Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

  Because you know, wifey, the first time I saw the sea? I was three years old and somebody took me to Salisbury Beach, I guess, or Hampton, I remember somebody offering me five dollars if I’d get into my bathing suit and I refused. In those days I used to lock myself in the toilet. Nobody was going to see me part naked in those days. But I stood there and put my little three-year-old hands to my brow and looked deep into the horizon of the sea out there, and it seems I saw what it was like, the actual waving gray, the Noah’s Ark inevitably floating on it, popping up and down, the groan and creak of it, the lash of rigs winging, the very centerfoam splowsh and lick: I said to myself then: ‘Ah soliloquizer, what royal wake out there, what heave boom smack . . . etc. What pain in salt and door?’

  As my poor mother huddled in the parlor of her new cottage she watched me walk right out into the sea and begin to swim. I rose high up with the crest of the waves and then sank way down into their valleys below, I tasted the salty spray, I smashed my face and eyes onward into the sea, I could see it coming, I laughed aloud, I plowed on, bobbed up and down, got dizzy with the rise and fall of it, saw the horizon in the gray rainy distance, lost it in a monster wave, put out for a boat which was anchored there and said ‘We’re Here.’

  Begod and BeJesus we were. I got on the boat and bobbed there awhile, side, side, stern, stern, looked back, saw my Ma waving, laughed, and jumped into the sea. Underneath I deliberately stared deepward to see the darker gray there . . . Great day in the morning dont ever do it, during a rainstorm dont ever get down to the bottom of the sea and see what it looks like further in toward Neptune’s inhappy clous (‘nails’).

  Three silver nails in a blue field.

  III

  And the next day, to add to the woes of my mother and father, who are trying in one way or another to be happily unpacking, it’s sunny, I put my swimming trunks on again and go out swimming straight a mile toward the nearest sandbar. I get out on the sandbar (having swum the Merrimack up and down along the boulevard many times for practice), and one afternoon swam pine drunken Pine Brook about a hundred times up and down, a few miles or so, for practice, come to the sandbar and take a nap in the early September sun. Come dusk the water’s lapping at me toes. I get up and swim back toward our cottage, which I can see a mile away. Slow, slow, always swim slow and let your head lean in the waves like in a pillow. There’s my poor Paw out there on the seawall hands to eyes looking for his drowned son. He seems me coming. ‘Whoopee! he yells to Angie my Ma. ‘Here he comes!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There he is! That’s him. Coming real slow!’ And I pull up and go in the house and wonder what they were scared about. ‘It’s time tomorrow for you to go to Columbia and start your sophomore year, now stop fooling around. Go down to the corner, it’s only a mile, buy the evening paper, some ice cream, cigarettes, cigars, here’s the money . . .’

  ‘We’re going to have a good time here,’ says Ma.

  ‘When there’s storms the sea’ll be looking for your parlor,’ I shoulda warned her.

  It was just a summer resort, empty in fall and winter, and really that Sound can kick up in December to March. A big mansion along the rocks a half mile down the beach was the home of Helen Twelvetrees the old actress. My Ma actually talked to her later on.

  Bill Keresky you remember from HM, and Gene Mackstoll, and another guy came in a sports car to fetch me to take me to New York for the new year. To pack my suitcase I went up in the attic to fetch certain things and my both feet fell down thru the phony ceiling and I landed my crotch right on a beam and cried. I got over it in a halfhour. We got in the car, kissed the folks goodbye, and went to the City.

  They drove me straight to Baker Field, the Columbia U training house, and there was Lu Libble working over his plays at the blackboard in the diningroom, the footballers sitting around watching and listening, everybody giving me dirty looks because I was a day late. Upstairs, bunks. Morning, breakfasts, saltpeter so we wouldnt get horny, showers, taping, aching muscles, hot September sun tacklings of silly dummies held by assistant coaches and idiots with cameras taking our pictures dodging this way or that.

