Walt Whiman's Lover Tells How They Met

Walt Whitman, one of the greatest poets of Americana and author of Leaves of Grass, is now openly acknowledged as homosexual, though the man absolutely denied it (understandably so) during his lifetime.

Peter Doyle was conductor on a railroad and met Whitman in Washington, D.C.. While shying away from any specifics, he admits his close relationship to Whitman during an 1895 interview with Whitman’s literary executors, three years after the poet’s death.

“You ask where I first met him? It is a curious story. We felt to each other at one. I was a conductor. The night was very stormy, - he had been over to see Burroughs before he came down to take the car – the storm was awful. Walt had his blanket – it was thrown round his shoulders- he seemed like an old sea-captain. He was the only passenger, it was a lonely night, so I thought I would go in and talk with him. Something in me made me do it and something in me had the same effect on him.

“Anyway I went into the car. We were familiar at once – I put my hand on his knee- we understood. He did not get out at the end of the trip – in fact went all the way back with me. I think the year of this was 1866. From that time on we were the biggest sort of friends. I stayed in Washington until 1872, when I went on the Pennsylvania railroad. Walt was then in the Attorney-General’s office. I wuld frequently go out to the Treasury to see Walt; Hubley Ashton [Assistant Attorney General at the time and one of the founders of the American Bar Association] was commonly there- he would be leaning familiarly on the desk where Walt would be writing. They were fast friends – talked a good deal together.

Peter Doyle & Walt Whitman

 

“Walt rode with me often – often at noon, always at night. He rode round with me on the last trip – sometimes rode for several trips. Everybody knew him. He had a way of taking the measure of the driver’s hands – had calf-skin gloves made for them every winter in Georgetown- these gloves were his personal presents to the men. He saluted the men on the other cars as we passed- threw up his hand. They cried to him,

“’Hullo, Walt!’

“And he would reply, ‘Ah there!’ or something like.

“He was welcome always as flowers in May. Everybody appreciated his attentions, he seemed to appreciate our attentions to him. Teach the boys to read, write, or cypher? I never heard of, or saw that. There must be some mistake. He did not make much of what people call learning. But he gave us papers, books, and other such articles too.

“In his habits he was very temperate. He did not smoke. People seemed to think it odd that he didn’t, for everyone in Washington smoked. But he seemed to have a positive dislike for tobacco. He was a very moderate drinker. You might have thought something different, to see the ruddiness of his complexion – but his complexion had no whiskey in it. We might take a drink or two together- nothing more.  

 

“It was our practice to go to a hotel on Washington Avenue after I was done with my car. I remember the place well – there on the corner. Like as not I would go to sleep – lay my hands on my head on the table. Walt would stay there, wait, watch, keep me undisturbed – would wake me when the hour of closing came. In his eating he was vigorous, had big appetite, but was simple in his tastes, not caring for any great dishes.

“I never knew a case of Walt’s being bothered up by a woman. In fact, he had nothing special to do with any woman except Mrs. O’Connor and Mrs. Burroughs. His disposition was different. Woman in that sense never came into his head. Walt was too clean, he hated anything which was not clean. No trace of any dissipation in him.

“I ought to know about him those years – we were awfully close together. In the afternoon I would go up to the Treasury building and wait for him to get through if he were busy. Then we’d stroll out together, often without any plan, going wherever we happened to get. This occurred days in and out, months running. Towards women, Walt had a good way – he very easily attracted them. But he did that with men, too. And it was an irresistible attraction. I’ve had many tell me – men and women. He had an easy gentle way – the same for all, no matter who they were or what their sex.”

For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst. 

The Golden Trough

The following excised excerpt is from my upcoming novel Sunday Morning at the Peak of Hell. It has been cut because it doesn't fit the narrative of the story any more, but I still think it has potential as a disconnected piece of flash fiction. Enjoy. 

The Golden Trough is open for business! The already fat customers are packed single file into a maze of cold iron bars with flaking lead based white paint. They are whipped along by a cadre of rail thin menial workers wearing cheap Casper the Friendly Ghost masks. The customers huff through one at a time and are then forced to wait in line again for the cashier. They mutter non sequiturs, while looking at their cell phones, or their shoes, or the ceiling, or their fat beer guts, but never at each other or anyone around them. Direct eye contact is verboten!

