The Man Who Was Not With It

by Herbert Gold

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The Man Who Was Not With It is the story of young Bud Williams and his safari southward to Florida. On the way, he is abruptly confronted with the con men, addicts, and freaks, and the bruised innocence, of carnival and nightclub life. 

Release date: October 1, 1987

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 314

Sample

The young man who wrote this book was remembering the boy who scrambled out of high school in Lakewood, Ohio, and instead of going to college or to work in a defense factory, as a kid was supposed to do, left home and hitchhiked toward the great, shining, mountain-towered metropolis of Pittsburgh—discovered, No, that’s not the center of all adult doings, either—and thus set out again toward New York. It got cold that winter. A job as dishwasher left him unfulfilled and chapped. A job as a Mercury Messenger put no wings on his feet. So then he looked south, hitchhiking down Route One (the number seemed important) as far as Key Largo, sleeping where he could, eating how he could, until finally a kindly hood in a Buick perceived his good and loyal character and hired him first as a shill (looked too young for the job) and then as a busboy in an afterhours and illegal gambling joint on Pelican’s Roost, an outcropping of rock on the long curve of sea-splashed, eel-slick road leading toward Key West. Pelican’s Roost was the kind of home a seventeen-year-old person could treasure forever.

After the middle of the night I was alone when the more solid citizens—hookers, shills, bartenders, gangsters—returned to their well-deserved rest on the mainland. I slept on the floor, cushioned by dirty laundry, dishtowels and tablecloths, when the real grownups and girlfriends vanished in their sedans and coupes. The top girlfriend wore two fur boas tucked around her collar. “Hey, just sweep up and the place is yours, kid.”

Barracuda cruised among the rocks. The predawn sky sparkled. I jumped into the salt water because I was warned not to. I howled my seventeen-year-old passions into the wind and there was no one to tell me I was going through a crisis, maybe even pushing it a little, considering that I was really a nice boy from a suburb of Cleveland.

Ten years later, living through the memory again as a young writer, I called back the experience in dreams. I wanted to close some debts to those who were like me, kind and unkind, frightened and arrogant, seeking to live free and alone and also loving to share the chatter. My wanderyear at age seventeen was not that of Bud Williams, but the quest for discovery—fathers and mothers, self, sex, and risk—was a parallel one. A French psychologist calls it “the crisis of juvenile originality,” which sometimes leads to schizophrenia and sometimes to art and usually to mere adult life. When I began to write this book, in my late twenties, married, with two children, I wanted to cut up a jackpot with my old friends on the roads to Pittsburgh, New York, Jacksonville, and Key Largo, and to learn what a writer and everyone else tries to learn and then must keep on relearning: that the hard times go on, but there’s a good and with it way to be not with it, too.

Since I was a young writer finding my language—and expect I’m still doing it, although less young—I tried on this jaunty, speedy, decorated prose partly because I was crossing a gloomy, slowed-down, partly barren time in a young man’s life. No, I didn’t try on the language; tumbled into it. The elements were hectic: the street lingo of various lower depths, jazz, Prospect Avenue in Cleveland, Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem; the buffoonish French I learned in Paris and from reading Raymond Queneau; the need to name a shifty violence of dream and nightmare. Memories of carnival hanging out. Recollections of my brother Sid’s tales of traveling with carnivals (the book is dedicated to him). Reading studies in American jargon, books on con men, pickpockets, addicts. Even my own parents’ lyrical inaccuracies (English was not their real language).

There was, of course, no loyalty at all to what I had figured out. I let the fantasy ride. Later, when an angry review by a carnie in Billboard Magazine said I had clearly been taken in hand by carnival people and then betrayed my mentors by telling their secrets, I was mightily flattered. I had invented most of these secrets. When D. W. Mowrer, whose scholarly works on eccentric jargon had entertained me, wrote to ask for information about the “provenance” of expressions I had made up, I was terrifically flattered. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the terms he included in his new glossaries were my creation.

