Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man (4 page)

Why am I telling you all this? I’m sure you can guess my baser motives, but there is one altruistic impulse involved as well, old buddy. If you two are going to live together, you ought to know as much as possible about one another. And you also ought to be able to know when someone has begun to replace you in her affections.

The day she spits you out, old buddy, is the day you’ve been replaced.

This typewriter is really chockfull of surprises. I honestly never meant to write you any of this. I didn’t mean to write you at all, as I said. I was going to write Fran and tell her how I spent the weekend. When one has been jilted, one wants to get a little of one’s own back, ignoble as that may be, and this was a sensational weekend, and writing to Fran about it would constitute a symphonic chorus of “I can get along without you very well, believe me….” Believe me.

I left the Kettle when they closed it, since there didn’t seem to be any alternative. By then I had drifted in and out of perhaps a half-dozen conversations and twice as many private reveries and was having a high old time, in all senses. And I had very nearly managed to drink myself sober all over again. To wit, my memory of some of those hours in the Kettle was sketchy, but when I walked out into the stale air of MacDougal Street I was in full possession of what faculties Providence gave me.

Not that I was sober. I could walk straight and talk straight and think straight—well, almost—but I was nevertheless looped.

If drinking always worked that way, I swear I’d do it every night. There’d be no earthly reason not to.

So I walked up MacDougal Street singing something. I think it was “Big Yellow Taxi,” the Joni Mitchell thing. There are some difficult notes in the chorus and I was missing some of them, and aware of it, but I still sounded pretty good to me. I crossed MacDougal at Third Street. I don’t recall having any special destination in mind. There was a station wagon waiting for the light to change. I crossed behind it (which I suppose constitutes jaywalking, which you can add to the list of my sins) and I paused at the end of a line of the song, suddenly unable to remember what came next, and through the open rear window of the station wagon two voices supplied the next line in unison. Two clear, fresh, youthful, soprano voices, and they got all the notes right.

I leaned an elbow on the back of the wagon and peered owlishly in at them. The car was full of girls. There was one in front driving and one sitting next to her, and there were two more in the back seat, and there were another two—the songbirds—sitting cross-legged in the luggage compartment. The ones that I could see were all very pretty. So, I learned later, were the others. A total of six pretty girls sitting two and two and two in a station wagon at the corner of MacDougal and West Third at something like three-thirty on a Saturday morning.

“Why, hello,” I said. “I certainly want to thank you for helping me out with the song.”

“It’s a beautiful song,” one of them said.

“It’s a beautiful evening,” I said.

“It was raining earlier.”

“Earlier it was the winter of my discontent. Now it’s made glorious summer.”

“And are we the sons of York?”

“I doubt it,” I said, squinting in at them. “You might be the daughters of Lancaster.”

“Burt Lancaster? Hey, is Burt Lancaster anybody’s father?”

“If we were wise children,” another one said, “I suppose we would know.”

“Are you a wise child?” another one asked me.

“No, I’m a mad drunken poet.”

“Oh, everybody’s a mad poet. Are you at least Welsh?”

“My mother came from Ireland,” I said. “ ’Did your mother come from Ireland?’ ” I sang.

The light had turned green in the course of all this, but the car stayed where it was. Now it turned red again.

“And where did your father come from, mad drunken poet?”

“How would I know? I’m an unwise child.”

“Have you a name, mad poet?”

“Mad with a U,” I said, “and poet with an E.”

“I think I missed that one,” somebody said.

“Laurence with a U,” I said, making another stab at it. “Clarke with an E.”

“Laurence Clarke?”

“Yes, Laurence Clarke the mad poet.”

“What do you do when you don’t write poems?”

“Everything,” I said. “I never write poems. I haven’t written a poem for a year and a half.”

“Then what do you do?”

I considered this. “I don’t edit
Ronald Rabbit’s Magazine for Boys and Girls
,”
I said.

“Neither do I, mad poet.”

“Ah, but I did,” I said. “Or at least I was presumed to do so, but
Ronald Rabbit’s
doesn’t exist. I was stowing away on a corporation, and today they fired me.”

“Poor mad poet.”

The light had turned green again, and the car behind us was using his horn to bring this fact to our attention. “We can’t just stand here,” one of the girls said.

“We can’t drive away,” another one said. “We can’t leave Mad Poet here. How would we find him again?”

