Essays by DAR

On the Famish

(First published in Ploughshares, Fall, 2009)

 

      What shall we call it when we’re sexually starving?  I never liked the word “horny”; it’s trivializing and more than a little rhinocorean. Also too front heavy to be used for women.  The old-fashioned phrase “on the lurch” sounds rude: monstro-comically (courtesy of the Addams Family) redolent both of lurching forward and being left in the lurch.  But what’s a better expression? London cab drivers call their apprentice period, when they’re learning the ins and outs of London backstreets, “on the knowledge,” and I’m thinking it would be nice to have a locution like that: “at the scent” or “in the quest.”  “On the famish,” maybe ….  

      Anyway that’s how I was feeling, for the first time in my life: a famishment so profound that actual sex, I suspected, would only serve to stoke it. Seeking distance from my wrenching divorce at home, I was scouring the globe, rapacious for something I couldn’t put my finger on. I had a physical need for diversion but wasn’t clear on what precisely I was diverting myself from -- rage?  revenge?  a sense of repentance?  I couldn’t tell so the best thing to do was keep moving.  Fortunately, I had a travel column that enabled me to get away, frequently and far; my latest wanderings had delivered me in the middle of winter to the tropical home of my oldest childhood friend Skipper, a hippie biologist living and teaching outside Pretoria.  But the peculiar gnawing ravenousness followed me wherever I went.  All week in his suburban ranch house, Skipper was boastfully physical with his wife, it seemed to me; showing off how frisky their relationship was.  She was a fetching freckly woman with a buoyant attitude toward sex, an open marriage kind of gal who made no secret of the fact that she was in an open mood. Could that have been what I wanted?  But no, for a week she kept joking that she was going to “get” me to sleep with her, and Skipper grinned, giving it his Skipper seal of approval.  How kinky childhood friends grow up to be sometimes!  Maybe this was what South African hippie biologists were accustomed to, but it unnerved me as an act of incest would have and I couldn’t think of a tactful way to decline the offer.  On the evening they seemed to have reserved for her purpose, we went to a South African club and I purposefully cut into two women dancing together and invited one of them outside.  Skipper and his wife watched reproachfully as she and I sauntered past them to the parking lot where we made her little car rock so much, I blush to confess, that party revelers banged on the hood at one point by way of joining the fun.  Ducking out on Skipper’s wife like that was abrupt, assuredly; but it was the most cordial way I could think to handle things, by saying sorry, I’d given at the office. 

      This went on for a week, with my hunger unfocused and unabated, till we all three decided to go hiking together in a neutral place: the Drakensberg Mountains a few hours’ drive south of Pretoria.  At our rough campsite she and Skipper were painfully coquettish with each other, driving home the subtext that I was a jerk to have declined her treats, and my sleeping bag seemed lonelier than it would have had the subject never come up at all.  Now that it was established that her openness was not for me, their flirtatiousness was punitive.  Night after night they made love with the lantern on inside their tent ten feet from mine, casting all kinds of tantalizing images upon the canvas walls: her legs prettily beating the air, locks of her hair falling forward as she greedily fed upon him, etc.  I missed my wife but didn’t know how to access my missing.  She had vanished herself from our marriage as efficiently as a fading photograph; how could I miss a ghost?   
 

  The last day of our hike, we discovered a cave that Bushmen must have occupied a hundred years earlier, spotted with primitive Bushmen paintings, smudged and beckoning. The three of us sat in it hushed for a moment, imagining what it must have been like to wait for your prey to wander by so you could hurl a spear into its side.  It was so perfectly like the stage set of a cave that it almost wasn’t real, somehow, and before I could pull my hand back I impetuously scraped one of the paintings off – only a silver-dollar sized chip, but Skipper’s wife used the incident to uncork her anger at me, lambasting me for being “avaricious.”  How judgmental free spirits could be when they’d been crossed!  But she was right.  It had been an inexcusable, avaricious act.  It seemed ironic because I’d been unwilling to take what I really wanted from her, and so had expressed my avarice elsewhere, where it was inappropriate. I had to acknowledge to myself the fairly hippie conceit that the lucky souls who’ve managed to evolve beyond avarice are those who’ve permitted themselves to take what they need of the world, so don’t need to take elsewhere.  But such a conceit did me no good at the moment.  “Oh look, Daniel, here’s another piece of Africa for you to deface,” she said the rest of the day, sarcastically pointing out interesting pieces of bark or moss.  I felt so stupid that by nightfall I hurled the chip off into a ravine of trees, which only compounded my stupidity, because then not even I could enjoy it. So was it spite I was feeling?  If I couldn’t partake of the treasures of this world, damned if I’d let anyone else partake of them, either?

