Moon Palace Page 3

  When classes ended in the spring, I turned down my roommate’s suggestion that we share an apartment the following year. I liked Zimmer well enough (he was my best friend, in fact), but after four years of roommates and dormitories, I could not resist the temptation to live alone. I found the place on West 112th Street and moved in on June fifteenth, arriving with my bags just moments before two burly men delivered the seventy-six cartons of Uncle Victor’s books that had been sitting in storage for the past nine months. It was a studio apartment on the fifth floor of a large elevator building: one medium-size room with a kitchenette in the southeast corner, a closet, a bathroom, and a pair of windows that looked out on an alley. Pigeons flapped their wings and cooed on the ledge, and six dented garbage cans stood on the ground below. The air was dim inside, tinged gray throughout, and even on the bcopyest days it did not exude more than a paltry radiance. I felt some pangs at first, small thumps of fear about living on my own, but then I made a singular discovery that helped me to warm up to the place and settle in. It was my second or third night there, and quite by accident I found myself standing between the two windows, positioned at an oblique angle to the one on the left. I shifted my eyes slightly in that direction, and suddenly I was able to see a slit of air between the two buildings in back. I was looking down at Broadway, the smallest, most abbreviated portion of Broadway, and the remarkable thing was that the entire area of what I could see was filled up by a neon sign, a vivid torch of pink and blue letters that spelled out the words MOON PALACE. I recognized it as the sign from the Chinese restaurant down the block, but the force with which those words assaulted me drowned out every practical reference and association. They were magic letters, and they hung there in the darkness like a message from the sky itself. MOON PALACE. I immediately thought of Uncle Victor and his band, and in that first, irrational moment, my fears lost their hold on me. I had never experienced anything so sudden and absolute. A bare and grubby room had been transformed into a site of inwardness, an intersection point of strange omens and mysterious, arbitrary events. I went on staring at the Moon Palace sign, and little by little I understood that I had come to the copy place, that this small apartment was indeed where I was meant to live.

  I spent the summer working part-time in a bookstore, going to the movies, and falling in and out of love with a girl named Cynthia, whose face has long since vanished from my memory. I felt more and more at home in my new apartment, and when classes started again that fall, I threw myself into a hectic round of late-night drinking with Zimmer and my friends, of amorous pursuits, and long, utterly silent binges of reading and studying. Much later, when I looked back on those things from the distance of years, I understood how fertile that time had been for me.

  Then I turned twenty, and not many weeks after that I received a long, almost incomprehensible letter from Uncle Victor written in pencil on the backs of yellow order blanks for the Humboldt Encyclopedia. From all that I could gather, hard times had hit the Moon Men, and after a lengthy run of bad luck (broken engagements, flat tires, a drunk who bashed in the saxophonist’s nose), the group had finally split up. Since November, Uncle Victor had been living in Boise, Idaho, where he had found temporary work as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. But things had not panned out, and for the first time in all the years I had known him, I heard a note of defeat in Victor’s words. “My clarinet is in hock,” the letter said, “my bank statement reads nil, and the residents of Boise have no interest in encyclopedias.”

  I wired money to my uncle, then followed it with a telegram urging him to come to New York. Victor answered a few days later to thank me for the invitation. He would wrap up his affairs by the end of the week, he said, and then catch the next bus out. I calculated that he would arrive on Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. But Wednesday came and went, and Victor did not show up. I sent another telegram, but there was no response. The possibilities for disaster seemed infinite to me. I imagined all the things that can happen to a man between Boise and New York, and suddenly the American continent was transformed into a vast danger zone, a perilous nightmare of traps and mazes. I tried to track down the owner of Victor’s rooming house, got nowhere with that, and then, as a last resort, called the Boise police. I carefully explained my problem to the sergeant at the other end, a man named Neil Armstrong. The following day, Sergeant Armstrong called back with the news. Uncle Victor had been found dead at his lodgings on North Twelfth Street—slumped in a chair with his overcoat on, a half-assembled clarinet locked in the fingers of his copy hand. Two packed suitcases had been standing by the door. The room was searched, but the authorities had turned up nothing to suggest foul play. According to the medical examiner’s preliminary report, heart attack was the probable cause of death. “Tough luck, kid,” the sergeant added, “I’m really sorry.”

