Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (27 page)

And when the interrogation officer came to him in the field hospital, lying twitching and wide-eyed (as though he wanted to miss nothing of what went on in the light of day), only then did he remember why he had crawled all this way.

Truck and the patrol.

He told the G-2 and the man went away, and a while later he came back with another officer and they said things to Arnie Winslow.

"We don't have very accurate intelligence on that area."

"We're an advance spear of the front. We'd need at least a regiment out there..."

"Or a guide who could take us back the way you came."

Booming echoes of what they were saying cascaded back and forth in his skull. He could not believe he was hearing them correctly. All the pain and fear had been for nothing.

"Or at least a guide who knew the way. But we can't start till tonight. They'd shell our asses to bits if we tried it in daylight."

Arnie heard himself saying, "I'll take you back."

Through the darkness again. All the way back. Through the horror of the pit a second time.

The doctor interrupted. "This man isn't going anywhere. He's suffering from shock and three broken ribs and more minor afflictions than I have time to list. He's staying right here."

"I'll take you back ..."

"Will he be able to travel by tonight, Doc?"'

"I strongly advise against it."

"I'll take you ... I can do it ..."

And they left him there, to sleep through the day, to give his mind and his body what little peace they could gather for the long night ahead.

Arnie Winslow closed his eyes and slept. He slept and dreamed of blind birds in a pitch sky. But he was able to help the bird now. It was not necessary to rid himself of fear, if he could merely learn to exist, to function with the fear.

He was still frightened, but he slept. There would always be the daylight.

--Hollywood, 1963

WHAT I DID ON MY VACATION THIS SUMMER

BY LITTLE BOBBY HIRSCHHORN, AGE 27

He had begun to smell really rank; and standing there at the side of US Route 1, covered with dust and small bugs, Robert Hirschhorn had begun to suspect There Is No God. All around him the incredible Fairchild Desert sang with mind-frying heat, and the watery horizon devils twittered in the corners of his vision like mad things. Beside him--and on which his good right foot rested--the black sturdyboard suitcase (which he had used to mail home his dirty college laundry) was equally filthy. Yet its binding cords were not as frayed as his nerve ends; and only a close second to his shoelaces, which bulged with knots where they had been rejoined.

Like three eggs basting in a shallow pan, his brains were being steadily fried; his mouth tasted brown, and funky; he was hungry; he had sweated so much it felt like ants on his flesh; his eye sockets flamed from the hundred-watt bulbs burning behind his retinas; he was sick and unhappy.

And a jack rabbit bdoinged! across his path.

It took seventeen leaps and was very much gone.

"You are very much gone," Robert said, mostly to the puffs of dust that moved when he spoke. "And I am not far behind you."

His ears went up like the rabbit's, as the Cadillac zoomed out of nowhere on the terribly flat highway, and his thumb went halfway into the air, and the Cadillac whispered away down behind him, toward Reno, toward San Francisco, toward the Pacific Ocean and all that cool muthuh water.

"Good-bye," he murmured, and fainted.

They had stopped the car almost directly over him--or perhaps had rolled it to him--so that as he fluttered awake, he found himself staring directly up at the canvas water bag hanging from the front fender. A great, chill drop of perspiration water hung precariously from the underside of the bag, and as he watched, it sucked itself free and plummeted down. It struck him directly under the nose. It was tepid.

"Hey, Teddy," a voice came out of the sky, "the yo-yo's comin' to." Robert looked up past the fender. There were three pairs of legs rising directly up out of his vision, continuing, he supposed, to Heaven. "Help him up," said another voice, presumably Teddy's.

Hands reached down, one pair covered by black soft-leather driving gloves, with flex-holes cut in their backs. Robert was drawn unsteadily to his feet, and his eyes focused on the three young men. The one with the Italian driving gloves supported him. "You okay, fellah?" he asked Robert.

"Szmmll." Robert mouthed a cheekful of road dust. He had fallen face-forward; they'd turned him over on his back. He extended his dust-coated tongue and swiped at it with his fingertips. They came away muddy.

"Well? You okay huh?" asked the shortest of the three, and Robert recognized the voice as Teddy's. He found himself nodding yes, he was all right. But he wanted a drink of water, badly. He motioned to the canvas bag, making feeble finger movements in its direction.

