Last Notes from Home
“Are you into imagination, Frederick?” Robin once asked me. Now how about that for a rhetorical question, Alissa, I mean directed to the dude I call Exley who prides himself on an imagination he likes to think runs the gamut from the utterly morbid and diseased to the rarefied and heady heights of the generous and eloquent? And that is how it all began. We had taken a long swim on Waikiki, had washed the sand and sea salt from us at the pool shower, had repaired to 1602, and had no sooner entered the room when Robin threw that one at me.
“Well, I would most certainly hope so.”
“No, I mean, you know, Frederick, sexual imagination?”
On that day Robin had on a 1972 Olympic tank suit, blue with red, white, and blue stripes running vertically from her crotch to the V of her breasts, one of those featherweight garments that seem to weigh no more than stealthy fog moving among trees, and I had on His Grace’s kelly green trunks with the Boheena crest stitched to the right thigh. Apparently I was supposed to be the coach of the Olympic swim team, hilarious in itself because, though I had in youth been a gifted swimmer—having grown up on the river and Lake Ontario—Robin could now spot me fifty meters and beat me in the hundred-meter freestyle. And I was further, according to Robin, supposed to be screwing all the other girls on the team but poor, poor Robin and as we had now found ourselves alone in the locker room for the first time Robin insisted she needed to unwind from the excruciating rigors of training as badly as the other girls and, great tears of self-pity in her eyes, demanded to know what was so repugnant about her? Robin of course provided me with my own “rational” answer. It was because I found her so breathtaking, intelligent, and high-minded that I was utterly terrified of getting into it with her and finding myself without the ironfisted will to unshackle myself and hence find myself “hooked for life.”
Now Robin approached, rubbed her breasts against me, and coyly demanded to know what would be the matter with that, what, what, what, could I not, Frederick, envision a life together? Mrs. Robin Exley she again and again lolled about her salivating palate. To make a long story infinitely longer, dear old Al, Robin even made me lug the goddamn king-size mattress from the bed onto the carpeting, suggestive, I expect, of those locker room mats swimmers often rest upon. Because distaff swimmers seem to be getting younger every year (one famous coach was quoted as implying you had to get them before they got into guys, that once they started screwing their brains became scrambled and they wouldn’t win you doodly-squat, which must have gone down marvelously with Ms. Steinem and Billie Jean and the girls), Robin was only fourteen or fifteen, a virgin, natch, I had of course to go through some painstaking foreplay, be ever so delicate and gentle about penetration, but by the time it was over Robin was crying stuff like, “Oh, this is ever so much better than a blue ribbon! No, it’s better than a bronze! Better than a silver! God, God, God, Frederick, it’s better than a fucking gold!”
After we’d lain in each other’s arms for some time, we rose, removed our shirts, Robin picked up her alligator balloon bag, we went into the bathroom, took a shower together, lathering each other, toweled ourselves dry, and I returned to the bedroom, poured myself a stiff vodka and grapefruit juice and sat down to wait. I never knew, Alissa, what garments Robin had in her bag. What I did know was that we’d long ago exhausted her erotic repertoire, the games had become repetitious to the point—fun though at one time they’d been—of driving me round the bend; and I am now forced to point out to you, Alissa, that despite the incredible hurt we have over the years heaped on one another, in the good times, in the very good times, in the lovely, enchanted times, we never, never found the need to fuck anyone but each other, warts and all.
When Robin at last emerged from the bathroom she had her hair in pigtails, she wore a lemon-yellow short-sleeved cashmere sweater, a steel-gray pleated skirt with a slit running from hip to hem and a great outsized decorative gold safety pin joining the slit at the thigh, one of my generation’s garments, dark green cabled knee socks, and loafers with fucking pennies in them. Now listen closely, Al, and let me explain the way Robin had taken a perfectly truthful story I told her about an adolescent sexual experience and how she had transformed it; for, as you can well imagine, Robin would keep me up half the night beseeching, imploring, nay, fumingly entreating me to relate, in unsparing detail, every sexual experience I’d ever had, did so until I went quite mad with zany preposterousness and gave her some genuinely wondrous stuff straight from the top of my septic dome. Can you guess, for example, what I told her about you? Do you know those quarter-inch cubes bartenders are now packing into rock glasses? As any drunk knows, Al, and drunks know everything, with these cubes the sleazebags can have their pourers set at half an ounce, give you very little mix, so that whenever I’m in a place that uses these I insist on both a free pour into a shot glass, as well as a bottle of mix on the side, insisting I like to mix my own. Well, ma’am, I told Robin you liked to have your vagina plugged with these cubes before intercourse.
