A Fan's Notes

  Mr. Blue professed neither to drink nor to smoke, but he did both. He didn’t drink a great deal. Each day he said he’d have one I. W. Harper on the rocks to toast what was certain to be his most remunerative collaboration to date; but he always ended by having six or seven, by which time he was tipsy, garrulous, and profane, and attempting to regale the bar’s patrons by doing handsprings or front-and back-flips up and down the aisle of the barroom. Watching a nectareously obsequious or cretinously eye-rolling announcer on the television, the patrons were not regaled; they didn’t even look at Mr. Blue. In the dreary cosmos of those saloons it was as though there were operating a tacit though inviolable interdiction that prevented the patrons viewing anything genuinely remarkable—for that matter, anything alive. Druggedly watc ing the television and dopily chuckling on cue, they waited clockwork-wise for the swing shift, dreamed of being wealthy satyrs, fingered the quarters the state had given them, and wheezingly gummed their cigars. Knowing what effort Mr. Blue was expending to please them, I used to indulge a rage at their heavy-skulled indifference. Whenever Mr. Blue was engaged in his gymnastics, I quelled an urge to shout, “Hey, you guys—look at this! Look at Mr. Blue!” I quelled the urge because I hadn’t faith in my ability to resurrect the dead.

  Unlike the cigarette panderers who reluctantly allow that smoking may be hazardous to one’s health, Mr. Blue didn’t equivocate. “Cigarettes,” he said, “will kill you fucking dead.” By the second drink, though, he’d have lighted one, and from that point on he chain-smoked and coughed. Caressing the illusion that an addiction must cost cash, he never bought any cigarettes; and for that reason I developed the habit, whenever I went to the cigarette machine, of buying two packs of Chesterfields, opening them both, and sliding them between us on the bar so Mr. Blue could permit himself the luxury of believing he was only occasionally filching one from me.

  With the enthusiasm of a too-long-dormant guru, there always came a time during these afternoons when Mr. Blue felt the need to instruct me in still another method for getting into a house, and each method proved more beguilingly ludicrous than the last. Now that I was in the racket, though, I couldn’t laugh and had to sit, a dutiful student, on the edge of my barstool, my hands folded primly on my lap, nodding very solemnly. Most of the time Mr. Blue reverted to his oratorio, calling up some crackpot dream of sales that he foisted off on me as historically authentic. Once, for example, he had been “way the hell up and gone” on some country road and had come across an isolated farmhouse. “A real dump,” Mr. Blue assured me. Having gone without a sale for weeks, and broke, Mr. Blue had decided, “What the fuck.” A tall, wiry farmer had answered the door. Mr. Blue “did” him for me. Hypnotically bulging his eyes, working his Adam’s apple, tortuously compressing his lips, letting his arms go lax at his sides, and thrusting his bony wrists far below his shirt cuffs, Mr. Blue became an American Gothic. Humorless, stoic, crab-featured, prairie dust on his shoulders, cow dung on his gaiters, he allowed in an imitatively toneless drawl that he did indeed want something. “I want some of them redwood storm windows,” he said. Mr. Blue, who sold aluminum storm windows, became Mr. Blue again, tacky, coy, cunning, persuasive. “You don’t want those,” he lied to the farmer. “They cost a hundred and twenty dollars apiece. Now, aluminum—” Abruptly all Adam’s apple and horny hands and toneless drawl, Mr. Blue was the farmer again, interrupting. “I didn’t ask how much they cost. I said I wanted some of them red wood storm windows.” Striking a dumfounded stance for my present edification, Mr. Blue rolled his eyes with that mock wildness by which one conveys to a third party he’s aware he’s dealing with a blubbering lunatic. Shrugging, Mr. Blue decided to challenge the “old fart.” “Just how the hell yuh gonna pay for some of them redwood storm windows?” he asked. In his voice there was a subdued irony; but, always the salesman, he put the question pleasingly enough. “Cash, son,” the farmer replied. “The way I pay for everything I buy.” Thereupon the farmer removed from his pocket, if Mr. Blue’s globed hands can be credited, a roll of bills as big as a grapefruit. Breathlessly—oh, swooningly—grabbing the tape measure he carried in his inside jacket pocket, Mr. Blue now ran from window to window of the bar, showing me with what antic dexterity, with what accelerated and unspeakable passion he had run about the house measuring and counting the farmer’s windows. One, his silently upthrust forefinger counted for me, two, three, then five, now ten, now the backs of both his hands flashed twice in rapid succession. “Twenty?” I cried in gleeful admiration. Still silent, Mr. Blue shook his head dramatically and emphatically no, and with equal gravity held up yet an other finger. “Twenty-one?” I shouted. With a curt nod Mr. Blue gave me a precise yes. Even so. That I might savor the extent of his triumph, he now walked silently and slowly back to the bar and stood haughtily beside me, his chest expanded with cosmological serenity. “Twenty-one goddam windows in that dump,” he said finally, shaking his yellowing head in heavy and exaggerated disbelief. Having driven furiously back to the city, he had bought the windows for eight dollars apiece, had charged the farmer the quoted price of a hundred and twenty dollars, had been paid in hundred-dollar bills, and had netted twenty-three hundred and fifty-two dollars. “More than the whole fucking house was worth!” Majestic with self-approval, Mr. Blue added, “That was the winter I spent in the