The book falls into three parts, and so did my life when writing it. The first section was written in Cleveland, where I was not so grateful as I should have been for a job as a night clerk after exuberant student days in Paris. Literature, I believed, was my way out of a career in skidrow alcoholic rooming house management. An early draft of this section was published in New World Writing #6 and got some attention. Back in Cleveland, I was consoled of some of the burdens of my job and of a (supply adjective here) marriage.

Well, sir, a story in New World Writing, even a lead story, did not make a career, although it picked up my spirits. I searched through library lists of scholarships and fellowships, applied for and received a kind of Caribbean Fulbright to spend a year in Haiti. There, in Port-au-Prince and Kenscoff, amid another language shock, Creole upon French upon English, I discovered that the story did not end yet; or rather, it continued past its first ending. I wrote Part Two, which begins with this quotation from Rimbaud:

It should be every man’s ambition to be well-enough acquainted with himself to be his own doctor.

Bud Williams was beginning to grow up, to fall in love, to learn how to deal with fathers, to leave his boyhood while still being a son. Personally, I had a wife, two daughters, and a publisher’s option for a book.

After my year plus a few months in Haiti, I needed money to come home. I sent the manuscript, the two-thirds completed manuscript, to the World Publishing Company, which had printed my second novel, The Prospect Before Us. I received in return a long, careful, unctuous letter from my editor, explaining how I was on a wrong path and should be doing a book more like … my last book. What I needed was money and good counsel. What I received was no money and smoothness.

My friend Roland Devauges, a French anthropologist, did the unFrench thing: lent me money to come home with. Unlimited blessings on his memory. Seymour Lawrence, then the editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press, was enthusiastic about the manuscript and gave me a contract. Blessed be his name, within limits; we seem to have quarreled later.

And so now I found myself an instructor in English at Wayne University in Detroit. Sensing that my marriage was coming to an end (that word “sensing” covers much insomnia), I had thought the right thing was to bring my wife back to her home town. During two more years we struggled; and during those years my joy and flight took the form of finishing and rewriting, rethinking, reimagining this book. I suppose the concept of Joy was partly a tribute to my perished hopes in a marriage, and also a celebration of a new love. The walls of marriage, with two small daughters to reckon with, were higher in the 1950s than they now seem to be.

Negotiations with the Atlantic Monthly Press, before publication, were complicated. I am grateful to Sam Lawrence for his careful reading and line editing. Others at the house—and perhaps at Little, Brown, which co-published—compiled a list of words they wanted changed. Since I was inventing a language, I countered with explanations of how it was necessary and self-explanatory; all a person had to do was read carefully, like poetry. They had another argument: If I “corrected” the list of sixty or seventy items they wanted changed, I had a chance—this was only hinted—at the Atlantic Prize, which was ten thousand dollars plus major attention. My response was enthusiastically to suggest they give me the prize but not change the text.

And then there was the title. Odd as it is to imagine now, the concept of not being with it seemed impenetrable in 1955 in Boston. Suggested titles flew to Detroit from Arlington Street. When someone offered “The Cup of Kindness” as title, I wired Sam Lawrence: OKAY IF EXPANDED TO THE CUP OF KINDNESS IS A MANY-SPLENDORED CROCK (“OF SHIT” was rejected by Western Union). Sam Lawrence wired back in this sense: I surrender, dear.

The book was published as I wanted it. It didn’t get the Atlantic Prize, the publisher lived up to its lack of enthusiasm for my un-cooperative nature in revision, but the book received some good reviews. To some extent the editors were right about the language, since English publishers said it was too American and French publishers said it was untranslatable. (Later, in the sixties, it was published in England and also in French, translated by a poet under the title “Le Voyage de Grack.” So the terms “too American” and “untranslatable” turn out to be temporary and evanescent jargon, too.) In a few years the title came to be familiar lingo, even to junior high school kids.

