On a night when I had managed a
cheap outing with Anne-Marie Walders to the Art Center
for Renoir's Golden Coach a bunch of us ended up in the
semi-circle of a large booth behind a littered table facing
the east end of Hooligan's bar -- where she chided me about
some perceived gloominess -- in truth it was over this cute
German immigrant herself who had recently arrived with her
family to the West Side of Milwaukee to commute, as most
students did, to the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She had let it be known -- was
actually adamant -- that she was a virgin and intended to
remain so, and furthermore wasn't especially romantically
interested in anyone, which, of course, included myself.
In the '60s, even the early '60s, by
which time Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl was
giving women permission to have sex, this struck an unusual
chord and made even more poignant my hopeless fascination
with her enchanting European peasant face: all soft planes
and pouty lips,
and a swirled mop of brownish hair, tendrils escaping
erratically -- set off by exceptionally even and white front
teeth in frequent smiles -- as I sat rather glumly.
"Just stop and
look . . . " she attempted to jolly me along.
". . . All the shapes and colors." Sweeping a hand at the
massed bottles on shelves behind the bar. They sold package goods, after
all, being known as what is called a Super Bar, so of course
they extended rank upon rank of all sorts -- though the
aesthetics that apparently fascinated her did nothing for
me. "It's all beauty, in it's own way." "Yeah, right."
Noticing that much of the glass needed dusting, wondering
how anyone could imagine any display of inanimate objects
could compete with the need for a naked body -- her naked
body -- to revel in. I knew it didn't help that she
was still a practicing Catholic. Meanwhile, the juke box rocked on,
inane -- at least to college students out of high school and
preferring Miles Davis and Brubeck -- early
Beatles
stuff, and the TVs above both ends of the long bar silently
delivered an old movie -- though those of the engaged group
at the table who had glanced up at the right time got a
laugh when it began with a car pulling up on a country road
in front of a mansion and a title announced:
Trouble
began . . .
I felt she had to be for me
-- even though I knew it was hopeless -- when she even made
a multi-lingual pun that played off my khaki army jacket,
worn often with shades as a quick indication of my usual
somewhat beatnik persona. And of course, bought at
Goldfish army surplus Downtown, it didn't cost much.
Shifting with her fingers some of the few coins that
remained with the couple dollars I had in front of me on the
shiny black table, avoiding the beer puddle and empty peanut
bags:
"Well,
Donald -- Don -- I guess you're just an army
boy." Alluding at the same time to my joylessness
and relative poverty, because arme
of course was German for poor. "Ah, a
triple-level pun," I acknowledged, getting back one of
those quick smiles.
Nice red lips, echoing even the red-trimmed seams of the filmy
white blouse, transparent enough to show shifting outlines of a
white bra underneath. Even the modest size of the tits
made me feel I would be somehow protective of them -- cupping
them like plump little birds -- if I had the chance, sappy as it
was. But as I later found when I finally had
someone to live with and fuck at will, that
someone --
eventually to become my wife, Jenny -- worked at the same
time with Anne-Marie at the lunch counter in
Riegelman's
drugstore on Downer Avenue and reported, with some smugness,
that the woman I had idealized to myself as the displaced
waif of the Black Forest had found me
boorish. Of course, I
had thought I just had a romantic beatnik layer over a
proletarian outlook.
Even though I didn't hang around
much at the coffee houses like the
Avant Garde
and hungry i that were
sprouting up all over -- I had been too fond of beer
drinking and bars for too long already. Still, as a bone fide
English major
I assumed people would see in my identification with the
working class -- no matter that I grew up in the
working-class North Side of modest homes and rented flats
and tidy alleys with garages and ashboxes, near the factories that supported so many,
including American Can Co. where I worked summers for years
-- that I had transcended my origins for a more
literary appreciation of the lower classes.
Apparently not, though that didn't really explain why I had to
keep returning to the old neighborhood for the connections it
held -- my buddies and the quaintly named Lorri LaRue, equally
virginal, though she would be accommodating with the occasional
handjob if it suited her. And its familiar taverns. "That isn't considered a
masterpiece or anything, is it?" Anne-Marie was
asking, about the Renoir.
"Well,
yeah,"
I said, somewhat offended that she thought I would waste her
time -- and a chance to impress her with my sophistication
-- at an early stage, so I hoped, of our relationship, with
less than a classic. Of course, being shown at the
Art
Center was a validation I had relied on. Especially
with sub-titles. Still, I gathered she had
considered it pretty much the way I did -- romanticized
fluff, a jumble of bright color and spectacle, dominated by
Anna Magnani's blowsy overacting. Though the
improbable tale of an 18th Century Italian acting troupe in
colonial Peru had its charm, and
Magnani in her pursuit by
three suitors at least exuded an appreciation of an adult's
need for an erotic life -- an earthiness that probably
contributed to Anne-Marie's distaste -- I wasn't drawn in by
the stated philosophical --
metaphysical -- concern with
role-playing on the stage that was the world, as Shakespeare
would have it. It was the proletariat's lot that
concerned me, and there was certainly a wave of contrasting
naturalism in art -- novels and their subsequent films,
especially -- that absorbed me. From the early
'60s with Sillitoe's
The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner and
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
in books and movies, to Adrian Mitchell's jazzy
If You
See Me comin' brought back for me from
London as a gift from the Garsons. I suppose it started in 1959 -- the year I entered college -- with
Laurence Harvey in Room At
the Top. I could only vaguely picture myself then
with either a rich industrialist's classy daughter or a smoldering
Simone Signoret, sure that I would be paralyzed and inept,
but I could hope that UWM would lead me in that
direction. And Harvey was for the most part -- except
when getting beat up or embarrassing himself with his
betters as part of his social climbing -- so cool that I
worked at brushing my brownish hair to look like his. Without
much success, just as I couldn't seem to find
Milwaukee's
slatternly shop girls just out for a good time, the type who
populated the Brits' kitchen-sink dramas, even up to the
time of Ken Loach's
Poor Cow as late as 1967.
(But by then, with our home-grown hippie chicks -- and I had
passed through the beatnik phase myself -- and the sexual
revolution, it wasn't important. After getting
divorced from Jenny, I entered a wide-open decade or so.)
That these were the kind of novels and stories that Bibiana and
Gregory Garson -- as teachers and friends -- loaded my willing
arms with while leading me to discover socialism just
accelerated my education in that direction outside the
classroom. I have to assume that, skeptical of religion
and authority as long as I could remember, I would have
gravitated to progressive causes anyway, but their example
certainly speeded up the process. So it was that
Mitchell's novel ended up on my growing shelf next to
Malamud's
The Assistant -- for alphabetical purposes
-- and I added more obscure works by
Paul Goodman, like
Nature
Heals and
Making Do
after he was brought here
for
a semester by Gregory, mostly on the strength of
Growing
Up Absurd, I figured. At least it was one the
education majors knew, unlike his early impenetrable novel,
The Empire City.
Though he called himself an
anarchist, while the Garsons allied themselves with
Detroit's Marxist-Humanists, his politics of community organizing, like
Saul Alinsky's, were
compatible with theirs, and because they admired him I was
glad to have the chance to drive him around in my
old Volkswagen, one of several beaters
I bought cheaply during my college years.
Even if he ignored me when the blatant bisexuals in
our group were around.
Of course, I
had thrilled to the discovery of Studs Lonigan and then
James T. Farrell's Danny O'Neill pentalogy at the Downtown
library even in high school, but they and even more
of Chicago
in the works of Nelson Algren and
Willard Motley,
though published later, had a dated, 1930s quality. Milwaukee
after the war, in spite of -- or because of -- the pervasive
factory culture had a more affluent everyday life,
though even such films as The Moon Is Blue had been
censored by the
Motion Picture Commission and I had to
explore foreign cinema like Brigitte Bardot's latest for
glimpses of nippled nudity at the Times Cinema on the
West Side. Socialism -- despite us
having the country's last important socialist mayor,
Frank Zeidler -- was equally exotic. He was
popular -- though increasingly irrelevant as a leader
of a waning movement, even among the laboring classes -- but
when relatives and neighbors discussed politics at all, it
was with a Democratic, unionized bent. Even though
Milwaukee elected Socialist mayors beginning in 1910 with
Emil Seidel. The
manufactured rumors that
the scholarly Zeidler, possessed of more Germanic Lutheran
integrity than any official I ever knew of -- strictly a
user of public transportation who never learned to drive,
owner of a modest home in the inner city -- had scattered the southern states with billboards luring Negroes
to move north for jobs in the city didn't help his grip on
power or ability to pass it on, and he retired after 12
years, to be replaced by the contentious Democrat, Henry
Maier. Race-baiting tales that his (always-single) daughter married a black man
didn't help either. At least he had a
Municipal Building
and a Downtown public square named after
him, while the even more influential
Victor
Berger, the first Socialist elected to Congress, in 1910,
was treated shabbily when the only landmark named after him -- an elementary
school -- was renamed for Martin Luther King
Jr. As if they couldn't recognize
King by choosing a
school that didn't already honor a public figure.
So it wasn't a surprise, given our collective historical amnesia, that
Lorri scarcely knew what a socialist was, and had equally
little enthusiasm for anything but the most banal pop culture.
Something I was finally learning to question myself, what with
starting college and getting friendly with the Garsons. Lorri and I went to movies,
but I had to drag her to foreign films. "What's
wrong with Hollywood movies?" she asked. I
told her they were made for twelve-year-olds, such as the
vehicles for Rock Hudson and Doris Day
. . . not the grimness I equated with progressive art. So I appreciated that
Anne-Marie not only preferred art films, she believed she
was knowledgeable enough to appraise them. And discuss
them, the same as with her literary views. Lorri
wouldn't have ever read Helen Gurley Brown on her own -- I
gave her a copy -- and certainly never picked up anything as
demanding as the Betty Freidan or Simone de Beauvoir
tomes I had dutifully plowed through. The booths and bar stools
at Hooligan's that night
were full, and juke box music and voices contended. As
often happened, Aileen Kern was the only colored chick -- black wasn't considered polite then -- and
getting a lot of attention. Straight black hair in a
chin-length bob slashing across her face under a silken yellow headband, the gap-toothed smile and liquid
laugh. I thought of a stream burbling over pebbles. I hadn't gotten over my crush on her, but she
had avoided getting serious while letting me drive her
around -- she became the manager of an East Side
apartment building converted from an old mansion where I was
thinking of moving for the cheap rent and great parties -- and
occasionally going out for drinks together. All the more frustrating
because she had been fucking white boys, even my friends,
for a long time. First the preppy Allan Jensen
from Brookfield -- and she was generally bourgeois herself,
the daughter of a lawyer and small-time politician --
and then Matt Wilensky, a psych major who worked full time
at the Milwaukee Psychiatric Hospital where she did, in
Wauwatosa. I picked her up
there once following her afternoon shift, in my battered Olds
Rocket 88 convertible
that I had bought from an Eastsider and drinking buddy from the
can company where I worked many summers, Ray Malina. He was proud
himself of the classic pink '57 Chevy he was working on.
But I guess my drinking from the supply of canned beer stashed underneath the
front seat helped make up her mind that I was too crude for
her -- another one, just like Anne-Marie. And I
supposed that following ex-Milwaukeean jazz singer
Al Jarreau
-- one of her first boyfriends, she said -- set the standard
rather high, especially for her father's ideals. At least
for comportment. And he had been an outstanding basketball
player, too, while I was a skinny smoker, and no athlete. My only other real encounter
with a sexy Negro girl was back at North Division High, at
some sort of after-school dance where Brenda Hedrick --
intense and energetic with straightened black hair -- asked
me to dance. I was well aware of her before that -- any
attractive girl, white or not, would at least get my
sidelong scrutiny, and she had a habit of reaching behind
her at her desk next to mine and tugging down on her bra
strap, jiggling bounteous breasts under her tight sweater, though she
was otherwise sort of thin. A lot more palatable
than the Jewish girl at Washington High School, from where I
had transferred, who had liked to scratch her scalp and
collect the scales of dandruff -- what didn't rain down on my
desk behind hers -- under her nails, to flick away. But though Brenda was,
if not especially light-skinned, pretty and focused enough on me the
way she often was in homeroom -- even when all we said was Hi
-- to make me freeze in panic as I felt whorls of energy
radiating from her groin that I couldn't deal with, and
fantasized her wiry arms clutching me. My imagination, I suppose,
and I was drawn to rather full, vivid red lips and a wisp of a
scent of bergamot -- but I swiftly turned her down. It was
a slow dance, and I couldn't imagine holding her in my arms, her
brown face burning hot on my cheek. And not just
her alone -- I
could sense just out of my vision masses of imagined white and black
folks staring, weighing me down with their scrutiny.
And
what would we talk about? Her family was big in the
funeral parlor business and populated a few pulpits as
preachers, but I hated funerals and preferred to sleep late
on Sundays, and didn't believe in religion
anyway. As I later told Bibiana -- recently moved here from
Detroit where she had been active in school integration, a
role she and her husband Gregory were getting into again
-- we hoods and greasers didn't mingle with the
colored students, though the school was about 50-50 at the
time, while the lower grades were almost all colored as the
neighborhood continued to change. Only the student-government types, too nerdy
for us to care much about their doings, seemed to have
interracial friendships -- and the jocks, too, though we
didn't pay much attention to them, either. Standing
around outside, smoking, was the extent of our
extra-curricular activity. (Only one, bowler
Wayne Zahn, son of a well-known pro who
turned pro himself, ate with us at our table or outside on the
steps in nice weather where we could scrutinize girls' bodies. He went far enough that I saw him introduced
from the TV audience on the Ed Sullivan show.) But if any of them had
their integrated romances, we didn't know about it, and
certainly no couples were flaunting anything in the halls. Maybe it
was odd -- Bibiana, for one, thought it was strange that
there wasn't more interaction and turmoil -- but it was a
way of keeping the peace that everyone seemed to absorb when
they walked in the door, and was never even a topic of
conversation. Still, there were
always a few white girls, it seemed, who fawned over the colored
athletes. It was an attraction my friend Marvin, who lived
close to the school, and I puzzled over. One time after we
had a sparring match in his basement with some puffy boxing gloves he had,
his sister Ethel -- old enough to go to bars and the inspiration
for our jokes about getting a job at a filling station
pumping ethyl -- heard us
wondering about the charm some of the colored guys seemed to
have.
"Oh, I know why," she said with a smug smile, on her way out the door
all made up.
But she
refused to elaborate. So I didn't put my
awkward box step -- taught to me by my mother when I
started junior high school and going to the Friday night dances
at the Auer Avenue School rec center -- to use guiding her
around in our socks on the gym floor, home court of North
Division's mighty Blue Devils, or Black Devils, as the state
powerhouse of 1957 and 1958, showcasing Howard Fuller, was known. At least to the
loose, exuberant colored kids at school rallies, though the
whites kept such terminology to themselves. Notably for the
unpretentious school -- though Golda Meier had
been a 1915 graduate --
Fuller
went on to fight with Frelimo in
Mozambique and
become superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools, among other
accomplishments. But by then he had
gone from being called a Marxist activist when he founded a
black freedom university in North Carolina to being labeled
a tool of conservatives who lobbied for private schooling
vouchers. As a typical
semi-delinquent myself, I doubt if we ever spoke unless when
passing in the halls.
But by the time I tried to date Aileen, who had mostly white
friends anyway, I was ready for what we called a spade chick,
but she treated me as a pal while stoking my eagerness even more
with indiscrete talk about her sex life, as you would with a
good friend. The hard-working and pale blond Matt,
wispy hairline already
retreating -- hipped
about jazz, picking up early on trombonist and arranger Don Sebesky, who was
Polish like himself -- and my first contact with weed, wouldn't have been happy that she let it slip that she had
to put up with his small dick and impotence too, until, as she said,
I
finally got him straightened out. And suburban kid
Allan, though he talked himself about having a small dick
and worrying about getting it up and then -- I'm all of a
sudden thinking I'm in and doing it, I'm fucking again, and
Bam!, it's all over -- the premature ejaculation,
didn't know that Aileen was irritated by all that too, as
she confided to me, if nobody else. But I was too
tough for her, and not the way we described musicians as
being tough. But my fascination -- heightened
by the thought of my buddies scoring with her with ease,
problems or not, while I still hadn't gotten laid at all, by
anyone -- accounted for my sensitivity to her laughing at the
next table and telling stories about work at the psychiatric
hospital. Even with Anne-Marie right in front of me,
glowing and chattering. Neurotic rich people and their
phobias and compulsions, fortunately nothing as gross as Matt
talking about the uncommunicative recluse with impacted bowels
and having to assist in digging shit out of his ass with a
spoon. But I had come far from
my high school days when I weighed 125 pounds, skinny and
coughing from chronic bronchitis -- spiking to 136 only when
the doctor told me to stop smoking -- by lifting weights and
gaining 50 pounds. I was enjoying my new muscle too
much, actually able to work summers in a can factory and heave
pallets around, to try to be smooth. Being rough and
stomping around in my army jacket, especially in the old
neighborhood, with nobody trying to beat me up any more, was
more satisfying. Especially in warm weather when I
could drag myself out of bed to slather myself in baby oil,
sometimes mixed with iodine,
and lie sleepily in the sun in the back yard before
going to work, wearing short-sleeved shirts with rolled-up
sleeves to the bars after second shift. What with not
smoking, I was tanned and fit as hell, with other college
guys to drink with for the summer and shoot bumper pool and
still get enough sleep. Then after I had moved from
my parents' house -- mother and stepfather -- to Aileen's
building in 1964, it was time for the Fourth of July and a reason
to toss some contraband firecrackers down the still-ornate,
carpeted stairwell, celebrating my move.
The pungent smell of gunpowder, oddly pleasing, hung in the air, and I was ready for my
last few semesters at UWM.
I lusted after her even more then, and was well aware of her
a booth away, squeezed in with Gregory Garson after one of his
night classes and a couple of guys I knew -- in fact, most of us
were in both a philosophy and a Literary Criticism class.
Ann-Marie was lovely, but Aileen fucked, and I couldn't help
looking at her now and then. One time I had been waiting
for her in her manager's apartment on the first floor, while she
did some ironing in her slip before putting on her makeup in a
hurry so she could get a ride to work. "I don't have any natural beauty," she remarked, as her
heavily-darkened eyes and thick, black lashes emerged, though
her lips were left just about untouched. I always figured
that was a ploy to look less Negroid, and the large, slightly
gapped front teeth drew enough attention, but it was true,
though I hadn't really noticed. Her nose was more bulbous
than flat -- maybe a legacy of some Arabic slave trader? --
but the clinging peach slip and smooth brown skin made an
unsettling package, and she was as sensuous as ever.
I had only seen naked photos of her, taken by an
older
proto-hipster,
Bob Watt, who was recognized as a painter and
sculptor, but who had to pay $20 an hour to get models to
pose nude for his own collection of pictures, probably used
to beat off with. He showed them in a slick album he carried
around, apparently thinking he impressed us as a rakish
artist with a bevy of willing posers to call on, but we knew
the truth. Of
course, now she had on a white bra, and I could just see the outline
of her panties under the slip, and only barely discern dark brown nipples
like Hershey's Kisses and imagine a stubbly black patch I had only
found in photography magazine spreads of exotic dark models
at Sherman's Drugstore on Hopkins Street.
Playboy was years away from even showing pubic hair,
but I used to
spend chunks of time leafing through the magazines on the rack, which
Matt Sherman tolerated; in turn I bought an occasional Coke
or malt. I had started college, but was too young to go
to bars, so it was an urgent pastime I was inevitably
drawn to after a few hours at home studying and needing a
break and some walking for exercise. I might be
having dates on the weekends then with girls I had hung
around with on Center Street -- along with the other guys --
since high school, but they were a conformist clique,
mostly Catholic. They drove away any competition that might
put out -- the few that came around our old corner in the
'50s and early
'60s -- while dispensing at most handjobs and some bare
tit action if their boyfriends were exclusive and discrete
about it. Otherwise it was only necking, at parties and
the drive-in theaters. Sadly, that was my role even
after high school. But I had
another goal: I always walked past my Jenny's house,
though young as she was her parents had stopped us from
dating and she wasn't likely to be outside very much at night in
the quiet neighborhood. But she was a known
sleepwalker, sometimes making it to the sidewalk in her
nightgown and bare feet before being led back, and I thought
it would be intriguing to encounter her, awake or not. But I never
did. So Aileen's ass looked
especially nice, rounded with its
hint of a dark furrow
where the clingy slip rippled in the sunlight from the rear windows
looking out towards the old coach house in back.
