lickhaven

[her last installment]

“Jim – Jim Crawley, the fellow I came here with, from Brazil – he headed a roadbuilding project with the Peace Corps, and Togo needs roads. Well, I suppose it does. You Americans have such a funny leftover colonialism. You assume people need things, that there’s an absolute way other peoples’ countries should be laid out and you try to do it that way for them. With them, in theory. Togo’s a skinny little country. It doesn’t have much of a coast and it doesn’t produce much, but it knows how to be small. There isn’t real corruption, despite the Gnassingbé family running the place since God set up his lemonade stand, because everybody knows everybody else. Corruption would be like stealing your brother’s toys. Jim was very kind, and the Togolese got excited, especially about a beautiful stone bridge they were doing. They hadn’t worked much with stone before, just wood carvings and bowls and thatch, things like that. But they knew the stone would last for centuries. There wasn’t that much craft to it – they didn’t know enough – but there was carefulness. Jim is always careful. And kind. I said that. With Americans, you get the idea they’re petting the natives. I don’t mean it isn’t meant well… Jim and I had a good trip, he’s very… I really ought to control myself more. I never know why I’m with anyone. Did I tell you that you’re almost the only person near my own age I’ve had to do with? I’m always involved with older men. Why is that? I’m chained to wheels, I roll away from one and get started on another one just like him. Not just like – that’s unfair. And there’s always biology, I go half way round the world just to fiddle the same things over in another country. This time I didn’t tell anyone I’d worked before in biology. I suppose I wanted to prove that I could make it on my own. But I already proved that in Brazil, didn’t I? Here I think I can keep clear of the higher-ups. That’s what happened in Manchester, at the end, I got involved with Swengdon and he was going off to the Amazon, so I went too. ‘Getting involved,’ a stupid phrase, why not just say I was sleeping with him? Screwing him. In a real sense I wasn’t involved at all. It… he was just handy. That sounds awful, but you can’t afford to spend too much time thinking that the things you do are awful. I always wanted to go to the Amazon, I don’t know which was an excuse for which. Didn’t you? Always want to go there? Oh. It’s one of those places so fantastic it turns out to be just what it ought to. Of course, everything bites, the mosquitoes could make you a half inch thicker all over if you didn’t… do something. Not paradise, certainly no Christian paradise. Togo is  mostly, almost mostly Catholic, which doesn’t do them much good. I wonder why I like jungles so much? Perhaps because they’re places most people never go to. I always want to do things nobody else does, but when I get there I’m not sure why. Except that it’s fun. I’ve said that. Even getting into scrapes is fun when you look back. Even those… unfortunate happenings when they’re happening, or is that just me, the feeling you get on a roller coaster ride, the joy of being terrified without consequences. But I do it when the terror is real. I fell into quicksand once and I really thought ‘that’s the end,’ but it turned out quicksand doesn’t do much to you as long as you can swim and there’s someone to tell you not to thrash about. Are most dangers overrated? Jungles, quicksand, diseases… I don’t expect them to do anything to me – I was scared in the quicksand – so in general they don’t, not so I’ve noticed. I didn’t expect older men would do me a great deal of harm. More or less it… they didn’t, though I was uncomfortable a lot. I would have been uncomfortable with younger men, most likely. There was one man at Manchester – not Swengdon – and it got fairly serious. I mean I did get involved, and I didn’t want to get involved. Through getting involved. Language is strange. That’s another reason I left. I’m always running away. Not a grownup way to behave. Usually I don’t have any particular place to go, just something to get away from. I though that going away from Dublin I wouldn’t have my father to worry about, but he came to visit at Manchester. It was dreadful. The thing is, I really like him. On one level. I don’t know what he thinks of people, I think he steps back and looks at them to see how they can be used. He can like somebody while he’s figuring how to destroy him. That’s too heavy a word, destroy. We got along all right when he came over, but I couldn’t wait for him to go away. At least he didn’t follow me to the Amazon, I got that part right. He can be very funny, and I think that’s why so many people like him. I’d get mad at him and he’d say, ‘Go ahead, hit me.’ One time I did take a swing and he just held my fist in one of his huge hands and I couldn’t move it. He’s incredibly strong. He beat us with a belt when we were children, half the time I wouldn’t know why. I’d find out later. Usually. He did have his reasons. When I was sixteen, about there, we started going out to pubs together. I looked older. Most of them, his friends at the pubs, I guess were used to him bringing in young girls. It maybe never occurred to them I could be his daughter – that was a big joke on them, a conspiracy we had, my father and me. That’s when you’d expect the incestuous business to happen, but we were just pals by then, padres. The other only happened when I was about five. I mean it began then, I don’t remember when, how, it ended. I used to run all the way to school to get away from him. But then I’d run all the way home too. He’d come in at night and make me take off my pajama pants and play with me. I knew it was… wrong. How can you know something like that when you’re too young to hear about it or have anything to compare it to? He never said not to tell my mother, like you hear most do – it was another conspiracy between us. Not a friendly one like at the pubs. Does that make sense? He had enough women going, or I suppose he did, judging from later. It was something else he was doing to my mother. All those women, they didn’t bother me, and he told me about them, but my mother… she was a strong person in her own way, and he must have known that a family with all our children wouldn’t hold together without her. She wasn’t complacent or stupid, she just went on and put up with everything as part of something else, bigger. There was a lot of Catholic martyrdom in it. Irish women always have that, but