Other than Cass’s twice performing fellatio on me in that lightless balcony, I remember very little else and certainly nothing of the movie. On the first occasion I recall that with my thumb and forefinger I fiercely strangled my penis at my scrotum and that Cass kept prying my fingers away and mock-slapping my hand, as if demanding I allow her mouth to control the act. Then, too, when the ejaculation was imminent, I touched her lightly on the head, leaned over, and whisperingly stammered. “I’m… I’m going… I’m going to do it.” Although I couldn’t see well, when Cass looked momentarily up at me I sensed a movement indicating a so-what shrug and she was back at her business. Never, never shall I be able to draw a true analogy or accurately describe my unbridled terror, my immeasurable anguish, my boundless pleasure. I think of a memsahib of Empire experimenting with a wog servant while her husband, Captain Smathers-Welles, is out on the plains of India shooting dacoits, the stricken bewilderment and heart-pounding terror diffusing the wog’s entire being, realizing that if caught hell be chopped into bits and fed to pariah dogs at the same time he is utterly unable to stay himself from sitting there paralyzed, stunned by enormities beyond his comprehension, ravished by the damnably excruciating pleasure.
When Cass had finished, obviously having taken my semen into her, she rose and as if it were the most natural thing in the world picked up her pocketbook, took out a stick of gum, offered me one (I declined), sat, and almost instantly was laughing at Red Skelton. She sat as far from me as possible, as if she were trying to make a shoulder impression in the plaster of the wall, and I found myself sitting as far from her as I could, two strangers warily circling one another and trying to decide if it would be worth pursuing a friendship. But this is not, I think, entirely accurate. No doubt Cass knew exactly who I was, another goofy awkward male. What was needed, Cass seemed to be saying, was time for a rube like me to get used to who Cass not only was but who she had now become in my eyes. Apparently Cass decided I had had time enough. Fifteen minutes before the movie ended, she was back on the WATERTOWN FIRE DEPT. slicker at my feet.
But I never learned to live with that night. No one who didn’t live through the forties and fifties has any comprehension of the tyrannical precepts, decorums, rules, and restrictions with which we were instilled and to have fellatio performed on one as well as to perform it was a good deal more damning to the participants than a simple loss of innocence, it was absolutely, believe me, nothing less than a fall from grace and a consignment to eternal hellfires. Moreover, and this is what would so shamefully beriddle me over the years, Cass saw me as some kind of jock-guru, like all converts she was embracing the faith with an outrageous passion that would have disarmed those born to the belief, metaphorically and literally she humbled and humiliated herself at my feet and with a kind of terrifyingly pathetic and gaspingly oral gratitude—that is what I loathed, the suggestion of gratitude—took my body’s sap into her as though it were the nectar of some reverent being rather than the sperm of a conniving wretch.
4
Unable to rise from bed the following morning, I thought I’d finally done myself for sure. In those days, one must understand, The Big Three of things proscribed for athletes were cigarettes, alcohol, and masturbation. “It saps the energies, boys. You may as well swim the English Channel, then try and play a football game.” (As an ironical aside, and in the cyclical nature of things, coaches now prefer their athletes to have healthy sex lives, and pros take their wives and girls to Super Bowls for the week preceding the game.) Be that as it may, whatever I’d done had assuredly sapped my energies. When my mother took my temperature, she found it pushing an alarming 103, she disappeared and returned momentarily with some clean flannel pajamas and told me the family doctor, Stubby, was on his way. Stubby verified the temperature, then spotted the white silk sock, splotched now with purplish blood-and-pus stains. Taking it gently off, Stubby took one look and said, “Jesus Christ!” then, “Look, would you get me a pan of boiling water, Charlotte?” When Charlotte had gone, Stubby ordered me to take off my pajama bottoms. Reluctantly, I did so, timorously terrified that Stubby, no man for mincing words, could in some miraculously gnomic way detect what had taken place the previous evening.
“Jesus Christ, look at that!” And Exley, in his appalling ignorance, dwelled lingeringly on his limp dick, looking to no avail for lipstick stains. I cried, “What?”
“Can’t you see the red line running up the inside of your leg and the swelling in your right nut? The goddamn infection has gone to your right nut!”