The toll for this establishment is $31.41. Exact change is required. Outside the customers must display this amount to the thick suited guards, armed with truncheons and Mace. If the customer is off by one cent, they are given a healthy dose of stick and spray and sent on their way. Once the amount has been verified, the customer must swallow it before being let in. When they reach the register, they are slapped on the back of and forced to regurgitate all of the money onto the counter.

The manager is a hirsute man wearing a stained wife-beater shirt, with five chins and surprisingly spindly arms. Stinking of old oil and spoiled tomatoes, he anoints each person who pays on the forehead with a stamp in blue ink, reading “valued customer.”

The inside is one large gleaming white room, with plain patternless, easily stained, linoleum glued to the floor. On the leeward side, a large aluminum tough, spray painted gold, is sunk into the floor, with “friendly” waiters there to attend to whatever is needed. Each of the “friendly” waiters cheeks have been pierced with twine that is pulled back and tied behind the head, forcing the waiter to smile no matter how obnoxious or stupid the valued customer is.

         Three feet in front the trough are a series of holes exactly 14 inches apart. The valued customer crawls (walking is so exhausting) up and positions their anus exactly behind a hole. Then a “friendly" waiter pulls down the valued customer’s trousers and brown streaked underthings (“Anything to make it easier for the customer”), and pulls up two plastic tubes from the hole. One is inserted into the rectum, while the other is slapped on the penis or into the vaginal shunt.

Thus the valued customer isn’t discomforted by having to handle such unsavory bodily functions, which one would not like to think about at the dinner trough. They must merely pause their gorging for a brief moment, flex what muscles are need to get the ball rolling, and automatic suction machines take over the rest of the process.

To cut costs, The Golden Trough only hires one “friendly” waiter per estimated one hundred and fifty customers. So occasionally, the customers must wait. They shift about, getting annoyed, making little huffing noises, but they dare not raise their voice above the low decibel range, lest they are picked out from the herd by The Scum Who Rule. They could start eating, if they wished or even apply the tubes to themselves, but they don’t. They prefer to wait and delay their pleasure, they're paying someone else to deal with these problems, not to do it themselves.

For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst. 

How Much to Research? Am I Wasting My Time and Life?

Currently I am finishing up a book, called Sunday Morning at the Peak of Hell, the setting of which is the great beyond, the bad place where the souls of all the people we don’t like go. It’s a modern day odyssey through the afterlife, similar to the one Dante took in the 11^th century, only updated for modern times. So far it’s taken me five years to complete. Not because of the plot, there isn’t much of one, it’s because every time I had a new historical figure, I feel the need to stop all work and research the hell of that sad soul.

Granted a lot of these characters aren’t exactly well known in the public domain: Decius Mus, Upnastium, Alistair Crowley, Anton lay Vey, Tomas de Torquemada, Hetty Green, Ambrose Bierce, Wilhelm Reich, and John Romulus Brinkley. Recognize any of those names and you get a gold star. However, when I added each of these characters, often knowing very little myself about their lives, I felt the need to stop everything, buy every book I could on them (often this didn’t amount to much more than two books, in two of the cases there weren’t any and I was forced to use Wikipedia alone), and absorb the whole of their lives. Which is why the whole of the book has taken five years to complete.

You’re probably going to laugh when I say that all of these months of research often only resulted in a few extra paragraphs (maybe half a page at most) of text. But I was also trying to absorb the flavor of the historical figure’s personality, so that their dialogue in Hell would seem accurate to the two readers who would read my novel and also know who John Romulus Brinkley or Hetty Green were. For some reason, it needed to be feel right to me.

Now later on, as I’m polishing this work up to actually send to publishers, I’m wondering if I just spent too much time, literally years, on making these obscure characters as real as possible. Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist. Maybe I’ve got OCD. Maybe I’ve been wasting my time and no one will give a damn.

As a final taste test, I gave the latest draft to my wife. She read over the manuscript and shrugged.

“It’s pretty good,” she said.

“What did you think of the depiction of Ambrose Bierce?”

“Oh, is that a real person?”

Ah well….