Pages from a Cold Island Read Free Page A

heartbeat—to the Oval Office ought by any measure to have made not only the kids but an entire populace drop out. It would flatter me to think they saw me in this latter light. With Beckett (the literary not the historical) I hold it as axiomatic that rather than a deadly sin torpor and sloth comprise a spiritual condition insulating one from life ’ s crippling hurts called disenchantments, a condition out of which there stands revealed, finally, the heart ’ s epiphanies. I’d chosen—gone back to—Singer Island because I once again longed to see the world through gauze and to draw sustenance from the closeness of those alienated youth on the hot bright streets beneath me.
    By ten when I arrived with the newspapers at the Beer Barrel next-door, having always to cut a bold swath through the surly kids to get to the door, I ’ d already been up for hours. For months past I had out of habit risen at six, had put the aluminum kettle on the hot plate for my Tasters Choice instant coffee, had vigorously brushed my teeth (invariably to the threshold of emission from the previous evening ’ s booze), and had sat at the maple-stained thirty - two-by-eighty-inch door I ’ d fashioned into a desk. On its gleaming surface, which with a kind of demented lust I constantly waxed with Lemon Pledge, there was nothing save a cheap high-intensity Japanese desk lamp, two ball point pens, the Random House unabridged dictionary, and stacked as neatly as if it were a freshly unwrapped and unsullied ream of yellow second sheets the manuscript of Pages from a Cold Island .
    As easily as a drunken quack detects a cataract but whose shaky skills aren ’ t up to excising it, I ’ d known forever at what level the book didn ’ t work without being able to do anything about it; I ’ d reached that excruciatingly unhappy impasse wherein I ’ d once spent an entire week going through it page by page and accomplishing nothing more than attempting to see that that and which were used correctly; my morning time lying asprawl the white Naugahyde couch listening to Brubeck featuring Desmond on alto sax on the stereo had begun to outweigh my time at the desk; my coffee and cigarette consumption were consummate. If from out of this torpor the heart ’ s revelations were going to mani fest themselves, they had, I thought, better do so soon; and when at midmorning as regular as the screeching alarm of a creaky old-fashioned hand-wound clock I felt the booze and caffeine shakes coming on I rose, descended in the elevator to the dark cool lobby, picked up my mail and stuffed it into my hip pocket, stepped squintingly out into the heart-arrestingly dazzling heat, went for the newspapers, thence to the Beer Barrel to begin my morning ritual with Jack McBride, the bartender.
    McBride was thirty, bright, tall and handsome. Girls said he resembled a ren owned movie actor who in Techni color adventure yarns always plays a stoic two-fisted role in which he is never asked to draw on acting talents he doesn ’ t own; he is in fact an atrocious actor but he does have what in that dim-witted business is called “ presence. ” Jack did resemble that actor but didn ’ t much like this being remarked. For years there had persisted a rumor that the actor was homosexual and with t he advent of the new permissive ness there was now in circulation a story that he was “ mar ried ” to a hillbillyishy male television personality, probably, I thought, one of Toni ’ s tales gleaned from the pages of Midnight . Given to the new styles, Jack wore his black hair long, he sported a luxurious Mexican bandido mustache, and he wore bell-bottomed white-duck hip-huggers with a wide heavy silver-buckled black belt and long-sleeved extravagant-colored satiny shirts with V-necks and sleeves that bloused out at the wrists, which from me elicited, “ How can you worry about your resemblance to that fucking swish and wear those fruity shirts? ”
    He ’ d spent three years in