A Boy's Own Story (23 page)

Or should I say he simply didn't like my nature—the fact that I was drawn to art rather than business, to people rather than to things, to men rather than to women, to my mother rather than to him, books rather than sports, sentiments not responsibilities, love not money?

And yet he always ended by lavishing his money on me, more than he spent on my sister, whom he really did adore in his obstinate, silent, astringent way.

Difficult as my father might be and obsessed with him as I might have been, Dr. O'Reilly had decided my dad was merely a son of a bitch but not the true villain, not like Mom. It was she who had broken past the immunological barriers of my frail psyche and infected every last inch of my soul. It was she who'd ensnared me in silk fetters, she who'd shorn my strength and blinded me to the gross imposition of her will. Indeed, she'd so thoroughly invaded me that scarcely anything of my own remained to me. Dr. O'Reilly's mission was to purge the invader and to fatten up my ego. Although he'd never met her he spoke of her with real venom. His blue eyes blazed with scorn. When I said I feared what would happen to her if I rejected her, he said, "That old cow? She'll outlive us all," as though he and I were a pair of young boys and she all the tenacious wickedness of the adult world.

During World War II O'Reilly had served as an army doctor in Polynesia, where he had studied the childrearing methods of the natives. There no infant was ever punished, he said, and none ever cried. An infant's deepest insecurity, he went on, was derived from its physical smallness and helplessness. The Polynesians, especially those on the happy isle to which fortune had blown the good doctor, countered this insecurity by carrying their babies on their backs in a sling pitched so high that Baby's eyes peered out over Mama's head. This literally superior position insured the infant against all future anxiety and guaranteed him a life-long serenity. Eager to spread these advantages to America, O'Reilly insisted his patients emulate the Polynesian mode of transporting a baby. I saw those patients, men and women alike, all over town, sheepishly stepping over snowdrifts or gliding down supermarket aisles, their infants, petrified with fear, squawling and clutching locks of parental hair.

But this practice figured as only one of the many ways in which O'Reilly reformed our lives. Unlike those tight-ass Freudians, he said, who never suggested anything, who judged silently and interpreted rarely, he quite cheerfully broadcast his wisdom by spilling handfuls into fertile minds he himself had furrowed.

He believed that since I'd missed out on a loving childhood I had to feel my way backward in time, to regress in order to be raised all over again by him. "An adult," he said, "has no right to expect unqualified love, but a child does. That's what I'm offering you: love with no strings tied." He invariably made that mistake—"tied" not "attached." Sometime during each session he would repeat this extraordinary assertion of his love, and each time I felt embarrassed, for I couldn't help noticing how poorly he remembered the names of my parents and best friends and the major facts of my life. Perhaps foolishly, I thought of knowledge as a necessary if not sufficient condition for love. When I told him of my doubts about him he chastised me for being overly cerebral. "But you see," he said, "that's your unconscious pushing me aside because on some level you realize how much I love you. You're afraid of intimacy. Real love would force you to discard the mother imago you've introjected."

Spring approached and the gold Buddha grew more resplendent as rain washed away winter smuts. Although we were hundreds of miles inland, on some days the air smelled of salt and I half expected to see a gull perching on the statue's topknot like Maitreya, the Bodhisattva of the future. Everything quickened, even my heartbeat. The sense of smell, so long banished from out-of-doors save for a whiff of exhaust or the scent of desultory smoke unspooling from a chimney, now returned and released memories long buried in the pockets of earth's apron. I'd cross the piazza at school and smell something earthy or rusty or a dog's stale turd, much washed and often salted, leeched of everything except its palest quintessence. Or last autumn would rise like a revenant from a scattered pile of burned leaves long covered with snow, and behind that ghost stood one even taller, more deeply shrouded in sadness—the memory of the hollow behind the house where I'd lived and played as a child. But if all these odors awakened memories, the salt smell, suggesting nothing of my past, promised a future, a journey, and I could hear sails luffing and snapping as they were cranked up the mast until they shivered under the weight of the cold wind.

