MY HAIR’S too short. I’ve worked a healthy handful of brilliantine through it, brushed it, combed it, and it’s not too bad on top, but there’s nothing I can do about the back and sides except wait. By the time I’ve grown a good thick DA, it’ll be fall and I’ll have to cut it off for school. The disadvantages of the Academy, I’m thinking, are beginning to outweigh the advantages. My father had sent me out there to make me manly, and, to both his surprise and mine, I’d eventually grown to like the place—but now I’m no longer a child who finds the uniforms and toy guns exciting, and I’ve begun to hate it more than ever when I run into Raysburg High kids on the street and they chant after me that ancient rhyme going all the way back (so he’d told me) to my father’s day:
Hup, two, three! Hup, two, three!
We’re the boys from the Academy.
We don’t smoke, and we don’t chew.
And we don’t go with girls that do.
So maybe Raysburg High doesn’t have the most elevated academic standards in the Valley, but at least the guys who go there aren’t required to keep their hair cut down to military length. But most significantly—they go to school every day with girls.
There’s an apologetic tap on the bathroom door. “Oh, Christ,” I say silently, forming the words for myself in the mirror. Out loud: “Yeah.”
My mother opens the door six inches. “You aren’t going to be really late again tonight are you, honey?”
“No.”
I wait until she shuts the door. Then I roll up the short sleeves of my pink shirt one turn, fold up the collar high behind my neck, unbutton another button to show more of the hair that’s begun to appear on my chest. Watching myself in the full-length mirror, I push my jeans lower on my hips. Half-inch black belt buckled on the left side, polished engineer boots on my feet, I slouch against the wall, studying the effect, trying for that perfect mask of sullen boredom and hostility: James Dean. I hear my mother in the living room playing the piano. It’s Debussy, one of those pieces she plays interminably, always getting stuck in the same place, always blowing the same run, always starting over. The sound of that piano can drive me frantic.
On the way to my bedroom, I hear my father yell, “Hey, Elvis.”
I decide to be amused. “Yeah, Dad?”
“Another big night?”
“Never can tell.”
My mother blows the run again and starts over. Her back’s to us; we could be in another world. My father’s sitting on the couch, his feet up on the coffee table, the paper in his lap. Within easy reach of his right hand is the coffee cup left over from dinner; it’s there every night. By now it has more Jim Beam in it than coffee, but neither I nor my mother is supposed to notice. He looks up at me grinning: pink round face, chocolate-brown Dupre eyes, hair perfectly parted.
◊ ◊ ◊
“Need a buck?” he says.
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
He digs a five out of his wallet, folds it with a snap, and pushes it at me. It’s a brand-new bill, fresh and crisp as if it’s just come off the press. I can never get over how perfectly he keeps his nails. He wears an amethyst ring on his left hand, smells of hair tonic, Old Spice, and whiskey. He sends me a broad wink. “Watch yourself.”
“Sure.” In a hour or so my mother will go to bed with a Reader’s Digest Condensed Novel. My father will lay aside the paper and, whistling some old tune between his teeth— “Yes sir, that’s my baby!”—will smooth back his hair with his set of matching brushes, knot up his tie, put on his suit jacket, and slip out of the house. Then he and I will be doing the same thing: getting drunk. We’ll never run into each other though, because I’ll either be sitting in the dark corner of a Polish bar or walking the alleys of South Raysburg and he’ll be on the other side of a locked door with a one-way mirror—in the Twenty-one, playing poker. Sunday morning we’ll face each other across the breakfast table with unspoken hangovers. I’ll be able to tell right away whether he won or lost.
Out front the horn’s already blowing.
“Hey, why doesn’t that kid ever come up here?” my father says sourly. He’s afraid he’s not good enough for the son of the Revingtons. He’s right, and I’m already down the stairs.
“What say, old man?”
“Evening, William.”
“Check the back.”
I look. Four quarts. Revington knows the bartender in the Oval. “A good night, William, a good night. Are we going to get drunk, or what?”
“We’re not merely going to get drunk, we’re going to get juiced out on our asses. I came in last night and the old man said, ‘Tell me, William, what are you doing drunk on Friday night?’ I said, ‘Well, Dad, it’s like this. I’m just getting started early for Saturday.’”
Revington’s the class wise-ass. He’d been my only friend when I’d first showed up at the Academy, and he’s still my friend—although sometimes I wonder why. I’m certainly not the colorful character he is. At sixteen, he’s already six feet tall; in a school that demands a ramrod-stiff posture, he slouches down the halls like a twenties lounge lizard. His jetblack hair is always too long, always falling in his face. He has a way of looking at our teachers—simply looking at them with an amused, superior glint in his dark eyes and the faintest suggestion of a smile on his lips—that drives them absolutely nuts. Most afternoons he can be found on the road in front of the Old Main, marching off an hour of punishment duty.
