One Night In Manhattan

by Edward Morris 

My name is Harold Hart Crane. I am alone in my hotel room.

It is Christmas Eve, in the Year of Our Lord 1941. I will not lose

my mind.

The Herr Doktor told me to repeat things like this,

 when the “peak” of the drug happens, whenever that is. Time

 has turned to rubber. The clocks have melted down.

 The gods have all gone home. There's only us. The typer. And me.

My name is Harold Hart Crane. I will not lose my mind.

A thousand years ago, I got that package this afternoon

from that quaint little bearded Kraut Dr. Rinkel at Boston

Psychopathic Hospital. The stuff’s an alkaloid that acts on

several chemicals already in the brain. He orders it in micro-

grammes, do you believe that, at the most exorbitant rates from

Sandoz Labs, in Chur, Switzerland.

Or did, a thousand years ago. Before the clock melted on the

wall, and the trip to the store did not end. This room is tired.

The velvet wallpaper spirals up into patterns of patterns toward

the ceiling, beanstalks I have no heart to climb. I am too fasci-

nated by where I’ve gotten to down here on Earth, this warm

radiator and the radio on just sub-audibly, a mad caterwauling

counterpoint to the juke-joint Jezebels below.

A wall of silence rings my Moroccan portable typer in this

restless one-night cheap room. Just beyond, I hear the blessed

Andrews Sisters belting out “Bein Mir Bist Du Schoen” from

the hotel bar while rhumba drums beat mad macumba, animal

jungle rhythms of Science, Commerce and the Holy Ghost

jitterbugging with my Lucky Strike Green that jitterbugs all by

herself in the flying-saucer-shaped ash tray on my desk.

I, with them, want to dance my legs down to the knees at

the sight of what I see my cigarette smoke doing, bending light

around the strange typer that is harp and altar of my fury fused.

I started writing the thing I was working on before, an essay

on the sub-genre phenomenon that Will Jenkins at Amazing

Stories calls ‘sidewise-history.’

I was thinking of a few fanciful examples of this ‘flash-in-

the-pan’: the Great War never happening, the South being

given modern fusion technology during the Civil War, a dozen

other such....

As fast as I wrote and replaced scenarios on the page, the

three framed photographs I’ve hung above the Burroughs

cybernetical typer changed again, image shuttling past image

like a Tarot hand drawn by a riverboat gambler.

The pictures are all wrong, now. I can’t slot-machine them

back to what’s supposed to be there. And it’s the typer.... Me....

That’s doing it? I grab for my Lucky and smoke half of it off at

one drag, never enough, never enough.

My typewriter. Mine. It did that. I have no tangible explana-

tion for what I’ve just seen, and barely the capacity to describe

it. The page went blank just as I started to come up on this

LSD-25, and then....

I need to slow down. My God, how did I not see that I got

into the wrong racket when I started publishing Scientifiction? I

should have stayed a poet!

But then there’d never be this moment now, the right sound of

the right keystroke twanging the strings of the cosmic harp in

such and such a way that it might ripple back, and change

the shape of Not Quite All?

What the hell is History, anyway? And who writes it? How

do we know we’re not, at this very moment, living someone

else’s parallel world?

What does it matter what we do now? I could go rob a bank,

assassinate anyone, sleep with anyone, abuse any drug, commit

any crime, and then come back here, sit down at my desk, and

write it out of existence, and it would have never....

There it is. I know I’ll remember this in the morning. Damn

it all, we should all just stop working and start doing what we

want to do. Then Society would have to change. We could do

it. We didn’t give away all our power after the Great War. Not

all of it.

Did we? I don’t know. I can’t think about much, except the

images hanging on the wall above my desk.

I will write my way through this, too. Dear Bill Burroughs

tells me the gods smile on me when I’m in my element.

But this isn’t my element, Bill. I’m somewhere else on the

Periodic Table, tonight, in my sordid rooms at the Chelsea Hotel

where I sit in front of my Aladdin Portable at the mirror and try

not to fall apart....

