Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Read Free

alcohol injudiciously, and gets publicly abusive with women, something I never saw Fariña do. His own approach to women was never less than courtly and sensitive, though not without perhaps one or two jiveass moments.
    The wolf story, for instance. This is one of Gnossos’s encounters with homicidal animal life, the other being the monkey demon of Chapter 14 . In the book, Gnossos tells the wolf tale to Kristin McCleod, a young woman he’s falling in love with. He puts it in the form of a dialogue, in which Kristin, and we reading, are asked to provide the sense data—the cold, the squeak of the snow, the Adirondack visuals. It is Fariña’s most perfected version of a piece whose early tryouts many friends first heard at Cornell, some more repeatedly than they really wanted to. He was in fact dismayingly successful with the wolf story, which he was using then mainly to hustle coeds, often those on whom one had sort of had one’s own eye. Most of them, as I recall, went for it. Each time he told it, of course, he rewrote, so it got better and better.
    The monkey demon or mandrill-at-the-window story didn’t play as well. Some only thought he was being dramatic, others thought temporarily insane. When winter boredom set in there was always a chance of entertainment in sneaking up to Fariña’s window at unlikely hours and making what we imagined to be mandrill faces and sounds, in hopes of some reaction. But he would only half-smile, and shrug, as if to say, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.
    But it remains one of the most effective of the many dark scenes in this novel. The darkest of all, and I think the best written, is the sequence that takes place in revolutionary Cuba, in which Gnossos’s best friend is accidentally killed. Although a few pages of campus rioting come later, the true climax of the book is in Cuba. Back in his Hemingway phase, Fariña must have seen that line about every true story ending in death. Death, no idle prankster, is always, in this book, just outside the window. The cosmic humor is in Gnossos’s blundering attempts to make some kind of early arrangement with Thanatos, to find some kind of hustle that will get him out of the mortal contract we’re all stuck with. Nothing he tries works, but even funnier than that, he’s really too much in love with being alive, with dope, sex, rock ’n’ roll—he feels so good he
has
to take chances, has to keep tempting death, only half-realizing that the more intensely he lives, the better the odds of his number finally coming up.
    Close to the end of his last term at Cornell, Fariña seemed to grow impatient. He had a job waiting in New York, and they didn’t care, he said, if he got his degree or not. There may also have been some romantic disaster involving Kristin McCleod’s original, though we never talked about it and all I heard was vague gossip. We were in one class together that term, and studied for the final at Johnny’s Big Red Grill over bottles of Red Cap ale. Next day, no more than half an hour into the exam, I was scribbling away at an essay question, caught a movement, looked up, saw Fariña handing in his exam book and leaving. He couldn’t have been finished. As he came past I raised my eyebrows and he gave me that smile and that shrug. This was the last I saw of him for a while.
    He went to New York, to Cuba, married Carolyn Hester, got a career in music going, toured overseas, lived in London, Paris, got divorced—then it was back to California, Boston, California again. Sometimes we wrote letters, sometimes—not often enough—we’d run into each other. We talked on the phone the day before he died. His book had just come out. We arranged to connect in L.A. in a few weeks. The next evening I heard the news over an AM rock ’n’ roll station. He’d been riding on the back of a motorcycle on Carmel Valley Road, where a prudent speed would have been thirty-five. Police estimated that they must have been