When Charlotte returned, Stubby scrubbed the foot clean with soap and water, followed again by swabbing the area with cotton balls dipped in alcohol. This done, Stubby gave me a shot, explained to Charlotte that some patients reacted badly to the medication (it occurs to me it was my first shot of penicillin, the miracle drug of World War II), and told to her to call immediately if any one of a number of symptoms showed up. He also told her to keep my foot elevated and exposed on a pillow, gave her a bottle of capsules I was to take at three-hour intervals with orange juice, and said he’d return at noon to give me another shot. When he did return and he and Charlotte were ascending the stairs, I heard him say, “You know what that crazy bastard said to me, Charlotte?”
“Who?”
‘The coach, the coach. He tracked me down at the hospital making morning rounds, demanded I be interrupted, then ordered—not asked, mind you—me to have Fred ready to play by Saturday. I just laughed and hung up. Ex’ll be lucky if he’s running by Christmas. I mean, is he crazy, or what, Charlotte?” I smiled, thinking it was the second time in a week I’d heard the coach referred to as crazy, the first being Cass’s parroting Uncle Farley’s opinion.
Penicillin was indeed a miracle drug. The infection had pretty much cleared up by the following Monday, the telling red line running up the inside of my leg vaporized, the swelling in my nut abated. The fever, however, had laid heavily on me through Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. For those days I was only able to take juice, milk, cocoa, and beef and chicken broth with crackers and my weight loss was eight pounds. Jack Case, the sports editor of The Water-town Times, announced the games on the radio and though I tuned in the game, and because it was that wavering fluctuating tricky time before a fever breaks, I fell asleep before the end of the first quarter and that night had to ask my sister, a cheerleader, to discover we’d beaten Onondaga Valley. Early that night a number of players, including Hotdog Wiley, my substitute, who was considerably bigger and stronger than I, paid me a courtesy visit prior to their pilgrimage to the Circle Inn. Hotdog was kind enough to say he’d taken an awful beating that day and sure hoped I’d be back by Thanksgiving. A girl named Cass, my mother informed me, called religiously twice daily, inquiring after me. My sister, as curious as most sisters, continued to wonder aloud in my mute ironically smiling presence what Cass that could be? She said, “It can’t be Cass Mclntyre. She’s way too beautiful and way too nice for the likes of you.” I took counsel of my silence, which of course infuriated my sister. Siblings never understand what suitors see in their pain-in-the-ass brothers and sisters, in the way it took me years to understand what women saw in the Brigadier.
When I returned to school and practice (Stubby told my mother he’d assume no responsibility for the latter goddamn madness), the coach weighed me, had my game uniform taken in, and, unwilling to leave it to chance, in practice made me take calisthenics and run full out. It didn’t matter much. Thanksgiving Day against Lackawanna, the field was wet, cold, and muddy, precisely the field I abhorred, I was yet so weak and inept I was replaced by Hotdog at the end of the first quarter; and for the last three quarters I stood on the sidelines shivering in a Golden Cyclone parka, the occasional burst of rain matted my hair to my head, and knew, despite my continuing with basketball, that I was saying good-bye to all this, the rain and the cold and the infections and the pain and the brutality. After we’d had the family Thanksgiving meal, I called Cass, she invited me over and said sh
e’d pick me up as she had a terrific surprise for me.
I wasn’t surprised. It was a postwar Lincoln coupe, precisely like Cookie’s save that it was a blindingly snow-trooper white and was, Cass squealed, “registered in my own name!” What did surprise me was that Fairley was at the house and that they were just preparing to eat, having been joined by a beautiful dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties, one of Cookie’s possible replacements I had no doubt. Knowing I’d already eaten, Fairley told me to join them anyway and asked Cass to get me a bottle of Genesee 12-Horse Ale. Howie said, “You stunk today, Exley.” “Howie!” Cass cried. “I told you before we went to the game Fred had a bad foot. God, you’re rude. Isn’t he rude, Uncle Fairley?” “What’s the matter with it?” “Fred doesn’t want to talk about it when we’re eating.” Howie was an insistent little bastard. “For cryin’ out loud, Ex,” Fairley said. “Take ‘im into the kitchen and show it to ‘im. Then maybe we can eat in peace. Maybe Howie’ll learn what football is all about.” When we returned to the table, Howie, not only a brat but a born ballbuster, said, “You ought to see it, Fairley. It’s got all this purple and red blood oozing out of it and all these pussy-looking scabs.” “Jesus Christ, Howie, would you please shut up!” Fairley slammed his fork onto the beautiful white linen tablecloth. And though by then I’d be long gone and moving lethargically about in a free-spinning disenchanting world, I should here append that whatever Howie saw that day, he accepted, learned to live with it, and years later I heard he’d captained both Watertown High School and the Colgate Red Raiders and had actually been given a fre,e-agent tryout as a defensive back with Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers. Howie was, I understood, the last player Lombardi, with the greatest reluctance, cut from his roster before the regular season began.
