AT FIRST ALL WE HAD growing was a potted plant that Ellen had brought over and put in the window. But it didn’t get enough sun and the air was too heavy for it and after a bird shit on it, God knows how at that angle, we had to pick off all the splattered leaves because we couldn’t clean the leaves without breaking them. Jack was pissed off and so was Ellen when she came back over and saw what was left of the plant.
“Why did you two pigs have to eat it?” she asked us.
“We didn’t eat it,” I said. “We were just trying to save it.”
“Save it!” she said. “How can you save a plant by pulling off the leaves? Just tell me that.”
I was going to tell her about how the bird had shit on the leaves but Jack got to her before me. He was sitting on the floor in his underwear. He had been sitting there like that most of the day, doing nothing, and I knew he was just as pissed off over the thing as Ellen was. “Don’t make such a big deal out of it,” he told her. “It wasn’t grass or anything important. It was just a stupid plant.”
“I raised that plant in my own bathroom from just some seeds,” said Ellen. “And you two pigs had to go and eat it.”
“You’re a real mother,” said Jack. “You’re such a mother you ought to sell soap on television.”
“Come on and cool it now,” I told Jack. Ellen was my piece and I knew that once he got to going good they would be at it all afternoon. She was my piece and I had to protect her. I went over to the window and threw the plant downstairs. But then Ellen got pissed at me too and stalked out the door, that long brown hair trailing behind her in the breeze she made.
“What a real cool head you’ve got there,” said Jack, as Ellen was slamming the door. “She’s uptight and it wasn’t even grass. Just a lousy pile of leaves.”
“You don’t understand her,” I said.
“You don’t either,” said Jack.
So we sat around and wondered what we should do next. We had a whole summer to do whatever we wanted and all we had to do was figure it out. Then, that next morning, Jack had the idea that we should go to Newport, start our beards growing, sleep in the open, and sweat and not bother to wash until we got back. It sounded great to me and that night we drove down in my VW. But when we hit the town we saw that there were a million kids around with the same idea and all of us looked alike, and the local pig-cops wouldn’t let us sleep on the ground. They had a lot of sawdust on the ground and we dragged our feet through it and threw it up in the air and on each other. Jack even tried to stuff some of it in his pockets to bring back with us and make our place smell better, but the pigs stopped us there too. The Festival was on that weekend and a lot of the little rock groups were singing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” a real oldie. It seemed to catch on, though, and even way up on the stage, about a hundred benches from us, Christopher Robin and the Sparrows, a new group in from the Coast, were singing it too. It was our first night there and I looked around in the bright white outdoor lamplight and at all the faces and there was this girl, a Jew with a big nose trying to keep warm in a blanket, and she was singing it too, right next to me on the bench, and she was crying.
I nudged Jack. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.
“All right,” Jack said. He was as set to go as me: our beards had not grown as much as some of the others there. We left the benches but Jack thought we should wander around some to pick up a couple of girls to bring back with us. I was thinking about Ellen and the plant.
“I don’t want to,” I told him.
“Why not?”
“Let’s just get the hell out, alone.”
Jack didn’t push it or bitch about it much. I guess he didn’t mind that either.
So we came back to the city with some groovy sawdust in our shoes that we had managed to pick up. But that night in our place when we poured it out of our shoes on the floor it looked too much like dirt. And we had to throw that out too.
“I’m tired of this shit,” said Jack.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Want to call Ellen and Katie over and get laid?”
“If you want to,” Jack said.
“I don’t really want any unless you need some.”
“No. I don’t want any.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
He was always that way. He never knew what he wanted. Sometimes I thought he was pretty deep because he never knew, because sometimes I don’t know what I want. But sometimes I thought he was square and pretty stupid. Like for instance the way he wouldn’t dress in the morning; he’d just mope around in his underwear all day as if he was trying to make up his mind whether he wanted to put clothes on or not before it was time to go to bed again. Sometimes he could be really weird, like he was being that night. I looked at him. “Look,” I said. “That Newport thing was crap anyway. We should’ve left the crowd and cut out on our own, up to one of the beaches or something.”
“Yeah,” said Jack.
He was laying on the floor with his hands behind his head and he was looking up at the way the lovebeads dangled from the string on the light. I felt bad because it had been my decision to come back so soon.
“You sure you don’t want some pussy?” I asked him.
