Memoir From Antproof Case (6 page)

I had no need whatsoever to have been so constrained. At that age, especially, I was as tender and innocent as a milk-fed veal. But you know very well what happens to innocent and tender milk-fed veals, and where they end up. The judge whose bitter imagination had contrived my sentence actually had brought a cup of cheap nauseating coffee into the courtroom where I was being tried. What justice could exist when mine own judge was himself one of the many fiends I was compelled to eradicate?

With no coffee nearby, I was very gentle. I was easily moved, always in love, and most willing to sacrifice. I worked hard, and because I lived more or less alone and had no entertainment, and was totally serious, totally nervous, I was far and away the most accomplished student in my school, though my record was mixed. This was only because I was never able to force myself to engage those subjects that did not excite, confound, or invigorate my imagination, and also because I was always immediately willing to defy authority.

Even as a schoolboy I made mortal enemies among adults—my Latin teacher, for example, a cruel, balding young man of twenty-seven with a canine tooth that hung out over his lower lip even when his mouth was tightly closed. The first day in class, we took a look at him and we knew that God had put us on earth to carry forth the victories of the angels, which were achieved not only on the pale blue terraces of heaven but in the most unlikely corners of hell. Though I received consistent zeros in Latin, by the time I exited his jurisdiction I had scarred my teacher, scalded him, lamed him, and punched out his pointed and drooping tooth.

Others were worse. When I was not yet ten, an art teacher whose name was Sanco Demirel ordered me to have my hair clipped. I threw back at him a simple flat
no.
He immediately charged through the rows of desks, lifted me into the air, and transported me to the book-storage room. Rage often builds upon itself, and his was no exception. As I flew, painfully gripped, high above my accustomed altitude, I feared for my life.

He slammed the door of the book room and took a cane from the top shelf. "Bend over!" he commanded.

For me, this was a defining moment. I decided then and in an instant that defiance and death are preferable to subjugation, and I narrowed my eyes, signaling for a fight. Irritated beyond measure, he began to chase me around the room, flailing with the cane. Books flew about like chickens, but I was able to escape. It did not take long to make him apoplectic, and I knew that if he caught me he was going to kill me. I rattled the door. It was locked, the latch frozen, and I hadn't the strength to move it, but he thought I was about to escape.

He was at the other end of the room. So much lay littered between us that he despaired of catching me, and threw the cane in frustration. It missed, it clattered, and it was soon in my hands.

He remained unfazed, for I was only half his size. The straight end of the cane was quite narrow. As soon as I realized this, and that my possession of the cane gave him an excuse to beat me to smithereens, I put it in the pencil sharpener.

As I began to turn the crank, his jaw dropped. Had he moved quickly he would have had me, but he hesitated. When I removed the bamboo shaft from the gray sharpening machine, I was no longer a fourth-grader about to be turned the color of blotched jam, I was
Achilles.

The shaft was three feet long, with a six-inch tapered point of razor-sharp, hard, blond bamboo—and I was as agile as a gnat. I could jump and twist unlike any grown man, and my reflexes were so fresh that I was able to toss five pennies from the back of my hand and catch them one at a time before they hit the floor. I will never forget the light and uplifting moment when the power fled from him to me. A beam of sunlight came through the windows above the highest shelves and enveloped me in a bright golden disc.

The first thing he said, shrinking back, was, "I didn't intend to hurt you."

My answer to that lie was, "Sanco Demirel, you are going to die."

I have always been fiercely protective of children, especially myself, as the task was almost exclusively mine from a rather early age. I had not then the moderating experience that later years would fail to bring, and I fully intended to kill him, right then, in the book-storage room. I jumped the piles of overturned primers, fragrant pine drawers that had flown from cabinet carcasses like extracted elephant teeth, and chairs turned helplessly on their sides. And, by God, the ray of sun followed me, shining upon the golden sword that I was ready to thrust into any one of a hundred terrible places in Sanco Demirel's cruel bullying body.

