Landscape With Traveler (3 page)

 

8

I

Wonder

Sometimes

I wonder sometimes whether everybody has his own quiet, peaceful
1930
s, even though they were the
1940
s or '
50
s. They must, though I can't believe they were really as quiet and peaceful as mine were!

Before the war I was taken to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but the whole thing was a bust for me because my sole object was to catch as many trinkets that the people on the floats threw to the crowds as I could, and I ended up catching nothing. Nobody in our crowd did, in fact, and when my father found one on the ground later on and gave it to me as a consolation, I threw it away in great indignation, thinking—as I still do—that if you didn't catch it yourself then it wasn't any good.

That was my first acquaintance with New Orleans, at about age nine or ten, and I saw absolutely nothing but all those baubles flying off the floats in every direction but mine. It was my only acquaintance with that city until after the war, and since most of the “important” things of that period of my life happened during the war—not because of the war, but because it was during the war that I climbed into the great clamshell of puberty—New Orleans was not very interesting to me.

 

9

In

the

Period

of

Best

Friends

In the period of “best friends” there was the normal business of spending the night at each other's houses, soul-searing arguments, riding bikes out into the country, stealing watermelons and ripe tomatoes, and playing with our “ding dongs.”

Up till puberty I was omnisexual,
and extremely so! Genitals were the most fascinating things I'd ever known about—my own, the little girl's next door, those of all the other boys and girls I knew, even the dog's and cat's. After I was twelve or thirteen, girls suddenly decided we boys could no longer be their doctors, so we had no choice but to turn to each other. This pleased me.

I had perceived quite early that girls' “things” were hollow in roughly the same proportion as mine was protuberant and precociously suggested to Sadie Sue (the little girl next door) that we try sticking mine into hers. “Don't be stupid!” she huffed—”Yours doesn't belong in mine.” She was exactly nine months older than I, and I believed whatever she told me (if I didn't, she'd hit me), and this was no exception. I wonder at times, only half-facetiously, whether I don't still believe her.

At puberty, I entered my “romantic” phase, suffering through
Wuthering Heights
and such like, writhing in ecstasy (with real tears) over Shelley's more maudlin efforts, though at the same time building ship models, reading
Treasure Island
and the
Bounty
trilogy over and over again, and dreaming of adventure.

Team sports never interested me in the least, though I liked swimming and track quite a lot, and was good at them in an offhand sort of way, as long as they weren't on a competitive level, which turned me off completely. I never cared about winning. In fact, the only ambition I ever had was to be happy.

I was also taking piano lessons and tended naturally toward the most severely classical pieces, like Bach, and the more lyrical things, like Mozart, etc. I heard my first opera—one of the first Met broadcasts, I guess—one Saturday when I was in bed with measles, and liked it right away.
Rigoletto,
I guess it was. So I became a devotee of the opera broadcasts—the only opera Baton Rouge offered at that time. Though Huey Long had brought down one of the old Met stars, Pasquale Amato, to head the opera department at the new Louisiana State University, and they gave a couple of operas a year, which I didn't see.

I remember the flap when Long was assassinated. It meant nothing to me, but I was fascinated by the marks of the bullets in the Capitol walls and kept going back to look at them. People talked of nothing else for ever so long.

My first acquaintance with anything like jazz, other than what we heard on the radio, came from a maid who worked for us (seven days a week, including laundry and cleaning and cooking, for $
4
.
50
a week!). She was always singing jazzily away in the kitchen and taught me some of her songs, mostly spirituals, true to the stereotype. She also, at my insistence, once showed me her breasts, which I evilly pinched.

And when I was twelve there was the incident of “Sweety,” the ice cream man, who would give me and my friends free ice cream and invite us up to his room for sex. We went gladly and thought nothing of it—after all, it was what we did all the time anyhow—the novelty being the ice cream! He also unknowingly provided more data for my foreskin file. Then he was arrested and we were all taken down to the police station to identify him. He was naturally packed away to prison, poor guy.

