Ice-Cream Headache (23 page)

Actually, nothing much happened at the Newsstand that morning. He was razzed unmercifully by the two who had seen him buy the box last night, and of course it was immediately taken up by all the others as they stood at the benches folding their papers and stuffing their paperbags under the bare bulbs in the back room—but he kept his mouth shut and said nothing and did not get mad, It was easy to do because he kept the mental picture of Margaret Simpson happily opening his box in the forefront of his mind, as a shield. Nobody could touch him when he thought of that. Anyway, the folding of the papers and the stacking of them in their proper sections only took ten or fifteen minutes, and then they were outside and separated, spreading out across the town, and he was by himself again, able to enjoy ecstatically again the physical discomfort that he suffered not only because of the money it made him but because it made him feel he was strong and had will power, and to dwell also upon, and to worry over in his nervous excitement, the valentine and his happy picture of Margaret, as he made his route. Then it was back home for breakfast and to change for school.

Twice as he was dressing, and as his nervous excitement mounted to almost unbearably unpleasant heights as the time left slid away, he almost decided once again to drop the whole thing. He could leave the box right here in his drawer and gradually eat the candy up himself, and no one would ever know where the box had disappeared to. But once again his ironbound promise to himself, which it was against his private rules to break, would not let him, and sustained him; that, and his happy picture of Margaret Simpson’s face, warm and loving as she opened up his box, and its natural sequence which automatically followed: of him telling her how much he adored her, and always had, from a distance, and her warm understanding of it, and then his hands and face moving against her lovely chest. When he took the paper-sacked box downstairs and his mother asked him curiously what it was, he told her it was a couple of books he was taking back.

On the way to school, as the other kids converged, it was harder to say that. He knew of course that the moment would come (It appeared to be rushing down on him swiftly, in fact, like a freight train.) when it would have to be made public. When there would be no avoiding saying what it was, or who it was for. So gradually he was forced back to saying simply, “Aw, nothing.” or “Nothing that would interest
you.
” Everybody of course knew by now though that it was a valentine.

There were several valentines on his own desk in the 8A room when he got there, from different kids, two of them from girls in the back of the room who thought they were stuck on him but whom he didn’t like because they both of them came from Sacktown and were poor, and not very smart, and often not even very clean. All these he opened and looked at, in a kind of daze of nervous excitement, hardly even seeing them, and then put them down. Then, painfully aware that he was being watched, he carefully pulled the big box out of its paper sack and laid it on his desk. Big; it was huge! It looked monstrous to him. He had attached a little card in a little white envelope to the ribbon which said: “To Margaret, with love, John Slade.” He stared at that a while. It had cost him deeply in pride and fear, to even dare to write it. That word. But he couldn’t stare at the envelope forever. Margaret Simpson had not yet come in the room, and it was still three and a half minutes till the bell rang. Abruptly, suddenly, he knew he couldn’t stand it, just could not wait any longer; he hadn’t made a promise to himself he would hand it to her, had he? And besides, if he waited to give it to her himself like he had planned, the way he was now he wouldn’t be able to say a word, not a single solitary goddamned word. Panic had enveloped him. He wanted only to be out of sight of everyone. The valentines on his own desk had given him an idea. Jerkily, cursing himself for looking so foolish, he picked up the box and walked across the room with it and laid it on Margaret Simpson’s desk, and then came back to his own desk and went out into the cloakroom pretending he had forgotten something in his overcoat.

There was a little buzz, sort of, that he could hear from the cloakroom, and when he peeked around the door there were several kids standing around her desk looking at it, admiring it maybe. He stayed in the cloakroom. How he could manage to while away three whole minutes in the cloakroom he didn’t know, and once, as a subterfuge, he went back in to his desk and got some handkerchieves and things out of it, pretending he wanted to put them in his coat to take home.