  Yucatan.”

  “The Yucatan?” I cried; but before I could say, “Aw, now listen here, Mr. Blue, you come off that nonsense, will yuh?” he was off and running.

  Unnecessarily explaining, “It’s a peninsula in Mexico,” he said, “Broke one minute, in ‘ Mayheeco the next. That’s the way it is in this business. Usually I spent my winters in Acapulco, but this time I wanted to go someplace they never heard of aluminum siding.” He sighed. “Trouble was,” he said, “those fucking Indians in the Yucatan never heard of nothin’ but donkey shit and beans.” He smiled ruefully, heavy with life’s melancholy. But in the soothing memory of that sale, real or imagined, he couldn’t sustain his gloom and presently was embarked on a series of drunken handsprings down the middle of the barroom. Completing the arc of the fifth one, Mr. Blue lost control of his legs, and the long, effeminate heel of his alligator shoe caught the corner of a table, toppling a glass of beer from it onto the lap of a pursy, perennially weeping whore. Not only volunteering to have the dress cleaned, Mr. Blue ended by giving the woman fifteen dollars for a new one. Rendered munificent by the memory of that long-ago coup, Mr. Blue then bought drinks for the bar. “On me, fellows!” he shouted. “On me! Drink hearty! God bless you! Cheers!” But no one turned round to thank him, or even took his eyes from the television. “Oh, Jesus, Freddy,” he said fondly, “those were the days.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. And I was quite unable to be derisive, and against my better judgment found myself caught up in Mr. Blue’s faulty but enthusiastic reminiscences.

  The farmer, Mr. Blue said, was what is known in the trade as a gopher.

  “A gopher?”

  “Yeah! Go fer anything,” Mr. Blue bellowed, and there upon, with hyperbolic tenderness, he laid his yellowing head against my breast and, spaniel-like, coquettishly rolled his big blue eyes up to look into mine. “Cut the shit, will yuh, Mr. Blue?” I said. Owning the charm of legendary charlatans, Mr. Blue had an intuitive sense that though I didn’t believe a word he said, I much preferred listening to him to listening to Mr. Bert Parks.

  I am now faced with the uncomfortable chore of recording something of Mr. Blue’s sexual fixation, about which I perhaps know a good deal less than I imagine. I was almost certain that though he longed to kiss the female pudendum, he had never done so. In retrospect I recall his conversations as little more than formal, Oriental bridges joining islands lush with that, the inevitable subject. Obsessed with the vision of his hoary, aging head dipped down between golden thighs, and the disturbing notion of translating that thought into action, Mr. Blue had become maniacally purposeful, his eyes so narrowly focused as to be crossed. Like a jeune hom
me feroce of the arts caught up by and spouting some soi-disant aesthetic salvation in a Parisian bistro, he was pushy, distasteful, immoderate, and megalomaniac; and like the latter he seemed to believe that once articulated his vision would open doors to paradisial princedoms. What continually preyed on me, what quite wearied my feeble brain with perplexity, was what exactly Mr. Blue hoped to gain by kissing a cunt.