This was all taking place against the ghastly backdrop of World War II. I see it only now as ghastly. At the time I found it merely exciting or, at times when the discussions at table took a serious turn, tedious. Whereas life had been, before the war, comfortable (despite the Depression) and peaceful and nice, it was still all these things but was now charged with an energetic excitement, to me ill-defined. I never questioned things anyway, but, as usual, gathered in the result for its own sake. I sensed what is now called a polarization, a unity in aim, as much of a feeling of “patriotism” as either I or the nation were ever to feel. Everything separated into a series of neatly defined pairs of opposites—good and bad, right and wrong, us and them—which have more or less remained with us ever since. (Perhaps they had always been there unnoticed by me?)

The rationing coupons made us feel needed and virtuous. Sunday drives were given up. Fudge was rare. There were blackouts and air-raid drills. I wished my father were an airraid warden, but during blackouts we gathered in safety and comfort all together close to the gas heater in the dining room (my bedroom) and listened to the radio, curtains drawn, our favorite programs interrupted at times by news bulletins “from the front.”

My grandmother sat by the radio, newspaper in hand. My mother crocheted on her afghan (which I still have). My father and grandfather played dominoes. And I dozed or daydreamed on the floor in front of the “fire” with the dog. Often it would be raining hard outside. I seem to remember the war as one long, stormy, cozy night.

Sometimes on Sundays I was sent out to invite a soldier or two home to dinner. The town was always full of convoys in transit from somewhere to somewhere, both secret. I loved hanging around the soldiers. I always carefully chose the ones to bring home, but my hopes never came to anything. We all assumed, I suppose, that we would win the war, that “the boys” would come home, and that life would go back to the '
30
s and be nice again, little dreaming that those selfsame '
30
s were to be the last time of true peace any of us would ever know. Jim, for instance, cannot miss them, having been born after the war, and doubtless has a loved time of his own to remember. But I will be looking for those prewar years for the rest of my life.

 

10

I

Would

Get

an

Urge

to

Be

Grown

Up

After the war, on hot summer nights (me sixteen or seventeen), one or another of my friends and I would get an urge to be grown up
and devilish and would take a Grey-hound bus to New Orleans, which was a two-hour trip. We'd wander around trying to persuade bartenders that we were eighteen, usually unsuccessfully, generally ending up in some soda fountain for a malt and then back home.

I'm amazed, thinking back on it, that my parents didn't protest these outings. I even persuaded them to buy me a bottle of wine to have for my very own—California Tokay (ugh!)—and felt very suave indeed offering my friends alcoholic refreshment over our “intellectual” chatterings.

School went on as usual in winter with nothing about it extraordinary enough for me to remember. It was something I went through with as good grace as anyone, but with no interest. It all came very easily to me, and I was thought a genius by most of my teachers, though my indifference caused persistent predictions that I would come to a bad end. And I guess that, according to the standards behind those predictions, it is true.

Also at this time, I was caught with a friend robbing a Coke machine—of Cokes, not nickels. My father talked me back into every-one's good graces and paid for the Cokes. That was my second visit to a police station.

I wasn't completely idle during my high-school days, however, I had a paper route early on, which I gave up to work as a soda-jerk in a drugstore. This was fun. I gained weight. Every Sunday morning a German lady, who I later learned taught German at the university, would come in and order the same breakfast—one of those small “individual” boxes of corn flakes (a novelty at the time) and a cup of coffee. She was exceedingly cold, rigid, and nasty, or so it seemed to me (the war was still fresh), and never left the least little tip. One morning, much to my pleasure and her horror, she opened her box of corn flakes and found a dead, desiccated mouse in it. She screamed and screamed, enraged most probably that she obviously could not blame it on us. I was delighted.

But the job I enjoyed most during that period was as an usher in the Paramount movie theater, an old vaudeville-opera house type of theater with great rococco loges and lots of ornate columns and dusty draperies, cupids painted on the ceiling, and the like. Pete (a fellow usher) and I had great times poking around backstage in the dim light, looking into the dark dust-filled dressing rooms now used as junk rooms. Pete was at least as fond of mutual masturbation as I, so even if the movie was uninteresting (we saw each one seventeen times) there was no cause for boredom, and in any case we “helped each other out,” as Pete preferred to call it, at least once every evening. We were the envy of all our friends, as we saw all the movies free and were even paid some moderate, easily spent salary. We even got to wear rather tatty, brass-bebuttoned uniforms, which we considered very dashing.

