‘police riot’ in its report.
I ended up in a holding cell meant for fifteen prisoners — twenty, max — with about sixty gassed-out, punched-out, drugged-out, beat-up, messed-up, worked-over, fucked-over, blood-all-over hippies, some smoking joints, some crying, some puking, some singing protest songs (from far over in the corner, issuing from some guy I never even saw, came a stoned-out version of ‘I’m Not Marchin’ Anymore’). It was like some weird penal version of telephone-booth cramming.
I was jammed up against the bars, trying to protect my shirt pocket (Pall Malls), and my hip pocket (the copy of Lord of the Flies Carol had given me, now very battered, missing half its front cover, and falling out of its binding), when all at once Stake’s face flashed into my mind as bright and complete as a high-resolution photograph. It came from nowhere, it seemed, perhaps the product of a dormant memory circuit which had gone momentarily hot, joggled by either a nightstick to the head or a revivifying whiff of teargas. And a question
came with it.
‘What the fuck was a cripple doing on the third floor?’ I asked out loud.
A little guy with a huge mass of golden hair — a kind of Peter Frampton dwarf, if you could dig that — looked around. His face was pale and pimply. Blood was drying beneath his nose and on one cheek. ‘What, man?’ he asked.
‘What the fuck was a cripple doing on the third floor of a college dorm? One with no elevator? Wouldn’t they have put him on the first floor?’ Then I remembered Stoke plunging toward Holyoke with his head down and his hair hanging in his eyes, Stoke muttering ‘Rip –
rip, rip- rip, rip -rip’ under his breath. Stoke going everywhere as if everything was his enemy; give him a quarter and he’d try to shoot down the whole world.
‘Man, I’m not following you. What — ‘
‘Unless he asked them to,’ I said. ‘Unless he maybe right out demanded it.’
‘Bingo,’ said the little guy with the Peter Frampton hair. ‘Got a joint, man? I want to get high. This place sucks. I want to go to Hobbiton.’
44
Skip became an artist, and he’s famous in his own way. Not like Norman Rockwell, and you’ll never see a reproduction of one of Skip’s sculptures on a plate offered by the Franklin Mint, but he’s had plenty of shows — London, Rome, New York, last year in Paris — and he’s reviewed regularly. There are plenty of critics who call him jejune, the flavor of the month (some have been calling him the flavor of the month for twenty-five years), a trite mind communicating via low imagery with other trite minds. Other critics have praised him for his honesty and energy. I tend in this direction, but I suppose I would; I knew him back in the days we escaped the great sinking continent together, and he has remained my friend; in a distant way he has remained my paisan.
There are also critics who have commented on the rage his work so often expresses, the rage I first saw clearly in the papier-mache Vietnamese family tableau he set afire in front of the school library to the amplified pulse of The Youngbloods back in 1969. And yeah. Yeah, there’s something to that. Some of Skip’s stuff is funny and some of it’s sad and some of it’s bizarre, but most of it looks angry, most of his stiff-shouldered plaster and paper and clay people seem to whisper Light me, oh light me and listen to me scream, it’s really still i()6g, it’s still the Mekong and always will be. ‘It is Stanley Kirk’s anger which makes his work worthy,’ a critic wrote during an exhibition in Boston, and I suppose it was that same anger which contributed to his heart attack two months ago.
His wife called and said Skip wanted to see me. The doctors believed it hadn’t been a serious cardiac event, but the Captain begged to disagree. My old paisan Captain Kirk thought he was dying.
I flew down to Palm Beach, and when I saw him — white face below mostly white hair on a white pillow — it called up a memory I could not at first pin down.