      I just didn’t know.  It felt so stupidly existential ….

      When we parted company the next day, it was Christmas Eve and I was blue. At the hikers’ parking lot, while I was on my rented motorcycle in line to pay my exit toll, a local teenager came up to me and flashed her black tits.  This was during the height of apartheid, which leant the sight a poignancy and a political weight it otherwise would have lacked.  Shaking their heads in the car behind me at the kind of karma I was attracting, Skipper and his wife proceeded to putter in their four-cylinder back to Pretoria; I drove my bike on to the city of Durban on the Indian Ocean. The Christmas decorations hanging between the telephone poles looked bleached of all joy in the bright heat. That night in my hotel room I was plagued by yearning more sharply than ever.  Beating off barely scratched the surface. I knew that what I pined for was more profound than sex, yet at the same time I suffered so pressing a need for release that the word +come+ was dismally insufficient, it was really a need to +go,+ an urge so sea-water-heavy I couldn’t be normal again, I couldn’t be “myself,” until something vastly salty was dispelled from my system.  In scuba, they call the process of clearing your mask “purging.”  You bear your finger down on top of the mask and forcefully breathe out through your nose to expel the water that regularly seeps in and interferes with your vision. So it was with me now.  I needed to purge myself so I could once again see straight. 

      At dusk I went down to the hotel saloon.  A couple of Afrikaners with huge brutish hands – their pale fingers were like fat uncooked sausages next to mine on the mahogany bar – asked me why I wasn’t off somewhere engaging in boorasport:  sausage sport.  They chortled their gravelly laughs and importuned me to send them a Playboy when I got home; apparently the magazine was quarantined in this repressive society.  I left and wandered around the Indian spice markets of Durban – cardamom!  cumin!  tamarind! – whose fragrance only refined my longing.  It wasn’t just go I needed, it was also in. Finally I sidled up to a cab and asked the driver through the window if he could take me to find a lady.   I crawled into the cracked fabric interior of the back and it felt like climbing into a stranger’s well-worn clothes.  He drove me to a shanty in the seaport – a stage set for sure, for could a seaside shanty really look exactly as a seaside shanty should? – a narrow smoky room filled with the shaded eyes of potential companions lit up like the eyes of water rats in a fog.  I befriended a woman of mixed color, one of the few there who was neither deformed nor aged.  My cabby was waiting, it hadn’t taken more than a minute to complete my transaction, and he drove us back to my hotel room where the woman and I lay on my still-made-up bed talking for a couple of hours and drinking peach brandy.  Now that we were on my bed, I curiously lost the urgency to be purged.  But she was very sweet, with roan-colored skin and dark lusterless hair, and a gentle sadness to her, a decent quiet sadness that didn’t call attention to itself.  We got to know each other and I found her pretty.  Women’s faces are always prettier when they are lying down, I’ve found; their features take on a biological ease when they’re horizontal; but she was pretty also for being, by now, my friend. I told her about my babies at home and she told me about hers. When eventually we made love, pulling back the blankets shyly like a couple of high schoolers on a second date, it was so unexpectedly dainty that she found herself roused to a pitch of passion that required its own purging.  Afterwards, lying there, she told me it was her first orgasm in two years and though I knew it was folly to believe a whore, I believed her.  Is that what she was – a whore?  A prostitute?  What ugly words to associate with the sensitive, vulnerable company she provided me. Yes, she may have been a working girl from a seaside shanty, but as she lay on her back, lightly strumming her fingertips over her belly, she confided that ever since she was a child, that had been her private falling asleep gesture. I found this confidence so touching that when I walked her through the lobby to fetch her a cab, I made the white bellboys titter by kissing her tenderly on the mouth.  Kissing a non-white prostitute in front of snickering bellboys at the peak of apartheid, when sexual relations between the races was a crime punishable by jail, seemed like the best act of political defiance I’d ever made.  