“I’m sure I don’t want some pussy,” he said.
“Want to turn on?”
“No.”
“Want to go to bed?”
Jack just looked up at the lovebeads. Finally he got up and went over to the box and got a couple of beers. We sat drinking them.
Now I know Jack, mind you, and I knew that when he didn’t know what it was he wanted he would always think about it over beer. We had been in the place two years together and I had got used to the way he was. Sometimes, for no reason at all, he would get moody and just flake out. We would be laughing about something or we would have a couple of broads over and I would look up all at once and Jack would be turned off, completely. Now, I tend to mind my own business and I usually do a good job of it, but seeing him all uptight or flaked out or whatever he was, kind of bothered me. I remembered one time he went away, just before he finally quit school for good. Jack had been in Philosophy and he used to really think about it and read a lot of it before he saw where it was at, and put it down. I remember seeing him there, at his desk, not even turning the pages of his book or not even smiling when I was talking funny about some far-out cat we both knew who was trying to be hip. It was real funny. But Jack wasn’t listening to me. I stopped talking for a few minutes and he never even noticed it. Then I said:
“Hey, man, where are you?”
He didn’t even look up at me. He just stared blank-like at the wall behind his desk.
“What are you writing?” I said in a louder voice.
“I can’t do this paper,” he finally said.
“Why not?”
“Too goddamn many footnotes. I can’t put my own ideas in.”
“Well, what ideas you got?”
Jack sighed. “None,” he said. “But I refuse to use anybody else’s.”
“What does it matter?” I said. “All you want is the grade anyway.”
“It matters,” he said. “It matters to me. And I don’t give a damn about the grade. I just want to do something with my ideas.”
“But you don’t have any ideas!”
“What’s wrong with that?” he snapped.
“It’s weird, that’s what’s wrong.”
“So I’m weird,” he said. He slammed his hand down on the desk, hard. He even turned around in the chair and looked at me, mean.
“And another thing,” he said. “When you see me thinking don’t ever interrupt me.”
I started to tell him just where he could go but then I changed my mind. I had just been in the loft with him three months then and I didn’t want to provoke him because I was thinking that he was a real nut.
“All right,” I said to Jack. “If that’s the way you want it.”
“That’s the way,” Jack said.
And that’s the way it had been for almost two years. I knew when to talk to Jack and when to leave him alone. I learned to leave him alone when he was quiet and wanted to be left alone, and I learned to get him to start talking when he wanted to talk but didn’t want to begin the thing. But seeing him that night, on the floor drinking the second can of beer and looking up at the lovebeads, made me feel responsible because it had been my idea to leave the sawdust at Newport.
“Tell you what,” I said to him. “We’ll do it again.”
“Do what?” said Jack.
“We’ll go back to Newport tomorrow. The Festival’s still on and some new group’ll be in and there’ll always be plenty of girls around.”
“I don’t want to go back,” said Jack. “It bothers me being there.”
“But you dug it tonight?”
“That was tonight. I don’t want to go back. There’ll be new things tomorrow but it’ll be the same place.”
“You want a new place, is that what you want?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I want, a new place.”
I thought about a new scene. I thought very hard about someplace new to go. I almost blew my mind thinking about a new scene. But it was no good. We had been everywhere.
“I’ve had it,” I said after a while. “There’s no place left to go to. Unless you want to fly somewhere.”
Jack sat up on the floor and knocked over the can of beer he had put next to his arm. He was smiling and I knew he had one of his ideas.
“Bryan Dillworth has a place in the woods,” he said. “I know where it is, up in New Hampshire. I was up there with him last winter. It’s a groovy place in the woods and I know it’s open because it’s way back in the sticks and you have to walk to get to it.”
“You out of your nut, Jack?” I said. “What could we do in the woods?”
“Just go and sit around.”
“I don’t think Ellen and Katie would go for that,” I said. “Even if Katie did decide to speak to you again.”
“The hell with them,” Jack said. “We don’t want to take girls along anyway. They would just spoil things.”
“Then what do you plan to do at night?”
“Just sit around.”
“That’s pretty weird, Jackie,” I said. “Who wants to sit around and listen to crickets making out all night?”
“The hell with you too,” he said. “I’ll go by myself.”