He threw a textbook of physiology at me, and as it flew through the air—easily dodged, I might add—a red and blue diagram of the circulatory system flashed from the flipping pages. Thus, I decided to stab him in his Psoas Quadratus Anastimositum. The sadness, loneliness, and determination of my eyes half-closed against the roaring sunlight convinced him that I was going to reach him and that I really was going to kill him, and he climbed the bookshelves in an attempt to escape through the narrow windows above. This exposed his Psoas and I felt the surge of grace and rage that is the mark of a warrior. As I closed for the kill, the door was smashed open by our rotund headmaster, whose expression I shall never forget.

As I grew older I grew subtler, recognizing the need to balance decisive action with the possibility of escape. In the eighth grade, just before we entered the war, I was molested by a pederast, the so-called dean of men, who pushed me down and grabbed for my private parts. Though we were alone in a deserted hallway, we were not quite alone, for the school dog, an old Labrador named Cabot, lay in the corner like a shadow.

In our biology class we had been studying muscle power, and as an illustration the instructor had used Cabot to bite upon a compression-meter. Evolution, he explained, had favored those dogs who could crack the bone and get the marrow. The compression-meter had been the handle of Lewis Teschner's tennis racquet, sliced in half, with a stiff spring between the two parts. To hold the apparatus together, the biology instructor had used the tape that we wrapped around our wrists in boxing class. Cabot was a sweet-tempered and unassuming dog who had never bitten anyone in his life, but for several years he had been rewarded with kisses, pats, and dog biscuits for sinking his teeth deeper and deeper into the compression-meter. As the object was to increase the force and tighten the hold, he had been trained to bite, to bear down, and never to give up.

I thought I had had it. The dean of men was 6'5" tall, 250 pounds, a natural-born fighter, and the boxing coach. As he pummeled and grappled me in unspeakable combinations, I saw, through the fog of rape, that his wrists were taped. He had either just taught a boxing class or was about to teach one.

Another second and I had made the connection. "Bless you, Cabot!" I screamed. This, somehow, excited the dean of men, but it also got Cabot to his graying feet, tail swinging back and forth. I looked at his smiling dog's face, and, hardly able to speak, I said, "Test, Cabot, test!"

Cabot lifted his head in readiness, as dogs will, and looked about for the compression-meter. He found it—he thought—and approached, just as he had been taught to do in class. He wagged his tail. "Bite, Cabot, bite!" I commanded. And he did.

This dean of men immediately disengaged from me, the object of his affection, and rolled onto the floor. "Bite, bite, bite!" I chanted, just as we had done in class. "Bite, bite, and never give in!" And that dear dog cracked the bone, got to the marrow, and did not ever have to pay for it, because, to my never-ending satisfaction, the dean of men implicated a phantom bulldog that he claimed, to universal astonishment, had been lying in ambush near the urinals.

On the way from the Tombs to Château Parfilage I was accompanied by a New York City homicide detective, a nineteenth-century Irishman by the name of Grays Spinney. The judge knew that a straitjacket and certain requirements of nature do not go well together, and, mindful of the cruel and unusual punishment clause in the Constitution, had provided both himself and me with a way out. As soon as we were beyond the three-mile limit, Spinney sized me up and took off the restraints, though he replaced them for transit through Paris, Geneva, and the other cities of my eternal humiliation.

On the Hudson and in the valley of the Shenandoah, spring was rising. The angle of the sun was perfect, the light not overbearing, the young grass short and uniformly green, the night euphoric with blooms and warm breezes. And the beautiful sights of spring were punctuated by banks of red and yellow flowers that looked like distant strokes of oil paint laid upon forest and field.

But on the North Atlantic the waves were combat gray, the sky a miasma of spray and fog. Tiny icebergs the size of polar bears blew across the sea like marshmallows, and Spinney, who had spent his life dipping into the Tenderloin in pursuit of derbied gunmen, got me to the porthole a hundred times with sudden exclamations such as, "Jaysus Christ! A neked Iskimo woman ant a blooody fookin' kangaroo!"

Though he was a detective of exalted rank, he was not literate enough to read the
Police Gazette
without assistance and, after hundreds of inquiries—"Does L-I-V-E-R spell Lady Gaudoyva?"—I became his private secretary and amanuensis. In a process that confirmed the genius of Isaac Newton, my every effort was repaid as he recounted to me in equal measure his years, begun in "Eteen-hundert ant soventy-soven," as a cop.

