It was Sunday, and after watching Ed Sullivan and What’s My Line? in the game room with Mums (Poppy was still in the breakfast nook poring over his insurance records and slugging away his Pabst), Bunny and I, having made previous arrangements, met in her room at midnight, a room which lay in one of the clapboard spokes at the opposite side of the house from her parents’ room. Through The Frigid Male Bunny had made herself charmingly conversant with sex’s more devious possibilities; she had high hopes that in that consecrated room, that there among the innocent memorabilia—the one-eyed Teddy bear, the gold-plated piggy-bank, the cheerleader’s megaphone—of her infancy and adolescence, that in that lovely place something wonderful might happen. She sat on the bed, legs crossed Indian style, wearing a short blue nightie and looking more stunningly caressable than I had ever seen her. Without speaking, I lay down beside her, motioned for her to turn out the light, and lighted a cigarette. Nothing whatever happened. I lay there for about three hours, conscious of her tensed body beside me in the darkness, thinking how fantastically inventive life was, how terrifying really in that it sometimes does give substance to our airy dreams. And really, what good are dreams if they come true? After a long time, when I sensed that the breathing beside me was labored in sleep, I rose, bent over, kissed her unseen face, and walked out. It was all over then; the terrible thing was that we yet had to go through the formal motions of dissolving it; we had, as humans do, to lay blame, to kill each other a bit, to pick up the pieces and move on. Still, our relationship ended more quickly and more satisfactorily than most.
Back in Chicago, after having seen her in the ghastly light of her parents, I brought things to a quick conclusion, though at the time I was so distraught that I didn’t realize I was ending things. For many months after, I actually succeeded in believing that Bunny’s decision to leave me was as arbitrary as the winds. The first thing I did was take out her letters, which I kept tidily bound in a dresser drawer, and reread them. They were, as I suspected they would be in the light of my recent visit, astonishing displays of her ignorance; they might, I thought, have been written by any literate seven-year-old, characterized as they were by a chafing and moronic romanticism. Such information as that she had written my name in the dust of a train-car window—which once I had found unbearable in its touching quaintness—now seemed to epitomize her childish (everything and everybody were either “neat” or “not neat”) and gross intelligence. Moreover, the English Department at her particular Big Ten factory must have been partial to the dash and the exclamation point; one read letter after letter without encountering a single comma. As for the period, she substituted for it an exclamation point, such was the unswerving homage she thought should be given every bland phrase she uttered. I had, of course, begun rereading the letters with a sense of giddy misgiving; I ended with a sense of be numbed horror, a horror which, upon our next meeting, turned to a strident and vicious cruelty.
For some weeks I had been disturbed by the sexual expertise with which she strove to please me, thinking that such abandoned mastery might derive from experience. And the next time we met I made her relate that experience. Oh, my God, yes! I made her tell me against her will, assuring her of the largesse of my tolerant heart. “I’ll understand,” I said quietly. Eyes avoiding hers and smiling painfully to myself, I lay on the candy-striped couch knowing, and not admitting that I knew, that each word she uttered—between each terrible sob (and what pleasure I derived from those sobs!)—put her that much further from me. It was not a pretty picture. Miss America, it seems, was a Lolita after all and had been indulging herself, with a remarkable lack of discrimination, since a high school fullback had taken her at a scarcely pubescent fourteen. I heard all the names after that, Tom and Dick and Harry, and all the sordid details, and eyes avoiding hers continued to smile in that painful way. She told me lastly about the effeminate Holden Caulfield who had given me her name. “And how about Mr. Absolutely?” I had snapped at her. “Who?” she had sobbed in bewilderment. “Mr. Absolutely,” I had bellowed. “The creep who gave me your name!” He had been, it seems, “like a drug.” Then she went on to relate the sexual practices to which he had introduced her, relating them in penitent, terribly groping tones, as if she were relating Sins Monumental. The practices were no more than the average indulgent couple has engaged in, or thought of engaging in, at one time or another; and the horror was not in discovering that she looked upon them as degenerate (Christ, she was just a kid!) but that they put dirty pictures in my mind, in discovering that I was not worldly at all but Farmer Freddy Exley from up in the cow country with dreams of pure and virginal worlds populated with glimmering and upright people, in discovering that I was incapable of loving that which was tainted (damn you, Hollywood and Herman Wouk!). When Bunny finally finished, crushed and made ugly by the burden of her forced confession, I assured her, kissing away her tears, that everything was okay, that I understood perfectly. But I must have known then that it could never be okay with her, that in impotency I had assumed what I was and had committed a grievous assault to my own manhood, and that I had, in effect, made it possible, nay, necessary, for her to turn from me.