Two developments were unfolding within me, or rather two quite different stories about a single life were getting told. In one, Dr. O'Reilly's version, I was wrestling with my unconscious, an immense, dark brother who seeped around me when I was awake, flowed over me when I slept, who sometimes invaded my body, caused my pen or tongue to slip, who erased a name from the blackboard of memory—a force with a baby's features, greedy orifices, a madman's cunning and an animal's endurance, a Caliban as quicksilver as Ariel. This doppelgänger was determined to confine me to what I'd already experienced and to deny me adventure, as though life were a cynical editor of gothic romances who demanded that every novel conform to a formula, who might accept slight variations in detail so long as the plot remained the same. O'Reilly's job was to outwit this brilliant tyrant.

While I observed the rounds in this psychoanalytic struggle, a quite different, less lurid, more scattered sort of story was taking place within me, one that lacked narrative drive or even direction. It sprang up without warning like mushrooms after rain; it came and went, circled around itself, died away and then was crawling like moss over the rock face of my will. Like a whole rootless plantation of algae, it washed in tides of longing and self-loathing. For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve—then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging.

If I had the skill I'd write about the way that place—the cold corridors of the school, its symmetrical parterres of snow, the replicas of the "Discobulos" and "Dying Gaul"—how that place became the espalier which my moods crept up, I'd find a way to connect moods to weather, to rhyme books I was reading with bouts of illness I endured, to link pop tunes of the moment with persistent fantasies I concocted (I was Rimbaud; Verlaine loved me so much he fired on me; I endured, lonely, smoking cigarettes on an African beach), I'd place Buddhism over Hesse, divide a laugh I borrowed from a popular senior with an incurable rash on my left ankle I scratched day after day—all figures in an algebraic equation in which X would stand for
Stimmung
and Y for truth.

What I was doing in those spring months was once again steeling my social nerve. I was becoming popular—not in a big way, of course, but as a bit player. I started smoking cigarettes in order to join the Butt Club, a coterie of fascinating disreputables who'd obtained parental permission to meet for fifteen minutes after lunch and dinner and for half an hour before bedtime to smoke. Serious athletes, admired prefects, good school citizens—they all looked down on us. We were not square, we were bums, hoods, bad characters. One small windowless room in the basement had been set aside for our regrettable hobby. Someone pinned up the famous nude calendar pose of Marilyn Monroe on the cinderblock wall, but even her maraschino charms looked bilious under the low-wattage green bulb screwed into the ceiling for "atmosphere."

I had never been bad before. Of course I'd been intolerably wicked or maybe just sick in sleeping with other boys and men, but those transgressions were secret and solitary. Now at last I, who'd always been considered obedient, even docile, was rubbing shoulders with guys who were about to flunk out, who got drunk and totaled cars, who knocked up girls, who got into fistfights with their dads, who stole motorcycles and went off on joy rides, who had created such chaos at home they'd been banished to Eton. These boys accepted anyone at all so long as he was a smoker and a failure. Here came the hell raisers who sneaked off campus after lights-out, who downed a quart of vodka a day and nodded off in class, who faked medical excuses to get out of gym, who went weeks without showering ("Give us a break"), who jerked off in the back of class to the amazement of their neighbors ("Yuck"), who farted and popped their zits in assembly ("Ee—yuh"), who bought term papers from brains or beat the brains up, who in one case seduced a master's wife ("Neat"), in another a fat Latvian wash-up girl with greasy braids on the kitchen staff ("Barf").

