Pages from a Cold Island (32 page)

“
What do you want to talk with him about?
”

I was becoming bored.
“
Oh, for Christ
’
s sake, Ray, who knows? Maybe I
’
ll ask him if he
’
s got an anal hang-up. He
’
s always got his heroes shoving it up some broad
’
s fanny.
”

“
That
’
s what I mean,
”
Ray snapped.
“
I ain
’
t even goin
’
to introduce yuh!
”
And for good measure:
“
Peckerhead!
”

But Ray did. On his way out Mailer pulled up behind me, shook hands with Ray, thanked him for a lovely meal. I
’
d swung round on my barstool so Ray couldn
’
t avoid me, and at the last possible moment he asked Mailer if he
’
d met me. We shook hands, and Mailer introduced me to his wife. He was, as people had so often told me, very much the gentleman (though with equal sincerity I
’
d heard as many stories about what, if true, could only be deemed a strident cruelty), speaking in a very low-keyed voice weirdly compounded by the staccato word-biting of the born Brooklynite, as tho
ugh his vocal cords, quite inde
pendently of anything he was willing, were attempting the impossible feat of staying attuned to his acutely febrile cerebrum.

“
You did well with your book.
”

“
So-so,
”
I said.

“
Your editor sent me a copy but I haven
’
t had a chance.
”
He shrugged.
“
I
’
ve been, you know, sort of busy lately.
”
He had of course been running and resoundingly defeated in the city
’
s mayoralty primaries.

“
I
’
m sorry,
”
I said, meaning that I was sorry both that he had taken the time from his work for yet another ego trip and that he hadn
’
t had the time for me.

“
How
’
s the book moving?
”

“
Seven thousand copies,
”
and here I doubled my fist, projected my thumb upward, then turned the fist over and shoved it toward the floor, Nero giving the word to plant the sword in the throat.

Mailer laughed heartily.
“
That
’
s about four thousand more than most of them do.
”
By one, two, three of his courtiers he was being impressed with the urgency of the hour.
“
You going to the fight?
”
he said.

“
No.
”
We shook hands again, then he was gone, lost now, because of his pint-size, amidst his entourage.

Although I never saw Mailer again, I began to see a lot of Quinn. I had found my way to Christopher Street and The Lion
’
s Head Ltd., a bar—as I have elsewhere noted— frequented by poets, novelists, columnists, reporters, editors, agents and camp followers, and though Quinn must be relegated to the latter category, and though I
’
d already wit
nessed him in what I deemed a woefully unbecoming role, I found on acquaintance I liked him very much and hence never mentioned the circumstances under which I
’
d first seen him. That summer Quinn spent a lot of time on the West Coast and in Italy, putting together one stock deal or another, but whenever he was in town he was at the bar of The Head, as it is familiarly known, and the half-dozen times I drank with him there I found him generous, outgoing and sincere, a sincerity that bordered on the touching when one day he told me that with any luck, with the closing of two or three deals then looming on the horizon, he could get out of the business entirely within a couple years and be free to do his own thing, an appeal to accept him as a man of more substance than a shuffler and reshuffler of embossed certificates.

Had I then been sensitive to any appeals whatever, I certainly would have reacted to Quinn
’
s appeal, but I was on a two-bender-a-day program, the first beginning in the swanky borrowed apartment shortly after I awoke in the morning, the second in The Head after I
’
d taken a late afternoon-early evening snooze; and my discourse during the latter bender was about as stimulating as yup, nope and
I
’
ll-be-fucked
, none of which was destined to get enshrined among the provocative graffiti etched into the men
’
s room walls of The Head. I was in effect in a state of total and constant ineb
riation and thereby not only in
sulated utterly from every kind of subtle human appeal but even
“
the great events,
”
like Buzz and his Jack Armstrong buddies strolling among the craters of the moon, reached me with no more appeal t
han if those jokers had been ex
ploring the marshlands of New Jersey.

Even inebriated I found it impossible to tune out the harsh noises resounding from Chappaquiddick. If there was a name that inspired in some of The Head
’
s regulars more perked ears, more throbbing pulses, more stiffening of the backs than the name of
Norman, it was the name of Ken
nedy. Not only had many o
f the patrons taken the assassi
nations of John and Robert as personal betrayals, it was as if they had seen shockingly and bloodily aborted some embryo that had promised them a greener, more lovely America than had heretofore been known; and now Sen
a
tor Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and the last of the Kennedys, had yanked the rug from under them completely, rendering the politically inclined patrons bitter, spiteful, bloodthirsty.

