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To Deen Kogan, with thanks for all the support she has given to the arts over the years
Chapter
1
THERE WAS A time in my life when I woke every morning with fear and anxiety and did not know why. For me, fear was a given I factored into the events of the day, like a pebble that never leaves your shoe. In retrospect, an adult might call that a form of courage. If so, it wasn’t much fun.
My tale begins on a Saturday at the close of spring term of my junior year in 1952, when my father let me use his car to join my high school buds on Galveston Beach, fifty miles south of Houston. Actually, the car was not his; it was lent to him by his company for business use, with the understanding that only he would drive it. That he would lend it to me was an act of enormous trust. My friends and I had a fine day playing touch football on the sand, and as they built a bonfire toward evening, I decided to swim out to the third sandbar south of the island, the last place your feet could still touch bottom. It was not only deep and cold, it was also hammerhead country. I had never done this by myself, and even when I once swam to the third sandbar with a group, most of us had been drunk.
I waded through the breakers, then inhaled deeply and dove into the first swell and kept stroking through the waves, crossing the first sandbar and then the second, never resting, turning my face sideways to breathe, until I saw the last sandbar, waves undulating across its crest, gulls dipping into the froth.
I stood erect, my back tingling with sunburn. The only sounds were the gulls and the water slapping against my loins. I could see a freighter towing a scow, then they both disappeared beyond the horizon. I dove headlong into a wave and saw the sandy bottom drop away into darkness. The water was suddenly frigid, the waves sliding over me as heavy as concrete. The hotels and palm trees and the amusement pier on the beach had become miniaturized. A triangular-shaped fin sliced through the swell and disappeared beneath a wave, a solitary string of bubbles curling behind it.
Then I felt my heart seize, and not because of a shark. I was surrounded by jellyfish, big ones with bluish-pink air sacs and gossamer tentacles that could wrap around your neck or thighs like swarms of wet yellow jackets.
My experience with the jellyfish seemed to characterize my life. No matter how sun-spangled the day might seem, I always felt a sense of danger. It wasn’t imaginary, either. The guttural roar of Hollywood mufflers on a souped-up Ford coupe, a careless glance at the guys in ducktail haircuts and suede stomps and pegged pants called drapes, and in seconds you could be pounded into pulp. Ever watch a television portrayal of the fifties? What a laugh.
A psychiatrist would probably say my fears were an externalization of my problems at home. Maybe he would be right, although I have always wondered how many psychiatrists have gone up against five or six guys who carried chains and switchblades and barber razors, and didn’t care if they lived or died, and ate their pain like ice cream. Or maybe I saw the world through a glass darkly and the real problem was me. The point is, I was always scared. Just like swimming through the jellyfish. Contact with just one of them was like touching an electric cable. My fear was so great I was urinating inside my swim trunks, the warmth draining along my thighs. Even after I had escaped the jellyfish and rejoined my high school chums by a bonfire, sparks twisting into a turquoise sky, a bottle of cold Jax in my hand, I could not rid myself of the abiding sense of terror that rested like hot coals in the pit of my stomach.
I never discussed my home life with my friends. My mother consulted fortune-tellers, listened in on the party line, and was always giving me enemas when I was a child. She locked doors and pulled down window shades and inveighed against alcohol and the effect it had on my father. Theatricality and depression and genuine sorrow seemed her constant companions. Sometimes I would see the cautionary look in the eyes of our neighbors when my parents were mentioned in a conversation, as though they needed to protect me from learning about my own home. In moments like these I’d feel shame and guilt and anger and not know why. I’d sit in my bedroom, wanting to hold something that was heavy and hard in my palm, I didn’t know what. My uncle Cody was a business partner of Frankie Carbo of Murder, Inc. My uncle introduced me to Bugsy Siegel when he was staying at the Shamrock Hotel with Virginia Hill. Sometimes I would think about these gangsters and the confidence in their expression and the deadness in their eyes when they gazed at someone they didn’t like, and I’d wonder what it would be like if I could step inside their skin and possess their power.
The day I swam through the jellyfish without being stung was the day that changed my life forever. I was about to enter a country that had no flag or boundaries, a place where you gave up your cares and your cautionary instincts and deposited your heart on a stone altar. I’m talking about the first time you fall joyously, sick-down-in-your-soul in love, and the prospect of heartbreak never crosses your mind.
Her name was Valerie Epstein. She was sitting in a long-bodied pink Cadillac convertible, what we used to call a boat, in a drive-in restaurant wrapped in neon, near the beach, her bare shoulders powdered with sunburn. Her hair wasn’t just auburn; it was thick and freshly washed and had gold streaks in it, and she had tied it up on her head with a bandana, like one of the women who worked in defense plants during the war. She was eating french fries one at a time with her fingers and listening to a guy sitting behind the steering wheel like a tall drink of water. His hair was lightly oiled and sun-bleached, his skin pale and free of tattoos. He wore shades, even though the sun was molten and low in the sky, the day starting to cool. With his left hand he kept working a quarter across the tops of his fingers, like a Las Vegas gambler or a guy with secret skills. His name was Grady Harrelson. He was two years older than I and had already graduated, which meant I knew who he was but he didn’t know who I was. Grady had wide, thin shoulders, like a basketball player, and wore a faded purple T-shirt that on him somehow looked stylish. He had been voted the most handsome boy in the school not once but twice. A guy like me had no trouble hating a guy like Grady.