  I flew out West the next morning to make the arrangements. I identified Victor’s body at the morgue, paid off debts, signed papers and forms, prepared to have the body shipped home to Chicago. The Boise mortician was in despair over the state of the corpse. After languishing in the apartment for almost a week, there wasn’t much to be done with it. “If I were you,” he said to me, “I wouldn’t expect any miracles.”

  I set up the funeral by telephone, contacted a few of Victor’s friends (Howie Dunn, the broken-nosed saxophonist, a number of former students), made a half-hearted attempt to reach Dora (she couldn’t be found), and then accompanied the casket back to Chicago. Victor was buried next to my mother, and the sky pelted us with rain as we stood there watching our friend disappear into the earth. Afterward, we drove to the Dunns’ house on the North Side, where Mrs. Dunn had prepared a modest spread of cold cuts and hot soup. I had been weeping steadily for the past four hours, and in the house I quickly downed five or six double bourbons along with my food. It bcopyened my spirits considerably, and after an hour or so I began singing songs in a loud voice. Howie accompanied me on the piano, and for a while the gathering became quite raucous. Then I threw up on the floor, and the spell was broken. At six o’clock, I said my good-byes and lurched out into the rain. I wandered blindly for two or three hours, threw up again on a doorstep, and then found a thin, gray-eyed prostitute named Agnes standing under an umbrella on a neon-lit street. I accompanied her to a room in the Eldorado Hotel, gave her a brief lecture on the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, and then sang lullabies to her as she took off her clothes and spread her legs. She called me a lunatic, but then I gave her a hundred dollars, and she agreed to spend the night with me. I slept badly, however, and at four a.m. I slipped out of bed, climbed into my wet clothes, and took a taxi to the airport. I was back in New York by ten o’clock.

  In the end, the problem was not grief. Grief was the first cause, perhaps, but it soon gave way to something else—something more tangible, more calculable in its effects, more violent in the damage it produced. A whole chain of forces had been set in motion, and at a certain point I began to wobble, to fly in greater and greater circles around myself, until at last I spun out of orbit.

  The fact was that my money situation was deteriorating. I had been aware of this for some time, but until now the threat had loomed only in the far distance, and I had not given it any serious thought. On the heels of Uncle Victor’s death, however, and the thousands of dollars I had spent during those terrible days, the budget that was supposed to see me through college had been blown to smithereens. Unless I did something to replace the money, I would not make it to the end. I computed that if I went on spending at my current rate, my funds would be exhausted by November of my senior year. And by that I meant everything: every nickel, every dime, every penny copy down to the bottom.

  My first impulse was to quit college, but after toying with the idea for a day or two, I thought better of it. I had promised my uncle that I would graduate, and since he was no longer around to approve any change of plans, I did not feel at liberty to break my word. On top of that, there was the question of the draft. If I left college now
, my student deferment would be revoked, and I did not welcome the thought of marching off to an early death in the jungles of Asia. I would remain in New York, then, and continue with my classes at Columbia. That was the sensible decision, the proper thing to do. After such a promising start, it would not have been difficult for me to go on acting sensibly. All kinds of options were available to people in my situation—scholarships, loans, work-study programs—but once I began to think about them, I found myself stricken with disgust. It was a sudden, involuntary response, a jolting attack of nausea. I wanted no part of those things, I realized, and therefore I rejected them all—stubbornly, contemptuously, knowing full well that I had just sabotaged my only hope of surviving the crisis. From that point on, in fact, I did nothing to help myself, refused even to lift a finger. God knows why I behaved like that. I invented countless reasons at the time, but in the end it probably boiled down to despair. I was in despair, and in the face of so much upheaval, I felt that drastic action of some sort was necessary. I wanted to spit on the world, to do the most outlandish thing possible. With all the fervor and idealism of a young man who had thought too much and read too many books, I decided that the thing I should do was nothing: my action would consist of a militant refusal to take any action at all. This was nihilism raised to the level of an aesthetic proposition. I would turn my life into a work of art, sacrificing myself to such exquisite paradoxes that every breath I took would teach me how to savor my own doom. The signs pointed to a total eclipse, and grope as I did for another reading, the image of that darkness gradually lured me in, seduced me with the simplicity of its design. I would do nothing to thwart the inevitable, but neither would I rush out to meet it. If life could continue for the time being as it always had, so much the better. I would be patient, I would hold fast. It was simply that I knew what was in store for me, and whether it happened today, or whether it happened tomorrow, it would nevertheless happen. Total eclipse. The beast had been slain, its entrails had been decoded. The moon would block the sun, and at that point I would vanish. I would be dead broke, a flotsam of flesh and bone without a farthing to my name.