Cerise-colored curtains bowed in slightly in the warm
breeze. I offered that some
people couldn't look attractive no matter what they did. "Hmmm, I guess so," she decided with a shrug.
"But could you honestly love this? I mean forever, not
just for now?" Turning her head in profile, her brown face
in repose, not the usual half-smile, and I had to admit to
myself that
though the pear-sized tits were distracting she was quite plain
underneath after all. "Well . .
." But, barely into my twenties, I knew I had
hardly started, that there should be women all over the
place and I wouldn't much resist any impulses for
years. And though I never caused pain to any blacks, I
hadn't spoken up when older guys on the playground would use
typical nigger terms in insulting each other or the
time when one of them ragged on a stray little
black kid as
an insect and ape until his tears ran down as he just froze there,
transfixed. So what could I say? "See! -- I
know you guys." Disappearing then into the
bedroom to slip on her white uniform. I wanted to
protest that she wasn't being fair. Who declared undying
love before even beginning a relationship? Not Matt or
Allan, I was sure. In Hooligan's
she
accepted the attention as naturally as always, the usual
drunken, fragmented student discussions that I could
sometimes make out in the general din continuing, covering
everything from The
Portable Heidegger to aesthetics. Jack Vogel from
Professor Bernard Fleischman's recondite
Comparative Literature class complained
that he could never remember the word synaesthesia,
though the condition sounded cool. Then Garson brought up
Milwaukee's de facto segregated school system,
subject of a lawsuit soon to be brought by the NAACP, which
the school board even perpetuated through a policy called
intact busing, in which black pupils transported to white
districts were still kept together, even in the
cafeteria. For necessary administrative purposes, of
course. Even in my case, when I
tried to transfer from almost all-white Washington to
North
Division,
an indifferent female office worker behind the desk told my
mother that it was against some policy or other, even though
North was a lot closer and I lived a block from
the 20th
Street border. I had to step up myself and complain
that it was too expensive to follow the dress code, since
they didn't allow blue jeans. True enough, though I
really just preferred my Levi's, but Milwaukee
certainly didn't seem to care about keeping the inner city
school integrated. I eventually got a guy in an inner office to
sympathize, or at least agree just to get rid of me. I
shouldn't have been surprised at the bureaucratic lethargy: No one ever suggested I plan on going to college, either,
though my grades turned out to be good enough to get me in
without taking any SATs. By that time several years
had gone by and a career in a factory -- I was etching
metallic adhesive labels with acid at the W.H. Brady Co. in
Glendale -- was becoming intolerable. With
Louis Armstrong
rasping out Hello, Dolly one more time -- the
Beatles
may have owned the charts but he was certainly holding on --
Aileen remarked several times rather blandly about her
friends the pink people, until Matt, still her
boyfriend, objected: "Do you have to call us
that? You've been reading too much Baldwin. And
we're not all pink." I expected that Matt --
who usually couldn't make it to our gatherings because of
work -- would be up on black literature, as he seemed to
make a point of being. But apparently not The Fire Next
Time, which had just come out, actually with a somewhat
conciliatory message for whites, though excoriating Christianity's
unmitigated arrogance and cruelty.
"Why,
don't you like Baldwin?" "I don't like what
he's doing to you." "Okay, Sweetie . .
. Pinkie." If her family once had any
southern accent, it was absent in her. She was as
Midwestern as any of us. I could hear Jack
Vogel's deep chuckle at that. It was hard to
miss: He had a low rumbling voice that carried, like
rolling logs. I
first really noticed him shortly after the start of the
school year when he followed on my heels with the two
Meissner brothers -- a philosophy and a business major -- into
Barney's tavern
Downtown for the usual free Friday night raw beef spread, mixed
with raw eggs and chopped onions, served on crusty Italian bread
instead of the more customary rye. After midnight, an
accommodation to the
Catholics, of course. ". . .
My dream is
to march down Division Street with the bums in
Chicago in my
combat boots," I heard him saying, surprising because
only the round glasses and short, curly hair had registered
and I took him for another North Shore wimp. Even
though I simultaneously knew that many of them played a lot of
sports and were quite sturdy. But I
realized, looking again -- especially after a barking
laugh -- that he was a lot more like me than I had
thought. And a lot tougher than the Meissners. I never did find out
what he had in mind, but I gathered that he felt formidable
enough to swagger amongst the local gangs and intimidate
aggressive panhandlers. But I had no reason to think
he was a racist -- obviously he fit in with the Hooligan's
bunch, including Aileen -- and I doubt if anybody else gave her
race much thought. I didn't know how much, if any,
discrimination she had ever encountered: The only twinge I
observed was when the four of us -- she and Matt and Allan and
myself -- went out for breakfast on a Sunday after bar closing
at 3:30 in the morning. As we filed
out of the old Belmont Hotel coffee shop on
Wells Street
into dawn coming up as orange and purple streaks piled higher like
crenellated edifices over Lake Michigan, a
middle-aged couple glanced up from their coffee cups and then at
each other. "Now that's
something I hate to see," said the woman. Not even
sotto voce. Who
knows what kind of licentiousness she thought was going on,
but there wasn't much that could be said, and we plowed on
out through the door. I suppose Allan and I were taking a
chance being there, since about a year earlier Stan Beckman
had calmly strolled in front of me out the door, ignoring our
bill, leaving me to assure the cashier, "I'll go get him," and
dashing out behind him. My green Olds
had been in the lot across the street and took that
opportunity -- as it often did -- not to start until I just
about ripped off the loose air cleaner and blocked the
intake with my hand to act as a choke while Stan twisted the
key. Gasoline odor reeking, it fired
and caught, as befitting a car, though junkable, that was still
capable of burying the needle at 120 mph on an occasional jaunt
with classmates to a back road, terrifying everybody with its
shuddering, hurtling body. What the restaurant staff did during our getaway
I'll never know, but we made it. Laughing even as we
halfway still expected to hear a siren behind us, but
didn't. Soon we left
Hooligan's, since Ann-Marie wasn't the type
to stay out until the end, especially with Mass at
St. Leo's Church in the morning, and I had only
Sid McCoy's
all-night jazz show on Chicago's WCFL to look forward to on
the way home. I knew she wasn't going
to let me kiss her goodnight, and she put both hands on my
right arm and thigh in a pre-emptive move and pecked my
cheek. Of course, I could feel her tits against my
arm, and I knew she did it on purpose -- women always knew
what they were doing in contact like that. But I was
starting to see Jenny again -- her parents had relented
since she was soon turning eighteen -- and I asked myself, why
bother any more? as she disappeared in the dimness
at the top of her porch steps. I watched until I was
sure she was inside. Bars were still open and I headed
back east, still on the North Side, to The Renegades for a
nightcap. By my reckoning
there were at least four sexes at
The Renegade, as the sign on
the outside said, or
The Renegades, as another one said
inside. Renegades was
preferred by Tony S.
(he said few persons bothered with his
almost-unpronounceable Polish last name). He seemed
to run the place, although actually he couldn't get a
license and his friend fronted for him. Mostly a dyke
bar, though there were guys who liked sissies and guys who
liked them butch -- the same with the dykes -- and some who
just liked to watch the goings-on. It was all new to me, springing up
there in my old neighborhood, the name alone enough to get
me to stop in out of curiosity. Being polite I always
said gay instead of queer, and didn't try to
pick up the girls. That was appreciated; I even
ignored one who rubbed her front against me at the
jukebox and played tunes on my coins: "What do you
like?" "Jazz, none of
your goddamn hillbilly stuff," I answered. And
there was some Cannonball Adderley, but I also found
and punched some rare -- at least in white Milwaukee bars,
though Top 40 Radio was pretty eclectic -- Slim Harpo and
Jimmy Reed. There was some jazz and
rock, but mostly hillbilly, and the dykes would sit at a
table for hours and sing
Blackboard Of My
Heart
and other country standards, for some
reason. Left alone, they had a hell of a good time,
happy-gay, and could drink every night of the week, it
seemed. There was much ribald laughter and joking,
especially at certain lyrics that could take on a double
meaning, anything with the word queer or gay,
of course. The boys had their own favorite,
Frankie and
Johnny. So
finally
after I first noticed the place, sharing an intersection with a
gas station on the slashing diagonal of
Hopkins Street, with its traditional corner taps bracketing the grocery stores,
dry cleaners, barber shops, jeweler, the Zenith Theater,
radio repair specialists, beauticians, Koepsell's
and Rexall drugstores -- mostly with
apartments on the upper floors of the brick buildings abutting
the sidewalks -- and
one sharply triangular corner credit union, I stopped in after driving Jen to work at
Kohl's supermarket bakery on Hampton Avenue
after
school. She was about to graduate, and since her parents decided she didn't
have to wait until she was eighteen to see me, I could at least
pick her up after school -- they knew
my family, after all, from St. John's Methodist Church,
and she had been my little sister's babysitter for years.
She had started that when she was 14, as I often got too busy
with night classes or working to help out myself by watching
Annie. That led to me running into her -- really first
noticing her growing tits and cuteness -- when I would get
home before my mother. Word about the fairies and lesbians had gotten
out around the
neighborhood, and I picked her up at Washington High across the
street from the cascade of broad concrete steps in the afternoon
under a canopy of leafy elm trees doomed by the newly-encroaching
Dutch Elm Disease. We cruised with the top down until I dropped
her off, then checked out the bar before trying to get some sleep . Half dying, I
felt, with a cold in the middle of a fall hot spell, face
red and pale at the same time, overshaven for Jen to the point of
pain if I smiled and riding in sun with the top down,
squinting even in shades. Feel of oil and sweat and
slight burn on face -- but with this young chick beside me and
the radio playing.
Telstar by the
Tornados was
one of my favorites to blast in the open convertible when I
could, and the Chantays'
Pipeline. But I was coughing intermittently, even though I carried Kools as well as Luckies
and alternated between them, back to smoking again -- something I
could share with Jenny -- but feeling an awkwardness between
us after almost four years, until I left her at the bakery
department, wondering if I could get back to where we were
when she would sneak away the first summer she could manage it to see
me
and I would feed her sloe gin and sweet on ice. It
tasted like cherry soda to her, and she always asked for
more, leading to some rolling around on floors, where I
could glimpse pink nipples under a suspiciously loose
bra. I knew I could get my hand in it, and so did she. But though she was proud of her new equipment up
to a point, she was skittish since I always tried to get
her drunk -- usually at Ray Malina's house when his parents
were out -- and she was wary also of her parents. Then there
came a girlish goodbye letter from church camp, signed

telling me her parents had drawn the
line at us dating. Giving her a few years
to grow up, they thought, but also maybe get involved
with someone else her own age. Which, I found out later, she did: getting fucked
on the carpet for her first time at sixteen by a high school
boyfriend named Ron who surprised her with the gift of a sweater
for her birthday. They were alone at his house and
she was so pleased, she
said, she went at it without giving it a thought after she let him
slip off her panties for her usual fingering. No
rubber, of course, and I thought jealously that at least I would
have been more responsible. If only her parents could have
figured that out. I could see
her white uniform and the paper cap perched on her helmet of
coal black hair -- dark jetties escaping around her ears
-- through the plate glass window as I drove away,
needing a drink. Her dark complexion may have been due to
some Indian blood, it was said, from her father who was from
New England.
I wanted time to contemplate our new possibilities, though I
couldn't stop coughing with my cold and discomfort and usually
didn't drink in the old neighborhood except nights after class
when I would make a last stop at the bar closest to my parents'
home. It
should be interesting; I knew the citizens were outraged by
the queer bar, one of the few in the city my friends even knew
about -- one other being the Mint Bar
on State Street, but
that was Downtown and mostly male. But neighborhood
bar-goers would
still get drunk and show up sometimes late at night, even
old guys with beer bellies, to gape at the pool-shooting
girls with their masculine haircuts and vests, cursing as
they lined up their bank shots. My step-father, who
sometimes tended bar at the Hop Inn down the street asked me
if I knew that one was a cop's wife, or so he had been told.
Stopping not for the first time, then, but the first time
for me to be noticed, I had peppermint schnapps and water back,
peppermint schnapps and water, and so forth -- schnapps
being simply the German word for shot, but reserved locally for
flavors like Rumplemintz -- for the
coughing, and then some beers, to get to sleep before third
shift that night. Even if I would miss the supper my
mother had cooked. "Hey, there --
Up
jumped the Devil." A greeting coming at me from this
side of the bar. At least I thought it was a greeting. So I met that day not
only Conrad the partner and early day bartender -- known
as Connie the Bitch to Tony -- but Tony himself, the money
behind the place. Surprisingly tall, and goggle-eyed
behind thick glasses, not only a limp wrist but a limp and
jerkily-moving body, always pursing and twitching red, moist
lips. I found out he was usually there from four in
the afternoon, drinking plebeian
rum and Cokes and checking IDs, watching for trouble --
cops and vice squad harassed him, coming in often to look
around. Neighbors were complaining to the alderman, and
the new police chief, Harold A. Breier, was famous for his
stubbornness and intolerance of any sort of deviant. Tony
carried bottles of
his whiskey when he went to see the same alderman, but
Breier -- who was loved on the South Side because he didn't
assign Negro cops there to keep them from arresting whites
and was myopic about organized crime as represented by
Frank
Balistrieri
-- was also
considered incorruptible. Breier was
eventually even reported to have been keeping a file of pink
index cards of names of gay bar patrons based on license plate
numbers collected by cops on the neighborhood beats. Over time, they learned I was straight but not a
troublemaker and I started getting the regular prices instead of
those for tourists -- the numbers on the cash register didn't
show when rung up, covered as they were by a small placard -- paying
a dime for a tap beer instead of a quarter, or 50¢
instead of a buck for a bottle of Blatz, and so forth.
That afternoon I drank with the scratchiness in my throat being
soothed by the schnapps like liquid warm candy cane on my throat
and brisk clean tap beers, switching between them. Coughs eventually subsiding
while I listened to the arguments about further
improvements, Tony being a con man according to the Pabst
salesman he mocked, who pulled out taps every week to put in
a different brand when he couldn't get the right free signs
and decorations he wanted. Ended up furnishing the
place strikingly for a neighborhood bar, lots of mirrors,
and for almost nothing, though it became obvious he didn't
mind throwing money around on just about anything. Connie gave me a few
drinks on the house while continually filling Tony's glass
where he sat, next to me. Tony apparently likes my
silky, loose short-sleeved shirt that I tell him is from
Johnny Walker's on Wells Street when he checks out the
label. Connie may be getting jealous of one of us; at
least Tony says with an annoyed glance, "Whatsamatter Connie, I'm having a
drink with a customer, all right?" Eventually
Nancy
Wilson is singing while I morosely accept another drink and
think about Jenny, wondering just how much sex she's had since she pulled back,
figuring I had to see if she could stay out late enough so
that I could take her
out on a Friday night after second
shift, maybe to Beyond the Sea, an Italian restaurant on the
East Side. I know it serves late. I hope there
would be time enough to park and drink at the lake
front. In my grogginess the thought of her young cunt
floats like a vision, dark but not too bushy. Silky dark.
Maybe Indians were like Orientals I had seen in magazines.
Someday soon, I hope. A young guy comes down
from the upstairs apartment, thick arms in a T-shirt, blond hair, spooning
a cantaloupe into a pinched face. I take him for a
late-sleeping trick Tony had paid, but decide he's a friend
or lover. There's a conversation about him taking
Tony's new Lincoln to the stock car races at Cedarburg; Tony
says he wants to pick up some rough trade -- a term I
had learned from reading, maybe John Rechy's
City of
Night -- on the Avenue with Connie later. The
novel was passed on to me by A.J. -- for Austin John Brennan
-- another staff
member on our
UWM literary magazine
Cheshire,
who shared a flat with an openly bisexual student in the
theater department. They never copped to a sexual
relationship, but I think he speculated that I might have a personal
interest or that it might rub off on me, but I only knew
that I was just generally fascinated by bohemians and
hipsters, from Jack London to Jack Kerouac. But A.J. acted
straight enough, and everyone -- I don't know how he did it,
since I never heard him brag -- passed it around that he was
a good amateur boxer in high school and fast enough with his
hands to catch flies in mid-air, like Willie Stark in
All
the King's Men. But Mike Grumley,
his actor roommate -- also a fiction writer -- wasn't as
restrained. Though strapping enough for leading man
roles, with glossy, slicked-back, if thinning, black
hair, a somewhat small mouth and delicate movements
told a different story. And he was proud of hobnobbing
with wealthy, older homosexuals. Especially one he
called the most sophisticated man in Milwaukee,
adhesives heir Charles Brady. From the
Brady
family that gave me my introduction to adult work, washing
sheets of metal in pans of hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid,
inhaling fumes in a small, unventilated hutch in one corner of
the shop floor. Unfortunately,
at least to his sycophants, Brady died in a fire that swept his hi-rise
apartment on Prospect Avenue, though Grumley did have a
semester to console himself with Paul Goodman after the two
met in my Volkswagen
early in his lecturing semester here.
On top of
his other seemingly effortless achievements, Grumley was an
artist's model and painter, and Goodman gave a lecture on
Michelangelo and his painterly qualities, so I imagine they
had art to bond over too, though as Goodman always made
clear in the anecdotes he related of anonymous sex, lust was
enough. A great democratizing force between men, as he
wrote in
Five Years,
that covered the period immediately before his stint
at UWM. And he
liked to say, as I found out in listening to him talk about
his sex life and his writing, it pays to advertise. Reading
some of his stuff supplied by the Garsons, in anticipation of
his sojourn here, I realized that from my perspective he was
getting old, and I asked Bibi if he might now be over the
hill when it came to having sex, but she asserted that Jewish men
never stop fucking. Goodman had yet to find
his greatest fame as a social critic through his Playboy
articles, but his books and poems were substantial and left no
doubt about his bisexuality, though from the way he ignored
actual women I figured his wife and children were mostly for
show. Critical reviews of his work gave him a lot of
credit for having a true marriage, but it was my opinion, which
hadn't changed, that bisexuals really lean heavily one way or
the other and otherwise dabbled for the perceived status. He plunged into our campus
battles over censorship during his brief stay, and defended
a banned poem of mine in the college
paper, titled after one of his books:
COMMUNITY
OF SCHOLARS
we
often discussed sex and particular girls the
professor (my friend) and I Freud or not, is it
strange that I should have dreamed we stood
before a urinal oddly constructed that drained
by running on the floor between my feet
-- and he flicked drops of piss upon my face
suddenly, so that with a jab of my left I smashed
his humpbacked imperious nose without
thinking and as I choked with remorse he
complicated matters intolerably with his bitter
forgiveness
Of course, it drew on my erotic thoughts of
Bibi and the august Gregory, arising in an actual dream.
I suppose I thought I could pique Garson a little bit without
giving him any real impetus to jealousy. Goodman later
combined it with some other censorship cases in an article
for Liberation magazine. But the closest Grumley
came to hitting on me -- at least I thought he was -- was in
Barney's one crowded night when he peered up
from the booth bench at my face, saying, "You
have the smoothest forehead of anybody I know." A little flustered, I could only say
thanks -- though I didn't know if there was any truth to it
at all, and certainly never cared -- and from then on my
forehead became a minor theme whenever we ran into each
other.
But A.J., closet case
though I'm sure he was -- and the little group of his
friends on the magazine that ![UWM Mitchell Hall [Main Bldg.]](../GRAPHICS/Mitchell.JPG) all had their origin in their
childhood neighborhood in St. Francis on the far
South Side
seemed to want to ignore it -- succeeded in staying an
enigma. It was only the very first time I met him,
when the Cheshire office was still in the basement of
Mitchell Hall and he was there at the very start of the semester, just
to greet anybody who might wander in, that he seemed a little askew. After introductions we chatted
a little about my chances of writing for them -- rather
good, it seemed -- when he leaned back in his wooden chair
and dropped his hand to his crotch.
