Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 23

Guertel, cruising along at 50kp/h when the tail lights light up. It’s rush hour, like the L.A. 5:30pm crowd, and it’s only 2:00pm on Sunday, that is, 14:00 in Austria, and a mild Stau/traffic jam, anyway. I think I’ll put on a little Dylan, maybe that “Biograph” tape, and regress, refresh my brain, light up the air waves with a little grain of sand . . . I am suddenly feeling good, I don’t know why. It’s been a good day. I don’t know how what’s next looks, but I don’t care. Life will take care of itself. If I get in the way, that’s OK, too.

There’s the flat now. How did I get to this Bezirk/district, already? Too busy living to notice the progress, movement, time passing. Time passes when you’re having fun, I guess. Now what am I doing first? It’s the second stage: I turn the key and head for the shower. I can’t wait to get under that hot shower. I must have walked farther than I thought. How could I be this messy? I throw the shirt into the dirty clothes bin. It’s really the same all over the world: Only the scenery changes. It’s all an illusion, a maya, so to speak.

Gee, that feels good. That water is nice and hot. The soapy suds wash all that dirt down the drain. My hair follows: the clean machine, the lathering hands, rub a dub dub. I drift to that woman and get a little horny for a moment. I start to lather suds over my cock and give it a few strokes as I recall that scene. Hard in a flash. It only takes a few seconds, it seems: I let out a guttural cry of release as semen is sprayed out and down the drain.

It’s only a mirage, a real-life story. Choices. It’s all choices and energy and living. It’s sweet and it’s frustrating. I was only minding my own business. I don’t want to keep wondering what-if, thus and so. I tell myself to shut up: that part that wants to have the zipless fuck, without any involvement. These aren’t the seventies, eighties, or nineties even, after all, nor is this the real Western, the cowboy-casual, laid back world of my earlier years. The California Kid returns. Native Son. Saunter on down the road, bunky, the reverb is in the back room where the hassle-free environment is replayed in time sequence.

“Timothy Leary’s dead,” went the old song, and now he is, on that extraterrestrial space teleportation, moving off Earth-base to settle onto friendlier planets or celestial bodies unknown: a great thinker and manipulator of the big myth of the normal life led with nonchalance in conformity by twentieth century man, out-of-focus and disconnected from his surroundings. He’s laughing now at those of us humming that song. The studied Harvard halls of madness, the Millbrook escapades on the white horse galloping on into cyberspace, the virtual-reality man. “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” was what was needed at the time.

The word-speak, the program, the pioneer life led by running from the feds. The Texas charges of green substances:one joint, I think it was. Escaping to Algeria; the media had a circus. The white hair, effervescent energy-plus, exploring interior circuits that most of us aren’t willing to confront.

Timothy Leary is dead, but not forever . . . LSD dreams, the dead bodies in Nirvana, in Bardoland, awaiting further instructions for mortal humans to overcome the slow-consciousness mindless fuck ups of man, ready to spring forth an ex-communication from the human race, for the reformation.

No point in glorifying a drug guru, say the skeptics, asleep at the wheel, taking handouts from the wheeler-dealers on Capitol Hill, the gravitators and gawkers, rubbing noses and who-you-know in the bathrooms, snorting and sniffing, and up in smoke. The tobacco lads smuggling in Havana gold, puffing in good-old-boy parlors, with only shapely women erupting out of cakes dressed like Eve.

Tim did it for us, talked nonsense and made sense, too far ahead of normal minds to comprehend the gibberish. Got to freeze that brain, bring it back again when mankind catches up.

Oh, we tripped and hallucinated and came back and had flashbacks and then continued working, and grew old and died, and that was that. On the threshold: We saw the light, felt the vibrations, the energy, the universal oneness that normally would have passed us by, had we not been there, there on the line, marching and meditating and searching, there beside some of these fellows who felt and explored and went for more and dedicated their lives to blowing minds, carrying on with the cosmic joke. The buffoon, the fool, not just fading away.

What was this all about? The natural rhythms, the hopes and dreams, the schemes? Another day, another dollar mentality: Hop off that train.

Now we hear that 20 per cent escaped the green memes, thinking we are leaping ahead with the techno-revolutions only to be fooled by the fact that we all have to not-demonize the others and only 2 per cent, perhaps, have leapt to the second tier. Two per cent, according to Ken Wilber, have gone beyond the reconciliation and acceptance and in-house bickering about who is right and who is wrong. And the wheel of fortune keeps on spinning as we start to wake up a little.

