Follies of God Read online

  Tell me, Mama. What did you give to me, and where is it now?

  Tenn believed that if he could get back to the intersection of Royal and Conti streets, or Dumaine and Bourbon, he could connect all those floaters in his brain, all those leaves, which he came to believe were memories unacknowledged, unrecognized.

  Another night, sleepless, anxious, afraid of a visitation of the time knot, Tenn saw an actress on television and had an idea. He would later relay it to me, and I would write it on the menu of a praline shop.

  A young man circles a small Southern town. Everyone has seen him. The older woman, living alone, nurses her memories of the young man she once loved, who died, taking with him her unrequited love, her desire for the surcease provided by the flesh, and a dark secret. Is this man walking about a ghost? He appears to the young man who sits in the public park at night, because he has heard there are assignations among the magnolias, buttocks pressed against the cool bases of the Confederate statues. This young man speaks to the phantom, who never responds, and who never submits to his longing. Is he real? Is he the desire most wanted and never found? The town becomes afraid of the young man. Is he responsible for the vandalisms, the small robberies, the sound of shattering glass in the still night?

  Tenn would stare into tablecloths, bare walls, the noonday sky, and remember: “This is the white of the pale judgment which faces me every day. I think of piles of cocaine, beautifully white and pure, like sand on the beaches where I was beautiful and the days were long and fat with purpose. I can look into the cocaine, as I look into a white tablecloth, and I can see the spots that dance in my eyes, and they are like the leaves that whirl in my brain. If I can only connect them. If I can only find a means to use them.

  “I pray to the emptiness that is the page,” Tenn said, “and I pray to the emptiness that is my mind, and I ask that I be filled.”

  Tenn paused, then continued.

  “Now, I can recall a summer in Italy, in a small pensione, simple and rustic, with the most luxurious towels. No grand hotel of Europe ever had such plush towels, as white as this tablecloth, fresh-smelling, nubby. I remember that the shower had a loud, slow drain, and as you began to rub your body down with the towel, you would stand ankle-deep in warm, soapy water. The air was full of the smell of castile soap—those bars that are as large and as heavy as Baptist hymnals—and the sweet smell of onions and peppers slowly cooking in olive oil. When I would begin to dry my face, I would press the towel against my eyes and I would feel—and be—totally blind. There was blackness as stark as this cloth is white, and I was ankle-deep in the water, and I was casting off the poisons of the previous night, so I was not strong or sure on my feet, and the smells were there, and I would suddenly hear a woman’s voice, hear her words, and she was reciting her Rosary, in Italian, a language that was still new to me, so I could only decipher a few words of her prayers, but I could hear, I could feel, her intent, her desire, and I could begin to write. That voice ultimately became the voice of Serafina [the primary character in The Rose Tattoo], and I just followed that voice from prayer to prayer, from room to room, and that woman and I completed that play, on a different evening, in a different setting, on a night that was balmy and smelled of lemons.”

  The memory of balmy evenings forced Tenn to reopen, then reclose his eyes, and remember a New Orleans summer, in a room where the shuttered windows were open to the humidity and the noise of the city, burning peanuts, hot chicory, and a blank page in front of him, but fog incoming. “I was poor and I was parched,” Tenn laughed, “and there’s a prayer everyone has memorized, and I took my last coin and I went to a Rexall’s and I bought a lemonade, extra ice, and I drank it fast and hard, and it hurt and it healed, and I could only think Rapture! And Blanche DuBois had entered the picture, danced her way into the blank whiteness, and begun to live.

  “Tell me,” Tenn had wondered, “is it that I can’t find the words? Is it that I have nothing more to share or to care deeply about? Or am I husbanding my niggardly treasures because I would rather have them surprise and comfort me in the deep of the night, scribbled on some scrap of paper, rather than fill the vast whiteness?

  “I need you to understand three things,” he told me. “Find the memories. Build words from those memories. Trust me, they will come. Finally, recognizing the worth of the words, separate the wheat from the chaff. That is all.”

  “That is all?” I asked.

  “That is more than enough, baby! That is enough for a lifetime of fog and time knots.”