The book took an odd turn, with consequences for me in the real world, because of its first paperback reprinting. Permabooks, an impermanent enterprise, exercised the privilege paperback publishers enjoyed then, changing the title without consent of the writer in order to improve the Trailways bus station market. Their mass twenty-five cent edition was called The Wild Life, with these lines of print prominent on the front cover:

THE UNVARNISHED CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG CARNIVAL HUSTLER

Although the book was written in the first person, from the point of view of Bud Williams, I didn’t imagine that it would be presented as autobiography in the drugstores, depots, and supermarket racks all across this literature-crazed nation. For years afterward I was asked one of two questions about the book: “Was it hard for you to give up heroin?” And, from the hipper beatnik veterans: “Hey man, what was it like to get off junk?”

No one asked why I changed my name from Bud Williams to “Herbert Gold,” perhaps to profiteer on the rage for Jewish writers from Cleveland.

In fact, of course, all books, including your bank book, are auto-biographical. The chronicle of nightmare, daydream, and what goes on below the reverie line at every moment in life is a part of history, if we can only find it. The description of heroin detox illness was a mixture of fantasy, information, and my own miseries from malaria contracted on a treasure hunt in Port-de-Paix, Haiti. There really was a treasure map, including thirteen slaves buried alive to curse anyone who dug up the Spanish doubloons; we didn’t find the treasure, but I found the curse. Like any normal novelist, I changed the curse into a blessing. Black water fever and plasmodium in the liver become, for the writer, a kind of alchemical delight. The fanatic storyteller rewrites his suicide note until he forgets what annoyed him so much about living. My shakes, quivers, fevers, and nausea could have been the envy of any genuine junkie. My five-year-old daughter, helping me into the shower to bring down the murderous fever, was saving my life. Grack and Joy did something like that for Bud Williams. And along with Bud, I learned something about the debts of love.

I was partly aware—fortunately, only partly—of the ritual exorcisms in carnival, circus, spectacle, the traditional explosions and harnessings of madness. I went about inventing a society of carnival, that enclosed world of the traveling fair which served in opposition to the differently enclosed world outside. By the end of the book, I had educated myself a little. What I lived through as a quest by Bud Williams was surely my own quest to separate from both worlds and belong to both of them. Now I can pick out a portion of what Grack, Joy, Pauline, and the countstore mean to me, but I’m still more interested in what they meant to Bud Williams. Some of the mystery endures. I’m grateful for that.

The Man Who Was Not With It has remained alive for me over the thirty years since its original publication. Beatnik readers were surprised to find the writer, well, less weird than they wanted him to be: a husband sometimes, a father, a non-junkie. I worked at various times with actors, film directors, and producers trying to carve a movie from this story. Once dope money came into the project, along with, again, the wistful question: “When you gave up junk, did you go back to grass?”

No, and it wasn’t hard for me to give up malarial hepatitis, either.

When the book was reissued, here or in Europe, new readers would write to me about circuses and carnivals; and when I visited the fêtes foraines of France, those country fairs with their connections back through time with tricksters and medieval wandering entertainers, Roman circuses, and even more ancient rites and orgies, I felt as if I were coming home again. Whatever quality the novel might have, I had written it wildly, wildly, to save my life, to provide wild limits, and made the dream a kind of doctor for my soul.

The Man Who Was Not With It has never had a large sale, but has continued to saunter like the debonair living dead through the publishing industry. People who esteem nothing else I’ve written wonder how I could have found such a book in me. A San Francisco hippie explained it by demonic possession; the present solemn middle-aged fellow was invaded by a marauding spirit—maybe his. And to tell the truth, some readers who like other books of mine have never been able to read this one. It’s not nice, it’s not Jewish, it plays tricks. Yet there have been eight different editions in English, counting The Wild Life.

In the body of the middle-aged fellow there still does lurk the prancing boy. Through the miracle of reverse physics, that which takes place in the future can seem to cause what happened in the past. When I remember writing this novel, when I remember my year on the road as a seventeen-year-old, when I remember my dreams of kinds of abandon, kinds of love, a Joy, a Grack, a Pauline, those raucous others on the carnival midway—now it happens again.