Then, finally, one minute before the bell would ring, Margaret Simpson came in, with two boys who were on the gradeschool varsity basketball team, and they hung up their coats and went inside. John busied himself with his own coat and did not look at them. Completely degenerated now, no longer able even to control, he could not resist and sneaked to the door and stuck the top half of his head around it, grinning foolishly. Margaret Simpson was just showing the card, his card, to the two boys. She said something he could not hear, and then laughed and gestured with her head toward the cloakroom where he was hiding, and the two boys laughed. Then Margaret looked down at the big red box with amusement.

John, who had already seen enough, jerked his head back and crept back to his own coat, pretending to himself he had to get something out of the pocket. But then, when he got there, he leaned his face against his coat sickly and shut his eyes, trying to shut out with the light existence also. He put his hand in the pocket of the coat so he could make it look like he was hunting something in case anybody else should come in. How could he ever go back in there, when the bell rang? How could he possibly? Sickness ran all through him, all over him, in long waves, at the thought. And everybody had seen him standing peeking around the doorjamb like a silly idiot. He had ruined it. He’d messed it all up. He should have made himself stay and hand it to her. Then it would have been all right. He stood that way, clenching and unclenching his fists, until the bell rang, knowing it would ring, listening for it.

When the bell rang, he forced himself to walk to the door and to his desk and sat down, trying hard not to look at anybody.

This one was written right after “The Valentine,” and is probably my favorite in the whole book. I like the mood and tone of it. I
love
the character of the bar-owner. I like everything about it. Particularly I like its form. I have tried since several times to reutilize the character of the bar-owner who exists in this story, but have never been able to recreate him. Apparently he belongs only in this story. An interested reader will note the reference to the tennis game against the garage which reappears as the main theme later in “The Tennis Game.”

E
VEN WHEN I WAS
very young, I had learned that telling the truth did not necessarily mean that you would be believed. Not that I was less prone to lie than any other child. But even on those occasions (and they were not what one could actually call rare) when I did tell the truth to grownups, and consequently expected to be patted proudly on the head, I more often than not found myself in hot water instead, was challenged and told I was lying anyway. Naturally, since I was not stupid, after a good big number of such painful experiences I began to realize that it did not really matter what you told people as long as it was something they wanted to believe—something that you knew by some sure sly instinct of childhood they
would
believe, because they thought that way—and that the actual fact of whether you were really telling the truth or not had nothing to do with it.

Not long ago I went with a friend to pay a reckless driving fine, and I quite by accident heard mentioned the name of a man who was intimately involved in these deep philosophic problems of my childhood and whom I had not thought about for years. Chet Poore was his name. And, in my home city, I never heard him referred to any other way. I assume his first name was Chester. He was what you might call a criminal, sort of.

Now, this thing of going to pay a reckless driving fine is always a slightly embarrassing business, if not downright cowing. It was especially so in my friend’s case, since while the charge was reckless driving, the sin itself was actually drunken driving. In our State, as in most others I guess, though I don’t actually know, so awful has the crime of drunken driving become that the first time you are caught at it you are not even charged with it. You are charged with only reckless driving, but given a very stiff fine. But of course, as in my friend’s case, everyone involved knows that your sin is really drunken driving.

In case anyone is interested in the rest of the progression, the second time you are caught at it you are actually charged with it, and given a stiffer fine; and you lose your driving license for a year. Automatically. The third time you are caught at it you will probably spend a year in prison. And you will lose your driving license forever. This of course, in our day and age, is comparable to having your feet lopped off back in François Villon’s time, if not as bloody. If anyone should be so foolhardy as to be caught
a fourth
time, after all this and with no license to drive, I have no idea what the penalty is, and don’t want to. I shudder to think of it.

But this is how serious the crime of drunken driving has become today. This, of course, is due to two things. One is that perforce we are a nation of drivers in the U.S., and the other is that we are a nation of drunkards. Really compulsive drunkards. Everyone knows this, but it is considered impolite to say so. I myself attribute this peculiarly American type of drunkenness to the fact that as a nation we are so repressed in our social and sexual lives. But of course I cannot prove it. And even if I could, what? But I am forced to grin whenever, in my tavern that I run, I hear TV newscasters or read newspaper editorials that chide the Russian leaders for downing so many double shots of vodka.

