Tough Guys Don't Dance

  That was true enough. For years I had hardly ever seen him give her a kiss and then only like a miser pulling out the one ducat he will spend this year. My poor mother. She was so affectionate she would kiss me all the time. (Out of his sight.) She never wanted him to think my habits were unmanly.

  “Not once, Douglas,” she now repeated, “do you ever say you love me.”

  He did not reply for a minute, but then he answered in an Irish street voice—it was his declaration of love—“I’m here, ain’t I?”

  Of course, he was famous among his friends for such an ascetic view. In longshoreman days, he had earned another legend for the number of women he could attract and the powerful number of times he could do it in a night. All the same, it was his manly pride that he was never obliged to kiss the girl. Who knows what ice room of the heart my skinny Irish grandmother raised him in? He never kissed. Once, not long after I was kicked out of Exeter, I went drinking with Dougy and his oldest buddies, and he was meat for the roast on this matter of a kiss. His friends might be scarred and half toothless and in their fifties, and since I was twenty, they looked ancient to me, but, God, they were filthy-minded. When they talked, they rolled around in sex like it was stuck to their pants.

  My father was, by then, not only divorced from my mother, but had, in the general waste that followed, lost his bar. He lived in a rented room, had a lady friend once in a while, worked in a barroom for wages and saw a lot of his old friends.

  Every one of these old friends, I soon discovered, had a quirk, and the rule of the game was to kick your old buddy on the quirk. Some were tight with a dollar, some had foolish habits like betting long shots, one of them always threw up when he was drunk (“I have a sensitive stomach,” he would complain. “Yeah, we have sensitive noses,” they would reply) and my father always got it about kissing.

  “Oh, Dougy,” his old friend Dynamite Heffernon would say, “last night I was with a nineteen-year-old who had the juiciest, sweetest, plumpest, loveliest mouth you ever saw. Could she kiss! Oh, the moist breath of her fine smile. Do you have any idea of what you’re missing?”

  “Yeah, Dougy,” another would cry out, “give it a try. Break down. Give the broad a kiss!”

  My father would sit there. It was the game, and he would suffer it, but his thin lips showed no pleasure.

  Francis Frelagh, a.k.a. Frankie Freeload, took his swipes at the ball. “I had one widow with a tongue last week,” he told us. “She put that tongue in my ears, down my mout’, she licked my t’roat. If I let her, she would have swiped my nostrils.”

  At the look of disgust on my father’s face, they laughed like choir boys, high-pitched and shrill, Irish tenors kicking Dougy Madden’s quirk.

  He took it all. When they were done, he shook his head. He did not like to be performed on while I was there—that was the measure of his fallen state—so he said, “I think you’re all full of shit. None of you has been laid in the last ten years.” When they whooped at his anger, he stuck out his palm. “I’ll give you,” he said, “the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say you know a couple of girls. And they like to kiss. Maybe they even go down on you. All right. That’s been known to happen. Only, ask yourself: The broad is taking care of you now, but whose joint did she cop last night? Where was her mouth then? Ask yourself that, you cocksuckers. Cause if she’s able to kiss you, she can eat dog turds.”

  This speech put his old gang in heaven. “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” they would croon in Dougy’s ear.

  He never smiled. He knew he was right. It was his logic. I knew. I had grown up with it.

  This was as much, however, as I could go on thinking about my father before the itch of my tattoo began to distract me out of measure. By a look at the clock, I saw it was nearly afternoon, and I stood up with the thought of taking a walk but had to sit down again beneath the sudden weight of fear that came upon me from no more than the thought of stepping outside.

  Yet now I felt a whole decomposition of myself, a veritable descent from man to dog. I could no longer cower here. So I put on a jacket, and was through the house and into our damp November air with the jaunty sense that I had just performed a near-heroic act. Such are the warps of pure funk. It is a low comedy.

  Once on the street, however, I began to comprehend my reason, at least, for the new fear. Before me, a mile away, was the Provincetown Monument, a pinnacle of stone over two hundred feet high, and not unlike the Tower of the Uffizi in Florence. It was the first sight of our town from the road or sea as one approached our harbor. It sat on a good hill back of the Town Wharf, indeed, so much in the middle of our existence that one saw it every day. There was no way not to. Nothing built by man was of such height until you got to Boston.

