Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings Read online

  ‘Once,’ Agnes countered, morosely stirring sugar into her black coffee, ‘when I was little, I had a dream about Superman, all in technicolor. He was dressed in blue, with a red cape and black hair, handsome as a prince, and I went flying right along with him through the air—I could feel the wind whistling, and the tears blowing out of my eyes. We flew over Alabama; I could tell it was Alabama because the land looked like a map, with “Alabama” lettered in script across these big green mountains.’

  Harold was visibly impressed. ‘What,’ he asked Agnes then, ‘did you dream last night?’ Harold’s tone was almost contrite: to tell the truth, his own dream-life preoccupied him so much that he’d honestly never thought of playing listener and investigating his wife’s. He looked at her pretty, troubled countenance with new interest: Agnes was, Harold paused to observe for perhaps the first time since their early married days, an extraordinarily attractive sight across the breakfast table.

  For the moment, Agnes was confounded by Harold’s well-meant question; she had long ago passed the stage where she seriously considered hiding a copy of Freud’s writings on dreams in her closet and fortifying herself with a vicarious dream tale by which to hold Harold’s interest each morning. Now, throwing reticence to the wind, she decided in desperation to confess her problem.

  ‘I don’t dream anything,’ Agnes admitted in low, tragic tones. ‘Not anymore.’

  Harold was obviously concerned. ‘Perhaps,’ he consoled her, ‘you just don’t use your powers of imagination enough. You should practise. Try shutting your eyes.’

  Agnes shut her eyes.

  ‘Now,’ Harold asked hopefully, ‘what do you see?’

  Agnes panicked. She saw nothing. ‘Nothing,’ she quavered. ‘Nothing except a sort of blur.’

  ‘Well,’ said Harold briskly, adopting the manner of a doctor dealing with a malady that was, although distressing, not necessarily fatal, ‘imagine a goblet.’

  ‘What kind of goblet?’ Agnes pleaded.

  ‘That’s up to you,’ Harold said. ‘You describe it to me.’

  Eyes still shut, Agnes dragged wildly into the depths of her head. She managed with great effort to conjure up a vague, shimmery silver goblet that hovered somewhere in the nebulous regions of the back of her mind, flickering as if at any moment it might black out like a candle.

  ‘It’s silver,’ she said, almost defiantly. ‘And it’s got two handles.’

  ‘Fine. Now imagine a scene engraved on it.’

  Agnes forced a reindeer on the goblet, scrolled about by grape leaves, scratched in bare outlines on the silver. ‘It’s a reindeer in a wreath of grape leaves.’

  ‘What color is the scene?’ Harold was, Agnes thought, merciless.

  ‘Green,’ Agnes lied, as she hastily enameled the grape leaves. ‘The grape leaves are green. And the sky is black’—she was almost proud of this original stroke. ‘And the reindeer’s russet flecked with white.’

  ‘All right. Now polish the goblet all over into a high gloss.’

  Agnes polished the imaginary goblet, feeling like a fraud. ‘But it’s in the back of my head,’ she said dubiously, opening her eyes. ‘I see everything way in the back of my head. Is that where you see your dreams?’

  ‘Why no,’ Harold said, puzzled. ‘I see my dreams on the front of my eyelids, like on a movie-screen. They just come; I don’t have anything to do with them. Like right now,’ he closed his eyes, ‘I can see these shiny crowns coming and going, hung in this big willow tree.’

  Agnes fell grimly silent.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ Harold tried, jocosely, to buck her up. ‘Every day, just practise imagining different things like I’ve taught you.’

  Agnes let the subject drop. While Harold was away at work, she began, suddenly, to read a great deal; reading kept her mind full of pictures. Seized by a kind of ravenous hysteria, she raced through novels, women’s magazines, newspapers, and even the anecdotes in her Joy of Cooking; she read travel brochures, home appliance circulars, the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, the instructions on soap-flake boxes, the blurbs on the back of record-jackets—anything to keep from facing the gaping void in her own head of which Harold had made her so painfully conscious. But as soon as she lifted her eyes from the printed matter at hand, it was as if a protecting world had been extinguished.