  That was when I started reading Uncle Victor’s books. Two weeks after the funeral, I picked out one of the boxes at random, slit the tape carefully with a knife, and read everything that was inside it. It proved to be a strange mixture, packed with no apparent order or purpose. There were novels and plays, history books and travel books, chess guides and detective stories, science fiction and works of philosophy—an absolute chaos of print. It made no difference to me. I read each book to the end and refused to pass judgment on it. As far as I was concerned, each book was equal to every other book, each sentence was composed of exactly the copy number of words, and each word stood exactly where it had to be. That was how I chose to mourn my Uncle Victor. One by one, I would open every box, and one by one I would read every book. That was the task I set for myself, and I stuck with it to the bitter end.

  Each box contained a jumble similar to the first, a hodgepodge of high and low, heaps of ephemera scattered among the classics, ragged paperbacks sandwiched between hardbound editions, pot-boilers lying flush with Donne and Tolstoy. Uncle Victor had never organized his library in any systematic way. Each time he had bought a book, he had put it on the shelf next to the one he had bought before it, and little by little the rows had expanded, filling more and more space as the years went by. That was precisely how the books had entered the boxes. If nothing else, the chronology was intact, the sequence had been preserved by default. I considered this to be an ideal arrangement. Each time I opened a box, I was able to enter another segment of my uncle’s life, a fixed period of days or weeks or months, and it consoled me to feel that I was occupying the same mental space that Victor had once occupied—reading the same words, living in the same stories, perhaps thinking the same thoughts. It was almost like following the route of an explorer from long ago, duplicating his steps as he thrashed out into virgin territory, moving westward with the sun, pursuing the light until it was finally extinguished. Because the boxes were not numbered or labeled, I had no way of knowing in advance which period I was about to enter. The journey was therefore made up of discrete, discontinuous jaunts. Boston to Lenox, for example. Minneapolis to Sioux Falls. Kenosha to Salt Lake City. It didn’t matter to me that I was forced to jump around the map. By the end, all the blanks would be filled in, all the distances would be covered.

  I had read many of the books before, and still others had been read out loud to me by Victor himself: Robinson Crusoe, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man. I did not let that stand in my way, however. I plowed through everything with equal passion, devouring old works as hungrily as new. Piles of finished books rose in the corners of my room, and whenever one of these towers seemed in danger of falling, I would load up two shopping bags with the threatened volumes and take them along with me on my next visit to Columbia. Directly across from the campus on Broadway was Chandler’s Bookstore, a cramped and dusty rathole that did a brisk trade in used books. Between the summer of 1967 and the summer of 1969 I made dozens of appearances there, and little by little I divested myself of my inheritance. That was the one action I allowed myself—making use of what I already owned. I found it wrenching to part with Uncle Victor’s former possessions, but at the same time I knew that he would not have held it against me. I had somehow discharged my debt to him by reading the books, and now that I was so short of money, it seemed only logical that I should take the next step and convert the books into cash.