But I knew he wouldn’t do it alone. I knew that much about Jack. He didn’t say anything else and he lay back on the floor and started mumbling to himself about the stuff he was going to take up with him. He didn’t even look up at me and I knew he was waiting for me to throw in the towel and say I would go. But I didn’t know whether I should or not. No one wants to be stuck out in the woods with a nut; and I was coming around to thinking that Jack was blowing more of his mind every day. Still, I had made him come in from Newport before he wanted to and I knew he would try to make me feel guilty about that if I didn’t go along with him. Jack was very good about doing that.
“Can I take the VW if you’re not going?” he asked all at once from the floor.
“I don’t want my car going down no country roads,” I told him. “If it got stuck you’d never be able to get it out by yourself.”
“So, O.K., I’ll walk.”
“You’re really out of your nut, you know that?”
“What the hell?” said Jack. “I’ll walk.”
And it was still my fault about the Newport thing. I felt guilty. Jack was playing with me and waiting and I was pissed off because I couldn’t help myself. He had me.
“All right,” I told him. “We’ll go. But I’ll be damned if I’m driving.”
Jack looked over at me and smiled.
II
WE GOT AN EARLY START that next morning. Jack was driving my car and he refused to take the turnpike. I thought he was doing it just to make me get mad and say something, so I kept my cool. But after a while of going down that little road with a drag-ass ahead of us slowing us down I decided to risk it. “Look,” I said to him. “This way it’ll take at least seven hours to get there. Be logical and take the pike, for the love of Jesus.”
“If you want to be logical and drive on the pike, go ahead,” he told me, “but if I drive we go all the way on back roads.”
“But think of all the extra gas we’ll use?”
“So?”
“And we’ll waste a lot of time too, going this way.”
Jack thought a minute. I thought he was finally seeing the light. Then he said: “That’s what you think.”
“O.K.,” I said. “We’ll do it your way. But I’m not paying a fucking cent for the extra gas.”
Jack stepped on the brakes right in the middle of traffic on that road. I was lucky to have my seat belt locked.
“Get out,” he said to me.
“What the fuck do you mean?” Cars were honking behind us.
“Just get the hell out of the car.” He had his lips tight and he was looking through the windshield.
“We’re way out in the middle of the goddamn sticks already.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn. Get out now and thumb a ride back.”
“Be logical,” I said to Jack. “At least pull over to the side of the road.”
“Everybody’s logical,” he said. “I’m tired. Get out!”
I just sat there looking at Jack’s face. It was tight and turning red and the two sides of his nose were moving real fast like he was out of breath. I didn’t move from the seat beside him. I mean, it was my car. More traffic was honking now, but Jack just sat there, his hands locked on the wheel, looking out the window down the empty road. I was getting hot as hell then but I knew I had to keep my cool because Jack was just waiting for an excuse to throw me out of the car and I was scared to fight him. I don’t think I would have fought him anyway. You can’t win fighting a crazy man.
We sat there quiet-like, waiting for me to get out or the car to start. It was really tense. I knew that I wasn’t about to leave my own car in the hands of a madman. And I was thinking about playing it cool and safe and apologizing to him, when this pig-faced trucker leaned into the window on Jack’s side of the car and said: “How much longer you guys gonna take for your coffee break?”
“We don’t have coffee,” Jack told him.
“I don’t neither,” said the pig. “In fact, I ain’t got nothin’ but a truckloada overripe peaches back there. But I figure since you guys are sittin’ here and ain’t got no coffee I might as well offer you some peaches, since I can’t move my truck anyways.”
“Thanks,” Jack told him.
The trucker slammed his hands down on the roof of the car like he really had to hit something. Then he reached in the car and grabbed Jack by the arm. “All right, smart-ass,” he said. “Get the fuck outta the road. You got five seconds, and if you ain’t outta here before then I’m gonna pull that hair off your chin one piece atta time!” He was wearing this unhip plaid shirt that was open at the chest and the thick red hair under it was moving up and down real fast, like he was about to really explode.
“Please, Jackie,” I said. “We don’t want trouble. Let’s go.”
“You tell him, Willie,” the trucker said. “You young punks need some trouble anyway. I’d like to see one of you guys bleed anyway ’cause I got this bet with a buddy that you ain’t human.”