  The utterly self-sufficient, unchanging reality of the things surrounding her began to depress Agnes. With a jealous awe, her frightened, almost paralysed stare took in the Oriental rug, the Williamsburg-blue wallpaper, the gilded dragons on the Chinese vase on the mantel, the blue-and-gold medallion design of the upholstered sofa on which she was sitting. She felt choked, smothered by these objects whose bulky pragmatic existence somehow threatened the deepest, most secret roots of her own ephemeral being. Harold, she knew only too well, would tolerate no such vainglorious nonsense from tables and chairs; if he didn’t like the scene at hand, if it bored him, he would change it to suit his fancy. If, Agnes mourned, in some sweet hallucination an octopus came slithering towards her across the floor, paisley-patterned in purple and orange, she would bless it. Anything to prove that her shaping imaginative powers were not irretrievably lost; that her eye was not merely an open camera lens which recorded surrounding phenomena and left it at that. ‘A rose’, she found herself repeating hollowly, like a funeral dirge, ‘is a rose is a rose….’

  One morning when Agnes was reading a novel, she suddenly realized to her terror that her eyes had scanned five pages without taking in the meaning of a single word. She tried again, but the letters separated, writhing like malevolent little black snakes across the page in a kind of hissing, untranslatable jargon. It was then that Agnes began attending the movies around the corner regularly each afternoon. It did not matter if she had seen the feature several times previously; the fluid kaleidoscope of forms before her eyes lulled her into a rhythmic trance; the voices, speaking some soothing, unintelligible code, exorcised the dead silence in her head. Eventually, by dint of much cajolery, Agnes persuaded Harold to buy a television set on the installment plan. That was much better than the movies; she could drink sherry while watching TV during the long afternoons. These latter days, when Agnes greeted Harold on his return home each evening, she found, with a certain malicious satisfaction, that his face blurred before her gaze, so she could change his features at will. Sometimes she gave him a pea-green complexion, sometimes lavender; sometimes a Grecian nose, sometimes an eagle beak.

  ‘But I like sherry,’ Agnes told Harold stubbornly when, her afternoons of private drinking becoming apparent even to his indulgent eyes, he begged her to cut down. ‘It relaxes me.’

  The sherry, however, didn’t relax Agnes enough to put her to sleep. Cruelly sober, the visionary sherry-haze worn off, she would lie stiff, twisting her fingers like nervous talons in the sheets, long after Harold was breathing peacefully, evenly, in the midst of some rare, wonderful adventure. With an icy, increasing panic, Agnes lay stark awake night after night. Worse, she didn’t get tired any more. Finally, a bleak, clear awareness of what was happening broke upon her: the curtains of sleep, of refreshing, forgetful darkness dividing each day from the day before it, and the day after it, were lifted for Agnes eternally, irrevocably. She saw an intolerable prospect of wakeful, visionless days and nights stretching unbroken ahead of her, her mind condemned to perfect vacancy, without a single image of its own to ward off the crushing assault of smug, autonomous tables and chairs. She might, Agnes reflected sickly, live to be a hundred: the women in her family were all long-lived.

  Dr Marcus, the Higgins’ family physician, attempted, in his jovial way, to reassure Agnes about her complaints of insomnia: ‘Just a bit of nervous strain, that’s all. Take one of these capsules at night for a while and see how you sleep.’

  Agnes did not ask Dr Marcus if the pills would give her dreams; she put the box of fifty pills in her handbag and took the bus home.

  Two days later, on the last Friday of September, when Harol
d returned from work (he had shut his eyes all during the hour’s train trip home, counterfeiting sleep but in reality voyaging on a cerise-sailed dhow up a luminous river where white elephants bulked and rambled across the crystal surface of the water in the shadow of Moorish turrets fabricated completely of multicolored glass), he found Agnes lying on the sofa in the livingroom, dressed in her favourite princess-style emerald taffeta evening gown, pale and lovely as a blown lily, eyes shut, an empty pillbox and an overturned water tumbler on the rug at her side. Her tranquil features were set in a slight, secret smile of triumph, as if, in some far country unattainable to mortal men, she were, at last, waltzing with the dark, red-caped prince of her early dreams.