At any rate, because our government is worried (and rightly so), our propaganda about drunken driving has reached really astronomical proportions. Everyone now knows what a horrifying crime it is. Did you ever notice the sequence of thoughts in your own mind which follows the mention of it? It runs something like this: What? Drunken driving! Why, he might have hit a poor little innocent child. He might have struck down a poor old lady wending her tired way home with her laundry bundle upon her back. The by-now-ingrained thought sequence, you see. It appears in everybody’s mind automatically at those two heinous words: drunken driving. Your mind and my mind and, I’m quite sure, the minds of all drunken drivers when they are sober. And the moral stigma is of course tremendous. It does not matter that the child might have run out in front of him deliberately to scare him and show off to its friends, not knowing he was drunk. It does not matter that the old lady may have stepped in front of him purposely to commit suicide, being tired of being forced to carry her laundry bundle on her back all her life in everybody’s imagination whenever she steps out of the house. It does not, in fact, matter that there was in actual fact no child at all, and no tired old lady. They appear. They appear, and they exist, at the mention of those awful words, and remain to plague the hapless driver who really injured nobody and did nothing actually except get himself a load on and then attempt to drive himself home to safety.

Thus, for perhaps the first time in human history, due to circumstances involving high-powered means of transportation, an honest upright law-abiding ordinary citizen of a politically stable nation can suddenly find himself in the eyes of his peers placed in the company of thieves, second-story men and murderers. All because of high-powered machinery which he could not handle. The drunken driving situation is somewhat analogous to the atom bomb, I sometimes think.

On the other hand, I myself (I cannot speak for my friend and others, though I’m sure they would disagree with me) would not mind so much being placed in the company of criminals if they were all like Chet Poore who was a house-breaker and a car-thief, as well as being an excellent pool- and poker-player.

At any rate, my friend and I appeared at court. My friend, looking shamefacedly criminal, pleaded guilty to reckless driving. The judge (a very nice young man, with whom my friend and I had been drunk many times) looked embarrassed too and pronounced his sentence of a stiff fine. Then the sheriff (with whom we both had been drunk too), also looking embarrassed, escorted us to the County Clerk’s office to pay the stiff fine, accompanied by the deputy sheriff who had made the arrest and therefore did not look embarrassed but proud. The sheriff, of course, would never have arrested my friend; he would have taken him home instead, his deputy still had this to learn. The County Clerk, who accepted my friend’s money, did not look embarrassed because he was not a drinking man. My friend’s lawyer, who had accompanied us but had nothing at all to do, stood and chatted cheerfully with the proud deputy sheriff without looking embarrassed at all since to him this was only business, and he did not believe being drunk was a sin, or even being caught at it driving a car, and all of this to him was only a matter of legality and legal wordings, not morality at all. He was that kind of a lawyer. As well as being an excellent thief in all of the estates he handled. A healthy type to be around, sometimes.

It was then, standing with my friend while he wrote out his check for his stiff fine, and looking shamefaced and embarrassed too myself, I’m sure, that I heard the lawyer mention Chet Poore’s name to the deputy sheriff.

“Chet Poore. Yes,” the lawyer grinned. “They just picked him up again in Detroit in a stolen car. It was in the city paper.”

“That’ll make him a three time loser, won’t it?” the deputy asked.

Chet Poore. Chet Poore. The name echoed resoundingly back and forth from side to side of my suddenly empty head and left me feeling startled. Not actually living in my home city but in an adjoining county, not only had I not heard the name, I had not thought of the man in years and years. Whenever I did though, like now, I had a very definite mental picture: a huge tall man stood over me and stared grinning down at me. And always a feeling of intense smiling pleasure came over me.