Jack still had his hands on the wheel and all at once he gave the VW the gas, right down to the floor. He almost ran over the pig trucker’s feet, he pulled out so fast. “Schmuck!” he called back at the trucker out the window. He gave the guy the finger with his left arm and almost lost control of the car. I knew better than to say anything. I was sure now that Jack was losing it. But he was smart enough to do eighty until we came to a place where we could turn off that back road and onto the pike. The pig trucker was really pouring it on behind us but it didn’t do any good. We were way out front, and after we got on the pike Jack kept her at eighty.
“Hey, slow down,” I told him. “You’ll run into something going this fast.”
Jack seemed to ignore me. Then, after a while, he said: “What the hell. Why should you worry? You belong to Allstate anyway. You don’t have to be responsible for anything.”
“I worry,” I said. “I haven’t paid for the car yet.”
Jack smiled. “Why worry about that either? You’re Allstate’s.”
But after a while he finally slowed her down to a smooth sixty and we settled back for some steady driving and neither one of us said anything. I couldn’t say anything. I was thinking about moving the hell out of the apartment just as soon as we got back.
III
IT WAS REALLY BEAUTIFUL in those woods that first evening. The water in the pond was too muddy and had too many bugs in it for us to drink it, and so we had to find our own source. Jack liked that. We went off into the woods just before sunset, and all the leaves on the ground were hit by this kind of white-red sunlight coming through the trees and it made them look browner and redder and greener than they actually were. Walking on them made a good sound. The sound was so good, in fact, that we didn’t even look very hard for water. We just walked around some and listened to the sound our feet made in the leaves. It was much better than the sawdust and I really began to feel good that Jack had made me come up. I even began to feel a little bit good about Jack. But I was still thinking about moving the hell out of the loft as soon as we got back. Then Jack found a little stream and we followed it until we came to a place where the white water flowed down over some clean black stones, and we filled our bottles with the water without collecting a single bug.
Going back to the cabin, Jack said to me: “I’m awfully sorry about today, Joe. I just got kind of pissed off.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to be a shit about the thing.”
“Don’t think about it,” I said.
“I feel closer to you than anybody in the world and I don’t want you to feel bad about me. About the way I am.”
It was getting dark and the woods were not so beautiful then.
“Let’s get back to the cabin,” I said.
“You don’t feel bad towards me, do you, Joe?”
“Hell no,” I told him. “But let’s get back to the cabin.”
We had to cut wood for the stove and the fireplace because with the sun down it got awfully cold in the cabin all of a sudden. Jack insisted on cutting all the wood; he wouldn’t let me help him cut any or even bring any in the cabin. He didn’t even want to stop when both the woodboxes were full and he was sweating. “For the love of Jesus,” I told him from the cabin door, “don’t be a mule. That’s enough. We’re only going to be here for one night. Leave something standing for the woodpeckers.”
“I like it,” Jack called back to me, swinging the axe high over his head and coming down hard on a log. He didn’t even split that log; it was hard work.
“But we don’t need all that.”
“I need it,” said Jack.
“What the hell for?”
“For me.”
I couldn’t get him to stop it, and finally I went on back inside the cabin and started the fire in the big old rusty pot-bellied iron stove. I took a can of beans out of my bundle and opened it and thought about Jack. Something was always eating him up inside and I didn’t think it was something that I caused. After you live with a fellow for almost two years you kind of know what he thinks and what bothers him and what doesn’t. I knew it wasn’t being around me or Ellen that bothered Jack. And it wasn’t Kay either. He didn’t give a damn about her; she was just something he liked to have around because she was so stupid that having her around made him feel better. I knew that much. But I didn’t understand what else there was to it. Outside, Jack was still cutting wood and it was really dark. I didn’t see the sense of it but I wasn’t about to go out to stop him. One man has his bag and another man has his own. Jack was into his now, and there must have been some good things in it for him, whatever they were.
He came in later with three loads of wood. The cabin was warm from the stove then and he was sweating in his beard and on his forehead.
“We might as well stay the winter,” I told him. “We’ve got enough wood now, anyway.”
He dumped the last armload on the pile next to the big fireplace and turned around and looked at me.
“We could stay the winter,” I said again, nodding to the big pile of wood behind him on the cement part of the fireplace. I was trying to find a way to make him smile or talk, at least, because the quiet bothered me. “We could, with all that.”
“Maybe we will,” he said.
“We could bring up Ellen and Katie, or maybe big Susan Slussman. She likes to cook. You could chop wood all winter and Susan could cook while Ellen and I made out all the time.”
