A Moveable Famine Read online

  OTHER TITLES BY JOHN SKOYLES

  POETRY

  A Little Faith

  Permanent Change

  Definition of the Soul

  The Situation

  PROSE

  Generous Strangers

  Secret Frequencies: A New York Education

  a MOVEABLE FAMINE

  John Skoyles

  A Moveable Famine is an autobiographical novel. While the narrative follows the timeline of my life, it is not an exact record of events. I have collapsed several characters into composites, and have created others from my imagination. Where I have related stories concerning known persons, I have used their real names because the incidents described are as I recall them.

  Copyright © 2014 by John Skoyles

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Skoyles, John.

  A moveable famine / John Skoyles.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-358-6

  1. Authorship—Fiction. 2. Identity (Philosophical concept)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.K6564M68 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2014006118

  Printed in the United States of America

  PREFACE

  We were hell-bent to become poets and all poets stood in our way. We had been outcasts in high school, stars in college and had graduated from finishing school in the art of verse. We drank and smoked and fucked as much as we could while bemoaning our middle-class upbringing and the wasted lives of everyone who did not see the world through the lens of poetry, a lens cloudy with the jizm of jerking off in furnished rooms, which we called suffering.

  We contemplated suicide when our thoughts were ineffable. We contemplated suicide when we transformed our thoughts into bitter poems. We contemplated suicide when the world ignored our poems, and we committed suicide when we were ignored by the world of poetry.

  With women, we were sensitive, bearing the burden of witnessing our nation’s militarism, the savage effect of the Dow Jones on the poor, the illusion of the comfort offered by religion. We pitied our parents, our siblings’ scrounging existences and two-week vacations. We pitied their ignorance of the human heart and their refusal to rake the bottom depths of the soul.

  And in those depths, we forged friendships with poets who loved our poetry. Poets with whom we would tap, knock, bang, and finally demolish the doors of poetry’s academies, societies and foundations.

  We were hell-bent to become poets and all poets stood in our way.

  CHAPTER ONE

  POEM IN THE BATHTUB—WORD POWER—GREENWICH VILLAGE—FRANK O’HARA—MATER CHRISTI—THE CHIEF PROSECUTOR OF GALILEO

  My mother recited the same poem every night when she gave me a bath—the ballad Oscar Wilde wrote while imprisoned for sodomy, a poem in which he envies a fellow inmate, a murderer sentenced to hang, for having the passion to commit a real crime. Part of the long narrative of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” goes like this:

  Yet each man kills the thing he loves

  By each let this be heard,

  Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word,

  The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

  Some kill their love when they are young,

  And some when they are old;

  Some strangle with the hands of Lust,

  Some with the hands of Gold:

  The kindest use a knife, because

  The dead so soon grow cold.

  The bells of the Good Humor truck, children shouting and occasional police sirens drifted into our Queens railroad flat. By the end of each week, I learned a new stanza. Although I didn’t understand it, it intrigued me. There were knives and wine and blood, just as in our church, Saint Bartholomew’s, named for the martyr who had been flayed alive. Led by nuns, we paraded single file under a statue of that saint who held a blade in one hand and his skin over his arm like a suit. My mother, Olga Bertolotti, grew up in that same neighborhood in a large Italian family. Her sisters became nurses and secretaries and her brothers joined the transit authority and fire department. The men on our block prized close haircuts and shaves; their wives wore heavy foundation garments. Every sofa and armchair was fitted with a plastic cover. My mother graduated from Newtown High, whose most famous alumnus was Don Rickles, where she won a contest for putting the words of the school anthem, “Sing with a Will for Newtown,” to the tune of “Glow little glowworm.” The prize was a poetry anthology, A Quarto of Modern Verse.

  The summer I was twelve, I found that book on the knick-knack shelf next to Hummel figurines of girls swinging baskets of daisies, but ignored it in favor of my father’s paperbacks, Increase Your Word Power and Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. My father didn’t finish eighth grade, but had gotten a job as an envelope salesman and wanted to keep it. The office manager gave him these books and told him to read the New York Times. He became the sole white-collar worker on a block of policemen, longshoremen and steamfitters. His story imbued the books with a magical promise—they had power in the title, the power to transform a man.