The climax of my ushering career came one cold Saturday night in mid-winter. Pete and I went downstairs as usual to escort the cashier from her little glass house to the entrance door, where we were met by the manager who then locked the door, and we all proceeded upstairs to the manager's office. As we reached the office door, two masked men (black bandanas) jumped out of the darkness of the mezzanine with guns. Inevitably, one of them said, “Inside! This is a stickup!” Pete and I were thrilled to the marrow. The men instructed us to lie down on our stomachs and then tied us up, wrists to ankles, gagged us with our handkerchiefs (donating one of their own to gag the cashier), emptied the cash box and safe, ripped the phone out of the wall, and told us, “Stay where you are for ten minutes or we'll kill you.” Then they fled down the fire escape stairs. Pete humped over to me and we untied each other, then untied the others. The manager and cashier didn't think all this was half as much fun as Pete and I did. Pete went out to a pay phone and called the police, and we all got to tell our stories. Next day there was an article in the paper. The robbers had got away with six or eight hundred dollars. Pete and I had been envied before. Now we were positive heroes.

 

11

I

Went

to

College

I went to college with no idea that one was supposed to have chosen anything to study. I just thought you went to college as you'd gone to school. I asked a friend what he was going to study. Electrical engineering, he said. Okay, said I, I'll study that too. It was a bust, of course. I flunked chemistry and realized that that line of work was not for me.

My father suggested business administration, the catchall course of the time, but a semester of that proved a failure, too. I had bought an album of Gladys Swarthout singing
Carmen,
and decided French was a lovely sounding language so became a French/Romance languages major.

I was the jeune premier of the Romance Languages Department, and Maggie Crow, a serious, near-sighted, intelligent Texan, was my leading lady. We toyed at a “love affair,” meaning we were inseparable, enjoyed each other's minds and company, and indulged in chaste kisses. We drank wine and rolled our own cigarettes with a cunning little machine, and were considered “characters, but nice.”

French (and later Italian and Spanish) came so easily to Maggie and me that we had a lot of time to devote to our eccentricities—never studying but still making straight A's being regarded as not the least of these. We shared most of our interests. The world at large read marriage, kids, and academe into our future.

Years later, I married Maggie, lived with her for three years, at which point we both interestingly enough decided that our own sexes were, after all, more interesting than each other's, and we split up. That's when I went off to Europe on a little money my mother left me when she died—but all this later, in its proper place.

 

12

As

I

Write

This

Sentence

As I write this sentence, I am forty-eight “going on forty-nine,” as it was put in the South of my childhood. If I don't think hard about that from time to time, I am unconscious of my age. I smoke a pack a day, drink socially, eat junk food (usually) for my one daily meal, drink fifteen to twenty cups of coffee a day, go to bed too late, and feel fine, though I catch colds with the greatest of ease. When I was in college, nineteen or twenty, I was taken to a fortune teller of high repute, an ancient black lady who lived in a little dark cabin deep in the woods. The plain wood of the large chair she sat in was burnished with lifetimes of use. Her only name, that anyone knew about, was Mother, and she smelled of wood smoke. She would receive you if you were brought by someone she knew, then would hold your face between her hands and gaze into your eyes for as long as she needed to decide whether she would tell you your future. For her services she would accept nothing but a little tobacco, though if you wanted potions, charms, or spells, you had to pay a moderate sum, and she told you flatly that she had no confidence in such things. Her grandmother had taught her how to concoct them, so she continued the tradition. There was the hiss of silence about her. She looked at me for a long time and said quickly: “Happiness till fifty-five. Then death from your lungs. Not much money. Not much love. Enough.” Then she let go of my face and smiled. I gave her the tobacco I'd brought, thanked her, and left. When I think about what she said, it's the last word that holds my attention. It somehow seems the core of her insights, and though I share with my namesake a horror of interpretation, the word fascinates me. If she had been a simpler woman, I'd accept it at its face value as a dismissal. She was not a simple woman, however. Looking at her face was like seeing the Earth after all life had left it, and looking into her eyes was like looking back through the tunnel of time to the beginning. She was an embodiment with a slight rearrangement of the opening theme of the Quartets. Well anyhow, I have thought much about that word, and I believe she was right. It all is, or will be, enough. I have accepted her lesson and have not asked for more.