Out of town, up High Light Road to drink the first quart, we’re singing along with the car radio. Revington, hunched over the wheel playing fighter pilot, screams us around that insanely curving West Virginia road—sheer rock face on one side, forty foot drop-off on the other. He talks to me out of the side of his mouth in one of his movie voices. “Girls, old man ... Canden High girls ... the whole frigging lot of them.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t invited.”
“Invited?” he says, laughing. “Who says I was invited? She has to let me in. Her family knows my family.” It’s the out-the-pike crowd he’s talking about, the rich kids; he’s one of them himself. His father’s a big shit at Raysburg Steel; one uncle’s a lawyer, one’s a doctor, and one owns a bank. He’s the only guy I know who lives on a street with his own name on it: Revington Crescent. “You said you wanted to meet girls, Dupre . . .” He shrugs.
“Let’s see who’s at the Inn first,” hedging because I’d told Lyle I’d meet him.
Two quarts gone, we park on Short Market Street. High school kids—all male—lounge about on the sidewalk grouped by school: Canden on that corner, Raysburg High on this one, the boys from the Academy leaning against the wall under the Capitol Theater marquee. Every ten minutes or so the prowl car slides by easy as silk. The girls have to walk the gauntlet, past all those hungry eyes and up the stairs to Gerry’s Inn.
“What do you say, gentlemen? Any action?”
“Shit. Nothing.”
“Been out yet?” Meaning: for a drink.
“Not yet. Later. Hey, you drunk again, Dupre?”
“Who me? Goddamned filthy rumor.”
Lyle’s drawing me aside to say in an excited whisper, “Hey, boy, what are you doing with him?” He doesn’t like Revington. “We’re going down to South Raysburg later. Kruszka’s uncle works in a hole down there. He’ll slip us something out the back. What do you say?”
“Shit, he wants me to go to a party with him.”
Lyle looks down his big nose at me, disapproving. It’s not just money and family, it’s that Revington can never take anything seriously, particularly can’t take athletics seriously. He’s our only pole-vaulter of any note, but he doesn’t care, doesn’t train, and for Lyle that’s something that can’t be understood or forgiven.
“Canden High girls,” Lyle says in a hissing, disgusted voice. He doesn’t approve of them either.
It costs a lot to go to the Academy; most of the students come from families with money, but the school does give scholarships, athletic ones to tough Polish boys from South Raysburg, academic ones to straight-A students like our few token Jewish kids—and me. It makes for an uneasy mix. I’m one of the few guys who can move from group to group, but not without a certain friction. “You’re going to blow it loafing with him,” Lyle says.
It makes me angry. “Damn it, boy, I’ve got to meet some women.” Christ, where does Lyle get off with this shit? He has a steady girl, doesn’t he? Shirley Pulenski—a slight blond kid with blue-framed glasses. Lyle, who seems to adore her with a passion only slightly less exalted than a monk might feel for the Virgin Mary, had told me (embarrassed, giggling in that high-pitched strained way of his) that before asking her to the Christmas dance he had prostrated himself in front of the picture of Jesus in his bedroom and prayed that he would be worthy.
Back in Revington’s car up Raysburg Hill, over the speed limit, running the red light at the top. I’m feeling like a traitor, my loyalties torn. “Where are we going? Who’s having this party?” I’ve figured out that I’m being used as a pawn in one of Revington’s practical jokes; he’s planned the whole thing—going to turn up with some hoodlum friend reeking of beer, walk in and show off his cool. I’m dressed like a hood, so I’ll do, but anybody would do. Shit, I should have stayed with Lyle.
“Don’t sweat it, Dupre.” He locks it up and screams into the curb, grins at me, pushes back his hair, lights a cigarette. “Kicks,” he says. Fuck you, I think. My mouth’s gone dry. It’s a long way from my parents’ place on Raysburg Island to this neighborhood. He hands me the quart and I kill it.
A girl meets us at the door, obviously the young lady of the house, a ponytail blond in heels and a cocktail dress. She’s probably our age. “Good evening, Barbara,” Revington says in an affected drawling voice. He’s posed himself, the entire skinny length of him, leaning against the doorjamb. He trails a languid hand with cigarette in it, pointing at me. “My friend, Johnny Dupre. Mind if we come in?” The girl steps back from the door; her face has fallen completely apart. Revington smiles down at her like a British actor. It’s the first time I’ve understood exactly who he is—his effortless good looks, his boneless elegance, the way he wears his clothes, no matter how casual, as though he’s Fred Astaire in a tuxedo; it’s what my mother calls “breeding.”