  When I did pick up the quarto, I found the words of Wilde I’d memorized, the poem printed across from a photograph of the flamboyant poet with cape and cane. Kipling held a pipe under his brush mustache. Poe scowled next to the outlawish Stephen Crane. I hid the surname of dapper John Masefield with my pinkie and imagined my own name there. If I read a poem twice, I had it memorized.

  It never occurred to me that poetry was still being written until one afternoon, sitting in front of the TV eating chocolate snaps, I watched Art Linkletter hold a microphone to Big Eric, a bearded beatnik tapping a bongo drum and reciting in a Greenwich Village coffee house. Women with straight hair and black leotards clicked their fingers in applause. I asked my parents to take me to Bleecker Street. Surrounded by Le Figaro Café’s dark mahogany, men smoked pipes and played chess. I ordered a Himbersaft for the strangeness of the name. It turned out to be a simple raspberry soda, but I savored it because a Himbersaft in Le Figaro Café was different from a Coke at Woolworth’s.

  Most weekends I sat on the lip of the fountain in Washington Square Park listening to folksingers. On Eighth Street I bought a print of wide-eyed children behind a torn chicken-wire fence. I associated these waifs of Walter Keane with the Beats simply because they showed emotion. I listened to anyone who wore a beard and swayed under a tree declaiming from a sheaf, and one afternoon I stood before a toothless old man who lisped a long litany, every line of which began, “Hear my heart.” I found a discarded Village Voice on the Number 7 train to high school. The front page printed a poem by Frank O’Hara called “To the Harbormaster,” and I placed it in the frame of my bedroom mirror. Searching for more of his work, I learned he died that week in 1966, the poem surrounded by a black border of mourning. Poet Ed Sanders ran the Peace Eye Bookstore, a former kosher butcher shop, with hand-printed signs on the shelves that called for the legalization of pot and cunnilingus. On my first visit I left with a mandrake root and a copy of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

  I saw poems by O’Hara in an issue of the Evergreen Review at my neighborhood newsstand, Admiration Cigar. The cover showed a naked woman jogging through the autumn woods. I paid the dollar and eased it into my book bag, walking home carrying a forest where girls ran nude.

>   Mater Christi, my high school, three stories tall, was shaped like a horseshoe and divided down the middle into male and female. The genders mingled only in the center of each floor: gym, cafeteria, and the library, where my two desires fused—books and girls. Leafing through magazines, I watched the plaid skirts, knee socks and blouses tied at the neck by bows, and met no one. In the stacks I found The New American Poetry, with Kerouac’s dizzying line, “Love’s multitudinous boneyard of decay.” Jack Spicer’s biography said to write him at THE PLACE in San Francisco. I sent a letter, waited months, and then I learned he was dead. I revered a photograph of Ezra Pound’s lined cheeks and pointed goatee. I stared at his ancient face and imitated “The Cantos,” asking the gods of poetry to send Pound’s ghost, the powerful voice of antiquity, into my soul. Then I learned he was alive.

  Many of the poets met friends and lovers at college. Gary Snyder roomed with Lew Welch and Philip Whalen, so college became a path to poetry. No one in my family had gone beyond high school, and my investigations discovered poet Richard Wilbur at Wesleyan. Bard College interested me because the cover of its literary magazine showed a biker on a Harley kissing a bikini-clad girl in a jungle. My application essay, cribbed from How to Be Accepted by the College of your Choice, began, “Our small family has always been a happy one.” I took a guidance counselor’s advice to apply to the all-male Jesuit college he called a safe bet. I enrolled at Fairfield University of Saint Robert Bellarmine, whose mascot was the stag and whose namesake was the chief prosecutor of Galileo.

