Read Dancing in the Dark Online
Authors: David Donnell
Did I really like for real listen for 4 ½
maybe longer blue jeans checked shirts years
all through high school
Malvern Collegiate
when we lived in the east end
& Jarvis Collegiate after we moved to Mount Pleasant
& I had a big third floor bedroom to myself
gabled but huge floor space & windows out on the street
to
this short, cocky
somewhat acid tongued English guy
a ripe huckster
plus his borrowed name
Elvis
Costello? I guess I did.
That was years ago. Before college. Funny isn’t it
how time
& Elvis Costello
& Kate Millett slip away? Somehow the story
of Johnny Rotten
tearing the Pink Floyd t-shirt,
& writing “
SUCKS
” across it in large letters
& then putting it on,
seems easier
to identify with than abstract Ping Pong.
½
of this generation
is going to hell in a basket,
or an ABC Dish
or
an Ottawa flatbed railway car.
And
½
of this generation
as long as we’re not wiped out by a plague
or personal disaster
or a wave of developers
is going to be just fabulous. That’s
what I think,
Tom, okay?
And it’s all out there, Dancing in the dark.
Jack Kerouac was a big idol for me when I was 17
in Toronto
& just going into 1st year college –
Trinity for some reason.
I was the odd guy in 1st year. I was fresh from Gravenhurst
up deep in the red & yellow Muskokas;
& by 4th year I was the moody
intellectual
walking around Trinity College on Hoskin Avenue
with my hands in my pockets & my tweed jacket
over my shoulders.
People told me I looked like Jack Kerouac
& I thought that was cool. This was 1984, Kerouac had been dead
for I don’t know
a long time, but I had a big b&w picture of him
leaning against a brick wall in New York City smoking a Pall Mall
up on my residence bedroom wall. What else can I say?
I’ve been reviewing books on & off for 2 years now. Part-time
bartending on weekends in the east end & on Queen Street West.
I’ve never picked worms with a flashlight at 4 o’clock in the morning.
And I’ve never been a railway lineman in west Texas.
I’ve got ideas that are different from the ideas of my generation
but I think it’s too soon to release them –
interesting ideas about intellectuals & contemporary music,
new ideas about intellectuals & the labour movement.
So I’m reviewing a few books & taking my time. But as far as
drives go,
what about Miamiiii? Miami in the middle of frozen
New York & Ontario cold weather warnings? What a blast of colour,
forsythia, sweet bougainvillea, the lush blue line of the Florida
coast?
“Hush now,” she says, “I’m going upstairs
to talk to the baby Jesus.” The big upstairs swinging
door swings open & shut behind her. A house big enough
to give the 3rd floor over to a kind of retreat.
I lie with my hands behind my head & the sweat
drying slowly invisibly on my thighs, one knee & on my
shoulders. So she’s a good-looking young white woman
with a big house but I don’t think she’s really serious
about this baby Jesus stuff. Maybe,
who knows?
Puts her hand between my legs the way you would stroke
some tomatoes or green peppers in a Loblaws
if you weren’t too sure of what you were buying
but we’re talking about crisp fat fresh radicchio here
not that wilted kind they serve in restaurants
& she says, “Tell me about Mississippi.” She’s drunk,
I guess. But I tell her a few things I’ve heard
people say. I don’t know anything about that
Mississippi shit. I’m just lying here looking out
at the moon, ½ full, yellow moon behind some clouds,
numbers don’t really interest me. I’m on the cusp
of turning 21, now that’s important, either this man
I am goes back to school or I don’t go back to school.
All I really want is to come & go, leave this city
after the trees, there are trees everywhere here, start
tumbling down & go somewhere & sit tilting the Jim
Beam & the Jack around in my glass watching the Mets
come up from 2nd place, fall weather, an old sweater,
Gooden pumping up the steam; the steam from really good
rich dark coffee beans is different from other kinds
of steam, it’s deeper, richer, it draws me in
& I tumble like a butterfly, that’s a funny image,
& beat my wings I guess, lift up & away
& watch the game in some neighbourhood bar
where an old woman, Irish maybe, asks me to move
my chair a bit because I’ve got such a big head. O
yeah, I guess so, but I don’t know shit about Mississippi,
& I don’t think I like baseball so much
because my father was a black dentist in Boston
or because my mother sings in a choir in Toronto;
it may have something to do with colour,
but I think it’s mainly because I don’t want to be a
lawyer, and because I don’t want to stay in one place
for too long. Mississippi, shit.
All these stories about Jay Mc
Inerney
as a youth novelist are a bit exaggerated. McInerney
didn’t do very much “youth culture” after he published
Bright Lights
,
Big City
. No circuses
or great concerts
or mass gatherings
or serious journalism. No Music, for sure no music.
Life was calm
& McInerney just hung out in New York
after hours places
like Nell’s
& did what people used to do in diners – drink coffee
& talk about what they used to do back in college
except that in the after hours club version
you’re supposed to do a little coke every ½ hour.
O
coke, O coke. I prefer some of the stories
about Truman Capote
coming up to New York when he was 19
after writing
Other Voices, Other Rooms
& all the crazy
parties he was involved in after that. I read his short
stories in Grade 13 at Malvern High & I thought,
Wow,
is this guy imaginative. Southern Gothic. Plus,
he had a great admiration for the time signature &
personality of the American sentence.
There was a yellow sky, it was smoky yellow, it was around 6:45 on a June night, and we were sitting, draped over large over-size white-painted wicker furniture, on the long front porch before supper. I was having supper at Susan’s, her parents were in New York for the weekend, there was water boiling for spaghetti, we were going to go in soon and make a tossed salad, nothing special, maybe some cracked walnuts and orange sections, and then we were going to go to a film with Ted and Alice.
