Adam slept a medicinal sleep.
No dreams. Just the mind like a clear, colorless, odorless, tasteless substance
suspended in a weary, regrouping organism. When he woke he felt like hell.
That there was no coffee in his
kitchen, no Jamie at home in the apartment down the hall were points that
escalated Adam's sense of nastiness. He stumbled into Jamie's kitchen where he
made coffee with a growing resentment. "I'm writing a play, goddamn it. I don't
feel well. Why should I have to make coffee, too?" he thought, not for a moment
realizing how unreasonable this petite emotion was spent in such large quantity.
When Jamie came in while the playwright was finishing his first cup of coffee,
Adam snapped, "Where have you been?"
"The doctor." Jamie poured them
both cups of coffee. "My ass."
"Oh! Your ass!" said Adam, remembering the bath accident. Catapulted out of his
wakeup grouchiness by sympathy for his friend, he glanced at the five p.m. clock
and said, "What'd the doctor say?"
"He just gave me pills," said
Jamie, bringing half-and-half from the fridge.
"Just pills? Pain pills?" Jamie
nodded. "It isn't broken? Good..."
"It's broken. There's not much
that can be done for a broken coccyx," Jamie said, sitting down gingerly and
giving out a little soprano groan. "Sometimes they do surgery to remove the
broken off piece if it's floating. But you know how I hate sodomy."
Adam snorted. Then choked a bit.
He didn't really know how to react to the remark. As close as he and Jamie were,
there was no way for Adam to know if this were sarcasm or truth. "But can't they
do something for you?"
"How do
you put an ass in a cast? Very awkward. It'll heal on its own. I'm fine."
"Poor Jamie. I'm sorry. That I
let the bath run over." And Adam drifted off into himself to be in the place
where the play was writing itself. He drank his coffee, the second and third cup
in silence. Jamie refrained from talking or sudden movement, not wanting to
interfere with Adam's processes. At length Adam rose and took a cup of coffee
back to his own apartment.
He
wrote. All evening and all night he wrote, and into Sunday morning until he fell
into bed at nine a.m.
He awoke at
five p.m., wrote a passage of dialogue he had perfected in his dreams, then
bathed and shaved, sans disaster. But he did notice while shaving that the
glands in his neck were decidedly more swollen than the day before. He gave a
test swallow and his throat was decidedly more sore as well. He swallowed again
and watched in the mirror to see if the soreness had any visible effects. But
the salient information, he realized as he started at his image, was that he
scarcely knew at all what he looked like, what might be normal and what might
not. He had become so abstracted over the years that his flesh and his own
living likeness were strangers to him.
"That's absolutely insane of me,"
he told himself as he ambled down the hall to Jamie's for coffee. "I have less
of a concept of myself than a child has. I've reverted to an infantile stage."
He was terrified. And yet he was fascinated. It was what the play he was writing
was about: identity. Not surface image. But self. The profounder personality.
"Jesus," he thought as he watched Jamie make coffee. "If I don't know what I
look like, how do I know how Yvonne say me the other day? Was that Friday? Is
this Sunday? Jesus, I don't know what I look like, I don't know what day it is.
I have a lot of nerve to write a play. I have a lot of nerve to wonder what I
might appear to be to Yvonne Yvette." "Jamie," he said aloud. "Do I look as
crazy as I am?"
"Don't flatter
yourself."
"No, really. Do I look
like an insane person?"
"I don't
know what you look like at all. I know you too well; I spend too much time with
you. But here, look at me, let me look at you," Jamie commanded, setting a cup
down in front of Adam and then settling into a pillow on the kitchen chair
opposite him at the table.
"Geez,
Ad, I don't know. You look great. I mean I suppose you are a little mad. But
you're entitled. On you it looks good." He was tempted to ask if this sudden
spurt of vanity were shallow or deep. But he decided better of it. For one
thing, with Adam, deep or shallow would amount to the same results anyway. And,
besides, if Adam was being vain in worldly terms, that was nothing but an
excellent turn of events in one so otherworldly, so dissipated. But he leaned
over the table and spoke to Adam in confidential tones, not being able to resist
a serious confession. "Sometimes you scare me. Sometimes I think you are about
to become translucent. I shouldn't tell you this. It'll only add to your
tremendous spiritual vanity. But sometimes I think you emit light."
"That's crazy!" Now Adam was
really terrified. Many times upon thinking back after Kiki's suicide, he had
remembered that she had had just such a glow, such a translucence for just a
moment as he had approached her as she sat waiting for him in the police station
after bailing him out. And Adam had a photograph of his uncle that had caught
Robert in a similar transcendent condition a few days before he died.