  Four years later, I entered the master’s program in English at the University of Iowa, which I found in the college rankings of U.S. News & World Report. My parents had the same response as everyone in my apartment building: “Couldn’t you get in anywhere around here?” My Aunt Linda called to congratulate me, but before she hung up, she said, “By the way, John, I think it’s pronounced Ohio.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ADVISING APPOINTMENT—THE GANGBANGER OF IOWA CITY—MEETING McPEAK—SMOKE RINGS—ALLEN GINSBERG—“RIBBLE”—PAYMENT IN THE LOW TWO FIGURES

  I drove a ten-year-old Mercury Comet to Iowa City. The four-story Iowa Bank and Trust building, the tallest in town, flashed the temperature: 101 degrees. In the Daily Iowan classifieds I found a cheap furnished basement apartment with a wall so thin I woke to my neighbor’s spoon scraping her cereal bowl. I lived on money from a summer job at the Associated Press, and had a budget of twenty dollars a month for food. I ate mostly hot dogs and drank powdered milk from the Royal Market where the aisles were stacked with products still in their cartons.

  The packet of information I received in New York told me to see my advisor, Serge Andreyev, editor of the Ethical Literary Review. I walked to his office in EPB, the English Philosophy Building. The Old Capitol, with its gold dome, presided over university buildings known as the Pentacrest. Sandwich shops and barbershops stretched out before it, along with hardware stores and department stores whose windows displayed cracked mannequins in floral housedresses. Two Epstein’s Bookstores were a block apart: one used, one new, run by twin brothers, Harry James Epstein and Glenn Miller Epstein. Farmers in overalls walked among sorority girls, hippies, frat boys, school children and tweedy professors. There were bars on every block: The Airliner, Donnelly’s, The Deadwood, The Mill and The Vine. George’s, The Brown Bottle and Magoo’s. Each with its own clientele and some with a particular literary aesthetic.

  Andreyev waved me in just as his phone rang. The building was cool, but sunlight entered his office and warmed the spines of the Ethical Literary Reviews with the smell of burnt toast. A heavy, bald man with a red face, he kept repeating into the receiver, “I’m on my way. I’m leaving now.” When he hung up, he said, “That was my wife. We had ham last night and now she has stomach pains. She’s sure it’s trichinosis, but it’s guilt. I’m taking the bone for testing.”

  I asked if he would help me choose my courses.

  “I really don’t know what to suggest,” he said. “You can’t go wrong. And I have to be off, as you heard.” He lifted his briefcase, which contained, I guessed, the ham bone. On the way out, I stopped at a framed print of men touching torches to tree branches and snaring birds with nets.

  “Batfowling,” he said. “And over here.” He pointed to other prints, “Pike fishing and otter hunting. Pursuits of the nineteenth-century common man.”

  We took the elevator together in silence and, when we got out, he said, “Don’t worry. The worst you can do is take a wrong step in the right direction.”

  I went back to my apartment and opened the course list while my neighbor’s voice came clearly through the wall as she phoned friends, telling them that her married boyfriend was cheating on her with a high school girl. She spoke with a twang, and said she was going to call her rival’s parents and reveal their daughter’s affair.

  I chose Seminar: American Transcendentalism.

  My neighbor’s friends counseled against her plan, but she insisted she could convince the girl’s parents to keep her home. As she dialed, I found Poetry Workshop.

  “Hello, sir,” she said. “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but I want to tell you, sir, that your daughter is going out with a married man.” The father’s response encouraged her. “Yes, I thought you would like to know.” They talked for a while, my neighbor upholding family values, but adding at one point, “And, sir, I hope I can be frank and tell you your daughter is known as ‘The Gang Banger of Iowa City.’ ” Even this did not put off the father and they talked for another minute while I added “Chaucer” to my list. At four a.m. I woke to the roar of a motorcycle, followed by bone-shaking thumps on my neighbor’s door. After the visitor drove off, the girl ran to the window, lifted the metal venetian blinds, and moaned a long wavering moan.

