He just waved his hand. “Get in her pants for me, Zagg.”
I laugh through my nose and started off. I saw G.J. move his palmed hand—blessing good-by—okay.
I roamed off, negotiated whole Lowells walking down the main arterial mainline vein of Lowell, Moody Street now Textile Avenue, sweeping down on clacking shoes to go find my gory-dowry. “G.J.’s wrong as day.”
Night night. Impatient to wait for the bus, I hit Kearney Square on foot a minute ahead of it and jump into the South Lowell bus for roaring wailing rides with the great driver dumping all his passengers most of em in the last streets now just has to bang through out of town tar construction trolley torn-up sewage under outlying streets and blast along just missing holes, posts, fences, to the car barns outside town now turned slick redecorated garage—eying his watch, timetable, his wild interests in time coinciding with mine as I leap off the bus at Massachusetts Street just underpass and be sent skittering on little feet as he continues his roaring journey, goes up the road blinking big red lights—The void of the universe surrounds the lonesome walker—I negotiate along the banks of the Concord, actually just walking in the middle of the street and seeing it through little bungalows, back orchards, abrupt little river down to the little shore, nothing big about the Concord but full of acorns—
Maggie’s not down at the end of the street with her dress flapping and us singing Deep Purple as in the lonesome romance of winter when we’d melted together under frozen stars—now molten faced stars of easy summer were blearing on our cold love—no more bad cars passing us on good roads—“Jacky,” she’d said, “- – — ―,” untranslatable love words best to keep secret if you can remember em at all—
“But now she aint standing in no road,” I’m telling myself, hurrying up, the light that made G.J. and I see as we talked about her now faded in the west where she was hidden—
“I think she went down through that broken fence, Jack, down that lane—the kids are swimming or talking about swimming tonight.” This is Maggie’s kid sister, smiling bashfully at me; in a year they’d be saying she had crushes on me, others, but right now still a little girl and writhing around a post to play hopple dee skotch with Jamie ma mop, appata pippity pappety poo—
37
After that it was just a question of getting on with the ambitions that my family and I had decided for my life so, I went to New York with my mother and we saw Rolfe Firney at Columbia who’d written after my old high school football coach Tarn Keating had touted or scouted me to his old friend of the Boston dog races Lu Libble, Lu Libble the big Columbia coach, both of them in the “ribbon committees” of the great crazy dog racing night of electrified rabbits in the huge darknesses near Suffolk Downs with its giant gas tank so huge that I keep seeing it by dog tracks and by the sea in my life—I was going to make my pipe-smoking golden-windowed dormitory studies in this great university of the world. I was so proud that when Boston College and Coach Francis Fahey later of Notre Dame tried to get me the following summer I didnt change my mind but stuck to my idea of New York, Columbia, Horace Mann prep school, despite the fact that my poor father wanted me to go to Boston College because it would secure his recent new job in Lowell in a printing plant that did all the jobwork for Boston College, Emil Duluoz once more popular and solid—nevertheless both my Ma and I had minds set on Columbia—The additional details were that of a “football talent search,” another story—
Rolfe Firney received us politely, showed us the athletic offices where the faces of the gentlemen seemed to me immensely and richly and beautifully important, men with white hair, grave, grand, all well-dressed, opulent, courteous. I proudly brought my mother to see all this before she returned to Lowell. She’d traveled to New York to arrange for my room and board with her stepmother in Brooklyn where I was going to live while attending Horace Mann prep thereby riding the subway every morning from Booklyn-of-the-red-heart all the way to Broadway and 242nd Street a total insane twenty miles—I liked it though, because people are interesting in the subway when you’re seventeen and you’ve never savored the big city. I was a really contented kid to see myself at last among the great mountains of glittering buildings. Horace Mann School was built in ivied Tom Brown gray granite on top of a cliff of solid rock—behind it was a beautiful athletic field of green grass—a gym with vines—You saw the immortal clouds of the Bronx floating in the Indian sky and dont tell me it isn’t an Indian sky. Below the cliff toward Yonkers lay the vast Van Cortlandt Park for the beautiful decathlon athletes stretching their white aristocratic legs in fields of shrubbery and foliage Jews and Italians of a new heroism of another sort of Kingdom Lowell.