  A Comparison

  How I envy the novelist!

  I imagine him—better say her, for it is the women I look to for a parallel—I imagine her, then, pruning a rosebush with a large pair of shears, adjusting her spectacles, shuffling about among the teacups, humming, arranging ashtrays or babies, absorbing a slant of light, a fresh edge to the weather and piercing, with a kind of modest, beautiful X-ray vision, the psychic interiors of her neighbors—her neighbors on trains, in the dentist’s waiting room, in the corner teashop. To her, this fortunate one, what is there that isn’t relevant! Old shoes can be used, doorknobs, air-letters, flannel nightgowns, cathedrals, nail varnish, jet planes, rose arbors and budgerigars; little mannerisms—the sucking at a tooth, the tugging at a hemline—any weird or warty or fine or despicable thing. Not to mention emotions, motivations—those rumbling, thunderous shapes. Her business is Time, the way it shoots forward, shunts back, blooms, decays and double exposes itself. Her business is people in Time. And she, it seems to me, has all the time in the world. She can take a century if she likes, a generation, a whole summer.

  I can take about a minute.

  I’m not talking about epic poems. We all know how long they can take. I’m talking about the smallish, unofficial garden-variety poem. How shall I describe it?—a door opens, a door shuts. In between you have had a glimpse: a garden, a person, a rainstorm, a dragonfly, a heart, a city. I think of those round glass Victorian paperweights which I remember, yet can never find—a far cry from the plastic mass-productions which stud the toy counters in Woolworths. This sort of paperweight is a clear globe, self-complete, very pure, with a forest or village or family group within it. You turn it upside down, then back. It snows. Everything is changed in a minute. It will never be the same in there—not the fir trees, nor the gables, nor the faces.

  So a poem takes place.

  And there is really so little room! So little time! The poet becomes an expert packer of suitcases:

  The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

  Petals on a wet black bough.

  There it is: the beginning and the end in one breath. How would the novelist manage that? In a paragraph? In a page? Mixing it, perhaps, like paint, with a little water, thinning it, spreading it out.

  Now I am being smug, I am finding advantages.

  *

  If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.

  I have never put a toothbrush in a poem.

  I do not like to think of all the things, familiar, useful and worthy things, I have never put into a poem. I did, once, put a yew tree in. And that yew tree began, with astounding egotism, to manage and order the whole affair. It was not a yew tree by a church on a road past a house in a town where a certain woman lived … and so on, as it might have been, in a novel. Oh no. It stood squarely in the middle of my poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard, the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated it—everything! I couldn’t subdue it. And, in the end, my poem was a poem about a yew tree. That yew tree was just too proud to be a passing black mark in a novel.

  Perhaps I shall anger some poets by implying that the poem is proud. The poem, too, can include everything, they will tell me. And with far more precision and power than those baggy, disheveled and undiscriminate creatures we call novels. Well, I concede these poets their steamshovels and old trousers. I really don’t think poems should be all that chaste. I would, I think, even concede a toothbrush, if the poem was a real one. But these apparitions, these poetical toothbrushes, are rare. And when they do arrive, they are inclined, like my obstreperous yew tree, to think themselves singled out and rather special.

  Not so in novels.

  There the toothbrush returns to its rack with beautiful promptitude and is forgot. Time flows, eddies, meanders, and people have leisure to grow and alter before our eyes. The rich junk of life bobs all about us: bureaus, thimbles, cats, the whole much-loved, well-thumbed catalogue of the miscellaneous which the novelist wishes us to share. I do not mean that there is no pattern, no discernment, no rigorous ordering here.

  I am only suggesting that perhaps the pattern does not insist so much.

  The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts.

