MORSE CODE KISSES
fiction, plus Adam Johnson review, Jean Genet review, “Del is nice to your ear”
(Originally published at Expat Press in 2022.)
At the Annual Sorority Auction at the Lambda Psi, in the parlor made of oak and gold, Morgan Geld bid way high on a bronze likeness of Kali (all the girls went ooooh) and shut down the “stealth Zelda” across the aisle.
“Do I hear one hundred, two?”
The room was full to bursting with students, mainly women. When bidding is decisive, an audience at auction will applaud, as if at an opera.
Morgan didn’t even go to Cornell. She was visiting one of the few men present, her supposed boyfriend, Terry Marble. Supposed because lately he felt conditional. During intermission, by the table of crudités, Morgan watched as Terry leaned too close to a brilliant Asian girl with a pierced nose. The trifling brat had explained to Morgan in a high, breathy voice what a stealth Zelda was: a Jewish American Princess undercover as a goy.
“Cornell is full of them,” the antisemitic student explained as she lingered in Terry’s physical space like a magnet and Morgan burnt her at the stake with her eyes.
The $1,000 Morgan bid on the Kali statue was a warning shot. Across the bow of every woman present. Hip alumni ladies in their 30s cornered Morgan:
“Thanks so much.”
“It’s for a good cause.”
“It’s for missing children. Where do you go to college?”
Morgan sneered. “That’s my good deed for this lifetime.”
It was Valentine’s Day, 2003.
Terry grazed her shoulder with an open hand, a pale mockery of all prior graspings. Mentioned some soiree on Catherine St. that he and Klaudia (pronounced “cloud-ee-uh”) were trekking to. “Coming with? It’s Valentine’s Day.”
It’s all Love. No one offered to carry her Kali as they made their way through the snow. Freezing fog linked every streetlight. And below zero, breath died.
From the house’s yard the muffled bass was like a chopped-up siren-roar, a robot underground who raped, devoured Nintendo princesses by the score. A spooky pixie with a bankroll held Morgan in her arms so tender at the door, like sisters reuniting, then took ten bucks, waved her in, from the next accepted more.
The coat-check cheeba monkey, gay, examined her fur coat, asked with stereotypical eyebrow raised if it was fake, and swore to guard the Hindu figurine not knowing what it cost her. Without her sheath Morgan Geld resembled heroines from Austen, if Austen put her heroines in spiky collars from the pet store and torn black t-shirts reading MORS SYPHILITICA.
In clever parallel of Tolstoyan balls Terry and Klaudia disappeared into the tiny whirlpools found between the plankton dancers. The basement’s stairwell, once they were down there, was blocked to all escape by a big-boned grad student in ironic party frock and a shaved-head banjo player who argued over UN Resolution 1441.
Green light at the rave turned everyone to kelp. A tall guy with dreadlocks danced like a stack of barrels threatening to fall on the bomb-ass lesbians breakdancing inside a thronged circle where Morgan stood and watched.
A crazed guy across the circle was videotaping, got her attention. She came to life, thought fast enough to blow the camera double kisses, in Morse Code: -. = the letter N. The dot was a punctuation for the drawn-out dash of her concupiscence.
A curious sound effect within the music pulled all the time within the room into one corner, gradual as a bent bowstring, farther, painful until it couldn’t be borne, then let the time snap back just in time to leap inside the next measure, as if sneaking at the last second through closing subway doors.
Morgan only glimpsed Klaudia when she was kind of ¼ dancing, ¾ drinking from the same water bottle refilled from a mysterious source. Terry, the boy who had invited Morgan to drop in, or at least made no struggle to prevent her when she gave warning in an email she was coming to Cornell (which is the same thing), stood behind Klaudia arms over her shoulders. With his hands he held the bottle while she drank from it.
Morgan Geld when she stagger-swayed into the circle danced like underwater ballerinas might: spins, expansive curving arm movements, wearing on her face the poise and dignity of 1819, under a strobing light. Whereas all the other girls were more like martial artists, shadow boxers shielding their personal spaces. The half-crouch, the liquid torso flexes, all while fixing faces at some boundary between disgust and pleasure.
Morgan Geld never stalked Terry through the basement’s maze of branching catacombs but did not leave the party either.
The whirling party-emerald slowed, drifted up the basement stairs and filed, facet after facet, out the front door onto the snow to form at dawn gregarious clumps, then reassembled facing west on Catherine St. The phalanx forming in the dawn exhaled balloons of frozen steam and at some signal trickling through the crowd began to drift.
They cheered when blending with a larger flood of citizens as they turned en masse up Eddy St. (“in Collegetown since before you were born”). Terry Marble could be spotted through the bars of the shifting crowd-cage by his puffy orange coat. He told Morgan once he wore it since it mimicked Buddhist saffron robes.
Past Seneca Street, then left on Buffalo, the morning sun behind them cast each person’s shadow all acute onto the angry backs and shoulders of the ragged rank in front. Morgan didn’t know she was caught in one tributary of the largest antiwar demo in all of human history.
