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Subject: {ASSM} from TxM6 Novel Chapt 3. REVISED!!
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Also From TxM6 Hyperfiction
http://www.txm6.com (updated 9/16/00)
http://www.txm6.com/enfer (updated 9/17/00)
http://www.txm6.com/lcfallon
http://www.farragher.com (Poetry updated 9/20/00)
TxM6 is entirely a work of fiction for adults only.
Copyright (c) 2000 Sean Farragher.
FIVE YEARS BEFORE LAURIE WAS KIDNAPPED
TxM6 Chapter Three
Gargoyles: The Herrig Estate
Journal of Henry Whitman
Friday April 17, 1987
HENRY WHITMAN
Henry Ezra Whitman, 45 years old, bespectacled with an
easy smile and cleft chin, understood acceptance and
rejection. A tall muscular and artistic man, he
labored for 70 hours a week driving a taxi for Hudson
Street Cab Fleets. In the remainder of his daily life
he wrote poetry, loved his many children, and madly
drove his life beyond even the memory of limitations.
Isn't that what we all do?
TAXI YARD: 6 AM:
Before Henry left the taxi yard, he clipped his watch
to the sun visor, stepped back out of the cab, and
inspected it for spare, jack, tire iron, dents, dings
and cum stains on the back and front seat.
Adjusting the mirrors, then looking back at the rows
of yellow and beige cabs lined up evenly almost as if
a ruler had been used on both sides of the narrow
parking spaces, Henry pulled straight back breaking
clear.
Riding the circles of the steering wheel, he begat his
day with the clean taste of burnt coffee and change
box, maps and one stale buttered roll. On the floor in
a cloth bag, Henry carried a camera, tape recorder,
two books of poetry, a novel and a notebook for those
scribbled images digested on the taxi stand
At 6:04 AM Henry passed the taxi stand on his way to
the time call. Smiling at his the long faces of the
drivers, he passed them knowing he could be there on
the stand tomorrow bull shitting with them how much
the driver had paid off the dispatcher.
Don't have to be there until 8:00, Henry thought. Take
the easy way to make sure. Morristown, NJ is about an
hour from Fort Lee. Anything can happen on Friday.
Henry decided not to stop at the diner for an egg and
bacon sandwich. Driving one handed, he wolfed the
stale buttered roll that tasted like taxi throwing
half of it out the window when the traffic stalled.
Henry usually rode the back roads to avoid the terror
of morning traffic around the GW Bridge.
Falling down Central in Palisade Park, he turned left
on Broad and right at Route 46. He was not surprised
that broken down Route #46 already had construction
crews lined up on both sides of the road. One old
timer told Henry that he remembered when Route 46 had
opened. "I was a boy," he said, "in 1931. Same year
the bridge opened. It was just the same then. It had
those same bumps and the worst accidents. No one knew
how to drive then."
Looking at his watch and forward at the merging
traffic, Henry relaxed. Congestion wasn't that bad.
Maybe I will have some time to really look at this
place all the drivers claim is fancy. Like Joe said.
He called it a "piece of fucking work.
Taking Route #80 west off 46, Henry intending to get
off 80 and back on 46 before I-287 traffic stopped up
like traffic outside the Meadowlands complex after any
sports event.
Forty minutes early, Henry pulled up to the gate of
the Herrig Estate. One solitary guard met dressed in
what appeared to be a historic Nazi uniform stopped
him at the checkpoint. Raising his hands in that grand
gesture of STOP, the guard frowned when Henry ran his
cab to one inch of the white wooded halt sign. It
actually said HALT with the rest written in German. It
looked as if it was a prop for a Nazi movie.
Henry laughed thinking what if I had just ran this son
of a bitch mother fucking nazi border guard down.
Should have done it to Adolf Shickelgruber in 1923.
Henry was irritated and his mind leaped to other
violence. "I hate anti-Semites, Henry lisped to
himself. Not a Jew, but I hate them. They made the
world more horrible than it really is. Maybe they
didn't, who the fuck knows, he thought. I hate what I
think when I meet them. Fucken Nam.
Sometimes, when driving in New York City, Henry
imagined losing the brakes and plowing into fifty
pedestrians at the cross walk.