  Of course, a native never needed to recognize it was there. I probably had not looked at it for a hundred days, but on this day, so soon as I turned to walk toward the center of town, my tattoo, like a meter to mark the pulsations of my anxiety, seemed to crawl over my skin. If normally I looked at our monument without seeing it, now I most certainly did. It was the same vertical tower that I had tried to climb on a drunken night almost twenty years ago, and I came so near to the summit as to reach the overhang of the parapet not thirty feet below. I had gone up the vertical, taking handholds and footholds where I found them in the granite blocks, enough at least for my fingertips and my toes. It was a climb to awaken me in the middle of many a night for years after, since in more than one place I had to lift myself by the strength of my arms alone, and in the worst places I ran into ledges wide as two fingers for my toes, but nothing for my hands—I could only mount palms flat against the wall—it is incredible, but I was drunk enough to keep going until I came to the overhang.

  Now, I have talked to rock climbers since, and one or two have even looked at the monument with me, and when asked if they could manage the overhang, said, “A piece of cake,” and meant it. One even explained the technique he would use, although I hardly understood. I was no rock climber myself. That night was the only hour in my life when I lived on a wall near to two hundred feet from the ground, but it came to so poor an end that I never had the moxie to try again.

  For I locked myself up, as they say, in the overhang. It seems I should have trusted the holds I had, and leaned out backward until I got a hand on the parapet—it was only a small overhang!—but I could not figure how to surmount it, and so I pressed instead against an arch just beneath, my back on one supporting column, the soles of my feet on the other, and there I remained, my body stuffed in the small arch just under the parapet until my strength began to go, and after a while I knew I would fall. Let me say I thought it was not possible, given the position I was in, to descend, and I was right. It is easier, I was told later, to go up a wall than to go down if you do not have a rope. There I perched, then there I clung, while all the collected valor of the spirits I had drunk began to wane. Then I was sober, and so frightened that I began to shout, and soon, I suppose, to scream, and to cut such recollection to its shortest, I was rescued by the Volunteer Fire Department in the middle of the night by a huge fisherman in a bosun’s swing (no less a person than Barrels himself) who was let down on a rope from the balcony above (having gone up the stairway within the tower) and he was able to grasp me finally while they hauled both of us up, but by then I was like a cat trapped for six days in a tree—I had smelled my death—and they say I fought him off, even tried to bite him when he came near. I suspect it is true, for in the morning I had a huge knot on the side of my head where he gave me one bang against the rock to chasten some of that lividity.

  Well, I was also ready to take the bus that morning, and packed my suitcase and was going to leave Provincetown forever when some friends came by and treated me like a figure of valor. It seemed I was not looked upon as a fool. So I stayed, and came to realize why Provincetown might be the place for me, since no one ever thought I had done anything crazy or even particularly bizarre. We all had extraordinary stuff to get out of
us, that was all. Do it the way you could.

  Still, I kept that bag beneath my bed for all of the winter months I stayed that year, and I do not think there was an hour when I was not ready to decamp—one jeer at the wrong time would have been enough. It was, after all, the first time in my life I had to recognize I was not automatically sane.

  Of course, I had some idea of what could be at the core of it. Years later, reading Jones’s biography of Freud, I came across a reference Freud made to what was “doubtless, an unruly attack of latent homosexual panic in myself,” and had to set the book down, for just so suddenly was I overcome with thinking of the night I tried to scale the monument. Now my tattoo throbbed. Was that unruly attack with me still?

  Yes, was it not true that every place renowned for its colony of homosexuals invariably had such a monument? I thought of the men and boys who cruised the obelisk in Central Park, and the invitations with phallic measurements listed next to many a telephone number inscribed on the partitions of the public toilets at the foot of Washington Monument. What in me had I been attempting to extirpate on that lunatic climb? In Our Wild—Studies among the Sane by Timothy Madden.

  There was one other man in town who could call himself my mate for he, too, had attempted to go up the Provincetown Monument. Like me, he had failed to solve the overhang and been rescued by the volunteer firemen, although this time (there are limits to symmetry) Barrels was not on the rescue rope.

