It was dark under the bed, a gray-lit—not a green-tinged—jungle, and the smell of dust took the place of the smell of leaves. Randolph was pretty and he was dull. We had no language of useful abuse; it was all done in inflection:
Him?
As I understood it, nothing could come before a game, not one’s mother’s fears, not one’s own. There could be no safety, no prearranged rules, no set order to appeal to: everything was re-created every day; yesterday’s everything died in one’s sleep, in the furnace of one’s dreams; what dreams allowed to stand, luck burned: your friends were busy or had allied themselves to someone else or had entered some other sphere of influence, or you had. To appeal to logic or any law outside immediate precedent, to any law outside childhood and a range of two days, was to be past our ability to describe in language the sort of person you were and why it was no good to play with you. The only acceptable mental set was that of a profoundly irreconcilable anarchist. I don’t know how much we lied, how attached we were to logic and safety after all—I don’t think much. To a sickening extent, the real world was curtained off from us: we tried to make our world real; we were grubby, we were little militarists, soldiers in a garrison town. Would we be six feet tall? Would we be creepy? What would luck do to us? While we waited, we thought it shameful to be organized in any way. To be a Little Leaguer was a terrible thing. We liked to explore sewer outlets and the sewers themselves; we liked to hunt rats; we put rat corpses on streetcar tracks and studied the parts of the exploded cadavers—“Lookit the thing like a bean.” We liked to sit around in grubby, abandoned places, derelict corners of the park, and say crude things about our teachers. We had moments of fastidiousness and delicacy, of concentration, and of limpness. We doted on violence; we were sexually inadequate; the rage spilled out: we liked banditry, thievishness, treachery. We liked to spit on the floor of the garages of Catholic families. We vandalized sporadically. You could be crazy and ugly, but as long as you realized other people were alive and as long as you had no rules, you were eligible for companionship. But no rules—none of that leverage. We were sick to death of innocence.
Randolph was a lousy playmate; he didn’t realize the bedsprings didn’t squeak, it was the monkeys chattering. When I told him, he said, “Monkeys?” Then he said, “Tell me again.” What he liked was being told. His mother was close to my mother, and Randolph had a little-child’s crush on me, so I had to play with him. But I was ashamed of it and was playing this naked game in order to get something not too
boring out of it and also maybe to shock his mother and get that over with. You could snort and refuse to play and say sharply to someone, “Aw, you don’t do it right,” and stalk off, but then the mother of who you stalked off from might strike back through the school psychologist, who was erratic as hell and might accuse you of being unstable: then it was war between the families and between teachers at school, some of whom thought you were crazy and some of whom liked you: to the towers, to the towers. The phrase was
It is hopeless.
Randolph is uplifted by the rapture of hearing an untrue statement made with passionate faith in its usefulness inside a frame of pleasure and for no other purpose except selfishness; the delight for him is not in the logic that opens out of any game and one’s adherence to the game; his delight was in the willfulness of speaking the blasphemies of private imagination as truths. He will be a lawyer, an advertising man, a drunken grammatical loveless poet, a wit who does not amuse. The idea of willed pleasure will always exalt him because of the trick of it, which he will never have but will claim to have. He will at intimate moments make the wrong confession. The unhappiness he experiences bores me—not all unhappiness is worth respect. He will maybe never realize he is boring and plays games badly. He expected to be liked, to be a toy; his mother and grandmother had reared him as a toy for themselves; he was pruned and undone, a harem male. He was startled into a dependent, tense, always brief, and soon doubting pleasure, by whatever I said. He keeps his arms around my neck, his body lies on mine, and he waits to be amazed some more. Meanwhile I maneuver in the scrofulous hot jungle dust beneath the bed, acting out my notions of adventure and of physical splendor, and I largely ignore him.
M
Y FATHER
has been ill; he’s had a series of heart attacks; sometimes he asks me to sit near him; he holds my hand and tells me bitter things; sometimes almost with dim amusement, as if from a great distance, as if he floated out away from everyone on an inner sea, he refuses to be interested in something I ask him; he will say, “You don’t need me to tell you what to do—you know how to be a fool all by yourself.” He says it often with affection, a kind of affection; he makes jokes of that kind; I don’t understand why he doesn’t worry about me.
