HART CRANE BY MOONLIGHT

by
Zsolt Alapi

There was that small town across the New Hampshire border into Vermont—Fellow’s Balls, the boys called it. This was where the guy who was twenty-one or who had a good false ID went on Friday night whiskey runs. For the others, there were the kegs that rolled in after 5 p.m., once the last classes of the day were finished.

I learned very little at Dartmouth, though it was Ivy League and everyone told me how privileged I should feel to have a full academic ride. I was eighteen when I arrived there, having read a lot, but knowing very little about the ways of the world. The two upper classmen who had the “suite” next to my single made it their mission to teach me. Jocko was the Master of the Revels. During Frosh week, he made us chug pints until some puked or passed out. He took it personally if a keg was returned undrained. No one knew much about him or even what his major was, except that he was from a moneyed family from the Berkshires.

After his seventh pint, Jocko quartered a water melon. He said: “It’s red, just like the inside of a pussy, boys. Watch me eat.” It was something awful to see. Jocko was big and broad with a Neanderthal forehead. He had thick, fat lips—cunt-lapper lips, he called them. Jocko dug in. His tongue darted like crazy in and out of the pink flesh. He started spewing seeds and pieces of melon flesh all over the floor. His chin and face were covered with melon juice, black and white seeds, some green rinds. Jocko lapped away like a man possessed. Even his glasses fogged up from the effort.

Finally, he stopped: “That, boys, is what eating pussy is like, but more delicious. One day, if you’re lucky, you’ll get some and have me to thank for teaching you. Try a piece.” He offered another untouched quarter to those of us left standing. Somehow, none of us wanted any.

Jake was his roommate, a swimmer who had almost qualified for the U.S. Olympic squad. He majored in finance, skied the Rockies every winter, and had a mother who was into antiques. Their room looked like a den out of a nineteenth century Victorian bildungsroman. There was an armoire in one corner and a velvet sofa that seemed to be made of silk. On the day I arrived, Jake had a large Persian carpet draped over a rope between two trees. He saw me lugging a box of books up to my room.

“Hey, shitshorts…..come here….I got a job for you.”

“What,” I said, “I’m busy.”

“Listen, you unripe piece of dried gism….you do what I tell you, or you are going to be one sorry motherfucker. Now get your ass over hear and start beating. I just know you got to be good at that.”

He then gave me a ski pole and told me to start beating the rug to get the summer mold and mildew. Jake watched me, flexing his arms. They looked big, and now some others had gathered around, laughing. I started to beat the rug, but then looked him square in the eye, ignoring the others. I took a tremendous swing, missing the rug entirely, and wrapped the pole around one of the tree trunks. There was silence.

“Sorry, guess I missed.” Then, I turned and walked up to my box of books as I felt their eyes bore into my back. I never turned back to look at him but walked upstairs to my room at Richardson Hall.

They came to call me The Ghost. I guess it was because I always walked through the campus at night. I seldom went to my classes and spent much of the days sleeping. Night was another matter. This was when I came fully awake, and a restlessness drove me along the bank of the Connecticut River that ran through the north side of the campus. One day I found the tower. It was actually small, with maybe about twenty six stairs leading to the top turret. But it was a place to sit, to be, and nobody ever came there. I had just started reading Joyce in the only course I thought worth attending, and it came to be my Martello from whose top I looked across the vast sea of trees, the scrotumtightening green of New Hampshire’s firs and maples.

It was there that I first read Crane’s poems, and, by moonlight, “The Broken Tower.” There were the lines that haunted me:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

Although it was only mid-September, I shivered under the blank gaze of the moon. The night breezes, the noises of the woods, the starkness of the night with its stars. I felt Hart’s tears in these lines, his longing for the embrace of death, of love. But not for long to hold each desperate choice. As if he, knowing his own short tenure, the call of the sea, the black ocean split by the ship’s prow, sailing back from the Caribbean. And leaping into Her arms. I was eighteen, longing for romance, for the painful embrace of my own life.

