So we walked down the road—nothing happened.
When we returned to the roadster, Smitty’s date was drinking some home brew and his fly was open and his tumescent member stood straight up and I was somewhat appalled. It looked more like a weapon than part of a human body.
But the fire-cat eyes, and the tall and well-formed body counteracted that aversion, and as the year went on, we fell more and more in love yet still without any outlet for the physical side of the attachment, at least none that led to a release.
When spring came, I remember lying on the wide lawn at night and he thrust his hand under my shirt and caressed my upper torso with those big fingers of his. I would always go into my shaking leaf bit and I would always say or do nothing to encourage him.
Obviously, our attachment had begun to trouble the brothers.
Smitty was dropped and he moved disconsolately into a rooming-house. We went on seeing each other without interruption, however, and one night we went to a sort of open-air speakeasy, identical to the one I later described in Orpheus Descending. A long-sloping hill was dotted with little gazebos in which the home brew was served and in which the couples would carry on. The gazebos were lighted by tissue paper lanterns, and one by one these lanterns would be extinguished.
I think we would sometimes turn out our lantern, too, and still nothing happened.
But one night something did.
We got quite high on the brew and we started laughing and hooting together in a crazed condition. Then all at once we raced out of the gazebo and down that long-sloping hill toward the fence at its bottom. I was too drunk to get over the fence. I sprawled in the deep, wet grass and he sprawled on top of me. We sort of wrestled together in an amorous way, that was all. But he said, “Let’s spend the night at my place.”
We went there by taxi and several times, making a joke of it, he attempted to kiss me on the mouth and each time I would push him away.
Sort of dumb, huh? I would say so …
Soon as we entered his bedroom, I puked on the floor.
He swabbed up the vomited brew with a towel and then he removed my clothes and put me to bed. When he got in bed with me he caught me in a tight grip with his arms and legs and I shook so violently that the bed rattled.
He held me all night and I shook all night.
At this point I might say, “Ah, youth,” and possibly get away with it …
After exams (he had flunked) came the night which was known as “Crazy Night”—the night just before the college kids dispersed for home. Smitty and I and some other fellows all piled into somebody’s big car and we drove about town in quest of bootleg liquor. We got quite drunk, all of us. We ran out of booze and drove to a house where home brew was dispensed. Smitty, another boy and I remained in the car while our companions went in the house to make the purchase. While we waited, Smitty dropped his hand on my crotch. My cock stood straight up.
He made a joke of it.
“Tom thinks I’m like Melmoth,” he yelled, removing his hand from its improper position.
And this reference to Melmoth leads squarely enough into an odd chapter-meeting which had taken place in the “house” a few weeks before.
The chapter meeting was secret. Melmoth was not present. There was an atmosphere of spooky solemnity.
One of the officers of the fraternity made a speech. He said he was sure we noticed the absence of Melmoth and there was a reason for it and the reason was such a shocking thing that it was hard for him to mention it.
He said slowly, with a ferocious glare into space, “It has been discovered that Melmoth is a cock-sucker.”
An awed silence.
Then another brother, God bless him, spoke up.
“That isn’t so,” he said. “I’ve been his roommate all year and I know what cock-suckers are and he isn’t.”
The boy who spoke up was a very, very handsome black Irishman. Logically, I should think Melmoth would have attempted to seduce him. But Melmoth was a cool one.
The officer said, “I’m sorry, but we happen to be very certain that it’s true.”
He then told how Melmoth had gotten very drunk one night and had put the make on some boys at another house, and how, having failed with them, he had gone up to the dormitory and made advances to one of our own “brothers.”
Well, it was decided that Melmoth must not only leave the fraternity at once, but also his job and the town. Within a week, he had gone from the scene and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of his subsequent fate.
More about Smitty, now.
About once a month I would hitchhike home to St. Louis—I mean to University City and to the apartment on Enright. It so happened that my sister Rose’s room was available to Smitty and me one weekend, for Rose had gone to Barnes Hospital for a checkup. Her long period of mysterious indigestion—preceding her mental crack-up—had set in.
He and I shared her ivory bed, which was double. And all that night we lay sleepless; he embraced me tightly while pretending to be sleeping and I—the trembling, teeth-chattering bit.
Is a lifetime long enough to hold the regret that I have for that fantastically aborted but crazily sweet love-affair?
I decided yesterday that once again, as I did a few days ago and before then, I would take a role in Small Craft Warnings, the part of Doc, as a way to draw people to the play. After the performance, I escorted Candy Darling to a nearby bistro named P. J. Clarke’s. The party grew to about eight. And during our supper, there, I got a bit high on wine and I said, “You know, I only sleep alone nowadays. You see, I’m such a light sleeper that anyone else in the room would keep me awake …”
“I’m like that, too,” said Candy. We exchanged commiserating glances.
I said a lot of other stuff, mostly about my faith in God and in prayer, but my paradoxical disbelief in an after-existence. I also said that I believed in angels more than I did in God and the reason was that I had never known God—true or false?—but that I had known several angels in my life.