  What were the chances of Columbia this year? Nothing, as far as I could see, since the only real football player on the team, Hank Full our quarterback, had joined the Marines just a day ago and was leaving. Thackeray Carr wasnt bad. Big Turk Tadzic of Pennsy was ready but they had to make contact lenses for him, an end. Big Ben Zurowsky got sore at me after scrimmage because I evaded his attempted tackle and picked me up in the showers and held me up sky high at arm’s length saying ‘You lil bastart.’ Then he glowered at Chad Stone who was too big to pick up. It was Chad’s job and mine to take out Kurowsky on what is called the ‘high-low’, that is, ‘you hit him high and I’ll hit him low’, I hit Kurowsky low and Chad hit him high. Chad was 6 foot 3. I was 5:8 1/2. We got Kurowsky out of there some of the time. He was 6 foot 4 and weighed 240.

  They could have had a good team but the war was coming up.

  And then in practice I began to see that good old Lu Libble wasnt going to start me in the starting lineup but let me sit on the bench while Liam McDiarmid and Spider Barth, who were seniors, wore out their seniority. Now they were shifty and nifty runners but not as fast or strong as I was. That didnt matter to Lu Libble. He insulted me in front of everybody again by saying ‘You’re not such a hot runner, you cant handle the KT-79 reverse deception’ – as if I’d joined football for ‘deception’ for God’s sake – ‘first thing you know, you with your big legs’ – they werent that big – ‘I’m going to make you a lineman.’

  ‘Now run and do that reverse.’

  With my eyes I said ‘I cant run any faster these first two days, my legs are sore.’

  Never mind, he said with his eyes, putting me in mind of the time he made me run on a broken leg for a week.

  At night, after those meaningless big suppers of steak and milk and dry toast, I began to realize this: ‘Lu Libble wont let you start this year, not even in the Army game against your great enemy Art Janur [who pushed me out of the showers when I was a kid in Lowell High but got his come-uppance from Orestes Gringas], and not even maybe next year as a junior, he wants to make a big hero out of his Italian Mike Romanino, well Mike is certainly a great passer but he runs like Pietryka like an old cow. And Hank Full’s leaving. The hell with it. What’ll I do?’

  I stared into the darkness of the bunkrooms thinking what to do.

  ‘Ah, shucks, go into the American night, the Thomas Wolfe darkness, the hell with these bigshot gangster football coaches, go after being an American writer, tell the truth, dont be pushed around by them or anybody else or any of their goons . . . The Ivy League is just an excuse to get football players for nothing and get them to be American cornballs enough to make America sick for a thousand years. You shoulda stuck to Francis Fahey . . .’

  Well I cant remember what I was thinking altogether but all I know is that the next night, after dinner, I packed all my gear in my suitcase and sauntered down the steps right in front of Lu Libble’s table where he was sitting with his assistant coaches figuring out plays. My bones were rasping against my muscles from the overtraining. I limped. ‘Where you going Dulouse?’

  ‘Going over to my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn and dump some of this clothes.’

  ‘It’s Saturday night. Be back by tomorrow at eight. You gonna sleep there?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Be back by eight. We’re going to have a light calisthenics, you know the part where you get on your back and turn your skull to the grass and roll around so you wont get your fool neck broken in a game?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Be back at eight. What you got in there?’

  ‘Junk. Presents from home, dirty laundry . . .’

  ‘We got a laundry here.’

  ‘There’s presents, letters, s
tuff, Coach.’

  ‘Okay, back at eight.’

  And I went out and took the subway down to Brooklyn with all my gear, whipped out a few dollars from the suitcase, said goodbye to Uncle Nick saying I was going back to Baker Field, walked down the hot September streets of Brooklyn hearing Franklyn Delano Roosevelt’s speech about ‘I hate war’ coming out of every barbershop in Brooklyn, took the subway to the Eighth Avenue Greyhound bus station, and bought a ticket to the South.

  I wanted to see the Southland and start my career as an American careener.

  IV

  This was the most important decision of my life so far. What I was doing was telling everybody to go jump in the big fat ocean of their own folly. I was also telling myself to go jump in the big fat ocean of my own folly. What a bath!