"It's boring down
here." Meaning, ostensibly, the basement marble corridor
which seen through the open door was indeed deserted. "I think
I'll masturbate."
He pretended he
was opening his zipper, then stopped. It was, of
course, a perfect come-on that could also be taken as just a guy
joke if it got the blank response I was showing.
Instead of I might as well join you? Or so I
figured out years later; at the time I was just
puzzled, and silent.
But I became part
of the intense but friendly bunch at the magazine, English majors
mostly, united by our obvious superiority to the crass
journalists on the UWM Post down the hall when
we moved across Downer Avenue to the converted apartments above
Riegelman's and Green's Bookstore.
Of course, there were a few of us who fell in
both camps, like the charmed aspiring poet Allan
Jensen, who -- hapless as he was at something
ordinary like spelling -- was elevated to
Post editorship, and the sleek
sorority queen Leslie Strobel, Allan's more
competent predecessor there who nevertheless also
dabbled in poetry while exuding a
fashionably-turned-out quality that brought back
my memories of a sensuous, perfumed Mrs.
Kalterjahn, Sunday school teacher and youth group
leader of my boyhood -- who once, to my shame,
caught me smoking on an outing --
and her nyloned legs. Certainly a grown
woman I hardly had the nerve to speak 
to, with a family, but mysterious yet friendly in
a black Sunday hat and sleight veil with her sexy
lipsticked mouth. Leslie seemed
unapproachable in the same way, perhaps
explaining why she seemed never to be dating and
even virginal -- I wanted to ask her about that
but it would have been awkward, since I barely
knew her. Occasionally I would
give her a ride at night to her home on
Marlborough Drive in the
northern suburb of Whitefish Bay,
once even as we swished cozily enclosed through a
misty rain while the radio sounded a muted
romantic suggestion of a darkened Italian
streetscape from a recent Antonioni movie at the
Downer. But I was diffident, and
she had always seemed elite, remote -- the moment
passed for me, and she was delivered untouched
and no doubt oblivious. Years later, after
they moved to New York -- together, though A.J. eventually
got engaged to a woman -- I was as saddened as anybody, though not
really shocked, when word got back that Grumley had died at
46 of AIDS.
 One of the first victims in the '80s that
we knew back here. By then he had stopped acting but
became a successful non-fiction writer who
had even promoted one book about
 finding artifacts
from Atlantis in the Caribbean on local TV. He had
dated some cute Theater Department actresses during his stay here with A.J. and
had published more -- including the novel, Life Drawing -- than I had, so it
took that kind of ending for me to stop envying him and his
friendship with Manhattan writers like
Edmund White,
Jean Genet's biographer, who wrote the foreword to his novel,
and the
![A Dying Grumley & Partner Ferro [Click to Enlarge]](../GRAPHICS/GrumFerTN.JPG) other six members of the important gay writers group, The Violet Quill.
Even if it was only a little bit of jealousy, and
I tried not to . . . My reverie ends
when the blond guy asks, "What time you
goin'?" I hear Tony call him Norman.
"Well
Baby, what time are them damn races over?" Tony wants to
know.
"About 11,"
Norman says with an unperturbed, level look. He's got
power over Tony.
"Well, that's all
right."
"And take it easy,
huh? They're watching that car, you know, they're
watching us."
"Who?"
"They're watching
all of us, you don't want to get picked up with no underage
tricks in the car."
Tony just smiles and bends and stretches his
body in the black knit shirt, elbows to the back,
"Oh Baby, I'm so horny today." Turning
back to me where I had been arranging my nickels
and dimes in precise patterns in front of me on
the smeared bar, fantasizing about Jenny and
wondering what really attracts me to this place. Physically I found the idea of sex
with a male repulsive, though I suppose I could admire naked
Greek statuary as much as anyone. Even an oiled-up
body builder in a magazine had an aesthetic appeal, and they
were an incentive for getting pumped up myself -- that's why
they posed there, after all, and the gays had their own
magazines -- but the closer I looked at a man with all the
stubble and pores and flab the queasier I felt at the alien
flesh. Hairy nostrils especially repelled me. Hard to comprehend that women could feel as
warm and searching to such slabs of grotesquery as men felt
for their softness and orifices. I figured
that's why I paid so much attention to my own grooming: I
liked to display muscle, but hated being unkempt and coarse like a lot
of guys were, thinking it should turn women off -- though my
concern
was also considered feminine itself by some guys, as I found out.
I didn't even much like a friendly arm around my shoulders,
a habit drunks too often had. But still the whole operation
and the patrons had a raffish charm. "Well, Donnie,
what are they saying about us on Hopkins Street?" "Hell, you
know." I shrug.
"Whoa -- Up
jumped the Devil. It's a queer bar, right?"
I didn't want to use precisely that description, but:
"Well sure, that's obvious, man. I don't think they like
you."
Noting he had used the
phrase again that seemed to be an all-purpose
interjection. Eventually I learned it was from a Robert Johnson tune, though I don't know whether he even
knew it:
Who's
that milling on the courthouse steps
Nailing my face to the hitching fence
Who's that milling on the courthouse steps
Up jumped the Devil and off he crept
Suddenly,
though, I feel my head drooping, the warning that I was
liable to wake up -- as I sometimes did when I wasn't
careful enough -- after falling asleep for a few hours
behind the wheel in the car parked right in front of my
house. It would happen and I sometimes couldn't make
it inside, but I always knew just when I had to get out
fast. I never really thought of it as passing out, since it
was bedtime anyway. So I made it to bed then with the
shades drawn against the sunlight, thrashing -- at least so
I thought -- in the old dream where it seemed I was having a
seizure and was falling to the floor, though I
would wake up in a sweat in the same supine
position.
After that,
The Renegades was a place I could go when it was convenient
to get closer to home with a little time left
for a jolt after driving across town and something was
usually still going on. Another late night -- at least
for her -- with Anne-Marie seemed right for that, since I
was far from the East Side and pissed off enough
to slam a few quick shots. Fuck her. It was off to the bar for
some shots and then to bed; fortunately I had no classes the
next day, though I would have to make it to my unimpressive but
necessary school-year job as a bus boy at the Cudworth Post
American Legion Hall. But hangovers never bothered me
much as long as I slept through the worst of it. And I
always tried to.
There was no late
-- early? -- breakfast for me at the Belmont,
though Tony as usual offered to buy. As a frugal
student, I usually saw no reason not to let him
try to impress me with all his cash. That may
have been the time I idly asked him just what he
did during sex. He thought for a moment, at
least about his phrasing, then said simply, "I
suck."
My turn to
ponder. "What does that do for you?"
Another pause, then, "It lets my eternal soul flow and
flow . . ." Rolling his eyes up and looking up at the
ceiling in pretend ecstasy.
But that was a rare real conversation, though
sometimes a few of them would just drink in the
back room after hours and bullshit and I would
join in, especially after Tony said I was afraid
he would rape me, though I doubted that with his
gawky body and spastic movements, tall though he
was, that he thought he could. But I could also put him off just by taking his
drinks and staying aloof. Once, even as I couldn't
help thinking of the girls that baffled me when they were as
unresponsive as I was being now, I just said, "Shit,
Tony, what are you talkin' about, you want to blow every
cute guy you meet. You don't even know me."
"Whoa -- Up
jumped the Devil . . . what do you expect from a
queer?"
How could I argue
with that?
*
*
*
At the
Cudworth Post the next night I cleared the tables arranged
in a large horseshoe, watching when I could the girl in
green at one end. Small and perfect features, smiling
placidly at the guy next to her who, to my eyes, looked like
a crew-cut lecher. I thought of a woodland bird -- I
had hunted bobwhite quail as a kid up north near my aunt and
uncle's cheese factory in the country -- when she chuckled,
nibbling at her prime rib. The high-necked dress had a
rich, brocaded front, covering her breasts but sleeveless,
leaving her arms exposed. White and fine -- firm, of
course, and I muttered to the other bus boy, not an original
thought but it leaped to mind: "Man, I'll have
her on rye."
It was an
office party, and as I handled food scraps presents were
passed out by a nondescript but jolly man in a gray
suit. Funny presents, they thought, like a bottle of
Nair, toilet paper with cute sayings, a shorty nightgown and
hot-water bottles. They were in on it -- apparently it
was a wedding event -- and they watched with
anticipation as the girl in green extracted her
gift from from the square box with shiny red
paper and ribbon: a long coarse and greasy
salami. She held it up to show around, smiling
shyly to the shrieks of the older women and some
guffaws from the men as I cleared butter and
relish dishes and pictured her white haunches and
tight little groove like a clamshell on edge as I
hiked her dress and bent her over the table.
When they all left --
some heading to the bar and more brandy old-fashioneds -- I
loved her even for her slightly awkward, tipsy balance on
small, black shoes walking away. "Hey," I
called to the high school kid, Andy, the other busboy who
was dumping ashtrays by her empty place, "Is there a
note there for me?"
He imitated a search
and held up some wrapping paper and said, "Is your name
Handsome? If it is . . ."
Later he wanted to
leave early so he could pick up his girlfriend. I felt
like saying no, irritated that he had a girlfriend while the
girl in green never knew I existed.
"Yeah, I guess
so." I knew he was in Young Americans for
Freedom, and YAF was a big supporter of Goldwater in the
coming election -- something we clashed over -- but he was
likeable enough and I didn't want to be a prick.
But as I turned away he
stopped me. "Let me ask you something -- those
college girls, when you take 'em out and like that, do they
expect you to put it to them?"
Anne-Marie came
instantly to mind, and my rejection. She was seeing some guy who often
picked her up at the drugstore whom she seemed to love to
serve until she could leave on his arm, clutching and
smiling.
You should be so lucky, I thought, before I admitted it
to myself: I hardly know. I couldn't really
afford actual first dates, the kind where you asked a
relative stranger out to a genuine event, like a concert, and if I didn't
necessarily think they all looked down on me because they
were from North Shore schools like Nicolet and
Shorewood
High, that didn't help, either. Besides, few even
attracted me, though we could talk about
everything from Brakhage to
Zelda Fitzgerald at
McClellan's restaurant on Downer
Avenue. So I only
saw Lorri -- who, with her lower-class proclivities, commanded
less and less of my attention despite the lure of
handjobs -- and then Jenny, both from the old neighborhood, and just
hung around with the Cheshire group and
aspiring reporters and philosophers and such who
liked to drink cheaply during the school year.
Jenny at least let me get my fingers in her pussy
in the car -- startling me the first time I landed
on her bare thigh slippery wet under her skirt
down to her knee -- and I could hope to guide her towards
college where we could be together. In the summer
season I had more cash, though I had to save for tuition and
paid room and board until I finally moved out, but I worked
nights anyway and had the same old buddies and chick friends
from the corner going back to the days of Pompey's Sweet
Shoppe and the Savoy
Theater on Center Street, next to the library.
Since we went to different schools and generally lived blocks
apart, I don't know how we all found each other, but that's
the way it was -- a popular playground or a busy intersection
with restaurants and drugstores and perhaps a theater could
draw a nucleus that perpetuated itself as a group for years.
"Well," I told Andy, "Sometimes. But not
really. Not at first, anyway." Hoping I didn't
blow the facade of sophisticated college man, but
figuring I was right. Still, knowing I
could have those dates if I really had a plan
filled me with diffidence, while the girl in
green had me seething at her unattainability. An
inversion of ambition I lived with, but I was
afraid it marked me for failure. Still, there was a year
or so to graduation and I might yet do something
worthwhile. A few undergraduate stories and poems
hardly made a ripple, and it was more rewarding -- or
inevitable -- to sit and drink at Hooligan's anyway.
Stopping there that same night I was glad to see
Bibiana. Gregory was probably home with the
kids, as we knew he hardly drank; he was more
likely to appreciate an ice cream sundae or a big
slice of cake. As a minister's son, he had never
touched a cigaret, and no one could get him to
try grass. But Bibi liked to drink beer and
smoke and listen to music and often went out
alone. Definitely
on Friday nights at
Barney's where we all went as part of our communal
ritual. Though Gregory -- a published poet -- wouldn't
deign to write for our lowly student magazine, Bibi had
started to work on her own style, a very simple,
conversational approach, and had submitted work that we were
glad to have.
Her eyes did seem to sparkle more when she talked
to me, though she appeared to have the look of
someone nearsighted who had forgotten the glasses
she was used to wearing, indicated by reddish
marks on her nose. But I was intrigued when she
asked about going together to listen to some jazz
groups sometime. Gregory could never get away. I had
begun spending more time at their ramshackle house on
Maryland Avenue, drinking beer on the couch at parties or
with visitors who always seemed to drop in, talking or
listening to albums I had never heard, like Kenneth Rexroth reading
Thou Shall Not Kill (A
Memorial for Dylan
Thomas) from his
and
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti's 1957 poetry album:
. . . .You,
The hyena with polished face and bow tie, In the office of a billion dollar
Corporation devoted to
service; The vulture dripping with carrion, Carefully
and carelessly robed in imported tweeds, Lecturing on the
Age of Abundance; The jackal in double-breasted
gabardine, Barking by remote control, In the United
Nations; The vampire bat seated at the couch head, Notebook in hand, toying with his decerebrator;
The
autonomous, ambulatory cancer, The Superego in a thousand
uniforms; You, the finger man of behemoth, The
murderer of the young men.
. . .
. . . .He
is Dead. Like Ignacio the bullfighter, At four
o�clock in the afternoon. At precisely four o�clock. I too do not want to hear it.
I too do not want to know
it. I want to run into the street, Shouting,
�Remember Vanzetti!� I want to pour gasoline down your
chimneys. I want to blow up your galleries. I want to
bum down your editorial offices. I want to slit the
bellies of your frigid women. I want to sink your
sailboats and launches. I want to strangle your children
at their finger paintings. I want to poison your Afghans
and poodles. He is dead, the little drunken cherub. He is dead,
The effulgent tub thumper. He is Dead. .
. .
[Click
for Complete Poem in .DOC Format]
Thomas had died not too long before of alcohol poisoning from
downing what he claimed was a record of 18 straight shots, in
New
York on an American tour which included a reading here at
Marquette University. So he had a solid following in
Milwaukee.
It was backed by a muted jazz band,
beatnik style. And there were records by Tom Lehrer,
Nichols & May and guitarist
Kenny Burrell, whom they had
known when Gregory t  aught at Wayne State University in
Detroit. Michael McClure,
Rexroth himself,
Gary
Snyder, even Allen Ginsberg: Bibi made him scrambled eggs
with a ham steak from which an adoring
student retrieved the bone to wear on a neck
chain. Over time there was no
telling who would show up. One
afternoon, coming from UWM, I was welcomed to
stay for a memorable meal, a seemingly
impromptu offering of tempura -- shrimp and a
variety of vegetables deep-fried in an
exquisitely tasty puff batter -- served for
the visiting actress Erika Slezak, then
appearing at the nearby Milwaukee Repertory.
I learned she was the daughter of the
more-famous actor Walter Slezak, though she
went on to recognition for her role in the
long-running soap opera, One Life to Live. It was
there Allan and I hatched our plan to drive my
white Triumph to New York so
he could attend a film festival to scout for
local Art Center film circle
director Franny Lee -- who had no budget to
send a representative but who could get him in
-- while I dropped in on Milwaukee
boho expatriate painters Peter Sinclair and
Mike Grumley in the East Village.
On another night shortly afterward I found
myself elaborating to an inquiring
McClure about the non-stop 17 hour --
more or less -- trip each way, when we took
turns peering with binoculars out the windows
of the Spitfire for tracking law-enforcement
vehicles while the small sports car topped out
in its speed. Not that fast, to be sure
-- barely 100 mph -- though certainly enough
to get us a big fine, but we made it without
incident so I could wander enthralled from
Wall Street to the
Village living on deli food to go and
visiting the renegade friends while Allan took
in the screenings.
I was immediately captivated by the 24-hour
liveliness and unceasing sounds reaching up to
the indoors and brazen
pedestrians crossing streaming thoroughfares
that only let me drive the Triumph with any
ease after midnight down Broadway
and even through Central Park,
while I could find arty events to explore in
the Village Voice
for even my paltry finances. I could
only hope to make it back someday, even if it
meant furnishing a space by dragging up an eight-story walkup the
cast-off furniture -- even mattresses -- that
magically appeared along the gutters every
morning.
The shotgun apartments that dwindled like a
vanishing perspective in a painting as each
room got smaller with distance from the
kitchen where the bathtub was covered with a
board for a makeshift table and the door was
guarded with a police lock like a crowbar
based in the floor weren't discouraging, just
exotic. Maybe I could relocate -- though
I wanted to spend a year each in
Madison and Chicago
just for the experience -- even if the sight
of crowded blocks of parked cars in the
canyons each with their antennas snapped off
and hoods dented from gangs of kids holding
runs from corner to corner on their tops was a
bit unsettling.
At the Garsons' soir�es
the long pleated skirts with the wide
plastic belts Bibi often wore were not very flattering when
she moved around the room in her big-hipped
way, and I thought she could have used more
lipstick on the small, pinkish mouth. But while Gregory was my English professor and
more reserved, it was wonderful to sit together in the living room
and talk about my classes and gossip about her encounters
with students as a new instructor. After a few times I
had enough nerve at Hooligan's to say I should take her to a
couple of jazz bars I knew.
When things
broke up that night some of us lingered outside in the
parking lot facing east on the five corners of Farwell, Murray and North Avenues, one block from busy
Prospect Avenue and cut off from the view of Rieder's more
upscale tavern with its stained glass windows and German
hunting lodge theme. The Oriental Drugstore.
Frenchy's well-known white tablecloth restaurant a little farther (noted
for its wild game, but the regulars knew not to order the
elephant: The story was that the French-maidified waitress
would make you wait half an hour then return to inform you
that Chef says he's sorry, but he can't start a whole
elephant for just one person),
across from the New York Diner hot dog place and a handful
of other bars. Wimpy's Hunt Club. Vitucci's and
Monreal's on Murray, with its tiny stage for weekend
jazz. Bibiana suggested tea at her place for the
bunch, but I had already developed the habit of never
stopping once I started drinking and drew the olive-brown army jacket a
little tighter around me as a brisker wind kicked up, though
I was glowing somewhere way within and planning to keep it
going. Halloween was in the air and things were
cooling down.
"Never touch the
stuff," I said to the offer. "But I've got
beer and wine in the car if you want to go," I said to
Anne-Marie. I usually picked up something
like Black Cat malt liquor and Mission port
wine to get high fast when I got off from the
factory to pick up Jenny, and kept the wine in
the car trunk for cross-town trips. Anne-Marie still rode west
with me sometimes, as we had planned earlier, though by that
time she was dating someone else and I seldom saw her except
at Riegelman's in her brown and white checked uniform. The
quaint carhop look was cute on her, and I couldn't help
tracking her with my eyes as she worked the grill. Wanting
to undress her, of course, visualizing short, brownish curls
captured by possibly skimpy panties , under the starchy
dress.
She said no, she had to get home, but before
we got moving Bibi suddenly said, "You know,
your sneakers are too white," and I was
dodging her foot soles, intent on smudging, on
the cold gravel. Another girl from our table joined in the game
as I yelled, "Come on, cut it out, dammit," as I
hopped around and they chased me until I cleverly -- I
thought -- jumped to the top of a low whitewashed concrete
wall. The girl followed, but Bibi could reach my feet
from where she stood below and inflicted a scrubbing of feet
with a few handfuls of gravel and dirt.
I liked having
clean, white shoes, but it was no use.
I was pissed off to see how the dirt on
my shoes made a tracing of my toes like crayon
on paper over a coin -- or a gravestone
rubbing -- until the dance was abruptly over
when I stepped on her hand, crushing it on the
sharp gravel on the wall. I was walking in
the moonlight on black bones and she was
wincing in pain, and I felt terrible, but it
was an end to the evening. As usual,
Sid McCoy in the car helped
float me along in the bittersweet night, after Anne-Marie got out, to
get a shot and
chaser, this time back at
Peanuts Herlitz's, but I could
think about drinking alone with Bibi.