“What in the world does that do, Frederick?”
“Christ, Robin, what a sexual novice you are! A guy can keep a hard-on for about six hours that way!”
And I’ll be goddamned, Alissa, if Robin didn’t insist on trying it. You know of course what happened. The frightful hog shriveled to the size of a sun-baked grape, and I had to explain it away by saying there was apparently some mysterious and unaccountable anatomical difference between you and Robin. Yeah, I know, Alissa, thanks a lot, Ex.
Be that as it may, when I was a hotshot high school basketball player, one night after a game I came up from the locker room with the guys, was handed a sealed envelope by a girl I didn’t know, I put it into my overcoat pocket, and the guys and I piled into a couple cars and drove to the top of Washington Street hill to the Circle Inn, where they weren’t finicky about checking draft cards—the legal age was then eighteen and most of us were seventeen and eighteen in any event—and where you could get a bottle of Genesee for twenty cents, so that if a guy had three bucks he was, as we then said, “holding the heavy.”
Halfway through my first beer, I took the note over to the light of the jukebox, discovered it was from a very attractive classmate I’d never known had any feeling for me one way or another, she said she was babysitting for a wealthy couple who’d gone to Syracuse for the evening and if after the game I came over I could do with her what I must. After I’d finished a couple Ginnys, I had one of the guys drive me into the city, naturally making him drop me six blocks from my destination so he wouldn’t know where I was going, then walked to the address I’d been given in the note.
What I could “do with her what I must” turned out to entail—oh, ecstasy!—being allowed to kiss her breasts, play a little “stink finger”—I wasn’t even allowed to remove her panties, had to slide my hand under them—and I received a hand job. Halfway through this, she asked if I had a handkerchief and when I said no, she fled to the kitchen, came back with a still damp dishrag, and all the time I was coming into it, she had the dishrag strangled fiercely over the head of my penis, her head was turned away, she was making nauseous ugh sounds and over and over, repeating “disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, ugh—”
Now listen, Alissa, the only reasonably accurate thing Robin drew from this story was what the girl was wearing, the fact that my generation was without the pill and hence deathly afraid of becoming pregnant or inducing pregnancy, and by mental gymnastic leaps across the years Robin transposed my rather grotesquely amusing tale a generation or two to her more “enlightened” adolescence. First Robin would give me a blowjob, so she could keep her teeny-bopper outfit on, I’d then lift her steel-gray wool skirt, remove her panties, perform cunnilingus, after which she’d orally bring me up again, just happen, at age seventeen mind you, to have a ribbed Trojan and some K-Y jelly handy—I never heard of K-Y until I was forty and a fag friend, an entertainer I much admired, told me about it—and then we’d have anal intercourse to prevent pregnancy, all this supposed t
o have taken place in Watertown fucking New York in the forties! Listen, Al, coming from my generation I never had the guts to get down between the lovely old thighs and take a look at one until I was twenty-five, never performed cunnilingus until I did so with you, I was twenty-eight then, you were seventeen and would never be so lovely again, no offense intended because you are now so much lovelier in other ways. So as we now began on the bed, I was naked next to a clothed Robin, for her imagination was such that, thank God, she never required that I get myself up in whatever in the hell it was I wore in high school, and she began blowing me, having forever and forever and forever been denied the truth that I’d been blown frequently in high school. But that is another story, one that one does not tell to loonies like Robin, for in that story there is sorrow beyond measure, grief so deep it resides in those darkest pits where damning life abides, not a little unavoidable black humor and a guilt so terrible that there are times, after all these years, I can hardly bear to think upon it.
PART FOUR
Blowjob
1
Her name was Cassandra “Cass” Mclntyre, Cassandra of course being a healer of men, and she was an orphan and lived in the Jefferson County Home for Children on outer State Street in Watertown. I know now, in my fifties when with any luck and any smarts one might just begin to acquire that elusive thing called wisdom, that I loved her more than any woman I ever knew, more than Alissa, more even than dear, loony Robin. Of course I then did not know that I’d end by both denying and betraying Cass, or that backing a high school football line and loving to whack and put hurt on an opponent have nothing whatever to do with courage.