“That’s all you think about, making out, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about footnotes or somebody else’s ideas all the time. You wouldn’t even have to worry about what to do next or feel guilty about dropping out of school. You could just chop wood all the time.”
“That would be real good,” said Jack.
“Of course we couldn’t get grass or acid this far out in the sticks. The best we could hope for would be airplane glue or extract. But whatever we got, this would be one hell of a good place to trip.”
“I think I’ll put acid down anyway,” he said. “I’m through with tripping.”
“Man,” I said, “you can’t mean that. How would you live?”
“I’ll cut wood.”
“I was only putting you on with that bit,” I said. “This is an O.K. scene for a night or so, but it’s weird if you really get into it.”
“I still like it,” Jack said.
“Well, don’t forget, we’re pulling out tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah,” he said. Then he got down in front of the fireplace and began to light the smallest sticks for the fire. I watched him. And he didn’t even try to use the lighter fluid we brought. He just kept trying to do this Davy Crockett bit with a box of wooden matches. They didn’t work but he kept striking them and watching them burn out before the wood caught. It was really frustrating watching him. But I knew he was just waiting for me to suggest the fluid so he could start some shit. I just watched him. We didn’t even need the fireplace now but he kept on with this frontier jazz. I knew then that it was time for me to pack my things when we got back to the place.
IV
WE WERE JUST LAYING AROUND the fire after we had eaten the beans and I got to feeling kind of concerned about Jack again. I got to thinking about the last few months before the summer and how he had started to all at once cut people off, about how he cut off Katie.
He had had a good thing going with her. Katie was a real slave. She did all of those spade things for him like cooking, washing his things, keeping the loft clean, even sewing his sandals. A real slave. And she was nice to him in the sack too. From the sound of them, she must have been much better than Ellen. Sometimes at night, when she was sleeping over in Jack’s room, there were lots of good things to hear. They really had a good time and, I admit, sometimes, listening to them go, I got a little jealous of Jack. And many times, in my bed in the next room, I caught myself thinking about how nice it would be to try Katie for a change, just to see if Ellen measured up to her. But I never got a chance because Jack fucked it up for both of us with another of his weird ideas.
He wouldn’t let Katie use the pill. He made a big thing about wanting everything to be natural and uncomplicated. He said he wanted her to be original. Of course Katie didn’t go for it, and neither did Ellen, and neither did any of us. But Jack said it was his show because she was his piece and he was going to run it his way. The natural way. Then Katie took to staying away at her time every month. And that really pissed Jack off. It was like he wanted her to get pregnant, just to see if he could do it. He must have thought he was a real cool head, really hip, because all of us knew that he wouldn’t marry her if she did get pregnant. Katie knew it too, and even though she really dug Jack, she told him that she was going to put him down if he didn’t come off the God bit. But Jack wouldn’t cool it, and pretty soon we got the word that Katie was sleeping around with some spade cat she had picked up. That really got to Jack. And that was when he took to laying around and thinking, and that was when he finally put school down.
Now, looking at him spread out by the fire and looking up at the big, dusty moose head over the fireplace, it kind of came to me just what it was that was eating him and why he wanted to get me way out in the sticks, alone with him.
“Hey, Jack?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me something honestly.”
“What?”
“You turning queer?”
“What?”
I had to swallow hard and brace myself before I could say it again. I expected him to jump on me. “Do you think you’re going into a gay period?”
He didn’t answer.
“I want you to know, it’s nothing to me if you are. Everybody’s gotta live.”
“Suppose I am?” he said. He was still eyeing that moose head.
“I just wanted to know, that’s all.”
“Well, maybe,” he said.
I propped my head up on my arm and looked into the fire. “What’s it like?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t feel anything. I don’t want anything. I just feel like nothing all the time.”
“That’s normal,” I said. “When was the last time you tripped?”
“Acid?”
“Yeah.”
“Last spring, I guess.”
“Why don’t you get some from Solly when we get back and go again? That’s probably all you need.”
“That’s not it,” said Jack. “It won’t be any good. I just feel useless.” He stopped talking and thought for a while. I could tell he was thinking because his eyes were moving from the fire up the moose head and the firelight was flashing in them. “Maybe you’re right,” he finally went on. “Maybe that’s the start of a gay period.”