      The next day I had a horrific brandy hangover as I rode north along a lonely road through Zululand.  My mouth was dry as lamb’s wool and I had to keep stopping by the side of the road every half hour for cups of tea prepared by black men boiling water in iron kettles over smoldering acacia tree branches while their babies huddled in tattered blankets and stared wide-eyed at me as though I were a white god. I felt like taking the babies in my arms and saying, “I am not one whit better than you!” But it would have only increased their awe, especially using an old Colonialism like “whit.” Where had I come up with that? I felt starchy to myself, stuffed up and stiff. I also found, no surprise, that my original yearning was still unquenched.  The purging of the night before hadn’t cleared me out; it had been like fast food that left me hankering again an hour later.  +In. Go.+ As the morning progressed, I felt the famish more.

   By three in the afternoon I was riding past an expanse of denuded cornfields that went on for mile after mile.  Periodic signs on the chain link fence announced that the flat, serenely featureless cornfields, their rows of corn stubble as straight as rows of corduroy, were the property of a coal mining outfit. Suddenly my free-floating hunger fastened onto a crazy idea:  Could I plunder my way inside the earth?  Would it cure me to penetrate the planet?  It was a hangover vision: burrowing deep inside a woman hadn’t done the trick, so how about worming my way into the mother lode? When I finally reached the entrance gate to the coal plant, I told the gate-keeper that I desired to experience the inside of a mine.  He didn’t know what to make of me, so I directed him to use his walkie-talkie to call headquarters and see if I could meet with the chief of the plant.  He did so and presently was waving me inside with a bewildered look.    

      I rode a hundred yards past hillocks of black coal to the main docking station – another stage set, filled with the props of a coal mine plant – and parked as directed.  A smartly dressed executive shook my hand and seemed amused by me.  He walked me into the plant and up to a board room on the third floor where a meeting was underway; the ten white men, formally attired with white hankies flattened into their dark suits, like butterflies that had been pressed between the covers of an etiquette manual, seemed tickled to make my acquaintance, exclaiming to themselves in Afrikaans with an abundance of gutturals.  The president of the company put down his pipe and stood to shake my hand.  “In a mood to tour a mine, are you?” he asked, very chipper.  “You’ve come at the right time.”

      “Does one happen to be open now?” I inquired.

      They thought this droll.

  “Open?  I should say so!  Round the clock, Christmas or no, we’ve got a business to run!”

      I felt severely underdressed.  I was in banged-up sneakers and the tennis shirt I’d been hiking in the last few days.  These gentlemen were all in business attire with shiny shoes; their hankies seemed to leer at me. They were jumbo-sized men with bellowing voices.  Their fingers lined up on the table before them – more uncooked sausages.

      “I’ve never seen one before, and thought it would be interesting,” I amplified.

      “Oh, ‘interesting,’ I don’t know about that,” the president said, causing a chuckle to go round the table. “Just men beneath the ground hauling coal, I should think.”

      “Sounds great!” I said.

      They liked my moxie.  “Of course we don’t run tours, you know, but if you’d like to put on some clothes, perhaps we can persuade Bobo to give you a look-see.” 
    

      Bobo, it turned out, did not like my moxie.  In a minute I was alone in a locker room with a large jolly black man acting as though I was the silliest thing he’d ever seen. With an impersonal giggle that indicated he believed he had my number, Bobo tossed me a uniform that was starched so tight I had to pick open the holes for arms and legs and then punch my limbs through.  Bobo got himself outfitted identically, and gave us both helmets with a lantern on top and sturdy square-toed shoes and then, still giggling unhurriedly and shaking his head without actually looking at me, he drove us across cornfields like the ones I’d been riding past all afternoon.  The ground was harder and bumpier than it seemed as we banged along with no shock absorbers. We stopped by a section of cornfield indistinguishable from any other except that it was enclosed by a chain link fence, ten square yards around, with a numbered pole sticking up from the middle like a golf pin.  Bobo unlocked the padlock to its gate and we stepped beside the pole, which I now saw indicated not a golf hole but a man-sized one, angling down into the earth, inside of which was another gate and another padlock which Bobo unlocked before squeezing through.  “You coming?” he called, from inside the hole.