The hobo hopped on in another era. This was fitting for the post-war, post-Eisenhower years’ blacklists, McCarthy had the magic spell, the hell-on-wheels Hoover FBI control, the ruining of lives. We read about it all.

I, Jesse, the ex-S.D.S. man, the student advocate, free speech and all the rest. What happened to all those years, fighting and chanting and smoking and singing and reflecting?

It’s come undone: an illusion, the sold-out cop out, continuing above ground on the way to achieving, busy-ness, the ideal life lived in bliss, plentifully content, at whose expense? The “Marin prosperity consciousness,” being hip, being cool, knowing all the right moves, getting an endorsement from Coke. These are the golden years, the expected results of living life to the fullest, buying into the party line, or being so independent that community is only a word in the dictionary, with the me-first and I’ll-get-mine mentality as God.

So where does this leave me, an expatriate in Vienna, looking back and forth from what-path-is-this-and-how-did-I-get-here?

I can’t believe this has all been thoughts, lost time. Oh no, stuck in Lodi again. Yes, drifting on, Jess, my man, the talking voices inside, again haunting me across the seas.

Visions of past and present reflect and reverberate across time, and now the last twenty minutes of warm water spraying on my back take me back again to the importance of this very moment. I reach for a towel. My skin seems likes it’s been lifted and thrown in the dirty clothes bin. The dead cells have gone down the drain with the Drano, the washing away of my sins, the wasted time, wasted years.

Now the door bell rings, and it’s also six bells on the old antique Seth Thomas, so I know this time is accurate, reminding me of where I am supposed to be and what I am supposed to be doing now, and with whom.

Now I hear a loud knock at the door.

This must be the cinema scene where he comes to the door with only a towel draped around his waist, his biceps flexing and his long straight black hair flowing, past old Hollywood stars like Valentino, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and Humphrey Bogart, maybe. Or McQueen, Connery, Delon, Eastwood, Pacino, Hoffman, Cage, Cruise, Arnie S., Redford, Newman, Mastroianni, Belmondo, Douglas (2), Curtis, Hudson, Kinski, DeNiro, Depardieu, Portier, Nicholson . . . And now perhaps Pitt, Clooney, Depp, Bloom, DiCaprio . . .

Water dripping, making a dew-line from the bathroom to the front doorhandle. It turns easily, sliding with wet fervor. I open the door, and there are those large blue eyes, innocent and misty, refreshing yet cautious.

She says hello.

The words shatter the thoughts. I wrestle with the pregnant pause, struck by the little figure standing before me. She says, “Hi, Jess, aren’t you going to ask me in? Oh, you aren’t dressed! I can wait out here while you get dressed. Boy, was it hot today! How are you?” She gives me a bussi/kiss, on the lips:quick, crisp and meaningful, and then proceeds to walk past me, not once looking at my almost-nude body, and sits down in the living room.

“I’ll be just a minute. The time slipped by. I lost track of time. I was going to be ready when you came, but you know me, a little space-cadet.”

“How are you? You look good. Is that a new dress? It’s so nice and cute on you.” I think to myself how beautiful she looks. She is every bit nicer than that woman that I was salivating over. I do know her a little, too, which makes it a bit easier to break the ice. I mean, she knows me somewhat already, my idiosyncrasies and all. I don’t have to bother to introduce myself and then get slapped in the face. All that anticipation and expectation in meeting someone new, getting carried away in fantasies and all.

Let’s see, what was I doing?

I’ll just dry off and put on these socks and underwear. I’ll parade by her on the way to the bedroom. “Hello again, see my new Jockeys? I’m still a size thirty-two. I have to get my Body Glove shirt. Oh, I missed my workout at Gold’s gym today. I was pressing three hundred already. I’ll have to practice for my triathlon that’s coming up.”

“Ha, ha, I’ll bet you couldn’t do thirty push-ups right now!” I knew she was right.

“I’ll bet I can. In fact, here I go: You count.”

Anna is over me in a second as I ready myself on the hardwood floor. I am fit, but I am not really confident that the magic thirty will be reached, though that isn’t so much for a forties-something-year old man, I think to myself.

Suddenly I hear, “One, two, three, push those beef cakes all the way down now, six, ten, come on now, flex those muscles, watch that nose of yours, watch out, the sweat is spraying everywhere, fifteen.”