When Cass and Fairley’s friend came from doing the dishes, Cass told Fairley we were going to a movie. Having forgotten what a busy moviegoing night Thanksgiving was, we actually went, too, but stayed only ten minutes and ended at the Thompson Park Pavilion (it would be snowed under within days) overlooking the east end of the city, the Lincoln’s engine and heater running. And so began my endless season of the “blowjob,” though I’m not at all sure that in those days we used such a word. Many believe our century was dramatically and traumatically divided into two parts, the first half ending with our use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese in 1945. Certainly guys but a few years my senior were coming back from Europe, Asia, and the Pacific and bringing with them not only terrible memories of war but the language with which they had confronted the madness and it was only a matter of time before “fuck” and “suck” and “motherfucker” and “cocksucker” became such a part of our nature that over the years I’ve often found myself with lovely, intelligent women who would feel quite at ease at a Jackie Presser teamsters’ convention.
But to have someone as lovely and intelligent as Cass perform fellatio on me night after night, week after week, month after month, and to have her do so in what seemed such an enthusiastically unself-conscious way was a quantum leap into the second half of the century for which I wasn’t prepared. And the worst part was that among the antediluvians of my epoch there was absolutely no one I could tell, primarily because I was all but illiterate, hadn’t the language, had I even known who he was, to either comprehend or articulate the unabashedly crude joy of a Rabelais, and had further come to see that none of the guys would believe me in any event. Long since I’d come to see locker room talk for what it was, fantasy. And in retrospect I wish I could, having heard that So-and-so was a great fuck, enumerate the wasted hours I spent in pursuit of these fantasies, only in my case to get these wantons alone and get nothing whatever. In those days we had no roll-ons and I spent so much time rubbing my sister’s Mum salve—“Mum’s the word,” we said of someone with body odor—into my armpits that I developed something like exudating canker sores under my arms and had to carry them away from my body, as if continually poised for a wingless flight from the top of the six-story YMCA building.
But what tore me asunder, what ripped my intestines out and fed them back to me, was that on the one hand what Cass was doing seemed so unspeakably crass and damning, on the other hand there seemed to be something so spiritual and seraphic in the way this healer of men went about her ministrations that, despite my continuing to pester Cass demanding—often I bellowed and swatted her—to know where she’d learned these things and how many guys there had been other than the Brigadier with whom she’d indulged these “aberrations,” Cass would give me only a chilling, “Haaaay,” as though demanding her own airspace at the same time she was insisting that whatever the case there was presently no one but me. My paranoia was zooming toward ethereal heights, and if the thought of the Brigadier and Cass together made me damn near rabid, the image of Cass with anyone else made me smash and despoil things and I became one of those hooligans who break men’s room mirrors and purposely miss urinals so the piss goes all over the floor for the next poor bastard to step in.
In the way of intuitive women Cass sensed that I was expanding, ballooning up with rage, and poised to burst; and though I didn’t know what she was up to, in late spring she began earnestly inquiring, over and over, what I intended to do on my graduation in June. What possessed me to lie, other than the desire to see where Cass was taking me, I don’t know; but in fact I’d already been told by the guidance instructor that my grades were an abomination, that I hadn’t enough credit hours to graduate and would have to return in the fall and take my diploma in January. To Cass I said, “Get a job, I guess, like everyone else.” Once Cass said, “When you’re eighteen, maybe Fairley’ll put you to work. He’s always bitching about no longer having the energy or any time to spend with Howie.” My heart leaped at the prospect Other than my mother’s raising holy hell, I didn’t see why not. In any event, Fairley was always handing Cass and me twenty-dollar bills the way other parents dispensed half-dollars and singles and I felt I may as well be doing something for the money.
Then one day, in the first week in June in the halls of the high school, Cass handed me a note written on lined notebook paper. It was scrupulously folded, had enough staples in it to secure a summer cottage for the winter, and I took it into a stall in the boys’ room to read. Its tone was pugnacious and defiant and said that if for one second I believed there was anyone else but me I could that night do Cass “in the normal way” and that I needn’t bring “one of those things”—obviously a prophylactic—as she knew from cleaning the house where Fairley kept his. Lord, Cass’s self-possession had so come to verge on contrariness that I was surprised she hadn’t used “rubber” or for that matter “cocksafe.”
