Less(12)
Freddy frowned. “Arthur,” he said. Then he looked down at the table.
Less took some candied pecans from the bowl before him. He asked what the problem could be. He thought he’d come up with a good one.
Freddy shook his head so that his curls bounced, and he sighed. “I don’t think that’s true. Maybe when you met me. But that was a long time ago. You know what I was going to say?”
Less said he did not know.
The young man stared at his lover and, before taking a sip of his beer, said: “‘Arthur Less is the bravest person I know.’”
Arthur thinks of this on every flight. It always ruins everything. It has ruined this flight from New York to Mexico City, which is well on the way to ruining itself.
Arthur Less has heard it is traditional, in Latin American countries, to applaud an airplane’s safe arrival. In his mind, he associates it with the miracles of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and indeed, while the plane suffers a prolonged bout of turbulence, Less finds himself searching for an appropriate prayer. He was, however, raised Unitarian; he has only Joan Baez to turn to, and “Diamonds and Rust” gives no solace. On and on the plane convulses in the moonlight, like a man turning into a werewolf. And yet, Arthur Less appreciates life’s corny metaphors; a transformation, yes. Arthur Less, leaving America at last; perhaps, beyond its borders, he will change, like the aged crone who is rescued by a knight and who, once she is carried across the river, becomes a princess. Not Arthur Less the nobody, but Arthur Less the Distinguished Featured Speaker at this conference. Or was it a princess into a crone? The young Japanese tourist seated beside Less, impossibly hip in a yellow neon sweatsuit and moon-landing sneakers, is sweating and breathing through his mouth; at one point, he turns to Less and asks if this is normal, and Less says, “No, no, this is not normal.” More throes, and the young man grabs his hand. Together they weather the storm. They are perhaps the only passengers literally without a prayer. And when the plane lands at last—the windows revealing the vast nighttime circuit board of Mexico City—Less finds himself, alone, applauding their survival.
What had Freddy meant, “the bravest person I know”? For Less, it is a mystery. Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.
What a relief, then, to emerge from customs and hear his name called out: “Se?or Less!” There stands a bearded man, perhaps thirty, in the black jeans, T-shirt, and leather jacket of a rock musician.
“I am Arturo,” says Arturo, holding out a hairy hand. This is the “local writer” who will be his escort for the next three days. “It is an honor to meet a man who knew the Russian River School.”
“I am also Arturo,” says Less, shaking it garrulously.
“Yes. You were fast through the customs.”
“I bribed a man to take my bags.” He gestures to a small man in a Zapata mustache and blue uniform standing arms akimbo.
“Yes, but that is not a bribe,” says Arturo, shaking his head. “That is a propina. A tip. That is the luggage man.”
“Oh,” says Less, and the mustached man gives a smile.
“Is it your first time in Mexico?”
“Yes,” Less says quickly. “Yes, it is.”
“Welcome to Mexico.” Arturo hands him a conference packet and looks up at him wearily; violet streaks curve beneath his eyes, and lines are grooved into his still-young brow. Less notices now that what he had taken for gleaming bits of pomade in his hair are streaks of gray. Arturo says, “There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow road…to your final place of rest.”
He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men.
Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.
Of the Russian River School, Arthur Less missed all the fun. Those famous men and women took mallets to the statues of their gods, those bongo-drumming poets and action-painting artists, and scrambled from the sixties onto the mountaintop of the seventies, that era of quick love and quaaludes (is there any more perfect spelling than with that lazy superfluous vowel?), basking in their recognition and arguing in cabins on the Russian River, north of San Francisco, drinking and smoking and fucking into their forties. And becoming, some of them, models for statues themselves. But Less came late to the party; what he met were not young Turks but proud bloated middle-aged artists who rolled in the river like sea lions. They seemed over-the-hill to him; he could not understand they were in the prime of their minds: Leonard Ross, and Otto Handler, even Franklin Woodhouse, who did that nude of Less. Less also owns a framed excision poem, made for his birthday by Stella Barry out of a tattered copy of Alice in Wonderland. He heard bits of Handler’s Patty Hearst on an old piano in a rainstorm. He saw a draft of Ross’s Love’s Labors Won and watched him scratch out an entire scene. And they were always kind to Less, especially considering (or was it because of?) the scandal: Less had stolen Robert Brownburn from his wife.
But perhaps it is fitting, at last, for someone to praise them and to bury them, now that almost all of them are dead (Robert is still kicking but is barely breathing, in a facility in Sonoma—all those cigarettes, darling; they chat once a month on a video call). Why not Arthur Less? He smiles in the taxi as he weighs the packet: lapdog yellow, with its leash of red string. Little Arthur Less, sitting in the kitchen with the wives and watering down the gin while the fellows roared beside the fire. And I alone have lived to tell the tale. Tomorrow on the university stage: the famous American writer Arthur Less.