I begin to huff and puff, but I’m grateful to reach twenty. She says she has a surprise for me if I reach thirty. I am not quite so sure, as I hear, “Twenty-five, twenty-six, let’s go, fatty! OK, soldier, work it on out now, or you got KP duty at 21:00 in the mess hall,” she belts out, like a real sergeant. At twenty-eight, I call it a day, or rather I collapse in all humiliation at the feet of my honey. “That’s a good try, J. I knew you could almost do it. Not bad for an old man. You ought to lay off those Sacher Tortes! No, just kidding. That was pretty good. I don’t know if I could do twenty of the woman push-ups.”

I nod, huffing and puffing, but not blowing the house down, and head for the showers, or was it the bedroom? I just had a shower, didn’t I? And now the sweat from this and the hot shower bring beads to my newly-thinning hairline. I laugh to myself at how much fun that was. I like a challenge, and besides, I do need to work out a bit, not that this little session would make me look like Arnold: Austria’s – and now California’s – answer to Hercules.

Let’s see, where was I? Looking for some nearby Levis and a cool summer sport shirt. Oh there’s the one with the tropical birds and the purple and black background. That feels appropriate right now. What was Anna wearing? Did I notice everything about her? Something was different. The hair, of course. She must have washed it and cut it some. The split ends were getting a little tiresome, probably. OK, here I go. I find myself humming, “Just singing in the rain, getting soaking wet,” as I ease on into the living room, where she is reading my latest Vanity Fair. I give her a peck on the neck and make a loud sound.

This scares her and she looks up, frightened at first and then laughing a nervous laugh. “Oh, don’t you look the Jamaican, mon. I was just reading this horrid expose of the homeless plight in America. It’s so shocking. The pictures are enough, but the real live interviews with some of the women and children – it’s sad. It’s scary, too.”

I just now notice her new amber necklace. It’s quite nice, and goes perfectly with that new yellow dress. I say, “Wow, that’s a nice necklace!” as if on cue to change the subject and proceed to the kitchen to start preparing the meal. “Where is that lettuce? It needs washing. Ann, could you wash this salad while I get the rice and fleish/meat together? We’re going to have some Wienerschnitzel, if I can remember how it goes.

“Of course, dear. But I only came to eat, not to do prep work. I thought I was going to have a nice break from kitchen duty. Just kidding – I’ll be glad to do that, and even to set the table,” she says as she immediately moves in search of the colander.

“You know where the plates and utensils are. I thought we would have a nice candlelight dinner: It’s Shabbat, you know, so I picked up some nice wine at a Heurigen. It’s already chilling. Like, chill out, man,” I say, trying to be cute and funny at the same time. I am often at a loss for words, so I make up for it with some nonsensical talk perhaps better left unsaid.

“You know, I’m a bit thirsty myself right now, so why don’t we uncork one of those babies now? OK with you?”

“Sure,” she says, as she cuddles up to me and puts her arms around me while I cut the garlic and onions. This feels good to me. A little affection and human warmth never hurt anybody. Besides, I’ve been aroused and sexualified today already, and right now as I am feeling two warm jello molds of flesh pressing up against me, I realize I am shifting this anticipatory excitement onto the nearest fox. This is what I have been missing for a week now. Last Saturday at her place, we made beautiful music together. What was she talking about? Oh yeah, the hungry and needy in America. That’s a long way away now, and I think I’ll let that subject ride. I don’t want to get started on that one. Better just enjoy the present, and let those folks panhandle somewhere else.

We sit down to dine. It’s already around half past eight, and we are both famished. We light the Shabbat candles, or Anna does, as it is the woman who lights the candles since it’s the Shekhinah, the feminine energy, that brings in the Shabbat . . .

“Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam, asher kidshanu, b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.” The two candles fill up the dark room with light. “Mahlzeit,” we say “Prost,” “L’ Chayim,” we also say, along with the blessing over the wine, “Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu melech ha-olam borei pri hagafen.”

We clink our glasses, this time for the third, or is it fourth, glass, I can’t remember. Ann’s face is flushed a nice red wine color, although we always drink white. She looks as though she is feeling no pain. We have already said the blessings for the bread . . . “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha-olam, hamotzi lechem min ha-aretz. Aahhhhhmmeennnnnnn/Amen. This tastes good, if I do say so myself.”

“This is great. You ’re getting better, the longer you’re here. Why, I remember when you first arrived and you fumbled around in the kitchen. Look at you now, a regular European chef at a class-B restaurant. It’s been a long time since those early days when you were just a pup,” she laughs.