When she called
my house the next week and said hi she went on
quickly: "There's nothing oriental about the
Oriental Drugstore -- except maybe the old gentleman at the
counter." If she was nervous -- and she hid it
pretty well -- I was too, but I said something about the
ornate Oriental Theater next
 door, a landmark that gave the
building its name, and then we were setting a time and
choosing a place to go.
"I can't very well
pick you up in my car," she said at first, but I
couldn't picture us in the green Olds with its noisy pipes and
conspicuously flapping tattered white ragtop -- too much attention for an
unlikely couple, one of them a married teacher, parked on a side
street or maybe down at the lake. Better her stodgy family sedan.
So I asked her why not. A pause, then:
"Well -- all
right. Do you want to meet me?"
"Oh, just stop in front at eight o'clock
and blow the horn." I knew I couldn't
see the street from inside without going into my parents' bedroom,
and of course my mother was sitting right there on the couch. Hell,
this would sure beat staying home with the collected
Shakespeare or a psychology textbook and one eye on new host
Johnny
Carson on the Tonight Show, intensifying my reading during commercials. I
could put off working on a paper about the
atheism of Measure for Measure, a point I wanted to
prove to the English department's Professor Tom Burnham,
an Episcopalian from Virginia. That was my usual
method -- do library research and find some obscure
viewpoint to get fired up about to the point where it was
fun to write an argument that the teacher probably wouldn't
agree with. Not just counting words on the page but
having something to say was half of the effort right
away. I had done the same with
The Merchant of
Venice, using the writing of Jewish author and publisher
Harry Golden of the
South Carolina Israelite to argue
that Shakespeare wasn't anti-Semitic, though Burnham taught
the conventional view that on balance he was.
The
horn blew when Bibi got there and there was no problem
and she slid over to the passenger side
and said through the open window, "You drive."
We made our first night
together a visit to Les Czimber and his group at the Embers
on Capitol Drive. It was cozy, with pianist
Czimber -- a Hungarian who had escaped the
Russians in the 1956 uprising -- playing
straight-ahead jazz, and I told her about his
early championing of then-local Al Jarreau.
I drank whiskey and sour, appropriate for
that kind of evening, I thought, and it went
by quickly -- Gregory was used to her
excursions but she didn't want to push things
too much -- until I was parking the sedan at
the lake front. It was the usual place for couples to go, with
a reasonable amount of privacy if the cops could see clothed
torsos through the windows, though it was a good idea to
watch for them cruising back and forth on the road. With
others positioned up and down the drive we were watching the
submarine races, as the local saying went. Or at least
waves rolling in.
It was a good strategy to park right
under a streetlight so there wasn't as much
shining in and the canopy of leafy trees
spaced along the curb could spread their
shadows, blocking more illumination. When I could get Lorri LaRue down there
with my clean handkerchief ready there was easily enough
time for some necking, a hand under her blouse, to get
jerked off without any problem. Why she didn't ever feel
the urge to put it in her mouth, I didn't know, just as she
resisted letting me touch her pussy. I only occasionally
even
saw it when we stayed naked
under the sheets drinking beer most of the night in my married buddy
Chuck's bedroom, when they went out for
the night.
I was at a loss for conversation for
the moment, but the radio was playing -- the
usual Top 40 of WOKY -- then the news carried
a report of an armed robbery and getaway at a
West Side mall. I commented, knowing she was
active in civil rights and school
de-segregation, that the three suspects were
described as white, though I had thought race
was usually not mentioned at all unless it
involved the feared black males.
"Well, I
have
heard it before, in Detroit at least," she said as I
was thinking I ought to kiss her or something in spite of
everything seeming suspended. But here were thin lips
and . . . what? Something missing. Ever
since Barbara Firley in grade school I was
drawn to a soft baby face, cushiony lips,
welling up with a
kind of tenderness that came to me from
somewhere at the mere sight of the rounded
features. But in the skein of branch shadows on her
face through the window she arched her back and made the
maneuver I had seldom seen -- and never for me -- that had
her hand behind her unfastening her bra then snaking it
through one sleeve of her sweater. A little shake of
relief and she stuffed it in her purse and stubbed out her
cigaret.
For some reason I
thought washerwomen's tits
as I found one nipple then
the other, larger than I was used to and rubbery in my mouth
before I nuzzled the side of her neck a little bit under her
ear. I liked the tiny pearl earring. "I
didn't think they were this big."
"You just never noticed."
I had avoided kissing her, but
while I was cupping a large breast and sucking
on her nipple I knew what the hand on my groin
meant -- or at least it was time to find out
how available she intended to be -- and I did
the unzipping myself. Of course, the
white Jockey's made it a little awkward until I pulled the
waist band down far enough and she manipulated me into the
warm and wet mouth that had me slowly growing hard. I
wasn't imagining it when she bit me gently, teasing with
just her teeth. I was thinking it would be great if
Herman's Hermits could come on with
I'm Into Something
Good -- after all, she was a teacher and it was a
classic schoolboy moment to remember -- but I had to settle
for
Maria Elena,
a cool instrumental for romantic driving and parking at night.
Still, after a while
with her head down while I watched the drive I didn't feel
any impending spurt coming, just a friendly comfort, and she
stopped after a few desultory pumps with her hand and sat
up. I stared past her profile out the
windshield at stars affixed to the unmoving
nightsky over the lake as I wilted.
"You have a nice one," giving
it a little waggle for emphasis. I
didn't want to argue with that, though I didn't see how I
could take any credit, either. Actually, I would come to identify more with
Charles Bukowski,
who wrote that his dick was in the normal range but his balls
were huge. Too bad you didn't get much credit for that,
though I had been amused by the limerick that started, "There was
a young man of Assizes . . . ."
She looked
straight ahead out of the windshield, where we could see the
beach curving north, and ceaseless waves.
"Something to look forward to . . ." To
me or herself, I didn't know.
Then after a moment she
took my hand. "Rub my stomach."
I knew perfectly well
what she meant, and half-heartedly put it on her lower belly
on the skirt. By then I was unnaturally calm, I
thought, indifferent though I had even fingered several of
the more willing girls as far back as junior high in the
Savoy and the Zenith. We called it sitting together
when on Friday or Saturday night a friend, usually a girl,
would ask a girl on behalf of a boy who liked her and we
would find two seats in an uncrowded row in the
theater. Sometimes the girls would ask; either way the
guys might proudly end up with a face full of lipstick,
though a hand quickly fondling a covered breast was about as
far as it went. But it was possible to get someone
with the right reputation, if she liked you enough, in a
remote enough spot -- maybe the closed balcony -- and get a
hand between her legs, under the panties, and explore.
Inevitably, I would get to the point where I felt there was
nothing left to discover and I would get up, even though it
felt cruel, to go the bathroom or buy candy and just not
come back.
If the girls talked
about it between themselves I never knew, but the rituals
continued and the messages went back and forth until we all
started going more and more to social center and parish
dances like St. Elizabeth's. Full body contact
had its own charm, even with clothes on, and
real dating could take over.
Of course, I knew nothing about the clitoris
until I discovered a marriage manual in my
Aunt Marjorie's bedroom, and even then for years
I thought it was pronounced cliTORis. So none of the balcony girls came, though
I'm sure some of them could have guided me to the right
little bump even then. But they were as unhelpful as Sandy
Agnello had been when I had her leaning against her garage
with my middle finger misplaced in what was
actually the crease where her thigh met her
body -- and she just laughed and pulled away
when I caught on after several minutes of
triumph. But it was gratifying in my
adolescent mind to slide a finger or two
around in the moist, virginal slits that
contrasted with what I imagined tonight to be
Bibi's tangled, damp mass inches away. She
was about 15 years older, with two kids, and I pictured her
husband, my English teacher, who had been plowing there in a
gaping void. Not inviting.
It seemed,
with my hand still inert, that it was time
to leave the shore -- we had to make the trip back to my
parents' house on the other side of the city -- and the time
together was companionable enough after she finished another
annoying cigaret and blew the last of the smoke out the
window.
But I was spooked
after that, not wanting to disappoint her but feeling no
passion. The Garson's
house
continued to be the place to go -- even more
so as it became a center for civil rights
activities, and I would drink cans of beer
there a lot with the other students they felt
were interesting or malleable enough to
invite, and I would sit there on the couch,
often next to her when the others had left. Flattered, as
always, by her attention and showing her stuff I had written
-- though I planned on being a novelist, I thought I wasn't
refined enough to write poetry until I began reading
hers: everyday observations that she shaped sometimes
without formal meter or rhyme schemes. Some of mine
were about her, of course, and I even thought I might be
going too far in touching on our attraction -- because
I certainly felt something -- insinuating a lust that Gregory
Garson, when he saw them as part of my creative writing
class, wouldn't know we never acted upon. Even though
I never used her name:
May First
. . . Summer will bring your protests, picketers to gather
Around your flaring skirts and high, excited voice
Your insights into the structure of power, the
Academic phrasings you can't wholly be rid of. . . .
Mother of his lovely daughters (as they're always called)
Lover of the workers, working at being a lover
We breathe heavy new winds
When rain slews sideways on the covered porch
You accuse me of trying to plan for accidents
While you take advantage
Of marital accidents to plan. . . .
Several
times she mailed me on the West Side, once sending me this:
I like your poem fine.
After talking to you on the phone
I looked up a couple of prosy non-
poems to send you
no images no obscurity
I'm sorry you hate my body
please may we talk sometime?
And some others I
saved, including one about our date at the Embers:
really, really
did you look at me
through the crowd
like I thought you did?
when someone said --
when
you mentioned, you dear
a place we knew last year?
(that long ago?)
if so
many thanks
And another:
New Year's Eve
I took it like a blessing
the pope grants the faithful
when you lifted my dress an inch
and kissed just above my knee
I remembered
we had been sitting on the floor of her living room, her
rounded bare knees schoolgirlish and delectable, as we all
listened to Eric Burdon & the Animals perform a powerful
The House of the Rising Sun,
and then an older Aretha Franklin album. Bibi quickly
rated Burdon above Mick Jagger, and I couldn't argue with
that.
But still, I had already written a poem that gave me a twinge
of guilt to publish in our off-campus mag riverrun.
Cruel if taken as a literal description, but of course it was
a poem with presumably fictional actors:
Sex, Why Not?
consider the drooping buttocks. one can wedge a quarter in the folds of the flesh or turn on the breasts, flicking the nipples with the tongue like a finger on a rubber light-switch
one after the other, and wait for a spark a flame again, a brighter red
than the dark port wine swishing in the jug half-empty & warm was tangy for the tasting as her young thighs splitting to a sliding finger were wet to her knees
and full of feeling and promise, once
But Bibi
on the carpet seemed smaller and younger for the moment, and I thought
past what I imagined were slack labia and a drooping butt; after
all, I had seen her driver's license with her birth date at some point and
couldn't escape some images of the effects of all those years of
marriage and having two
kids.
I had given my aversions some thought and wondered if it
wasn't a consequence of an incest avoidance, that guys were
programmed to make sure we looked for sex experiments in
younger girls outside of maternal possibilities. I know that
at a pre-pubescent age -- and I had started jacking off at 11
-- I had squirmed away when either my mother or my aunt had
held me to kiss me good night, as usual, and I put a stop to
it all from then on. I later
observed families where it seemed as if an adult with nothing to
do would grab one of the kids to kiss and hug, and
I came to think that if my own relatives had ignored my protests
that I was too old I would have accepted it and been better
able to express affection outside of sex later on. But we
were never that demonstrative. Of course, I was seeing Jenny
by then, though we only had the same parked-car
possibilities for limited sex. My friend Chuck, who had let
Lorri and me use his house when he and his wife Donna were
away, freaked out when he realized that some of us were
visiting her when he was gone. Only Ray Malina was
fucking her, though I had worked on my own plan, even driving
her once in my car as I casually rubbed her upper thigh and then
her cunt through her slacks.
"Doesn't your hand get tired?" she asked after a
while, but she seemed interested, and I hoped she'd
soon be leaving Chuck. But I
couldn't actually imply too much while they were still
together, since I didn't want to be responsible for a
breakup. Or for her baby boy.
When I was confronted by Chuck, some of that came out, and though we had
been buddies since high school we went our separate ways and never
spoke again. But at least
Jen had
grown up without any inhibitions, it seemed, and though she
didn't have any experience with blowjobs my cock was getting
more attention than it ever had with Lorri, who really only
wanted to neck. So I had the excuse of being faithful
to my girlfriend. As I told Bibi one night, the two of
us alone except for her kids -- one head a foot or so higher
up than the other -- peering out from their bedroom doorway just off
the kitchen, "It would be like you being a whore."
"Is that what you want
-- for me to be your
whore?"
"No,
no." What could I add?
And I don't want
to flunk English, either? Meaning
Gregory was a
friend and teacher that I wouldn't risk alienating except
for the kind of all-consuming affair I could only
imagine, a Tea and Sympathy tryst.
It never occurred to me that maybe they had worked out at
least a tacit agreement to tolerate each other's flings and
that I wasn't the first crush for Bibi.
"Is your sperm so precious?" And
of course I wanted a girlfriend I could count on to be with
and have real sex like everybody else.
But not with her; I wanted a cute young thing, sexy but
vulnerable at the same time. Even though I once had a
crush on a Mrs. Kalterjahn, a powdered and perfumed,
impossibly perfect
Sunday
school teacher with the sleekest nyloned legs, though I didn't
have the nerve to even visualize a body under the finery. It was bad enough that I
would question Gregory's aesthetics and ideas more than hers
because I felt he should be able to take it; after all, he was
more
accomplished, more like a father figure that I had to learn
from by opposing. Even if he rightly expected more
deference. But that was also the price of being my
friend rather than just a teacher.
And Jenny was my girlfriend; we didn't see anybody else, though
she still had rules about getting home at a certain time.
A.J. and Grumley's flat was on Newhall Avenue across from
the brushy slope that led down to the Milwaukee River a few
blocks west of the campus. They occasionally had beer
parties there, though I guessed they were hustling queers to
get invited to more elaborate soirees on Lake Drive. It was typical
student decor, with some large paintings of a nude Grumley
and some of his own work -- more figure studies -- and
there was a barbell leaning against the wall in their living room,
giving at least the impression that one or both of them worked
out.
I was
early enough -- though later than the appointed time -- to
find Grumley still strutting around in a white terrycloth
bathrobe, seemingly out of the shower moments ago, with an
open bedroom door and the brassy blonde actress we knew as
Luanne just getting up from the bed in her own blue robe,
exposing the side of a breast. As
if she were on display.
But any woman with Michael Grumley
seemed like a decoration, or just a good friend, and he
didn't seem to know many he could invite. A couple of other
guys, including a new
Cheshire short
story writer named Zetteler, had come alone. It was
certainly good I could bring Jenny, though I thought because
we were a couple I shouldn't encourage her when she
swayed and danced to David Rose's The
Stripper.
"I'm not gonna
take this off, so forget it," she
said, tugging out on the waistband where it stopped below the
bared, tremulous breasts. But she smiled and did her best to swivel and
bump and grind with the striptease.
Near the end of the record she pretended to roll down the
elastic top, then stopped, smiling as she pulled it up. She
imitated the stagy ooh look of a professional stripper.
Half-naked, she was as cute as ever, with inky dark eyes --
a little smudged, looking weary for a young girl -- and
pouty red lipsticked mouth. Another one with a gap in
her front teeth, like the Wife of Bath.
"I bet you'd let
Don take them off for you if you were alone," said Kent
McKenna, a swishy anthropology major who was one of the original
A.J. Brennan gang from high school days in St.
Francis. We had published his parody of
Ginsberg's Howl in
Cheshire, and Goodman had
singled out for approval a line in another poem he read at the
Garson's: He diddled her middle with a
Christian cross. . . . Such
praise irked me a little, I admit, since though he had liked
some of my poetry, I had read one aloud that he had judged as displaying my
sophomoric illusions. Titled
GETTING TO SLEEP, it was set in the protagonist's
bedroom
at
five o'clock on a frigid morning
of a below-zero year
when frost
has covered the window except for one
patch perhaps the size of his hand
and approximately the shape of a knight's head
and continues through a session of
drinking from a wine jug and a pensive, naked
dance seen in the mirror and the morning
radio stock report evoking memories of
watching slaughterhouse sheep shot in the
skull with a .22 rifle, until with the dawn
he rolls the bottle under the bed
and easily sleeps till supper time
All right, somewhat bathetic and jejune, I suppose, but
as a college student I didn't think I should
sound like a middle-aged Jewish man, either,
but I let it go. Jenny,
still charged up and slipping on her clingy yellow top with
black trim,
responded lightly to McKenna: "I don't know --
he never tried. But we don't really have any place to
go."
I was chagrined that
she had made it sound as if I weren't really interested in
sex, but Allan Jensen later said that hell, we ought to go
in together on a cheap rented room. He was seeing a
tall Latvian chick named Ieva that lived at home and they
didn't want to go into the bushes at the lakefront
either. We ought to be able to find something in the
converted mansions on Prospect Avenue near the
Cudworth Post
where we were both busboys.
Later, when we were
driving alone, I had to tell her how pissed I was:
"Listen, I'm still the man, even if we haven't been to
bed. You don't have to go telling everyone about our
sex life . . ."
I looked straight ahead
with my best stone face, knowing coldness was about the only
weapon I had at my disposal, while women always had the
power of the sexual gatekeeper if they wanted it.
Hell, any reasonably attractive woman could unbutton far
enough to show a little cleavage -- or really push them up
and out if she were desperate -- and get all the attention
she wanted, any night she wanted. But what could a guy
do? They already knew we were all horny, and any
posturing like unbuttoning a shirt just looked
silly.
But as I expected, she
was contrite: Though I had been doing some reading and was all for
economic and legal equality for women, I hadn't noticed that
any of them were looking for somebody they could push
around. Far from it. Dump one guy, sure, but
then it was to find someone else to take the lead or cater
to. And I was older, besides, and had the car.
Women who really liked sex didn't use it as a weapon, since
they would be depriving themselves, I thought, though it was
mostly theoretical until now.
"Okay,
okay." She leaned over and kissed me high on my
cheek and darted a tongue into my ear.
But oddly enough, I thought, her
performance didn't make much of a stir in the
long run -- I didn't mention it otherwise on
the ride home or after that -- though as the
party was winding down after I came back and
we were slumping back into the furniture, the
light through the wooded river banks starting
to stream in, the occasional car drifting
down the shaded side street at the start of
the new day, things did become more bizarre. Several of them
talked about a French film at the Downer in which a Gestapo
colonel tortured a captive with lit cigarets for information. Besides
Allan Jensen from Cheshire and Matt, my other good
friend was Stan Beckman, from Anne-Marie's neighborhood near
Washington Park and an aspiring writer like
myself. He
wasn't preppy like Allan -- his father was a mailman -- and
covered his severe psoriasis with long-sleeved shirts.
But he had dates occasionally, and the one he brought -- the
only chick left -- had us listening as she claimed to know
that cigaret burns weren't all that painful.
Surprisingly, this one-time farm girl --
Sylvia -- told about a game the guys and
girls back home had of holding out their bare
arms or legs together and putting a lit
cigaret in the channel between them to let it
burn out. If you flinched you lost, but for
couples it made identical scars as a sign of
their connection.
It wasn't long before we had to experiment, of course, and I
was overly vicious for some reason in grinding out a butt on
my friend Stan's forehead after Sylvia and I held our lower
legs together and let a cigaret burn out between our
calves. True enough, after the first searing pain the
nerves went numb and we lasted through it. Left alone,
the cigarets always went out after some excruciating
moments from the red-hot glowing tips searing skin and nerves.
Sylvia wouldn't go any farther than
taking off her blouse, keeping the satiny white bra -- and Stan
did report once at the Tux that she had inverted nipples -- while we put
our torsos together and burned a lasting mark for both
of us just above the waist, like old fashioned raised white
vaccination scars. It was one more for her and the
last for me, though I later learned that Stan had come off
the worst, with some ash getting into his wound and
prominently marking his forehead for years, if not forever.