Superstitious of midnight the first night we slept at grandmother’s in Brooklyn I lay awake for hours listening for the creak of the ghosts of New York in the house, hearing faintly sounds on the Brooklyn street like lovers late in summer city night giggling in each other’s necks by the moon of shipping; it was an altogether different Lowell, and so all opening-out into the big megaphone hole of the world from those Rudy Vallee lips of Merrimack Square and Maine that I knew that it was getting lost like a marble ball rolling down eternity in a bowling alley opening out to darkness down to infinity rockets cells telepathic shock tape.
I lay in bed thinking I was going to be a big hero of New York with rosy features and white teeth—an idiomaniac post-Iddyboy incarnation of the American Super Dream Winner, Go Getter, Wheel,—and white snowy scarf and big topcoat with corsaged girls in tow and no teetotaller I but big journalistic champion of off Times Square (like The Little Theater) as I had seen newspaper tragedists in B movies talking over beers in stale barrooms of neon winking Manhattan night hatbrims lowered like Marc Brandel or Clellon Holmes heroes brown taverns thru the pane glass written Bar & Grille you see the blackracked giant Neon Sign of the Owner of The Paper—Cigar Mouth Mann, grandson of Horace, hardhittin tough jesuitical editor, mainline artist, phlegm screamer of silver blary screens of the Rialto all the times that winter between Maggie and High School I’d played hooky in but now I’m in New York viewing the real thing from a scared bed in Brooklyn, seventeen. Gulp. “G.B. Mannpram, Pub. of the Manhattan Manner Post Evening Star,” planes are flying in with serum, and I’m sitting in the bar heroically brooding over the way I just smashed the waterfront gang and G.B.’ll give me a raise (I see G.J. raising his leg to burp, “All right J.D., the job is yours, b-r-up, and dont cut me out of any of that offshore oil of yours”—) and I head for my penthouse, bored with the loose overcoats, shroudy hatbrims of big alcoholic newspaper new york and change casually into evening clothes (dinner jacket with velvet lapel glossy like London fires in a grate, which shine on it making vellum pools of rich wine-bottomless substance on my wealthy breast), and say hello to my wife, idly—
Through her balcony window you can see New York skyline in the starry night lace-dim behind sheer curtains, the sherry and the cocktails are ready, we can hear a piano tinkling from the Gershwins upstairs, and our fire crackles.
Oh how our fire crackles—how lovely the swan of her throat—I lie bedded in black night sending up white puffs of dialogue balloon for my gold encarvened dreams—Dear Angel Gabriel broods over me, listening. (Logs from old Adirondack in the penthouse, my hunting gun is there, early Jack London rich Frisco heroes of the penthouse have invaded New York via Lowell Mass. the viaduct from landing beaches and cold pines of the St. Lawrence River, over the mer the Breton fisher boys are snarling up the nets with salt cracked hand and have to do it all over again—) My whirls of world-seeing race around the room, I gulp to see vast mothers of light swarming around, and to hear my brother tree in no more wilderness outside in Brooklyn scratch a fence in a little Brooklyn August breeze. My dream has in it a wife beautiful beyond belief, not Maggie, some gorgeous new blonde gold sexpot of starry perfection with lovely lace neck, soft long skin, inturned mouth top—I pictured the gorgeous Gene Tierney—and the voice that went with it
, Kitty Kallen, Helen O’Connell, a young beautiful American girl getting excited in your arms—
Next day, in any case and aside from the validity of these dreams, my mother and I strolled arm in arm across the grass of the Horace Mann field—bleachers, goalposts, the English Gothic roofs, the headmaster’s own rose-covered cottage made of stone—a Kingdom military fort overlooking other worlds—already at seventeen I’d formed the idea to some day draw maps and write the history of another world in another geography of another Africa, another planet of Africas, Spains, pains, shores, swords—I had little knowledge of the world I lived in.