“You mean Laurence Clarke. You shouldn’t call him Mad Poet.”

“You can call me Mad Poet if you want to.”

More honking behind me. The tailgate dropped and the girls in the luggage compartment moved to make room for me. “We’ll give Mad Poet a ride,” one of them said. “Hop in, Mad Poet. Hop in, M.P.”

“Military Police,” said a voice from the front.

“No, Member of Parliament. Laurence Clarke, Member of Parliament. Where are you going, Laurence Clarke?”

“To hell in a handcar.”

I got inside, and got the tailgate shut behind me. The station wagon lurched forward just as the light turned red. The honker behind us didn’t make the signal and went on honking his distress at us as we sped away.

“Where are you going, Mad Poet?”

“Call him Larry. Can we call you Larry? Where are you going, Larry?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you have a home?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So we’ll take him home with us.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that be brittle!”

“Utterly peanut. Should we kidnap you, Larry?”

“No one would ransom me.”

“Then we could keep you forever, and feed you peanut brittle and marmalade.”

“And treacle, and weak tea with cream in it.”

“How super if we could kidnap him.”

“Go ahead,” I put in. “Kidnap me. But treacle makes me ill and weak tea with cream in it is very hard to find. I’ll have jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, if that’s all the same to you.”

“Mad Poet knows Alice.”

“Mad Poet knew Alice long before you ever fell down any rabbit holes,” said Mad Poet. “And Mad Poet feels the same way about little girls that Lewis Carroll did.”

“Oh, super! Mad Poet’s a dirty old man.”

“But not
that
old.”

“How old are you, Mad Poet?”

“Thirty-two.”

“We’re sixteen. Except Naughty Nasty Nancy, who is fifteen.”

“A mere child,” murmured Naughty Nasty Nancy. She was one of the two in the back seat, and wore a peaked witch’s cap and granny glasses.

“Hey, Mad Poet! Where do you want to go?”

“Wherever you’re going,” I said.

A forest of giggles. “But we’re going to Darien!”

“Excellent.”

“That’s Darien, Connecticut!”

“Only Darien I know,” I said.

“Do you really want to come with us?”

“Wherever you want to go,” I said, “that’s where Mad Poet wants to go. Be it Darien or Delhi or Dubuque. Whither thou goest, Mad Poet shall go. Mad Poet loves you.”

“All of us?”

“All of you,” I agreed. “Mad Poet loves one and all, including Naughty Nasty Nancy, who is a mere child of fifteen. Mad Poet loves the daughters of Lancaster.”

“And the daughters of Lancaster love Mad Poet,” said a small voice at my side.

“How nice,” said Mad Poet. “How nice indeed.”

How nice, friend Steve. How nice indeed to be the Mad Poet, at once disarmingly drunk and brilliantly sober, joyously kidnapped by six winsome refugees from the Convent of the Holy Name. For six little maids from school were they, Steve, six little maids from one of those cloistered mausolea to which the Catholic aristocracy condemn their most nubile daughters for the duration of their delicious adolescences. They had stolen away that night shortly after bed check (bed check!) and had borrowed the car of their algebra teacher. Merry Cat was doing the driving. Merry Cat’s name is Mary Katherine O’Shea, and she possesses a license which allows her to drive in the State of Connecticut during daylight hours. If anyone had stopped Merry Cat, she would have been in a whole lot of trouble. No one did, and she wasn’t.

Merry Cat is sixteen, as are all of them but Naughty Nasty Nancy, the fifteen-year-old witch-girl whose last name is Hall. Merry Cat does have a feline face, with sharply sloping eyebrows and a quick grin. Her hair is black and her skin very fair, and what she looks like is a very classy Irish girl, which is what she is.

It is also what most of the rest of them are, Irish or Anglo-Irish or Castle Irish or Ascendancy or whatever. Shall I describe the rest of them for you?

All right, I think I will. But only because you insist, Steve-o.

Let’s return to the station wagon and do it geographically. Merry Cat, as I said, was driving. Sitting beside her was Dawn Redmond, a soft and quiet girl, soft of face and soft of body, with hair the color of a freshly opened chestnut and a slight complement of freckles on her cheekbones and across the bridge of her nose. She has exceptionally large breasts, and their sensitivity seems to be in proportion to their dimension. She goes all glassy-eyed when they are stroked, and can achieve orgasm from such attention.