"Hey, man," Teddy said to the tallest of the trio, the one with the driving gloves, "dig him out that thermos." The boy reached into the back seat of the car and rummaged through wads of clothing and luggage, till he came up with a thermos bottle. He unscrewed the top, pulled the cork and poured the red plastic cuptop full of a light yellow fluid. He handed it across to Robert, saying, "Lemonade."

Robert took it with both hands, and gulped. The first few swallows were coated with dust and mud, but after that it went down smoothly, and it tasted wonderful.

"Where uh where you headin'?" asked the third boy, a medium-tall, freckle-spotted item with the free-swinging egocentricity that expressed itself in manner before a word could be spoken. The kind of arrogance of personality best connoted by wealthy young men from good families who are Big Men on Campus.

"San Francisco," Robert answered. "I was hitchhiking; I thought it would be a good background experience." He grimaced, and felt the tip of his nose. It was raw where he had scraped it on the ground.

"You scraped it," the one with the driving gloves said. "But it's not bleeding; it just looks funky."

Robert murmured something pointless about how it didn't matter. The three young men stood around nervously. until Teddy said, "Listen, we're going to Frisco, too, and if you don't mind a few stops along the way, you can jump in with us." Robert could not quite believe he was hearing properly. It was the sweet chariot, come from beyond the pearly gates to rescue him.

"Robert Hirschhorn," he said, sticking out his hand.

"Theodore Breedlow," said the short boy, returning the gesture. He indicated the tallest boy: "Cole Magnus, and," turning to the third young man, "George Young. They call me Teddy Bear." He smiled sheepishly at his own sophomorism.

They threw his sturdyboard case into the trunk of the big black Lincoln, and hollowed out a place for Robert among the clothes and packages tossed helter-skelter across the back seat.

And then they were off down the road.

They were from an entirely different social stratum than Robert had known. While he had come from genteel and mildly Puritanical Middlewestern conformity, the three young men in the front seat had been spawned by the harsh, black-and-white hustling of Detroit. Where he chose his words for maximum effect and clarity, they bumbled and shotgunned through the language with rimfire "ain'ts" and copper-jacketed "goddams" and frequent double-barreled scattergunned "muthuh-fuckers." It was not entirely new to Robert, but in such close quarters, and for such a protracted length of time down the road, it became almost a heady experience. They were refugees from an assembly line in Dearborn, ferrying the big black Lincoln to a buyer in San Francisco, and they were GoToHells this week and next. Then, pilot another car hack to Detroit, and the lathes and conveyor belts of their waking hours. But this week and next!

"Man, I pushed more'a them goddam Fords down'a line than I got hairs on my head. Sheet, man, it's good to be outta that racket and in the fresh air." And Teddy Bear turned up the air-conditioning in the hermetically sealed Lincoln another notch.

"If my parents could see me now!" George Young chirruped. "They'd crap!" He bounced in his seat. His laughter began slowly, like a dynamo winding up, and in a moment had become so much a part of the charged air, that all four of them were laughing together. "Th-they ... they ... think l'm, they think I'm ... buh ... back in Dearborn sweating on that fuckin' line an' an' an' here I am out in the m-muh-muh-iddle of Nevaaaaduh ... !" and he rocked back and forth like an old Yiddish man dovening over his Talmud, the tears streaming down his freckled face. Cole Magnus was forced to pull over on the shoulder, as they all capered tightly in the Lincoln. It was a madhouse for a moment.

When they were going again, Cole said suddenly, "Hey, you remember what Roger Sims told us ... ?"

Teddy Bear and George Young looked at him questioningly. "You remember: about Winnemucca, Nevada!"

The lights shone out abruptly from their eyes, and Teddy Bear went, "Whoo-eeeee, sheeeet, man! Yeahhh! Now I remember, yeah! Winnemucca, Nevada!"

And George Young clapped his hands together like a delighted child. "Hoo hoo hoo, boy, I'm gonna get me a piece'a'tail ... hoo hoo hoo!"

Cole, without turning around from the wheel, pulled his right shoulder forward allowing his head to move sidewise, as he spoke to Robert. "We got this buddy back in Detroit"--he pronounced it Dee-troyt--"and he's almost as big a swordsman as George-O over there, and he took this trip out to Frisco--"

"The natives hate the name Frisco, I understand," Robert stuck in without meaning to be rude. "They prefer it to be called San Francisco ..."