I don’t know why I got out of my car. I was tired, and my back felt stiff and dry and peppered with salt and sand under my shirt, and I had to drive fifty miles back to Houston and return the car to my father before dark. The evening star was already winking inside a blue band of light on the horizon. I had seen Valerie Epstein twice from a distance but never up close. Maybe the fact that I’d swum safely through a school of jellyfish was an omen. Valerie Epstein was a junior at Reagan High School, on the north side of Houston, and known for her smile and singing voice and straight A’s. Even the greaseballs who carried chains under their car seats and stilettos in their drapes treated her as royalty.
Get back in the car and finish your crab burger and go home, a voice said.
For me, low self-esteem was not a step down but a step up. I was alone, yet I didn’t want to go home. It was Saturday, and I knew that before dark my father would walk unsteadily back from the icehouse, the neighbors looking the other way while they watered their yards. I had friends, but most of them didn’t know the real me, nor in reality did I know them. I lived in an envelope of time and space that I wanted to mail to another planet.
I headed for the restroom, on a path between the passenger side of the convertible and a silver-painted metal stanchion with a speaker on it that was playing “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Then I realized Valerie Epstein was having an argument with Gra
dy and on the brink of crying.
“Anything wrong?” I said.
Grady turned around, his neck stretching, his eyelids fluttering. “Say again?”
“I thought maybe something was wrong and y’all needed help.”
“Get lost, snarf.”
“What’s a snarf?”
“Are you deaf?”
“I just want to know what a snarf is.”
“A guy who gets off on sniffing girls’ bicycle seats. Now beat it.”
The music speaker went silent. My ears were popping. I could see people’s lips moving in the other cars, but I couldn’t hear any sound. Then I said, “I don’t feel like it.”
“I don’t think I heard you right.”
“It’s a free country.”
“Not for nosy frumps, it isn’t.”
“Leave him alone, Grady,” Valerie said.
“What’s a frump?” I said.
“A guy who farts in the bathtub and bites the bubbles. Somebody put you up to this?”
“I was going to the restroom.”
“Then go.”
This time I didn’t reply. Somebody, probably one of Grady’s friends, flicked a hot cigarette at my back. Grady opened his car door so he could turn around and speak without getting a crick in his neck. “What’s your name, pencil dick?”
“Aaron Holland Broussard.”
“I’m about to walk you into the restroom and unscrew your head and stuff it in the commode, Aaron Holland Broussard. Then I’m going to piss on it before I flush. What do you think of that?”
The popping sound in my ears started again. The parking lot and the canvas canopy above the cars seemed to tilt sideways; the red and yellow neon on the restaurant became a blur, like licorice melting, running down the windows.
“Nothing to say?” Grady asked.
“A girl told me the only reason you won ‘most handsome’ is that all the girls thought you were queer-bait and felt sorry for you. Some of the jocks told me the same thing. They said you used to chug pole under the seats at the football stadium.”
I didn’t know where the words came from. I felt like the wiring between my thoughts and my words had been severed. Cracking wise to an older guy just didn’t happen at my high school, particularly if the older guy lived in River Oaks and his father owned six rice mills and an independent drilling company. But something even more horrible was occurring as I stood next to Grady’s convertible. I was looking into the eyes of Valerie Epstein as though hypnotized. They were the most beautiful and mysterious eyes I had ever seen; they were deep-set, luminous, the color of violets. They were also doing something to me I didn’t think possible: In the middle of the drive-in, my twanger had gone on autopilot. I put my hand in my pocket and tried to knock down the tent forming in my fly.
“You got a boner?” Grady said, incredulous.
“It’s my car keys. They punched a hole in my pocket.”
“Right,” he said, his face contorting with laughter. “Hey, everybody, dig this guy! He’s flying the flag. Anyone got a camera? When’s the last time you got your ashes hauled, Snarfus?”
My face was burning. I felt I was in one of those dreams in which you wet your pants at the front of the classroom. Then Valerie Epstein did something I would never be able to repay her for, short of opening my veins. She flung her carton of french fries, ketchup and all, into Grady’s face. At first he was too stunned to believe what she had done; he began picking fries from his skin and shirt like bloody leeches and flicking them on the asphalt. “I’m letting this pass. You’re not yourself. Settle down. You want me to apologize to this kid? Hey, buddy, I’m sorry. Yeah, you, fuckface. Here, you want some fries? I’ll stick a couple up your nose.”
She got out of the car and slammed the door. “You’re pathetic,” she said, jerking a graduation ring and its chain from her neck, hurling it on the convertible seat. “Don’t call. Don’t come by the house. Don’t write. Don’t send your friends to make excuses for you, either.”
“Come on, Val. We’re a team,” he said, wiping his face with a paper napkin. “You want another Coke?”