  In American Transcendentalism, I met the Thompson twins, Mandy and Sandy, from the tiny town of Longleaf, Georgia. Sandy, rotund and blonde, full of giggles and good cheer, was the opposite of her sister whose high cheekbones and dark hair, parted in the middle, gave her a somber look. Elderly Alexander Kern held the class in his living room on Mayflower Heights, a promontory overlooking the city. Deer nosed at feeders outside his glassed-in balcony. Twelve of us sat in a row of folding chairs, six on a side. Kern, an elfin man at Iowa for forty years, sank into an armchair at one end and blew smoke rings from his cigar down the center as he lectured. Twelve heads followed each circle of smoke. On occasion, he reached the farthest student.

  The Art of Poetry was taught by Frank Ridge, a second-year MFA candidate in the writers’ workshop. Ridge’s handsome but slightly pudgy face loomed above a football player’s body. He shuffled through the halls, dragging his Wellingtons. We had Catholic, working-class backgrounds in common and became friends.

  I thought Chaucer would be a festival of lewd stories, but Dr. Stabile believed Chaucer a religious man who wrote bawdy tales to mock sinners. Stabile rode a girl’s thick Schwinn to campus, his long red pony tail trailing down the back of the poplin suit he wore every day. Doctoral students, marked by jackets and ties and the thermoses they carried to the library, comprised the entire class, except for me and a member of the writers’ workshop, Mike McPeak, who smelled of beer and missed every other class. Stabile flew into rages at contemporary moral misconduct, condemning the workshop in particular for lecherous behavior. One day McPeak muttered that it was no worse than any other department and I agreed. Stabile crowned his argument against us by pointing his finger toward the ceiling and pronouncing, “May I let it be known that when Philip Roth was here, he seduced the wife of our most prominent faculty member!” After class, McPeak bought me a beer at The Deadwood, a bar with a western theme, where workshop students gathered. Wanted posters of outlaws covered the pine paneling. A gnarled piece of driftwood loomed over the bottles. Frank Ridge joined us and tried to guess the cuckold’s identity. McPeak said the answer rested on whether “most prominent” meant the English department or the entire university. “If it�
�s the whole school,” he said, “then it’s clearly Van Allen of the Van Allen belt.”

  From then on, McPeak pronounced words in Stabile’s class as double-entendres, saying, “Really, do you think Chaucer wrote that scene just to save our souls?” But he drew out the last two syllables, so it sounded like, assholes. In his research paper, he quoted a character’s standard for a successful tale—“Mirth is All,” and wrote, “Chaucer puts his dictum into Harry Bailey’s mouth.”

  He tried to get me to join in, but I had already been through that at Fairfield with Father Rogers, a sadistic priest who wiped the sweat from his forehead with his index finger and flung it into our faces as we entered his class on Victorian prose. In his role as prefect in the Loyola dorm, he forced students to strip publicly and take cold showers while he doused them with buckets of water. Rogers seemed more comfortable with students like Monk Lawrence who hung by his legs for hours from an isometric bar, and Tim “No Mind” Garahan, who died diving headfirst into a rock in the Connecticut River. My roommate and I consulted Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, for its bizarre accounts of famous nineteenth-century writers. He pointed out Tennyson’s “preferring dogs to niggers,” and that when a physician examined Thomas Carlyle’s wife after twenty-five years of marriage, the doctor reported that she was a “virgo intacta.” Rogers hotly insisted that biography was extraneous. My roommate’s climactic moment was noting that John Ruskin became forever impotent on his wedding night, quoting Harris: “This art historian who rhapsodized over the beauties of marble nymphs was shocked at the sight of a real woman’s pubic hair.” At this remark, Rogers became so flustered he lost his place and kept licking his finger as he whipped through English Prose of the Victorian Era, our two-thousand-page tome of tissue-thin paper. I searched Harris for writers’ deaths, selecting the most absurd. I noted that Matthew Arnold died jumping over a fence, and that only five people attended John Stuart Mill’s funeral. After a while, I stopped consulting Harris altogether and simply invented things. When Robert Browning died of a heart attack, it was after being chased across a field by a goose. Christina Rossetti’s cancer was hastened by her shame at being glimpsed on the toilet when an outhouse collapsed around her.