600 cities, 8-30 million people. In Rome alone, 3 million. A global spasm of dissent against the vampire oil mafia Kellogg Brown and Root and the DC chicken-hawks who aimed to lay a big egg, big bang in the middle of the Middle East. The commentariat wanted war. “UN inspectors are too slow, too biased, too Old Europe, too anti-semitic.” So said Fox News all day. Even Lib-Dem Brits in Parliament were waiting for a 2nd resolution. The New York Times intoned: “There are two superpowers on the planet today: The US and worldwide public opinion.”
She followed the crowd on its path through history, thinking she would be getting an omelet. She was no constituent of the demonstration nation. She was wealthy and apolitical even as her dad eyeballed a Senate seat. In the footage they were playing on repeat, Saddam discharged archaic shotguns in the air while frantic US commentators jabbered everywhere. Morgan had watched it on TV on the sofa beside her dad, thinking: “Let’s go in and get him.” He did look very sleazy, that’s for sure. She remembered from Manhattan club life how stinky eager Arab suitors were.
Terry and Klaudia like two evasive strokes of the brush blended into a moving landscape. “War Is So 20th Century!” A grinning Catholic nun displayed the sign. Morgan saw a student on the sidelines start to douse a US flag in kerosene being filmed by antic Morse code guy. Like an oyster spooked, her throat closed up. She used her dancer’s shoulders to become a small droplet, which leaked like mercury through several close-knit lines of students and professors up ahead. All losing body heat rapidly, all trying to forestall Iraqi dead. Hooded anarchists, belts of riot gear emitting (as if gamma radiation) fear, chatted with the neo-hippie moms, across their chests strapped sleeping baby-bombs. They had a chance to cross-pollinate united in their utter hate of Condoleeza’s misdirection tricks and all the cowboy geopolitics.
She couldn’t see the Buddhist robes nor the Chinese brat’s hat of powder blue.
The marchers were so vain, they probably thought this march was about them. They asked one another to create a protest-souvenir: to videotape them shouting shrill slogans only when the red RECORD light was on. After pounding deafness at the dance their shouted phrases at the march could not have been more angrily direct, without need, since everyone in earshot was another antiwar marcher. Except her.
The stealth Zelda bright-eyed and well-slept in a kuffiyeh yelled with such grad school gusto a yard away from Morgan’s poor eardrums, as if performing for some crowd within the crowd that was hard to pinpoint.
“History is seldom made by well-behaved women.”
So was she still his girlfriend now?
“Smash patriarchy!”
She wasn’t going back home to Mommy and Daddy’s parlor in the Catskills without getting his attention.
“Hey hey, ho ho, Bush and Rumsfeld got to go!”
But she never did catch him, no matter how she filtered, stalked, became a samurai of jealousy. She heard the hoarse speeches. She listened to the bitter panoply of older left-wing bugaboos — sweatshops, unions, Palestine — which for the moment had emulsified like drops of oil in water with the wider population’s newer fears of global bloodshed.
Invade Switzerland for all she cared. She had her war. If Betty and Veronica were opposing poles, then Klaudia had out-Veronica’d Morgan. And that was unacceptable.
She couldn’t find a person to skirmish with, to tell them so. Terry was missing from his house when she got there finally. His housemate let her in to get her bag and things. In the den of cat hair, they had a cup of tea. She pumped him with such cleverness for info on her rival from the Ivy League. He spoke with studied judgment since he wanted to triangulate himself with care. She weighed the pros and cons of tossing him a hand-job (more?), right there on the couch. To use the co-signer of Terry’s lease for childish revenge and fun.
But the housemate wore green Crocs, a t-shirt with the image of an ugly rapper who she didn’t even know, and worst of all, a necklace made of pukka shells and hemp. A choker, really.
Six years late on that one, homie, Morgan thought. So she dodged that bullet.
It was only once she’d passed the snow-white exit east for Unadilla, softly singing with John Mayer, tears like yolks about to break, some lucky woman’s body was a wonderland, only then did she tumble to it, the fact she’d managed to forsake the angry goddess to whom she’d made her heartfelt offering of all-destroying wrath.
A review of Covered in Sharpie and Suing for Peace (also published on goodreads)
A challenging, raw, hilarious and scary amalgamation of voices and styles. Reading this book is like standing at the bottom of a linguistic waterfall and absorbing the rush of water along with all the detritus it carries: pop culture, legalese, textspeak, horrifying Burroughsian characters behaving like utter shits to comic effect. There’s a lot of gunplay; Johnson’s coordinate points are positioned well within the territory of 2nd Amendment America. But more so, there’s a feeling of suburban America disintegrating under the pressure of relentlessly searching minds chattering and muttering to each other in the dark interstitial spaces.