  Plans were made. I was to meet Tenn in Jackson Square, in front of St. Louis Cathedral (“Louie’s Place,” he called it), and we would have lunch, we would talk about writing, I would help him connect the dots that were flying about.

  “I need to know that I mattered,” Tenn told me, “and your letter led me to feel that I did. Surely, there must be others who can tell me that I mattered, that I was of some value.” Tenn paused to cite, apparently from memory, two vituperative quotes from theater critics who had come to their separate conclusions that Tennessee Williams had never mattered; his work had been overrated; it was time to reevaluate him or discard him forever.

  “One man felt it charitable,” he continued, “to assume that the real Tennessee Williams had died, and all of my later plays, my work of two decades, had been perpetuated by a clever epigone, a paid hack carrying on the industrial entity known as Tennessee Williams!” He laughed and hacked a bit, recovered, and muttered, using a term I hadn’t heard since childhood Sundays in revivals, “Good Lord, can I get a witness?”

  “Do you need a witness?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Tenn quickly responded, “and I’ll be yours. I’ve read your work and I’ll champion it, and I’ll be your witness.”

  He was full of energy now.

  “Here is the importance of bearing witness. We do not grow alone, talents do not prosper in a hothouse of ambition and neglect and hungry anger; love does not arrive by horseback or prayer or good intentions. We need the eyes, the arms, and the witness of others to grow, to know that we have existed, that we have mattered, that we have made our mark. And each of us has a distinct mark that colors our surroundings, that flavors the recipe of ‘experience’ in which we find ourselves; but we remain blind, without identity, until someone witnesses us.

  “How does the pretty girl know she is pretty? Her witnesses testify to the fact that she is unique, that her peers lack something in pigment or stature. How can we know that we have talent until our words or the manner in which we speak them moves someone? Makes them think outside the puny lines into which they’ve colored themselves? We can’t know that we have the power to break these lines apart with thought until we have our first witness, that person who tells us what we have done.

  “So we grow from being watched and felt and we grow from watching others, and we have to fight our way out of the blind alleys that we create by believing that a witness can be snorted from a mirror or can reside on the tip of a syringe or come tumbling from the mouth of a paid witness.

  “No,” he uttered, seemingly defeated, “I’m afraid that we can’t continue to run from each other; I’m afraid that only in the company of these people, all of our witnesses, many of whom frighten us, can we learn who we are and what we’ve done.

  “Jim, be my witness.”

  The following morning I got into a 1977 Chevy Malibu and drove the eighty miles to New Orleans from Baton Rouge with the memory of something Tennessee Williams had said to me.

  “Perhaps you can be of some help to me.”

  HERE IS what I took with me on that trip from Baton Rouge to New Orleans: three small blue exam booklets. Soft-blue covers and lined pages. I took Berol pens. I did not take a tape recorder, because I was not a journalist and this was not a “story” or an “interview.”

  I wrote everything down. I am a dutiful student and there have been complaints that I rarely look up and into the face of my subject. I wrote when I was with Tennessee, and I
wrote when I was away from him. I researched everything he mentioned or told me to study.

  The blue books multiplied, and ultimately more than twenty were filled with notes. The books have long since deteriorated, their staples fallen away, their pages thinned and yellowed. The words from those books were transferred to pages typed on an IBM Selectric, then to pages created through an IBM word processor and on to Compaq and Dell computers. Some of the pages were given to those about whom Tenn spoke.

  That day in September was slightly muggy, so I used the air conditioner in my car, and people throughout the Quarter were in shorts and light cotton shirts. There was a lingering feel of summer in the air. Nonetheless, Tenn was wearing an enormous coat of indeterminate fur, a large straw hat, and sunglasses: he seemed ready at any moment to endure a winter storm, imitate Rudy Vallee, or face the firing squad of a Latin American judicial system.

  Tennessee Williams in Jackson Square, in the late 1970s, reciting poetry to the pigeons (illustration credit 1.1)

  Before I could approach him, he turned, saw me, and smiled. “You must be Jim,” he crooned. “You look utterly confused.”