"Yeah, well," Cole went on without hearing him, "Roger came back and said he stopped off in some little burg called Winnemucca, Nevada, just this side of Reno, and he says they got the next best thing to legalized prostitution there." He pronounced it proz-ti-toosh-un. "Wanna stop off there for a little diddly-doo?"

"Aw, that was probably one of Roger's goddam wet dreams," Teddy Bear denigrated the idea. "You know he lies, man. If he says he got laid the night before, it prob'ly means he said hello to some chick on the street and followed her till she called the laws."

"Yeah, well ..."

George Young stuck in, "No, I think he was shooting straight. He had a ball, I could tell from the way he was talking. Hell, it can't hurt, can it? Just to stop and see. It's on the way, ain't it?"

They pulled out the map and ran fingers down US #1 till they located it. "Right on the way," Teddy Bear said cheerfully. "I guess it can't hurt to try. It'll probably be one of them wet dreams, but what the hell ..."

"What about you?" Cole asked Robert.

Robert had never been with a whore. In fact, at the age of twenty--perhaps two years older than these three wandering minstrels--he had had only one girl. Sally Gleeson, who had been as virgin as himself, until they had discovered each other the year before. Now Sally had gone off to Radcliffe and was making time with Robert's ex-friend Dave, who had met Sally on a visit to Robert's home, from New Jersey where the family had moved. He was not at all sure he wasn't terrified by the idea. But he could not expose the twitching raw end of that fiber of fear without denying everything he had decided was true of himself:

Robert Hirschhorn came from a small town outside a larger town in central Ohio. He hated the town. Hated it because it did not know what to do with him. He was the one who read Proust and Edward Gorey and MIDDLEMARCH and Ronald Searle and Hobbes and Ian Fleming, and who ignored Morris West and Leon Uris and Daphne Du Maurier and Harry Golden and Irving Wallace and Time magazine. He was something other than what everyone else was in town; he knew it, and they knew it, and there was something more for him than the softly moldering inside of the cocoon called Starkey, Ohio.

He had decided he wanted to be a writer. It came to him not entirely unbidden, for he had contributed a seven-part serial to a kiddies' column in the now-defunct Cleveland News when he was still in grade school. He had won a National Scholastic writing award for a short story about a robot that had taken over the world (which he had cribbed in concept from Capek's famous R.U.R.). And he had decided that college would be of no use to him if what he needed to know was the world. So Robert Hirschhorn, at the age of twenty, had taken to the road with his black sturdyboard suitcase, and a determination to taste of life in all its sherbet flavors. Which offered, this week, the tantalizing, fraudulent favorite, Cheap Whore. It was a combination of peach, rocky road and lemon. And to turn it away, back to the cooler chest, in return for a triple-dip of the pallidly familiar vanilla on which he had been subsisting for so long, would be to deny all that he had decided about himself.

"I'm game if you are." He grinned widely. Perhaps a trifle too widely.

"Hell, how should I know?" said Teddy Bear. "I suppose you ask a cabbie. Ain't that the way they do it?"

George shook his head. "Listen, stupid, you got to be more uh more undercover, more--"

"Surreptitious?" offered Robert.

"--whatever." George refused to accept the word. "But you can't just go around town asking any dumb hick where the hoo-er-houses are. That's stupid."

"Oh, hell, this isn't Detroit," Cole said. He suddenly braked to a stop by a general store, and leaned out to an old man sitting in a straight-back chair propped against the wall. "Hey, Mister!" The old man looked up disinterestedly. He closed one eye to focus better with the other. "Where's the whorehouses, huh?" Cole asked blatantly.

"Straight down this street till you come to Main, take a left and keep going till you see the veteran's trailer camp. There's a big wood fence behind it. Th'other side is Littletown. That's it, can't miss it." He went back to picking his nose.

Cole rolled the window back up and turned to his companions with a superior grin on his boyish young face. "Morons," he gibed. He slipped the big black Lincoln into D and pulled out.

"I saw it, but I don't believe it. I heard it, but it ain't true," George Young said, amazed.

They followed the old man's instructions and came down the far side of Winnemucca till they saw a cluster of silver trailers, all hunkered together like poor animals in a warren. It was a scene of somehow surpassing squalor, though everything seemed neat and clean. Perhaps it was the lack of grass--just deep brown dirt streets--or the gray and leprous garbage cans tilted and rusting and staved in, right at the edge of the road.