Herbert Gold

San Francisco, CaliforniaJanuary 1, 1987

THERE he is on the midway, Grack the Frenchie, talking for his countstore or his zoo while the loudspeaker clamored under his come-on with a hee hee hee and a ho ho ho. “Roly and Poly, the sole and o-nelly genuine Siamese twins from Siam in these great States—no adhesive sticking them together behind either, friends—and Little Bo Peep, the educated chimp, she’s no geek, speaks five African languages—I’ll translate for you, friends—move in there on the edges, you—lookee here at me, at my, at your friend Grack, friends,”—and they looked.

This was the big show, if they only knew it.

“Lookee, lookee, lookee, friends!” He brought his hand with the horny nail of his index finger in a wide circle, swinging an invisible lassoo, looping their belly-eyed gaze and taking it at his eye. They were caught first at the spongy wart on his nose and then in his eyes, working it for themselves now like the flies caught wriggling in sticky-paper. That wart made a stiff flop when he tossed his head in beckon and hitch toward the pungent foot-darkened sawdust at the door of Grack’s Zoo, a gobble of cajolery up from his throat and the swollen Adam’s apple.

Even that pretty monkey Joy, Pauline’s pouting daughter, an agile child sneaking through the high stakes to womanliness, stopped in her roaming through this carnie where she dwelled and listened. Her dark face lifted to Grack while his lips rehearsed his words and her lashes veiled her carniebrat’s opinion. She knew his pitch, but he played in a pleasant new line for her now and then, and whirled with his immense mouth of grin to tease to her: “All green and life-defying, folks! All dreadful, friends!”

As Grack went to turn the crowd in, Joy scuffed off to where she would smile and nip the pleasant Southern air and take the tickets to Palmistry Pauline’s mittcamp. “Psychopalmologist Tells All, Marital, Sexual, or Mineral—but leave our Joykins alone,” Grack chanted in farewell to Pauline’s girl. “Oh diddle a hand, oh raddle a riddle, so step right up,”—it made no difference what he said. The marks listened to him, his hand and his eye, not his words.

Ho, ho, ho. He adjusted the dial down. Hee, hee, hee. The machine now softly vented its hilarious spleen behind the platform. Pretty little Joy had smiled and gone. Again Grack opened to his sweet-and-sour hurry-up song. “Now you take them circus Siamese babies, you can’t trust them, never could, folks—” He was a sallow stooped carnie with vapors fuming in his eyes and hard skinny hillbilly muscles, but he had a knack: he could chant them into anything. He could put them down hard on a paper dollie as quick as he could sell the gaudy clatter of Rosie’s hips bumping, our grind-girl from the Boys’ Farm in Hudson, Ohio. The index finger and the wart and the eyes did the turn; he plugged them in. All he asked of them was to ease loose the marko’s fist. The slum prizes dripped from their hands, taffy, teddybears, streamers of paper, and he didn’t need the laughing machine to make the folks feel rewarded. “It keeps me company when I get lonesome,” he said. “Sure, it gasses me, but you can die from the stupid marks you see out there.” He said: “I don’t booze, I don’t mainline, I hardly even pull my robin, but I got me the right kind of mad on. That’s my fix, boy.”

“You don’t get tired of it, Grack?”

“Sick of it. Sick of what, eh? Sick of them all and their pockets full of hanky-pank money—but you’re a young fellow got his end before him.”

“You get like that, Grack?”

“Got his end in front of him. I already come to my end, boy.”

Even so, sometimes his thumb-and-finger snapped with a yen for the girls, and then there might be trouble, since the flypaper eyes were the smartest thing about him and they didn’t reckon on anything but the sale. Me, I was a brat yet, not much older than Joy, a sawdust streetkid, and I asked too much of men in our world without women; that’s ahead of the story. Grack, maybe he asked too much of the crowd in a world made, whatever he said, by individual men, just as one of them had made the rasping ho-hee platter which backed him up each workday evening, winters and traveling excluded.