      Just like that we were we in. Clicking on the helmet lanterns, we had to squirm on our bellies about ten feet down through a narrow tunnel, which then opened into an underground corridor that stretched out before us, on an incline heading down.  We could stand up in the corridor, hunched over.  The passageway was like something you might dream:  just the height of my head and wide enough for two men to walk abreast, though Bobo kept in front of me, trotting a little to keep his balance as we descended.  The walls were moist and strung with wire that every hundred feet was punctuated by a bare 25 watt bulb, no stronger than a bulb in the back of a refrigerator, giving off a solitary yellow glow.  Every so often there was another gate with another padlock, and when we had passed four of these, at a depth of six hundred feet, with no ceremony we suddenly flattened out into a subterranean netherworld.

      What a space!  I drew my breath in the thin underground air.  There must have been three dozen men in the yellowish half-light, all sweating shiny black and hauling iron carts along a network of tiny tracks that crisscrossed toward dark warrens in every direction.  From within each of the warrens came the muffled percussion of clanking.  Bobo walked me down one after another of these warrens and they always ended with a man working by himself in a little dead end with a pick, jagging off shards of coal from the ceiling and chucking them into the cart until it was full enough to be heaved back along the track.  It was inconceivable that such a beehive of activity could take place beneath seemingly candid cornfields.  Under our unknowing feet night and day, a labyrinth of laboring…. 

      Suddenly I ached for my wife: it hit me in the belly.  The fact that she was no longer sleeping with me, no longer laughing with me, no longer shaking her head with me over the antics of our babies … none of it was existential anymore; it doubled me over with searing, nauseating pain.  Down here in the bowels of the earth, my intestines understood that she represented all that was light and aboveground in the world, celebrating Christmas at home with what remained of our family; I was down here hankering for a life I could no longer have. With an airless little burp of grief I realized that for the past weeks and months it hadn’t been generalized human contact I was craving, which was why generalized human contact had failed to hit the mark. It was marriage, that specific contact, tiny and plain and frail, whose loss could cause the whole world to cave in on itself. The grief I felt at its passing was a grief I could only express geographically, by scouring the globe, or better yet geologically, by delving inward.  What I’d needed was a tomb to match my mood, a crypt I could sink in with my whole body to feel what had become of my life. This was such a crypt, a grave where I could be buried alive 600 feet deep, but it was more than I’d bargained for.  My famish was gone; in its place my knees nearly buckled under the weight of homesickness, humbled by the sight and smell of black brawn hauling iron carts weighing half a ton each. In the press of hangover that throbbed at this depth I saw things clearly: the truth was, I was merely a diversion for Skipper and his wife, who would probably stay together forever, while my marriage rocked on broken tracks further and further into the realm of memory. Not only that, but for all my idle political sentimentality, sleeping with the woman the night before had been a parasitic act, as avaricious as ransacking the Bushmen’s painting. What a fool I was – making a car rock with pretend passion, believing a whore’s orgasm – what a fool!  Flitting on the surface from mountaintop to motorcycle, I was a tourist in the worst sense, patronizing the planet rather than partaking of it in any meaningful way, obliviously gallivanting between faraway places but never sweating in them for even a day.  I was a surface lightweight playing with props while deep inside, well, we knew what went on deep inside.  “Round the clock!”

      By the time we reached the surface again, I was spent. Bobo dropped me back at the company headquarters in silence, and I lurched to the locker room to get into my old clothes. Putting them on again, I felt puny. Relative to everything else, I had been risibly undersized – next to the sweating blacks belowground even more than to the white kings coordinating them from the board room above. We had been underground only an hour, but I knew that never again would I look at an empty cornfield and be sure that was all there was to it.  Maybe 600 feet beneath that placid surface, workers were purging their guts out for thirty cents a cart. Maybe beneath its thin crust, the whole substructure of the earth was one vast trap, teeming with men locked away from the sun, slogging by the strength of their backs in hellish symphonic silence.  Just as you should never tour the sewers of Paris lest the astonishing fact of urine never leave your nostrils, just as you should avert your gaze from repair work being done on a gothic cathedral lest you witness the cheap cinder blocks beneath, so had I been vouchsafed a vision.  I had the knowledge now; the famish had brought me to it.  

  Several years later, sunning myself on the deck of a glamorous schooner in the South Seas, I came across a small item inside a back section of the International Herald Tribune.  It said this mine had collapsed, burying and after several days killing 41 miners – they weren’t sure of the exact number because it was too dangerous to reenter the mine and fetch the bodies. A cry escaped my lips – a half-bark of grief – that made my new wife raise her eyebrows to me invitingly, but I adjusted my mask over my face before sliding off the prow and vanishing, unhungrily, beneath the surface of the waves.