And so after forty six days I reentered the world again. Departure was no less easy. The Dean of Arts called me into his office. Under a portrait of Daniel Webster, he told me what a mistake I was making, of how I was cheating my parents, my country, the university, and, above all, my future. Here was an opportunity given to so few that I was throwing away. Had I no shame? After all, the university had invested so much in my promise. After an hour I left.

Now, almost touched by some odd grace of fortune, I became in my last days no longer The Ghost, but someone who everyone wanted to speak to and be around. Jocko and Jake took me to their frat house for a farewell celebration. Everyone looked at me like some rare being, a Lazarus come back from the dead. If there would have been wounds, they would have wanted to feel and verify them. I went back to the tower one last time that night. I rolled a joint and slowly smoked it, watching the stars, the heavens unfolding over the broken world.

*

I got a ride across the border into Vermont with Dan (the Man), who was making the Friday afternoon booze run for the others in the dorm. We bid each other an almost formal farewell, shaking hands on the outskirts of the town that led toward IS 87. Four more rides landed me in Burlington where I found a small hotel. It was late at night when I arrived and there was a young woman at the reception looking bored and (so I thought) eager.

We talked for a bit. Her name was Amy-Jo, and she had a small pug-face with a strong body, round breasts, and almost obscenely full lips. Amy-Jo was a farm girl trying to make it in the city. She drove an old heap every day to Mater Dei College to attend courses in business management. Amy-Jo had plans for her life. She was going to work eventually in a metropolis, maybe even New York.

I asked her about what she did on the weekend or on days she wasn’t working. I asked her about boys and, because I had read my Kerouac, I asked her what she really wanted out of life, about her dreams and deepest desires.

“A good life,” she replied, “with all the trimmings. Someone to love, a family, maybe some kids, a house in the country eventually. I want a job where I make piles of money. I know I can do it. My marketing teacher says I have a real gift for making money. And you?”

I told her about leaving Dartmouth, about my dreams to see the world and to write.

“You left an Ivy League school? Are you crazy? You don’t know what you’ve thrown away. Can’t you go back? I’m sure they would take you back if you asked enough.”

“But I don’t want to go back. It really wasn’t for me. I’m sure that after four years there, I could have gotten a job as a junior exec. for Reader’s Digest. The guy next door to me in the dorm…his father was a Veep there. I want to live at the heart of life.”

“The what? What are you talking about? Listen. I grew up in a family of five kids. My dad worked from dawn until night on the farm. Dropped dead at the age of fifty, right there in the barn. Josh, my brother who was eleven, found him on top of a bale of hay, his face purple and his tongue hanging out. He was still clutching a pitchfork in his hand. The sheriff had to pry his fingers off, they were so cramped and stiff.” She began to cry.

“You must miss him, I guess. I’m sorry.”

“The bastard,” she blubbered, “he felt me up after I turned twelve. I can still feel those calluses on my tits. I hated the fucker!”

We were both silent for a while. Finally I spoke:

“Say, Amy-Jo, when do you finish up here? Tomorrow’s Saturday. Why don’t we spend it together?”

“I’m coming off a five night shift. I’m tired, man, really beat.”

“I’ve got the room upstairs for the next day. You can crash there for a while. Maybe we can smoke a number and do something together.”

“Oh yeah, like what?”

“Anything. Talk. Make the beast with two backs. You pick.”

“Go to sleep, Dartmouth boy. We’ll talk by and by. It’s awful late.”

She tossed me the keys and I went up to my room. It was on the third floor and smelled of must and mildew. Even the sheets seemed damp since it had been raining for the past two day, Amy-Jo had told me. I went to the old, cracked tub to run myself a bath. There was a stray dark pubic hair near the plug and the sides of the tub had faint brown rings from age and neglect. I ran the taps and rusty water came out as the pipes began to knock loudly. I washed the tub out as best I could and ran a steaming bath and got in and lit up a spliff.