What?
“Oh, I mean human angels,” I explained. And that is true for sure …
My return to “the boards” as Doc last evening was a distinct letdown. I am no longer the capacity draw that I was during my first stint at the New Theatre, when I followed my performances with the “symposiums.” At the first return performance, Tuesday evening, we did have a full house, and a certain exhilaration at being back in action as actor carried me through the evening, despite a few fluffs, with a degree of bravura.
Yesterday evening, though, I was immediately deflated, upon entering the men’s dressing room, by Brad Sullivan, who plays the pathetically boastful stud, Bill. Sullivan has always had a tendency to put me down, at least so it seems to me, and I don’t understand why. I’ve always treated him with an easy and amiable informality, a manner of behavior toward the cast that I’ve tried to establish since the start of rehearsals. I must acknowledge that most of the others have responded in kind, that is, most of the time. Actually I was closest, both in age and in spirit, to that fine actor, David Hooks, whom I have replaced in Doc’s part.
Now my return to the role has been a matter of box-office exigency. During those very hot summer weeks, business had dropped rather badly. Billy Barnes, my present agent, asked me if I would go back in the part since I had proved such a draw that single week when I appeared earlier in the summer.
But the bloom has worn off a bit. The house, last night, had noticeably shrunken in size and perhaps it was apparent to the actors that I was not going to be the draw I’d been before. At intervals, Gene Fanning, who plays Monk, complained about my opening monologue saying that it was not “conversational” enough. This was not quite fair in my opinion, and I was much disenchanted with Gene, who had always been so helpful to me in previous performances. After all, I was laboring under double jeopardy. I had been continually told that I did not project sufficiently and must always “cheat” toward the front of the house. However, I woul
d always relate to Gene by quick glances at him. The stage manager also gave me a bad time. He said that I had left out some important bits. It was true that I had made a couple of one- or two-line cuts in my expanded role, but the cuts were not important and, without Gene’s assistance, I believe that I covered them up and possibly the talky play was improved by these deletions.
Bill Hickey was my only male defender now, though Patrick Bedford was, as always, very friendly to me. But I was—probably out of wounded ego—quite annoyed after the performance and I said, with only a surface jocularity, that from now on I would use the ladies’ dressing room or the separate room devised for Candy Darling—who, being a transvestite, had been given special quarters. She is, by the way, becoming my closest friend in the cast.
I left the theatre in costume, going to Candy’s room before leaving and asking her to go with me to Joe Allen’s restaurant, a night spot for theatre people on West Forty-sixth, which she had mentioned favorably the night before. She dressed up in a glamorous fifties style, with her very becoming blond wig, on which she placed a black velvet cloche hat with brilliants over her forehead.
We must have made quite an entrance at Joe Allen’s, since Candy is over six feet tall and I only five foot six. And I had on my “planter’s hat,” a thirty-dollar Stetson with wide upswept brims which I had bought to wear in the play.
We were cordially received by the manager and we had a nice talk. Candy recited a poem she’d written called “Stardust” and it was very touching. We talked about our private lives, the loneliness of them, our difficulties “with men.” Then I took her home—her duplex apartment next to the Christian Science church (from which she says she gets good vibes)—and when I took her to the entrance of the apartment, she invited me to come up but I declined. I was tired and didn’t want another drink.
My third year at the University of Missouri was relatively colorless. My adored Smitty did not return to school at all, and the roommate I had was of no interest to me. In the spring of that year, I had a poignant and innocent little affair with a very charming girl named Anna Jean. My feeling for her was romantic. She was very pretty, she lived just across the street at the Alpha Chi Omega sorority and she had a delightful sense of humor. I wrote a little poem about her, well, I think several. Here’s one:
Can I forget
the night you waited
beside your door—
could it have been more
plainly stated?—
for something more.
You spoke a rhyme
about young love
while we stood
breathing the rain-sweet
fragrance
of the wood.
I was a fool, not
knowing what
you waited for.
And then you smiled
and quietly
shut the door.
This was to be my final year at this first of three universities. My grades were good in English and one or two other subjects, but I flunked out of ROTC and got poor grades in several other courses.
When I came home, Dad announced that he could no longer afford to keep me in college and that he was getting me a job in a branch of the International Shoe Company.
This job was to last for three years, from 1931 to 1934. I received the wage of sixty-five dollars a month—it was the depression.
Well, truly, I would take nothing for those three years because I learned, during them, just how disgraceful, to the corporations, is the fate of the white-collar worker.
I got the job because Dad had procured for the top boss his position at the Continental Shoemakers branch. (This was still before the poker game and the decline and fall of “Big Daddy.”) Of course the bosses were anxious to find an excuse to get me out. They put me to the most tedious and arduous jobs. I had to dust off hundreds of shoes in the sample rooms every morning; then I had to spend several hours typing out factory orders. Digits, nothing but digits! About four in the afternoon, I was dispatched to the establishment of our main client, J. C. Penney, with great packing cases of shoes for their acceptance or rejection. The cases were so heavy that it was a strain to lift them: I could carry them only half a block before having to set them down to catch my breath.