"It's just that you don't wear
masks, Adam. In a lot of ways you're a rich and courageous man." Adam's eyes
popped in surprise, and the muscles of his face scrambled about searching for a
mask. He gave it up and just stared at Jamie. Jamie, who could glance out every
mask known to man all at once now in Adam's face that had come to a rest, gave a
laugh. "But then, too, you're just a spoiled brat who can afford to wallow in
the human condition. That's why you have to write, to pay the debt for your
chronic vacation in the isles of agony."
"Oh, so that's it!" Adam laughed.
"Masks and debts. It sounds like a 17th century poem. Politics; theater;
symmetrical pragmatics; manners."
"No, you look okay. It's just that you are you. You know?"
"Sure. It's just that every time
I resolve an identity crisis, five new ones arise out of the resolution to the
old one. Is that what everyone goes through?"
"I don't know. I don't know
everyone. I only know us and we're crazy," said Jamie, suddenly very gloomy.
"I'm going to assume it's
universal for the sake of sanity. If you think you're just like everyone else,
it'll become so. Won't it?" asked Adam, feeling very cheerful suddenly.
"No! Thinking you're like
everyone else is crazy itself. Then you--I don't mean editorial you, I mean you
Adam with your obsessive tendencies--you might come to think you are
everybody and you'd explode. I mean either way--thinking you're absolutely
different or absolutely identical with every other atom in the roiling mass of
humanity--either way is madness. A little bit of each, I would think, is the way
to think about it. Alike and unique. Is that too pat?"
"Yes and no," Adam said, feeling
very awake and alive now, feeding off the imperfect but perfectly ambiguous
conversation. "So who are you, Jamie?"
"Oh!" groaned the older man.
"Don't you ever weary of the sophomoric perspective? Go write your play."
"I'd love to stay and discuss all
this with you, but I must go," Adam chuckled. But his good feelings turned to
jelly the moment he stood. He had the giddy sense that the conversation had
caused him to give up ideas and impressions that should have gone into the play.
After Adam left, Jamie retained
the spirit of sophomoric inquiry which haunted him as he puttered through his
day. Who indeed was he? What had he done with his life, who had he been, what
did it mean, and what did it matter. Etc.
Adam, though, felt terrific once
he got back to the play. The talk with Jamie had helped enormously and Adam
wrote swiftly and surely. By eight o'clock Sunday night he had a first act. It
set the stage for an epic identity crisis. The man in the play would lose all
sense of who he was, while the audience would be more and more certain that who
this character was was a man bent on giving up his identity by savagely pursuing
it, and destroying himself and others in the process. But the terms of the
dialogue were the thing; the place where identity as a universal abstract was
discussed.
Adam laid down on the
bed while the printer whacked out two copies of the first act. He gloomily
contemplated identity. "It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out,"
he sang in his best John Lennon voice. You know, he thought, there are millions
upon millions of people who never wonder who they are. They go to work, take
care of their families, and never worry about who they are... Oh, that's
garbage, he argued to and with himself. Elitist garbage. Everyone wonders,
worries. They just don't put the questions in sophomoric terms. They don't use
university words to whine about it. Every time someone smacks his kid, has a
fight in a barroom, goes out on strike, or puts a bumper sticker on his car,
it's an attempt to evince, create, demand identity.
Adam sighed a few thoughts later.
"Ego, ego, everything is ego," he said aloud, imitating Angelo McGuire imitating
Solomon. Adam countered this thought now with what he had opposed McGuire with a
decade before: Ego has its evil side. But ego is a survival mechanism
foremost--or complex network of mechanisms. Without a sense of self, he had told
McGuire and he reaffirmed now, there would be no human survival. Ego is what man
has instead of instincts. Ego is as natural to man as furlessness.
Adam sat up smiling until he
laughed. "My god!" he said aloud. "Man has vanity instead of fur!" No wonder fur
coated ladies seem the epitome of vanity; are in fact a symbol for vanity. He
saw across the room that the printer was done. He tore and collated the two
copies of the act and dashed down the hall to Jamie's apartment. Adam was going
to tell Jamie about the invisible fur coat of vanity/ego. He was going to tell
him that the invisible cosmetic/creative compulsion was constantly chaining man
to surfaces: costumes, the invented world, symbols, dogma. Man could also
constantly shed his skins, his contrived images. And that societies, groups,
hierarchies, festivals, holidays, sports, clubs, political parties, companies,
religions, any kind of meeting, were all opportunities, either before or after
the fact, to create, act out, evolve roles, identities. Adam was shaking with
the delight of discovery--or actually, rediscovery of something he'd known long
before but had proved now through experience--as he let himself into Jamie's.
But Jamie had a guest. Adam
skidded to a halt in the livingroom, feeling embarrassed like a boy who had run
out of his room half dressed not realizing there was company in the house. He
stood looking at Jamie and Jamie's lover whom Adam did not know, peevish that he
could not share his revelation because of the intrusion. And the lover
considered Adam to be the intruder. The visitor bluntly, suspiciously stared at
the playwright.