John Hawkes: Second Skin

In retrospect, I think he was stripping from himself the last shreds of the mantle I’d forced on his shoulders so many years ago when I barged into his office quoting Second Skin. He was telling me that he was a writer and, like any writer, he worried about the fate of his books in the world. He was telling me, now that I was old enough to understand, exactly what kind of shoes he wore. And what kind of shoes, in emulating him, I had squeezed into myself.

It was my good fortune to study with the great, cantankerous Hawkes and to know him as a teacher and as a friend, to enjoy his kindness and humor, his histrionie self-dramatizing, his pagan vitality, and to hear, from his own lips, the natural flow of his eloquence and the utterly original workings of his fine and incomparable mind.

When I graduated, I wrote a note of thanks to Jack, most of which I’ve forgotten. The last line, however, comes back to me. “1 will always begin with what you taught me.” That is as true today, as we gather here to celebrate the man and his work, as it was in 1983.1 want to say, God Bless John Hawkes, but it doesn’t feel right. Jack was an existentialist. He told me once that he liked the idea that we create our work out of the void. So rather than address Jack in heaven. I’ll end by saluting the god he spoke of most often, the imagination, specifically the imagination of John Hawkes, which bodied forth from the void his many brilliant books.

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.

Yet surely I am more than a man of love. It will be clear, I think, that I am a man of courage as well.

Had I been born my mother’s daughter instead of son — and the thought is not so improbable, after all, and causes me neither pain, fear nor embarrassment when I give it my casual and interested contemplation — I would not have matured into a muscular and self-willed Clytemnestra but rather into a large and innocent Iphigenia betrayed on the beach. A large and slow-eyed and smiling Iphigenia, to be sure, even more full to the knife than that real girl struck down once on the actual shore. Yet I am convinced that in my case I should have been spared. AU but sacrificed I should have lived, somehow, in my hapless way; to bleed but not to bleed to death would have been my fate, forgiving them all while attempting to wipe the smoking knife on the bottom of my thick yellow skirt. Or had my own daughter been born my son I would have remained his ghostly guardian, true to his hollow cheeks and skinny legs and hurts, for no more than this braving his sneers, his nasty eye and the scorn of his fellow boys. For him too I would have suffered violence with my chin lifted, my smile distracted, my own large breast the swarming place of the hummingbirds terrified and treacherous at once. Just as all these years I have suffered with a certain dignity for father, wife, daughter, each of whom was his own Antigone — the sand-scratchers, the impatient sufferers of self-inflicted death, the curious adventurers for whom I remain alive. Perhaps my father thought that by shooting off the top of his head he would force me to undergo some sort of transformation. But poor man, he forgot my capacity for love.

With Hamlet I should say that once, not long ago, I became my own granddaughter’s father, giving her the warmth of my two arms and generous smile, substituting for each drop of the widow’s poison the milk of my courageous heart. At night what a silhouette I must have made, kneeling, looming beside the child as she sat the always unfamiliar white statuary of the chamber pot. She must have known, I think, what happened to her mother, her mother’s mother, her grandfather’s father, and that she herself was the final accident in this long line of what I shall call our soft and well-intentioned bastardy. In the mirror our two heads — the bald one, the little silver one — would make faces together, reflecting for our innocent amusement the unhappy expressions worn once by those whom she and I — Pixie and I— had survived. So the all-but-abandoned Pixie, and my daughter, whose death I fought against the hardest, and my weightless wife, a flower already pressed between leaves of darkness before we met — these then are my dreams, the once-living or hardly living members of my adored and dreadful family, the cameo profiles of my beribboned brooch, the figures cut loose so terribly by that first explosion which occurred in my father’s private lavatory. I know it was meant for me, his deliberate shot. But it went wild. It carried off instead dear Cassandra and hopeless, hysterical Gertrude. Went wild and left only myself alive.

Yes, my own feet at rest on the rotted window sill. But I am no mere sickened leaf on a dead tide, no mere dead weight burdening some gaudy hammock. In body, in mind, am I not rather the aggressive personification of serenity, the eternal forward drift or handsome locomotion of peace itself? As a walker, for instance, I am a tiger. I have always walked far in my white socks, my white shoes, and the extent and manner of my walking have always been remarked upon, with admiration or maliciousness, in the past. Since childhood I have walked into a room, or out, out into the shadowed greens or dangerous sand lots of the world, holding my chin lifted, my lips pleasantly curved and my eye round, measuring my steps so that they would never falter and keeping my hands in motion at my side, wishing never to appear intimidated by the death of my parents, wishing never to conceal the shame which I thought had left its clear and rancid mark on my breast. Even today I take these same slow-paced, deliberate, impervious footsteps, using the balls of my feet in proud and sensual fashion, driving a constant rhythm and lightheartedness and a certain confidence into my stride through the uninhibited and, I might say, powerful swinging of my hips. Of course there are those who laugh. But others, like Sonny, recognize my need, my purpose, my strength and grace. Always my strength and grace.

In all likelihood my true subject may prove to be simply the wind — its changing nature, its rough and whispering characteristics, the various spices of the world which it brings together suddenly in hot or freezing gusts to alter the flavor of our inmost recollections of pleasure or pain — simply that wind to which my heart and also my skin have always been especially sensitive. Or it may prove to be the stark elongated brutal silhouette of a ship standing suddenly on the horizon of the mind and, all at once, making me inexplicably afraid — perhaps because it is so far off that not one detail reaches the eye, nothing of name, passengers, crew, not even smoke from the stack, so that only the ugly span of pointed iron, which ought to be powerless but moves nonetheless and is charged with all the mystery and inhuman distance of the compass, exists to incite this terrible fear and longing in a man such as myself. But for now the wind trails off my fingers, the ship fades. Because I suppose that names must precede these solid worlds of my passionate time and place and action.

There was Fernandez, then, my small son-in-law, who held up his trousers with the feathery translucent skin of a rattlesnake, and who, even in his white linen suit and with Cassandra’s hand in his at the altar, continued to look like the hapless Peruvian orphan that he was. A breath smelling of hot peppers, dark and deeply socketed nostrils, flat smoky brown skull that cried for lace and candlelight, in his jacket pocket a Bible bound in white calfskin, and in his hand a bunch of somber crimson flowers — this was Fernandez, who underwent a triumphant and rebellious change of character in the wedding car (it was his own though he could not drive it, a sloping green-roofed sedan with cracked glass, musty seats, bare oily floors rent and jagged so that the road was clearly visible, the car Cassandra drove that day only with the greatest effort and determination), this then was Fernandez, who caused me, that day, to smile my most perspiring smile for the loss of my dear blonde-headed Cassandra. But even then, of course, I could not have imagined Fernandez on a bloody hotel room floor. And even now, after the fact of these events— time has worked on them like water on old knots — even now I cannot entirely castigate the memory of that Fernandez who was the groom. His favorite name for me was “good Papa Cue Ball.” For anyone else — except Cassandra, except me — that nickname would have been warning enough. But I would have welcomed Fernandez then, Fernandez with his menacing green car, his piles of tattered ration booklets, his heaps of soft smooth tires piled in the black wooden structure where the chickens scratched, even had he threatened me with the little hook-shaped razor blade he carried next to his Bible in an Edgeworth tobacco tin. Welcomed him with opened arms, I am sure.