In a way the poetry book is novelistic, it is one mass of language in the way that the plastic in the ocean forms one undifferentiated body of human culture discarded. The question is: do you want to look closely at the plastic island for clues about the culture that once was, that produced it? With this book, you do. The nuggets of jokes and rueful observation about how people relate and how they live life speaking to each other are as plentiful as bottles at the mega liquor store in your city. It’s funny as fuck in places. Reading this book along with Johnson’s other poetry books (What Are You Doing Alone Out Here, Away From Everyone? (HASH Books) and White Paint Falling Through A Filtered Shaft (Anxiety Press)) is like going to a trio of hot springs where you dip into pools that get progressively hotter and more infused with therapeutic minerals — good for you but caustic to your skin.
This book would make a great spoken word LP or audiobook. It should really be read aloud. Johnson is a master ventriloquist doing karaoke numbers at the TS Eliot nightclub, always funny but here there is some real pain hissing in the recording’s background. Death, real estate, fatherhood, court appearances, meeting up for drinks, prostitution—everything gets expelled in a verbal stream that artfully mirrors the digital blob of information that we all as inheritors of modern culture absorb on a daily basis online. I said “artfully mirrors the digital blob” — this seems to be the compositional riddle of our time: how to create literature that reflects the consciousness the machines have given us this year, this month, this week, this hour? No one can do it perfectly, and Johnson doesn’t either, but his fireworks display are worth the show.
One note about the style. If you’ve been reading Johnson all along you will notice a Berrymanesque syntactical flux that has increased over the books. I say Berrymanesque but it is as original as pollution. Johnson’s lingo innovations are more than half the draw: “Byron the Kisser had an allergic reaction to the judge but he was just an alternate so they let him go it was nearly female on female terrorism indict me I’ll commit suicide at sentencing the gsr testing got me that’s gun shot residue for the uninitiated this is all paregoric written from my Subaru with bitters I take it back all of it this is short and to the point I’ll suck lint from my navel fr I do not fear alcohol and the night I fear the night because of what I will DM you sweet prince.”
Berryman echoes: “he treads not on shore / but in the deep, that’s logical / a passing wave laughs in tenor / at his sinning, and quips / about time / this is all in a second book / that Kotton is reading / until he playfully bookmarks / and listens to audio of / the scotuses and their gavelings / wave / shock / relentless humor / a leaked opinion / relief”
Later, a prosecutor in court says: “your honor has exhibited indicia of the wrong belief system. judge, i want the record to reflect that you have sprouted fangs and a nose leaf.” The judge “cracks her knuckles, removes her robe, mutates into a bat, flies from the courtroom through an open window in the direction of a full moon and is shot out of the sky by bailiffs.”
Our Lady of the Flowers. Jean Genet. Grove Press, originally published in 1943. 307 pages.
Still hypnotized by the magical writing of this novel. I know it was translated into English from French by Bernard Frechtman but I was bowled over by the prose style that Genet apparently had mastered before writing this, his first novel. This is hands down one of the best books I’ve read this year, or for a number of years. The book was wildly digressive but I did not mind. I could within reason sort out what was happening and who it was happening to (one of the main characters, Divine, had a female persona but also a male persona Louis Culafroy — Genet set his novel amongst cross-dressing prostitutes, pimps, and murderers). Genet effortlessly swerved amongst and between consciousnesses in the gay criminal underworld of Paris and kept himself in the book as the master POV, almost like a child playing with stuffed animals on his house’s staircase and making up stories for each one. Except the stuffed animals were all the grimy populace of the Paris demimonde and Genet retells the stories from the dream-fortress of his own prison cell that floats away each night when the prisoner goes to sleep but snaps back into place in the morning when he wakes up and re-enters the static flow of his prison sentence.
As a peephole into a foreign empire of shadows, this novel was remarkable. It could have been just that — a lot of crime novels are windows into these other worlds of violence and tough-guy manners — but in addition to that it was crafted with artistic grace that rivals some of the prose in Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian novels (also I’ve only read those in translation too, so there’s a blind spot at work here that is unavoidable). It makes you wonder if standards were just higher then in European fiction; the answer can only be yes.
The gay content in the book was quite graphic so for those who don’t dig these trappings I would say stay away. The moods and humor surrounding the “fairies and queens” were as hilarious and bitchy as anything you might see on TV circa right now, but the insecurities and jealousy seemed all too solid and 3D and poignant. The panoramic range of experience and tragedy and comedy, the outer world and the innermost emotions and secret thoughts, and all the rest were lovingly captured.
I have heard that this is Genet’s best novel but I am willing to read the other ones now to judge for myself. A curious benchmark has been achieved wherein I, who have only read Swann’s Way and part of Within A Budding Grove before giving up, feel like reading Genet might be good “Proust training” for another attempt at tackling that massive novel. Genet appears to be inspired by Proust in his construction of sentences, his drifting consciousness, and scalpel-sharp psychological perceptiveness. But Genet’s subject matter, gay criminals and murder, is so much more sensationalistic and motivating than that of the modernist masterpiece from the 1920s. So my hope is that by reading more Genet I am strengthening my reading muscles and getting them acclimated to read In Search of Lost Time later.
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“Del is nice to your ear”