Long before I heard the Brigadier was involved with Cass, I had had a thing for her that had begun in junior high school when I was in the ninth grade and Cass in the eighth. It was, I expect, not unlike a case of angina where, when the patient walks too rapidly or goes abruptly up a staircase, a steady burning ache below the sternum begins, an illness that might easily be rectified by the afflicted’s losing twenty pounds and throwing away his cigarettes. When one learns, as I did when I first asked about Cass, that he is unable, be he the most iron-willed dude in Christendom, to shred either the weight or the weeds and must continue to live with the moroseness of a valetudinarian, it is no happy discovery.
Cass was, I was told, an orphan and lived at the orphan’s home on State Street. In what way was I told? In a way of course that emphatically signaled any further discussion of Cass as a human being, least of all a lass to be wooed, was precluded if not boringly time-consuming. In the first place, and this is what was so finally and formidably tacit among the guys, the girls at the Home were so rigorously supervised and confined that the idea of getting them alone long enough to hold hands was an insurmountable one. Even as seniors in high school, if one could persuade one’s mother to write a note to the head of the Home seeking permission to escort one of the girls to a dance, one had to have her back to the Home by 10 P.M., have her back, in effect, when the dance was only beginning.
And the idea of making such a request of one’s mother was an even more insurmountable one. Lord, how easily and smugly mothers transferred the stigma of abandoning parents to those faultless children, in their ignorance not in the least realizing, my mother included, that what they were really saying was that if they had to put up with their spouses and four spewing brats the rest of the world could damn well abide by the same schismless rules. Looking back, and I say this in utter sincerity, I doubt I had a single friend during the forties and fifties whose parents wouldn’t have split a dozen times—I know mine would have—had they not been bound together by an evangelical trepidation of a vengeful God visiting his wrath for violating their marriage vows and, foremostly, being blistered together by a Depression poverty so exacerbating they simply hadn’t the wampum to split. If the postwar affluence has done nothing else, then, it has allowed a man or a woman the exhilarating freedom to say, “Toodle-oooo, asshole, I can’t hack this shit one second longer,” a gesture, I hasten to add, that two ex-wives and uncountable girls have visited upon me.
So from the ninth grade to my senior year in high school, I learned to live with the burning ache, never in my wildest imagination dreaming that the angina would be cured by the cause of it, Cass herself. Although it is doubtless physiologically impossible, I cannot remember Cass changing in the four years from the day, in the halls of South Junior High, I first became smitten with her to the day I denied and betrayed her. In everyone’s past there is the pipsqueak adolescent who, like the Jolly Green Giant, sprouts eight inches over the summer holiday and is miraculously transmogrified from a perky runt to the star who leads his school to the state basketball championship. But what happened to Cass between the seventh grade, when I was totally oblivious to her, and the eighth grade was even more miraculous. Cass became a woman.
And, as I have said, and though I’m certain that by the eleventh grade the lines of her figure must have grown more alarmingly feminine, her flesh more pulpously appetizing, I stared at Cass so much during those four years—and I could hardly have been alone in this furtive, gnawing watching—it was as impossible to detect changes as it is for a spouse to detect the day-to-day weight loss of his scrupulously dieting mate. In an orange-and-white checkerboard cotton dress with a white dickey collar and a little orange bow, she came at me in the halls, her mountain of books cradled in her arms and quashed firmly to her lovely new-formed breasts, disguising them from guys buoyant with an inarticulated screaming lust. Thinking her a new addition to the school, and wanting to lay groundwork for a blissful future, I stared at her in the hope that she would look my way that I might play Joe Good Guy and give her a welcoming nod. As I gazed, I detected a habit Cass never lost in all the time I knew her. Deep in long thoughts, and I can understand now that Cass was beleaguered, distraught, stunned by how foolish—nay, downright simpleminded—her recent anatomical changes had rendered the young men about her, Cass’s response to perplexity was to lay the tip of her tongue on her lower lip and grip it with her upper, so that it looked the tip of a juicy peach suspended between puckered moist lips. When Cass came abruptly up from her heavy thoughts, a child drowning in a new sexuality that was frightening her beyond the bounds, her lovely blue eyes gone alarmingly wide at finding herself back in the pedestrian world of rowdy classmates and clanging lockers, and I gave her my nice-guy, strictly aboveboard, nothing-up-my-sleeves smile of greeting, not only Cass’s light copper-colored face but her entire body, ears and throat, dimpled knees and sturdy calves, seemed to diffuse instantly with the blood of self-conscious shyness, she nodded in response, the delectable peach was withdrawn and her enticing lips formed a word that sounded very like—surprise!—”Fred.”