It was a rich school for young Jews ranging from age of eight all the way to sixteen, eight forms in all, you could see them arriving now at the school in limousines with their parents to give it the once over. It was high, warm, beautiful. “O Ti Jean how nice it’ll be in this little paradise! Oh boy! Now it’s making sense!” my mother said decisively. “Now we’ve got something to be proud of—you’re going to be a real little man in this place, it’s not just old regular schoolteachers or one of those dirty old places your father went to in Providence one time and always talked about it and now he wants you to do like him—non, go here, and go to Columbia, that’s the best idee.” In her head my mother saw herself living in New York walking in the big lights of the great exciting world and the great shows, rivers, seas, restaurants, Jack Dempsey, Ziegfeld Follies, Ludwig Baumanns in Brooklyn and the great stores of Fifth Avenue in New York—Already, in my little childhood, she’d brought me to New York to see the subways, Coney Island, the Roxy—I’d at age five slept in the tragic subway of buried people shaking from side to side in the black air of the night.
I had a scholarship at Horace Mann, paying most of my tuition; the rest was up to me, my father, my mother; I helped get a lot of publicity for the school in the newspapers in the fall—there were 10, 12 other guys like myself—“ringers” from high schools everywhere—bruisers, we murdered everybody except Blair (0–6), it was a scandal—the bruisers, they too’d had their loves, tempestuousnesses and sadnesses of sixteen.
“Now you’re all set,” said my mother as we walked among the beautiful clean halls, “we’re gonna buy you a nice new coat to look nice in this little place that’s so cute!” My mother was positive in her secret heart that I was to become a big executive of insurance companies. Just like when I made my First Confession, I was a little angel of pure future.
38
She went back, everybody exchanged huge letters—To prepare myself I fixed my room at my grandmother’s with dusty old books from the cellar—I seriously sat in the flagstone yard of little flowers and woodfence sometimes with a drink like ginger ale and read Lust for Life the life of Van Gogh I’d found in a bin and watched the great buildings of Brooklyn in the afternoon: the sweetish smell of soot and other smells like steam of a great coffee urn beneath the pavements—sitting in the swing—at night the buildings shining—the far train of great howls on the profound horizon—fear grabbing me—and with good reason.
I started football practice but sometimes played hooky to see shows all alone on Times Square, drank huge milkshakes for 5¢ impossibly aerated like cotton you drank illusion of liquid like the taste of New York—I took long walks in Harlem with hands clasped behind my back, staring at everything with great interest in roaring September dusks, no idea of the fearful complexities that would arise later in my mind about “Harlem” and blackskinned people—I got letters from G.J., Scot, Lousy and the Vinny—G.J. writing:
All fooling aside though Zagg, I just cant seem to get used to the idea of you being away. Sometimes I come out of Parent’s Market and say “Well I guess I’ll go to Jack’s and listen to the 920 Club,” then I remember you’re away. In one way, I’m glad you’re in New York though Zagg, because down here it’s worse than the Sahara Desert. By that I mean it’s dead. Same old thing day in and day out. It’s monotony at its highest. I’m going to school as a P.G. this year Zagg, or at least if I dont change my mind I’m going. My Ma promised me she would try her hardest to send me to college if I did. The way things are now it’s a very faint possibility, but I’m hoping for the best. That’s about all Jack except don’t forget to give your Mother my best regards. [He thought she was still in New York with me.] And here’s hoping you have the best of luck in everything.
Your Pal
GUS
Scotty in his brown house kitchen sat down at his mother’s round table by the stove and wrote: “Hi Zagguth ye babe: Well I’m—“and talked about his work—“so when I go on days again or better still—“and then talked about Lousy in a way that made me see it had rained on a lot of things since Maggie’d spurned me in sweet Lowell, a bleary new barrel was filling, and all would drown in it—
By the way Lousy left Machinist and is now looking for a job as a foundry man. He’s wacky. He ought to stick to Machinist but Zagg did you ever see a guy so bashful to ask for a job. This morning I learned that the Diamond Tool needed a man for a telephone job. I went and got Lousy and when we got down to see the boss you know big office Lousy wanted to turn back, because he was afraid the job was to be nights when he didnt even know, Zagg, so I had to make believe I needed a job and Kid Sam followed me in then we filled out the same old application and Belgium never let out a word. I’m telling you Jack he’s got to talk his way into a job and if he acts this way he’ll be a goner. I’ll have to bang it into his head. Well I’ll hear from you yet Jack and, you also from me so I’ll say good night now as it is approaching the second hour of the Thursday and in about 15 hours I get $29.92 for my last weeks’ pleasure. Your pay, SCOTTY, Write Soon.