Henry never fully reasonable or predictable was,
however, peaceful. Worn down from Nam, He did think
the unthinkable, and he wondered why when it was over,
and the outburst done, did he feel uncomfortable with
himself.
Many taxi drivers hoard mysteries. One of Henry's was
public. In 1986, just a year before, Henry had been
caught fucking an eighteen-year-old college freshman.
She had been a student in one of Henry's creative
writing classes at City. She claimed when caught (got
pregnant) that although she loved him, she had fucked
him for good grades. Henry simply said she had earned
it by her writing and I paid for the abortion.
"I can't help it," Henry told his best friend Aaron
about that time. "She refused the money and had the
kid. She claims she never told the school. She said
they found out from another student. She called the
kid Henry. Wrote me that she wanted to always remember
what I had added to her life beside the child. It was
a gracious letter, but I didn't answer it. I figured
she would line up for her support payments like
everyone else. She didn't, but then her family lives
in the Hamptons and she drove a vintage Thunderbird.
No one really cared why Henry had fucked her. Henry
accepted responsibility and didn't argue or whine
about it. "I was stupid for getting caught, he told
Aaron.
Despite the lunacy of sex, war and the failure of
profit in a cab, Hudson Street taxi drivers liked and
respected Henry. Henry was a down to earth man with
brains, Frank told Henry. "The guys like you" because
you don't make them feel like shit. They just don't
understand why you are a cab driver.
Elected President of the union one year, Henry lost it
the next when he won the union held grand lottery and
kept the prize. Some members claimed he had fixed it.
The charge was never proven.
Henry was a war hero. Served in Nam as a combat Medic
for fourteen months. Local VFW and Legion hated that
he turned the medals back to the soldiers who had
earned them. They also hated that he refused to
participate in the marches and the benefits. He told
them I go to East Orange on Vet days. I am there once
a month. Send your boys down there with me, and I will
show them the heroes. "This ain't WWII," He added.
Henry like many Vets made the pilgrimage to the wall
to leave them there. Henry rarely talked about Nam,
but when one asshole questioned his service there.
Henry took the fuck by the lapel and screamed in his
face without hitting him, "I know fucken death. I
stuck it, I cleaned it, and I bagged death almost
every day. Get the fuck out of here before I forget I
can go to jail for blowing your brains out."
Looking at the Gestapo guard talking on the phone,
presumably to the fare, Henry hoped he had not made
this fucked up trip for nothing. Using the double
speak of cab drivers, Henry thought, Shit I will wait.
I don't really care how long it takes. I am here on
time. Even if they cancelled, I would get paid. At the
same time he was pissed and complained every few
minutes hitting the steering wheel but not hitting the
horn.
Henry often made it through his driving shift
balancing patience with irritation. Driving himself
out of madness, he would punch the dark period at the
end of a softer line as he rolled within his taxi
toward his own mind. These odd thoughts he collected
walking about he called walkabouts after the tennis
player Goolagong.
Using this blank time Henry filled himself with these
flights of insanity. As they were sometimes self
destructive, Henry wrote them in the margins of his
poems as lonely images forlorn and graphically
violent. They give tension to the poem or story, he
once told a student. Why do I find it hard to lie and
stay insane? Why can I not lie like anyone else?
What's kept me sane? Certainly not this fucked up job.
Perhaps, It's my equal desire to be left alone and to
be involved.
Stalled, almost at zero time, the gatekeeper leaned
too far into Henry's driver side window and said.
"About two miles as the crow flies."
"Get the fuck out of here, your breath stinks," Henry
rolled up the window.
The rent a Nazi cop had no sense of humor. Mumbling
through the closed window he told Henry the obvious
that he would have to wait but the family wanted him
to wait up by the house.
"No shit." Henry laughed.
Hitting the gas too hard, Henry raced through the gate
but not before the wooden barrier slammed down into
the rear deck of the taxi just missing the rear
window.
THE PROMISED LAND
Henry rode slowly into questionable domains. This
forest hidden from two major suburban highways drove
him slower. Captured by the unkempt foliage, Henry
smiled at that improbable irony. Imagine living in a
world so peaceful? Would it ever become ordinary?