I only saw her once after that, in a restaurant in the Loop. She would not come to the apartment, which hurt because I had had two weeks to get used to her humanity and knew, surprisingly, that things were going to be all right with me, that though I couldn’t seduce a dream, I could a rather ignorant blond doll from Heritage Heights. I begged her to come with me, but she wouldn’t, telling me that it was over. I made a lot of agonizing phone calls to her after that, tearfully pleading with her to give me a chance to “make it up,” saying things she probably didn’t understand like, “Look. You’ve got to understand. I was just a goddam farmer with a lot of crazy dreams. Look. Give me the chance to put away the dreams!” But with each call her voice grew less distinct and finally drifted into memory. I know now that it was best that way.
I know because I had seen myself consigned to the kitchen with Poppy, our Giant tuques pulled down about our ears, swigging beer from the Pabst cans, and making weak, worried, and self-conscious jokes about the womenfolk in the other room. But having seen this, did I really know that I would have been unhappy, or should I say any less happy, in that life? I did not. I do know that the road I was to take would prove neither particularly pleasant nor edifying nor fruitful. No, all I knew in the end was that walking away had rescued me from the slow, dwindling emasculation undergone by so many of my brethren; and this, ironically, perhaps even a little miraculously, was the truth. For in the same way that a man’s defect can be his virtue (as a gross physical ugliness often renders in its bearer a fine, subtle, and true aesthetic), I came to understand that my sexual failure in the end redeemed me, saved me from an almost certain castration. The failure was never to recur, so that I have no way of understanding it save in the light of that place, Chicago, at that time, a time when more than any other I felt at one with my country, and with that American girl, Bunny Sue. Had I gone erect with the awesome passion that I then felt for everything, had my penis mingled with that honey-dripping, corn-bred womb, who knows that I ever could have walked away? And I still do not know what saved me. Oh, I know the Freudian voodoo, the feelings of inadequacy that sometimes come to a man, the latent homosexuality, and so forth, and even the probable causes for such things. But it’s all hogwash. In the end a man has to have an explanation he can live with, and I have one of these, one that would only occur to an English teacher, and one whose levity I can live with. I like to think that my penis started withering on its stump when, the day after I met her, I received those two letters from her, that I was saved, as it were, by the dash—and the exclamation point!
After Bunny, Chicago went cold and horrid for me, and the story of my dizzying descent into bumhood is the usual bleak fantasy, so I will omit the details. After repeated warnings about my excessive drinking, I was fired from my job. Both of my bosses were good, even excellent, men. All they
wanted from me was a sober confrontation, an admission on my part that a problem existed, so that, in trying to help me, they would not feel obtrusively puritanical, holier-than-thou. I wasn’t man enough to give them that confrontation, and the day that we made our good-byes, both of them, while I shook their hands, turned away from me in sorrow.
For the next few months I drew forty-five dollars a week in railroad unemployment, and with this, together with moneys I quite shamelessly bummed from my roommate and other bar room acquaintances, I was able to stay drunk continually. I didn’t shave, I didn’t wash, and I became one of those stark silhouettes—perhaps the first in the history of that ingenuous city—against the Near North Side bars. The strangest thing of all at this time was my search for the girl with the coal-black hair. The copywriter who had introduced us had gone to New York, or to the Coast, nobody seemed to know precisely where, and I spent hours trying to re-create in my mind’s eye the note I had crumpled up and thrown away, trying to visualize a single number, name, or address that had been written upon it. All I ever came up with was the given name Ronald —he who had died of a heart attack with a smile on his face dreaming of fishing in Canada. Eventually I began taking the Elevated north. Getting off at stops that seemed familiar, I would walk for hours nipping on a pint of bourbon, looking for that elusive apartment. Once or twice I was sure I had found the building, but I was unable to recognize any of the names on the mailboxes. I did buzz what appeared to be single women, Margery Winsaw, Edith Starkweather, Beverly Heartstick, et al., divorcees and widows and Lesbians and ugly-buglies. None of them was she.