  But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

  The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle

  There are other tattoo shops in Madigan Square, but none of them a patch on Carmey’s place. He’s a real poet with the needle and dye, an artist with a heart. Kids, dock-bums, the out-of-town couples in for a beer put on the brakes in front of Carmey’s, nose-to the window, one and all. You got a dream, Carmey says, without saying a word, you got a rose on the heart, an eagle in the muscle, you got the sweet Jesus himself, so come in to me. Wear your heart on your skin in this life, I’m the man can give you a deal. Dogs, wolves, horses and lions for the animal lover. For the ladies, butterflies, birds of paradise, baby heads smiling or in tears, take your choice. Roses, all sorts, large, small, bud and full bloom, roses with name scrolls, roses with thorns, roses with dresden-doll heads sticking up in dead center, pink petal, green leaf, set off smart by a lead-black line. Snakes and dragons for Frankenstein. Not to mention cowgirls, hula-girls, mermaids and movie queens, ruby-nippled and bare as you please. If you’ve got a back to spare, there’s Christ on the cross, a thief at either elbow and angels overhead to right and left holding up a scroll with ‘Mount Calvary’ on it in Old English script, close as yellow can get to gold.

  Outside they point at the multi-colored pictures plastered on Carmey’s three walls, ceiling to floor. They mutter like a mob scene, you can hear them through the glass:

  ‘Honey, take a looka those peacocks!’

  ‘That’s crazy, paying for tattoos. I only paid for one I got, a panther on my arm.’

  ‘You want a heart, I’ll tell him where.’

  I see Carmey in action for the first time courtesy of my steady man, Ned Bean. Lounging against a wall of hearts and flowers, waiting for business, Carmey is passing the time of day with a Mr Tomolillo, an extremely small person wearing a wool jacket that drapes his nonexistent shoulders without any attempt at fit or reformation. The jacket is patterned with brown squares the size of cigarette packs, each square boldly outlined in black. You could play tick-tack-toe on it. A brown fedora hugs his head just above the eyebrows like the cap on a mushroom. He has the thin, rapt, triangular face of a praying mantis. As Ned introduces me, Mr Tomolillo snaps over from the waist in a bow neat as the little moustache hairlining his upper lip. I can’t help admiring this bow because the shop is so crowded there’s barely room for the four of us to stand up without bumping elbows and knees at the slightest move.

  The whole place smells of gunpowder and some fumey antiseptic. Ranged along the back wall from left to right are: Carmey’s worktable, electric needles hooked to a rack over a Lazy Susan of dye pots, Carmey’s swivel chair facing the show window, a straight customer’s chair facing Carmey’s chair, a waste bucket, and an orange crate covered with scraps of paper and pencil stubs. At the fr
ont of the shop, next to the glass door, there is another straight chair, with the big placard of Mount Calvary propped on it, and a cardboard file-drawer on a scuffed wooden table. Among the babies and daisies on the wall over Carmey’s chair hang two faded sepia daguerreotypes of a boy from the waist up, one front-view, one back. From the distance he seems to be wearing a long-sleeved, skintight black lace shirt. A closer look shows he is stark naked, covered only with a creeping ivy of tattoos.

  In a jaundiced clipping from some long-ago rotogravure, these Oriental men and women are sitting crosslegged on tasselled cushions, back to the camera and embroidered with seven-headed dragons, mountain ranges, cherry trees and waterfalls. ‘These people have not a stitch of clothing on,’ the blurb points out. ‘They belong to a society in which tattoos are required for membership. Sometimes a full job costs as much as $300.’ Next to this, a photograph of a bald man’s head with the tentacles of an octopus just rounding the top of the scalp from the rear.

  ‘Those skins are valuable as many a painting, I imagine,’ says Mr Tomolillo. ‘If you had them stretched on a board.’

  But the Tattooed Boy and those clubby Orientals have nothing on Carmey, who is himself a living advertisement of his art—a schooner in full sail over a rose-and-holly-leaf ocean on his right biceps, Gypsy Rose Lee flexing her muscled belly on the left, forearms jammed with hearts, stars and anchors, lucky numbers and namescrolls, indigo edges blurred so he reads like a comic strip left out in a Sunday rainstorm. A fan of the Wild West, Carmey is rumored to have a bronco reared from navel to collarbone, a thistle-stubborn cowboy stuck to its back. But that may be a mere fable inspired by his habit of wearing tooled leather cowboy boots, finely heeled, and a Bill Hickock belt studded with red stones to hold up his black chino slacks. Carmey’s eyes are blue. A blue in no way inferior to the much-sung about skies of Texas.