the monks out, Edith left Mason and embraced her father, saying, “Time is a river without banks.” It was late when Mason left, a bit dazed from sweet red wine but feeling as energetic as a licensed jester. He flew up into night blackness with its purple doorways dislodged from houses too soggy to stay hinged to the earth. When he tried to hold a bridge down, he discovered the weight of his body wasn't sufficient: it floated up, carrying with it smelly and hazy, gray green pink blue farm animals; and escapees from carousels and classified catalogues. He found himself on the banks of the Seine. The Eiffel Tower had fallen into the river. But this wasn't Nice! A fisherman came along and offered to share a bowl of red fish with him. They sat together, legs dangling over the edge of the embankment, and ate together in silence. Their images were reflected in the gray water. Then suddenly there was Chantal shaking him. “Hay!” he said. “Okay!” Was he trying to avoid Africa? Naw. Leaving Chantal to her own flight, her own wedding of separate words, he went to be alone: at Bar de la Degustation. Free here in his world of silence, he brooded. White and blue emergency van shot by with the half dead body of yet another old person. Mason's own soul was wrapped so thinly in wax paper he was sorta glad this S.O.S. amities was available. Maybe he'd have one day to thank his lucky moons and the nuns of the infirmiers. A man walked by carrying a crucifixion with a black bird nailed to it. But this whole moment was still some kinda circus: and Mason was diving, diving, diving straight down into a blue depth without a net…. Well, cheer up, buddy. Life is full of vivid harmony, jagged lines, forebodings, floats and twisted fiddles. Rereading the letter from Signard, Mason drained the last bitter drop of coffee from his cup. So, what the hell, he'd go to Africa! He sat there watching the people go by: Daphnis and Chloe, girls in jeans and red French cowgirl boots and those ones in black stockings and mid-thigh long skirts, boys in too-large punk double-breasted plaid suits, old ladies with humped backs, little blue-clad men carrying shopping bags. Yes, in Africa he'd be able to climb onto the back of a butterfly and fly to larva heaven. Or turn himself into a desert spiny swift and dart across the rock of the universe! or get involved with a revolutionary group and become an international hero. He could surely find Tarzan and wipe him out for ever; feed him fruit flies and spray his tree-house with the processed blood of a dimetrodon. Africa's insistent sun would include Mason soon, as wind moving along city pavement includes all the shadows and leaves and cigarette butts, as it whips the debris into a haystack between two buildings. He'd be a gray-eyed crow in Africa: He'd keep his wings clean and he'd fly!… The day before he left, a manila envelope arrived from Signard. It contained a brief note and a sealed envelope addressed to somebody called Chief Q. Tee. Mason read the note: “Please kindly deliver this when you arrive in Monrovia. Be careful with it: if its contents leak you may find your health in danger. Your tour in Africa is dependent on your carrying this envelope safely to its addressee. Thank you. Have a safe and rewarding trip!”