Whatever Lola Wants

slave.

PART I

THE PAST

1959–2003

One

AS THE TWIG IS BENT

1. (1959)

The telegram arrived in the middle of Bobbie’s performance. Ginsberg stuck it in his pocket. For a while he forgot it. She was such a success, they loved both her and the stuff she was reading. He whispered to Gary, She’s given up the control’s why it works.

Gary nodded. Shifting it. They leaned back and watched.

She sat slumped in an overstuffed armchair and continued her paced pattern, silent and unmoving between poems, staring down the audience as they gazed at her, thirty seconds, maybe a minute, then she’d read again. She spoke. This is from a new group. Sonnets. The only one that’s nearly ready. There’ll be ten. Called, ‘Vomit Cycle.’ She read:

VOMIT 3

Then comes the pus.

Its nylon smothers us.

It sticks on our skin,

We’re girdled in.

Pus glows on his skin.

The state he’s in.

It kisses my lip,

Oozing acryl. I sip.

Pus pees through our guts.

What it touches it rots.

Try to sink it in gin.

Try to ice it in shit.

Sniff. Shoot. Score. Plastic spew.

We piss pus when we screw.

•

Lola wrinkled her nose. Yuk.

They say you had to be there, I replied.

Where?

San Francisco. The scene.

Who is Bobbie?

Carney’s best friend. I grinned. My sister-in-law.

Oh. Her. Is she important to Carney’s story?

Important? No one more so. Such impatience. Why don’t I tell you? Then you’ll know.

She gave me an I’m sorry smile, and pretended to glance over the edge.

•

Again Bobbie’s silence. She stared out at them, her large brown eyes unblinking. Her darker brown hair covered her forehead, cut off in a hard line a half inch above her eyebrows. She stood. That’s all. Her brown sack dress hung to her knees, in front from her tits, behind from her ass. She walked off the makeshift stage.

The applause came hard. Cries of, More, Bobbie! More!

She reappeared, suddenly grinned, and Ginsberg saw the sister he should have had. The audience’s shouting fell away. She said, There isn’t any.

Go write some! yelled Gary, and people laughed.

She sipped bourbon. She’d arrived in San Francisco seven months back. And fitted in. First place she could say to herself, Here is home now. She missed her sister, Annette, sure, and her nephew, Carruthers. A little bit Annette’s husband; they sometimes talked easily, sometimes less so. Her father maybe but he was out of his head and if he ever came back in she had no idea what he’d be like. Her mother? Maybe she loved her mother but she sure didn’t miss her. Nobody else. Here they all knew why she couldn’t have stayed in Median. They’d all come from the same kind of place, Topeka and Dracut, Cincinnati, Medicine Hat, Amesville. The bourbon wasn’t much good. Surely Kenneth had better taste than this; why the hell did he serve this crap.

She searched for him among bookshelves and displays. Never mind, if she wanted better bourbon she’d return to Median, to some Dennis who prided himself on his bourbon, needed his dentist’s salary to pay for it. Go all the way to New Hampshire for better bourbon? Too late for that. She held her nose and chugged it down.

Ginsberg hugged her from behind. Good, he said. Friggin’ good.

Friggin’?

Should I say ‘fuckin’ to a lady who says ‘fucking’?

Is that what I am, a lady?

Half, he said, and looked her up and down. Less and less, he added.

She patted his scraggled cheek. She wondered what he’d be like in bed. She wondered the same about half the men here. Half of the other half she already knew about. She knew she’d never go to bed with Ginsberg, she wasn’t his sort of attachment. She’d tried it the other way herself, with Carla and a couple of times with little Martha but didn’t get off on it, she preferred men. She smiled. Female after all. Not feminine, thank god. The girls in her dorm tried to feminize her, makeup and satin; but for whom? Those little boys who arrived on Saturday afternoons from Brown, Yale, Dartmouth? Ridiculous. Which left only the professors. Is it them we’re after? she’d asked her roommate Libby.

Libby blushed. Bobbie, really.

Libby was truly clever in the bio lab, a smasho mind at work. But also so pretty, tease-curled hair and bitsy nose and bright red lips. For whom? Herself? More of a challenge to try a professor. Bobbie had been attracted enough to one, her history man. At the seminar table he was so wise and smart from the button of his jacket up. She’d wondered what he’d be like below the table, behind the zipper. She asked for an appointment, dressed feminine, met him in his office. She couldn’t get him to touch her first, so she touched him. In ten minutes he was all in love. Lucky he was married or he’d have been on her the whole semester. This way, if he didn’t accept her schedule, she’d write his wife a letter. She decided not to tell Libby about the history man, Lib would go all pink-cheeked and then distant and envious. Hard to live with envy. Might even drive Libby to drink. Bobbie laughed. No, never; Libby couldn’t handle half a beer.

Over her time at Mount Holyoke, the most critical hour of her life was hearing Robert Frost read Birches and Nothing Gold Can Stay and Fire and Ice, pieces of magic she spoke in silence as he read. But she was born too late, the last basic truths had already been written early this century.

