THINGS GO BETTER
“Look, Weinraub,” I said, “you’re going to have to be careful.”
He laughed it off. He said, “Oh, you’re exaggerating. I won’t have any trouble. This is not a movie, this is real life. Oh, don’t worry. I can take care of myself.” You know how he is, you can just see the smile on his face, the knowing smile that he uses for everything. You know that he can’t take care of himself.
The next thing I knew, he was flying westward on gossamer wings of song, his thumb outstretched to the great wide wonderful land that is our nation, ranging across the vast expanse of this, the Pennsylvanian Commonwealth, ever eager to meet new people, encounter new and fresher viewpoints, discovering America on all her rich and terrifying levels, his ridiculously long hair flowing behind, holding and pulling him back.
As he went, he sang. He sang of poverty, he sang of ignorance, and fear, and he sang of Puff, the Magic Dragon and where all the flowers had gone. He carried a twelve-dollar guitar, a Supaphone that he had bought in a Penny’s basement in Harrisburg; he did not play it. One does not play on one’s image, and you can be sure that Stevie knew what was image and what wasn’t.
He stood on the side of the roads of our nation, every road and all roads, yes, and no roads, too, for he was everywhere at once with nowhere to go. He was our nation, the spirit of question, the spirit of adventure, the spirit of restless exploration that expanded our United States to their present maturity and slumber. And the myriad cars that passed him by, the thousands of rides that slowed only to hurl their empty cans of Carling’s, these Philistines are the poorer for it, and I join Steve Weinraub, wherever he is, in saying to them, “We cannot tolerate or condone such behavior.”
Oh, and now I must tell of those adventures, although it pains me much, I must relate his only exploits, his bootless fame, if you will, and how those events tore from him his very heart and soul, and stabbed deep into his visceral privates to wrench there from the darkling roots of identity.
He was out there, old Steve, alone under the Pennsylvania skies and the Pennsylvania sun and moon. He stood by the way, humbly, talking to himself and whistling. You know how he is when he is all alone: he will do old movie scenes and whistle Christmas carols. He waited for a ride. He waited in Leeper, he waited in Indian Bog, he waited in South Eastwich. The great muddy chariots roared through the Allegheny night, streaming by him like giant silverfish. He waited for the rebirth of wonder.
And yet, every once in a while a car would stop. Sometimes it would be a rich fag in a dusty tan Saab. Sometimes it would be a Mustang with a college-age couple who wanted to hear Carolyn Hester songs; sometimes the guy and girl were pinned. Mostly, however, he was picked up by blue-haired little old ladies in red and white Dodge Chargers. When he got an old lady, he always told her he was a poet. She would, of course, ask for a poem. Here it is:
What we’re here for
is death
Somebody accidentally
wound us up
(“I told you to leave that alone”)
and we must
wait
to run down.
Sex
is a better than average way
of killing the time.
My mind holds death
sometimes
like sugar
on Satan’s tongue dissolving
and life
seems but moments
of isolated
awareness—
leaves, insects discovered again
mistakes of beauty
made available by mistake:
Life
submerged in
living.
The old ladies invariably said, “That’s very interesting.” It seemed that their Roberts had been poets, too, before they had all passed on. The ladies always asked Steve how he felt about Edgar Guest; Steve answered that he liked him fine.
No one asked him if he was hungry. He was hungry, too, I know. No one said, “Why don’t we stop here, kid; let me treat you to a Double Cheese.” No one said, “Well, kid, where you going? Got anywhere to stay tonight?” No one asked; to them the free ride was enough. Weinraub marked it all down in his notebook. If only we could have that notebook, that priceless document of imperialist linoleum thinking. Then all your questions would be answered.
What did he eat? Nothing, and for a long time. Where did he stay? Nowhere, which is to say in little shady glens along scenic Route 80. Back and forth he traveled, back and forth across the ever-changing panorama of our Keystone State, looking and looking, and every person who picked him up told him where to find it all. Every car he rode in had it written somewhere, on a windshield sticker, on a fingerprint-smudged plaque bolted to the dashboard, on the bumper sticker from Fabulous Conneaut Lake Park. Everything said, “It’s all happening in Gremmage.” For a time Steve didn’t believe it; but, as is the case in situations like this, the evidence piled up beyond the point where he could ignore it. But the idea of actually finding where it’s at scared him. Steve lied a lot, but deep down inside he knew he couldn’t take care of himself.