  His attempt took place only four years ago, but such are the number of freak-outs and flare-outs who bob in the churn of the great washing machine that is Provincetown in summer that no one remembers anything. My father’s legend has been walking along with his life, but here, by the time Hank Nissen made his attempt, all had forgotten mine—too many people pass through!—and sometimes I think Nissen was the only one who remembered that I had also tried.

  I regretted, however, that our exploits were privately wed, for I could not bear the guy. Will it help to explain that his nickname was Spider? Spider Nissen. Henry Nissen a.k.a. Hank Nissen, a.k.a. Spider Nissen, and the last clung to him like a bad smell. He had a touch of the hyena for that matter—the same we-eat-tainted-meattogether intimacy that burns out of a hyena’s eyes behind the bars of his cage. So Spider Nissen would look at me and give a giggle as if we had both had a girl together, and each took turns sitting on her head.

  He bothered me prodigiously. I do not know if it was our mingled glory and shame on the monument wall, but I could not see him in the street without having my mood altered for the day. I knew as much physical uneasiness around him as if he kept a knife in his pocket to use below your ribs, and indeed he did keep a knife. For that matter, he was the type to knowingly sell you pot ravaged with paraquat because he needed the bread to score for coke. A bad man, yet through the winter, winter after winter, one of my twenty friends in town. In winter we paid a toll not unlike living in Alaska—a friend was someone to pass an hour with against the Great Ice-Man of the North. In the silence of our winter, dull acquaintances, drunks, wretches and bores could be elevated to a species thought of as friend. Much as I disliked Spider, we were near, we had shared an hour no one else could comprehend even if our hour was sixteen years apart.

  Besides, he was a writer. In winter we needed each other if only to be critical of our contemporaries together. One night we would look for the faults in McGuane, next came DeLillo. Robert Stone and Harry Crews were saved for special occasions. Our rage against the talent of those who were our age and successful made the marrow of many an evening, even if I suspected he didn’t value my writing. I knew I didn’t like his. My lips were sealed, however. He was my dirty, treacherous, raunchy neighbor-friend. Besides, one had to admire half his mind. He was trying to launch a series of novels about a private detective who never left his room, a paraplegic in a wheelchair who managed to solve all crime set before him through his computer. He would tap into giant networks, put knots in the CIA’s internal communications, mess with the Russians, but Spider’s man also took care of intimate deeds by peering into private computers. He’d locate the murderers through their shopping lists. Spider’s protagonist was a true spider. Once I told him, “We’ve evolved from invertebrates to vertebrates. You’ll take us on to the cerebrates.” Saying that, I saw heads with tendrils substituting for torso and limbs, but his eye glittered as if I had made a direct hit in a video arcade.

  I may as well describe his appearance—it was by now obvious to me that I was on my way to his house. He was tall and thin with very long limbs and long thin blond hair that was near to blue-green from dirt, even as his faded blue denims were almost a dirty yellow. He had a long nose that went nowhere—that is to say, it had no climax, merely ended with two functioning nostrils and a nondescript tip. He had a wide, flat, crablike mouth and dark gray eyes. The ceilings in his house were too low for him. The exposed beams were only eight feet from the floor—another fish-shed from Hell-Town!—and so the place consisted of four small rooms at the top of a narrow Cape Cod stairway above four small rooms below, all reeking of some sad, dank aroma, of cabbage, the faded scent of wine, diabetic sweat—I think his girl had diabetes—and old bones, an old dog, spoiled mayonnaise. It was like the poverty of an old lady’s room.

  But then in winter we huddled in our houses as if we belonged to the century behind us. His house was on one of the narrow lanes between our two long streets, and you could not even see its roof until you made your entrance through a gate in a high hedge. Then the door was on you. There was no yard, just the hedge encircling the house. On the ground floor, as you looked through each window, you saw nothing but that hedge.

  I remember wondering on my walk why I was visiting him now, and soon recalled that the last time I had been at his house he had cut a plug from a melon, poured in vodka and later served it to all of us with hash cookies. There had been something in the way he cut the melon—a high surgical precision in the turning of the blade that excited me to the joys of using a knife, much as a man who is eating with a highly refined gusto can inspire your taste for the same food.