  Tenn had been engaged in conversation with several people huddled in the Square, only a few feet from the bird-infested statue of Andrew Jackson, but he pulled from them quickly, put his arm around my shoulders and began walking toward the Quarter.

  “I am most at home in the Quarter,” he spoke to my right ear, but the conversation seemed decidedly one-sided, a monologue for his own edification. “Wonderful things have happened for me on Royal, of course. Nothing of any positive significance ever happens on Rampart. Have you felt that way?”

  I explained that I was actually from Baton Rouge, the club-footed cousin to New Orleans, and my time in the Quarter had been solely as a tourist. I could not speak to any deep experience on Rampart Street, or any other street in the city.

  “Let’s try to change that while we’re here!” he exulted. “But let’s now eat something. Do you like the Court of Two Sisters?”

  I admitted that I had never eaten there before.

  “You’ll love it. Wonderful food, courtly service, lovely people, food served in bowls the size of a dog’s head, all the time in the world.”

  I was not able to get a look at Tenn’s face until we stood in the dark, brick-lined passageway to the restaurant; a tiny shaft of sunlight streamed from the courtyard, and it fell across his face as if directed by an aging film star. Shadow obscured his prominent chin and neck, and his face held a high pinkness that made me think of Easter hams fresh from the oven. His mustache and beard were both trimmed short but looked askew, as if he had recently been resting flat on his face; there were hairs posing in quizzical fashion, curious as to their whereabouts. His lips were dry and flecked with white, and his tongue darted quickly and constantly across them, but never long enough to provide any moisture or comfort. Tenn’s eyeglasses rested unevenly across the bridge of his nose, which was red, weltlike, as if the glasses had rested too heavily and abraded him. The lenses were coated with fingerprints. His eyes were bright and were confusing in that they could appear blue or green or a combination of the two; the lids were heavy, and he blinked at an alarming slowness. Nonetheless, they were not the eyes of an old or tired man—they appeared to be fighting against the flesh that held them.

  The host and several waiters flocked around Tenn like bridesmaids cooing over a giddy bride; they were flush with compliments, praise, greetings. They all knew and loved Tenn, so they all loved me. I was embraced and led, a few steps behind Tenn, to a table in a dark corner, away from the bulk of the diners but still within view, our gustatory real estate of value to us and to the restaurant.

  Tenn snapped his fingers, then pointed to a pitcher of water. A tall, elegant waiter brought to our table the pitcher and two large goblets and filled them. Tenn quickly and voraciously drank them. “Good God,” he stated, spraying the table with fluid, “I was dying and didn’t even know it.” There was then a long, dramatic pause. “As is my wont.”

  I know that the waiter read us the specials and left us with menus. I don’t remember any of what he said, and I know that we failed to order for some time. It was more important for Tenn to drink, and he signaled that he wanted a bottle of liquor left at the table, along with a bucket of ice. I chose iced tea, the house wine of the South.

  Every eye and ear in the restaurant was trained on us.

  “I would like to talk about prayer,” Tenn said.

  Prayer was introduced to me—and to Tenn—as a device to achieve what earthly vendors could not provide. Prayer opened up supernal supermarkets, opportunities; energies were shifted, and people we needed or wanted appeared.

  I prayed to be accepted into the kingdom of heaven and I prayed whenever I plugged an appliance into an electrical socket, because I had been shocked at a young age doing so. I prayed to be left alone by school bullies, and I prayed to die young, because I believed that one remained forever at the age at which one died, and I didn’t want to get to heaven and be too old to enjoy myself or to be able to move around with ease. More than anything else, I prayed to get out of Baton Rouge.

  Tenn prayed for this same liberation, but his prayers came with a particular consecration: Tenn was raised in the cradle of the Episcopalian Church, his family serving the institution (on retainer to Christ, as he saw it), and his mother finding great strength in having and maintaining a high standing within its social confines. Deluded into thinking that his prayers would hold a higher power because of his connections, Tenn was bitter that they failed to remove him from his unfortunate place of residence.