I once told Bill my secret dream-job, when we were walking

in Times Square and sucking on Italian sodas, stoned to the

gills on Mexican brown ditchweed through the water-pipe back

at Huncke’s squat.

Bill slapped me on the back, looking like a preacher in his

loose, floppy gray suit, and said “Kid, poetry isn’t a career as

much as it is a chronic condition. In your case, Campbell’s boys

have rooted it out to a ganglion, but usually it’s terminal....”

Poets extrapolate. So do I. The sounds in my head fade down

now to zazen silence. Outside my window, the gray, dappled

belly of pregnant sky threatens snow. There’s nothing for me

now but that blank page in the typer, healed to be broken again.

My hesitation melts away like the frost on my window as the

radiator clanks into life once more. If my watch is even right. I

have gone mad. I must have gone mad.

It happened like this:

I stopped cutting my latest serial, Chaplinesque, when I felt

my pupils get big and my mouth get electric and came all the

way up, staring stupidly at the wall behind my desk. What was

hanging there were formerly been two photographs, one en

collage.

The one that caught my eye used to be a framed photo

of Harry S. Truman grinning at the camera like a baboon.

I pasted Truman’s portrait over a picture of the mushroom

cloud he unleashed on Tokyo, and scrawled in the Missourian’s

own words below it, ‘THE ONLY THING NEW UNDER THE

SUN IS THE HISTORY WE DON’T KNOW.’

Right next to Truman was, was a picture of another young-

old fascist, Howard Hughes, behind the tiller of his Lockheed 14

after that first trans-global flight. I just final-drafted a very diffi-

cult novel called Meet Me in St. Louis, see, tying Truman and

Hughes to the assassination of President-For-Life MacArthur.

My fictional Doug MacArthur as Prexy is clearly modeled after

our current, actual Caesar.

I gave the manuscript a slap and sent her onward just three

weeks ago. It’s a fine old vaudeville comedy of errors set in

the Kremlin and the Oval Office as America and the NATO

allies plunge hell-bent, headlong and breakneck into the Sino-

Vietnamese Conflict, the bloodiest war in human history, a

hypothetical Big Three.

My God, it was meant as a joke, like ‘A Modest Proposal’,

just something to get people off their butts and thinking. I never

meant.... That is....

Wait.

Black Mountain College just published Meet Me in St. Louis

as a mythopoetic curiosity. Their senior editor Bob Lowell

compared me to the homespun Scientifiction Grand Master

himself, Stephen Vincent Benét.

Bob also introduced me to Will Jenkins, who lives two floors

up from me now and lets me bounce my stories off that fertile

brain. Will’s got a fine turn of phrase himself, especially in his

newer epic works like ‘Doomsday Deferred’ or ‘To the White

Sea’, where he talks about his experiences as a bomber pilot

during the Berlin Siege in ’47.

Will is riotously heterosexual, but somehow we hit it off

anyway. The first advance for Meet Me in St. Louis came

yesterday morning. After I got back from the bank, Will and I

did some heroic drinking at Capote’s little walkup in the East

Village.

Truman was fit to be tied. We were up gossiping like a couple

of high-school girls until dawn. Truman could set me straight

on this now.

Catch is, I’m not afraid that Capote won’t see the difference

in the photos.

I’m afraid he will.

Or Edward will, that columnist from Vanity Fair, infuri-

ating Edward with the broken shift key on his typewriter, for

whom Gay is just the captivating cognomen of some nerdy girl

at Cambridge who didn’t like going to the monkey house to

make out.

Edward Estlin Cummings if you please understands me,

though, which makes him all the more infuriating. He called my

first novel, The Bridge, “a true portal to someplace I’ve never

traveled, gladly beyond any experience.”

But this morning, the wall above my desk and typer has

quietly informed me that I have lost my natural mind and trav-

eled someplace beyond. I like to have photographs of my subjects

while I’m working, always did.