In the back seat Naughty Nasty Nancy sat directly behind Dawn. Naughty Nasty Nancy does not speak too often, but her occasional remarks are always incisive. There is a distinctly fey quality to this girl, Steve. If you were casting Hamlet, you would pick her instantly for Ophelia.

On Nancy’s right was B.J. B.J. is Barbara Judith Castle. She looks enough like Merry Cat to be her sister, but isn’t. They may be cousins. I’m not certain. My memory of the conversation in which that part came up is somewhat vague, and I don’t know for certain whether they are cousins or lovers. I’m sure it’s one or the other. It’s possible, of course, that they are both.

Now for the luggage compartment, where I was sitting in a modified lotus position. On my right, Ellen Jamison, red-haired and slim-hipped and flat-chested and freckled. If her father ever loses his several million dollars, she can always earn a living posing for Norman Rockwell. She even has braces on her teeth.

Let me tell you something, Steve. Nothing brings you all the way back like kissing a girl with braces on her teeth. It makes you want to go home and stand in front of the mirror and squeeze blackheads. An ultimate nostalgia trip as the tongue-tip tickles all that shiny wire.

And on my left, chubby and giggly and bouncy and rosy-cheeked, Alison Keller. She wears her dark-brown hair in a Dutch cut, and her bangs fall upon her unlined brow. She is happy and bubbly and exuberant, and one is so delighted with this side of her that one doesn’t suspect there is more. But she paints, does Alison, and I have seen some of her paintings, and they are dark and mordant with echoes of Bosch and Dali, and they are weirdly wonderful, and so is she.

“We are truly kidnapping you, Mad Poet,” they kept saying. “And we will keep you hidden away in a cellar and smuggle scraps of food to you from the caf, and every day we will all steal down to you and make mad passionate love to you, and we will never never never let our Mad Poet go.”

How nice indeed.

The only hangup on the drive to Darien was that Merry Cat kept bitching about having to drive. “It’s not fair,” she would say. “Everybody else gets to neck with Mad Poet and all I have is the steering wheel. Doesn’t anyone else want to drive?”

No one else had a license. Except Mad Poet, but no one ever had the temerity to suggest that he drive.

“You’re always pestering to drive,” she accused them, “and now when I’m perfectly willing to let you, nobody wants to all of a sudden.”

So I could only neck with five of them, which was a shame. If life were perfect, we would have had a chauffeur. But why carp?

Steve, this was as perfect as life had ever gotten. Incredible.

You know, I shouldn’t have bothered with that geography shtick. It didn’t apply for very long. By the time we hit the West Side Drive, Dawn had climbed into the backseat, and she and Nancy and B.J. had done whatever it is you do to the backseats of station wagons to flatten them out, so that the backseat area just became part of an expanded luggage compartment. So there I was with the five of them, still in this same alcoholic haze and still sober regardless, and I reached out and kissed one, and the little devil opened her mouth instantly, and another one cuddled up and put my hand on her breast, and from there on you can write your own script. I never knew quite whom I was kissing nor whom I was touching at any given time. Nor did it ever quite matter.

The trouble is that I’m making it sound like an orgy, and it wasn’t at all like an orgy, not in the least. First of all, there was an air of utter innocence about the proceedings that couldn’t have been greater if we had been playing Parcheesi. We all liked each other and we were all having fun and it was all a lazy, giggly, delicious, magical thing.

Absolutely no urgency about it. The kisses were long and deliberate, the petting warm and wholehearted, but there was none of the rise and fall of serious sex about it. I find myself groping for words, perhaps because the whole ambience was one I had never experienced before, neither personally nor in fiction.

How to describe it? I could say that I engaged in two hours of incessant sex play and not only did not have an orgasm, but never much felt like having one. In youth I remember that sort of experience leading to an advanced case of testicular congestion, which I think we used to call Lover’s Nuts. I didn’t get this now. Perhaps it’s because I’m older now, but I rather doubt it.

Oh, hell, most of the time I didn’t even have an erection. It is not exactly unheard of for me not to have an erection in erotic situations, as I have not the slightest doubt Fran has told you. (Should you experience similar failings, you’re likely to hear about it, man.) But when that happened it was always because my mind was elsewhere, whereas this evening my mind was very much on what was happening. As a matter of fact, I cannot recall ever being so entirely involved in the Now, and entirely concerned with my partners.