Still, I learned a lot there about the comradeship between co-workers at minimal salary, and I made some very good friends, especially a Polish fellow named Eddie, who sort of took me under his wing, and a girl named Doretta, with whom Eddie was infatuated. Then there was the spinster at the desk next to mine, little plump Nora. While we worked we carried on whispered conversations about the good movies and stage shows in town and the radio shows such as “Amos and Andy.”
My first year there I came of age and I registered and I cast my first and last political vote. It was for Norman Thomas: I had already turned Socialist, and for reasons already made clear.
Hazel was still in school in Wisconsin. She was singing on the radio with considerable success. I continued to see her mother, Miss Florence, at least once a week.
I started writing at night. I would write and complete one story a week and mail it, as soon as I finished, to the distinguished story magazine called Story. It was the time when the young Saroyan had made a sensation in that magazine with “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” At first the editors encouraged me with little personal notes of criticism. But soon I began to receive those dreadful “form” rejections.
I had Saturday afternoons off from my job at Continental. I had an unvarying regime for those lovely times of release. I would go to the Mercantile Library, far downtown in St. Louis, and read voraciously there; I would have a thirty-five-cent lunch at a pleasant little restaurant. And I would go home in a “service car”—to concentrate upon the week’s short story. Of course all of Sunday was devoted to the story’s completion.
During the weekdays I would work on verse: quite undistinguished, I fear, and upon one occasion I knocked out what is probably the most awful sonnet ever composed. It strikes me, now, as comical enough to be quoted in full.
I see them lying sheeted in their graves,
All of the women poets of this land,
Each in her own inscrutable small cave,
Song reft from lip and pen purloined from hand.
And no more vocal, now, than any stone,
Less aureate, in fact, now, than winter weed,
This thing of withered flesh and bleached bone
That patterned once beauty’s immortal creed.
Rudely death seized and broke proud Sappho’s lyre,
Barrett and Wylie went their songless way.
He does not care what hecatomb of fire
Is spilt when shattering the urn of clay.
Yet, Death, I’ll pardon all you took away
While still you spare me glorious Millay.
My work in the short-story form, then confined to weekends and spurred by strong coffee, was considerably better, and most of these stories are preserved in the archives of the University of Texas.
The onset of my cardiovascular condition occurred in the spring of 1934, and it is a condition which has remained with me ever since, in greatly varying degrees, sometimes not enough to draw my attention but other times sufficient to become an obsession.
The first dramatic onset of this condition, in the spring of 1934, was triggered by two things. First, the quite unexpected marriage of Hazel to a young man named Terrence McCabe, whom she had been dating at the University of Wisconsin. I felt as though the sky had fallen on me, and my reaction was to start working every evening on short stories, overcoming fatigue with black coffee.
One evening I was at work on a story titled “The Accent of a Coming Foot,” perhaps the most mature short story that I undertook in that period. I had arrived at a climactic scene when I suddenly became aware that my heart was palpitating and skipping beats.
Having no means of sedation, not even a glass of wine, I did a crazy thing: I jumped up from the t
ypewriter and rushed out onto the streets of University City. I walked faster and faster as though by this means I could outdistance the attack. I walked all the way from University City to Union Boulevard in St. Louis, expecting to drop dead at each step. It was an instinctual, an animalistic reaction, comparable to the crazed dash of a cat or dog struck by an automobile, racing round and round until it collapses, or to the awful wing-flopping run of a decapitated chicken.
This was in the middle of March. The trees along the streets were just beginning to bud, and somehow, looking up at those bits of springtime green as I dashed along, had a gradually calming effect—and I turned toward home again with the palpitations subsiding.
I did not mention this experience to any member of the family but the following Monday I consulted a doctor who informed me that I had high blood-pressure and a heart defect of unspecified nature.
Still I said nothing to the family and I continued to work each day at the shoe company.
That weekend my sister and I went downtown to see a movie, The Scarlet Pimpernel, with Leslie Howard. I was too tense to pay much attention to the film. Afterwards, we took a service car home, a phenomenon of city transportation in the depression era. It cost fifteen cents a passenger from downtown St. Louis to suburban University City.
As we progressed along Delmar Boulevard toward University City, my tension steadily increased and a very alarming symptom occurred. I lost sensation in my hands, the fingers stiffened and my heart pounded.
When we were approaching St. Vincent’s Hospital, I leaned forward and said to the driver, ‘Please take me to the hospital entrance, I am having a heart attack or a stroke.’
I stayed in the heart ward for a week or ten days. It was when I returned home that Rose had her first mental disturbance of an obvious nature …
I remember her wandering into my small room and saying, “Let’s all die together.”
The suggestion did not appeal to me in the least.