But the beer had lasted
us and we were all pretty numb. Once again without Jenny after the first few
hours -- and we had no really good place to go, anyway -- I had hoped to smoke some dope,
but Matt Wilensky was the only one who consistently had a supply (Justin Beste, the
white-aproned student who watched the alley door for Barney,
it turned out, a stop on the pipeline from Chicago by way of
Kenosha) and he was working, as usual. It was the
school term for me, but I knew
Ray Malina was home from
third shift at the can company and I called him to see if I
could score. No luck, but though school and my life in
the old neighborhood seldom mixed, I invited him over.
Bars opened at 6 a.m., but without me to go drinking with,
the fall months could be boring. So he came.
I don't know if he was impressed with the
flat or my artistic friends -- a shiny
metallic African mask, a fabric wall hanging
-- as I had intended, but Sylvia with her
boobs making little humps over the top of her
bra was startling enough.
The blue ceramic chip
bowl held just crumbs, and the remaining dip was crusted
over, but the refrigerator still had some brown paper bags
with partial six-packs in them.
"So where's
yours?" Meaning my date; I had to point out
Jenny was still underage and had to leave when her parents
wanted her home. He was soon shaking his head over the
tale of the cigaret burnings, though as a Chicano it wasn't
unusual that he had his own home-made pinprick and ink
tattoo on his hand. No formal gang affiliation for him
as a pupil at nearby Riverside High, but he had long ago punctured
himself with her initials for the love of his long-time
girlfriend,
Linda. Even though he cheated on her all
the time.
But it was Bibiana who really let us
know how stupid and crazy she thought we
were. Certainly with so much shit going on
with blacks and cops and the school board and
especially marches down south and here we
were, spoiled and indifferent to doing
anything meaningful in our lives. She may have
been right about that, though I didn't see any real room in
my life for anything beyond joining an occasional
demonstration with the NAACP. The Vietnam war was very
remote for most of us, with students getting an automatic
deferment from the draft. Only Matt Wilensky made much of a
point of criticizing it. I had studying to do, and
worked too, after all. But it led to her high
irritation when Goodman -- never as solicitous of her or any
female as he was towards the guys who were invited to her
gatherings -- contradicted her stance and maintained
one night when she told the story that it was sometimes
healthy to do something extreme, even painful, to get roused
out of apathy. Like pinching or punching yourself or
taking a risk for the rush it brought. He was a
Gestalt lay analyst, so spoke with some authority, though I
rather felt she was right once I looked at my scars soberly.
Goodman confused things
further with his assertion -- despite being a community
organizer in his New York neighborhood and certainly a
sympathizer with the plight of mis-educated young people,
especially young Puerto Rican males, that a perfectly valid
way of approaching life and its difficulties was as the beast in the jungle. In other words, a
rejection of the humanitarianism and sense of justice most
of us at least aspired to in favor of raw
self-interest. Not something the idealistic Garsons
would likely embrace. Or even myself, especially with
their example. Once at Barney's when
a little drunk as usual and I suppose with immature
insensitivity I even asked Bibi what the Garsons ultimately
were doing with their lives. She felt I was demanding
she justify her existence, but she thought about it.
Finally she said she thought they were having an effect and
that she would ideally die a martyr to, you know, some
great cause. Without dope or even
enough women to go around, Grumley's party abruptly burned
out with the rising sun and I left, taking at least the
sight of the half-dressed Jenny home with me to bed.
That and the beer dulled any residual burn pain a lot and I could
ignore it, though Stan bitched about his branding every once
in a while until we graduated and he moved to St. Louis to
teach at a troubled boys' academy.
Especially, as he pointed out, since the torture proved
nothing about our actual will: "I bet if I put this out in your
eyeball you'd fuckin' talk." How could I argue
with that?
Grumley, who had his
own slight forehead burn rather gingerly administered by
Stan, was the first one to be twitted by Bibiana at her own
party: "I thought you were
different." But though she told me later she
thought he looked a little gay she couldn't believe it at
first when I told her he and A.J. were hustlers.
"But hustling,
I'll never understand it, even though I read City of
Night. I get the point they keep their masculinity, and at
the same time indulge their need for money
and sex. Well, at least they give of
themselves . . . no wonder he was almost
kissing that guy."
She indicated an older man in a well-cut business suit in close
conversation with a red-cheeked, animated Grumley. The
sophisticated Charles Brady, of course, no doubt slumming
with Grumley and even holding his hand. He did
remind me of the Noel Coward I had seen in old footage on
TV, a frequent visitor in an earlier era to Lunt and
Fontaine at their estate in nearby Genesee Depot, one county
away.
With Jenny about to
graduate in the spring I could keep her there for a
few hours, but I watched Bibi dance with strangers, faculty
and activists, grinding close with her hips in some cases,
and I had a few twinges. For one thing, it had become
clear that Jenny had picked up a lot of experience in a few
years with high school guys she was allowed to date and I
didn't want her to know how inexperienced I was, if I could help
it. I knew Bibi could have changed that, but I always
had that self-conscious hesitation, the feeling she was too
matronly for us to be simply playful equals and I wouldn't
-- couldn't -- respond to her blatant expectations if I
tried. A limp dick would devastate me and probably shatter
my allure. Even if, as she said during one long night
of drinking beer, "He knows what a whore I am.
And I know he's fucking some blonde piano player, a music
student."
Things continued at
that impasse into the summer after Jenny's graduation,
though I let Bibi -- and everybody -- think we were
screwing. What with the Garsons' vacations in Michigan and
her postcards
and then a trip to Europe with their kids, I was seeing less of
them and moving on into other classes and dating more.
Especially late nights with Jenny after second shift at the
factory. By the next year after I had moved to
the East Side she had started UWM because of my influence,
and of course we finally had a place to go.
A few months before she had helped me move some packed
boxes for my parents to their new upper flat in West Milwaukee.
We rested on the bare carpet with our greasy cheeseburger wrappings and
cans of beer from
the bar on the corner and I soon had her dress up and my hand on
a sopping cunt that I slid into amazingly easy for my first time,
coming quickly. So I was proud of
myself and glad to have the
cheap one-room apartment in Aileen's building. I had a small TV,
mainly for news since I was usually working nights or out
drinking, but I had started out as a journalism major --
switching to English when I decided teaching meant more time
for writing and less work than being a full-time reporter --
and always devoured the daily Milwaukee Journal, if
not the Hearst Sentinel as well. Like everyone else,
following the murder in Mississippi of
Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, I was
further horrified at the assassination of
Viola Liuzzo --
apparently with the acquiescence of the FBI. Learning
she was from the Detroit area, where Bibiana and Gregory had
come from, further personalized her for us, and I
could see Bibi's face
-- she was about the same age -- taking the place of Liuzzo's head with its mass
of dark hair in the news photo, a victim of some racist
machination. I imagined Bibi as being that heroic, given the
chance.
I might not want to
graze on the thinnish lips, but she was the standard for the
strong woman I
wanted to meet, someone I could argue with and who could teach me
something, with a major I knew nothing about, a painter like
Ieva, or musician. Or at least an English major I
could talk with. Even Aileen, not a student, had picked up some insights
into psychiatry.
But the same paper with
the account of Liuzzo's murder carried a local story about
an armed robbery of a jewelry store at the posh Mayfair
Mall that brought with it a slow realization:
Armed
Assault on Police Officers
Wauwatosa Police detectives
are investigating an armed assault on three Wauwatosa Police
officers that occurred last night. At approximately
11:53 pm, officers responded to Mayfair Mall on Mayfair Road
in reference to a reported robbery of a person in progress
at LeBoldt & Co. jewelers. When officers arrived
on the scene they were confronted by three armed
suspects. At least one of the suspects fired at the
officers. One officer returned fire, but the suspects
fled without being hit by the gunfire.
The suspects fled the
scene in a black Lincoln, and a vehicle pursuit began south
on 60th St. The suspect exited the vehicle and fled on
foot near Fiebrantz Avenue. Officers continued to search for
the suspects and two suspects were located on W. Leon
Terrace near Fond du Lac Ave., where they were
arrested after another exchange of gunfire.
The suspects have been
identified as: Anton Stojsarljevic, 38, Deidre
Marshall, 30, and Conrad Kuntz, 36, all of
Milwaukee. A fourth suspect is believed to be still at
large. The suspects in custody have been charged with
kidnapping, armed robbery, three counts of assault with a
deadly weapon on a law enforcement officer, possession of a
firearm by a felon, and numerous traffic charges.
In addition there were
outstanding warrants on Stojsarljevic for communicating
threats, assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill,
inflicting serious bodily injury, and possession of a
firearm by a felon.
It is believed that the
suspects were holding a female in the closed store against
her will when officers arrived on the scene. The
officers were not injured. The investigation is
continuing, and Milwaukee police are looking into
possible connections with other recent armed robberies on
the northwest side, including several holdups of
savings and loan associations in the area. Persons
with information are asked to contact the Wauwatosa Police
Department's Detective Bureau. . . .
Up jumped the Devil, hey Tony? As it
dawned on me that it was about Tony S. and three of the tavern
crew, I knew I had to check things out. So I swung over
to the West Side after second shift, though I usually
stopped every night at Barney's, to see for myself that the
bar was dark. It was nice knowing you, I thought.
But I was a student, after all, and this was just a small
part of my life. I had messed around
with petty crimes myself, just out of high school --
shoplifting, stealing from the back of trucks, breaking into
lake cottages -- even going to the edge of armed
robbery, though normal caution and an innate sympathy for any
victims held me back, until finally the cops
confiscated my
.25 automatic
from my trunk in a routine traffic stop.
I had even gone to the library to read up on police
procedure, like Arrest, Search and Seizure, hoping
to be a better criminal, and briefly imagined I could take the
training to be a cop for its macho rigor. But I learned
you needed unrestricted vision to join the force, and I wore
glasses. When the recruiters came to UWM the
same thing kept me from enlisting in the
paratroopers.
But I outgrew the romanticism of wanting to be an outlaw as
college life beckoned and I stopped hanging out on the
corner and drifted away from the old gang. The new challenges
engaged my mind, though my mother couldn't understand how I
could sleep late every day and hang out at the Tux
and Hooligan's and still do well in class.
Disgusted, she eventually stopped making my noonish
breakfasts and I usually headed instead for
McClellan's on Downer Avenue.
Downtown, weeknights at
Barney's brought out only a few patrons -- some art students from
the Layton School of Art, a solitary reporter or two,
like Ed Blackwell and Mike Kirkhorn, or columnist
Jay Scriba
who lived nearby with his wife Mona. Maybe a lesser
politician or staff member -- but Barney, an old-fashioned
saloon keeper and a fan of Edgar Lee Masters'
A Spoon
River Anthology, was pleasant company, if somewhat
puritanical: You would be well. advised not to say fuck in
his presence, or, as I learned, quote the lines, "Whose balls were
two different sizes. . . ." It was
fitting that the decor included a few oil paintings in
ornate gilt frames that illustrated some passages from the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Near the alley door:
And those who husbanded the Golden Grain, And those who flung it
to the Winds like Rain, Alike to no such
aureate Earth are turn'd As, buried once, Men
want dug up again.
Close to the
front where one table in the window looked out on Water Street:
Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of
Spring
The Winter
Garment of Repentance fling:
The
Bird of Time has but a little way To
fly -- and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
[Photo of
Original Barney's Painting from Carol
Ann Fryer]
A few
hard-boiled eggs from the back bar for me -- they shucked easily,
since Barney knew the secret of starting with older,
unboiled eggs -- and I lasted until closing, musing
about Tony and his gang and wanting to tell somebody.
But even though I thought it should be a solemn occasion, my
mind strayed to the hard-boiled eggs as I wondered if
anyone else knew my secret of also piercing both ends of the
egg with a cake tester to let in the water as it boiled -- I
had noticed that eggs that cracked while in the pot seemed to
peel easier.
I even played a few tunes on the ancient Wurlitzer Barney
kept against one wall, creating a bottleneck about halfway
down the narrow bar. He favored Glen Miller and some
old operatic singles and moldy figs like those by generally
forgotten cornetist Bix Beiderbecke
and other jazzmen like
Wisconsin's renowned
Bunny
Berigan. Records
were generally ignored on the weekends when conversation --
artists, students, politicos, reporters -- took over,
but it amused me to explore something like the now-obscure
Frank Crumit, once known for his novelties like
Abdul the Bul-Bul Emir:
The sons of the Prophet
are brave men and bold
and quite unaccustomed to fear,
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the shah,
Was Abdul Abulbul Amir.
If you wanted a
man to encourage the van, Or harass the foe from the rear,
Storm fort or redoubt, you had only to shout
for Abdul Abulbul Amir. . . .
[continued
here ]
I had become a library
researcher at The Journal, after
all, and eventually turned up some alternate bawdy
lyrics that fit the
tune.
Eventually I was
heading home to my mattress on the floor, forcing my
head to stay upright and keep looking ahead, only
bumping the curb a few times on corners.
. . .
the road was gravel, dusty white chunks that
sparkled in direct sunlight . . . reflected shafts of light
penetrated through the eyes into the brain of the child who
played by the road, painful, though he was usually
indifferent to discomfort until it might suddenly expand to
fill the universe as in the case of his pneumonia or the
torn scalp that came off when he fell off a playground
swing, when the hurt expanded the way they said the water
from the Kickapoo River came down the hills in the spring,
covering everything . . . the farm, the cheese factory, the
cars, the road . . . he watched the flood wiping out
everything the people tried to build, covering the clean
concrete floor of the factory with mud, only the painted
white lattice work of the porch enduring . . . he
pulled on the boards but he had to quickly fit the thin
nails back into their holes before his mother saw what he
had done . . . he didn't try it again, but he had to hide
under his mother's fur coat while they waited at the bus
stop . . . watching the squirrels of spring scurry and
rustle in the trees above i walked down
barefoot from the hills, walking since the beginning of
time i estimated as i stepped into the pasture parallel
to the slough where the waste of the cheese factory ran
viscous with blackgreen slime and yellow whey and milk
drawing flies while a tan cow grazed until i slapped
her flank and herded her to where i could milk her,
reminding me of the woman i had been rolling naked on
top of back on the hill who seemed not to notice she
had been showing me her bare breasts as i told her i
would come back when it was safe, though she looked sad
as if she didn't believe me redwing blackbirds
glided and swooped to perch on the dead tree branches,
and a bob white called, but i trudged on in brown work
boots to protect me from saw-edged grass to the boulder
i spotted half-buried working its way to the surface
that i crouched along side to heave and strain from the
soil, roughness scratching my canvas bib overalls as i
rolled it to the bank and pushed it into the water
where my cousin Allen had drowned swimming with the
catfish the binding
pressure of the overalls between my legs had me rubbing
against them with my hand though i couldn't get any
closer to an orgasm and i hoped the girl from Hansen's
farm not far from the Kickapoo would come by and we
could sneak back tonight while small unblinking animals
watched with their eyes shining in the dark and she
would strip shyly to show me what she had covered that
morning with a thin dress in the light of a rising sun
on a worn wood floor
her hand was
between my legs rubbing and rubbing and i was always on
the verge of coming but she kept twisting away when i
tried to force open her thighs so i could lick her but
she said we had to get married again
i lurched to my
feet to follow the road through grasshoppers springing
up as i came to a corrugated metal culvert with a
trickle of the slough running under the road . . . a
coiled snake basked in the sun on the warm metal . . .
another one like it lay smashed drying pulp-like in the
white gravel road, caught by the wheels of a milk truck
that morning reaching Readstown
where the kids and old people watched old black and
white movies flickering on a screen in the bandshell in
the town park, kids eating dry salty popcorn, while the
Redmen's lodge served beer in the dancehall down the
street and farm boys with Harley's drifted outside to
drink from whiskey bottles and fight over farm girls in
old-fashioned dresses but first i
had to get down the road to the farm buildings . . .
the house sagged at the open porch, white paint
graying, while inside the kitchen the girl who had been
swimming in the Kickapoo where my cousin Allen drowned
-- though my uncle Barney with his biceps like
baseballs from heaving around milk cans pulled him out
-- moved around in her mother's old, unraveling
sweater, breasts jiggling underneath . . . her long
brown hair was matted from the water and her face had
dried with no makeup on and a touch of secret lipstick
and her silly younger brother teased and excited her
though they didn't know why i stopped next to
the weathered, aging barn where chickens pecked swiftly
among scattered and withered corncobs and i leaned
against the sun-warmed boards until i suddenly saw the
Negro, standing in front of me
heavy and
threatening in his farmer's overalls but with a placid
waiting face i flinched and tried to
run but couldn't move . . . i realized he hadn't
noticed me or was ignoring me and there was no
sound . . . the Negro was tall, not a spindly
basketball player but solid, copper studs holding the
pockets firmly at the corners frayed but everything clean, newly put on with only fresh dirt
rubbed into the cloth worn thin at the knees . . . i
stared at his face as he waited and i waited . . . his
face was a light tan and sad, he looked like bop
musician Charles Mingus with his curly black beard,
growing scrubby around his mouth and under his chin but
nowhere else, the flesh showing through in small
patches . . . he wore a stingy-brimmed hat at a jaunty
angle from inside i
heard a cheerful woman's voice: "oh God?
where are you God?" i decided of course, she
is calling a pet, maybe a dog . . . she had a lonely
old lady's voice i
watched the Negro when he heard her . . . he swelled and the
distance between us shrank until he covered my entire field
of vision . . . the brown face distorted with a terrible
rage as he listened to the woman calling . . . he
grimaced, a snarl showing white and pointed small, vicious
teeth . . . he waited, huge and patient and trembling . . . "are you out
here God?" she asked from inside the barn . . .
"I've been looking all over for you"
. . . exasperated but a little timorous, as
if talking to a wonderful but feared lover the Negro expanded
in his rage so that i couldn't see the sky over his
head and the yard vibrated with his hardly to be
contained violence and he extended a large paw
overhead, gripping an old-fashioned black-painted
cast-iron dumbbell with
12 lbs. lettered on it in
yellow, and waited silently the small hinged
door at the bottom of the side of the barn for chickens
to scuttle through was pushed out by her head as she
crawled out on hands and knees "oh here you
are," she said, out of breath . . . she scrambled
out of the barn and looked up smiling, still on all
fours . . . she craned her neck and looked up with
adoration, a pleasant looking lady with gray hair
welded in a bun, and spectacles, her high-necked cotton
print dress dusty from her crawl the Negro brought
down his hand with a swooping smash, thudding the
weight onto her head again and again . . . the screams
that trembled the air were soundless and i could not
look was unable to look as i shook with the unheard blows .