Ringing bells, I was engaged in the search one night when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find two policemen who had answered a complaint that I was mashing. It was a bad situation. I was drunk, unkempt, unemployed, and sensed immediately that the only explanation that would save me was the truth. So I told them about the girl with the golden skin, and how I had incredibly, stupidly, unforgivably (I screamed in desperation, “I don’t even know why!”) thrown away her note. Did they believe me? They probably did. There was about my tale that element of madness contained in all truth, but they pretended not to believe me. One cop said, “It was probably just a wet dream.” To that they had both laughed like hell. I had, too. At any event, they were good guys—Chicago guys—and they let me go, even driving me in the patrol car to the Elevated. All the way back to the Near North Side, I laughed, thinking the cop’s explanation had been as good as any.
I had been in Chicago for almost two years by then, 1955 and 1956, and though I had completely disregarded football my first year in that happy city, during the autumn of 1956, after losing my job, I once again found that it was the only thing that gave me comfort. That fall was, ironically, the season when Gifford was having his greatest year in football, which culminated in his being voted by the other players in the league the Jim Thorpe Trophy—which made him, for that year at least, the greatest football player in the world. Most of my drinking companions were Chicago Bears fans—the most fanatical partisans on earth. Because the Bears were that year, as the Giants were in the East, headed for their division title, I spent most of the fall unmercifully needling Bear fans about what Gifford and the Giants were going to do to them in the championship game. I stayed in Chicago till December to watch the game on television from Yankee Stadium, the Giants winning 47-7, stayed to watch it and to rub it into the boys. I had no grace in victory, though. Chicago had gone bad for me. In triumph I was quite vicious, and within three hours of the game I was in two drunken fist fights, both of which were nasty and bloody, involving broken noses, split ears, cracked heads, and black eyes, some mine, some the other guys’. It was terrible in a way to leave that wonderful city in that mood. Right after these fights I was to pack a bag and go “on the road” for a few months. By the fall of 1957 I would be home on my mother’s davenport, staring at the ceiling and dreaming my dreams, waiting to be carted off to the private hospital the following spring, thence to Avalon Valley the immediately subsequent autumn. I know that I was sick even in Chicago; no one ever loved a city the way I loved that place, and it pains me deeply to have this final memory of it, seeing myself flailing away at drunken, angry faces, striking as if I were hitting out at the city that had so disenchanted me. It pains me because that disenchanted city—the one I knew in the final months—will, for me, never be the city I knew and loved for ever so long.
5 / Journey on a Davenport
At Christmas, in 1951, I flew from Los Angeles to New York City where I boarded the overnight train to Watertown, intent on spending the holiday at home. The train had no club car, but at one end of a passenger coach, serviced by a stainless-steel and closet-like kitchenette, were two booths, cozy and on either side of the aisle. I found myself drinking beer and eating ham sandwiches in one of these booths with a Marine sergeant returning from Korea, a vernal-cheeked coed with large breasts, coming from some cow-sounding college in Pennsylvania where, she had loftily announced, she was studying veterinary medicine, and a goateed and fraudulent-looking surgeon traveling to Montreal. In keeping with the season our spirits were lyrically jubilant, the surgeon was generous in buying the food and the drinks, and after a time we sang Christmas carols. The sergeant had a resonant, self-conscious baritone; and I, having no voice at all, amiably mouthed silent “silent nights” (as my teachers had made me do in grammar school so I wouldn’t undermine the melodious harmony of my classmates who, when singing, had stared with haughty disdain at the cretinous contortions of my lips). At one o’clock the porter asked us to call it a night. Because everyone was crestfallen, the chivalrous surgeon bribed the Negro with a five-dollar bill, though the latter ordered us to knock off the caroling. For that reason we talked about our families and our homes well into the early morning, drinking the beer the bribe had procured us.
