Beautiful Losers. Leonard Cohen

fat angels with their queer bums. Here come the Indians. Here comes Catherine Tekakwitha ten years later, lily out of the soil watered by the Gardener with the blood of martyrs. F., you ruined my life with your experiments. You ate a raw sheep’s heart, you ate bark, once you ate shit. How can I live in the world beside all your damn adventures? F. once said: There is nothing so depressing as the eccentricity of a contemporary. She was a Tortoise, best clan of the Mohawks. Our journey will be slow, but we’ll win. Her father was an Iroquois, an asshole, as it turns out. Her mother was an Algonquin Christian, baptized and educated at Three-Rivers, which happens to be a lousy town for an Indian girl (I was told recently by a young Abénaqui who went to school there). She was taken captive in an Iroquois raid, which was probably the best lay she ever had. Help me, someone, help my crude tongue. Where is my silver tongue? Aren’t I meant to speak of God? She was the slave of an Iroquois brave, and she had a wild tongue or something because he married her when he could have just pushed her around. She was accepted by the tribe and enjoyed all the rights of the Tortoises from that day on. It is recorded that she prayed incessantly. Glog, glog, dear God, hump, fart push, sweet Almighty, slurp, flark, glamph, hiccup, jerk, zzzzzz, snort, Jesus, she must have made his life hell.

       9

      F. said: Connect nothing. He screamed that remark at me while overlooking my wet cock about twenty years ago. I don’t know what he saw in my swooning eyes, maybe some glimmering of a fake universal comprehension. Sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out on a path the width of a thread and of endless length, a thread that is the same color as the night. Out, out along the narrow highway sails my mind, driven by curiosity, luminous with acceptance, far and out, like a feathered hook whipped deep into the light above the stream by a magnificent cast. Somewhere, out of my reach, my control, the hook unbends into a spear, the spear shears itself into a needle, and the needle sews the world together. It sews skin onto the skeleton and lipstick on a lip, it sews Edith to her greasepaint, crouching (for as long as I, this book, or an eternal eye remembers) in our lightless sub-basement, it sews scarves to mountain, it goes through everything like a relentless bloodstream, and the tunnel is filled with a comforting message, a beautiful knowledge of unity. All the disparates of the world, the different wings of the paradox, coin-faces of problem, petal-pulling questions, scissors-shaped conscience, all the polarities, things and their images and things which cast no shadow, and just the everyday explosions on a street, this face and that, a house and a toothache, explosions which merely have different letters in their names, my needle pierces it all, and I myself, my greedy fantasies, everything which has existed and does exist, we are part of a necklace of incomparable beauty and unmeaning. Connect nothing: F. shouted. Place things side by side on your arborite table, if you must, but connect nothing! Come back, F. shouted, pulling my limp cock like a bell rope, shaking it like a dinner bell in the hands of a grand hostess who wants the next course served. Don’t be fooled, he cried. Twenty years ago, as I say. I am just speculating now what it was that occasioned his out-burst, that is, some kind of smirk of universal acceptance, which is very disagreeable on the face of a young man. It was that same afternoon that F. told me one of his most remarkable lies.

      -My friend, F. said, you mustn’t feel guilty about any of this.

      -Any of what?

      -Oh, you know, sucking each other, watching the movies, Vaseline, fooling around with the dog, sneaking off during government hours, under the armpits.

      -I don’t feel in the least guilty.

      -You do. But don’t. You see, F. said, this isn’t homosexuality at all.

      -Oh, F., come off it. Homosexuality is a name.

      -That’s why I’m telling you this, my friend. You live in a world of names. That’s why I have the charity to tell you this.

      -Are you trying to ruin another evening?

      -Listen to me, you poor A——!

      -It’s you who feel guilty, F. Guilty as hell. You’re the guilty party.

      -Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

      -I know what you want to do, F. You want to destroy the evening. You’re not satisfied with a couple of simple comes and a nice poke in the hole.

      -All right, my friend, you’ve convinced me. I’m perishing with guilt. I’ll keep quiet.

      -What were you going to say?

      -Some fabrication of my guilty guilt.

      -Well, tell me, now that you started the whole thing.

      -No.

      -Tell me, F., for Christ’s sake, it’s just conversation now.

      -No.

      -God damn you, F., you are trying to destroy the evening.

      -You’re pathetic. That’s why you must not try to connect anything, your connection would be pathetic. The Jews didn’t let young men study the Cabala. Connections should be forbidden citizens under seventy.

      -Please tell me.

      -You mustn’t feel guilty about any of this because it isn’t strictly homosexual.

      -I know it isn’t, I-

      -Shut up. It isn’t strictly homosexual because I am not strictly male. The truth is, I had a Swedish operation, I used to be a girl.

      -Nobody’s perfect.

      -Shut up, shut up. A man tires in his works of charity. I was born a girl, I went to school as a girl in a blue tunic, with a little embroidered crest on the front of it.

      -F., you’re not talking to one of your shoeshine boys. I happen to know you very well. We lived on the same street, we went to school together, we were in the same class, I saw you a million times in the shower after gym. You were a boy when you went to school. We played doctor in the woods. What’s the point of all this?

      -Thus do the starving refuse sustenance.

      -I hate the way you try to end everything off.

      But I broke off the argument just then because I noticed that it was almost eight, and we were in danger of missing the entire double feature. How I enjoyed the movies that night. Why did I feel so light? Why did I have so deep a sense of comradeship with F.? Walking home through the snow my future seemed to open me: I resolved to give up work on the A——s, whose disastrous history was not yet clear to me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but it didn’t bother me, I knew that the future would be strewn with invitations, like a President’s calendar. The cold, which hitherto froze my balls off every winter, braced me that night, and my brain, for which I have always had little respect, seemed constructed of arrangements of crystal, like a storm of snowflakes, filling my life with rainbow pictures. However, it didn’t work out that way. The A——s found their mouthpiece and the future dried up like an old dug. What was F.’s part in that lovely night? Had he done something which opened doors, doors which I slammed back in their frames? He tried to tell me something. I still don’t understand. Is it fair that I don’t understand? Why did I have to be stuck with such an obtuse friend? My life might have been so gloriously different. I might never have married Edith, who, I now confess, was an A——!

       10

      I always wanted to be loved by the Communist Party and the Mother Church. I wanted to live in a folk song like Joe Hill. I wanted to weep for the innocent people my bomb would have to maim. I wanted to thank the peasant father who fed us on the run. I wanted to wear my sleeve pinned in half, people smiling while I salute with the wrong hand. I wanted to be against the rich, even though some of them knew Dante: just before his destruction one of them would learn that I knew Dante, too. I wanted my face carried in Peking, a poem written down my shoulder. I wanted to smile at dogma, yet ruin my ego against it. I wanted to confront