Time passed. I guess I must have dreamed about Amy-Jo and her pug-face, and promising breasts. She had used the pass key and walked into the bathroom, shedding her clothes along the floor. She had stood above me in the cramped bath, her curly bush level with my mouth. I “nibbled meekly,” as Roethke had written, she the sickle, I poor I, the rake. With a groan, Amy-Jo lowered herself onto my up thrust manhood. The water splashed out of the tub on all sides of us. She locked her lips onto mine and sucked on my tongue wildly. She moaned, gasped, gnashed her teeth. I half expected a bark. I felt a warmth tingle from the small of my back up into my stomach and then into the groin. I quivered like a leaf. There were whistles, bells, and more bells ringing.

It was the phone that woke me up, that and the fact that the water had cooled down somewhat. I opened my eyes and saw my erection at the bursting point. The ringing continued, insistent. I got up, out of the bath. My penis went flaccid, turning into a dull ache that cramped into my stomach like a tight fist.

“Hello, what is it?”

“Hey, Dartmouth boy. It’s the front desk. What the fuck? Room twenty four is complaining about the noise from the pipes and running water. They also say they smell something as if things were burning. Say they can’t sleep. It’s after three, you know. Keep it down or I’m gonna have to throw you out. All right?

“Sorry, but I fell asleep in the bath. How you doing, Amy-Jo? Still awake?”

“Barely. Now seriously, keep it down up there.”

“And you, are you coming up later?”

“Time will tell. Bye.”

“Ciao, bella.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Bye.”

*

Dawn came slowly, reluctantly. I had dozed a bit and felt groggy. I couldn’t sleep any more and willed the phone to ring or for a soft knock on the door. Finally, I got out of bed and felt around in my backpack until I found the book. I opened at random, and then dialed the front desk.

Her gruff, sleepy voice answered:

“Good morning, reception.”

“Don’t say anything, Amy-Jo, just listen to this. Something I wrote for you last night.” I then read her “Voyages” tenderly, my voice trembling. After, there was a long silence.

“You really wrote that for me? No one has ever done anything like that.”

And then the line went dead.

I shot back the bolt on my door and waited for the door to open. Well, Hart, your poems will serve someone some use today. I then I fell into a deep sleep, then awoke with a start as I heard the sound of a Norton 650 firing up outside my window. The driver wore a leather jacket and a red bandanna covered his long hair. He adjusted his sunglasses and lit a cigarette, balancing the big machine with his left boot planted in the gravel. Amy-Jo ran out of the office, her breasts swinging, her nipples hard in the morning air. She jumped on the back of the bike, kissed his leather-jacketed shoulder once, and buried her crotch into his backside. They roared off around the corner.

I packed my bags slowly and went downstairs to check out. Someone named Madge was at the front desk. She was barely twenty, a mousie girl with thin, wispy hair who smiled at me shyly through braces. I nodded to her and bent to the road, heading toward the highway.

There were some short rides mostly from farmers once I was closer to the Canadian border, and the last one left me outside of the village of Beebe. I walked a ways and then sat down by the side of the road on my pack. It began to drizzle, slowly turning into rain, and finally a hard downpour. I thought of Amy-Jo, Hart Crane, and the visionary company of love. Amy-Jo was probably asleep in the arms of Bret the Biker after a good fuck. Hart Crane was dead, his bones washed clean somewhere in the Caribbean. And what about Slater Brown? What had he felt when he heard about his suicide? They were all ghosts now, and I too felt like the Ghost they had called me. I began to shiver in the rain, and felt the pain of their loss, of all the lost souls who had loved greatly in this sorry world. I groped in my bag to touch his book, all sodden now, washed with the salt tears of the ocean that was his shroud and with the tears of all who had passed in and through the world.

I think I must have wept as I whispered:

“I’m sorry I did not do justice to your words. Your poem was more for me than for someone else.” In desperation, I searched the road for signs of life until finally a car came by, slowing, stopping, and letting me into its warmth. I sat back, half-closed my eyes and watched the blur of trees, sky, and the indifferent sun that had returned to warm this broken world.

© Zsolt Alapi
Reproduced with permission