Brion Gysin - The Process

I began to get that old wound-up, wordy feeling and found myself talking too fast and too much. To put them at their ease, if you please! I launched into a largely fictitious tale about my mother, a very big powerful woman she was, too, who had much the same trouble with Ulys O. Hanson, Jr., her husband my father, who had taken off with her best black lace and her add-a-pearl Tecla necklace to go to the Beaux Arts Ball at the old Savoy Ballroom, years ago, and neither hide nor hair has ever been seen of him from that day to this. I could see that the Hymners were profoundly shocked. Panic-stricken, I began to blurt out yet another story; the story, I claimed, of how I had first ever heard about Bahaï. I felt their faces stiffen in apprehension but it was already too late. My technique is to overwhelm one enormity with another, so:

There I am back in Carnegie Hall with my mother, right after the war and still in high school. Up on the stage, Mrs. Roosevelt is sitting side by side with our own Great Educator, Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. This duo of dainty dinosaurs is perched on two rickety little old gold chairs pulled up by a skinny-legged gold table on which the girls are munching away at the “Star-Spangled Banner” like sisters until, all of a sudden, Miss Mary lets out a holler like someone just stuck her under the table with a fork. Looking blacker than Granmaw in a pastel-pink potato sack and a hat made of ice-cream cake like Schraffts’ melting on top of her meringue of fuzzy white hair, Bethune grabs the mike from the First Lady to bawl at us:

“I want all of you all out there to know that every last one of us here is descended from the Black Kings of Africa!”

Hamid, who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, biting his nails as he listened intently up to this point, let out a loud snort; got up and left.

Too late! Carnegie Hall is rocked by applause like a mortar barrage. The Hansons, mother and handsome adolescent son, are beaming in the middle of a parterre of one hundred and seventy-seven handsome young Black Kings of Africa from Nigeria; all students at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. The young kings have been obliged to leave their crowns with the white hat-check girl at the cloakroom, who insists that, made out of gold or not, what you wear on your head is a hat. The kings of Black Africa proudly sweep the streets of New York with their trailing robes gorgeously embroidered in silver and gold. Ergo, not all Black men are slaves or descended from such. Thank you very much! We who have been nothing, can become Black Kings, every one! Mrs. Roosevelt has skillfully fielded the mike and is making her eloquent speech: “Not having had your advantages in adversity …” she seems to be saying.

Mother was a speech therapist so, at that point, she had to give me a big nudge: “She takes Voice!” she whispered delightedly. Eleanor was all too soon over for her and Miss Beryl Brown was announced. I could feel Mother stiffen when Beryl pranced out on stage, wound up in a little strip of leather torn off the skin of Life, like a lady-wrestler with nothing much on but a patch here and a patch there. Miss Brown announced, in a voice Mother could have done something with, that she was about to go into a Magic dance she picked up in Africa on her Fulbright. It was a dance of Initiation but she did not say who was going to get initiated into what. Then, Brown rolled out a big African drum, about as big across as a washtub, and she began to jump up and down on it like a trampoliner. That was all she did but, at every drum-jump— Boom! — and she pumped herself up just one more big puff. For a while, it hardly seemed to make all that much difference, she’s such a big girl, but, when the drums began pounding into your head, Beryl began blooming and booming and looming so big she could have floated away over Macy’s. Before she could explode the proscenium arch with her expanding naked brown-skinned flesh, they eclipsed her just in time with the big golden curtain before she could become what she was about to become, the great matriarchal myth-figure: Mother Maya Herself!

Hamid came back into the room and threw me a look of disgust. I could see that my elaborations had fallen rather flat. I had forgotten to add that, on leaving Carnegie Hall, my mother and I had decided to mark the occasion by venturing into the Russian Tea Room, which we understood was Restricted and, there, Mother had met up with a very nice woman from Larchmont in a mink coat, who told her all about Bahaï and offered her a job as … I could feel myself floating away into another one of my stories but I managed to stop. Simulating a sudden attack of brain-fever to the stony-faced Hymners, I rushed back to the Hotel Duende in the clamorous Socco Chico and dashed off that letter to the Independent American School of Algut. By return of mail, they wrote back to say that, what with the dollar and one thing and another, the school was facing hard times, financial difficulties and blah blah blah. They were dreadfully contrite to carry on like this with a man of my caliber but they simply could not pay for transportation at this point because, what with border controls and currency restrictions and blah, more blah, but it was a deal: I was on.

All I had to do was to go out to the Hymners and hit them up for the bread, I told myself. It was a lot less easily done than said. One of the worst things at their house was that no one could smoke because Maya suffered from asthma and other allergies. Her asthma was aggravated by overweight and her overweight was accentuated daily by Hamid’s great cooking with which he had, finally, hooked her. That girl was a greedygut; never stopped eating crunchy peanut-butter snacks between meals. Who ever told her she could play Desdemona? One night, we all dined out of doors by the light of candles in Moorish lanterns, tearing chickens apart with our hands under Hamid’s orders, lying around Moroccan-style on cushions and rugs. For a change, there was no Levant-wind blasting through Tanja. The sticky-sweet, night-blooming flowers like dama de noche , datura and jasmine, seemed not to bother Maya for once. When the candles guttered out, Hamid and I even dared light up a sebsi of keef on which we took turns in the dark. The night was lousy with stars and that old pregnant silence again from Him ‘n’ Her. When Hamid got up and went inside to clean up the kitchen, Maya began to talk.

“Hanson,” she said, perverting it into: “Handsome,” I thought I heard her; “when you say the Word, the Word will be made Flesh.”

“Of course!” I ejaculated, trying to pass it off as a cough. I was on! Coughing in earnest all of a sudden, spluttering and laughing, I got up and stumbled away through the dark garden.

Nothing daunted, Maya was down at the Hotel Duende , bright and early next morning, sitting on the foot of my brass bed. My Moroccan maids out in the hall made like they were scandalized; knocking and laughing, bumping their mops and pails against my door. I opened one blazing eye as I rapidly pulled on my black suit of human skin under the covers before I sat up and let Maya have it hard and straight. I told her I wanted no son of mine to be mooted about as a midget Messiah. I want no son of mine to preach or to teach and, besides — Yes, besides! I want no son of mine to be even one drop lighter than me. If I make a son, he has got to be Black, Black, Black ; a real spade, see! Does she figure to raise this child with a white mother and a white father and him fitting into no skin at all? And what if it turns out to be a girl? If she really feels she needs an African for this deal, Hamid is an eager African. Delicately, I indicated something flattering about his painting technique and the size of his brush. As for me, I am only a poor old, retired, spade performer; just shoveling along, dig? Now, would she please be a good girl and go order me a café au lait and a croissant on the terrace of the café in the Socco Chico below. In the meantime, I would shave my beautiful black puss and be with her in no time flat. I meant that: no time at all. That was it. When I did get down there about half an hour later, she was nowhere in sight.