“William,” the girl says, her eyes blinking rapidly. One hand, painted nails, is stopped halfway to her face. He knows that she knows that she has to let him in, and it is funny, damn it, but I won’t be able to laugh until later.
She pushes a smile back on, and we follow her down to the rec room. The parents are discreetly nowhere to be seen. We walk through the door, the party freezes over, but the record player keeps going, slaps down another forty-five. Nobody’s dancing, everybody’s looking at us, and Revington’s in his element, so pleased with himself that he can’t keep the laughter out of his voice. With a light touch on my elbow, he guides me forward. He seems to know all the girls. “Good evening, Sue. You look ravishing tonight ... Good evening, Janice. Good evening, Robin.” For the boys, he hasn’t got a word.
All right, so if I have to play, I’ll play. I lean against the wall next to the chip-dip and Cokes, slowly unwind myself as though there’s infinite time, as though all of this is beneath me, as though I might be so drunk that I could use some help from the wall for a moment—but only for a moment. The new kid in town, the outsider, Jimmy himself. I yawn, cross my legs, slouch just as I’ve practiced in the mirror. Then, with great deliberateness, with what I hope’s just the faintest suggestion of menace, I look around the room. Yeah, I’m out of place; every guy there is wearing a sports jacket and tie; a couple of them are big, look like they play center for Canden; they’re eying me with a menace that’s more than suggestion. The girls are in summer dresses or jumpers with frilly blouses, set hair or ponytails, makeup, nylons and heels. They’re immaculate.
Gradual thaw, the dancing begins again, and Revington’s hustling the girl of the house, the one named Barbara; he’s got her uncomfortably backed into a corner. I’m being ignored, carefully and pointedly. It’s no joke: I am drunk, but nowhere near drunk enough. I don’t know how long I can continue to stand there posed against the wall. I yawn again; inside I’m cold and contracted, thinking: Goddamn you, William Revington. But then I begin to see sideways glances from the girls; they’re checking me out, so quick and subtle I can’t quite catch them at it—brushing of bee wings.
A little girl on the far side of the room is sitting on the couch with her knees together, her feet pointed, her long legs arranged as perfectly as if she’s posing for a picture. My first thought: How did she get in here? Must be somebody’s kid sister. Her turquoise blue dress is like a child’s party frock— too many petticoats—and the skirt’s above her knees. It’s the shortest skirt in the room. On her feet, ballerinas the color of her dress and flat as paper. She meets my eyes and doesn’t look away. I can’t look away either. She has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen, enormous and shining. In a single stiffly explosive movement she jumps to her feet and walks directly toward me, rustling as she comes.
She’s not wearing either socks or nylons—oddly barelegged—and those huge eyes turn out to be as blue as her dress. Her straight taffy-colored hair hasn’t been curled; it’s cut off into ruler-straight bangs that cover her eyebrows, cut off at her shoulders—an abrupt unflattering pageboy, a little kid’s haircut, makes her narrow face seem even narrower, accentuates the long straight nose. Pale skin, nearly white, faint spray of freckles, but cheeks flushed with excitement. She’s painted her lips a screaming Marilyn-Monroe scarlet, lipstick laid on without compromise, and no other makeup to soften it—just those tense lips frozen into a smile like shiny red enamel slathered onto a marble statue. She can’t possibly be older than twelve. “Hi,” she says, “do you want to dance?”
Now what the hell can I do with that? The other girls are giving each other knowing grins, and I can feel the social lines crisscrossing the room like a spider web—whispering voices, oblique glances. Up close, her face is a mask of strain: flaring nostrils, haze of sweat on her upper lip. You’re a loser, kid, I think, and to gain time slowly push myself away from the wall.
I know if I dance with her, I’ll lose everything too—my image, my cool, the works—and that Revington won’t protect me. If I dance with this girl, I’ll join at once in her ignominious status; instead of the tough aloof stranger, I’ll be a jerk, a clown. The other girls are staring openly now, whispering and giggling, waiting with a breathless eagerness I can feel in the air for me to give her the brush-off. Even some of the boys are beginning to look. Suddenly I know how much I hate all of them. “Sure,” I say to her.
Her relief is so obvious that it hurts me to see it. It’s a slow dance; I take her into my arms and smell the sharp tangy perfume, much too much of it, and underneath, the stink of her fear. Her voice is bouncy and bright. “I really like this song, don’t you? I’m really glad you said you’d dance with me right away before it ended.” She presses in tight to me, finds my crotch at once, wiggles into it with one of her long legs. I’m so astonished that it takes me most of the song to get an erection. I let my right hand drift down her side. A tiny waist. And that flare to her hips is not a twelve-yearold’s. Her voice is moist and warm in my ear: “My name’s Linda Edmonds, what’s yours?”