For months now, Howie again having started to sleep soundly, Cass had abandoned nearly all pretense at demure-ness. As “I like to see what I’m doing,” she’d even begun to leave the lights on. After a minimum of petting, she’d assist me from my trousers, do what she had to do, after which she’d masturbate by rubbing herself back and forth on the length of my bare thigh, while I kissed a copper-colored throat that was the epitome of strength and grace. At the first sign of shuddering orgasm, however, Cass invariably wept chokingly and exclaimed, “Oh, Ex, I’m… I’m so embarrassed.” Although Cass never removed her panties, afterward my thigh was often so aqueously slick that on one occasion on donning my pants the corduroy stuck momentarily to my leg. It was a good thing, too, that Cass had access to Fairley’s condoms. It is not folklore that guys of my generation carried a condom so long in their wallets—boy, were we ready!—that smack in the middle of the imitation alligator leather there eventually rose a moldy lump the size of a silver dollar. In trepidation of my mother’s coming across mine (she doubtless already had), I’d flushed it down the toilet only to discover the hideous great circular lump never did vanish, a recurring reminder, if there ever was one, of the Christian admonition that thinking fornication is as grave as committing it.
What happened that night, as well as the repercussions theref
rom, I would shut from my mind for years. I could not have functioned in the world otherwise. That I was later institutionalized proves I’d repressed what happened on only the most triflingly conscious level. Although Cass did not remove her blouse or skirt, beneath them she was braless and pantless, she lay on the carpet before the peach couch, placed an old orange-and-white candy-striped beach towel beneath her haunches, then unbuttoned her blouse and pulled up her skirts, exposing herself. If I have learned nothing else in attempting to write, it is that a description of the act is beyond the pale of any artist, however gifted, so that even a Nobel laureate as talented as Hemingway makes us laugh aloud when his fecund earth starts trembling and rumbling, rather as if it were a tum-tum deprived of sufficient gruel, beneath his noble interwined lovers. In retrospect there is no question that in my youthful feverish lust I brutalized Cass or that at some point, or points, she cried out—if I never heard her, how then could I presume to describe the act?—in pained hurtful anguish. I know this happened inasmuch as sometime later when, having donned another of Uncle Fairley’s condoms, I reentered Cass, I abruptly became aware of a shoe ardently poking my bare backside, heard someone say, “C’mon, Exley, get the hell up,” and turned to find two Watertown policemen, both of whom I knew, hovering over Cass and me.
As nearly as I could later determine, Howie had heard Cass’s heartfelt cries, had come unseen down the staircase to find Cass and me lying side by side, Cass in her virginal blood staining the beach towel and sobbingly clutching my neck. Howie had then gone upstairs, called the police and said “Fred Exley is hurting Sis bad.” Hesitant to heed a ten-year-old’s word and enter Fairley’s house unbidden, the police had in turn called Fairley, were told where the key was and ordered to enter the house immediately. Fairley would, he said, be there momentarily. After I’d put on my skivvies, pants, and loafers (when I at last undressed that night, the rubber was still in my underwear), Cass having fled upstairs, I was taken, a cop fiercely clutching each arm, out onto the sidewalk where the officers, Sid and Pat, threatened to charge me with everything from breaking and entering to first-degree assault to statutory and/or first-degree rape. If this weren’t sufficient, and if Fairley so wished, Sid and Pat promised they’d beat the shit out of me. What I have to say about those times, or that particular moment in those times, does not in any way exculpate the lies I told about Cass. Still, and whether it excuses me or not, I shall never cease shouting what a stifling, stultifying world the forties and fifties were, how there hovered over our every word, deed, and thought the trepidation of a fearful despotism wreaking its awful vengeance for any distressing act or thought, how we all in one way or another bartered our soul to the rigidly puritanical image the public held of itself, so that if, in terrible fear of those apes carrying out their threats I cowardly and cringingly laid it all at Cass’s feet, spitting out unforgivable things like, “She’s screwing everybody in town,” and so forth. If the times do not exonerate me, and they do not, they do not, nevertheless my spinelessness must be seen against a backdrop whereon all one’s thoughts and actions were suppressed so that this great abstract high-minded self-righteous lump that called itself America could sleep in blissful ignorance of not only the sleazy but what was, in the case of Cass and Exley, nothing less than love.