My favorite smoker was Chuck, a gangly, pimply, popular guy with the gift of gab and the ambition to be a writer like Hemingway. Chuck was rumored to have the biggest dick on campus, but I never got to check it out. He was from a rich family and after listening to his stories of life at home I pieced together a glamorous feature film of two-seater planes, a sheep ranch in Montana, a fishing camp in Canada, a private island off Georgia—though Chuck didn't give a damn about possessions, all he wanted to do was stuff two fat black whores into his rattletrap Chevy and head south with them and a case of beer and of painful but not quite incapacitating clap and holler curse words at Arkansas cops and pass out from tequila, fatigue and sunburn at a two-bit rodeo in some dusty Texas town before he revived long enough to slip over the border into Tijuana, where he'd find those magic mushrooms or whatever the hell they were and that fabled gal in a straw basket hung on ropes from the ceiling, just her cunt exposed as she's lowered onto your stiff prong as you lie back and let the big-eyed nine-year-old girl assistant slowly, solemnly spin the basket and fan the flies off your face.

Chuck forged an invitation from his mother to me, something I could show the school authorities, and he drove me for the weekend to his family's deserted beach house. His parents were off in Florida. Everything here was gray and thawing, the sky and the lake anagrams for each other, iceberg of cloud above a cumulus of ice. We played a record of Big Bill Broonzy over and over again as we lounged about and looked out the plate-glass windows at a surrealists' world in which whatever had been hard seemed to be going soft. We drank beer after beer (Chuck pried the caps off with his teeth), we fell asleep in our clothes on adjoining couches, we were continuously hung over, we set out giant steaks to thaw, we awoke at dawn or dusk, who knew which in that long weekend of freedom, melting ice and nausea.

Although I certainly wasn't a straight-A student I'd at least always been conscientious in school. In one sense my doggedness was a way of hedging my bets, so that no matter how despairing I might be I was implicitly counting on my eventual happiness. Even as I made much of present miseries I was cautiously planning my bourgeois future.

There was nothing cautious about Chuck. He had his own trust fund from a grandmother who owned a cosmetics firm. He had a loud, maniacal laugh, he was big physically and knew it and half-scared people with his craziness, his drunk sprees, the way he'd twitch or shoot his cuffs or without warning scythe the air between you with a closed fist and shriek like a samurai. He scared the masters because he didn't want or need their approval and because he'd set himself up as an arbiter of absurdity. If a teacher said something banal or foolish or pompous in class, Chuck would quake with silent laughter until he was weeping and had slid halfway out of his seat onto the floor, a helpless sprawl of laughter. He appeared to be in actual pain and every eye was on him.

No number of demerits or revoked privileges or low grades intimidated him. He had no particular ambition to go on to college, nor did he doubt his own intelligence which, in the Amercian fashion of that day, had been Tested; he'd been Certified as falling well within the Genius Range and declared that most appealing of creatures, the Underachiever, a status he jealously preserved except in English class, an honors section conducted by a half-blind white-haired amphibian who paddled at the air with one wounded web, who pronounced
poetry
as "putrid" minus the final
d
and who was so absent-minded he'd once heard the bell for class and stepped off a high library ladder into thin air. This eccentric teacher was also a Genius; every summer he played Falstaff in an outdoor theater and he'd once written a textbook on semantics. For Dr. Schlumberger, Chuck knocked himself out composing a novel about an oil driller in Oklahoma much given to epic drunks and fornications—a novel in which terse dialogue and tersely narrated violence alternated with nature descriptions of a shocking delicacy, silverpoint tracery against a wash of Chinese white. I read and praised Chuck's book, and that made him like me. And the book made me like him, for though he continued to slouch about and swear and weep with laughter and refused to say an intelligent word, nevertheless I'd had that written glimpse into his temperament, and just as oils can be made fragrant by saturating them in the perfume of flowers, in the same way in my imagination Chuck's character had been transformed by this literary enfleurage.

Chuck decided we should visit a whorehouse. He picked up four day students from their houses and we lurched and wheezed in Chuck's Chevy down through the black section of the city. It was midnight and though this was the weekend the streets were deserted; only here and there a few neon lights outlined the windows of a tavern. The bordello was a dingy wooden house behind a larger one. To get to it we had to squeeze down a narrow strip of sidewalk past a sturdy metal fence behind which a neighbor's German shepherd kept barking and running back and forth.