Truman (Harry S., not my dear Holly G from the Village) and

Howard Hughes  were the models for my villains.

Until a few minutes ago, the only art upon the wall above my

desk was, ipso facto, the late Citizen Hughes, with his smarmy

prep-school good looks, gone down in his Hercules somewhere

off the California coast; and Give ’Em Hell Harry looking old

and broken after he dropped The Bomb, the year before they

found him hanging in the Oval Office.

I framed the Truman photo. Hughes just got masking-

tape. That three feet of wall Harry and Howard occupied was

reserved for photos pertinent to whatever story I was working

on, currently a kind of altar to the unquiet dead. But behind the

glass of the cheap frame just now is...was....

General Dwight David Eisenhower, out of uniform, wearing

a black suit with a thin black tie, in a Lincoln limo with the top

down, surrounded by Secret Servicemen (and...—women?) The

picture of Ike’s motorcade in Tiananmen Square is on grainy

new color stock.

Saluting him from a ceremonial throne at the other end of

the shot is a skinny man with a mustache and an overbite, with

shining diamond-coal eyes. Chiang Kai-shek, garbed in the

robes of a Han Emperor, leading a Komodo dragon on a gold

chain....

Where Howard Hughes just was, there’s now an 81⁄2 x 11''

glossy of a blonde tomboy with rakish good looks and a bomber

jacket that’s to die for, standing on a weed-choked runway beside

a Fokker F-7. The woman looks all-in, and is supported on either

side by what are clearly G-men in identical suits, leading her to

the 1932 Packard touring car just out of frame.  

“Amelia Earhart,” I mutter, able to think of nothing but my

first internationally published short story, ‘Atlantis Regained’.

In the story, Amelia was the first pilot to fly around the globe

instead of Hughes, because of....

“Because of that weird fuel tank Amelia designed, the one

she never got to use, the one she called the three-hump camel....”

Then I stop muttering to myself. The picture is no collage.

Where the masking-tape has peeled back on the upper right

corner, I pull the picture further away from the wall and behold

only the Op-Ed page of the Times for March Fourth, 19....

“...Thirty-two.” I feel very cold. “Six years before Howard

Hughes flew around the globe.”

I’m not leaving my room now. Now it’s dark, and I’m lying

down, with a cold cloth on my forehead. I don’t want to look at

those pictures again.

I have to get out of this room. I’ll leave, come back in and

everything’ll be hunky-dory and hucky-fucking-duck, just

as it was, nice vanilla bread-and-butter missionary 1941....

Slowly I turn, inch by inch, step by step, to the cracked

Motorola radio on the end-table by the window, and

turn on its warm, comforting little console-light

and the tinny squawk of WRNY News.

“...Hughes ToolCo formally disbanded today, on

the anniversary of the former President’s impeach-

ment hearings. President Albin Barkley, who himself

gained plenty from the impeachment, was strangely

temperate in his criticism of former President Hughes’

mad, short-lived term in office. ‘Howard Hughes de-

segregated the military,’ Barkley eulogized at a press

conference on the West Lawn of the White House this

Saturday past. ‘He put our Liberty satellite into space

at the private level way ahead of the Rooshians, and

helped us put Al Boyd and Bud Anderson on the Moon

seven years later. I knew Howard for many years, and I

can tell you...his heart was in the right place. America

has lost one of her true visionaries....’

“Protest marchers in Washington, D.C. said differ-

ently, however. At four o’clock this afternoon, Your

Reporter caught up with Carolyn Cassady, ringleader

of the—”

I reach up and shut off the radio. Barkley was a fool with

no vision who did what he was told and very little else. Never

President! Never! I never voted for him, I voted for Adlai Ste-

venson, who won, and— But they just said—

Someone’s putting me on. We have yet to reach the Moon.

Howard Hughes, too, has never been President of any United

States where I lived, worked, grew up.... Neither, for that matter,

has Eisenhower.

