A Fan's Notes (26 page)

From Bunny I had learned that, though Poppy made a good deal of money, he was just this side of bankruptcy, the mother having convinced him that he could make boodles of money by buying, landscaping, and paving the morosely vacant area called Heritage Heights. But the local inhabitants had steadfastly refused to recognize the comeliness of The Heights, had kept perversely away, and there was no doubt in my mind that Mums—whether Poppy made twenty thousand dollars a year or not—had laid the venture
’
s failure squarely on Chuck
’
s sour business acumen. Moreover, by that remarkable viciousness of which the American Mums
’
s mind is capable, it also became apparent that she had laid her own physical shortcomings as a woman squarely on the guy
’
s penis. As a result, there were that weekend all kinds of hushed conversations from which Poppy was excluded, an exclusion invariably instigated by Mums, and to which I was now—being of that charmed circle at whose heart Bunny lay—permitted. These conversations were more often than not concerned with moneys to satisfy Bunny
’
s apparently near-insatiable needs—a half-dozen more sweaters, a new car in the spring, a raccoon coat (at this point Bunny had suggested that if they were going to go into fur, they might as well get mink, and to Mums
’
s outrage she had turned to me and winked), ad infinitum. Whether it was for my benefit, an indication of what I might expect as the supplier of Bunny
’
s material whims, I don
’
t know; but-Mums always, with the briefest show of irritation, promised that the moneys would be made available somehow. Then she would put her finger to her mouth and say,
“
Shish. Don
’
t tell Poppy—he won
’
t understand,
”
saying it in such a way as to indicate that the man was all but moronic and would be no more capable of understanding the noble destiny that between them—it was presumably between us now—they had projected for Bunny than he would be of understanding Relativity. At the time, as I say, I thought I had felt rather sorry for him, but I can see now that I hadn
’
t. I had despised him for so docilely permitting his own emasculation; and what I had really wanted—incredibly!—was for him to come charging through the door, Pabst beer can in hand, to punch them both about a bit, and then to kick both their asses right out the door into Mums
’
s dim-witted dream of Heritage Heights!

The weekend proved a dismal enlightenment. At some point in it I fell into an unspeaking depression, and Bunny asked me repeatedly,
“
What
’
s the matter? What
’
s the matter? Is it something about my parents?
”
“
No! No!
”
I protested.
“
It
’
s just that I
’
m sick—something I ate, I guess.
”
Indeed I was sick, though the poisoning had nothing to do with the Allorgees
’
rather bland table fare. That weekend I had been browsing through an unread issue of The New Yorker and had come across a very funny George Price cartoon showing a whole boodle of his hatchet-faced low-lifes sprawled about the living room before the television set, guzzling beer, and all (grandma, too!) got up in Dodger baseball uniforms. I was chuckling like a madman, but suddenly the chuckle became very like sobs —because I had made an awful, a horrifying transposition. Substituting for the Dodger uniform a New York Giant tuque I had seen pictures of the players wearing while working out in frigid weather, I suddenly saw myself consigned to the breakfast nook with Poppy, our Giant tuques pulled down about our ears, our tongues lapping at the Pabst cans, our ears glued to the radio, now and again raising our eyes to look self-consciously at one another and to make not very funny jokes about the women folk in the other room, jokes that, sadly, admitted our helplessness before the jewel they carried between their legs. Yes, I saw myself sitting out there in Heritage Heights with Poppy, whose
“
reception
”
was so good and who had a marvelous gadget for opening the garage doors, and, oh lord, the thought that this might indeed be my heritage, my fate, struck me all the more impotent, quite unable to even satisfy Bunny, something which I had till that night always taken a kind of melancholy pride in doing—one way or another.

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.