On the night the Senator went on television to ex plain what happened following the
“
cookout
”
(ah, what PR genius came up with that one? Sorensen? Galbraith?), the bar was packed with no few of the men who set the temper, the moods and the opinions of the Republic. The Senator was minus the neck brace he had sported at Miss Kopechne
’
s funeral two days before—
“Thank the decen
cies,
”
one reporter remarked—and the reaction at the bar drifted among deranged disbelief (one reporter bit his tongue, looked cross-eyed and did a little St. Vitus jig), uproarious laughter and strident hissing when the Senator —implying his house was as doomed as the house of Atreus—threw that
“
spitball
”
about the
“
curse
”
that haunts the Kennedy family. When it was over, Don Schlenker, the bearded, pageboyed bartender known affectionately as Prince Valiant, and one of my favorite people in all the world, volunteered a mot that perfectly expresses the awful division in this country.
“
I
’
ll bet my mommy cried.
”

And I had to laugh, sensing that mine probably had also.

We drifted off into various groups, I finding my way to my favorite spot in the room, what I called
“
the paranoic
’
s alcove,
”
by the wall phone where I enjoyed leaning against the paneled walls beneath a framed glossy print of a dungareed Susan Sontag under which the novelist David Mark-son had written the legend
“
Is this really Joel Oppenheimer in drag?
”
With me were Markson, who if possible was even more apolitical than I, and Paul, a captain in the maritime service who wrote lovely poetry which on fear of rejection he never submitted. Never had I seen Paul so upset. A Jew, he loathed the Kennedys. It had to do with what he imagined was patriarch Joseph
’
s position on Hitler when in the pre-World War II months the elder Kennedy had been our ambassador to the Court of St. James. Paul was convinced that the tragedy of the Kennedys was the Biblical sins of the father, whom he called
“
a fascist prick,
”
being visited on the sons. To my shocked incredulity that such a gentle man could become so upset, all during the Senator
’
s telecast Paul, who had stood beside me, had kept repeating,
“
Look at that farina-faced glob of puke.
”

Trying to retemper an ugly mood unbecoming to men who had neither columns to write nor editorials to compose. I now told Paul and David a joke I
’
d heard from the New Left writer Jack Newfield, who was a qualified Kennedy man and was even then writing an excellent memoir sym pathetic to Robert Kennedy
’
s last days. It is an old joke now, but I
’
d heard it from Newfield the day after Chappaquiddick, so it probably is that a joke that swept the country was born at The Head. At the
“
cookout
”
Miss Kopechne tells Teddy she is pregnant. Teddy tells her not to worry about it, Miss Kopechne anxiously exclaims,
“
But what are we to do?
”
and Kennedy responds,
“
We
’
ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
”
After that the three of us exchanged a number of stories more appropriate to our easy cynicism, Paul dro
pped from out of his loftily in
dignant regions, and shortly thereafter I was at the bar for a refill when I felt a meaningful tapping on my shoulder and turned to find an angry Quinn.

“
Why don
’
t you guys knock that shit off?
”

I was surprised and bewildered.
‘“
What shit?
”

“
All those ugly jokes. Why don
’
t you give the guy a chance?
”

There was no doubt in my mind that Quinn was very upset, or that he wanted to knock me down, and that he would have little trouble doing so. Frankly, I was afraid, and felt that no matter what I said would be taken wrong and only further arouse his ire. So I didn
’
t say anything. I took my drink and retreated back to David and Paul.

The odd thing was that though I had no doubt that this joke would often be told in a cheap, sleazy or disparaging way, that sort of demeaning shot had been the furthest thing from my mind, as I suspect it had from Newfield
’
s. For in my own drunken, aimless
and sardonic way I was, and al
ways had been, an unqualified Kennedy man. There was no doubt the Senator from Massachusetts had screwed up badly and had ended the near-incredulous tragedies of the Kennedy Decade in a shockingly shameful way, and if I chose to laugh at the black humor of this joke that seems so much more silly and inappropriate in retrospect than it then did, I
’
d chosen to laugh to allay the pain. I don
’
t know David and Paul
’
s motives for retreating with me to the paranoic
’
s alcove, but as much as for any other reason I
’
d gone there away from the bar because if a single newsman had started talking in the jargon of tomorrow
’
s columns and thrown at me a banner like
“
An End to Camelot,
”
I doubt if I
’
d have made it to the men
’
s room to do my puking.

Moreover, from at least two reporters in that room I
’
d heard about the Kennedy brothers
’
“
notorious womanizing
”
(we did not hear such tales in Watertown, or on my island), stories told in a stout-fellow admiration that was apparently allowable among the
“
in-group
”
as long as it was not brought to the attention of the great unwashed out there yonder in that Outback west of the Hudson River. Even assuming that when he missed his turn and headed for that isolated beach sex had been the furthest thing from the Senator
’
s mind, which I am more than willing to assume —though any American male who claims the possibility did not cross his own mind is a shameless liar or a eunuch—I loathed that America which lived in cowering trepidation of a politician with a pair of balls and continued to see some elevated and enduring virtue in the wan celibacy suggested by an Eisenhower or a Nixon, but not nearly so much as I loathed the
hypocrisy
of that in-group America around me who could admiringly sanction a politician
’
s womanizing as long as he did not get caught.