Steve went west on Route 80; he turned around and came back eastward. On some trips, when he passed through Stroudsburg, he called me on the phone to say hello. Then he would turn around again and head west. Somewhere in the middle, though, his trip required a decision. Frequently he took the northern detour, through a bland farm country, and he avoided the sight of even the Gremmage chimney smoke. At other times he took the southern detour (particularly in autumn, his favorite season), because it wound through a dense and silent State Park. But every once in a while, very rarely but always in early afternoon, every once in a while he drove straight through Gremmage.
There were always rides to Gremmage. When he took the detours he had to wait, oh, hours for a ride. When he decided to go through Gremmage the cars would line up on the highway’s shoulder, anxious to have him aboard. As he rode through the town he watched, but no one seemed to be particularly unusual, nothing looked at all strange. He rode slouched down in his seat, he looked through the tightly closed window.
The flame of Gremmage drew him, the poor, doomed moth. Again and again he circled, back and forth he flew, above, below and, more and more often, through Gremmage.
And here the voice of reason whispers: one very cool night, starlight and moonlight bathing the strip mines with perverted ardor, Steve walks a lonely dirt road. He is entertaining himself with a scene from a hypothetical movie. “Colonel Rafferty, you can’t send a boy up in a crate like that!” “This is war, Lieutenant. We must all make allowances, and we must all make sacrifices. That boy . . . that boy is my son!” “Your son! But, Colonel, I ... I didn’t know that you had a son.” “Until thirty minutes ago, Lieutenant, I didn’t know either.”
“Help . . .”
With the good, clean Quaker State nothing around him, you can no doubt see the confusion in Steve’s features. Someone has asked him for help. He knows that he can’t even take care of himself.
“Help me, please . . .”
But we knew Steve, at least I did, and I know that he was basically a good kid. He had come to that universal Good Samaritan turning point in his life.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Good . . . Good King Wenceslas looked down . . .”
Sitting here in our sanitary colonials, guarded by legions of little black iron coachboys holding lanterns, guarded by phalanxes of iron flamingos, sitting here in our homes, we can afford not to shudder. We can pretend to see that unvaried night with its road and Steve and wretch. We can delude ourselves into thinking we feel that ginger-ale effervescence at the base of Steve’s spine. We’re not going to have to do anything when Steve’s own voice comes back to him from the swollen throat of the near-corpse by the side of the road, singing his own song.
“Oh, God,” Steve said. His voice broke the occult silence, which was already punctured by cricket calls, bird sounds, and leaf rustles. “What should I do?”
Steve found him in a ditch, this poor guy, beaten and robbed and left to die. Crusts of blood, and dirt, and other
“I... I...”
“Easy, old-timer,” said Steve, “easy there. Don’t try to talk.”
“Beware . . .”
Did you feel another ripple of terror? No? Of course not.
“Beware of what, old-timer?”
The man coughed, the blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth just the way movies have taught us to expect. He told his story haltingly, painfully. He was the last beatnik, the last of the old Gregory Corso school of poets. He was looking for America, too. The rest, ah, it is so evident that it hurts.
“Thus . . . beware . . .”
“Beware what, old-timer?”
“Beware . . . beware . . . be . . .”
The old beatnik’s legs tensed, his back arched, his neck muscles tightened. At last he relaxed and as he slumped back he whispered, “Gremmage.” He let out his last breath with a wheeze, and the Allegheny midnight smoothed itself with silence.
Steve knelt, cradling the corpse in his arms. Perhaps he wept (I like to think that he did); he set the man’s body down again, and closed the dead eyes forever. “Do not go gentle into that good night,” he said by way of benediction.
Yes, he could have guessed, and should have, as I did, that Gremmage had done this evil thing. He stood and shouted, loudly into the black etwas of sleeping Pennsylvania. He mourned, and he prayed, more than he had ever prayed before in his aimless life, and he screamed. “Quo vadis, America?” he screamed. Quo vadis, indeed, Steve. Never again would he venture near Gremmage.
Even as his vow echoed from the wooded mountains’ majesty a night-grayed Saab pulled to a stop. A thin, neatly dressed man leaned across the seat and rolled down the window. Gracefully. “Hi there,” he said, smiling. “Need a ride?”
“No.”
“Well, then hop in! Julian’s waiting supper.”
They drove in strained silence for some minutes. At last Steve said. “Which way’s Gremmage?”
“Back the other way, baby.”
“Fine. Keep going.”
The man let him out a short while later. Immediately the Mustang pulled up. The guy and girl in it smiled at Steve. The chick asked, “Going to Gremmage?”
“No,” said Steve.
“Okay, get in.”