My mother is a very pretty, overweight, tense woman, who has had a large-scale social life which is done for, for the moment. She says of
my father, “He pities no one but himself.” She nagged him to try harder to live; he told her to be gentler, to smile, to be nice; she said, “I can’t be a fool just to make you happy—be reasonable.” My father had decided he hated her, and his hatred was slow and far and unrelenting; he called her Madame The Great Horned Toad and Your Highness Our Own Killer Bitch and Mrs. Hellmouth. She did not think much of the masculine sensibility; she thought my father and I ought to be inspired by our feelings for her and do great things for her; but my father did not want just to be a father, breadwinner, husband, man uplifted by love, and she didn’t want to deal with him as a person. She was willing to play her roles for him for a while—she did not expect him or want him, maybe, to see her as a person, but to love her instead. She was casual that way. My mother made me play with Randolph. She liked to make me do things. She would say, “Take off my shoes for me—I’m all worn out.” But I didn’t want to; if I refused, there might be no dinner. She minds it that I am young, that she is supposed to take care of me, that I am a boy and will never be stuck as she has been as a nurse for someone. In an idle, terrible way she hates being a nurse and lets herself be cruel. She tells my father it makes her sick to take care of him—there is more to her than a maid and a cook. She often tries to wheedle me or crazily orders me to run the house—“Fix your father’s dinner—if it isn’t cooked right, he won’t kill you—you’re the one he likes.” She said, “I suppose you expect me to give you a happy childhood?” They were all crazy.
She was fond of me in a way, but now that my father was ill people were concerned about me and not about her: they expected her to sacrifice herself. She gets even for that, she endangers me, in a casual way; in a casual way, she indulges her moods, her impulses. She is good-looking and dangerous and aging. Other people say that of her, that she is dangerous and aging. I know she feels animosity toward me, and she lets herself feel it, and I am sickened and afraid, but what should I do? My father tells me to have nothing to do with her. When I avoid her, she cries and says, “You, too, you’re going to turn on me?” It is part of my wildness, those tears of hers, the animosity and then those tears.
I tried to avoid going to play with Randolph. That is, I made myself invisible, I forgot invitations, but my mother outwaited me. She said, “Don’t be so full of yourself. Be more willing to do someone a favor. Maybe he’ll help you someday. You never know what will happen—
you might have a good time. You should be flattered he likes you. Believe me, you haven’t an easy personality to like.”
She began to yell, “Go play with him! Don’t make a fool of me in front of his mother! I owe her a favor! Be kind to someone for a change! It won’t hurt you!”
I
N THAT SUBURB
, among boys my age, games of acquisition and of gambling, marbles, trading baseball cards, playing mumblety-peg for stakes, or tossing pennies, and games of real or of mock violence, peashooter wars, cops and robbers (with mock brawls, mock agony, often elaborate plots), Robin Hood, Tarzan, Space Search, and Torture, were more common than sports. We played scratch baseball, stoop ball, stick-ball, catch, touch football, wall ball, and various two-man games of imaginary baseball; it was hard when you were young to get up a real baseball game; we did not have easy access to a field, and if we got the field, older boys or grownups could easily dislodge us and take over; and where could we get eighteen kids anyway? Our parents sometimes lobbied for or paid for or set up sports to keep us from the happy nastiness of children, from our other games, but my parents did not have any interest in sports, and I had perhaps a larger acquaintance with the nastiness—and liked it more—than other children did. I don’t know that that was so. Our powerlessness, the reality of that physical fact, was dinned into us over and over: you might get asked to fill in on a baseball team of older boys, but your reach, your power at the plate were so limited that any older boy who showed up was welcomed and you were kicked off.