. . all i could see was the rising and
descending arc of the arm and i sensed how it pounded
her face, smashed her skull, scalp and false teeth
mingling into the ground, wire spectacles ripped from
ears and pressed into the dirt, eyes and blood forced
into a jelly-like amalgam with the loosened particles
of the hard-packed ground, stuck to with straw-like
bits of manure that lay in the barnyard . . . the arm
and the hand and the weight smashed down over and over,
until i knew she could only be a body with no head then he
stopped . . . satisfied and smiling benignly, he
turned and walked away, around the corner of the barn,
onto a plot of garden to hoe weeds using a
burnished, brassy saxophone that had been hanging from
a thong on his free wrist
he disappeared and i suddenly realized i could move, it was
as if i could always move, and i found myself at the
entrance to the barn . . . i looked in at the cavern formed
by the huge old wooden beams, slats layered with dirt and
dust . . . there was straw at my feet and i kicked some
aside with a polished shoe as i strode into the barn the atmosphere
flew at my skin to rest hot and steamy . . . it was
like a night club, dim red lights and patches of
darkness and smoke hazy above my head and smell of
whiskey and beer hanging in the air . . . i was in the
center of the cavernous room peering through the
dimness i thought we were
waiting for Allen to read his poetry, but heard:
"oh
God? where are you God?"
it was the woman
again . . . she was walking around the edge of the
hall, prim and unruffled in her cotton dress, looking
contented, her hair firmly in place in the round bun
which was pierced by long pointed needle
"God?"
there were
pictures of a bearded Christ high up on all four
walls . . . he wore a crown of thorns and a grave but
beatific expression . . . as her gaze swept around the
room they slid silently aside exposing peepholes behind
them through which the Negro named God watched into the
room . . . she could not see him . . . just before
she glanced at a wall the pictures would slide back
over the holes in the grimy wood and she would see only
the pictures of Christ with their unending, blank
scrutiny, while on another wall God would be watching
her, crouching in his overalls on a high secret
platform
she gave up and
turned to me, shrugging . . . i caught a glimpse of
God grinning with white teeth and full lips through the
opening in the wall behind her
back
"look," she said, directing my
attention to where she was standing at the
bottom of a wide pit at the end of the the concrete
ramp that sloped down from me . . . it was the floor
of a night club or bar laid out so that the patrons
sitting motionless and quiet around me could watch the
entertainment . . . the music of the band was
momentarily stilled, seeming to hang in the air, as she
began her talk
a long line of
identical black girls, naked and glistening in the red
light extended across the floor in front of her . . .
turned almost sideways to me, they were beautiful,
their faces turned away so that only a black shiny
cloud of hair and a ridged, soft neck were visible, but
their bodies were almost oily in the light . . .
heavy, pointing breasts swaying; their thighs had
a soft, grainy look with the startling void of the
black patches between . . . i thought of Charlie
Mingus' beard
the woman passed
her hand over the incurved back of the black girl in
front of her, the one closest to me, over her pert
buttocks and down a curved hip and flank towards the
back of her knee
"here they
are," she said, grinning, her speech rapid and
evenly toned like the chant of a carnival barker . . .
"the girls of the future . . . we will have a new
race, nothing but colored girls and white
men" . . . she went on, reasonable and
scientific, yet at the same time low-pitched and
insinuating, like a black pimp i had met while with a
group of buddies outside a jazz bar in New
Orleans . . . he had asked, "you fellas lookin'
for some girls tonight?" softly but
strangely menacing from a shadow as we passed by on the
sidewalk near the glossy photos of black strippers in
tassels and G-strings that adorned the
doorway
"a new race," she repeated . . . "it is
the perfect way, colored girls and white
men" . . . the girl under her hand did not move,
but seemed to agree by standing there proudly
naked . . . i nodded when the woman stopped
talking; it seemed very logical . . . almost
convinced, i tried to move toward the girl, toward the
long line of waiting girls as i inhaled a wonderful
perfume i decided was civet and gardenia
the woman was
speaking again, now to the farmers that had gathered in
the barn . . . they stood there listening, slouching
in their work clothes, faces blank and weathered tan
with creases . . . a long line of identical rednecks,
wearing battered, floppy hats . . . they nodded
acceptance at her recital, restrained but eager
customers in a whorehouse
my ears burned
hotly and i even tried to buck forward on the spot with
my hips for an elusive pleasure as i thought how
reasonable she was and wanted to be
convinced . . . tried to walk but my shoes
seemed nailed to the floor and i was glued to a flat
surface behind me . . . puzzled, i begged to be let
free, a small corner of my mind thinking something
about the woman's patter was odd, but i wanted the girl
to stroke my erection as i held back until i couldn't
any more and the thick air was suffocating me but fluid
was trying to break though my legs wouldn't move but as
i tried to figure out why i couldn't feel more i stayed
paralyzed and struggled toward the girl that wanted me
to come. what's wrong, i yelled, why can't i, but
my mouth and tongue didn't move, only twitched until i
thought i forced out a gasp before i started falling,
flailing in the dark toward the floor but heard or felt
only the slightest burble from my lips as i became
aware of the pillow drool and realized i hadn't
even moved at all
Man,
that's pathetic, I thought. What could be more
pointless than dreaming about masturbation when it
could be about fucking any woman in the world? I
shifted position and went back to sleep. A few nights later
on a Friday I didn't have to work and started out at
the Tuxedo, first sitting at the bar alone, though I
knew Larry Welleck one stool over, talking to a friend,
another vet. Welleck had been a philosophy major
and got a master's degree and ended up teaching social
studies at Bryant & Stratton business
college. We talked sometimes at the bar where he
liked to drink in the late afternoon before going home
to his wife, Jill. She had once worked in the Journal Library with
me. Somewhat heavy and bearlike,
he drank mostly bourbon and seltzer because it was more
slimming than the beer
he wanted. He had gone into the army at 19 and
ended up at Fort Gordon, Georgia,
where he was considered a renegade for his intractability,
missing roll calls and such. Tall and strong, though
inclined to put on weight, he thought he could take what
they gave him, which usually turned out to be the old
standby, KP and peeling potatoes. He had gone in with
a thing about shaving -- already he had a heavy beard, but
with very tender skin -- and he had never shaved two days in
a row if he could help it. What with the Georgia
sun and heat and drill-induced sweat he developed a
miserable prickling rash on chin and throat which made it
impossible to shave. Or so he thought. After the
sergeant made him dry shave three days in a row, no water
and no lather, his rash went away -- at least it didn't seem
so important, not worth bothering the sergeant about. He started
then being what he called philosophical about life,
especially the army, though he hated it even before
combat in Vietnam and smoking dope after watching
interrogators question uncooperative villagers by
threatening their families with hand grenades. As
he learned in class later, he could be a stoic -- they
were not at all averse to pleasure -- and still drink a
lot of bourbon and listen to a lot of jazz like
John Coltrane and Stan Getz. As he told me,
he occasionally went to veterans demonstrations
against the war and I saw him sometimes on civil rights
picket lines, like the NAACP Youth Council picketers in
front of Marc's Big Boy on North Avenue protesting
lack of meaningful jobs for young blacks. But we
took for granted the Subversive Squad detectives and
the obvious cameraman in the camel's hair coat who was
filming for the John Birch Society, no doubt for some
coming superpatriotic apocalypse, and could joke about
it later. But it seemed it was
hard for him to be detached about his new wife. I
didn't especially want to listen in, but I gathered that she
just wasn't that responsive, even though ". . . I made sure
my hair was always shampooed, and my nails were super-clean,
so she couldn't complain about any of that. . . ."
But he got nothing back, he told his buddy, until
". . . I got my head down to it and -- bam! She
just about
exploded in my face. . . ." Whether they were
happier now I didn't hear, but I remembered a scene
when I was 13 or so. I had my own little room in
the cellar with an elaborate train set -- mostly
neglected as I got older -- and shelves of paperback
books the family had accumulated and an army cot where
I would read for hours. I liked Mickey Spillane
for masturbation, though I had lots of paperbacks with
corners turned over, like Harold Robbins, and had
just read something racy passed to me by the girl in
front of me in study hall. Only a few of the
mimeographed lines stuck with me after I passed it
along, apparently forever:
While hugging and kissing in the
blackberry patch,
Ted offered me a quarter to feel my snatch.
I said, "Your quarter I don't want to steal,
But as for my snatch you're welcome to
feel . . .
His balls were as large as the eggs of a duck -- They sure did the work when we started to fuck. . . .
So I thought, why
not create my own porn along the lines of Spillane's
sex scenes only more explicit? After all, I
wanted to be a writer. I gave it a try, printing
in a notebook to type later if it were any good.
Unfortunately, somehow my mother found my efforts, even
hidden in the former fruit cellar in the basement, and
she confronted me one night upstairs in the kitchen, waving it around. "What's this
for? How do you know about all this?"
She crammed my efforts back into her front apron pocket over
her stomach. I protested that I
had just copied it on a visit to my cousin Darlene's house.
I guess I thought of her because we used to play doctor when
I lived upstairs there with my grandmother, and when we got
older she used to tell me silly dirty jokes. The girls
were going to bring the buns to the picnic and the boys
bring the wieners, that sort of thing. She came into
grandma's bathroom to look at me naked in the claw-footed
old bathtub sometimes, and my sex education got started when
I did the same to her and noticed what looked like flaps of
skin sticking out of the crack between her legs. "Yeah,
sure. And is this what you're going to be when
you grow up, a cunt licker?" Well, I had tried
to be inventive, and I guess I was planning on trying
everything I could some day, but of course I said
no. After she shrugged, disgusted, and let me off
the hook I was still embarrassed, but wondered if that
was such a big deal with everybody. Maybe it was
perverse, though I had read about it in other
places. Hearing Welleck
years later reminded me that I had only come close to
cunnilingus once,
with Jenny in the drab rented room, where I planned on us
having our first full-on sex. On
the narrow day bed where she was naked and I was the same,
sitting near her hips, I did twist around and tentatively
moved my face to her stomach past her belly button and down
to the bushy dark triangle where it brushed my lips and I
was appalled to instantly perceive that I had to pretend it
was just a playful gesture. Though I had learned from
my days playing with pussy in the theater that sometimes a
distinct, even powerful, odor could linger -- like a ripened
catfish -- on my fingers, this was an ammoniacal smell of
urine that could etch glass. It did kill the
moment. Though she was always willing to do
anything I
wanted, she never took any
initiative. In the last few years she had done it
with her boyfriend and a few others, even ending up in
a van with two well-known (to me) tough guys from the
21st Street Playground and riding around
while they fucked her, though she didn't know their names.
But still, she was used to just lying there.
One of the guys was Arnie Friend, which explained why
when she asked his name he kept saying Just A.
Friend. He was known to take a table leg in
the van to carry as a club outside This Old House beer
bar in Ozaukee County where he and his buddy Ray Wetzel looked for
fights, but you couldn't say he didn't have a sense of
humor. I went to Port Washington to drink myself,
of course, where the guys strolled on the dance floor with
their beer bottles held dangling down like cudgels and Ozaukee county
posted deputies inside. I heard some national acts occasionally,
like
Kathy Young
& The Innocents singing A Thousand
Stars, something Jenny, a singer in our church choir,
attempted sometimes. I had to admit to myself she was
generally flat and shouldn't even try. While that was the
beginning of my close examining of the double standard
in her case -- I had to decide that if I wanted someone
who liked sex it wouldn't have been with just me -- I
couldn't understand the thinking of the neighborhood
guys who would brag about getting blowjobs from chicks
then call them whores and kick them out of the
car. Why not feel affection for someone who could
cheerfully suck you off? I decided it was mostly Catholic guys with a
cultural history of Mediterranean or Irish villages and
parochial schools like St. Leo's that were preoccupied
with girls as tempting sluts, a group thing, while the
Protestants -- as I nominally had been -- were
raised to think of sex as an internal struggle to be
dealt with alone and quietly. Of course, not only
did I fail at that, I stopped believing any religious
message early
on. Still, the first
time I tried for a blowjob in the car she said she
didn't know how, and seemed ready to cry about it, so I
didn't bring it up again. I thought she was
probably taking the blow part a little too literally,
but I could wait. I didn't feel like climbing on top
of her now in that stark room, hoping to get hard again, and
settled for sitting back and drinking, looking down on the
pussy she didn't try to hide -- labia distinctly outlined
under the dark whorls -- and the indented girdle mark around
her middle, until finally I had her jerk me off like always.
But I didn't risk losing my hard-on by trying to get it in.
And it felt too good to stop.
The story was that she was staying with a girlfriend, and
eventually we fell asleep on the cramped day bed, a brocade
surface very rough on our skin -- I didn't bring any sheets,
and I guess if Allan brought any for his times with Ieva he
took them home. But using someone else's sheets was
distasteful to me anyway. Even for $32 a month split
with Allan, I really couldn't afford the rent and we never
made it back before I had to leave the keys on the battered
dresser top. When she put on her skirt
before we left for scrambled eggs and coffee at a diner
on Brady St. and Farwell Ave. in the morning, she
complained about the panty girdle she pulled on, and I
told her not to wear one on my account. She told
me how glad she was to leave it off, and she never wore
it again. Soon, she generally left off any
panties, and I found out how wet she could get;
sometimes as I drove with one hand on the wheel she
would be slippery all the way down to her knees . . .
Eventually, Allan
came into the Tux and sat with me at the bar.
Looking preppy, as usual, in a new tan loden coat, in
spite of the glasses sliding forward on his thin
nose. The interior had returned to the usual late
afternoon somnolence, following the previous week's eruption
when a disgruntled, cigar-smoking vet named Bing had tossed
a bar stool at the back bar over being cut off.
Allan had just come from the new Senior Art
Exhibit in the main building, he said, that he was
going to write up for the Post, though he had to
cut his time there short for his weekly editorial conference
with the paper's advisor as the feature editor. She liked what he was doing, getting
friends and persons he knew who ordinarily wouldn't
think of writing for the paper to write reviews, like
Sam Geline the music major who played jazz piano
standards -- a Lennie Tristano type -- at a downtown
hotel bar who was a natural to cover the Fine Arts
Quartet. Too bad he had to get home to read 80
pages of Chaucer and some Boccaccio
for the 12-weeks exam tomorrow, but he would stay and drink
for a while. Even though, he said with a sigh, it was
still a doggie dog world out there. Another
Cheshire writer, Mike
Zetteler, who didn't have anything to do with the
paper, had him waiting for an article about
Paul
Goodman (later, as he mentioned, also picked up by the
North Carolina
Anvil). And he had to call and line up a civil
rights interview with Linda Quint from MUSIC, the
school integration group. At the
same time he was working on a manifesto he jammed in
his back pocket calling for more spontaneous mingling
between artists and students on campus: paintings
and sculpture scattered around in all the dull spots,
musicians strolling in small groups, playing string
quartets or jazz or something. Maybe hand-lettered
poetry on the walls of the bathrooms. No wonder he
always seemed frazzled and was talking about quitting
the paper -- possibly even flunking journalism -- which
on one level didn't surprise me since I knew he
couldn't even spell well, and was given to other coinages
such as I've got an ace up my hole and items selling
like wildcakes, though he could bullshit about visual
endeavors like cinematography -- whether The Bicycle
Thief or Maya Deren -- or art from
de Chirico
to de Zurbarán -- and impress almost anyone. It
helped that he could rush out of the house after a few
minutes in the shower and comb with his fingers his
reddish-brown hair that fell like a Kennedy's over his
forehead and look charming for just about everyone,
tall and slim with a warm
grin. But his friends
knew that a little while back when he had done most of
the mimeographing and stapling for the off-campus
magazine we put out after the censorship flap at the
time he was worried about having gotten Ieva pregnant and
their scheme for abortion and deciding whether to get
married instead that he had walked out of Fleischman's
late Lit Crit class to turn himself over to the shrinks at
St. Michael Hospital after driving as fast as he could
out the freeway to smash deliberately into one of the
signs coming at him from all directions except that he
couldn't even decide which one, they came at him so
fast at freeway speeds that he couldn't read them --
he'd needed new glasses then, though he didn't know
it. So it was zap! zap! zap! until
he was all right again, able to make decisions.
Shock therapy was in and discursive was out, the Freud
he had read and wanted to talk about ignored by the
busy doctor. But, barbaric though it seemed to
us, it apparently worked -- for all intensive purposes,
as Allan said -- and he made it back in time to try to catch
up on his term papers. Still -- after moving on from
the bus boy job -- he had lost his job driving cab, and he
still often looked harried and frazzled. As he was heard
to say, A leper can't change his spots. Some of the others
had drifted in, and we settled in the booth. We
talked about the faculty, as we often did -- Allan's
former English teacher, Miss Perlowitz, was about
to leave for Israel to do guidance work in a kibbutz,
and he fondly recounted how she used to sit on
her desk displaying chubby knees but rather nice legs that
went along with her big breasts, talking about what D.H. Lawrence had meant to her, opening her up to
possibilities when she needed it. That reminded
several of us of the Tropic of Cancer trial soon after
the Garson's settled in, when both Garsons
testified in favor of the book's local sale,
though customs and the Post Office had ruled it could
be sent through the mail. The case was lost, and
the assistant district attorney, Frank Spurges, had
gotten Bibi to admit that she wouldn't characterize any
serious novel as obscene. Outside the courthouse
Spurges prattled to the press about teenagers who were
corrupted by pornography before learning the joys of
a beautiful, wholesome marriage; he had asked Gregory Garson whether he used the same four-letter
words to his wife in the ah, . . . bedroom. The answer
was yes, as it had to be -- something about salacious
words aiding communication between intimate adults --
but it took several years for the US Supreme Court
to reverse all the state court convictions. Of course, I
couldn't contain myself in the booth, though I tried to be
as offhand about it as possible: "You know
we've been going out to listen to music . . . she gave
me a blowjob in her car last week. I mean, that's
all we did, but it was great." Strictly speaking,
that wasn't true, of course, since I didn't actually
come, but I didn't want to go into that kind of
detail. Aileen was there, and if anybody
shouldn't be offended it was she, with her active sex
life -- by now she was actually living with Jack Vogel,
or at least he was always at her apartment -- but I
didn't want to act like it was a big deal. And she
sucked my cock, while literal truth, seemed a little crude, though I'm
sure she was doing the same to Vogel, something that
bothered me and certainly left me puzzled. I'm
too crude for you, huh? So there were a
few knowing nods all around, though Aileen just looked
into space, and talk turned to last Friday's party --
Allan and I remembered it all too well -- where Jim Lerntov, a crazy, skinny art student who ran a bohemian
bookstore on Farwell Avenue, had been doing
his usual act of pulling one pocket out of his pants and
asking if anyone wanted to see a one-eared elephant, while
fumbling with his zipper. No one
ever saw him actually go through with it, but this time he
was upstaged when Allan and I looked at each other as
Allan's tall, attractive wife came into into the room in a
low-cut peasant blouse, wide hips swaying, and I remembered
the few weeks early on in their courtship when he resented
that I also had a crush on her -- flirted with her -- with
her slight accent and demure smile, still European looking
with her long hair usually in a French twist, and suddenly
we leaped -- and he was my friend -- at each other, crashing
down on the coffee table and rolling around for a while.
Then it was over, indecisively. He was taller, but I was really
strong from the weightlifting, and the table was
unfortunately almost demolished. "Yeah, I got
there too late," said Vogel. "Just in
time to see the nigger pile. What happened?" The sudden pause
was the very essence of dead silence while
everybody at least glanced at Aileen. I broke in,
thinking I could smooth things over with more-or-less
feigned curiosity about black idioms: "Y'know, I often wondered, what do -- " "Sorry,"
Vogel said to her. "Forget
it," was all she said. She drank pensively from her beer glass. "At least he
wasn't mealy-moused about it," said
Allan. I chuckled without
saying anything else, and Allan looked at his wrist
where his watch would have been had he remembered to
wear it. "Gotta get going . . . lots to do
yet." The rest began drifting away,
typical for a weekday afternoon; as Allan said, It's
back to the old salt grind.
I had a pizzaburger before leaving myself. And a few
more mugs of beer, while I pondered Aileen and Vogel.
Maybe she was taking what she aw as her personal battle
into the camp of the enemy, or proving him a fool. But
there was always the possibility that she just gravitated to
the power that whites had, and especially the taciturn
Vogel. Guys could nail a
conservative chick and it would be considered an
achievement, but for a radical woman to end up screwing
a conservative would be seen as selling out. At
least by me. But crudeness be damned, I was
still essentially a wimpy liberal. As Allan said about
his own travails, it was a tough road to hoe. I couldn't
argue with that.
*
*
*
It
was a few Saturdays later when some of us ended up at
Hooligan's after I had worked out with the weights
as I usually did three times a week when I didn't have
to work or go to night classes. It was warm
enough that I could wear a short-sleeved shirt under
the army jacket, which I usually did when I felt pumped
up. Rolled-up sleeves and unbuttoned in the front
as far as I thought I could without being too
obvious about it. It was a few of us, mostly from
Fleischmann's current Literary Criticism class. All guys,
and now that I thought about it I realized I hardly
ever saw Vogel in public with Aileen. He was driving
around with the Meissner brothers that night, and I had
Julian Feindorfer, a hulking longhaired hipster who was
already writing music criticism for any small
publication that would take it, as well as deliberately
coarse poetry, in my car. We decided to try our
luck on the West Side, but we didn't turn
up any women at any bars except the last one. And the
best-looking one, a frowsy blonde, probably a factory
worker, asked in a rather snide way why I was wearing shades
at night. Truth was, sunlight
hurt my eyes with their new hard contact lenses, and the
sunglasses soon became customary. Hoping to come
across as a hip intellectual, I said, "It's an
affectation. Meaning . . ." "I know what
it means. It looks stupid." It didn't take too
much chatter to realize we might as well leave, and we
had already talked about pizza. We stopped with
both cars at the Clark Station, where I
left my army jacket in the car and went in with Jules -- who
needed cigarets -- to pay. "With arms
like that you should be a boxer. Uh-huh," he
rumbled in his ponderous way. "You'd make a
good middleweight. Mmm-hmm." His
mumbled phrasings generally followed a similar pattern. "Never
thought about it . . ." "You been
working out?" asked Vogel. "I never
exercised a day in my life." "This
afternoon. Usually three times a week." "I still
think I could take you in arm wrestling." He
inclined his head toward the top of a barrel. "Wanna try?" "You know,
I'm really still sore from this afternoon. It
takes it out of you for a while -- but what the
hell."