◊ ◊ ◊
A WEEK later, the voice over the phone was so loud and frightened that it took me a long time to recognize it, connect it with the image of the young girl I’d met. “I didn’t think you were going to call me,” she said.
I almost hadn’t called her. “Jesus Christ, John,” Revington had said to me after we’d left, “what the hell were you doing with Linda Edmonds?”
“I thought you’d think it was funny, William.”
“But do you know how old she is, for fuck’s sake? She’s just out of the eighth grade.”
I was saved by the magic of numbers, found out that she’d turned fourteen less than a month before I met her—which put her barely over the line. (By some unwritten law, fourteen was considered the absolute downward limit by the guys in my class.) But she was nothing to brag about. Except for the overdone lipstick, she’d been dressed like a child, and, to put it kindly, she didn’t have much of a figure. She did have a pretty face, but only that—pretty. So what if her eyes were fantastic, her legs long and lovely, and her dancing excruciatingly provocative? I certainly couldn’t walk into Gerry’s Inn with her, introduce her to Lyle, or take her to the prom. I couldn’t imagine taking her anywhere. So what was it about her that kept me from falling asleep at night, that made me call her up every day or two?
From those brief tense conversations in which I had to do most of the work because she seemed scarcely able to speak at all, I collected only a few trivial facts: that she was an only child, that she had a dog named Lady and a cat named Sooty, that she took ballet lessons five days a week, that she’d been the first girl in her class to go on pointe. I’d sit with my eyes shut listening to her strained voice, her breathless dangling sentences, and try to remember exactly what she’d looked like walking toward me with the rustle of all those petticoats, exactly what it had felt like to have her leg pressed tight into my crotch. Both an awkward little kid and the most forward girl I’d ever met, but that formulation didn’t explain a damned thing. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Finally, after a million phone calls, I said, “Hey, Linda ... can I see you again?” There was a pause on the line so long that I began to wonder if she’d laid down the phone and walked away. Then she said, “I think you’d better meet my parents.”
I knew enough to put on a suit and tie. I drove my father’s clunker Dodge into a neighborhood where I’d never been, into a huge circular street with a park in the middle and houses that looked as though the antebellum half of Gone With the Wind could have been shot there. I pulled up and checked the address, and by God that was it. The affluent home where I’d met her dwindled into nothingness, became as insignificant as a peasant cottage; her front lawn looked as big as a golf course. I parked, walked up the flagstone path, up the concrete steps, up the white wooden steps, passed between the Doric columns, and confronted the brass door knocker with “Edmonds” engraved on it.
I had asked my father, “Hey, do you know a Charles Edmonds?”
“Do you mean Charlie Edmonds?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s who I mean.”
“Well, if that’s who you mean, he’s one of the vice presidents of Raysburg Steel.”
I honest to God expected a butler to open the door, but there was Linda herself. It was a shock to see her again. I realized that I’d gone over the night I’d met her so much that it had taken on a polished legendary quality, and the process had distanced her. Now, suddenly, I saw those enormous blue eyes, those geometrically straight bangs, that thin pale faintly canine face, all of it confirming what I remembered, but no memory of her could be as profound and mysteriously human as her immediate presence in front of me. This was serious. She was wearing a plain white blouse, a pleated tartan skirt, knee socks and loafers—no lipstick this time: a little kid, flat as a board, her hands shaking. She couldn’t even smile. “Hi,” she said miserably, “come in.”
When I’d been admitted to the Academy, I’d had an interview with Colonel Sloan: six feet four, silver-white hair, back stiff as a Confederate rifle, orotund preacher’s voice. He’d scared the shit out of me, continued to scare the shit out of me all through high school, and if I met him today the way he was then—even though I know better—he’d still scare the shit out of me. That interview in the Colonel’s office remains in memory as one of the worst moments of my life. The interview with Linda’s parents was worse. The living room had wall-to-wall carpeting, a collection of antique glass, and a full-sized grand piano. The picture window wasn’t quite as big as a movie screen. I couldn’t imagine how anybody in their right mind could call Linda’s father “Charlie.” Her mother was wearing a suit complete with the jacket; her straight skirt was very tight, her spike heels very high, her long red nails as perfect as if they’d been painted an hour ago. I’d never seen anything like her outside the pages of a fashion magazine. I was doing my best to be the perfect Academy cadet, sir and ma’am and winning smile and looking them in the eye. Linda’s mother kept saying things like: “Dupre? ... Do I know your family?”
