Inner Tube: A Novel (17 page)

“High mass?” Nito made the sign of the cross. “I would rather watch the Ursula Andress movie.”

“Stay tuned. Study our national culture.”

“But where are the breasts?”

I took pride in those days in my total lack of purpose. It seemed to me a mark of real clarity, of harmony with the future. But in this role of disaffection, I’m afraid, there was too much ham. Even Carla, summering with friends on a farm in Pennsylvania, was sending me checks.

Bad Boy—

Am having dire word of you and your life in the slums. Mom and her inflations, you know. But here anyway a small contribution toward socket wrenches, or whatever you might need. Very muggy here, sleep difficult. The cukes, tomatoes, etc., seem to thrive on it, though. Raccoons come out of the woods at night and beg at the porch for scraps. Did you know they’re related to the panda? Neither did I.

Love and birdwatching,

C

For sure, the heat was on. Gordo suggested I enroll in electronics school. Casually, Alexander Butterfield betrayed the existence of a White House taping system. I slept with all the windows open and listened to sirens. I cracked ice trays into the bathtub and sat there reading about intrigue in the Ottoman Empire.

The Constitution in jeopardy. Our republic foundering. But I found no alarm in my surrounding streets. Nothing new at Katz Laundry, or at Three Bros. Coffee Shop, radio tuned to the Mets game. Elders outside the grocery sipped beer and slapped their dominoes, and of Nixon only amusement—“The fuckin’ guy.” Still, the indignant shock was out there, in some other part of town, or in green counties to the north, beside ponds and croquet courts, where values hard arrived at seemed to warp. Such blather. Such density of ego.

By the time John Dean began the careful relinquishing of his confidences, I had reached Chapter 7 in my bartender’s guide: Punches & Coolers. My cache of lemons attracted canny urban flies and scented the days with a pleasant bitterness. “A cancer in the White House.” The analogy anyone could understand. Clever Dean, nothing left to chance. Writers of enterprise flew off to interview his teachers and tennis buddies.

I filled a two-gallon pot with something called Rum Cockade and invited the Roysters. Chip and Dale had the apartment above mine. They were emigrants from northern Ohio, exponents of social change. Their walls were hung with serapes, the floor littered with cat toys. Their flattened vowels and cumbersome honesty charmed me, though I knew they were in for it. The city, having lured them, would no doubt show no mercy.

Dale assessed the President. “It’s like he wanted to get caught,” she said, swinging her braids. “Like when you’re a kid and do things just to test your mother. To see if she’s paying attention.”

Chip snorted and touched his bald spot. “Special attention for Dickie. He’s so misunderstood.”

Dale worked in a daycare center.

“Mr. Above-it-all,” she said, and drained her third cup. “You should be in a seminary.”

It struck me that this was one of those relationships based on the fact of its never working. Yet how tenderly Chip would comfort his wife a few hours later, cradling her as she retched over the sink.

I ladled out more punch. “Think we’ll ever get to hear those tapes?” What a host.

“Which tapes?” Chip said. “I mean, how do you ever know or not if what you’re listening to is fake?”

“He wants punishment,” Dale insisted. Hugging her knees, mouth hidden behind the tin cup, she was beginning to suggest an ad layout for CARE. “He wants to be stripped naked and flogged.”

“Yes, a ceremony.” I toasted her. “You’ve got a grip on it now.”

“What this country needs,” Chip said grandly, “is less humiliation and more humility.”

Chip had been with the Peace Corps in Guyana.

I slept heavily that night and dreamed I was a bagman for the Mormon Church. Gordon Liddy took me to lunch. The prime rib was rare. We talked about theocracy and gauchos and how to kill someone with a sharpened pencil. Waking in late afternoon, I told myself: Stop fighting the odds and you’ll make a fine apologist.

A few days later I met Dale in front of Katz Laundry. Her little face was pinched and she kept looking over her shoulder. Chip, she confided, was unwell. His vision blurred; he had ringing in his ears. Just that morning, short of breath and twitching uncontrollably, he had been admitted to Roosevelt Hospital for evaluation.

“We wanted to come here so bad. We said, ‘It’s the nerve center.’”

