Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

This wasn’t a problem for Jingle, who was a Western girl from Winnemucca, Nevada. Pat Bell, hence Jingle. We met in our freshman year at Cornell, riding opposite each other on the Lehigh Valley Railroad from Ithaca to New York City. I was going back to Washington Heights for Spring break, and she was on the way to visit aunt, uncle, and cousins on Long Island. We had great conversation and then ignored each other for the next three years, but I was always aware of this pretty young woman, sculpture major, who headed up a group called YASNY (you ain’t seen nothing yet), and built an eighteen foot dragon for the senior prom. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was a great dragon, that created a great atmosphere, for the greatest prom, and one of the last. Our marriage was almost secret, at a justice of the peace at the end of our senior year. Now we were on our way to present our union to her parents. I had never met them. I had never been west of Ithaca before.

We rose out of the bushes the next morning and I looked to the mountains that seemed more enormous gilded red-gold by the dawn. We stretched, aired our sleeping bags, rinsed our faces in the cold creek, and looked for breakfast. Over bacon, eggs and toast at the little diner I could sense that something was wrong. Jingle, usually upbeat and ready to go in the mornings, seemed very unhappy. I was loath to inquire. This was the first time I had ever been close to a woman, and it was very mysterious to me. Mystery is a good thing, but mystery can be confusing.

“Something is wrong,” I finally said. “What?”

“Nothing. No problem.” Her face never hid her feelings.

“Come on, Jingle. I can see something is bothering you.”

She looked at me, her eyes tearing, and then turned towards the mountains out the window. She was embarrassed to say it. “It’s those pants, your shorts.”

On this trip I’d been wearing a loose and nerdy pair of Bermuda shorts I’d picked up at a Salvation Army store. They were comfortable for driving, and I’d been doing all the driving.

“What’s wrong with them?”

“I can’t introduce you to my parents in those.”

Her parents had in my mind a mythical presence. Her father prospected and mined for gold at their claims on Buckskin Mountain. Her mother, originally from Brooklyn, was an early feminist who appreciated, indeed expected, macho men.

“Well what? What should I wear?”

“You should have jeans. That’s what men wear, low around their hips.” Jingle never had raised any fashion issues before, for herself or me. She was an incredibly capable seamstress who had already made me a couple of western shirts, without even using a pattern. She had never before had a fashion fit.

“Okay.” It made no difference to me. I got into my jeans. They weren’t as comfortable for driving. We were a day and a half from Winnemucca. Jingle cheered up. In those jeans, driving the popular car of the Third Reich, Steve and his happy wife crossed The Little Bighorns. They rode into Nevada. They rose up the dirt switchbacks to the cabins on the mining claims. It was Buckskin Mountain. They got out of the little car. It settled onto the Nevada mountainside like an odd button of mining equipment. There Steve met Forrest Bell, his wife Marian, Woody, Jingle’s brother, a real buckaroo and professional rodeo cowboy. He was wearing jeans. They were slung low on his hips.

In fourteen years of marriage, and subsequent years of strong friendship and mutual parenthood, that was the only time fashion and taste ever became an issue. Since then we’ve been free to be comfortable in all situations, for any encounter.

0: for Wendy Rogers once I wrote “The Wendy Rogers At A Glance Dance,” and she performed the dance so terrifically, and tried to keep in touch with me, but I was too confused tangled in an inappropriate, unhappy marriage, I didn’t… if only…

..3: Peter Campus, video artist, photographer, wanted to make videos of myself reading some “Mythologies” from my Creamy and Delicious . They would have been great. They could have been shown at Castelli. I should have… Why didn’t…?

…5: Random House came up with a terrific jacket design for Creamy and Delicious , that would have attracted notice on the shelf, but I rejected it in favor of my own bland idea, which didn’t work, just to assert my dominance over the project. That was my…

….9: grace to be born and live as variously as possible, except next time a better education, some richer understanding of what I am doing, and the gift of playing music…

…..9: so San Francisco again and I wonder again why I never ended up living here. It’s probably because…

……9: and even now embarrassed that it took me so long to realize that the pretty woman who sat down to flirt with me at the cafe near Termini in Rome was actually an Aussie guy. Big hairy hands should…

…….6: that once in Provincetown I had dinner with Robert Mother-well at B.H.’s, and Motherwell said all the interesting modern minds in the arts were painters, no interesting modern writers. I should have flown my Beckett up his nose, mummied him in Thomas Mann, stuffed his pants with Edward Dahlberg. But I kept my mouth shut, as I too often do when I hear stupid…

……..7: I believed the witchy woman I danced with at a loft party for Donald Judd in 1971 when she told me I would be famous, but late in life. It’s almost too late. When…

……..9: My oldest son has just now begun to pay back the 30 grand I lent him a decade ago to buy the land on which he now farms. He works hard. I love what he’s doing. It gives his kids the privilege of mud and goats, but this confirms the universal advice not to lend big sums within the family. It inevitably creates bitterness, and the lender becomes the villain for wanting the money back. I would love to give up my feelings, but they persist. His wife does acts of kindness, particularly for my ex who functions only vaguely in the present world. The daughter-in-law was raised an upper middle class girl who feels entitled to any money that comes within her purview. She has the fiduciary heart of a neocon. If only I…

………(94) too long before I really understood that the world won’t bend to my predispositions, but skillful means can make…

Feynman……084(51) I’m sorry. Forgive my presumptu…

compiled by Ted Pelton

Art & Artists

Clarence Schmidt; Clark of it; Drowning Kids; Forrest Bell; How Bilbao; Massacio and Me; Name Dropping; Poles; Preface:137.n; Rencine; Starting Artist; Stove; T-Shirt with Pete Dean; The Champ; Working Longchamps

Family

Birth/Bris/Theft; Busting Pots; Bypass; Chipmunk Man; Chungking Mansions; Claire; Critters; Dad; Drowning Kids; Eating Dog/Talking Turkey; Fifteen and Texting; First Supper; Forrest Bell; G’Ma Dies Again; Gallileo & Tot; High Train; If Milk; Luna di Miele; Mom Dies; My Speed; Oxygen; Ozark to Avrum; Patriot; People’s Republic; RIP; South Corn Street; Stream; Sunday Morning in the Afternoon; Trap Tourists; Us in Texas; Wan Don; Whacks the Chick; What Hannah Knows; Whitecaps

The Movies

Crow-Dog; Drowning Kids; Grassland; Hey Suicide; Name Dropping; Stove; Toussaint’s Turf; Wheel Me Out; When China Talks; Writing Toussaint

Music & Musicians

Babbadoodoo; Dubble Bubble; In India; Inflamed at the Y; Kathakali; Name Dropping; Reich; Skirt; Starting Artist; Stove

New York City

Big Flub; Caffeine; Crosby Street; Dubble Bubble, First Book; First Supper; G’Ma Dies Again; Gallileo & Tot; If Milk; Inflamed at the Y; Jewboy; Linebacker; Lost Paradise; Mom Dies; Morton Street; My Bridge; My Speed; Nicotine; Our Bomb; Patriot; PIIF; Preface:137.n; Publishing Uptown; Science Plus; Skirt; Snows of Yesteryear; Starting Artist; Sunday Morning in the Afternoon; The Champ; The Volley; Working Longchamps; Wylie