“Katie’s worried about you, you know that?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Everybody’s worried about you,” I said. “If you keep acting this way the word’ll get out that you are gay.”
“So what if I am?”
“So nothing,” I told him. “It makes no difference to me. I just want you to know how I feel about it.”
Now Jack began to smile, and his teeth and his beard and the shadows from the fire and the moose head made him look really wicked.
“How do you feel about it, Joe?”
“I’m not gay. That’s how I feel about it.”
Now Jack laughed aloud. And he looked directly at me in the firelight and scared me, he looked so wicked. “You’re not missing much,” he said.
I got up and went over to the cot against the wall. It was the only one in the cabin but it was big enough for two. Jack was still laying at the fireplace looking at me and smiling. It was really weird.
“You want to sleep by the fire or you want to take the cot?” I asked him.
“Is it big enough for both of us?”
“No. Take your choice.”
Jack smiled again in the firelight. He took a long time smiling and then he looked up at the moose head. “I’ll stay here,” he said.
And he slept there all night because I laid awake in the cot all night and watched him.
V
I DROVE STRAIGHT THROUGH all the way back to the city. Jack just sat on the seat most of the way back and said nothing. Once we stopped for gas at a station with a little restaurant on the side and I was really hungry but I didn’t get out because I was afraid that Jack might take the car and leave me there. You don’t know how to handle a queer all the time, especially if you’re not used to knowing he’s a queer. I have nothing against fags, mind you, some of the best men in the country are fags, but nobody wants to drive across country with one who, just the day before, was straight. At least in your mind he was. I didn’t want to be mean to Jack; I understood him now. I just wanted to get back to the place so we could decide which one of us was going to move out. I was scared to mention it in the car, and I figured that our loft was the best spot.
But when we got into the city, Jack wanted to get out downtown instead of going all the way in with me.
“I’ll come in after a while,” he told me when I let him out. “I want to do some things first.”
“Sure,” I said. “Come on in when you want.”
“And I’ll have a surprise for you tonight when I come in.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
Jack looked hurt. He stood outside the car and put his hand on the door next to me. “Look, Joe,” he said. “Back there, last night, I thought about it and I figure I was only kidding about being gay.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You don’t think I’m really gay, do you, Joe?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I honestly don’t know what happened to you.”
“I don’t know either,” said Jack. “But I know I’m not gay.”
“So you’re not gay,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”
“I’m not!” he said again. But I was already driving away.
Ellen was at the loft waiting for me when I got there. She was still pissed off about the plant and about how I had gone off without telling her. Then she was hot about Jack and how he had made fun of the plant. And the place was filthy with beer bottles and cigarette ashes and socks and dirt all over, and she was hot about that too.
“Don’t worry about Jack,” I told her. “He’s leaving before next weekend or else I’m leaving.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “We just can’t make it together any more.”
“I could’ve told you that three months ago when he put Kay down. He’s turning into a real nut.”
“That’s not all,” I said. “He’s turning into something else too.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said. “He’s leaving anyway.” Then I pulled her down on my lap and we fooled around some before we hit the sack. Being with her again was really good after a night in the woods with Jack. But I was sleepy and I could tell that I wasn’t too good for her then. Ellen is a tolerant girl, though. And, I guess, a lot more understanding than Katie. She knew there would be better times coming; so afterwards she let me sleep without asking me more about where I’d been or what had happened between Jack and me. I dreamed about her too while I was sleeping. And I dreamed about Jack. I dreamed that I was back to feeling sorry for him again and I was back in the cabin and letting him get in the bunk with me because he kept telling me that it was cold on the floor because the fire had gone out and the moose head was about to fall down on him. He was still getting in the bed and talking about how cold it was on the floor and how glad he was that he didn’t have to sleep there when I woke up and he was still talking, but in a different voice now. I heard him saying: “Bitch! Bitch!” and it wasn’t part of the dream.
I jumped out of bed and ran into the living room. Jack and Ellen were standing there screaming at each other. Jack kept calling her a bitch and Ellen was almost crying but still managing to call him a few choice things too.
When Jack saw me he pointed his finger at Ellen and said: “Look what she’s done. Look what she did to the place!”
I looked. Ellen had given it a really good cleaning. She had thrown out all the old beer cans and bottles and cleaned out the ashtrays and swept the floor. She had even washed the windowsills. And from where I stood in the living room I could see that she had done the same good job in the kitchen. That’s all she had done; but Jack was standing there like a crazy man pointing his finger at her and cursing.