  “I awoke every morning,” he told me, “enraged that I was not in Maine (I fancied Damariscotta, because I thought it might be like the Taj Mahal on the water, with silver maples in the background) or Paris or Los Angeles. I expressed grave disappointment as my mother’s face hovered over me in the bed each morning. It should have been Gloria Swanson or Judith of Bethulia or any number of imaginary women I had conjured in the night. I came to see that my reality was St. Louis and oilcloth on the table and watery eggs and perpetual abuse by my father and other boys, so I found a new means of prayer and a new means of liberation.”

  Tenn explained to me that he had and loved a large radio throughout his childhood. The radio reminded him of a photograph he had once seen of a cathedral, and it became for him a holy relic, an object of great adoration, as esteemed as the church that gave him nothing on barren Sunday mornings. Tenn could not recall if the radio was made of cherry, walnut, or oak, but it was the first fine gift he had ever been given, and his first memories of reverence were of polishing this radio with lemon or verbena oil.

  Deep in the night of his sleep, Tenn would hold the radio as he might have held a puppy or a stuffed animal, and he would listen to radio dramas, or parties over which band music wafted, and he could imagine other lives, other snatches of dialogue that could remove him from the reality of the life he endured.

  “When I was young,” Tenn told me, “and if I was particularly inappropriate, my father would punish me by sending me to bed early, demanding that I sit in my room with no illumination and reflect upon my maledictions. Having no access to my books or drawings, I would turn on the radio that sat by my bed and listen to the dramas that played there. I would hug the radio close to my body, the better to hide what I was doing from ears of enmity that lived around me, and also to better feel the vibrations of the action that was emanating from the radio—to feel the action of the airwaves enter my body. I became engaged to my imagination, and I loved the organ stings, the glissandos, the tiny dramas that used so much, so quickly.

  “As I listened to these programs, I also husbanded a deep hatred for my father and for the God who had decided, in an attack of cruel capriciousness, to cast him as my father in our own tiny drama, which deprived me of so much, so quickly.

  “I prayed a new prayer as I listened to these dramatic programs. I asked to be released from the prison
that was my home, from the meanness that surrounded me. I utter this prayer every day, to this day. You’ll learn,” he explained to me, “that prayers are directed at us, at our souls, our gifts; and I was being released, I was being directed to a new reality.

  “When my father was especially angry and fulsome in his rage, when I was especially effeminate or dreamy for his tastes, he would remove my radio from my room, and I was left with nothing but my imagination, my rage, and my pitiful prayer, thrown up to a God who directed, mercifully, my attention to the sounds outside my window—the scattered conversations of my neighbors, the sound of music and dramatic programs emanating from dozens of radios around the neighborhood, cast on spring or summer breezes, or encased in closed-for-winter homes. Faint or forceful, I would listen, and I would imagine the circumstances surrounding the shards of dialogue or music I could hear.

  “I believe this was when I came to believe I could write. I believe this was the time when I could imagine that there might be a God.

  “As the years have progressed, and as my maledictions have become pronounced and occasionally profitable, I still find myself in the dark, in the silence, listening and waiting, hoping and praying, beseeching that ever-capricious God to show me something, share something with me, cast upon the movie screen that hangs over my bed, or within the radio tubes that reside in my head, a narrative, a woman that I can follow and believe in and dream for and write about to pull me from that St. Louis bed of anger and fear and sadness. God, give me something, anything!”

  A pause, a lick of the lips.

  “Oil, as you may know, is most often found in our own backyards; euphoria deep within. Aren’t we told that the kingdom of heaven is within us? I’m still looking, and my guides, my fearless and supernal Sherpas, are attempting to keep me on the right paths.

  “As I stare into the darkness of my many nights and bad intentions, waiting for my mental proscenium to be lit, or for my above-bed screen to flicker with images, I think instead on those women—and a few men—who have been a constant source of inspiration and illumination; examples and extremes. I can’t always recall the circumstances through which they came to dominate my thoughts and my earliest attempts to communicate, but I can remember their names, and I have created acts of idolatry for them all, an amended Stations of the Cross in which I recall their acts of alchemy, of kindness, of spiritual and imaginative valor. I hold the memory of these people as close to me as I held that radio, lost to me forever.”