  It was delightful. I was washed clean. The bus went down to Maryland and I joyed like a maniac just because I was looking at ‘real Southern leaves’. A Negro from Newark kept talking to me in the seat, about how he won at pool in Newark and lost something in poker and now was going to see his dying Paw in Virginny. I wished I had enough money to go to Virginia but my ticket stopped at Washington DC. There, on a dismal street full of mailboxes and Negroes leaning against them, I got a room full of bedbugs, heat, couldnt sleep, paced around, and in the morning took the bus back to New York, where I transferred to New Haven so I could go home and see Pa. I was on the road for the first time.

  He was mad as hell but I explained to him how I wasnt supposed to start the opening game or any games as far as I could see. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I saw that from the start, same thing as Lowell High. You could have been a great football player Jacky but nobody wanted to give you a chance. If I had money and could slip em a few bucks . . .’

  ‘Never mind, the war’s coming up, who cares now?’

  ‘I care!’

  ‘I dont . . . if all these kids I grew up with are going out there, like Dicky Hampshire, what the heck, I feel like a shit.’ (In French, that word, merde, is never a bad word, it’s just the truth.) (Buy that.)

  ‘Well what are you gonna do now?’ says Pa.

  ‘I heard there’s a job in a local rubber plant for a tire hemmer or whatever they call it . . .’ That night in my room, as Ma and Pa slept, I played Richard Wagner as I gazed at the moonlighted Sound. I little dreamed I’d be sailing that Sound one day soon. It was the ‘Magic Fire Music’ from Die Walküre but I had sinus trouble and a kind of virus and almost choked to death.

  In the morning I showed up at the rubber plant, got the job, spent all morning in the noisy rubber-dust joint rolling up tires and intrimming them with some kind of gum, got disgusted at noon and walked away and never asked for any morning’s pay. I went down in the afternoon, in the lengthening shadows of Long Island Sound, saw cottages on little hills overlooking distant coves, and came to a fairyland playground where children, among autumn leaves, were riding hobbyhorses to the tune of ‘In the Good Old Summertime’. Tears came into my eyes. The great American football player hero and hero miler and hero world’s champ boxer and writer and playwright was just a sad young man like Saroyan with curly hair surveying child’s delight in the gloaming of the sun . . .

  Ah, poetic. I went home and told Pa I couldnt take that job. He said ‘There’s a postcard here for you, from Hartford Connecticut, from your little buddy Joe Fortier, says he can get you a job as a grease monkey there.’

  ‘Okay I’ll go tomorrow.’

  ‘It isnt that we dont want you in the house . . . but I have to walk a mile to that printing plant every morning, your mother remember was wiping tables in the Waldorf Cafeteria in New Haven last week while you were s’posed to be making the football team. Here we whack along in the same pickle as ever. Whey dont you people ever do right?’

  ‘We’ll see about that. I’ll get that grease monkey job in Hartford and show you.’

  ‘Show me what you little punk?’

  ‘I’ll show you that I’m goin to become a great writer.’

  ‘No Duluoz was ever a great writer . . . there never was such a name in the writing game.’

  ‘It’s not a game . . .’

  ‘It’s Hugo, Balzac . . . It’s not your fancypants Saroyan with his fancy titles.’

  But in the morning, before breakfast, Pa was out there on the beach picking up clams and enjoying the fresh Breton air. Ma was gaily making bacon and eggs. I had my bag packed and all I had to do was walk a mile or so and take the trolley to downtown New Haven, hop the railroad, and go to Hartford. The sun shone on the seawall.

  You’d think after showing them how to swim I coulda shown them how to swim all the way.

  V

  In Hartford I got the job, it’s not an important section of the book except for the fact it was the first time I had a room of my own, in a cheap rooming house on Main Street, Hartford, and rented an Underwood portable typewriter, and when I came home at night tired from work, after eating my nightly cheap steak in a tavern on Main Street, came in and started to write two or three fresh stories each night: the whole collection of short stories called ‘Atop an Underwood’, not worth reading nowadays, or repeating here, but a great little beginning effort. Outside my room’s window was nothing but a bare stone wall which later put me in mind of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ who had a similar view out of his window and used to say ‘I know where I am.’ Cockroaches, too, but at least no bedbugs.