“She just cleaned up,” I told him. “What’s wrong with that?”
Jack stopped cursing and just stood in the middle of the clean room and glared at both of us. Ellen had been crying hard. Some of that long brown hair of hers was stuck to her face where it was wet.
“I just thought that since this pig was leaving soon I’d just clean up some and get the smell out of here.”
“You don’t even live here,” said Jack. “You just come here to get laid. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“Now shut the fuck up!” I told him. I started to move toward him and he grabbed one of the wooden chairs from the table and lifted it high in the air. Ellen screamed and when he looked over at her I rushed him and tripped him to the floor. I had to hit him once or twice, and I really didn’t want to. But he kept trying to get up and I couldn’t take a chance on letting him. You can’t give a queer the same breaks you’d give a real man, no matter how sorry you feel for him. Finally I managed to pin him to the floor by lying on top of him and pushing both his arms down with both of mine. Ellen got the chair away from us.
“Now, what’s your trouble?” I said to him. I was breathing hard and I was ready to let him have it again if he started some more shit.
Jack went all limp under me, like a girl would after that last big moment, and I felt really uneasy lying on top of him that way. I got off and let him get up. But he only got up as far as his knees.
“What’s got into you?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” he said.
“If you wanted to raise hell couldn’t you find some better excuse than her cleaning up the place?”
Jack just stayed there on his knees. I was beginning to feel bad again, about the whole thing. Ellen was sitting on the chair, still crying.
“Look at the place,” I told him. “Look around. See how clean it is. It looks better than it’s looked in months. Is that something to bitch about?”
“I wanted to do it,” Jack said. “I wanted to clean up the loft.”
“Whatever the hell for?”
Jack did not answer.
“You’ve never wanted to do it before.”
“I wanted to do it,” Jack said again.
“You always kept it pretty filthy before,” said Ellen from the chair. “You never even bothered to pick up your underwear before.”
“I wanted to do it,” he said.
Then I knew that I had had it with Jack. We had reached the final point and it was really clear in my mind now that he was hopelessly gay and would be dangerous to have around the place any longer.
“Jack,” I said. “This is it, man. Either you walk out with your stuff now or I’ll throw you out and shovel your stuff out the window.”
“Like the plant,” Ellen said from the chair.
“Shut up!” I told her.
I turned back to Jack, still on his knees, on the floor. “This is it, man. We can talk about the lease later. You won’t have to pay anything, just get out now!”
I was really testing him then, because any straight fellow would raise hell about being put out of his own apartment, especially when his old man had already paid for it a whole year in advance. Only a real fairy wouldn’t put up a fight. This was Jack’s last test. And what did he do? He just looked at me, not wicked like he did in front of the fireplace the night before, but sad and like he was about to cry, just like one of those pet dogs. Then he got to his feet and walked to the door. Ellen and I watched him. Just before he went out the door he looked at me with that same hurt-dog look and said: “I’m not gay, Joe.”
I didn’t say anything.
He didn’t come back for his stuff until that next week. I don’t know where he went when he left. He didn’t get any calls while he was away, either; he had lost all his friends in our crowd a long time before that. And when the word got around about the scene he had made he didn’t have anything left. Even Katie, when she heard, put down the little feeling she still had for him. So there wasn’t much I could say to him when he did come back for his stuff.
Ellen moved in with me after that. We really didn’t need two bedrooms, but what the hell. She’s a better roommate than Jack. She does all the cooking and she keeps the place really clean all the time. I think it’s much better to live with a girl all the time than to live with another guy and only get to see a girl once a day, at night, or something like that. It kind of spoils a man. It makes him brood around and think too much. Thinking too much can be a bad scene. I guess that’s what happened to Jack. His mind must have beat him out of the straight life.
It won’t ever beat me, though. Ellen and I make it at least twice every night and sometimes some more, depending on how the day went. I don’t have to feel sorry for anyone any more, and that helps a lot. It makes me more a man. But sometimes I wonder about Jack, about how he was trying to show me that he was making a comeback to the straight life. And sometimes I wonder what the hell it was in his mind that made him think that cleaning up the loft was a straight thing to do. I wonder how the hell that would have helped him. I wonder, and I still think it was pretty weird.