  So it was that walking along the street, contemplating the monument and my tattoo, I thought not only of Spider Nissen but of the frightful scream he gave on the night of a séance over a month ago and the rare event that ensued: Patty Lareine had a most uncharacteristic fit of hysterics immediately afterward. With no more than this recollection of how he used a knife, and the quick but immaculate certainty (which came to me like an angel’s gift) that he might know how I received my tattoo, I was suddenly possessed of the conviction it was Spider’s knife that severed a blonde head from its neck.

  All this at once. The most intolerable pressure in my head now released itself. It is agony to live without a clue when you are in peril whose depth cannot be measured. Now, I had a premise. It was to observe my friend Spider. I am afraid, after every bad remark I have just made about him, that I had still been generous enough to take him along on more than one trip to the marijuana patch. Our winter loneliness is, as I say, the source of half our actions.

  Nissen’s woman, Beth, opened the door to my rap on the knocker. I mentioned earlier that there was no snobbery in Provincetown, and none there was, but you could still find a good many people to be offended. For instance, most of my winter friends never locked their door when they were home. You did not ring or rap. You walked in on people. If the door was locked, it meant only one thing—your friends were screwing. Some of my friends, for that matter, liked to make love with the door unlocked. If you came in, there was the option to watch or, given the phase of the moon, to join. There is not that much to do in Provincetown in the winter.

  Patty Lareine, however, considered this trashy. I never came close to understanding her mores, since I think she would have cohabited with an elephant—but only to win a bet, a very large bet. Where she came from, white trash were always wandering around in one another’s bedding. So while my good wife could consider many a proposal, some touch of class had to ac
company it. This Provincetown custom of one smelly joining two sleazos under dingy-gone blankets was revolting to her. They could go for it because they came from good middle-class families and were, as Patty Lareine once put it, “trying to get vengeance on their folks for giving them cancer!” Patty was having no part of that. Her body was her proud possession. She loved nude beach parties on the back shore and enjoyed standing (with her brown snatch limned in honey-gold by the sun) a foot away from the eyes of some potential lover on the sand who was eating a hot dog, one eye on the red meat covered with mustard coming up to his lips, the other on the copse between her thighs.

  She could cavort bare-ass in the sea, her arms around two other naked women, her mean, pinching Southern fingers tweaking their nipples—nipple-pinching, tit-grabbing, ass-slapping being good girl sports in the waterholes she used to know, the splash-rope hanging from the big limb of the old tree up on the bluff.

  She also liked to walk about our house in her high heels and nothing else, and it grated on her most sensitive tissues when some old parka with a man inside would fling our door open to ask, “Tim at home?”

  “You stupid low crude son of a bitch,” she would say, “did you ever hear of knocking?”

  So a law was imposed on our friends: Ring the bell before you come in. And we—meaning her—enforced it. We were looked down on for being so uptight, but as I indicated, reverse snobbery occupied our town in winter.

  Therefore I made a point of knocking on Spider’s door and nodded at his woman, Beth, when she let me in. There was a submission in her so slavish to every one of Nissen’s whims that even the most gung ho women in town gave up on her. The irony is that Beth supported Nissen’s household; indeed, it was her little house and had been bought with money given by her well-to-do parents (corporation types, I was told, from Wisconsin). Yet Spider held the salt-box as his fief. The fact that it was her money that had bought his Honda 1200CC, his Trinitron TV, his Sony video camera, his Betamax recorder and his Apple computer seemed only to strengthen his power. Her poor sense of worth was kept dimly alive by surrendering funds to him: she was a quiet, pale, soft-spoken, furtive, dun-colored young woman with eyeglasses, and I always had the impression, even as Beth and I bobbed our heads and gave shy smiles to each other, that she had deliberately refused every small charm that could have attached itself to her. She looked like a weed. Yet she wrote good poetry. On reading what little she would show, I had discovered that she was cruel as a ghetto rapist in the brutality of her concepts, quick as an acrobat in her metaphors, and ready to slay your heart with an occasional vein of feeling as tender as the stem of honeysuckle on a child’s mouth. Still, I was only surprised, not dumbfounded. She was one weed that had been fed on radium.