She was expelled for anti-anticommunist rabble-rousing and in the fall enrolled at the University of New Hampshire, graduating a year late with a degree in economics and history. She came home, taught a year at Median High, and lived with her parents, her crazy father locked in his room, her mother’s money taking care of them both. Her older sister, lucky Annette, married the writer who made enough so his wife could do exactly what she wanted: paint. Annette was getting to be real famous. And he took care of the boy.

Bobbie, writing poems nobody cared about, spent time down in Boston in coffee houses with her friend Mark, listening to men in dirty jeans and sometimes women too pretty for words read poems, the men, likely as not, returned vets who’d seen the black torments of war but didn’t truly know how to write about agony: that had all been dealt with by the poets of the Great War.

Back in Median she met Dennis the dentist. He too was married so he was safe. She liked him enough, delighted in driving him out of his mind with what she knew about sex or invented. Except a year and a month of Dennis was enough, despite his giving her whatever she wanted if money could buy it; good bourbon and her first taste of cannabis. Not clothing or jewelry. Dennis was schizzy, too often not all there. Bobbie wondered what happened when he wasn’t all there while drilling into cuspids and extracting molars. To his torment she took off for New York to live with Mark, but not usually in his bed because he was too much her friend. She met his city friends, they remembering the war in Korea, Pusan and Inchon, and Heartbreak Ridge; others still guilty with the relief of not having been there, still others that they’d missed out on the last great adventure of their times.

Dennis came to New York to take Bobbie home but Mark hid her. Dennis went back to Median. A few months later Bobbie got a letter from Dennis: In the prison of my days I am my own warden, which turned out to be a copy of his suicide note.

She lay in bed with Zed, smoking shit. He tried to arouse her with palm, mouth, fingers, but her mind was held by those other Vomit poems she said she hadn’t written. They were done and they were right but her stomach ached when the words came out. Writing them was a wrenching blast of fire, and now what was she supposed to do, publish them? Useless words and impossible to read, who would print such pain-filled, wonderful crap? Lawrence, ten minutes after she’d finished reading, said sure he’d bring them out in his chapbook series, especially the Vomit Cycle if the rest were as tough as what he’d heard, he liked that, that was good, good. But Lawrence said that to everybody. But if he really printed them? Did she dare allow her name on the little book? The Vomit Cycle and Other Poems by Roberta Feyerlicht. Not even her sister, Annette, would approve. And Annette’s husband—? Bobbie snickered.

Zed thought he’d finally got her.

Except she turned her back to him and laughed outright. Maybe Annette would love the poetry. And Edward? They were artists, in their special way. But so normal. Craftsmen. Zed whispered a small perverse not-tried-in-a-while suggestion into her ear and she figured, Why not.

After a waste year in New York—not completely wasted, she wrote her poetry—one day she’d packed up and driven across the country with Mark and his friend Louis in a 1947 Oldsmobile they’d bought together and arrived in San Francisco, and when they sold it, they had enough to live on for a couple of months till they found jobs: Mark a night watchman in a paper factory and Bobbie an assistant to the director of a YMCA youth group, two dozen nice, ready-to-learn-other-ways kids, thirteen to sixteen. Through Mark she met Jack; they got on because they’d each escaped from the old New England ways, she born in Median, he less than a hundred miles south down in Lowell. Through Jack she met Gary and Lawrence and Josephine, and Kenneth. First name friends. Only Ginsberg was Ginsberg, nothing else; he intimidated her like he could see her innards.

Of course it was Ginsberg who convinced her to read at the Six Gallery; nobody else could have turned her into a performer, she who liked being in crowds where she could stay impersonal, invisible, didn’t have to deal with more than one other person, a single person at a time.

She slept. In her dream she heard a buzz. It didn’t fit her dream so it couldn’t be in her dream. Before she pulled her eyelids apart she recognized the doorbell. She slid Zed out, got up, pulled on her muumuu, opened the door. Ginsberg.

Come in.

He nodded, and did. You okay?

Yep. She turned her head on a slant and felt her hair sticking to her scalp. She saw Ginsberg wasn’t okay. What’s the matter?

He handed her a telegram. This came for you.

She took it. It was open. At the bottom she saw her mother’s name. She read the words: Annette and Edward killed, plane crash, terrible. Carruthers despondent. Come home.

On November 17, 1959, Bobbie Feyerlicht, age twenty-four, caught the night flight to Boston, the bus to Median, full circle, to raise her nephew, Carruthers Carney.

•

I stopped, not sure what to tell her next. It’s always best to be selective.

Lola said, I didn’t like that pus poem.

I could feel her disapproval. I searched my notes. Try this, then.

She took it and read.

FLOW

A leaf hears the dark breeze, feels the bat’s squeal cut.

The leaves whisper, a breath shakes their arms.

A wet branch cracks, breaks, hangs.

The trunks tell each other. Now the sap knows.

Juice seeps to the bottom and below.

Into roots and soil, into the waters, a thick flow.

The sap tells, the soil confirms, the waters understand.

They lie steady.

The flow tells the larval nymphs, the snails, the fish, the breathing lands.

They make ready.

Roberta Feyerlicht

(February 3–16/03)

That’s the kind of thing she’s writing now, I said.