We both laugh. I just nod and the old memories start bubbling to the surface. I do remember Anna when I first came here and met her at the Classical Cafe. Some friends, or rather acquaintances, had brought me there. My classical music background was like my cooking, inexperienced and naive at best.

I only remember it was something like Beethoven followed by Mozart, when our eyes met across the room. It was around midnight and I was becoming a bit tipsy and getting obnoxious a la Americanese, and I started singing or humming along, and breaking into a loud, “Oh solo mio . . .” Next thing I knew, I had bought a rose from that dark-haired auslander/foreigner selling roses, a Turk, I presumed. It was a juicy red one, which I brought over to you at around one in the morning. We exchanged glances many times over the next several minutes, as I recall.

“I was just recollecting, picturing as if I were still there, that night we first saw each other. Remember, at the Classical Cafe, where our eyes met? You were sitting with a friend, and you seemed to be laughing at something, and we both seemed to fixate on each other for a few seconds. I remember you said something to your friend, and then you both looked over, as if to assess me and give me a grade of hit or miss.”

“Yes, sweets, I remember. But what you may have forgotten was that you didn’t look at me again for a long time, while I was talking about you, in a fantasy way, with Regina, you remember her? We were making up stories about you. We knew you were an American, that was obvious. You appeared quite devilish and started to hum along with the music, although it sounded not quite right, as if you didn’t know the music, a dead give-away of a newcomer and of someone who doesn’t hold his wine so well.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “You never told me about that, or what you fantasized. Did it turn out to be true? Do I measure up to your expectations and stereotypes, my background I mean, now that you’ve known me for so long? We’re going on five years now. That‘s a long time for any relationship,” I mused.

I had had a series of short-term affairs, quasi-relationships and assorted lovers, one-night stands, etc. I had lived with someone in the seventies, in my hippie days, so to speak, and also in the late eighties and early nineties.

Now, with Anna, I was working on something more substantial, more committed, if that word dared be said or even thought. Aren’t these the days of intimacy crisis, the lack of whatever it takes to sustain a longer, even live-in type of man and woman tete-a-tete? This flirtation, the narcissistic me-first seventies and the money-grab eighties had left us crying foul play, lest anyone thwart any of our desires, and wants, and our many unattainable needs. What did we call the nineties, the pre-millennium post-x generation? And now it’s the Postmodern Whatevers!

We men, I often think, are kept with our mothers too long, and they won’t let us go. We men are babies dependent on mama, and we want the same with a woman, although no one is quite like mama. Our fathers were either too harsh or were absent workalcoholics looking for an axe to grind, and too often taking it out on their children.

Anyway, Anna is steady, sweet, unassuming, real, and quaint, a little like some Austrian stereotype. There is room to move with her, and she gives me all the space I need. She isn’t even jealous if I turn my head gawking at some fox walking down the street. Anna is not pressuring me, nor is she looking to settle down immediately, although she is thirty-five. I am somewhat older (twelve years, is more than somewhat), and maybe she is looking for that father she wanted to be close with, who was really too close with her.

She needs some distance, yet often asks me for advice and looks to me to do the decision-making when we’re together. Maybe she just doesn’t mind, and is easy and not so particular — at least I hope so. I don’t like it when someone is too dependent on me, either. I think she likes me and is just happy to be with me, as long as it doesn’t get too heavy or we end up processing and arguing too much.

After a while eating in silence, Anna blurts out that she has been really surprised about me: that she hadn’t thought I was very deep, in fact thought that I would be shallow, as in “An American,” and that she hadn’t expected this to last.

I reply that I’ve also been surprised at our steady upward climb from friendship into lovers and into hanging out together, to our current expectations, I hope, of spending weekends and some weekdays together. “I think we just come along together. I love sleeping with you. I think you are pretty, and you have a great figure. It’s something I can get into, pardon the pun, but I really love your blue eyes, your hair, and I could really hold onto and knead your tits and cunt though these clothes right now. I like to be together with you more and more. What do you say, sweetie?”

“Yeah, I agree with you. I do like to snuggle with you. You are so manly, dark and virile. You’re easy to be with and not at all as obnoxious as the typical American I had pegged you to be. Why, you haven’t really gotten drunk but maybe two or three times since then. I like that side of you, though, the one that gets assertive and speaks up and says what he wants.