  I had no money in particular until I got paid the fifteenth of the month. As a consequence I fainted of hunger one day in the Atlantic Whiteflash Station where I was greasemonkeying with a kid called Buck Shotwell. He saw me out on the floor of the garage. ‘What the hell’s the matter? Wake up.’

  I said ‘I havent eaten in two days.’

  ‘For God’s sake come to my mother’s house and eat.’ He drives me to his mother’s house in Hartford and she, bowlegged and fat and kind by the table, gives me a quart of milk, beans, toast, hamburg, tomatoes, potatoes, the works. Buck loans me two bucks to carry me over till the fifteenth. Both of us are wearing coveralls covered with grease.

  When the management of the stations discovers I’m not such a hot grease monkey, knowing nothing about the mechanics of cars, they put me on the gas pump to pump gas and wipe windows and break open oil cans and put a spout in em and pour oil into the oil hole. In those days greasers only had to lift little oilcup covers and pour in, but you had to know where all the little oilcups were located. Meanwhile, it was autumn, ‘old melancholy Oktober’ I called it: ‘There’s something olden and golden and lost / in the strange ancestral light / There’s something tender and loving and sad / in Oktober’s copper might . . . Missing something . . . sad, sad, sad / End of something . . . old, old, old, /’ it was beautiful with falling red leaves aching, and then old silver November moved in, bringing fainter flavors and grayer skies, snow you could smell.

  I was happy in my room at night writing ‘Atop an Underwood’, stories in the Saroyan-Hemingway-Wolfe style as best as I could figure it at age nineteen . . . Tho sometimes longing for a girl. One day I was resting on the grass in front of our gas station in East Hartford and I saw a sixteen-year-old girl go by with dimples behind her knees, in the flesh where the knee bends, in back, and followed her to the lunchcart and made a date for her to meet me in the woods outside the Pratt & Whitney Plant. We just talked and watched airplanes go by. But we made the mistake of leaving the wood together at five o’clock exactly when the Pratt & Whitney workers were all coming out in cars, toot toot, whoo whoo, yippeeeeeee, and all that, and we both blushed. A few nights later in her aunt’s home I made the blushes worth a count. Also, at the time (no trouble), me and Shotwell were shifted to another gas station at Farmington and there came two girls across the street, he said ‘Come on Jack’, jumped in the car, we chased them, picked them up, went out to a November russet meadow and made the car bounce all afternoo
n: the ridiculous concerns of grease monkeys, I’d say.

  VI

  Careening in the American night. Then comes Thanksgiving and I’m lonesome for home, turkey, kitchen table, but have to work five hours that day, but here comes a knock on my cockroach door with the stone wall view: I open it: it’s big idealistic curly-haired Sabbas Savakis.

  ‘I thought I would join you on this day which is supposed to have some kind of significance concerning thanks.’

  ‘Very good, Sab.’

  ‘Why did you quit Columbia?’

  ‘I dunno, I just got sick of bumping around . . . It’s allright to be an athlete if you think you’re going to get something out of college but I just dont think I’ll get anything out of college . . . I set a new record there cutting classes, as I wrote you . . . Phooey, I dunno . . . I wanta be a writer . . . Look at these stories I been writing.’

  ‘It’s just like a sad Burgess Meredith movie,’ says Sabby, ‘you and I alone for Thanksgiving Day in this room. Shall we go out and see a movie?’

  ‘Sure, I know a good one down at the Cameo.’

  ‘Oh I saw that one.’

  ‘Well I didnt.’

  ‘Which one didnt you see?’

  ‘I didnt see the one at the Olympia.’

  ‘Well you go to the Olympia and I’ll go to the Cameo. Is that the way to abandon old Sabby on Thanksgiving Day?’

  ‘I’m not saying that, let’s go eat first . . . whatever movie you wanta see, go see it. I’m gonna see what I want.’