It was beginning to make me mad, and I heard myself saying: “We’ve lived in West Virginia five generations.” I think she heard what I didn’t say: How long have you lived here? Mrs. Edmonds had a reputation as a stunningly beautiful woman; I could understand why, but I never found her beautiful. Her eyes narrowed noticeably, and she gave me the look a royal equestrienne might give a horse that’s just kicked at her.
Underneath my smile I was furious, thinking: Yeah, I’ll bet you do know my family. Maybe you’ve bought a used car or some Alcoa aluminum siding from my father or run into him at two in the morning in the back room of somebody’s bar; or maybe you know about my grandfather, the professional gambler who vanished in his seventies, only to be found, a few years later, in a rented room in Lexington, Kentucky, surrounded by Baptist bible tracts and three weeks dead of cirrhosis of the liver; or maybe you’ve heard of my great-grandfather, the first John Dupre, who was said to have killed a man in a gun fight? I was strangely proud of my seedy family with its drunken sweet-talking uncles, batty fading aunts, and a thousand fractious cousins. So I thought: Who the hell are you, Mrs. Charles Edmonds, to come into my home town from the state of New York and ask me who my family is?
I never called her father anything but “Mr. Edmonds,” and I think he came to like me in his distant way. Raysburg Steel ate him up, and he wasn’t around much. We played chess one night—only once. He opened with his king’s knight’s pawn, and I knew I had him. I fianchettoed both bishops and chopped up his center with them. He allowed two passed pawns, and I rammed them down his throat, exchanged him down to nothing, and mated him in half an hour. It changed something, and he respected me after that. But Mrs. Edmonds and I knew each other from that very first night, and nothing ever changed. We were always enormously polite to each other, even to the very end. We couldn’t have hated each other more if we’d been the last contending survivors of a twelve-generation clan war.
They finally left us alone. It had been hard on Linda too; I didn’t think she was going to be able to say anything.
“So you’re going to be a freshman, huh?” I said.
She pulled herself together—I could see her doing it—and, as suddenly as if I’d pushed a GO button, out came the bright rapid chatter. “Oh, I’m so glad I’m going to be in high school. I’m really looking forward to it. You’re going to be a junior, aren’t you? I’m kind of scared. Everybody says it’s so different, they expect so much more of you. Do you think that’s true? Canden’s such a big school. I wonder if I’ll get lost out there.”
I tried to imagine what it must be like for her—leaving safe little Meadowland Grade School—tried to remember how I’d felt when I’d first gone to the Academy. And then the full force of it struck me. When I’d been her age, I’d been a dreamy little kid with no friends, my entire life focused inward, a science fiction reader, confused and miserable, still desperately wanting to be a girl. My first year in high school had been sheer hell.
She walked skitterishly around the living room, doing God knows what, picking up a magazine and putting it down somewhere else, straightening a doily. She offered me hard candy in a blue dish. I didn’t eat candy but took a piece anyway. And she quickly turned down a framed photograph on the piano so I couldn’t see it, then sat down immediately with me on the couch again, close. I took her hand. She let me.
“Why’d you keep calling me?” she said. “Why did you want to see me?”
I hadn’t expected her to be that direct, and I didn’t know the answers to those questions. “I think you’re beautiful,” was all I could find, a line like something my father would have used.
“Who, me? Maybe you’d better have your glasses checked.” But I could tell that she was pleased. After a moment: “I’m too young for you.”
“Who says? Your mother?” She didn’t answer. “Why’d you come over to dance with me?”
“I thought you were cute.”
Now I was pleased. “Do you still think so?”
In the tone of “What a dumb question”: “Of course.”
“Can I see you again?”
She had a hard time with that. When she answered, it was as though she’d decided on the truth, having run through a number of alternatives. “I’ll see you . . . as much as my mother will let me.”
The picture she’d turned down stayed in my mind; weeks later I’d get to see it—a tinted portrait of her with a ribbon in her Shirley Temple curls, short white gloves, a petticoated dress a foot above her knees, anklets and black patent shoes, posed on a chair. It took her a year to tell me that it hadn’t been taken when she’d been ten, as I’d thought, but when she’d been twelve, just as it took her a year to tell me that the reason she’d been barelegged the night I’d met her had been because she’d taken off the white socks her mother had made her wear and stuffed them into her purse. I found out about the lipstick right away though because she kept it in the glove compartment of my car—I mean my father’s car. He found it, of course, and kidded me endlessly: “Are you sure it’s the right color for you, John?”
You didn’t kiss nice girls on first dates; everybody knew that, so I wasn’t even thinking of it that night at her house, but she kissed me. She stepped outside and closed the front door—not tight, not enough to make a noise, just enough to be sure that we couldn’t be seen—and without any preliminaries, grabbed me. I bent to give her a brotherly peck and met her open mouth, her tongue on mine. She fled back inside and left me standing, blazing away like a distress flare, on that broad white porch.