“I wish you would stand up for yourself more, though, not exactly like the slogan of “be a man,” but I think a woman wants to be sheltered sometimes. It’s a mean world out there. Still, I don’t always understand you. There is the language problem, and then there are all those national pride things that you carry around with you, as if holding on for dear life. But I guess you have to do that when living in a strange country.”

“Often, I perceive you as being not really here, but off somewhere in a foreign land, ha ha. It’s as if you are here one minute and then in Berkeley or swimming in the Pacific Ocean the next. I want to confess that I’ve been feeling closer to you lately. Are we really in a romance stage? And what does that mean? Like, I don’t want to analyze it too much. We both have our own separate lives, and we like those parts, also that keeps us independent and still in touch with our own particular interests. You have your tennis, your reading, artwork, writing, music, and the walks in nature, which we both share. And I have my aerobic class, my interest in the arts, like you do, my friends, and of course, my violin.”

“Oh by the way, we’re having fresh strawberries with Schlag for our Nachspiese/dessert. I know you like fresh fruit. Well, are we feeling the wine, or are we just melting into each other’s arms? It doesn’t look like we will see that new film, what was the title of it?” I say, drifting back to those naked breasts this afternoon and now lusting for this luscious body right here in front of me. I am picturing our moving over to the sofa and grabbing for each other in mad, passionate love.

I go to the stereo and put on that violin concerto by Beethoven, I forget which one, but I know Anna will like it. Candlelight, wine, woman, and now music: the basic ingredients for a cozy night at home.

Anna moves to get up and clear the table. I interrupt her and tell her that I will take care of it, that she has the night off, and that we should adjourn to the other room where we’ll be much more comfortable. I make this ever so subtle hint, looking for that warm, receptive, come-on-over-to-my-place-baby gleam in her eye. I take her hand and kiss it with a manly bow, of the sort the Habsburgs used to make, I guess.

“‘Will you be so kind as to accompany me to the next chamber for some after-dinner aperitif, perhaps, or some surprise entertainment?” I inquire, remembering that awhile ago I was promised some kind of surprise for the thirty push ups, only to come up two short, but still looking for some goodies. Besides, I deserve it, I decide, and I am feeling no pain. Neither is she, judging by my dinner mate’s response. My only concern is that Anna may be feeling the wine so much that she is a bit too tired.

As we arrive at our next destination, she immediately sits down on the sofa and sighs as if she were about to crash, but not really. She is totally agreeable. It’s about nine or so and I follow quickly onto the sofa, as if stalking some wild animal. My instincts are wide open, and I am on the track, hot and inebriated.

I immediately sit next to her or almost right on top of her, and start grabbing at her full breasts and kneading them through the soft cotton material. They are most pliable, yet firm, and I feel a stirring in my loins. It’s getting hot, and we gravitate like two magnets-lips seeking each other. This feels good, feels as though another voice inside takes over as the body starts to relax and grope and moan and groan. Anna is French kissing me now, darting her tongue in and out of my mouth, and begins to ream the circumference of my mouth. This is highly erotic, and I feel like I am taking off.

Further along, she starts to caress my prick, now large and erect, through my pants. She goes up and down the length of it and starts to rub her one thigh over my leg as if to get close to genital-to-genital contact. I hear our breathing as we are both obviously in another space and time. She places my hand on her cunt, under her dress, and I feel her thin little panties. She begins to squirm, and she is getting wet. We can’t stop now. I have managed to get under her dress and her lace bra and am finding myself moving towards a now-naked breast, with the dark-pinkish nipple now hard and erect.

At about the same time, I hear something down below: my pants are being opened. My cock is being liberated. There is a tongue darting up and down, sucking and licking as if it were a chocolate ice cream cone. Anna really knows how to give head, but she is seldom this forward and fast.

I have my finger in her cunt, and take them out to smell her wonderful fragrance. Her juices are flowing. Now I am rolling my eyes, as if I am about to come in her mouth. I am hard as a brick and red hot and about to shoot off into outer space. She suddenly stops and sits on me, and we have beautiful intercourse, with simultaneous orgasms.

The next morning I hear sounds, some singing. It’s like some diva singing operetta over the radio or on a CD, but it sounds so close, and I wonder if it’s originating nearby, and live, even. I am not surprised, though. This is Vienna, after all, the city of music.

I hear a few hands clapping and I also clap, being a guest participant-listener in this real-life fantasy next door, over at that Schoenbrunn yellow villa. Is this a movie I am in, or is this a singer really practicing next door in that large villa? I am privy to some operetta, and the voice trills and thrills.