  That I might not panic and flee in terror, Mr. Blue led me gingerly into his madness, though he did so with a certain disarming vulgarity. The first day I talked with him he interrupted a conversation I imagined to be proceeding at a genial and exemplary clip and shouted, “They tell me if you get by the smell, you got it licked!” “Pardon?” I said, taken aback by a curious irrationality in his voice. “You heard me,” he said saucily; then he smiled challengingly at me, as though to re mind me that I shouldn’t take him for a fool and that he knew all about guys like me. I laughed uneasily. What else could I then do but admit that if one got by the smell, one did indeed have it licked?

  It was when I detected that Mr. Blue wanted a good deal more than a yes-man and was passionately seeking technical expertise that I grew nervous. Within two days he had interrupted an involved explanation I was making of the New York Giants’ umbrella defense to shout, “How do you get by the smell?” “Pardon?” I said (with Mr. Blue I said “pardon” quite a bit). “You heard me,” he said. “How do you get by the smell?” With strident purposefulness he narrowed his blue eyes on me. “How the hell would I know?” I said. “Hold your breath, I guess.” I giggled self-consciously. Such levity appeared to displease Mr. Blue, and when it did so, I grew somewhat impatient. “Well, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “It doesn’t have to smell, you know.” Then I essayed a detailed,

  admirably wrought, and charming little talk on the art of douching, and the powders, lotions, perfumes, and so forth that were available to render la petite pussi as aromatic and palatable as a toasted marshmallow. Despite the “artistry” of my monologue, Mr. Blue pretended he would have none of it; and all the time I talked he paced the floor, his hands jammed deep down into his jacket pockets, fiercely sucking in his feline cheeks and then blowing out—ppttoooooeeeee, as though, toasted marshmallow or no, even the thought of such “perversities” (as though I were suggesting them!) was more than he could endure and forcing him to emit a furious spit: ppttoooooeeeee. Whenever he did that, I’d giggle like a damn fool; and to show me that his displeasure was less than in transigent, Mr. Blue would giggle, too, tentatively. Then he’d compound my bewilderment by staring at me as if I were the ultimate heresiarch.

  Whenever Mr. Blue and I spoke of cunnilingus, and within three days I was aware that Mr. Blue wanted to speak of little else, we found ourselves giggling with a peculiar, naughty-boy relief. By chance I once found myself at a summer camp next to that of a lovely girl of seventeen who, having just graduated from high school, was preparing to enter the university in the fall. Though I had never before met her, I knew her parents. They were a very even, almost sane, couple who went to church Sundays, who thought Richard Nixon an admirable man, and who would have had one sign a promissory note against a five-dollar loan. Nothing was wrong with them save

  that they were damnably hung up on all sorts of banalities, orthodoxies, and affectations they imagined had something to do with life; and thus one day on the diving float in front of their camp I was astonished, as even recalling it today I still am astonished, to find myself teaching the daughter to mea sure off a chunk of her arm and enunciate fungoo. Explaining that she had seen the fellows on the high school football team do it, she asked me what it meant, I told her, and she tried it herself a number of times—fun-goo, FUN-goo, fun-GOO— becoming moderately adept at it. Before I fully realized what was happening, at her own insistence, though abetted by my coaching, she was mouthing all sorts of obscenities—mouth ing them between waving gaily to her Mom who sat some distance off on a lawn chair knitting a red wool sweater to keep her baby warm at the university.

  Never was there any thought of sex between the girl and myself; and I slowly, rather amazedly, came to understand that the girl had been drowning in an unhealthy finickiness of atmosphere and that what she was so touchingly striving to do was pulverize the mystery from the forbidden words: fuck and suck and cunt and prick and cocksucker. Wanting no longer to be repulsively enthralled or struck tongue-tied in the face of the moronic graffiti scribbled on bridge abutments and toilet walls, she desperately yearned to come to an intimacy with forbidden things and thereby negotiate terms with a whole segment of life which had only recently begun opening to her. Not only did she want to learn to measure off her arm (she never got the hang of that, a man’s gesture apparently) and bellow fungoo, but she insisted that I coach her in offhandedly dropping expressions like “Up yours” and “Suck a big dick.” Nor did I have any compunctions about such coaching or fear lest she corrupt her freshman dormitory when she arrived all fresh-faced and filthy-tongued at the college, know ing that once she could casually and carelessly throw away such ribaldries, for her they would never hold trepidation again, would cease to mean anything.