He sat in the back seat and discussed old Ian and Sylvia albums until the couple had to leave the main road. Steve got out and was picked up by a little old lady in a red and white Dodge. She was delighted to learn that Steve was a poet. Her late husband had been one, too. Steve recited his poem. When he finished, the old lady turned to him and smiled. “That’s very interesting,” she didn’t say. She didn’t say that at all.
“All right. Here we are: Gremmage!” she said. Steve got out of the car and found a place to sleep.
“Yes,” he swore the next day, “I will learn this town. I will discover every ugly sore it has to hide. I will bring it down about the ears of the Gremmagers. I’ll take care of all of them.”
He took the twelve-dollar guitar from around his neck and put it on the sidewalk. He sat on the curb, his defenses inviolable, waiting for Gremmage to make its first move and its first mistake. When they come to hold me down and cut my hair and beard, I will kick their groins, he thought, I will karate chop their Adam’s apples.
“Hey, kid, you new around here?”
Oh, Steve, he was smiling, the Gremmager was crossing Ridge Street, hand out, smiling, welcome, welcome! Steve! Sometimes you forgot that you knew that you couldn’t take care of yourself.
“You got a place to stay, kid?”
Why, no, he didn’t have a place to stay, hadn’t had a real shower in a while, traveling a lot and all.
“You hungry, kid?”
“Yeah, well, you know. Yeah.”
“Well, come on over to the diner. We’ll buy you lunch. This is a friendly town we got here. Lots of towns around here, they wouldn’t like one of you hippies wandering around and all. But here in Gremmage, why, doggone happy to have you.”
See them now. See Steve hand his guitar up to one of the grinning locals, see him stand, see them all head off down Ridge Street to the diner, about nine Gremmagers and Steve. Can you listen? Can you catch Steve’s nervousness, do you find fear in his words? No? Do you find fear in his bearing, in his easier laugh? No? I told you that he couldn’t take care of himself.
He slides into a booth in the diner. The locals divide, so part of them sit with Steve and part take their own booths. They all look alike to Steve, so he does not find the one with his guitar. It does not matter, he guesses.
And then they talked. The waitress took their order, cheeseburgers and french fries; they laughed when Steve said pop instead of soda (or the other way around). They talked and laughed; the laughter wasn’t forced, it was, beyond doubt, genuine. Steve was surprised, his defenses grew steadily more violable; he sort of liked the Gremmagers. They talked.
They talked about hair, of course. They did not say that he looked like Jesus. Steve thought that this in itself was worthy of being recorded in his notebook. A Gremmager laughed delightedly. Another suggested that Steve was really the Apostle Paul: he had finished the First Corinthians, and the Second, and now he was working on the Honorable Mention Corinthians. Everyone laughed; Steve laughed too, that poor, dead dear.
When the cheeseburgers came the locals were still talking about hair. Steve was interested in the Gremmagers’ point of view.
“I’ve never really had it explained so clearly,” he said. “I never understood the objection to long hair before. But I can sympathize with your point.” The Gremmagers smiled to each other.
If you squint just right, you can see the entire population of Gremmage crowded together on the sidewalk in front of the diner.
“You are right,” said Steve, “on some people long hair looks horrible. But I always thought it filled out my thin face.”
The diner is empty except for the group of Gremmagers that came in with Steve. The waitresses and the kitchen help have all gone outside to join the others on the sidewalk.
“I wish I could get this hair cut right now. I don’t know how I ever thought it was decent for a grown man to wear it like this. I look like a damn faggot. Right after lunch you’ll have to show me the barber shop.”
The Gremmagers laughed. “No need to wait, if you don’t want to,” one of them said. “Matt here’s a barber. Do it for you right here.”
“Oh yes, please! Cut it off already; God, I hate it!”
You can look around, there’s about twenty minutes now, nothing much happening except the haircut. The Gremmagers inside the diner and the Gremmagers outside slap each other’s backs and laugh a lot. At last Steve’s hair is tastefully short. With his beard he looks like D. H. Lawrence.
“You gonna keep the chin feathers, son?”
“Maybe you could trim the beard a little, neaten it up.”
“You’re gonna look like some regular professor or something.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Take it off.”
“Hey, Don, I think it’s time for the sign.”
The Gremmagers were cheering. They cheered each other, they congratulated Steve. They gave him a new suit and a ten-dollar bill. Someone flipped a switch and a neon sign lit up above a dingy door at the back of the diner: A High-Pay, Fascinating Career Is Waiting For You In The Exciting, Wide-Open Field OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING!!! Steve grabbed the doorknob. He turned back to the Gremmagers and smiled shyly. He never could take care of himself. As the town of Gremmage applauded he opened the door and went through.