◊ ◊ ◊
LYLE AND I gradually began to have a profound, even shattering, influence on each other. He convinced me that to find what we were after, a physical and bodily search was as important as a mental one. He disturbed me with his strange Catholic mysticism, inspired me with such intense faith that I suspended my inherent skepticism dozens of times. Once, at the height of a blistering summer heat wave, he insisted that we fast all day, then walk to the Academy and run until we couldn’t run any more—and eat toothpaste in between laps. I thought he was totally out of his mind. I did it. In fact, if he’d appeared one day for morning formation wearing a loincloth and had invited me to accompany him into the wilderness, I might very well have done that too. And I widened his narrow parochial school background, could catch the flaws in his arguments, refer to writers he’d never heard of. As half-baked as I was then, I must have appeared profoundly learned to him. I gave him new ideas. He took them, tore them apart, and gave them back to me—on fire.
We were chameleons, changing roles faster than understudies for the commedia dell’arte. I vacillated between a tough guy pose, which couldn’t have been further from the truth, and that of an urbane man of the world. Lyle was half a dozen people, from Saint John of the Cross to cool investigator (he always had a science project going—studying the effect of acids on seed germination, collecting rocks and fossils, measuring the rainfall) to beer-guzzling hood. Halfway through our third year of Latin, we studded our speech with Latin phrases like seminary students, his always mangled through the warp of his Polish tongue. (He could never pronounce anything right: Modigliani came out Mo-diddlyani; Kerouac became Kerolic, to rhyme with alcoholic.) We were playing games with a passion, light-hearted on the surface— underneath, deadly serious.
William Revington was my other close friend, and, although I managed to get him and Lyle together a few times, even drunk together, they never liked or trusted each other. I’d grown up so imbued with the myth of a democratic America that it wasn’t until I looked back on it, years later, that it occurred to me that the tension between them could have been explained by a phrase as old and flat-footed as “class differences.” But I was becoming identified with the Polish contingent; even something of the magic of athletics was beginning to rub off on me. It wasn’t required that I be a winner, I discovered, only that I try: “Dupre? Oh yeah, he runs track. The mile.” And it didn’t hurt the bad-ass reputation I was cultivating that I occasionally drank until I passed out cold.
That fall some fuse that had been smoldering through childhood caught and my junior year took off like a roman candle. The image is Kerouac’s, and that was the year we read him. Like James Dean (another of our heroes), Kerouac had the perfect blend of outward toughness, inward sentimentality. We were on his wavelength; he was just as fucked-up as we were, so we swallowed his mythology whole. When we betrayed each other, it was Dean leaving Sal sick in Mexico. When we hit the street for the weekend, we were out for, of course, our kicks. When we were filled with despair, we were dying along with Jack down in Denver. We made a fetish of experience as an end in itself, tried to say a resounding Dean Moriarity “Yes!” to everything.
I felt my horizons expanding like an endless sunrise; I was moving constantly, either mentally or physically, and the biggest part of that movement was talk. At the core of any conversation would be Lyle, Joe Kruszka, and myself with Kupla, Dutkiewicz, Czetwertynski and the others circling around. We talked before school, walking around the track; although we were supposed to maintain a decorous military silence, we talked in the halls between classes; we talked all lunch period in, of all places, the can, leaning against the radiator across from the urinals, and, of course, we talked in the gym locker rooms and afterward, going home. Then later, in the middle of the evening when we were supposed to be doing our homework, we couldn’t let it lie, had to get on the phone and keep on going until eleven or twelve at night, only to fall into bed exhausted to snatch a few hours of sleep in order to get ready for the session the next day.
The weekends were frantic; we began to prepare for them on Wednesday. By Friday afternoon we couldn’t have concentrated on a classroom discussion if it had been led by the Pope. A hysterical pulse shook the halls; voices came drifting around corners with half sentences which had the import of Cabalistic utterances; demonic laughter filtered from another floor. We were planning the great, unbelievable, marvelous, and indescribably daring times we were going to have, how much we were going to drink, how drunk we were going to get. If, on Monday morning, we were not bleary-eyed, drooping, weary—in short, totally demolished for any activity except another six hours of sleep, we thought we hadn’t had a good time over the weekend.
We talked about the mysteries of the Catholic Church (far more mysterious to me than to any of the kids who’d been raised in the faith), Plato’s Dialogues (How should we live?), and sex. All of us knew guys who actually fucked, but they were always somebody else. At any rate, it was impossible to sort the truth from the lies. “Did you get in her pants? No shit! And then what did she do? Really got your finger in, huh? Don’t shit me now, man!”