  Thus it was, too, that when I thought she had handled an “Up yours” with a particularly easy sophistication, I became very schoolmarmish and complimented her. What joy my praises gave her! To them she’d bound up on the raft, stretch out her arms as though in free flight, and in her bikini do wild, sharp-stepping jigs about the edge of the rocking float, all the time exclaiming, “No kidding? Did I really do good?” Then she’d wave gaily to Mom, who would wave gaily back and continue stabbing her needles into the embryo sweater. When, with an emphatic really, I’d assure her that she was becoming an authentic debauchee, she’d lower herself slowly back to the canvas of the float, lie face down next to me, fall silent, and become excessively self-absorbed. Then quite suddenly she’d begin giggling with that peculiar relief, the relief at inimical things being rendered familiar.

  And though Mr. Blue giggled, he proved, unlike the girl, a hard, intractable pupil. He had made of cunnilingus a shibboleth of Chinese Wall proportions, and his giggling appeared to me little more than an attempt to raze that wall with switches. Despite his absorption with the idea, within him he harbored some fixed and enduring hostility to acting upon it, and for that reason he was quite helpless to unclutter his mind of the fascination it held for him. When he was embarked on the subject, I often shouted, “Peace—oh, Mr. Blue, give me peace!” Never did it occur to him that such activity was a way of giving a woman pleasure or of paying adoring homage to the very special sweets of her gender; instead, Mr. Blue was hypnotized by the ambivalent notion that such oral endearments would either defile him utterly or unlock the gates to Rosicrucian insights. Just how nutty Mr. Blue was on the subject didn’t become totally apparent to me until the fourth and last day I worked for him, when I took him to see the deaf woman.

  At an oppressively fastidious dinner I once said, “Pass the fucking butter,” putting the emphasis on the obscenity so that my host wouldn’t be rattled by doubts and would thereby be unmistakably offered the alternative of knocking me down or, subject to his sense of the decencies, at least exiling me from his table. What distressed and finally enraged me about Mr. Blue’s approach to the woman was that she apparently had no such alternative. No sooner did Mr. Blue convince himself of the genuineness of her deafness than he began—the grand legs, the appetizing breasts, and the soiled peignoir must so have conspired to complete his fantasy of the archetypical housewife that the temptation proved irresistible—mouthing aloud all sorts of scabrous suggestions related to his fixation.

  Like Seedy, my predecessor from the long-ago, carrying the great portfolio case, I had led Mr. Blue up the sidewalk, with the aid of the pad had made the introductions, and we were now seated about the indigo table with the portfolio case open displaying colored aluminum samples mounted in the interior of its topside. A paragraph at a time, Mr. Blue dictated his closing arguments to me, and after writing th
em down I passed them on to the woman to read. Like Khrushchev dictating to his translator, Mr. Blue sat there unswervable, somewhat magnificent. As he dictated, the unhearing woman, impressed with having the “Alcoa man” in her house, smiled respectfully and diffidently at him; and as I (and as Khrushchev’s translator was once or twice said to have done) edited his nonsensical spiel onto the pad, she turned and smiled considerably more easily at me. All this time, and while she was reading what I had written, Mr. Blue let loose, enunciating very distinctly, a torrent of four-letter words. Twice I turned to him and said, “Shut your fucking mouth,” but he only winked, implying that I must of course be joking. Not only hadn’t the woman the alternative of slapping Mr. Blue’s face; she had waxed so enthusiastic over the color samples that I thought we might actually be making a sale and that, acting as he was, Mr. Blue was going to scuttle that sale. When she was reading perhaps the dozenth paragraph I’d prepared, and Mr. Blue was glibly mouthing his latrine chatter, the ordeal reached an unexpected and jarring climax. Detecting that the woman’s cheeks had risen to a high and incendiary red, I recalled the doctors’ pathological prognoses and, my body going instantaneously rigid as a pipe, I thought, “My God, she’s hearing us!” Was it possible? And immediately I thought, “Yes—it is possible!” Behind a “deaf middle-class housewife one might drop cherry bombs or smash inflated paper sacks to no avail, but what if one crept up stealthily and over her right shoulder whispered, “How’d you like a prick stuck right in your left eyeball?” But of course she was hearing him! Jumping abruptly and wildly up, I slammed the portfolio case shut, snapped its fasteners, picked it up, and dashed into the dining room headed for the front door. Just before going through it, I heard Mr. Blue’s voice: “Hey, what the—” Then I was going down the steps, hurrying across the lawn toward the Cadillac.