Iddyboy, from Connecticut where he’d gone to work: ‘He thee boy!”—
Vinny wrote like he talked straight from the scene—
He tried it everyway he could, after we got through with her she still wanted more, Zagg please believe me I never seen a woman so hot in all of my life, a female rabbit and you know her very well. B.G. is her initials and she lives next door to me I dont want to write her last name down on paper but you know who I mean. Lousy and Scot were gone to show the unlucky stiffs. Well that’s all in a lifetime I guess. Albert Lauzon still goes to the Social Club at half past 4 in the afternoon so he can be sure to be there when the joint opens up good old Belgium—[Lousy’d started to shoot pool in earnest in green night]. Well you old screwball I guess that’s all for this time answer soon. Hope that you get lots of tail during the time you will be out there my saying is “there’s nothing like a very good fresh piece to refreshen yourself.”
VINNY
Turn Over Other side
P.S. (A HORRIBLE UNPRINTABLE P.S.—SIGNED SHASSPERE)
Have pity on the next girl you take on.
39
I went through the football season with a bang, there were big explosions of fiesta on the fields of folly and autumnal golden screaming glory—and the 7th of November all of a sudden when I was established and already vexed, mixed, blest, guffawing in the immense things of my new life, new gangs, new New Year’s Eves—when on little envelopes for memo I’d write “Keresky job” or “Garden City Defense” (study of the opposing team’s diagram) or “$5 Lab fee” or “write math formulas in subway”—and had about fifty crazy screaming friends who climbed the steep hill from the subway to the palace of the school in the red mornings always haunted by new birds—voila—bang—comes a letter from Maggie, and on the back of the envelope (in words as dreamy as an old touchdown before dead men) it says: “Maggie Cassidy, 41 Massachusetts Street, Lowell Mass.”
Jack,
Right off I am going to tell you who it is, it’s Maggie. Just in case you want to tear this letter up.
It must seem funny to you, to have me writing to you. But that’s beside the point. I am writing to find out how you are and how you like school. What is the name of the place anyhow.
Jack wont you try to forgive me fo
r all I have done to you. I suppose you are laughing at me but I am serious really.
About 2 weeks ago I met your mother and sister downtown. I just spoke I would have stopped and talked if we had been going together at the time, but I felt ashamed, if they had even asked me if I wrote to you I wouldnt know what to say.
Jack cant we make up I am so terrible sorry for all I have done.
I dont know how it is but some of the fellows you know have been trying to date me up as soon as they found out we broke up such as Chet Rave and some I would much rather not mentioning. I like Chet but not to go out with. He told me your address after much teasing. Bloodworth has been askin for you also.
Well Jack so long if you dont answer I will know you dont forgive me.
MAGGIE
In the study class, thinking, but also seeing the funny face of Hunk Guidry our center on the team, I passed him the note to read, to show him I had girls, he said no. He wrote on the envelope: “Some shit! You’re a heartbreaker just a Casanova.”
I wrote to Maggie a little later.
40
I invited her to the spring prom. After a few preliminary letters, and I’d learned all about the way things went with their big program of dances.
In November I went home, hitch hiking with my madcap friends Ray Olmsted and John Miller; John Miller, Jonathan actually, a horn-rimmed genius-knobbed hero of the New York Central Park West thickcarpet, his sister played piano, at dinner his lawyer father’d say “Mens sana in corpore sano—” “A healthy mind in a healthy body”—which was one of my proudest sayings about myself and coming from an aged lawyer—Ray Olmsted was the tall good-looking Tyrone Pemberbroke of American Love Magazines, handsome, a flat hat, a pipe—They didnt get along with each other, they were separate friends of mine; we had lost adventures on an old New England road, hasseled through New Haven, proceeded to Worcester—dark roads of early hitch hiking with a turkey dinner at the end of the string.