MLH STORY: Grey Fulsom

Flies floating in the air, in the light of the roadway, near the porch where they sit in the shade.

"He's a tit man.  No ass in it.  When he does get near a vagina, wolves howl, horses cannibalize.  Will is a fetishist, like every dirty white boy."

Here the older man, Grey Fulsom, listening to this, took it to turn it back on RR Beth: "He's a tit man, what?  He lacks objective?  He'rather play around than triangulate his ambition?  We can play games all day.  What of unmeasurable womb?  You could have been a fine writer could you have once got your mind around something bigger than your dick.  This is your group, your whole generation, masturbating and whores.  No war in your sack.  William Shakespeare is a pussy hound.  I'd love to say he's one of mine, but this is not true."

2. 

R.R.: I spoke to Szeto the other night.  He tells me the routine for his performances. Enters.  Wave is meek, defensive.  Two women to the left, behind him as he crosses, laughing at him before he begins.  At him.  He calls them whores.  The crowd is shocked.  

His routine begins: "I just broke up with my girlfriend."  
The women are plants.  They march out indignantly, and his crowd cheers.  God but does Mike hate his crowd.

3. R.R. Beth is sinking.  His bed is above, but he has given it to his guest.  Now he is downstairs, sinking into a chair, wiping sweat from his arms.  Drunk.  No war in his sack.  Sack is his war.  In the guest bedroom is the shadow.
GREY FULSOM; born in 1925, Brooklyn, New York.  Seemingly sprung from womb completed, the writer, the editor, the school.  And once Beth was the upstart deriding him, "He's a style, but what is it he's writing ABOUT?"  This was before they had met and Grey Fulsom had turned Beth into an acolyte of the Fulsom school.  The Fleabite School.  Sturdy plain American English saturated with style in seeming without, as if Mark Twain awoke in 1961 and wrote with increasingly speed-purposed right wing tendencies.  But never pretentious.
Grey Fulsom sold books made into Cary Grant movies.  Grey Fulsom sold books made into Gunsmoke episodes.  Grey Fulsom sold books.  Grey Fulsom drank vodka, smoked dope, fucked dudes, and sold books.  And even now, deep into the seventh decade of his life story, Grey Fulsom was a shadow over everything RR Beth did.
4. You've told me about Mike the comedian, now tell me about the girl.
I'd rather not.
She's left you.
She's left the house.  But still in town.
Town?  Is that the interregnum, but you mark yourself still in the game?  Where in town?
With a man.
What man?
A town man.  A fisherman.  
Oh, a natural man.
Jack --
(Former students of the Fleabite School called Grey Fulsom, Jack.  The old queer must have given himself the nickname, it's something he would have done.  RR Beth could imagine him sauntering around Manhattan in 1951 with scarf and bomber jacket, telling all the beatniks, "Call me Jack").
Jack, Beth said, I want to talk to you about this comedian, this stand up comedian, I think there's the book.
It's not the book, Fulsom said.  The book is right here.  The girl, your young girl leaving you for the sinewy arms of a coastal fishing stud.  I hate to give this gift to you, Richard, so I'll preface it by admitting a feeling I have that I'm not proud of: I am happy to see you've grown old.  I am tickled the woman left you.  You need a humbling.  Why write a novel about some MacDougal Street Czech comedian who hates women when you are a respected writer from Rockland, Maine who hates a beautiful young woman for leaving you?
Szeto is Chinese.
Write her a story, Dick.  She's a writer isn't she?
Quite talented.
Right, right -- I never thought one student I had was talented, not even you, but I never fucked my students.  How many lady novelists does NYU have in it?
This felt like being murdered.  Beth wanted Fulsom to never have made the trip from the side of that mountain in Vermont.  At this moment Beth wanted Fulsom to contract a bubonic dick disease and die a lady.  And this old man was the only friend R.R. Beth still had in the world, and this likely the last meeting they would ever have.
Fulsom said, Write her a story.
What story?  
Her story.  She's young, she's beautiful, she's full of talent allegedly: Swept off her feet, she follows the writer -- feel free to credit your accomplishments here -- follows from New York to Maine; he's left his family, she's left her education, and together they steal a summer on the ocean.  Until she realizes this sage professor, this lion of literature, is old, is older even than the number, by the rum dumb years of middling through Shakespeare conferences and undergrad pussy, and has now isolated her to his big house on the hill.  He babbles about a book on a comedian, though he himself has never written one funny line.
Stop it.
You're not funny.  You're a sturm und drang man.  Keep to your petty revenges, it's what you do.  Leave the laughs to me.  Now then: your lady has left the hill, has walked down to the beach, where she has taken up with a lobsterman.  A lobsterman with Leviathan's cock --
And like that RR Beth laughs.
Didn't I tell you?  Fulsom said.  Write this story, Dick.  By the end, you'll have exorcised her hold, or you won't.  If you have, publish. If you haven't, give the story to her.  Let her read it, let her feel the weight of the pages.  Let her decide what to do with it.  From one warlock to another, in this will be your revenge