It is now two, perhaps three, weeks later and, having ascended Thompson Boulevard on my bicycle, I am riding over Park Drive toward my home on Moffett Street. A walking Cass, whom I’ve met at the top of Thompson Boulevard near Gotham Street, is now an invited though reluctant passenger on the crossbar of my silver-gray balloon-tired beauty. In the two or three weeks since I learned, with that “Fred” spoken out of her moist lips, that Cass knew who I was, I have also learned that she is an orphan and has been since at least kindergarten when she enrolled in the Thompson Park Grammar School where the orphans went. Moreover, and talk about putting her out of reach, my informant told me Cass was so nice, and shy, she found it impossible to say hello to a guy without her face diffusing with blood.
Unless they were very special and trusted kids, which Cass obviously was, the Home kids had to return to the orphanage directly on school’s closing. Hence, coming from junior jayvee football practice, I was therefore mildly surprised to find Cass making her way home so long after the final bell. She was, I would learn, vice-president of her eighth-grade class and had attended a meeting of officers. If anyone from the Home saw her ensconced on my crossbar, Cass told me, she wouldn’t in the future be able to attend those meetings. Still, the meeting had run over, Cass w
as already late, abruptly she was on the crossbar, and I was the knight errant pumping like mad and flying over Park Drive, intent on getting the princess home before the foreboding stroke of midnight.
To say that during the past days I had in my mind fabricated such a chance and isolated encounter with Cass is putting it mildly; literally, I had thought of nothing else, even to forming in my mind those things I might say to most impress Cass. What those things were, I do not now recall. At fourteen, one is a long way from perfecting the high and ruthless art of guile, and I expect that something as preposterous as describing the rowdy, impoverished, argumentative, disorderly Exley clan as an adoring, high-minded, brilliant, dedicated, serene menage—to Cass, who of course had no family—was as far as I’d carried my mental courtship. Whatever, and however practiced and stylish this encounter was to have been, I ended saying nothing whatever.
Because Cass was in such a desperate rush, forcing me to lean into her as I strainingly pumped the pedals, my chin at her shoulder, her flaxen hair piebald with patches of honey at my face, her biscuity odor at my nostrils, the wind catching our hair and bringing her blouse so taut to her breasts she may as well have been nude, the blood now permeating her lovely copper-colored throat, the awful burning angina ache in my lower chest and upper abdomen, then suddenly the most insidiously monstrous erection imaginable, followed almost instantly, and I could not and still cannot credit it, by an effusive—on and on it went—seminal emission into my undershorts and light khaki trousers, the warm damp viscous fluid permeating the light khaki and leaving a dark stain half as big as a washcloth, yes, however practiced my wooing was to have been, I said nary a word, my face and my ears and my throat and my hands as charged with the blood of embarrassment as were those of Cass.
How to describe those four years, years in which my antisocial behavior became so pronounced that even after all this time, when I haven’t had a lapse or spell in four decades, it is all but impossible for me to enter a golf foursome with strangers, such is the terrible trepidation of having my long-dormant illness stand abruptly revealed in all its odious horror. Out of morbid curiosity, I have in the intervening years read what little literature (hardly the stuff of The Reader’s Digest) I could find in the subject. However, I so infrequently displayed the classic symptoms of the malaise that I can’t honestly say, see, I can cite case histories A, B, C, D, ad infinitum to prove I am at one with other men and as blameless as those dopey teenagers who contract mononucleosis. Hence, let me describe the last spell I had before taking up with Cass and describe this not because it was typical of my interludes but because it manifests those symptoms that would allow me to be at one with humanity.