By first light, only I was left awake. As though the fatigue of war had abruptly caught up with and sundered him, the Marine had put his head on his folded hands on the table and was sleeping with such heaviness that his forehead appeared to have depressed into and become part of his wrists. The coed, her outsized breasts now demure and maiden-like, was snoozing in the shelter of the doctor’s salt-and-pepper sleeve, the surgeon’s cheek, flushed now with boozy contentment, resting familiarly on her soft brown hair. During the night the north country had undergone its worst storm in years, and for the eighty-mile distance from Utica to Watertown, while those intimate strangers slept huddled all about me, and while the steam engine heaved and fretted through the brilliant, the near-dazzling whiteness, I looked out the window and watched the cold, the frozen world go by me. In the vague way one is aware of the contours of the back of one’s head, I had always been aware that my corner of America was farm country, but only that morning did I realize how very northern or “Russian”—almost steppelike—it really was. After watching the slightly rolling, nearly treeless landscape for a long time, and doubtless abetted by the unconscious knowledge that I was rising on the map, I began to experience the oddly com forting sensation of ascending to the very top of the world, of rising to some place apart from the fitful concerns and harsh sorrows of men, to a glacial and opaline haven where a man, having been hard-used by the world or having used himself hard, might go and ask himself where things had gone wrong.
At the precise moment I disembarked and my foot hit the icy platform, I looked first at my instantaneously white-flecked sleeve, then skyward to see that it had begun snowing again. In what was to be the most memorable holiday of my life, it scarcely stopped snowing the entire week I was home. Snow clogged everything. Its plowed and mountainous banks hid the houses from view. No cars moved, and because the sidewalks would be days in getting cleared, one was. forced to walk in the middle of the glistening streets between the snowy mountains on either side, a dreamy white world wherein one ambulated without fear of being flattened by an Oldsmobile. Their faith in the supremacy of the Detroit product lamentably touching, middle-aged men shov
eled furiously, attempting to loosen their Fords from Nature’s perverseness. As if those automobiles were extensions of themselves without which they could not live, they wielded their shovels with bent-back and vapor-exhaling dedication. The sky cleared, a few cars were loosed and began moving splutteringly through the embanked and narrow aisles, the sky once again clouded over, snow came, and the cars chugged, chugged, and stopped again. With renewed and exasperated vigor (it never occurred to them to walk), the men once again engaged the snow with angry shovels, their rampantly palpitating hearts threatening to burst ( I don’t know how many we lost to coronaries that year), while in a gang my friends and I moved up the shimmering white corridors, jeering at them. My friends were younger then and did not know that this was this, that that; though some of us might have been acute enough to know that though Detroit owned America, Detroit didn’t yet own us; we had the youthful and heartfelt hopes of being “our own men.” With youth’s arrogant confidence that we were so markedly dissimilar from those shovelers, we walked in that remembered brilliance, shouting, “Shovel, you fucking dummies!” That the shovelers might know our four-letter bravado was not to be trifled with, we then pounded each other on the back and roared with haughty laughter: a strained camaraderie designed to deter any of the braver shovelers from approaching us. Making our way to the next saloon, we drank draft beer in comfortable booths, cribbed and passed off as our own a favorite professor’s remark on Plato or Aquinas or Twain, and continued to sneer at “dummies” unable to see the beauty and completeness of a world in which one did nothing but walk about in the snow, drink draft beer in crowded booths, and try to understand a world not governed by automatic transmissions. Now I see in that laughter a good deal of desperation and sadness. About to leave the haven of our separate universities and be thrown onto the brutal free-spinning of the world, as we walked arm in arm through the snow, we carried with us, if only unconsciously, the knowledge that it would be our last holiday together; and we drank and laughed and sneered with the resolute sadness of men who knew that tomorrow we’d be trying to free our own mortgaged Buicks from our own snow-locked drives. That is what most of us ended doing. I didn’t; but I don’t question that my friends were right and I wrong, that they were happy and I was not, that theirs was the hard and mine the easy way. What always saddened me on confronting them was the surety that had I been foolish enough to bring up “old times,” none would have allowed himself a memory of sticking his finger into the vaporous and flaky air and shouting, “Shovel, you fucking dummies!” A self-destructively romantic man, I accepted our jeering defiance as a pact; forever.