He was near retirement and full of regrets. "Murther is entoyerly uninthirestin," he said. "The raysult is alwess the sim—a did boody. If Oy ware you, a tinder farteen-yar-olt buy, Oy'd be inthirested in the bonks."

"The bonks?"

"The bonks. Killin is amurl, but ayven assa paylease afficer, Oy don't see anythin amurl about robin bonks. Ya know, we hod a fellah who wint boy the name of 'Robin Bonks,' ant he would git himself al dresst oop ant walk into a bonk. 'Gut marnin,' he'd say, 'Oy'm inthirested in oopinin an accoont.' 'Whot's yir nim?' they'd osk. 'Robin Bonks,' he't reploy, ant see how lang he coot tayke it befar he hot to tayke oot his gon."

Spinney leaned over the top bunk rail as if to confide in me the secret of the universe. "The bonks," he said, "iss whar payple kip thir minny. Ya dawn't haf ta goo lookin far it. It's al in one playce. If Oy ware you, gooin oover ta lam Frinch ant Chairman ant al thot, Oy'd figger oot how ta git meself inta Harberd or Yell, and thin grotchulee warm me woy inta sum infistmint bonk or sumthin. Ya folia?"

I did, but I tabled it.

I cannot remember anything worse than being confined within a straitjacket—even going down into the sea, my windshield covered with oil and blood, the engines dying and the wind whistling death—except perhaps for shock "therapy," something to which I was subjected before I was sent abroad, a thing more terrible than I can describe, inflicted upon me by that coffee-drinking bastard who called himself a judge.

With great economy of means, a straitjacket inflicts semiperfect paralysis upon someone whose most pressing need is to thrash. Without exit through despairing limbs, the pain of the interior is the greatest torturer. Of the two types of straitjacket, the worse is the kind that pins your arms in front of you. Supposedly this is more humane, and better for the circulation, but it leads to a feeling of suffocation and powerlessness that is hard to convey.

Electroshock is somewhat more apprehensible to the general public, for most people have learned to dread the electric chair merely through its description. Can you imagine an instrument that, while offering every pain and terror of death by electrocution, denies the holy rest that one earns in suffering through the experience, so that one is preserved to be electrocuted again and again? I believe "electrotherapy" is still debated. Those who, quite insanely, advocate it, claim that the patient benefits. I'll tell you how you benefit. When you finish you're half dead (something that could be accomplished with a severe beating or by a simple toss off a low cliff) and therefore quite tranquil. One is grateful to be alive, that the torture has passed, that the pain is gone. Lesser details appear almost insignificant. After my electrocutions I was even able to sit next to a coffee pot.

For a fourteen-year-old boy who grew up within the shadow of Sing Sing, straitjackets and, particularly, electroshock were difficult to bear. Picture going to the top of the Eiffel Tower, visiting the Louvre, and strolling down the Champs Élysées—in a straitjacket. I did this. I sat with Spinney at the Café de l'Opéra, he with his mustache and watch-chain and nickel-plated pistol, and I in my white encumbrance. He was charitable enough to place me as far from the expresso machine as possible, and when the wind was right I was relatively untortured. With winks, glances, and devil-may-care expressions, I tried to meet women. And when they all looked away, I assumed that it was because my skin was bad or they thought I was too boyish. It never occurred to me that most women might not be interested in getting to know a boy in a straitjacket who sat at a table at the Café de l'Opéra winking, blinking, and raising his eyebrows at them.

Many soldiers were still in uniform, no longer burdened with the immediate fear of death, well rested, sunburned, some not too much older than I—all heroes and victors. The streets sang with wonderful green buses and trolleys that had yellow tops, and open-air platforms at the back. I would have loved to have jumped on and off them as they were moving. I would have loved to have held a French girl in my arms and kissed her. It would have been the first time I had kissed a girl.

Something was very beautiful as Paris awakened from war. Life from every quarter had begun to flood in. The trees were the softest green I had ever seen, greener than in the valleys of the Shenandoah or the Hudson, an ancient and delicate color that I will never forget.

Château Parfilage maintained a small office in Montreux purely for prestige. For the English-speaking world and the French, a lakeside address, with red tulips in well tended beds by the water, was ideal for a mental institution. The Germans preferred the mountains, the Italians the sea, and famous and rich people a place where noxious gasses bubble up through the mud.