Now Dale pined for the simplicities of Dayton, molded-salad luncheons and covered-dish suppers. Chip was afraid of having to work the line like his father, but could it be worse than this?

Shortly after Judge Sirica ordered release of the tapes, Nito was stabbed in the arm by a junior high kid who wanted his radio. By the time impeachment proceedings were under way, I had moved back to Lake Success, regained my job with the network, and become a commuter. The democratic system, it was widely announced, was proving its special merit. I was relatively sober, flirting with accommodation. And, unbeknownst to anyone, my mother was preparing to leave the world behind.

H
AVE I MENTIONED TO
you the stretch I pulled in San Francisco? Of course, yes, the story of the shoes with the holes cut in them. So. There I was in the city that has always wanted to be somewhere else. The place and the people in it were arch and overindulged and wanted their sophistication to be appreciated. The locale, in short, was all too fitting.

I had a cheap apartment with a view of the Oakland shipyards. Above an Italian restaurant, it was furnished like something out of a thirties detective novel and redolent of singed garlic. My landlady left small packets of anisette cookies in front of my door.

I had a job that brought me into contact with the sort of underworld I needed as an antidote to Lake Success. If I was going to shake loose of that depleting heritage, Le Sex Shoppe was ideal territory. It was undemanding work besides and afforded me nearly limitless reading time—B. Traven and Vargas Llosa were my fascinations at the time. I had barely to glance up from
The Green House
in order to make change for the peep booths.

I had an Olds 88 that enabled me to learn the city like an anatomy chart. I knew a spot in the Mission where tamarind or hibiscus popsicles could be had, and out the avenues toward the sea, a Korean grocery with the cheapest carton of cigarettes that side of the Bay and homemade kimchi that made your eyes water. In a light industrial zone south of Market, I found a record store called Tommy’s Soul Shack where I could get a bet down on anything from the sixth race exacta at Longacres to the bottom of a fight card in Stockton. In the apartment directly overhead lived a conceptual artist named Irv who made masks out of hair scrounged from beauty salon Dumpsters. Irv was a lapsed Jew from Baltimore, a fellow fugitive. He supplied me with high-grade black hashish at very reasonable rates.

The fabled city at my fingertips? The life of Riley? Well, not altogether. Ambivalence comes with every territory.

I was having an affair with an Armenian art student who wept while she fucked. “What is it? What is it?” I’d say, but Andrea would only pull her dark hair over her dark face and shudder. The tendons in her neck would stand out wire-tight. I’d stroke them, matching her silence for silence. Her mysteries filled me with loathing as often as with tenderness, but I couldn’t say goodbye. Andrea was short, round, not particularly beautiful. Still, I was enormously aroused by her almost complete lack of humor, by the warm morning smell that stayed all day with her and which no perfume could fully mask. Also, I suppose, I was unduly fascinated by my own reactions to the first woman I had known for whom there seemed to be so much at stake.

Evidently, Andrea was very much in love with me, although I had given her no good reason to be so. It unnerved me. Anyway, she was so bloody earnest about it, blew the notes so hard. Combined with some mutant species of Old World submissiveness, this studious approach of Andrea’s sometimes tempted me to strangle her.

We had known each other but a few days when she came to see where I worked. The presence of a living woman made the customers fractious and a few regulars grumbled across the street to the bar to sit in the dark. With the same sharp attention she would bring to a gallery full of Mirós or Rosenquists, Andrea looked over the merchandise. After a few minutes she carried an open magazine to the counter.

“Would you like for me to do this?” she asked quietly.

The photograph showed a woman cleaving herself with a black rubber dildo. I began to wish I were in the bar.

“You only have to ask.” Her eyes were shiny brown lakes.

The woman in the photograph grimaced; Andrea was expressionless. Her somber zeal bored into my skull like a steel screw.

“I’d ask you out for shots at the Forest Club,” I said, barely able to control myself.

But we had our harmonic periods as well. One of Andrea’s uncles was a grocery broker with a warehouse at China Basin. We’d head over there on a Saturday and load up with garbanzo beans, macaroni, olives, pomegranates, and marinated artichoke hearts. Then we’d go back to her one-room flat and eat like starved nomads while listening to the Giants game on the radio. Then we would ascend.

