Beautiful Losers. Leonard Cohen

the influence of the telephones. If you remember, one of the fluorescent lights was flickering, and the corner where we were standing jumped in and out of shadows as though great wings were passing over us or the huge blades of an immense electric fan. The telephones kept their steady black, the only stable shape in the shifting gloom. They hung there like carved masks, black, gleaming, smooth as the toes of kissed stone R.C. saints. We were sucking each other’s fingers, slightly frightened now, like children pulling at lollipops during the car chase. And then one of the telephones rang! It rang just once. I am always startled when a pay phone rings. It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet, like King Michael saying goodbye to Communist Romania, like a message in a floating bottle which begins: If anyone finds this, know that-

      -Damn you, F.! You’re torturing me. Please.

      -You asked me for the whole picture. I forgot to mention that the lights were buzzing, unevenly, like the snores of a sinus victim. I was sucking her narrow finger, careful of the sharp nail, thinking of the wolves who bleed to death from licking the blood-baited knife. When the light was healthy our skin was yellow, the merest pimple exaggerated, and when it failed we fell into a purple pallor, our skin like old wet mushrooms. And when it rang we were so startled that we actually bit each other! Children in a scary cave. Yes, there was someone watching us, not that we cared. He was watching us in the mirror of the fortune-telling scale which he was climbing off and on, dropping in nickel after nickel, dialing various questions, or the same one for all I know. And where the hell were you? The basement of the System is a horrible place if you do not stick with the people you came with. It smells like a desperate clearing in a siege of rats-

      -You lie. Edith’s skin was perfect. And it smells of piss, nothing else, just piss. And never mind what I was doing.

      -I know what you were doing, but never mind. When the telephone rang this fellow wheeled around and stepped off the scale, quite gracefully, I must say, and in that moment the whole eerie place seemed like his personal office. We were standing between him and his telephone, and I feared (it sounds ridiculous) that he would do some violence, pull a knife or expose himself, for his whole weary life among the water pipes and urinals seemed to hang on this telephone message-

      -I remember him! He was wearing one of those Western string neckties.

      -Right. I remember thinking in that instant of terror that he had conjured up the ring himself with his incessant dialing, that he had been performing a ritual, like rain-making. He was looking right through us as he stepped forward. He stopped, waiting, I suppose, for the second ring, which never came. He snapped his fingers, turned, climbed back on the scale, and returned to his combinations. We felt delivered, Edith and I! The telephone, hitherto so foreboding and powerful, was our friend! It was the agent of some benign electronic deity, and we wanted to praise it. I suppose that certain primitive bird and snake dances began the same way, a need to imitate the fearful and the beautiful, yes, an imitative procedure to acquire some of the qualities of the adored awesome beast.

      -What are you trying to tell me, F.?

      -We invented the Telephone Dance. Spontaneously. I don’t know who made the first move. Suddenly our index fingers were in each other’s ears. We became telephones!

      -I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

      -Why are you crying?

      -I think you have ruined my life, F. For years I’ve been telling secrets to an enemy.

      -You’re wrong, my friend. I have loved you, we’ve both loved you, and you’re very close to understanding this.

      -No, F., no. Maybe it’s true, but it’s been too hard, too much crazy education, and God knows for what. Every second day I’ve had to learn something, some lesson, some lousy parable, and what am I this morning, a Doctor of Shit.

      -That’s it. That’s love!

      -Please go away.

      -Don’t you want to hear what happened when I was a telephone?

      -I do, but I don’t want to beg. I have to beg you for every scrap of information about the world.

      -But that’s the only way you value it. When it falls on you from out of the trees you think it’s rotten fruit.

      -Tell me about Edith when you were telephones.

      -No.

      -Arrwk! Sob! Ahahah! Sob!

      -Contain yourself. Discipline!

      -You’re killing me, you’re killing me, you’re killing me!

      -Now you’re ready. We dug our index fingers in each other’s ears. I won’t deny the sexual implications. You are ready to face them now. All parts of the body are erotogenic. Assholes can be trained with whips and kisses, that’s elementary. Pricks and cunts have become monstrous! Down with genital imperialism! All flesh can come! Don’t you see what we have lost? Why have we abdicated so much pleasure to that which lives in our underwear? Orgasms in the shoulder! Knees going off like firecrackers! Hair in motion! And not only caresses leading us into the nourishing anonymity of the climax, not only sucking and wet tubes, but wind and conversation and a beautiful pair of gloves, fingers blushing! Lost! Lost!

      -You’re insane. I’ve told my secrets to an insane person.

      -There we were, locked in the Telephone Dance. Edith’s ears began to wrap around my fingers, at least so it seemed. She was very highly developed, perhaps the most highly developed woman I ever knew. Her ears folded around my throbbing fingers-

      -I don’t want the details! I see the two of you a lot clearer than you could ever describe. That’s a picture I’ll never be able to get out of my mind.

      -Jealousy is the education you have chosen.

      -Fuck you. What did you hear?

      -Hear is not the right word. I became a telephone. Edith was the electrical conversation that went through me.

      -Well, what was it, what was it?

      -Machinery.

      -Machinery?

      -Ordinary eternal machinery.

      -And?

      -Ordinary eternal machinery.

      -Is that all you’re going to say?

      -Ordinary eternal machinery like the grinding of the stars.

      -That’s better.

      -That was a distortion of the truth, which, I see, suits you very well. I distorted the truth to make it easy for you. The truth is: ordinary eternal machinery.

      -Was it nice?

      -It was the most beautiful thing I have ever felt.

      -Did she like it?

      -No.

      -Really?

      -Yes, she liked it. How anxious you are to be deceived!

      -F., I could kill you for what you’ve done. Courts would forgive me.

      -You’ve done enough killing for one night.

      -Get off our bed! Our bed! This was our bed!

      I don’t want to think too much about what F. said. Why must I? Who was he after all but a madman who lost control of his bowels, a fucker of one’s wife, a collector of soap, a politician? Ordinary eternal machinery. Do I have to understand that? This morning is another morning, flowers have opened up again, men turn on their sides to see whom they have married, everything is ready to begin anew. Why must I be lashed to the past by the words of a dead man? Why must I reproduce these conversations so painstakingly, letting not one lost comma alter the beat of our voices? I want to talk to men in taverns and buses and remember nothing. And you, Catherine Tekakwitha, burning in your stall of time, does it please you that I strip myself so cruelly? I fear you smell of the Plague. The long house where you crouch day after day smells of the Plague. Why is my research so hard? Why can’t I memorize baseball statistics like the Prime