How it happened with us is as easy as this: Grack, this fine talker, he stood in his box near San Diego and plucked a tricksie in shorts as she wiggled by. He took the thin pants between his horny fingers, appreciating her ripeness by the plump distance she jumped straight up, and roared like a kid: “Snookums!” He patted. He pinched. He held on.

She had friends, it seemed. In that crowd, with Tricksie jostling them every chance she got—I’ve seen her on all my midways in these wide States—they were blowing for a fight. “Ouch,” she peeped. “Oh me,”—and she rolled her round little eyes to see what she could see.

“You goddamn bum,” her marko friend yelled. “What you think you’re doing, squeezing tomatoes?”

“Yeah, goddamn, you think so?” his friend asked.

Craw jerking, Grack said, “I’ll explain it to you for the price of admission, children’s rates. See me after the show.”

They both jumped the Grack. He let go of Tricksie’s prettiness and murmured, soft-like and reluctant, “Hey, rube.”

Hey, rube!—with a ho and a hee for this carnie battlecry. Hey, you fearless rubes!

Dreamy in my high, I floated down from the next platform to kick the smaller mark where it would tell on him. I did it with my toes, as light as I could, though he did not appreciate this. It turned out that he was a real sociable fellow with a wide circle of friends and one of them came at Grack with a bottle. Grack whistled between his teeth. He had to rap the bottle baby on the knuckles. They were a party; we found ourselves with an old-fashioned hey-rube and obliged to move the show on that night. There was no patching it. I remember looking over to Tricksie with her pretty little hand tip-touching the black-and-blue spot, and I hoped that she would finally let Grack fix the rest of her for her, but just then someone broke my nose and I went thrashing about, spouting blood over everyone and yelling my courage mixed with salty phlegm. How could I do any better? I worked toward the best pleasures on earth, ready for high virtues of friendship even if the sharpest nosebones worked their way into my cheeks.

“Oh, do it for me,” Tricksie was saying.

Sam the Popcorn Man was throwing canvas over his machine and had it almost covered when a rube heaved a tent-stake and the popcorn blew like snow among us. “Hee! hee! hee! Ho! ho! ho!” Someone was windmilling an empty bucket. Someone had found a case of beer. Someone turned up the speaker at the zoo and it roared till our scalps shivered with it. “HO! HO! HO!” A small sliver like a fishbone had pierced my nostril in just the place where Grack’s wart lay. I noticed it at the time. Tricksie was rubbing herself and murmuring happily, “Oh, my, won’t you? Kill him for me, please.” She was lonely because nobody touched her after Grack. Picking her hand through the broken glass of the popper, she stuffed her mouth and said, “All for me? Oh, you shouldn’t hurt yourselves, boys. It’s not right. Get the skinny fellow over there, he’s the one. Kill him. I’m just a defenseless little girl. No, the one with the funny nose.”

Joy dumped a jug of warm peanut oil on Tricksie’s new hairdo. Tricksie stuck her tongue through it like surprised. Joy said to me: “Oh that must hurt, Bud. Bud! Let me wash it for you.” She was crying.

Later Grack picked me for true and handed me a compliment on the new nose. “You don’t look like a kid no more, kid, never will. Thanks for coming. You was first. I really mean it.”

“I was nearest, that’s all,” I admitted modestly.

“How was I to know the whole town was her friend?—in thin panties and fruitcake fat like that. We only just got in town. I didn’t hardly see that mark with the bottle. I should of known, though, frisky like she was.”

I blushed at this apology for the trouble and my broken nosebones. “You couldn’t have guessed, Grack. You were busy with business.”

“Business, kid, you mean monkey business. That there business finger got to look out for itself sometimes. Never did learn, did you?”—and he frowned at the dark hand with its pink ringed mounds of callus. He sighed, finished his study, and stuck his head toward me. “How’s the face?”

“Still there.”

“Looks fine, just fine.” He sighed again and put his vaporous eyes upon me. He didn’t con me with the finger, though. The wart lay sleek and still. “Just. . .