A previous tenant had cut a hatchway to the roof and installed a ladder. He wasn’t much as a carpenter and when it rained—which in San Francisco could be any minute now—the hatch was a difficulty. But Andrea had a tarpaulin she’d fasten over the top and a spaghetti pot to catch whatever leaked through to the bottom.

“I’ve got to have open space,” she said.

Golden Gate Park was at least three miles away.

Andrea had extra-long wiring on her record machine so that along with cushions and army blankets, we could haul it on up and listen to the atonal composers she liked so much. In each other’s arms, in the soot and waning sunlight, we would whisper like children.

Andrea told me stories about her family: the very devout grandfather with no left arm who several years ago had brought in the largest raisin harvest in the history of Inyo County; the cousin who, at least peripherally, had been involved in the assassination of a Turkish diplomat; and her eldest sister, who’d moved south, changed her name, and could now be seen as a corrupt D.A. on a semipopular daytime serial.

But the point of it all was simply this: We were so young we had no stories about ourselves. Probably that is a large part of what kept us after one another despite the negative signposts—the eagerness, even desperation, for heightened moments we could hoard away.

Must I always present things in such crass relief? Where is the balance? I should say that holding tight on that asphalt roof, I didn’t care that her paintings were derivative and cold, her dark mysteries so unnecessary. I felt enveloped and pleasantly stupid and I loved her.

Then in October Andrea was raped. Not by drunken seamen or nonwhite sociopaths, but by two fellow art students who cornered her late one night in the sculpture studio. They threw her over stacked bags of plaster of parts and pummeled her. As the second one burst in her, one flailing arm reached the purse that had fallen behind her. She plunged the nail file into the film major’s neck and ran, ran for blocks thinking of water to clean herself. On the apron of an all-night gas station bright as an operating theater, she remembered not to.

“You want a case, we need the semen,” said the bland resident.

I saw a 4-H sponsor petting a prize Charolais bull.

We sat on turquoise plastic chairs in the ER. The bruises on Andrea’s face were turning four or five different colors, but she was dreadfully calm.

I said: “You should have gone for his eye.”

“Blind him, shit, I was trying to kill him,” Andrea said. “Missed the jugular, that’s all.”

And that was the end of her weeping in bed. By instinctive understanding, no words passed between us; we simply resumed. Her silent encouragements were new, and the hardened ridges of her muscle. Even her surface textures seemed different: glassier, more like an altar statue. In her face, which I could watch without pangs now, was something I was certain had not been there before. She seemed distanced in a dream. I realized that I was to her now no more than a bright but finally weightless preoccupation, like a silver boar’s-head toothpick holder shipped to a lonely colonial outpost along with the rum and ropes of tobacco. I felt a kind of sick relief.

The trial came up just after New Year’s. Both defendants wore J.C. Penney suits and dark ties. Andrea appeared in a navy pleated skirt, and a different Peter Pan blouse each day. The gallery was so packed with her relatives that the usual aficionados—spidery women with liver spots, retired meat cutters—could only whine and cajole in the marble hallway outside.

The “forensic” phase was disastrous: The hospital resident was furtive and snappish, the color enlargements of Andrea’s lacerations stuck at the processing lab. Prosecutor Tedesci told us not to worry.

As the sole witness to the crime, Andrea was required to take the stand. She averted her eyes, spoke in the same low, liquid voice no matter what the question. The impression she gave was of sorrowful resignation, her spirit damaged beyond repair. Tedesci was overjoyed.

He said: “You want to work any more of my cases, sweetie, just name a figure.”

The jury was out less than an hour. Andrea’s relatives applauded the verdict, but grumbled at the ten-year sentences.

Tedesci had more reassurance. “They’ll be nothing but dog meat down at Chino, believe me.”

“The way I feel, I don’t know…not vindicated.”

Andrea stared at the vertical punch cards of the downtown skyline and I continued to massage her feet. We were up on the roof, under a cafe umbrella shimmed into a vent pipe. It was misting lightly and there was no moon. What we were really talking about, we weren’t talking about. And though I sensed the inevitable out there somewhere, I was convincing myself I had to have her, though she had slipped through a cosmic tear.