Answering, he thought. It is good that we have islands
like this to set us apart from the tedium of watching
the enfolding and its revival; all in one long playing
record.
What if, Henry thought, magical fountains, sprites,
and fairies emerged from beneath the grass carpets.
Alice in wonderland would be tame. Just like Lewis
Carroll, Henry understood that this place like Alice's
was not of this world. I do not feel invited and yet I
have absolute privacy. Why am I not lonely here?
Entering the estate, Henry crept along the road as a
peaceful horse and rider searching for easy ground and
a safe entry. He had heard about the Herrig mansion
from other drivers and had anticipated the expanse of
its landscape. This was larger, more formidable. Like
walking inside Louis XIV's private garden. It was the
forest primeval. Imagine what you would encounter, if
a man had transported plants and buildings whole from
his past in Germany
Advance driver gossip as usual had underestimated the
place. If it didn't have tits and ass, most of the
drivers were not interested. They might even think you
were queer if you collected wild flowers and read
philosophy and poetry while in the holding pen called
the taxi stand.
Living within the plastic taxi, pines crossed and the
images flickered. Henry marched back to the late 1940s
English movies of Alfred Hitchcock. Rebecca and
Notorious were the fare that made you think and want
to fuck almost at once. These movies unlike the Herrig
mansion seemed a misplaced metaphor that passion for
wealth and dark sexual obsession.
If I walked inside too long, Henry laughed, I might
discover the year 1887. It could just as easily been
2088. Inside anything, you never seem to understand
all of it at once.
What did I expect? Should I have imagined foxes
running after hounds? Might be wonderful if I could
make what I do in these next few moments last longer
than good sex or a bad movie.
Why does this place remind me of death? Why do I think
of myself falling under the thunder of horses? There
is that gasp of fraud I felt in Nam. Something here is
also a lie. When I jumped off the transport plane,
dropping easily on to the tarmac, I thought I was
already dead.
Knowing that heat Henry felt the rot within death
before dying. Perhaps if I die, I will not die, he
told one SGT who laughed at the medic philosopher as
Henry was called.
Opposite I know, but that could be the way out of
becoming another blind statistic.
Some wag started calling Henry Plato until Henry
smacked the fuck alongside the head and they rumbled
in the usual fist up your ass army kick him in the
balls street fight.
Fear never stopped Henry. He stepped into it. Death is
that moment when you have no thought. You are there
pissing and moaning and in the next breath you are
spit stains and a hand full of paperwork sent back to
Headquarters.
I do not want to leave, Henry thought. Gathered it all
in breathing the scent of rare flowers and happy
insects, He knew he must walk in this garden and
possess at least a moment at its center.
Turing progressively inward, Henry felt the pull of
circle and its gravity. He wondered if the turning
would end. Or was this a romantic heaven and a hell
around the corner. Where is perfection?
She was magnificent, Henry thought intentionally using
the female pronoun to describe the Herrig place.
Just like a great show girl: this place is just too
fucken beautiful for any ordinary man. How can you
imagine fucking her? Yes, at that moment she going
down on you and your fingers are milking all parts of
her at once.
Imagine a remote wilderness just off a major
Interstate Highway. Also imagine that every square
foot had been planned. Each tree, shrub and weed had
been bought, nurtured and backed up, replicated
hundreds if not thousands of times. What a marvelous
obsession, Henry thought. How many beautiful detail
can one-person know?
Turning, his circle decomposed, Henry rode the
"peaceful loops" inside towards the main house like a
captured serpent thrown into a large fish tank. He
felt every hidden eye record his position. He played
each step stage by stage.
Drunk on multiple colors of green and red, umber and
sienna, Henry stopped for a second time along the side
of the road to ride himself backward out of the
quagmire.
Far beyond the gate now, Henry rode for what seemed
like miles without change or any sense of destination.
Turning around, he backtracked. Everything old inside
the foliage seemed new.
Lost in green texture he stepped out of the cab amazed
that he could be lost on a road without turns.
Taking five, military style, squatting by the front
tire, he sucked on long grass and watched two rabbits
fucking. Henry wondered. Who will believe that? Who
ever notices when rabbits fuck? Am I dead? Could this
be nightmare heaven?