it was different with her, she really had a noble side, a boring one. She took such care in what she did, in making meals and washing clothes, keeping the hose clean. For all of us. Not resignation… doing everything properly so other people could get along without mess. I don’t want to be that way, ever. But it worked for her, and my father’s way worked for him. Still, you can’t be the way he was and call yourself a decent human being. Did I tell you his name? Francis X. McKinna. His friends call him Deus. Ha! Oh Christ, can the Irish drink. He’d drink so much I expected him to float out the pub door, and he wouldn’t even walk crooked. Just before he left Manchester, when he visited, he did ask me to sleep with him. That sounds dirty, but it wasn’t, it was more like pathetic, so upset to think of me going away, he wouldn’t be seeing me for a long time, maybe ever. Again. He had ideas inside he couldn’t tell just anybody, but he liked to talk to me about them. And his women. I don’t think he ever bragged about them to anyone. Well, I can’t tell that. But when he talked to me it was because he thought it was very funny. It was, too, when he told it – you should have heard him tell me about Aunt Sheila, my mother’s sister. She looked like an artist’s drawing of a whore. My father imitated the way she walked, you never saw anything so funny. They had a kid, my father and Aunt Sheila. Together. He took care of it, brought it into our family, like it was another one of us. Of course he never told mother that he was the father. It was ‘Aunt Sheila’s mistake.’ Nobody expected much of Aunt Sheila anyway. He’d tell me all the things he wanted to do, to get done, and the places he wanted to go. Do you think that’s sad? It didn’t feel sad, not much of it, maybe it was. That might be part of me running around so much. I feel guilty telling even you, though we’re five thousand miles away from him and it couldn’t possibly get back to him. There’s no reason for me to feel guilty, when he hurt so many people. Except being a Catholic – all that fucking to make hundreds of kids, no birth control –  and guilt. What a stupid religion. I said that. Oh, really funny, my father told me he’d peed in the holy water font when he was nine and the priest gave a sermon about it the next week. He was sure he was gong to go straight to hell if anything happened to him, if he got hit by a truck or fell in a manhole. He was afraid to cross the street. His parents couldn’t figure what was wrong. It took him three weeks to get up the nerve to go to confession, and when he did, all the priest said was ‘Tell the Lord you won’t do an evil thing like that again’ and gave him five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. A  heavy level of penance in our parish, but what a simple-minded way for a priest to talk about something supposed to be holy, inviolate. In violet, in yellow. I didn’t get screwed, myself, intercourse, until I was almost nineteen. There’s nothing much to that part, but I’d already been going out, with older men even then – my father didn’t care and my mother didn’t, wouldn’t know – doing  heavy stuff in doorways. It sounds so unpleasant, but you accept things when they happen and you’re living in a big dirty city. And I don’t know… it was always a challenge. You can be doing something, thinking it’s perfectly natural and at the same time know it isn’t what everybody else is doing, that it isn’t natural or regular, and that makes it almost… necessary. I even did things with a priest. Not screwing. Not getting involved either. I didn’t think I should be dong it, who would? but I didn’t also think you were supposed to say ‘no’ to anything a priest asked for. That was because of my father – the not-screwing part. Somebody would make a grab for my vagina and I would go tight and limp all at the same time, just curl in a ball and feel terrible. I’m glad it didn’t keep up that way. Sex is fun, at least as much as biology. Studying biology. Well, it is biology. I wonder if I should have kept on at Manchester? Instead of dropping out? That was after I started working in the labs. Going to university can be such a pile of shit. I took some biology courses because I felt good about the lab work – really – but I couldn’t put up with all the stupid things they tell you. They don’t try to think it through. You’d expect them to, in university. I wonder, would I be doing anything important now if I’d stuck with it, whatever important is? Did I tell you where I want to go next? Australia. There isn’t anything important in Australia that I’ve heard about, but I want to go there. That would mean I’d been to every continent but Asia, unless you count Antarctica. Can you imagine not going outside for six months because you might freeze solid, a Dreamsicle or whatever those are? I know what I want to do right now, make love with you in the shower, I’ve never done that. Do you want to? I hope I never get a sudden urge to throw myself under a car, I’d probably do that too. Most of the time I don’t consider whether I’m going to enjoy doing something, just whether it will be exciting. Is making love when you’re wet and soapy more exciting than when you’re dry or sweaty? It doesn’t count as a perversion. It might be nice to have sex under a dance floor, in a crawlspace with the room shaking and no one having any idea  there was someone fucking under their feet. I wonder it two people could fit into one pair of pants, a kind of costume, so that no one would ever be able to tell when they were having sex and when they weren’t. But it would be hard to go to the bathroom. I never want anyone to know exactly what I’m doing, then I get a little drunk, and I tell you everything I’m doing or done or thinking about doing. That must mean I’m really doing something else that I’m not thinking about. My tongue gets much more active when I’ve been drinking – you said that when we were kissing? I think we were really drooling on each other. Sex sounds mucky when you describe it. Even walking would sound peculiar if you tried to describe it objectively. Sex is better than walking when you’re drunk, because you don’t have to worry about falling over.”

[Say goodbye to Rylla, and please be nice.

Much of her rambles are based on conversations with a woman I loved way back before. Some of the stories about her father, especially going to bars with him when she was 16, are straight from those talks. I last heard from her in 1973, a letter from Laos. Nothing since. One wonders, doesn’t one, how life unfolds.]