I don’t know what I ran on in those days, sheer nervous energy perhaps. I somehow managed to get the schoolwork done (after a fashion), to read two or three extra books a week, talk to Lyle or Revington or anybody else handy every possible waking moment, get drunk twice over the weekends, lift weights in the gym, go out for track—and still I had time to take Linda out and think about her constantly. If I had a hard time fitting Lyle and Revington together, I had a harder time fitting Linda anywhere. Revington thought she was a bad joke, a pampered little rich kid, an infantile baby doll. And I was afraid to find out what Lyle or any of the Polish contingent would think; they knew I was dating, but I refused to talk about her. Her little-girl chatter, her bright-eyed naivety, all her family’s goddamned money— it was impossible. I kept her to myself. But in the night I replayed, in a deliciously detailed anguish, every nuance of those exploratory kisses we stole when we could evade the eyes of her bitch of a mother. Only the rock ’n roll singers on the radio understood what I was feeling. Maurice Williams recorded the perfect song; I bought his record and played the grooves off it. His high-pitched whining voice was the quintessence of a desire that could go on and on without an end in sight—burning. With no hope of release—burning. After all possibility of endurance is gone—burning. “Please let me stay . . . just a little bit longer.”
◊ ◊ ◊
I WAS always attracted to extremes, willing to follow any promising line of thought as far as I could, no matter how strange the journey. But Lyle, when I first knew him (strangely enough, for all his insane Catholic fervor), would go only so far and then pull back.
One afternoon at the tail end of winter, a sunny Saturday predicting spring, Lyle borrowed his father’s car, picked me up, and we took off for a drive into the country. His father, a worried man, had made Lyle wait until he was seventeen to get his driver’s license and then had told him plainly never to take the car out of town. So here we were, the first chance we got, headed out of town.
The car broke down just outside of Barnesville. We found a kid to help us fix it, one of those teenage automotive wizards who can repair anything with a set of open-end wrenches and a big hammer. While the kid was puttering around under the hood, I was playing the cool role, beginning every sentence with “man.” Lyle stood by and wrung his hands.
When we started home, Lyle was so furious with me that he couldn’t speak, clutched the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white, and stared straight ahead at the road. “How could you?” he began finally, “How could you do that? Playing so damned BEAT!”
“You were doing it yourself on the way out.”
“That was different. But after the car broke down, HOW COULD YOU?”
“Lyle,” I said, beginning as calmly as I could, “what do you think it is, a game?”
“Yes,” he shouted, “a game.”
“Well, for me it’s more than a game. It’s a pose, yes, but it’s got to be a real pose or it doesn’t mean a thing. And if it breaks down at the first sign of trouble, it doesn’t mean a thing . . . It’s just a child’s game, and we’re just a couple kids playing grown up.” I knew by taking that line that I was adding fuel to the fire, but I couldn’t resist.
“It’s not your father’s car,” he shouted back at me.
“That’s true,” I said, “but even if it was, I would’ve done exactly the same thing, said exactly the same thing.”
He said nothing, so I went on. “A couple years ago I kept trying to take certain books out of the library, the forbidden books, you know . . . Nietzsche, Freud . . . and the old bitch wouldn’t let me. I talked to her about it, and . . . well, what she seemed to be saying was that at my age I’d probably take Nietzsche seriously, but when I got to her age I’d know better and could read him with a ‘mature mind.’ I guess that means a mind that can play with ideas without taking them seriously. Do you understand me?” He still didn’t say anything, but I could see that I’d hit him.
“If you’re looking for Truth,” I said, pressing my point, “and you find an idea that appears to be true, then you’ve got to put it into practice, try to make it live in your life, or you’re the worst kind of hypocrite.”
I went on in this vein for a while. Lyle said nothing, stared straight ahead at the road. Finally, he burst out, “I don’t care about any of that, but it’s not worth fighting about.”
“Of course it isn’t. But don’t you see what I’m saying?”
“I see what you’re saying, but let’s just forget it.”
He drove in silence for a few miles. Then, with his voice shaking: “You just think I’m a dumb Polack, don’t you?”
“Jesus Christ, Lyle, how’d you ever . . .?”
“Why don’t you want me to meet your girl?”
Now I felt like the hypocrite. “Sure,” I said slowly, “if you want to.”
“I introduced you to Shirley, didn’t I?”
“Of course you did. Damn it, I just didn’t think it was important.”
“You and your Truth,” he said. “Are we friends or not? Why don’t you put that into practice?”
By the time we got back to Raysburg, the storm between us was over. We stopped into the New Moon Cafe for fish sandwiches and beer. Lyle was suddenly buoyant again. “You’re right,” he kept saying, “we’ve got to move.” Which isn’t what I’d been saying at all. But I nodded and agreed with him.