Standing
slightly crouched over the blue barrel we put out our
right arms. We gripped hands and though I had a
strong enough grasp his hand was more of a paw, with
stubbier fingers seeming to go along with his whole
stocky body -- his teeth when he bared them as we bent
to it were likewise the squarish Teddy Roosevelt type,
going along with the wire spectacles he sported.
It was a standoff -- going on too long, I thought
-- until with a last effort I put him down. He shrugged.
"I give up --You're stronger than I am.
Wanna try the left?" We
went at it again and to my chagrin he won, exhaling at the
same time. "I guess it's
a draw," I said, mostly to be charitable,
since I didn't think the left arms really
counted. We headed to the doorway and out to the
concrete drive and past the pumps. Our next stop was at Lisa's Pizza on
Locust Street, where the five of us met up again over a
shiny black Formica-topped table to shovel in
pizza. We'd had plenty to drink, and Lisa's only
served soda, so we made do with that. Jack started
getting belligerent again. "You know I'm
left-handed?" Implying, of course, that he
had beaten me after all since his right arm was
naturally weaker.
"So? I
said I was still worn out from working out today.
That makes us about even." In the meantime
the waitress had collected our money and I was mulling
out loud over how much to leave behind for her. "So here's
the tip." He picked up the chromed napkin
holder and snapped it harmlessly off my chest from
across the table, and as I reflexively grabbed the
Pepsi bottle from the table he heaved up his edge to
force it toward me but I brought the bottle down on his
head at the same time and expected it to break like in
the movies. It just bounced off. He seemed
not to notice it but the four of us collectively realized it was
time to get out and headed for the door, fast, a bell
tinkling behind us as it closed.
With Julian next
to me while I shifted through the gears on the
underpowered Beetle
I yelled something about knowing where to find
them. Of course, it was just a guess, but we were
on the East Side where we all went to the same few
bars. "First I
gotta stop and get something." I came out of
my apartment with a souvenir my step-father brought
home from the war, an ornate Japanese officer's sword
about two feet long, half of it a handle bound with
maroon cord, in a lacquered black wooden scabbard
scattered with flakes of glitter. By then Allan
Jensen -- always able to con his way higher after
screwing up -- was working as stage manager for the Skylight Theatre and he
had borrowed it when I lived with
my folks for the production of Bizet's
Pearl Fishers
in the suicide scene -- it was the only thing he could find
that showed up big enough in silhouette behind a screen --
and I had kept it at my place since then. "This'll
take care of him." With the sword
between the front seats I drove us around, Julian
trying to calm me down while maintaining his cool
image. We didn't find their group anyplace; in
the meantime between shots at the bars I was chugging
my stash of warm port wine in the car until I felt a relaxation
creeping over me and then even drowsiness. Bars
were near to closing time anyway, and I gave up -- not
knowing what I really would have done anyway -- and
dropped off Jules and then found myself at home.
Then in bed with my clothes no doubt scattered around
though I didn't really remember much after I stumbled
through the door. Face down in the dim light
flopping to one side, then the other. Eyes closed and
spinning going on behind them I kept seeing Vogel's
face and hearing his sardonic barking laugh and
pictured an impassive Aileen watching him while he
dominated whatever group we had been in last -- the
Tuxedo -- and the face of an unreachable,
impossibly cute Anne-Marie swimming to the forefront, prim
but with glossy lips, as nausea surfaced from a deep pit.
I had apparently put the wastebasket next to the bed as I
often did in the old days when I was learning how to drink
was heaving then the pizza and wine in a bubbling mix of
bold rosettes that made me think of bread and wine, a kind
of anti-communion for the lost Anne-Marie and her crippling
religion, at least where I was concerned. Fucking Catholic
cunt had taken up with a North Shore guy who
was graduated
from Dominican High School and going into city
planning or something like that, even though he and his rich
buddy liked to drop speed and drink Jack Daniels while
riding around on BMW bikes. I guess you weren't
boorish if you had enough money, just wild. I wondered
if she were at least holding out for marriage.
With a sweat pouring out of me as I took deep breaths
to hold off another alcohol boot, mouth copiously filling with
saliva, swallowing fast, then I was gone into sleep.
*
*
*
After
she moved out, Jenny's parents thought she shared
Aileen's apartment on the ground floor, though we
lived together one floor up with the two cats from the
Humane Society she had begged me for, and an illegal hot
plate. I ended up in grad school in English,
figuring with a masters degree I might teach someplace,
like Larry Welleck. I was too insecure about
appearing in front of a class to apply for a teaching
assistant job -- and I didn't have any tweed jackets or
corduroy ones with leather patches, and in fact took
out two small National Defense loans for a total of
$1000 -- so I kept on with the cab driving while Jenny
was in school. Though I had gotten good grades
even with sleeping at home during morning lecture classes,
instead reading textbooks and some supplemental stuff
at the school library, she was struggling while aiming
at nursing school. Prospect Avenue,
once a street of mansions, was now more one of high
rises or older, seedier homes converted into smaller
flats, often with apartments or furnished rooms to
rent. Some were nursing homes or combined small
offices with living quarters. We started with the
traditional mattresses on the floor -- I found it
hard to get used to sleeping next to another body and
kept my own for a while, hurting her feelings -- but
she also snored a lot unless I jabbed her hard, and I often stayed awake anyway,
drinking and writing or reading poetry. We got
comfortable enough with each other so that if she had her
period she would just scrooch down where she was
standing and deftly slide in a tampon
Since I had even dropped out of school for a semester and
worked in the factory so she could catch up and we would
have at least a year as students together -- and I didn't
mind the extra time for just hanging around the bars after
second shift, either -- I guess it was just a romanticized
life I was trying to live as intellectual bohemians, that
would catch on with her as she really began to study and
learn the college material. But she always had a hard time; even her taste in art
didn't progress much beyond Northern Tissue babies or
wide-eyed Keane waifs. Of course, I was a clich� myself, with bullfight posters
and
Feininger prints
from the bookstore on the wall, evoking one of our cats, but at least I was picking up on some things -- reading Sartre and even working through
Finnegan's Wake -- as I came to
realize girls were purported always to the smarter pupils in high school just because they
weren't troublemakers like the guys.
In reality, they could be stupid. So it was really a kind of
play-acting as two arty bohemian students that got me to set up
the rarely-used chess board on one of the mattresses to
start a game, though facing her with a short skirt
riding up her thighs exposed a filigree of dark growth
that I soon had to reach for, and the game was
forgotten. As the certain loser, she was happier anyway. About that time the
UWM
Post printed a letter from Bibiana, which
resonated with me, since I knew that realistically I
would have to keep going for a PhD at some other
university -- continuing at the same institution was
discouraged -- where it would be harder to pay tuition and
fees and make a living. Other than that, the
future was bleak for English majors; the most I could
hope for was at some company with a managerial training
program, but I hated the idea of a conventional job in
business. Bibi wrote:
Maturing
Absurd
To the editor:
Student complacency at UWM
might be more understandable if
they had something to be com-
placent about: like an exciting per-
sonal life, a satisfying work ex-
perience, esthetic or religious
thrills, or a future that promised
any of these. But, as far as I can
judge, their lives are dreary.
If our students were struggling
out of abject poverty, we intellec-
uals could "forgive" them their
mediocre materialism. But they
come from skilled workers' fam-
ilies, and better. If after leaving
UWM they were going to enter
the elite ruling classes of high
finance, high society or high poli-
tics, we might even envy them, or
get righteously indignant. But
looking at the POST's list of Cam- pus Interviews, I see that this is
not the case.
Our graduates can look forward
to becoming part of the beehive at
Northwestern Mutual Life In-
surance Company, (rearranging
papers on a desk?), the sterile lab
oratories of The Upjohn Company
(testing Milk of Magnesia?), or
the respectable black board jungle
of the Jack Benny Jr. High School
of Waukegan, Illinois. (Are they
kidding? How debased our edu-
cational establishment is!)
No wonder our students are
apathetic, complacent. They are
"growing up absurd" in an absurd
culture defined and dominated by
the vulgarities of business, tech-
nology and kitsch. Most of their
elders lie to them daily. Three
cheers for those who dropped out
-- into SNCC, the Peace Corps, or
Bohemia.
Bibiana Garson
English Department
|
How
could I argue with that? Clearly she had missed
her calling as a hip guidance counselor, though I
thought of life as rather exciting, not dreary, at the moment -- the
Post had run an article on student sexuality, and
Jenny and I read that we were cohabitating when it
was almost unheard of among students, which seemed
to give us at least a start on the bohemianism Bibi
advocated -- but how to live without much effort, or
at least on my own schedule? Artists and craftsmen
-- maybe leather workers or jewelry makers -- might be
able to swing it, but I was a long way from earning
anything by staying home to write novels, which is what
I dreamed of doing. I knew a glass-blower named
Terry Yelves that hung out at Barney's and went to a studio --
an old barn -- in Door County in the summer where he
sold to tourists, and guys who could paint houses, but
I was stuck. Life magazine came out
with a photo spread on Beats who were doing what they
called going underground, and I told Bibiana that's
what I wanted to do, maybe in Chicago, since I couldn't
stand the thought of more reading and writing about
some obscure writer -- I tentatively chose Edna St. Vincent
Millay from the choices -- to construct an
acceptable thesis. I had been in school for what
seemed like a decade and wanted to work on my own
stuff. She and
Gregory Garson thought I would like the Hyde Park
area, but the few poems I published locally or
regionally meant nothing as far as a career. Only
Robert Bly
at The Sixties was moved enough to
respond with any personal insight -- and that was to
call me a watered-down Bukowski and chide me for not
sending him anything that showed I was paying attention
to his droll observations. The short stories --
though they went over well-enough on the
Cheshire
level -- were rejected by the literary magazines where
I methodically sent them.
Still, I lucked out when by
virtue of still being in grad school I qualified for a
work-study program working on the index to a literary
encyclopedia Bernard Fleischmann, head of the
Comparative Literature Department, was writing.
When he went to Europe for the summer they
kept sending my checks even though I didn't have to
turn in any work and I knew I would drop out in the
fall before anyone could call me on it, though it
had been up to him to assign the manuscript pages I
was to scour for author references.
So I could give up the cab
driving and drag home a case of beer every other day or so
and type and re-type my stuff and send it out and watch
the sun rise over Prospect Avenue and the
lake -- the sliver I could catch out of the side
window, since we were in the rear of the building --
every day until I crashed. Old people in
their wheelchairs and tied to their beds in the
nursing homes on either side of our brick building
would moan and curse the attendants, voices carrying
through our screen windows, and our older tomcat
would leap in through the small panel I left open on
the door to the flat roof outside our second-floor
apartment most mornings. Jenny
came home in the afternoon to cook and we would sometimes
have sex, maybe go to a movie at the Downer Theatre or
Downtown to sneak her into the crowded
Barney's on Friday nights --
after midnight -- for raw beef sandwiches.
Sometimes she just ended up dozing off there in the
car
while I drank and socialized inside, even if we couldn't get
the few brandy and Cokes that
would have been enough for her.
I had
been with her one way or another since she was 14, and
though I had been getting drunk and jerked off for
years on the weekends, I had my uncertainties about
dealing with more sex until I experimented by fucking
every day for a week or so -- which was fine with her
-- until I slacked off, realizing how thoroughly bored
I had become. In any event, the real excitement
had been gone for a long time.
But I always marveled at her capacity to come
almost at will, and in the general sexual ignorance
of the time, I speculated that she maintained a
natural pathway to vaginal orgasms because she never
masturbated. After all, she claimed she never did.
Still, after crawling in
beside her more and more often with the sunrise, I
began sleeping with her all the time, keeping a worn
bedspread on my pallet and using it just for
study. I craved some variety, though, speculating
about almost every female we socialized with. I
could occasionally get her to humor me with a blowjob,
but if -- as I often did -- I would half-joke
I
think I'll come as she leaned over my legs
with her bare ass and its dark, swampy cleft in the air and sucked she would pause
and say
Don't you dare.
One time we were almost done,
still early in the evening and with the lights
uncharacteristically out, when someone knocked at my
door and in the crack underneath it in the lighted
hallway were what had to be a pair of men's shoes,
creaking with a substantial weight. I figured her
parents never really believed she was living with
Aileen -- her father had tracked us down once when we
were dating to a showing of Elia Kazan's
America,
America at the
Oriental, where she said we would
be, expecting to catch her lying.
Of
course, like most of us on the left I considered Kazan
a snitch for his testimony to HUAC, and
On the
Waterfront as a self-serving brief for informers, but
it was an American film serious enough to see.
Watching the door we stayed
as quiet as possible, only her head moving
enough for her to finish me off through several more
rounds of subdued but determined rapping, and the
shoes finally moved away without a word being said.
We never knew who it was for
sure, though we figured it was her father, checking on
whether she really lived downstairs with
Aileen, but
of course she was never there.
Unusual events like that could heighten our
desire for sex, especially if I hadn't touched her
for a while because I couldn't turn it on right away
after she had made me mad. Even though she would do
what few chores she felt like doing while stripped
to the waist.
"Quite looking at my tits," she would say to
goad me as she moved around the room, half-heartedly
dusting.
And mad I would get, over her
housekeeping
habits,
primarily -- she had sworn up and down that she
would faithfully clean out the cat box, but so many
times I would find myself unable to tolerate the
clumps she blithely overlooked -- smelling the acrid
ammonia fumes -- and do it myself.
And she would trail in her wake what
seemed like a rain of scarves and jewelry and makeup
items and papers and God knows what else, while I would
reflexively restore them to where I thought they should
go. Not that I couldn't tolerate the growth of
dust bunnies or the filmy windows or her dirty
ashtrays, but those did take extra work, where she just
created disorder when it could as easily have been
avoided in the first place.
"Jesus Christ! Would
your mother leave the sink like that?" I
would say, or bring up whatever the day's irritant was.
"Nevah," was her usual chirping response -- she
though it was cute, like a lot of mannerisms that
had lost their charm. And of course, we knew her
mother, like mine, was a cleaning fanatic.
"You just want me to be
Jenny Robot, pick this up, pick that up . .
." She would go into her machine imitation,
moving stiffly. Truth be told, she was good about
doing laundry -- maybe because she just wanted to get
out of the apartment -- always offering to take mine,
and making the bed. But it would go right past
her whenever I would point out that it was just as easy
to keep things neat as she went along. After all,
I always did. Of course, she couldn't be
bothered to put anything on the grocery list when she
used it up, and it became exclusively my job when we
went to
the Sentry
supermarket on
Oakland to make sure we
were supplied.
Kraft Dinner, the makings of tuna noodle casserole for
sure, an occasional steak.
And one time she asked flatly,
"Would it make any difference?"
Meaning, since she sensed my
growing indifference -- though my sex urges were about
as frequent as ever, only with fewer preliminaries as
time went by, more of just bending her over the
cast-off furniture, Then would you love me more?
Well, though I could be evasive when I had to be, or
very legalistic, I always had a hard time lying, and
after a long mental review of all the women I had
been lusting after, I had to admit that no, it
wouldn't.
Hell, if I walked the hall at
UWM and saw a woman with a blouse
gaping where the buttons were kind of far apart I
would change course to follow her for a while for a
while if I thought I glimpsed a part of a rounded
breast without a bra. And I felt I couldn't blame
myself too much for my lack of overall affection,
since she never had any trouble coming no matter
how perfunctory I was. Which, though rare, was
really how it should be for women as well as
men. After all,
we didn't demand much and didn't expect to be
complemented ourselves on the mere ability to enjoy
sex.
It was during that time that she would
infrequently wake up while I was still alert myself
to start a disjointed conversation. She looked
foggy, and I would generally tell her to go back to
sleep. Once she peered at me in bemusement: "You
have circles in your eyes."
I realized she meant my contact lenses, and since this
childishness seemed more than a little odd I probed a little
further on a hunch, asking what her name was. It turned out she
was Renée. That
was actually her middle name, and after that
since I knew she was, in effect, sleepwalking, I saw no
point in doing anything but gently getting her to lie down again. And I had recognized her state
as closely aligned with an activity I had abandoned a long
time ago: hypnosis. Even as a boy I had read
about it in one of my Uncle Homer's men's magazines when I
visited my cousin, Darlene. He always kept
copies of True and
Argosy on the coffee
table, and though I believed the article mostly
fantasy, I was curious enough to check out library books
that detailed a history from Mesmer and
Charcot through
military psychologists who used it to treat what was called
shell shock to fairly modern university
research. Having established its
legitimacy -- hypnosis was once used in everything from drug-free
childbirth to painless dentistry, including the antics
induced by stage hypnotists:
Cluck like a chicken; Sing a song instead of saying your name if asked your
identity -- I knew I had to
give it a try. I became familiar
with findings that came from experiments designed to
convince skeptics who held that subjects wouldn't act
against their own best interests. Never mind that
stage hypnotists had been humiliating stolid citizens --
admittedly pre-selected and tested -- in ways no sane person
would voluntarily put up with. These professors risked a lot by
having their volunteers commit petty crimes, like stealing
from purses. Of course, they
were discrediting the notion that subjects were somehow
aware there was no real danger in trying to grasp
rattlesnakes, since they could see the supposedly invisible
glass, or somehow saw through the experimenters who could
apparently trick them into attempting dangerous acts,
or were merely trying to please by putting on displays of
shivering from extreme cold or, the popular classic -- in
some circles -- of beating the heat by removing clothing.
Probably to take a convenient shower.
The element of trickery was important, since it was
recognized that a direct order to do something outrageous could
make the victim balk and wake up -- common terminology,
though it had been established that the connection with
actual sleep was superficial. A person acting under a
post-hypnotic suggestion -- a very real event -- gave no
evidence of sleeping, and someone handled by a competent practitioner would engage in aware conversation
and acts without any sign of a trance except, of course,
extreme suggestibility. So I made my first move --
really not expecting it to work -- with my younger
cousin, Georgie, in a dim bedroom at my house.
Conclusions about who made a good subject were
controversial, but young boys and adolescent girls
were generally considered good candidates. And
sleepwalkers. But
certainly not, despite common beliefs, unintelligent or
weak-minded persons, whatever that might mean. It took
a certain amount of intelligence, after all, to follow directions and
keep one's mind clear of distracting thoughts.
But I was certainly astonished to have a 10-year-old in my
dim bedroom start responding rather vacantly to my
conversational questions, and following the few commands I
could improvise to test him, being unprepared for success.
Inducing him to give silly answers to my queries about his
name and age, for example. But I didn't want to risk
jolting him into self-consciousness with something too
vigorous, since I had used the common sleep-inducing
technique -- though without the clich�d dangling pocket
watch found only in bad movies -- and wasn't sure if I could
convert him to a more wakeful state. Even if experts
did it all the time.
But from that time
-- after some serious follow-up reading -- I had an
activity, if not quite a full-fledged act, to beguile
friends at gatherings when no parents were around. In
addition to our clandestine beer-drinking. Of
course, with friends -- and especially boyfriends --
watching, I couldn't go too far in the way of having the
girls take off even their tops by making them think it was
getting hot or they were alone and getting ready for bed,
though I figured I could. But I could make people seem
to disappear and at least stretch the guys between two
chairs, supported only by heads and heels. With these
kinds of results I knew I could, in effect, create future
unwitting participants with post-hypnotic suggestions that
could be activated by phone or even letters.