I mean, come on! Eisenhower was blown to bits at Normandy

just like every other Kraut or Yank who was at Ground Zero

when the Niebelung Device detonated! I’ve tried to write my

way out of all my nervous breakdowns, with some success,

but.... Who the hell is Carolyn  Cassady? I—

I look out the window, then, the dark, cold hotel window with

its slight gray tint, its old pine sill marked with the ashes and

energies of every lonely Beat mendicant who ever sat in it and

watched the Manhattan neon and the cars on a cold night or

morning. I wipe off the condensation, peering out like a child.

Then I forget how to blink.

Snow tumbles down out there through the grey-blue light,

like stars seen traveling close to the speed of c, scribbling frosty

sagas on my eyes, the gleaming cantos of unvanquished Space.

It’s been a long time since I heard such stillness dumping down

in sheets as it is now, a million stars, a million dreams, a storm

of ticker-tape just for me, an endless sky you could sled in, one

that tastes as fresh and immediate as a nosebleed.

The sound makes me look down. The car bumbles around the

turn, its tyres higher and thinner than I’d consider trustworthy.

It’s metallic blue from stem to stern, and looks like a teardrop

or a diving-bell with elaborate finned fenders, low-slung and

gleaming with purpose, humming like bees in a lion’s skull.

MILBURN-STUDEBAKER Bateau, it reads across its hood

in raked-back silver letters.

There is no exhaust pipe. Only that hum, hum, hummm-

mmmm.... The old lady steering the contraption is having the

time of her life doing spins in the snow. (That ‘Milburn’s’ elec-

tric motor is apparently strong enough to climb a damn tree.)

She sees me, and raises a silver hip-flask. I wave back, hoping

for her sake that the cops don’t come.

Her round of “dough-nuts” (as we called such manoeuvres

when I was an under-grad) is done now. She turns away, driving

out of sight.

Merry dough-nuts to all, and to all a good drunk. Her license

plate reads NYC. I wonder if that is a new boro of Nieuw

Amsterdam, perhaps somewhere close to this one. Either way,

the plate is too large, and done up in the wrong colors.

Where did I put that Scotch? By the phone across the room,

right where I left it. Nothing’s changed, not even the....

Numbers on the dial. The words dry up in my mind. The

phone-shaped thing has more buttons than the squeezebox end

of an accordion.

All this was my fault. Somehow. I wrote this into being. Me,

me, Hart Crane, the most frustrated writer in New York since

Joe Gould! Hard to imagine me as....

God?

I go back to the window, watch the snow listen down inside,

to the secret self who finds the words in a simple declarative,

Yes.

Then I go sit in front of the typer again, awash in the melted

Italian soda of neon from the street outside, cold and sweet and

rare. Flakes of snowy silver sentence scroll down past my still-

open window with the crocus luster of stars.

Rage, blow, thou sermons’ flashing roar, scattered chapters

of living glyph! TAP. TAP. RATTATATATTATATATTATA—

But I write ‘sidewise-history’! If I do this right, I WILL PUT

MYSELF OUT OF WORK!!!

Yet all my fine collapses weren’t ever lies. My frosted eyes

raise altars, and silent answers stutter back across the stars. This

game enforces breakdowns, but I have seen the moon in lonely

alleys. I can still love the world, and sidestep the worst of it with

a fatal smirk.

Who can end up blaming me if my heart lives on, completes

the dark confessions spelled out in my every cell, and closes

round the jewel of this instant with its floating lotus flower?

This fabulous shadow could not be quenched by any sea.

Edward, I—

RATTA -TA—

My name is Harold Hart Crane. I am alone in my hotel room.

It is Christmas Eve, in the Year of Our Lord 1941. I will not lose

my m—

(then white)



*

FOR PAUL DI FILIPPO.

Click Below to read
 the short story

Sacri-fees

by Konstantine Paradias

on the FREEZINE of

Fantasy and Science

Fiction