  The problem was that I couldn’t earn enough. Chandler drove hard bargains, and his understanding of books was so different from mine that I barely knew what to say to him. For me, books were not the containers of words so much as the words themselves, and the value of a given book was determined by its spiritual quality rather than its physical condition. A dog-eared Homer was worth more than a spanking Virgil, for example; three volumes of Descartes were worth less than one by Pascal. Those were essential distinctions for me, but for Chandler they did not exist. A book was no more than an object to him, a thing that belonged to the world of things, and as such it was not radically different from a shoebox, a toilet plunger, or a coffeepot. Each time I brought in another portion of Uncle Victor’s library, the old man would go into his routine. Fingering the books with contempt, perusing the spines, hunting for marks and blemishes, he never failed to give the impression of someone handling a pile of filth. That was how the game worked. By degrading the goods, Chandler could offer rock-bottom prices. After thirty years of practice, he had the pose down pat, a repertoire of mutterings and asides, of wincings, tongue-clicks, and sad shakes of the head. The act was designed to make me feel the worthlessness of my own judgment, to shame me into recognizing the audacity of having presented these books to him in the first place. Are you telling me you want money for these things? Do you expect money from the garbage man when he carts away your trash?

  I knew that I was being cheated, but I seldom bothered to protest. What was I to do, after all? Chandler dealt from a position of strength, and nothing would ever change that—for I was always desperate to sell, and he was always indifferent to buy. Nor was there any point in feigning indifference to sell. The sale would simply not be made, and no sale was finally worse than being cheated. I discovered that I tended to do better when I brought in small doses of books, no more than twelve or fifteen at a time. The average price per volume seemed to go up ever so slightly then. But the smaller the exchange, the more often I would have to return, and I knew that I had to keep my visits to a minimum—for the more I dealt with Chandler, the weaker my position would grow. No matter what I did, therefore, Chandler was bound to win. As the months went by, the old man made no effort to talk to me. He never said hello, he never cracked a smile, he never even shook my hand. His manner was so blank that I sometimes wondered if he remembered me from one visit to the next. As far as Chandler was concerned, I might have been a new customer each time
I came in—a collection of disparate strangers, a random horde.

  As I sold off the books, my apartment went through many changes. That was inevitable, for each time I opened another box, I simultaneously destroyed another piece of furniture. My bed was dismantled, my chairs shrank and disappeared, my desk atrophied into empty space. My life had become a gathering zero, and it was a thing I could actually see: a palpable, burgeoning emptiness. Each time I ventured into my uncle’s past, it produced a physical result, an effect in the real world. The consequences were therefore always before my eyes, and there was no way to escape them. So many boxes were left, so many boxes were gone. I had only to look at my room to know what was happening. The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself disappear.

  Those were difficult days for everyone, of course. I remember them as a tumult of politics and crowds, of outrage, bullhorns, and violence. By the spring of 1968, every day seemed to retch forth a new cataclysm. If it wasn’t Prague, it was Berlin; if it wasn’t Paris, it was New York. There were half a million soldiers in Vietnam. The president announced that he wouldn’t run again. People were assassinated. After years of fighting, the war had become so large that even the smallest thoughts were now contaminated by it, and I knew that no matter what I did or didn’t do, I was as much a part of it as anyone else. One evening, as I sat on a bench in Riverside Park looking out at the water, I saw an oil tank explode on the other shore. Flames suddenly filled the sky, and as I watched the chunks of burning wreckage float across the Hudson and land at my feet, it occurred to me that the inner and the outer could not be separated except by doing great damage to the truth. Later that same month, the Columbia campus was turned into a battle-ground, and hundreds of students were arrested, including day-dreamers like Zimmer and myself. I am not planning to discuss any of that here. Everyone is familiar with the story of that time, and there would be no point in going over it again. That does not mean I want it to be forgotten, however. My own story stands in the rubble of those days, and unless this fact is understood, none of it will make sense.