Jules Siegal Playboy Article

[BenProfane at aol.com]

Here is the rest.
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I remember another visit shortly after I was graduated from Hunter and was
working for a public-relations agency. The firm was soliciting an account in
the field of atomic research that manufactured plastic mannequins called
radiation dummies, made of materials designed to absorb radiation in exactly
the same way as the human body. One model had a human skeleton. The other was
all plastic. Both had clear skins of something like Lucite and were eerily
beautiful. I had the literature at home. Tom took some of it with him when he
left. I was not to see him again for more than five years. 

There were letters. Eventually, the total was something like 30. They began
from Seattle, where he worked on the Boeing company magazine. I remember one
from Florida. He was then living with a girl and they had gone to visit her
family. A cute preteen attracted Tom's notice enough for him to mention her
lasciviously. Soon the letters had a Mexico City postmark. The Mexicans
laughed at his mustache and called him Pancho Villa. In the rainy season, he
awoke one morning to find a drowned rat on his balcony. Guanajuato was a town
of stone corridors twisting back on  one another. I had complained about the
complexity of V. "Why should things be easy to understand?" he retorted and
followed with a brief dissertation on the origins of the simple English
movement in the studies of comprehensibility of newspaper copy commissioned
by the Associated Press. The death of Marilyn Monroe grieved him heavily. The
girl was no longer with him. This letter was written with a brand-new Mexican
ribbon. He was gnashing his misshapen choppers in envy of my corrosively
elegant first drafts of short stories and letters complaining of my inability
to write. The return address changed, but the form of the letter was always
the same: neatly typed on engineer's quadrille paper, the signature in faint
pencil , "Tom."

By 1965, he was living in Manhattan Beach, California. I had given up the
public-relations business and was free-lancing for magazines. The Saturday
Evening Post sent me to California to do a story on Bob Dylan. I found Tom in
a one-room apartment with a view of the sea. There were some shabby
furnishings, a large gas heater, a narrow cot, a few books-- one, Totempole,
by Sanford Friedman-- little else; a monk's cell decorated by the Salvation
Army. I told him about the Dylan assignment. "You ought to do one on The
Beach Boys," he said. I pretended to ignore that. A year or so later, I was
in Los Angeles again, doing a story for the Post on The Beach Boys. He had
forgotten his earlier remark and was no longer especially interested in them.
I took him to my apartment in Laurel Canyon, got him royally loaded and made
him lie down on the floor with a speaker at each ear while I played Pet
Sounds, their most interesting and least popular record. It was not
fashionable to take The Beach Boys seriously.

"Ohhhhh," he sighed softly with stunned pleasure after the record was done.
"Now I understand why you are writing a story about them."

Another time, Chrissie was there. I had met her at a Beach Boys record
session. She was then a few months older than 18, still wearing a thin wire
brace on her big white teeth. Of Chrissie, it is necessary to post certain
warnings. It is easy to underestimate her intelligence, but it is a mistake.
she is obviously too pretty to be serious, conventional wisdom would have you
believe. In New York, she was offered a screen test by Carlo Ponti the first
week we arrived. She turned him down, likewise a modeling contract with the
Ford agency, beginning with a recruiting commercial for the Coast Guard. The
lady is full of surprises that do not go with a Pepsodent smile, shy and
expert in the arts of invisibility, detesting stereotyped response. Her
beauty is a device used to deflect inquiry, like the bullfighter's cape.
There is the kiss of the rose on the point of a sword. When Tom left, I took
him down to his old green Corvair parked at the bottom of the hillside.
"Don't worry about her," he said.

"What is that supposed to mean?" I asked 

"I think you worry about her. Don't. She can take care of herself."

We spent several days together, the three of us. One night we all went up to
Brian Wilson's Babylonian house in Bel-Air. Brian then had in his study an
Arabian tent made of crimson and purple Persian brocade. It was like being
inside the pillow of a shah. There was one light, fashioned from a parking
meter. You had to put pennies in it to make it stay on. Brian brought in an
oil lamp and tried to light it. The parking-meter light kept going out and
Brian kept dropping the oil lamp and stumbling over it. Neither he nor
Pynchon said anything to each other. Another night, we went to Studio A at
Columbia Records, only to find our way barred by one of Brian's assistants,
Michael Vosse, who explained that we couldn't come in anymore, because
Chrissie was a witch and fucking with Brian's head so heavy by ESP that he
couldn't work.

One afternoon, Chrissie and I drove out to Manhattan Beach to see Tom, taking
along with us some grass we had scored at a be-in (remember be-ins?) in
Griffith Park. Tom was then living in a two-room studio with kitchen that had
evidently been converted from a garage. It was on a side street a couple of
blocks up from the beach. The decoration was pretty much the same. A built-in
bookcase had rows of piggy bands on each shelf and there was a collection of
books and magazines about pigs. The kitchen cabinets contained not groceries
but many empty Hills Brothers coffee cans in orderly array, as if displayed
on supermarket shelves.