Looking up at the gray thick April sky Henry shrugged
his shoulders as if to ask for directions or more of
anything, but his request didn't include the rain that
had started. It was cold shower. February was still
here, Henry thought, turning lights and windshield
wipers on at once.
Driving again, pumping his foot from gas to brake,
Henry turned at the sign he had missed the first time.
GARGOYLES
Driving up to the stables set back from the road,
Henry memorized the carved wood gargoyles that
decorated the window frames. Henry would transform
them later into magical characters with their own
language and original vocabulary. Henry took it all
it, saving it as he did images written in notebooks.
If I didn't drive a cab, Henry mused, I wouldn't know,
would I?
Poetry had odd sources. Henry saved the images for
other reasons. I want those subtle textures that make
light into film and words for display. Henry shivered.
Death lurks out about that tree line there, and
pointed it out to himself, where he felt the danger.
In this place of mind, Henry accepted that he might
never know more about it what he would experience in
the next few minutes. I don't want to leave before I
have one chance to at least know it from the inside. I
don't want to be a cab driver here. I don't want to
serve these folks and their palace guard. I want to
live here and keep it all.
The year is 1887 not 1987, Henry imagined. I can't
write this down. I would have to stop the cab and turn
on the tape recorder. I might reverse the spell if I
stopped even for a moment?
Superstitious, Henry feared that he never understand
this place from the outside. Taking a chance on
changing the present, Henry pulled his tape recorder
out, Henry wrote his mind.
Marking his life there, he replayed it laughing and
tense when he heard his past speak carefully and with
precise diction his wonderful off center lecture.
Something important would happen, Henry thought.
Later, when that turned out to be true, he realized
while listening to the tape that he predicted it.
Yes, I want a cascade of trumpets and a flourish of
drums as I enter. Henry loved grand entrances. At that
moment, he smiled and started to sing the Stars
Spangle Banner in full voice laughing at the way the
ground and horizon waved him unsteady. Stopping the
song before the finish, he realized if somebody saw
him now, they might think him drunk.
Under his breath, in his thoughts, Henry said without
bravado to himself, please sacred father, let me live
again what I feel right now. Just like Vietnam, I want
to be lost and found in the same instant.
Suddenly jerking the cab easily around three-
construction backhoes directly in his path, avoiding
them, Henry saw a sick headline: TAXI DRIVER ARRESTED
FOR DRUNKEN DRIVING ON HERRIG ESTATE.
I never step in shit like this; Henry laughed at his
good fortune. He saw the spectacle of this call in all
its parts at once and almost stopped thinking.
Yes, I know I was fucken lucky. I'd tell anyone that.
This is how I get through life. Turning away to run
home to the winding stairs of Coole and Yeats, driving
his mind deeper into the Herrig maze he would
rediscovered with his Darwinian and pagan architect
not the origin of the species but rather a future
tense imperfect passion for indescribable disorder,
incest and abuse.
How did Henry know any of this before it happened?
Good Question. He did.
What is anyone's origin after all, Henry mused. How is
this seemingly perfect order, disorder or stew for
robins and rodents?
FRONT DOOR
No one saw the Herrig place as a whole. Henry flashed
back to his driving and the present. I will write
about it. Make it into a corrupt movie about porn
stars and political tricksters. Perhaps I can find a
unique President to be the principal John. No, wait.
Why do I want to turn the classic into the prurient?
Henry gripped the steering wheel and expertly turned
the paths as they closed. Nothing will change here no
matter what I write. Beauty is as innocence corrupted.
This place is more than a collection of living
objects. Nothing I do will alter the sequence of their
incorporation. Yes, I can say that. It is more than
any illusion or trick. Just like the paintings my
friend Aaron paints. He created grand abstractions
based on natural forms. He sometimes used a model, but
never painted her surface, but rather the interior. He
said he saw it as a contrast of forces. Making these
floor to ceiling fifteen foot long constructs and
larger, he bound his models inside the case of paint
and paper. They were there, but not there. I caught
their eclipse, he said. The Herrig place reminded me
of how and not just what he painted.