Of the games we could control, Torture was, from the time we were six until we were about ten and began to have the coordination and freedom for large-scale activities and actual bullying, the most common game. It was most often played by three children, but the third was really more a referee, a magical companion, a safety factor. It was popular in spurts and not everyone played it all the time but everyone played it some, everyone who was a
player
—there were children we did not play with, who were what their parents wanted them to be, and who we thought were disgusting (and maybe the future belonged to them: we didn’t know). Not all children have free will; and among those who have it, some have it more than others. Inflexible children, those who could not explore a moment’s exotic possibilities and perversities, were
excluded. Torture was straightforward: one of you was a captive and was helpless; the game hardly ever involved escape. Usually the central drama was that of interrogation; you could rise up and try to hit or actually did hit your interrogator, but then he or she would bring down an imaginary whip and you had to howl in agony. Girls played, too, but they were very strange, not easily controlled. In most cases, no real pain was essential; there were other games where the pain had to be real, but then it was shared or mutually inflicted. The basic plot of Torture was helplessness, and the reality of ruthlessness, and the survival of the will or its breaking. When you were very young, you played with everything imaginary—chains, whips, branding irons—but you might use an old shoelace or a piece of string as a lash: you know what children are like. Among the children I played with, the girls were the first to become realistic: cuticle scissors for stabbing (not deeply) or clipping off bits of the padded finger end. It was odd, and funny, that at that point Torture often turned into her giving you a manicure: the game’s voltage was too full of intimations, had too much resonance, was too nasty, and we would, as it were, forget what we were doing and slide into something else.
Girls insisted you be tied up. We played Torture perhaps for an hour on three days running and then maybe only four times more that whole year; I should not have said it was the most popular but that it was the most universal. If you went to another neighborhood, that was the game you were most likely to wind up in. Anyway, to be tied up we would use bent clothes hangers or bits of clothesline. Often the preparations would be the only part of the game we would play full-heartedly. Few girls or boys could say, “I’m going to put your eye out if you don’t talk,” except without conviction. I mean to say that the horror tended to evaporate: the expectation was frightening.
Sometimes the horror didn’t evaporate. In a neighborhood of richer children, I found myself tied up one time, tied to a chair in a basement. There were two other boys, and a girl was supposed to join us but she never showed up. One of the boys was named Lewis: his mother was a widow, Lewis was very handsome, very shy and silent in class, and well behaved; and I had not expected this side of him. He did not talk much, and most of most Torture games was talk, so I thought this would be dull. He and the other boy heated up a soldering iron and over my protests singed my hair; then they wanted to singe my eyelashes—Lewis was very proud of his steady hand. I told him to go fuck himself (I did
not know what fuck meant but I knew it was a serious term). He said I was tied up and he was going to do what he wanted: my blood ran cold and I began to twist, so he was afraid to come too near me; but he brought the iron close to my
chin,
threatening to burn me if I didn’t stop twisting around. It was considered shameful ever to appeal to a grownup or to tell one anything, but I told him to get the hell away from me or I would scream and I would tell. He backed away. Complainingly, the other boy untied me, and then I hit Lewis—on the cheek, but not all that hard, hard enough only to show displeasure, not rage. Lewis said he didn’t understand me; he and the other boy showed me how they played; the other boy put his finger in a vise (we were in a basement workroom); and Lewis swung the nipple-ended underbar of the vise and worked it tighter on the boy’s finger. The boy began to sweat and undulate faintly, and stared at Lewis with protruding eyes. Lewis tightened the vise still more.
There were stories of fairly severe injuries—but mostly among quite rich children (we lived on streets that ran parallel along the slope of a very long rise; on the top were mansions; street by street the houses grew smaller until you came to the valley, where they were quite small).
We were sexually latent—I knew no one my age who knew about sex; we talked toward it often, but were strangely blank. We had intense bursts of sympathy toward each other, periods when we were drawn to some other child’s company: I had been drawn to Lewis’s. Lewis and I went to visit a girl named Myrna, who had a white bedroom: Lewis and Myrna were Episcopalians, but it was an insanely fluffy, vulgar, princess-in-the-movies sort of bedroom; and afterward, Lewis and I played Torture, my way, in a nearby woods (near the school), using our imaginations and a skinny branch or two to lash lightly at each other’s legs. I thought Lewis would be wowed by my version of the game and I was stunned—and hurt—when he said he preferred the soldering-iron, finger-in-the-vise version he played.