His desk sat next to a window in the small living room. It had a clutter of
miscellaneous papers, letters from obscure publications pleading for
articles, an Olivetti portable typewriter, a thick stack of that graph paper
covered with his fine script-- the draft of Gravity's Rainbow, which he was
in the process of  typing and rewriting. He felt that he had rushed through
The Crying of Lot 49 in order to get the money. He was taking no such chance
with the new book, apparently having begun it soon after the publication of
V., interrupting it to write The Crying of Lot 49. Much of the draft was done
in Mexico. "I was so fucked up while I was writing it," he said, "that now I
go back over some of  those sequences and I can't figure out what I could
have meant."

On the desk, there was a rudimentary rocket made from one of those pencillike
erasers with coiled paper wrappers that you unzip to expose the rubber. It
stood on a base twisted out of a paper clip. The wrapper had been pulled up
into a cone from which a needle protruded. I touched the needle with the tip
of my finger and it fell into the cone. Tome frowned, cursed and spent at
least a half hour tickling the needle back out again. As soon as he got it
right and leaned back, I pushed it back in again. He put his face in his
hands and almost wept.

The grass was said to be Acapulco gold. It was strong and beautiful. The day
was misty soft-- cloudy water-color weather. We drove down the coast past a
couple of towns t see an abandoned baroque hotel, something out of Bergman,
but with a grand tattered Colonial flavor. As twilight thickened and
condensed into liquid darkness, we returned to Manhattan Beach in
relentlessly gathering fog. At night, we went down to the beach. The fog was
so dense that the streetlights on The Strand disappeared a few yards' walk
toward the sea. Enveloped in opal-gray night we floated in and out of one
another's view, dancing down to the water. Only the foaming edge of the waves
was visible, and even that was perceived mostly as a blurred lapping sound.
We were alone on the empty margin of existence, walking the scant line
between nowhere and nothing.

Too stoned to risk driving back to Laurel Canyon in the grainy fog, Chrissie
and I slept the night in Tom's dank bedroom while he made do on his studio
couch in the living room. The head of the bed sat in a low notch of damp
painted concrete formed by the floor of the room above. The room was a cave. 

In the morning, there was sunshine. As we sat in the kitchen, Tom said, "Do
you believe in ESP? Strange things keep happening to me. One day I was
sitting in here and the side of my came off, opening into Candida's office,
which I have never seen. She was talking on the telephone. Later, I spoke to
her about it and told her what her office looked like. I had it all exactly
right.

"You know the W.A.S.T.E. horn in The Crying of Lot 49? The symbol of the
secret message service? Every weirdo in the world is on my wave length. You
cannot understand the kind of letters I get. Someone wrote to tell me that
the very same horn was the symbol of a private mail system in medieval times.
I checked it out at the library. It's true. But I made it up myself before
the book was ever published, before I ever got that letter."

When Chrissie and I got back home, there was a message for me to call a
number in New York. It was the publisher of a new magazine for young people.
He wanted me to go East and be editor. We left soon afterward without seeing
Tom again. Less than a year later, depressed and whipped, I went back again
to Los Angeles. We stayed in the Ramada Inn on Sunset Strip. Pynchon came
bouncing into our room with a pound of excellent grass, the kind they called
ice pack, and a chunk of violent hash. He was wearing a black-velvet cape.
There was a mysterious undertone to his enthusiasm.

"What are you always so afraid of?" I asked him. "Don't you understand that
what you have written will get you out of almost anything you might get
yourself into?"

There was no answer, but looking into his face, I could see his thought as
plainly as if has spoken out loud. 

"You think that it is what you have written that whey will want to get you
for," I said.

A few days later, on February 4, 1968, just before i was to leave for my
brother's birthday party, which was to be held on a big boat moored off San
Pedro (James Gould Cozzens fans, note well), I slipped and fell and broke my
hip. Tom had been invited to the party and, in fact, did show up, striking an
acquaintance with Susan, a friend of Chrissie's from San Marino. Susan has
red hair and is breath-takingly beautiful, with the voluptuous body of a
showgirl. Like Chrissie, she is much brighter than she looks, but if Chrissie
plays the Dragon Lady, Susan plays Gracie Allen. The children of San Marino,
one of the headquarters of The John Birch Society, are careful to avoid open
displays of subversive intellect. Susan once came to the shattering
realization that while strolling on a concrete sidewalk that none of the
squares was true, that, indeed, there were not true perfect squares to be
found anywhere in reality. She was overcome by tears, then by nameless dread.
A psychiatrist in San Marino diagnosed her a paranoid schizophrenic and
prescribed shock treatment and apparently was going to administer it on the
spot. Now really in hysterics, she called her father, who very sensibly
countermanded the doctor's orders and calmed his child himself. Since then
Susan has been very careful in guarding her emotions, to the point where she
sometimes seems stupid and cold. It is a pose.