That’s better, said Lola. But her mind was somewhere else.

What’s up?

She waited maybe ten seconds. At last she said, Will you tell me something, Ted?

Anything I know. Almost anything.

Again she held back, as if afraid to speak. How do you do it?

What?

See their stories.

Like I told you. I look down.

But they’re not there any more.

What’s not there?

The stories you’re telling me.

But I can see them.

But how? I understand if the story’s happening just about now. Like what all those people were doing around the equinox. But you’ve just told me about what was going on in 1959. Can you see 1959 down there?

An insightful question. No, it had never occurred to me before, how I can see events that have gone by. Like I’ve never asked myself how I was able to walk. You know, I’m not sure. But when I look, there they are.

What’re you looking at?

Them. Many of them.

She shook her head. I don’t get it. It’s like you seeing into their minds, knowing from the inside how they’re thinking.

Yes. I’ve always been a little proud of that, seeing their thoughts.

Again she remained silent. I could almost feel notions crossing her mind. Maybe it’s because Carney’s your son. She thought for a moment. Can you see others in the past?

I— I shook my head. I don’t know. Obviously I could see some, but others not. Like who?

She considered my question. Like, maybe you can see what happened to the poet lady in 1959 ’cause you’re sort of related to her. Can you, she searched, can you see what happened to anybody else in 1959?

I closed my eyes. Bobbie I saw clearly, back in Median with Carney. Somewhere else back there I had a sense of amorphous forms, a lot of dark movement— Far over to the right, some color, something taking shape, someone there. I focused in. A woman. I recognized her; from where, I don’t know. Beth Cochan, I said, eyes open, staring at Lola.

Who?

John Cochan’s mother. I’d never tried this before, consciously trying to check out past moments in the lives of people.

But, Ted, how’s that possible?

I shook my head and closed my eyes again. Still there. Beth Cochan.

Is she doing something? Saying something?

•

2. (1959)

Beth Cochan believed her great success—seven major papers by the time she was thirty-one, three of them on tropical coleoptera, a worldwide reputation in pharmaceutical entomology—grew from what she called her induced insight. Which is to say, she reflected on the objects of her research while under the influence of marijuana or hashish. Toying in her lab, eyes closed, her mind watched the apparently chaotic flow of distinct particles, contemplated their movements, saw invisible conjunctions turn into sudden obvious connections, and transformed these links into necessary patterns. She would then direct her experimentation toward her discovered loci. Time after time her guess proved correct. So correct, she had felt at the start of her thirty-first year, it was a duty to turn her research onto the source of her inspiration, cannabis itself. To reward the generous weed by crowning it with popular legitimacy, a recognition of its powers to inspire, salve, and possibly cure.

She could find cures for whatever conditions she chose to study, she knew this clearly. Sam Ulrich, Vice-President and Director of Research for Cochan Pharmaceuticals, CochPharm, also recognized her brilliance. But too often he was bent on blocking her, keeping her from pushing her experiments to their conclusions.

Beth knew the potential for the good that cannabis could bring to the world. But the US government forbade all trials; it made use of cannabis illegal. Because cannabis turned people into potheads, insane reefer loony maniacs, dangerous to America because the commies would turn them into enemy agents, undermine the moral fabric of the United States.

Such a stupid argument.

But Beth Shapiro Cochan needed to experiment. Hers was life-saving work, every day more probable that the cure for rheumatoid arthritis lay hidden in the hormonal transformations she induced in her allomyrina. Without cannabis the transformations aren’t powerful enough! she shouted at Sam. I need experimental quality cannabis! We’re working in godforsaken Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, for pissake! How can the US feds control us here?

Because, Sam repeated, for the fourth time, the tenth, ever calmly, the corporate center of CochPharm is Cambridge, Mass.

It makes no sense, Sam, no scientific sense.

Legal sense is what’s at issue, Sam reiterated.

Beth found her cannabis, Beth always found what she wanted. For thirty months she experimented. Clear progress. Her allomyrina, fed on cannabis in a formula never to be revealed, took sleek and furious flight. Onward to mammals. The syrup called A-17, taken intravenously, later orally, transformed her rats, scraggly, arthritic, their leg and neck joints in agony, into silken, sure-footed, sunny creatures, all their painful shuffling evaporated. Undeniable success.

Time to test the drug on humans. But for this she needed specific permission. Already then she’d grown too distant from her husband, Joe, he the Chairman of the Board of CochPharm, to ask him for help. She went to see Sam. I have to do this.

You’re crazy.

Sam—

And you must think I’m crazy too. Sam stood behind his desk, his face and bald scalp gone red.

We’re none of us crazy—

"Beth. Listen. Let me be basic here. Marijuana is illegal. Importing it, buying it, possessing it for whatever purpose, is a felony. You’ve been able to get away with your tests because all of your animals are in cages, they can’t meander over to a cocktail lounge and blab away, ‘Hey, I had this high the other day, outasight.’ Right now CochPharm hides that secret here behind our walls. But you want to work with human subjects? Who live lives outside your lab? Who talk to their neighbors and their spouses? No, Beth.