lawyer told him he was lucky. Gardener asked his lawyer if he knew he was sitting on a time bomb and jerking his meat. His lawyer asked him if he had considered psychiatric help. Gardener asked his lawyer if he had ever considered getting stuffed.
But he had had sense enough not to attend any more demonstrations. That much, anyway. He kept away from them. They were poisoning him. When he got drunk, however, his mindâwhatever the booze had left of itâreturned obsessively to the subject of the reactors, the core-rods, the containments, the inability to slow down a runaway once it really got goingâ
To the nukes, in other words.
When he got drunk, his heart got hot. The nukes. The goddam nukes. It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didnât have to be Freud to figure that what he was really protesting was the reactor in his own heart. When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system. There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired. He sat and played with all the wrong switches. That guy wouldnât be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.
The goddam fucking nukes.
Forget it.
He tried. For a start, he tried thinking about tonightâs reading at Northeasternâa fun-filled frolic that was beingsponsored by a group that called itself the Friends of Poetry, a name which filled Gardener with fear and trembling. Groups with such names tended to be made up exclusively of women who called themselves ladies (most of them of a decidedly blue-haired persuasion). The ladies of the club tended to be a good deal more familiar with the works of Rod McKuen than those of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Ron Cummings, or that good old drunken blackout brawler and wife shooter James Eric Gardener.
Get out of here, Gard. Never mind the New England Poetry Caravan. Never mind Northeastern or the Friends of Poetry or the McCardle bitch. Get out of here right now before something bad happens. Something really bad. Because if you stay, something really bad will. Thereâs blood on the moon.
But he was damned if heâd go running back to Maine with his tail between his legs. Not him.
Besides, there was the bitch.
Patricia McCardle was her name, and if she wasnât one strutting world-class bitch, Gard had never met one.
She had a contract, and it specified no play, no pay.
âJesus,â Gardener said, and put a hand over his eyes, trying to shut away the growing headache, knowing there was only one kind of medicine that would do that, and also knowing it was exactly the sort of medicine that could bring that really bad thing on.
And also knowing that knowing would do no good at all. So after a while the booze started to flow and the cyclone started to blow.
Jim Gardener, now in free fall.
4
Patricia McCardle was the New England Poetry Caravanâs principal contributor and head ramrod. Her legs were long but skinny, her nose aristocratic but too bladelike to be considered attractive. Gard had once tried to imagine kissing her and had been horrified by the image which had risen, unbidden, in his mind: her nose not just sliding up his cheek but slicing it open like a razor blade. She had a high forehead, nonexistent breasts, and eyes asgray as a glacier on a cloudy day. She traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower.
Gardener had worked for her before and there had been trouble before. He had become part of the 1988 New England Poetry Caravan in rather grisly fashion . . . but the reason for his abrupt inclusion was no more unheard-of in the world of poetry than it was in those of jazz and rock and roll. Patricia McCardle had been left with a last-minute hole in her announced program because one of the six poets who had signed on for this summerâs happy cruise had hung himself in his closet with his belt.
âJust like Phil Ochs,â Ron Cummings had said to Gardener as they sat near the back of the bus on the first day of
But he had had sense enough not to attend any more demonstrations. That much, anyway. He kept away from them. They were poisoning him. When he got drunk, however, his mindâwhatever the booze had left of itâreturned obsessively to the subject of the reactors, the core-rods, the containments, the inability to slow down a runaway once it really got goingâ
To the nukes, in other words.
When he got drunk, his heart got hot. The nukes. The goddam nukes. It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didnât have to be Freud to figure that what he was really protesting was the reactor in his own heart. When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system. There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired. He sat and played with all the wrong switches. That guy wouldnât be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.
The goddam fucking nukes.
Forget it.
He tried. For a start, he tried thinking about tonightâs reading at Northeasternâa fun-filled frolic that was beingsponsored by a group that called itself the Friends of Poetry, a name which filled Gardener with fear and trembling. Groups with such names tended to be made up exclusively of women who called themselves ladies (most of them of a decidedly blue-haired persuasion). The ladies of the club tended to be a good deal more familiar with the works of Rod McKuen than those of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Ron Cummings, or that good old drunken blackout brawler and wife shooter James Eric Gardener.
Get out of here, Gard. Never mind the New England Poetry Caravan. Never mind Northeastern or the Friends of Poetry or the McCardle bitch. Get out of here right now before something bad happens. Something really bad. Because if you stay, something really bad will. Thereâs blood on the moon.
But he was damned if heâd go running back to Maine with his tail between his legs. Not him.
Besides, there was the bitch.
Patricia McCardle was her name, and if she wasnât one strutting world-class bitch, Gard had never met one.
She had a contract, and it specified no play, no pay.
âJesus,â Gardener said, and put a hand over his eyes, trying to shut away the growing headache, knowing there was only one kind of medicine that would do that, and also knowing it was exactly the sort of medicine that could bring that really bad thing on.
And also knowing that knowing would do no good at all. So after a while the booze started to flow and the cyclone started to blow.
Jim Gardener, now in free fall.
4
Patricia McCardle was the New England Poetry Caravanâs principal contributor and head ramrod. Her legs were long but skinny, her nose aristocratic but too bladelike to be considered attractive. Gard had once tried to imagine kissing her and had been horrified by the image which had risen, unbidden, in his mind: her nose not just sliding up his cheek but slicing it open like a razor blade. She had a high forehead, nonexistent breasts, and eyes asgray as a glacier on a cloudy day. She traced her ancestry back to the Mayflower.
Gardener had worked for her before and there had been trouble before. He had become part of the 1988 New England Poetry Caravan in rather grisly fashion . . . but the reason for his abrupt inclusion was no more unheard-of in the world of poetry than it was in those of jazz and rock and roll. Patricia McCardle had been left with a last-minute hole in her announced program because one of the six poets who had signed on for this summerâs happy cruise had hung himself in his closet with his belt.
âJust like Phil Ochs,â Ron Cummings had said to Gardener as they sat near the back of the bus on the first day of
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