Just before we parted that day, he said, “Damn it, let’s not fight. Your friendship’s more important than any of this.”
“More important than your father’s car?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Of course,” he said in perfect seriousness. “Of course it is. And look, I don’t care whether I meet your girlfriend or not.”
“You’ll meet her. I promise.”
He caught my hand and looked at me intently. I was tempted to laugh but didn’t. “That’s one thing we should never forget,” he said. “We’ve got to stick together.”
“Right, Lyle,” I said, smiling. I was suddenly ashamed at my impulse to laugh at him.
◊ ◊ ◊
LYLE LEDZINSKI: “The Mad Polack,” we had taken to calling him, and when we wanted to flatter him, “The Golden Polack.” He was one of my best friends, my brother, a person so important in my life that I can’t imagine being the way I am today if I hadn’t met him. With his passion, his energy, his craziness, he was magnificent, but he could also be a pain in the ass.
Phone call at four in the morning. I stagger up to answer, grab the phone, and there he is on the other end, crying. “This is Lyle.”
“I know, for Christ’s sake.”
“Hey, I’m sorry to call you . . .”
“That’s all right. I was sound asleep so don’t expect . . .”
“I just had to talk to somebody.”
“OK. What the hell’s the matter?”
“They threw me out. Out! Out! Out! Out of the house. What am I going to do? Where am I going to go?”
I can hear a truck roll by on his end of the line. “Where are you?”
“Twenty-second Street. I’ve been walking . . . What can I do? Has there ever been a son treated like this by his parents? You read about these things in books, but they never really happen. My parents . . . out of a book! They blame me for everything, would you believe it? My father’s bad heart they blame on me. My sister’s poor grades. When my mother gets in a bad mood, it’s my fault. My father’s business ... Me, me, me, it’s my fault. The leaky toilet. Have you ever heard of such things? Have you ever heard of such parents? They even blame me for . . . ,” I hear him giggle between sobs, “the cat peeing on the rug.”
“Fuck it, boy, come over here.”
“Are you sure it’s OK?”
“Of course it’s OK.”
And it was OK, at least most of the time. But with Lyle’s great talent for dramatizing himself (on two occasions he didn’t speak to me for days because he’d thought I’d insulted him), those middle-of-the-night calls could just as easily be over a poem he’d read, a momentary doubt in the Catholic Church, or Shirley (“She didn’t even smile when she saw me, man! Can you imagine that? She just walked on up the street!”)
Here’s Lyle in a bar. As soon as we’re seated with our beers in front of us, he shouts loudly, “I say pleasure dilutes happiness,” and pours Seven-Up into his beer. No one can say a word while he elaborates his new theory: true happiness consists of long and agonizing suffering. When any of us attempt to interrupt, he yells, “Let ME talk!”
After the first round he turns vindictive. I’m the target. “You! You’re always telling me that you’re against society. Well, why don’t you get out then? You guys are all alike.” He’s now including everyone at the table, that is, his entire circle of closest friends. “You talk a lot, but you don’t do a damned thing. You don’t follow your beliefs. Look at me. I hitchhiked to Morgantown. I saw a little of life. I’m out earning my living.” He was working for his father. “I make my bread and butter. You guys are all leeches, sponges. What do you do that’s useful? When have you had to work? You’re all hot air and no action.”
He’s getting so loud we’re in danger of being thrown out, pushing our luck as not one of us has a draft card. As diplomatically as we can, we maneuver him outside and into Joe’s car.
I’m in the back seat; he’s in the front. He turns around, crawls over the seat, better to shake his accusing finger in my face. “What happened to that three-day trip you were going to take with no money? You don’t know anything about life. ALL YOU KNOW IS WHAT YOU READ IN BOOKS!”
But two hours later we’re in the back room of the Owl. Lyle is drunk and telling us how much he loves us. “You guys are the only friends I’ve got. We’ve got to stick together.”
He kept telling us that he was going to quit drinking, but he never did, mixing his beer half and half with Seven-Up, stirring it with his long bony finger, grinning evilly, shouting at us about a new theory, a new idea, a new key to the universe—the one that would finally pull everything together so that it would all make sense. And just as easily as he could end up loving us all, he could end up crying, repeating that no one loved him, no one cared, that he had no friends, no one to understand and appreciate what he knew and how deeply he suffered. All this despite the fact that he would be surrounded by friends, all listening more or less sympathetically, buying him beer, lighting his pipe. And a hundred and one nights he’d get up and leave, to walk home, all the way home, all the way home alone, the ten or twenty or thirty blocks home, to punish us for not loving him.