“It’s over, Grady. You can’t help what you are. You’re selfish and dishonest and disrespectful and cruel. In my stupidity, I thought I could change you.”
“We’ll work this out. I promise.”
She wiped her eyes and didn’t answer. Her face was calm now, even though her breath was still catching, as though she had hiccups.
“Don’t do this to me, Val,” he said. “I love you. Get real. Are you going to let a dork like this break us up?”
“Goodbye, Grady.”
“How you going to get home?” he said.
“You don’t have to worry about it.”
“I’m not going to leave you on the street. Now get in. You’re starting to make me mad.”
“What a tragedy for the planet that would be,” she said. “You know what my father said of you? ‘Grady’s not a bad kid. He’s simply incapable of being a good one.’ ”
“Come back. Please.”
“I hope you have a great life,” she said. “Even though the memory of kissing you makes me want to rinse my mouth with peroxide.”
Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I watched Valerie walk through the cars to the boulevard, her beach bag swinging from her shoulder and bouncing on her butt. Grady was standing next to me, breathing hard, his gaze locked on Valerie, just as mine was, except there was an irrevocable sense of loss in his eyes that made me think of a groundswell, the kind you see rising from the depths when a storm is about to surge inland.
“Sorry this happened to y’all,” I said.
“We’re in public, so I can’t do what I’m thinking. But you’d better find a rat hole and crawl in it,” he said.
“Blaming others won’t help your situation,” I said.
He wiped a streak of ketchup off his cheek. “I was hoping you’d say something like that.”
Chapter
2
MY FATHER AND I went to noon Mass the next day. Even though my mother had been reared Baptist, she did not go to a church of any kind. She had grown up desperately poor, abandoned by her father, and had married a much older man, a traveling salesman, when she was seventeen. She hid her divorce from others as though it had cheapened and made her unworthy of the social approval she always sought. Each Sunday she made a late breakfast for us, and my father and I drove to church in his company car. We seldom spoke on the way.
I never understood why my mother and father married. They didn’t kiss or even touch hands, at least not while I was around. There was a loneliness in their eyes that convinced me prisons came in all sizes and shapes.
During Mass, I could smell the faint scent of last night’s beer and cigarettes on my father’s clothes. Before the priest gave the final blessing, my father whispered that his stomach was upset and he would meet me across the street at Costen’s drugstore. When I got there, he was drinking coffee at the counter and talking about LSU football with the owner. “Ready for a lime Coke?” he said.
“No, thank you, sir. Can I use the car this afternoon?” I said.
“May I.”
“May I use the car?”
“I was planning to go to the bowling alley,” he said. “There’s a league today.”
I nodded. My father didn’t bowl and had no interest in it. The bowling alley was air-conditioned and had a bar.
“Come with me,” he said. “Maybe you can bowl a line or two.”
“I have some things to take care of.”
My father was a handsome man, and genteel in his Victori
an way. He never sat at the dining or the breakfast table without putting on his coat, even if he was by himself. He’d lost his best friend in the trenches on November 11, 1918, and despised war and the national adoration of the military and the bellicose rhetoric of politicians who sent others to suffer and die in their stead. But he drank, and somehow those words subsumed and effaced all his virtues. “You dating a new girl?”
“I don’t have an old one.”
“So you’re changing that?” he said.
“I’d like to.”
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know her real good.”
“Real well.”
“Yes, sir.”
I took the city bus up to North Houston. The previous winter a friend of mine had pointed out a one-story oak-shaded Victorian house with a wide porch on a residential boulevard, and said it was the home of Valerie Epstein. I couldn’t remember the name of the boulevard, but I knew approximately where it was. When I pulled the cord for the bus driver to stop, I felt my stomach constrict, a tiny flame curling up through my entrails.
I stood in the bus’s fumes as it pulled away, and stared at the palms on the esplanade and the row of houses once owned by the city’s wealthiest people, before the big money moved out to River Oaks. I was deep in the heart of enemy territory, my crew cut and dress shoes and trousers and starched white shirt and tie the equivalent of blood floating in a shark tank.
I started walking. I thought I heard Hollywood mufflers rumbling down another street. On the corner, a woman of color was waiting for the bus behind the bench, her purse crimped in her hands. She looked one way and then the other, leaning forward as though on a ship. There were no other people of color on the boulevard. These were the years when nigger-knocking was in fashion. I tried to smile at her, but she glanced away.
One block later I recognized Valerie’s house. There were two live oaks hung with Spanish moss in the front yard and a glider on the porch; the side yard had a vegetable garden, and in the back I could see a desiccated toolshed and a huge pecan tree with a welding truck parked on the grass under it. Behind me I heard the rumble of Hollywood mufflers again. I turned and saw a 1941 Ford that had dual exhausts and Frenched headlights and an engine that sounded much more powerful than a conventional V8. The body was dechromed and leaded in and spray-painted with gray primer. One look at the occupants and I knew I was about to meet some genuine northside badasses, what we called greasers or sometimes greaseballs or hoods or duck-asses or hard guys or swinging dicks.