I loved watching Aaron create the first steps, Henry
thought as he watched the falling maple pods litter
the lawn. First he coated the stretched canvas and
then marking the rectangular border with black and
white papers he decorated the wet plaster paint like
footsteps caught in the middle of a sudden volcanic
eruption. Aaron said about his painting. I am the
recording engineer. He happened fifty million years
ago.
April 17, 1987
Stopping the cab fifty feet from the main gate, Henry
took one look back to watch for magical tree lines and
claymores in the boughs of maples and oaks. If the
fare had noticed him lurking, they might think he was
having trouble with the cab and call the company.
Henry moved forward and lurked closer to the LZ.
Henry always said he never cared what people thought.
He realized that was a lie. Just before pulling up to
the front door of the main house he decided that he
liked being there and didn't want to fuck up the
possibility of future calls. He knew he was a taxi
driver. That was his obvious role. He knew he had
little control over when he could leave and where and
how far he could travel.
Finally, when Henry moved up, took his place at the
front door, Henry that the Herrig place was
uncorrupted, authentic, and not fake. How could such a
man love the Third Reich? It did not fit any model of
the world outside. Yes, it is not a collection of
objects but form and force compressed into one scheme
with multiple plots and infinite varieties of color
and value.
Like Matisse, Henry recalled, the impossible in art is
before and after the mark on the margin to note
accident. Is any great art without accident?
Am I always at creation, Henry asked? I know how death
tastes. Copper blood and Iron masks wrap around my
forearm while I fought death in every firefight at
every LZ. I lost too many rounds by default, but I
survived somehow.
The man was already dead but I was too stupid to know.
There are steps in death. Knowing them as absolutes is
too difficult for one person to decipher. Sometimes,
it takes two or more. Then there are arguments, and no
one knows any answer.
HENRY WHITMAN
Taxi drivers are great with the canned lines. Yes sir,
Henry laughed as he continued to drive down the rich
man's driveway expecting to find some old couple
arguing about a diseased heart monitor that would need
its batteries changed. He wondered pulling into
another circle to settle down for the millennium wait.
Any yesterday, Henry was alone and mad. April 17, 1987
might change that, but then again perhaps not. Being
fulfilled would certainly not corrupt his cynicism.
His questions made for his answers. Henry would not
accept that extension and not limitation for five
years. It would take love to excite that capacity.
Love would start today. The journey from Gate to House
might be considered his first test. Why is art
important and questions about art more significant?
Henry believed that the visual mind knew more than the
verbal. That transformation from object to thought was
the one act of genius.
Pure creation (genius) may be the chance recognition
of any accident. When we select a word or a hue and
place it in a frame and note its combinations and
layers, perhaps that is like the selection of people
in our lives. We never know whom we will find inside
where we complete the edges of where we know and how
we were before we knew. How will it be later is always
the bottom question.
Henry did not know today he would meet Laurie Fallon.
She had requested him when she called for a cab. She
knew that he thought she was much too young and had
avoided her. She also knew from Angela that Henry had
no idea that her family was rich and decadent. She
didn't care about that except as a mental aside.
Laurie was depressed and strung out on cocaine and H,
uppers and downers, acid and relaxants, lying and
fucking. She wanted death as she wanted a new coat.
Make my life whole she thought. How did Laurie know
that Henry would save her life?
When she came out of the Herrig estate, Henry was
startled when he saw her walk down the steps. No one
was with her. No one helped with the bags.
The land had bewitched him. That was what it was.
Laurie lost no time and gathered him into her pocket.
Five years later the man called Abel and woman called
Lilth would kidnap her. During that time, Henry taught
Laurie poetry and he called her God; said she spoke in
tongues. He taught what all the others had missed. At
the beginning and the end he loved her poetry. He said
her poem, "Camera of Myself," was the perfect poem. He
knew that because he was jealous of it. He often had
said in the past that he could only be in love with a
woman if he loved her poetry more than his. Henry
loved Laurie.
When they were stoned, he would call out to Laurie,
insist that her name was Christ Tina or Saint Chrissy
or Spirit Faith. He said that she was the fourth
daughter of God. He would then refuse to name the
other three when Laurie challenged him. He answered
you are all four.
Standing next to her, out of time, five years later,
Henry's hand reached up for what he knew. This time,
Laurie was not here. Abel had taken her captive.
--
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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