Something made me think of a Suzanne Vega story, she’s a singer, and she does comic monologues when she feels like it, I’ve seen her on television a couple of times. I said, “Suzanne Vega has a funny story.” Susan nods with repressed hilarity, she’d been laughing violently about something else we were talking about, she’s wearing a pale mauve shirt, a big loose shirt, one of her father’s. She says, “Okay?”
I say, “She claims this is one of her earliest memories, I don’t know if that changes the nature of the story or not, gives it a special emphasis. She’s about 4 ½, she’s sitting on the floor on the carpet in her parents’ living room, Massachusetts or wherever, in front of the television set maybe. Her first boyfriend …”
“Just a second,” says Susan, leaning forward and almost falling agile athlete over the wide arm of her white-painted wicker chair, “her
first
boyfriend.”
I say, “Yeah, her first boyfriend.”
“So, how many boyfriends did she have at 4 ½?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “this was her first, so it’s special, I guess, okay.” We’ve been drinking gin & lemon juice & grapefruit juice & orange juice & cracked ice, I have a little bit left in my tall glass. “Anyway, they’re sitting there, and she remembers saying to him, at least she claims she remembers this, and she has every right to claim she remembers this, it’s private, sure, but it’s her life, right? she says to him very nicely, very seriously, maybe her parents were there, who knows, ‘When I grow up, Mark, I’m going to marry you.’ ”
“His name was Mark?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember. We don’t know for sure if the story is actually true, or if it’s simply one of her stories, I mean, she’s a comic, right, or a writer.”
“The other kid’s name may have been Albert or something and she could have changed it.”
“Right, so, that’s what she says to him. I like to imagine, she doesn’t go into details, that she was wearing one of those really neat little white dresses with a sash, like that photograph of your sister …”
“Very proper.”
“Yeah.”
“They weren’t working class?” Susan loves nitty gritties.
“I don’t know, she’s got a very upper middle class style, I mean, she’s preppy, she’s got that style.”
“Yeah, okay.” Susan is sitting up now straddling the wide arm of her wicker chair, she has loose multicoloured Bermudas on and the loose floppy legs of her cotton shorts ride up over her smooth tanned thighs creating an impression not of prurience, she just has white underwear on anyway, I mean it’s nothing exotic, but rather an impression of piled-up energy.
“So that’s what she says to Mark, if that was his name, if he, Mark, ever existed in actual fact land or not.”
“Girls are always saying that,” she says, with an odd, wrinkling of the nose, Susan has quite a beautiful nose, not aquiline exactly, not large, a fair-size nose, sort of Roman with a very distinct tip and just a bit delicate around the nostrils. “They usually say it to their fathers. I did. I walked up to my father in the living room, living rooms are the settings for all sorts of stuff, it was one night
after
supper, it was sometime around the time I started school. And I walked right up to him, he was sitting in his favourite armchair in the living room, my mother describes it, and I said, ‘Father, when I grow up, I’m going to marry you.’ ”
“And you’ve got no memory at this time as to whether you premeditated this dramatic statement, or it just occurred to you, apparently, out of nothing, apropos of something your mother said a few minutes earlier?”
“Oh, nothing, just, you know, one of those 5 million and 1 passing whims that go through your mind if you’re a little girl.” She leans forward resting her weight on her hands. Susan has beautiful wide strong simple hands, they’re not as tanned as her thighs, or her shoulders under the pale mauve man’s shirt, probably her father’s.
“So what next?” She gives me a big up from under her thick bronzy eyebrows look.
Okay, this is where the anecdote goes Freudian. And it’s already turned into a whole conversation, whereas what I thought I was doing was that I was just rattling off a quick photograph, and then we were going to go inside and make a big salad, because Susan loves big salads, even if the leftover balance has to be sealed with Saran Wrap and the bowl put away in the fridge. This has gotten deeper, not difficult or anything, but deeper, sort of like that Sunday afternoon deep old brown hole out in the middle of the Thames River.
I say okay. “So that’s what she said, ‘When I grow up I’m going to marry you.’ And then he stands up, at least I think she says he stood up, I suppose it makes a difference, and he says, ‘Well, when I grow up, I’m going to be a fireman, and I’m going to have a big hose, and I’m going to squirt water all over you.’ ” I’m laughing while I finish the story. I can’t help thinking it’s funny. It is funny. Most of the stuff that children do is funny. Even though I’m much too young to have children myself, although I suppose if I was careless, I’m not, then I might have. Children. James Purdy has a great book called
Children Is All
, that’s what’s going through my head at the moment, I’d love to be able to write as well as James Purdy, oh yeah, and other unlikely dreams. I’ll probably wind up playing bass fiddle in a dance band.
Susan’s hysterical. “Oh yeah,” she says between gasps, her violet eyes half-slitted, her mouth coping for air, “that’s so true, that’s so true it hurts. If you’ve ever been a young high school girl on a first date, and the boy has a car, and of course you don’t, then you know how true that is. The little fats.”
She’s getting up, I’m getting up, she’s clutching her slim flat stomach, also tanned, under the pale mauve man’s shirt, still laughing, and tucking in her shirt at the same time.
“Children are so beautiful,” I say, guilelessly, “that they can say anything.”
“Oh sure,” Susan says, “and they do, they do.”
The story is floating around us like a few distant maple keys in spring floating on a light breeze and drifting down to your front sidewalk or your back porch. “Is she good-looking?” Susan asks, picking up her empty glass and a bowl of salted redskins.