![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraCHAPTER 4
(i)
Three weeks went by. And then another three.
Henry Miller wrote letters. Lots and lots of letters. And paid visits to the Orpheum Dance Palace almost nightly till Nestor stopped letting him in.
Getting Nestor to bar him took considerable persuasion on my part, Cigarettes. Cash. Sexual favors. Practically almost nobody else was coming to the Orpheum that long hot summer in 1923.
August and September were always the hottest months of the New York summer, but that year, the heat was in a category all by itself. The air was a strangler you tried to fight off; if you breathed in too deeply, you’d feel it clutching your throat. Tar oozed and bubbled on streets that stank like 14th century Venice at the height of a bubonic plague outbreak.
How could the Orpheum compete with Coney Island where cool ocean breezes blew and a sailor could lure a girl under the boardwalk for the price of an ice cream cone? Why would you want to shuffle sweatily round a buckling floor with a jaded pro when for the same price, you could ride the Magic Bullet or wheedle a hand job from a fresh-faced lass—the reek of Poughkeepsie still upon her—in the Wonder Wheel, a hundred and fifty feet above the dark, eternal ocean?
I opened Henry Miller’s letters in case they had money in them. Sometimes, they did. Mostly, they didn’t.
June, June, the girl in the tune, Henry Miller wrote:
Hey! It’s not my love letter. Even if it looks like my handwriting.
It’s a mash note Anthony is writing to Cleopatra.
It’s a billet doux Napoleon is dictating to Josephine. (Don’t wash.)
It’s a poem Keats is composing from his fever bed to La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Do you believe in the conservation of matter? Well, you should because it is this principle and this principle alone that turned metaphysics into physics, and physics is the set of spells that guides all matter through its adventures in time and space.
I personally take great comfort in the conservation of matter. In knowing nothing ever really disappears. That we’re never gone merely altered. Decay is evolution. When I die, when I turn to worm food, I will remember squiggling in the rich dark earth. When the worm I once was is eaten by the bird I once became, I will remember flight, what it feels like to spread weightless wings and battle with wind currents that want to blow me to Greenland.
I love you so helplessly, and you no longer want me as a lover. But I still know what it feels like to be so deep inside you that there was no way to separate what I was feeling from what you were feeling, no way that the mingled scents of our bodies could separate out into two distinct scents. They never will, June. I will always smell like you. You will always smell like me.
June, I’m sorry you were loved by a liar.
What the hell was he talking about?
Once Nestor banned Henry Miller from the Orpheum proper, he’d stand on the corner across the street. He’d stand there for hours, the other girls told me. Staring. Smoking and staring.
I practiced invisibility so that when I slipped in and out of the dance hall, he wouldn’t see me. It’s an odd thing to make yourself invisible. Once you have the habit, it’s hard to lose. When I made it so that Henry Miller stopped seeing me, nobody else saw me, either. I stopped seeing myself.
(i)
Three weeks went by. And then another three.
Henry Miller wrote letters. Lots and lots of letters. And paid visits to the Orpheum Dance Palace almost nightly till Nestor stopped letting him in.
Getting Nestor to bar him took considerable persuasion on my part, Cigarettes. Cash. Sexual favors. Practically almost nobody else was coming to the Orpheum that long hot summer in 1923.
August and September were always the hottest months of the New York summer, but that year, the heat was in a category all by itself. The air was a strangler you tried to fight off; if you breathed in too deeply, you’d feel it clutching your throat. Tar oozed and bubbled on streets that stank like 14th century Venice at the height of a bubonic plague outbreak.
How could the Orpheum compete with Coney Island where cool ocean breezes blew and a sailor could lure a girl under the boardwalk for the price of an ice cream cone? Why would you want to shuffle sweatily round a buckling floor with a jaded pro when for the same price, you could ride the Magic Bullet or wheedle a hand job from a fresh-faced lass—the reek of Poughkeepsie still upon her—in the Wonder Wheel, a hundred and fifty feet above the dark, eternal ocean?
I opened Henry Miller’s letters in case they had money in them. Sometimes, they did. Mostly, they didn’t.
June, June, the girl in the tune, Henry Miller wrote:
Hey! It’s not my love letter. Even if it looks like my handwriting.
It’s a mash note Anthony is writing to Cleopatra.
It’s a billet doux Napoleon is dictating to Josephine. (Don’t wash.)
It’s a poem Keats is composing from his fever bed to La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Do you believe in the conservation of matter? Well, you should because it is this principle and this principle alone that turned metaphysics into physics, and physics is the set of spells that guides all matter through its adventures in time and space.
I personally take great comfort in the conservation of matter. In knowing nothing ever really disappears. That we’re never gone merely altered. Decay is evolution. When I die, when I turn to worm food, I will remember squiggling in the rich dark earth. When the worm I once was is eaten by the bird I once became, I will remember flight, what it feels like to spread weightless wings and battle with wind currents that want to blow me to Greenland.
I love you so helplessly, and you no longer want me as a lover. But I still know what it feels like to be so deep inside you that there was no way to separate what I was feeling from what you were feeling, no way that the mingled scents of our bodies could separate out into two distinct scents. They never will, June. I will always smell like you. You will always smell like me.
June, I’m sorry you were loved by a liar.
What the hell was he talking about?
Once Nestor banned Henry Miller from the Orpheum proper, he’d stand on the corner across the street. He’d stand there for hours, the other girls told me. Staring. Smoking and staring.
I practiced invisibility so that when I slipped in and out of the dance hall, he wouldn’t see me. It’s an odd thing to make yourself invisible. Once you have the habit, it’s hard to lose. When I made it so that Henry Miller stopped seeing me, nobody else saw me, either. I stopped seeing myself.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-21 10:25 pm (UTC)Well, you should because it is this principle and this principle alone that turned metaphysics into physics, and physics is the set of spells that guides all matter through its adventures in time and space. --KISS ME
The girl with the reek of Poughkeepsie still on her, high above the dark, eternal ocean was pretty excellent too.
I mean, this portion of this chapter is a gem all on its own.