The magnificently aged poet of 73 years, William B. Pracht, returns home from the funeral of a beloved friend – Kathryn S. He’s dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black cashmere overcoat. The door to his building is held for him. He takes the elevator to his spacious apartment on the top floor.
His shoulders hunched, he fumbles with the
keys. Inside, he undresses, brushes his teeth and washes his bearded face, never once looking in the mirror. Dear Kathryn, an artist and decent historian twenty years his senior; in his early 30s they had been lovers. She had given him a hand-up and
strengthened his belief in humanity.
Wearing a new dressing gown he sits in the living room and looks at one of her paintings – huge white tulips rise out of the skull of a long-dead anthropoid. In the painting he feels her love for the rainforest and her wicked sense of humor. Goodbye Dear Kathryn, he says. Forlorn, he climbs into bed.
He dreams of a dark and rainy landscape near the Hoboken piers. From a large fishing trawler Italian stevedores unload crates of whiskey into smaller boats and trucks.
Death is there too on the pavement in the shape of a watermelon rind. I am a blessing, death says. On a big blue sun-drenched day two boys, 13 years of age, stand in a field of alfalfa trading punches. I can’t remember where I shoveled the horse manure? Hide and seek. Two Dobermans and a Great Dane stand atop a skyscraper in grandiloquent Manhattan. A war rages inside the steel walls of the City. Brutality and Chaos refined. Oh, I’m cold.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey on November 13, 1936 with one functioning kidney, energetic, athletic, he was a voracious reader of world literature. In later years he would say, “Through reading, I escaped the world of the gangster.” At twelve, his parent’s basement, he ran a gambling casino for his fellow cub scouts. After he was busted he moved into the garage where he set up a strip-tease parlour. Every night before Halloween, he found himself hiding from the cops. Hide and seek. It was thrilling… to never… be captured.
First major decision was to attend St. Francis Xavier High School, a Jesuit military academy in New York City. Most of his family was proud, particularly his mother. Dad knew better, but said little. As he recalled, the school was on 14th Street in a hollow brick and cement building. Many of the teachers were as old as the Academy. In the middle of his freshman year, his mother announced she had divorced his father and was moving to Healdsburg, California. He stayed behind living with his grandmother in Weehawken to complete his freshman year. He left the school with the most incomplete sessions of punishment in the history of St. Francis Xavier. He re-united with his three brothers and his mother in July of 1950 on a horse ranch in Healdsburg, California.
He certainly felt his freedom as well as his mother’s baffling pains: migraines, psoriasis, and an aching need to be loved, but not her impending ruin due to a congenital brain tumor. What did he know of death? He was a colt prancing around in the hills of Northern California. He heard her screams; her gasps for air and her bravery as she fattened, lost all of her hair and became addicted to codeine. Not until the brain tumor exploded did they discover the source of her agony.
Fuck it, he had been with her in the best years. She had been a star, Vivacious Lady they dubbed her in high school, a serious reader of Emerson and Thoreau. Even in the last excruciating years she made loyal friends and pursued and created a world of joy out of inexplicable pain. Emerson and Thoreau would have been proud. She died during his high school graduation ceremony. After he funeral he traveled – walking, hitchhiking, talking, sporting and striding into little towns and big cities all across the country. He was looking for decent human beings and he discovered them, hundreds of them, but he never found what he really desired – a fellow traveler, a worshipper of words.
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