Evidently, Toms saw through her mask, for the two went off and lived together
for a long time. They came to visit me in the hospital and later at home,
too. The last evening they were there, Michael Vosse showed up. He had some
tarry black ganja, which he said had been grown high in the mountains by
natives who beat the plants with whips woven of silver thorns to make them
produce more resin. We smoked the grass. It was indescribably intense. The
pain of my broken hip expanded to fill the room. I found myself unable to
stand Michael's presence in the room and, after much reflective delay,
finally asked him to leave. Alone with Chrissie and Susan and Tom, I felt
some relief, but now the smell of the kitchen garbage bothered me. Tom
volunteered to take it out. Chrissie went off to show him the way. Susan and
I lay back, unable to move. The mood turned overwhelmingly sexual. I wanted
to make love to Susan, but I couldn't speak, overcome by the feeling and the
karmic implications, my thought racing toward certain inevitable conclusions.
The door opened. It was Tom and Chrissie. A little while later, he and Susan
left. I knew then that is would be a very long time, if ever, before I saw
him again.

Do you believe in ESP? I believe in everything and nothing. There are certain
moments when it is all clear. The future lies spread out against your skull
in blazing agony. There is the meaning of paranoia: not insanity but truth,
the end of all our precious privacies, not the dignity of confession but the
crazed gibber of the drooling beast.

	*

Chrissie and I went back to New York. My career went from modest turn to
modest turn and, before long, PLAYBOY sent me to do a story on hippie
communes in California. she went on ahead of me while I stayed and finished a
story on Herman Kahn that was purchased but never published. It was more than
a month before I was to see her again. I felt the drift of her voice as she
wandered off the telephone one day. It was nearly her birthday. I went down
to B. Altman and sent her an ounce of Le De Givenchy. The day before I left
to join her, it came back in the mail.

When I finally did reach Chrissie in Berkeley, where I had an assignment from
The New York Times Sunday Magazine to do a story on the Black Panther
Convention of 1969, the drift was subtle but very real. She was on her way
somewhere else and there seemed to be nothing that I could do to moor her
interest. It was the week of the first landing on the moon. How appropriate
that it was July, month of Cancer, of her birthday. After the convention, we
visited a commune out in the redwoods and lived there for something like a
month. Then I went off to Taos with a photographer and had various
experiences, prophetic dreams and insidious anxieties I will possibly detail
in some other work. I saw very far and well and truly, made certain decisions
and returned to my wife not afraid.

One day we went for a walk in the redwoods and I said, "Chrissie, I love you
more than any woman I have ever known, as much as I love my own mother.
Something is troubling you. I think that it will make you feel better if you
tell me what it is."

"I had an affair with Tom," she answered.

There it was. I felt all the things feel in those circumstance, but mostly a
sense of karma. Karma is what you get for what you do. It is also a certain
perspective of reality. The words are flimsy, but the fact is about as
graceful as a faceful of shit. Once, a long time ago, I had an affair with
another man's wife. The correspondence between eh two events is not quite as
algebraic as you  might think. The private affair of married persons is
merely a fact of life. We are all one person, really, and what one of us
experiences the other must necessarily experience, too. I should like to say
that I was calm and noble when my turn in the barrel came. Unfortunately,
that would be a lie. I do not like to lie. I define honesty, though, as the
ability to admit that you lie. I will spare you my hysterics. The lasted long
enough.

The ethics are rather clear. People are not property. The hysterics over,
Chrissie and I went on to attempt to reconstruct our marriage. In the course
of that work, there were many conversations about what went on between the
two of them that I suppose ought to be considered privileged. For the sake of
the historical record, however, I do want to share a few of them with you. He
was a wonderful lover, sensitive and quick, with the ability to project a
mood that turned the most ordinary surroundings into a scene out of a
masterful film-- the reeking industrial slum of Manhattan Beach would become
as seen through the eye of Antonioni, for example. Still, she found him
somewhat unworldly and bookish, easily astonished by her boldness. Once, out
on the freeway, she told him that we had all gone naked at the commune. He
professed to find that incredible and dared her to take off her blouse right
there. She did. A passing truck hooted its horn in led applause. He loved her
Shirley Temple impersonations-- On the Good Ship Lollipop sung and danced
like a kid at a birthday party. They talked about running away together. He
promised to get a job. Well, at least to move out of the cave. On their way
to do the right thing, to tell me the truth, he insisted on stopping to get a
pizza to calm his stomach. Then they changed their minds, fearful of one of
my outrageous tantrums.

There is more and maybe I well tell it another time. I have received no
letters from Tom in a long time. What did I do wrong? And those other
letters-- whatever did become of them? Ask the Dahill Mayflower Moving and
Storage Company of Brooklyn. They are the victims of my inability to hold on
to anything, sold at auction during my last long voyage through the hospitals
to replace my crippled hip with one of plastic said to be almost as good as
the real thing. Most probably, the auctioneer never even knew the value of
those sheets of faint-blue quadrille. I miss having them, but I miss some
other things more-- the hipbone I was born with, an antique brass oil lamp
with mild- glass shade in like-new condition purchased one sunburned summer
afternoon in Elkhorn Junction, Nebraska, a gilded-wood schoolhouse pendulum
clock that stopped working when my first marriage ended, a signed first
edition of The Godfather with this inscription: "Dear Chrissie and Jules. You
too can be rich and famous. See how easy it is. Mario."

Playboy, March 1977, Jules Siegel.
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Hope you all enjoy this (my fingers are tired, this was alot to type for
me!!)
Later,
BenProfane (Chuck)