Such commands had to be reinforced over time, of course,
if not actually activated, but they could persist for
quite a while, as in the little-shown but horrifically
accurate 1962 film
The
Manchurian Candidate, with Laurence Harvey,
Frank Sinatra and an incestuous
mother, Angela Lansbury. There, an
innocuous Queen of Hearts was the trigger.
I also knew that major law-enforcement agencies
were well aware of illicit uses of hypnosis, but I
believed I could at least be smart enough to exert
some powers without attracting attention. For one
thing, subjects in a post-hypnotic trance were very
clever at manufacturing rationalizations for the
most outlandish behavior, so stealing for me or
sexual acts might well be possible. I could
easily leave such an instruction in place, and no
one observing would even notice. After all, I used
post-hypnotic suggestions at my sessions already
just to make it easy to put my participants back
under with the snap of a finger -- and it was true
that my favorite and most susceptible reactors were
some of the chicks that always hung around with the
group. An enjoyment in dominating otherwise
frustratingly sexually aloof females, I imagine,
that made me especially patient in demonstrating my
prowess, though the guys were always there to look
ridiculous if I wanted to use them. Still, I was
scrupulous about removing all such future possible
influences from everyone's minds before the party was over,
though of course the care I gave to having them remember the
experience as enjoyable and deeply restful ensured a
repeating supply of subjects.
The
sleep-inducing technique came about -- and was
successful -- because, though young myself, I had a
rather deep and, when I wanted it to be, soothing,
some might say boring, monotonous voice. Not like
the stage hypnotists who worked with a loud,
overpowering tone under bright lights and noisy
conditions.
But even I later employed a method myself closer to theirs of tricking persons to go
under, not against their will -- which was considered
impossible, in the absence of an already-implanted
suggestion -- but surely without their consent, in the guise
of what was purported to be only a test of their ability to
comply with a practitioner's directions. This involved
some forceful, rapid talking and instructions to willingly
close eyes and blank out and just listen to commands that
had you imagining falling backwards and trusting the circle
of onlookers to catch you, and eventually being unable to articulate your
correct name. My buddies thought it was fun to supply
newcomers whom I could put under this way.
So did I, at first. But I became increasingly uneasy
at whatever power I could wield, and soon eliminated
most of the potentially humiliating aspects, and never
called upon any of the girls for any nudity or anything
sexual, even covertly. Tempting though it might
have been to have a sex slave, the idea of someone
following my wishes not of their free will repelled me,
and seemed to make for a barren, cold relationship that
could ultimately leave me alienated even from the world
itself.
Strong, perhaps, but the idea was chilling.
And so were certain consequences of a trance:
Subjects were unpredictable, and could be unnerving.
They were usually very literal in their interpretations,
but with variable results. You could tell someone that
when she woke up so-and-so would not be there.
Sometimes I would say you won't see him. Sure
enough, she would usually ignore anything the other
party said and did, even making excuses for his
non-appearance, but sometimes she would hear the
disembodied voice, which could freak anyone out. Just
because I said you won't see him.
And it always nagged at me that no one ever came up with
the definitive explanation of what hypnosis actually
is, though theories abound. From Freudian
childish regression to simply succumbing to a barrage on
the senses to the apparent disassociation that
accompanies sleep and its dreams. And indeed, one
could talk to a sleepwalker and lead her to a demonstrably
hypnotic performance.
But the mystery -- and ultimate neglect -- no doubt
stemmed from our ignorance of even the normal
functioning of the brain while we had a
growing ability to
predictably control it through drugs and simple duress,
even as we more surely dealt with disease. You
could add to this the simple ineptness of many a
would-be hypnotherapist, said to have been the
reason Freud himself gave up on it.
So by the time of Jenny's displays I had lost interest
in undue influence over anybody, feeling it an
alienating experience. Even though I had in our early
days found Jenny to be an easily and deeply manipulated
target. And the idea of a woman subject to my
sexual whims on demand had become more creepy than
anything else. Especially since I could get
anything I wanted, sexual or otherwise, through
conventional means. At least from Jen. If I had a failing in her
eyes, it was that I didn't want enough from her, that
she was no longer that significant to me. After several
sleep-talking episodes that I
told her about -- she had no memory of them -- she
pondered about it for a while and decided the fugues
surfaced because of a deep conflict: "You know I told
you I never masturbated -- I think I wanted a way to tell
you I lied . . . it was really a lot . . ."
Of course, it didn't really matter, and this general
indifference of mine meant it was inevitable that she
should move out to Allan and Ieva's on Cass
Street. They had gotten married with a baby on the
way and they had a room for Jenny in exchange for
some babysitting. I had ignored her more and more,
not wanting to make her feel dumb, but she was very
defensive. I pointed out that I knew very
little compared to the Garsons, but I didn't resent
them -- just the opposite -- for what I could learn
from them. I remembered an evening when Gregory had been
discussing Wisconsin poets
Lorine
Niedecker and
Harland Ristau, whom I as an
undergraduate had never heard of. I was a little
discouraged about my pace of learning, and Bibi
was slightly amused, making me cringe by calling out to the other room:
"Hey Greg, Don wants to know when he'll be as
smart as you." But her
defensiveness was a long-time theme with
her; when she was 14 and I was in college already
and 20 years old she wrote in one early letter:
. . . .I'm sorry that you were sick last week.
I thought about you alot
and I hope you will make it
all worthwhile this coming week. Even though I'm
"illiterate" I can still put down on
paper what I want to say. I'd give anything to be able
to go out at nite with you and have my mother not care
but I guess "Love in the Afternoon" is the
best I can do a present. . . .
But I don't know what
made her react as if I called her
"illiterate." I guess I was more overbearing
than I thought. I wanted to get laid, after
all, and I wasn't dumb enough to insult a girlfriend in a
relationship as tentative as this unless it was just
banter -- but she called things
off anyway, on her own, saying I really was too old for
her. It was two years after that we started
going out again, but this time her mother intervened,
saying she had to wait until she was 18, changing her
mind only when Jen turned 17 and was about to
graduate. So we could see each other, if
only on weekends, and her letters started
again:
. . . .I thought alot about you today. I'm sure going to miss you this week just
like last week & the week before. . .
.
Did you ever notice how I skip
from subject to subject. I feel very self-concious
(sp.) writing to you because I know
that you notice my terrible sentence structures, lack
of transitions, and my limited vocabulary. . . .
I'm getting quite a few hints
on the art of "making love" from this book
I'm reading. with a little practice I should
become quite adept. Of course I'll restrict my
practice time to the time spent with you which never
seems to be enough. You always said you needed me
but that I didn't need you. Well, I think you're
pretty well straightened out now & I am starting to
need you more and more. I love you Don, I'm sure
of that & I know that I want you & now I really
do need you. You're so quite sometimes that its'
hard for me to say these things in person.
I can't wait until Sept.
when I can quit Allen-Bradley & go to school which
means I'll also see more of you.
I
hope you didn't mind me
dragging you to that picnic Sun. At least you made me happy
by
COMING
----------
to the picnic. . . . That
concludes this irratic effort . . .
I was a little taken aback by the mention of being all
straightened out, since I had mostly forgotten the
performance anxiety that cropped up when I worried about
following through on our first spontaneous session. Even
though I got a stifled laugh once when I couldn't help
calling myself the incredible shrinking man after a
movie we had just seen.
I knew I was rather
withdrawn around her -- though I hoped not overly
critical -- mostly because everything I was learning
was beyond her and I didn't enjoy just lecturing when
what I wanted was a good discussion, but at the time I
figured that would come later. At least I had her
pointed toward college. And I had my own place, moving out from my parents' in time to get drunk
on the Fourth of July and toss those firecrackers down the
stairwell. Celebrating independence, of course,
and the freedom to fuck like goats. But a sign of
her struggles to come might be in the next letter where
she writes of her entrance tests:
I
don't have to go back tomorrow, it's for those
eleigible to take the English test to be exempt from
English 101. I'm not elegible because I only got
a 60 on the ACT in English . . .
And she wasn't
self-conscious about writing that summer that she
wanted to lose some weight, that she had about as
much resistance to food, sex & sleep as a wet
noodle. And with her last letter before
moving in I realized that I was probably dealing with a
girl of rather unusual sexual intensity:
I went
to the doctor to-nite fir my physical for U.W.M.
I never had a real physical before. I wonder if
any other women get "hot pants" from a
physical. Christ, the way he moved his hands
around I thought I'd croak. . . . he weighed me so I
have definitely decided to go on a diet . . . . I miss
you so much during the week, honey . . .I resent every
bit of fun or enjoyment you have away from me . . . .I
think I'll go to bed soon. Then I can dream about
you. I may not be perfect but I'm trying to learn
to be the girl you want me to be. I sure hope
you're happy with me as I am with you.
All my Love Always,
Jenny
Oddly enough, it was the same Possley family doctor who
played a role in her moving in. Her parents thought it
was outrageous for her to even locate in the same building,
and relented only to the point of suggesting they ask the
doctor -- who had a daughter about Jenny's age -- what he
thought. They stipulated to
following his opinion, not worrying much about it. As
it turned out his daughter was away at college in Madison,
and he thought it was perfectly all right for her to move across
town, no matter if I was so close by or not.
I did have to wonder if her moist, cozy session with him had
influenced his friendly attitude, while I was looking
forward to a lover who could get off rubbing it
against the corner of the sink.
So she moved in, and
though she was still cuter than almost any chick I had
met, her desire to please me didn't always extend --
and she had very black hair -- to shaving her legs and
depilitating the dark growth on her arms often
enough. Still, I didn't really want to control
her, just wanted to be left alone at times. It was pointless
to try to interest her in something I was reading --
though I tried with some poetry by Dylan Thomas, which
I even had on a record, along with Karl Shapiro's
In
Defense of Ignorance -- when she had to go to every
class and take notes while I slept late and skipped
lecture sections we managed to take together except
the first and last days of the semester.
And I still aced Econ 101 while she scraped by, and couldn't
understand how I -- with some knowledge of Marx
and Engels from a philosophy
course, honed by the Garsons -- could
question a few tenets of capitalism in class. Similarly,
in a more playful manner, I would use some notions I learned
about in Epistemology to try to get her to question the very
truth of reality. But she quite sensibly
maintained nature was concrete and predictable, and any
philosophers who claimed otherwise were crazy, or trying to
fool you. And none of that Veil of Maya crap, either.
Ironically, it was when we dropped acid years later that she
granted that those thinkers may have had a point.
But what this materialism of hers -- and mine too, I had to
admit -- meant for the notion of free will, she didn't know,
though she accepted that too. Even if, as I
pointed out, a universe of cause and effect didn't alter its
mechanics just when it was convenient for us to think so.
As Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim concurred with
Gen. Rumfoord
about the necessity of firebombing Dresden:
"I know, everybody has to do exactly what he does."
Which explained, I noted, why some of those reductionists
could believe that free will was an illusion, that thought was
something that just occurred a millisecond after an
action. An epiphenomenon, as it was
termed, that accompanied our already determined
impulses. Thanks, Dr. Ross. Ultimately, though, such speculation
was only rewarding in the beer-soaked sessions of cosmic
import I had with other students holding scholarly
pretensions, usually in a bar. So I learned early on
not to look to Jenny for intellectual badinage, though
she understood when I explained my resolution of the
free will versus determinism debate: It didn't
matter. We acted the
way we acted, and couldn't do any differently even if we
were aware of forces pressing on us. Such
awareness merely became another influence, in an
infinite regress, yet we still had to act. An
enlightened society made exceptions for inescapable
compulsion -- the proverbial gun to the head -- but
otherwise we had to live with the everyday results.
Coerced or not. As Bibiana said,
"So what if you knew everything was predetermined --
what would you do different?"
I knew I couldn't argue with that. But if I was
too remote for too long Jenny would let the cat box
fill up while the smaller kitten would make it worse
by scratching out his crap onto the linoleum, or
drop her own clothes and accessories wherever she
felt like until I would explode -- a few times,
anyway -- and swing out wildly with a clenched fist
at whatever part of her was closest until I was
spent after some clubs to the body.
As she frankly admitted years later, "Sometimes I
deserved it and sometimes I didn't." But it was certainly a
frustrating way -- for both of us -- to get attention,
and more and more I thought something was wrong and I
shouldn't be with her. And she was the
only woman I would ever hit.
The cats turned
out to be a further bother when we discovered way in
the back of a deep, dim closet where we tossed rags or
at least unwanted clothes that they had been using the
pile to piss on. Close up it reeked, of course,
but we didn't notice until Jenny went way back with a
flashlight to look for something. More surprising
-- though it wasn't unusual that she had been walking
around naked -- she said that on some sort of impulse
she had sat down on the old plush floor cushions to turn the flashlight on her own
vulva.
"I could see
what it really looked like inside -- I'll never
ask you to do anything . . . to do that to me any
more. I can understand why you wouldn't want to .
. ." It was true that I
could find the occasional cunt in pictures or real
life to be cute, a defined groove at most with
chubby outer lips but the rest tucked away, hair neatly
trimmed and not a wild thicket -- but some were more
like a gravy boat filled with night crawlers.
Such a critique, I felt, was matched by the
description I had read -- seconded by a girlfriend
-- of the male genitals as resembling a pile
of turkey giblets. But
with her I had mostly noticed how a true brunette
with white skin shaded into red and dark red edging
the black pubic hair, a private view that was a
little flick of knowledge.
So I was surprised, mostly because I had generally
ignored anyway what hints she had been making that I
eat her pussy, and didn't know it was an issue. It
was hard to get to, not like her nipples, and it
always did what it was supposed to and left my face
and moustache dripping to the point where I didn't
really feel right about kissing but didn't know
whether to wipe it off. And with what? I
thought that might be the equivalent of her spitting
my come, which she had never done. Especially since
she came as fast as she wanted without it, anyway --
I would just stroke until she went a little loose
and I would ask, "Did you come?" She would nod
while letting out a softly exhaled "uh-huh," and I
let myself come too. So
I guess I ignored her hints while plunging ahead. But I could still feel a little guilty since I had
even gotten her to douche. I had read enough
women's magazines in their homes, since I was a
compulsive reader, like Cosmopolitan -- I
would read Ladies Home Journal if that's all I could
get my hands on -- to know it wasn't medically
necessary, but given the direction of the plumbing
and the role of gravity, I felt uneasy about being a
backup cleaning system.
And it seemed they all got yeast infections eventually,
or trichomoniasis -- which at least one insisted on
pronouncing trichomonas -- or chlamydia.
And TV advertising emphasized the need to feel
fresh. Anyway, I didn't
invent the concept of douching. So it was only in the
abstract that I eyed delectable young ladies and
thought I want to see what you taste like. In
reality I didn't want to bother.
And my fastidious nature wasn't challenged then by
anything more outr�: It would take until the '80s to realize
times had changed when I read in Cosmo that ladies
should prepare for their bouts of anal sex by inserting a soapy finger.
But then I could feel superior, having picked up on
the merits of such personal everyday hygiene years
before when reading Kerouac's
Big Sur, where he mocked the general populace
for not cleansing with soap and water and going around with "dirty azzholes." As time went on she took more and more
solace in her favorite albums, played on our beat up,
green leatherette-covered record player: Barbra
Streisand and West Side Story. Nothing to
be ashamed of, but I soon tired of them and had my own
to get drunk to when I had written enough -- or tried
to -- for a session and wanted to get to where I could
sleep -- shutting her out with the
Dylan Thomas and
Edith Piaf and
Joan Baez
and the first of several
copies of Carmina Burana. After first hearing
Thomas read I would often think of some coincidentally
appropriate lines of his when I left some semen in her
hand or on her face, calling forth my Quivering Prince,
or prints -- though I doubt any woman picked
up the reference. In the same
way I realized I could stump just about everybody by
asking what city in Wisconsin was mentioned in a
Dylan
Thomas poem. If I were feeling helpful I would
tell them to think villanelle, but that's all.
There wasn't much
besides music and sex to do, anyway. Since we weren't married I
couldn't take her to the tavern with me -- otherwise
legal in Wisconsin for underage spouses and children --
and though in earlier days I made it to Barney's
or O'Reilly's or Hooligan's
every night after second shift it was mostly to line
up someone for the weekend. I was actually very
domestic and wanted someone to live with so we would
only go out to eat or drink on an impulse. I didn't
want to plan my free time just so I could be sure of
getting laid. Of course, with anybody new I
had to structure time for dates until things worked
out; at least whoever it was would know that we were
going to screw on a regular basis. Generally Friday
nights, and if it was on Saturday and we spent the
night together we had Sunday before getting up to
get in enough sex to last the week. Drinking at home could get out
of hand for me, especially when I was alone; once
she came home and I was contentedly balancing a tumbler
of bourbon and seltzer on my stomach sitting up on the worn mattress
and blasting
O Fortuna because, as I told
her, I had realized a pattern in my series of short
stories and figured out how I could interlock them
through one narrator into a novel, yet peddle them
separately. Thin stuff, but I was happy for the
moment, though all I got was an uncomprehending
"Terrific."
I gave her a
copy of my latest story, set in our old neighborhood,
and when by way of opening a dialogue a few days later
I -- somewhat slyly, I thought -- pointed out,
"There's a certain amount of hostility toward
women there," all she said was, "No
shit." Rather
sullen, I noticed. Of course, I had been wrapped up in
my writing for weeks. But then, considering her
struggles in English class, I should have known not to
expect much in the way of literary criticism. All her
papers were getting low grades, and she was having
problems with her English professor, a Dr. Kathryn Whitford.
An unforgiving harpy, to hear Jenny tell it.
Still, I knew she
cared about me a lot. I was dutifully working
out three or four times a week, rolling down an
old quilt over the apartment floor for padding, and when I had
progressed to the point where I needed some short
pieces of something for more height from the floor for
heavier deadlifts she struggled home twice from a nearby
construction site and up the staircase cradling some
rough concrete blocks. And far from resenting my
drinking, she knew it mellowed me out and encouraged it
by asking whether I wanted a beer whenever she got
herself Cokes from the chained and locked fridge in the
hall we shared with the lesbian couple next door.
Another guy up on the third floor also used it.
Generally I didn't accept, since I kept to my own
work routine, but she would often make me boloney
and cheese sandwiches if she thought I might want
one.
But I at least had hoped I could find someone
who could entertain herself, since while I hated
conforming to timetables or punching a time clock I
had to compensate by setting my own patterns and
rituals to concentrate on the important work of the
moment, even though it looked like all I had was
freedom. Other people put in their hours at
work -- or in class -- and seemed pretty carefree
the rest of the time and didn't understand why I had
to be so businesslike except when it was clearly
time to let go. But she would even intrude on
this remoteness, sitting or moving around half-naked
until she knew I was watching with a growing interest
then half-heartedly covering herself, pretending modesty,
suggesting, "Oh no, the mystery -- " But with her the
sex could be over really fast, lights on and TV
babbling away, and she would be left on her own
again. Maybe falling asleep, but several times
when we were still side by side, sticky and relaxed, I
would see the tears collecting and falling down her
cheeks. "What's the matter?"
"I always think it means you still love me."
But I had no way to manufacture a fascination
with her where there wasn't any, and I didn't try to
talk her into anything when she hinted at moving
out. Before she did
finally leave she said flatly, though she was somewhat
tearful, "I'm never going to
be an intellectual. I'm . . . never going
to to go down to the library to check out the latest
poetry books. . . ."
I couldn't argue
with that. Anyway, there seemed to be a lot of
women around now that I was taken, and I had scarcely
admitted to myself that she could leave -- though I
feared that at least l might get really horny again
and begin to imagine what I would do to her if she
would turn up at the door.
But I could let her go because I had the
built-in protection guys had against blatant sexual
manipulation: It took a while for real horniness to
take over, and until then it was hard to anticipate
feeling deprived. And you could always imagine a
new lover in the picture, even if there were no
actual candidates.
But underneath everything I had to admit that if women
really controlled life and could demand the most abject
worship in return for pussy, I would do it. If
that were the only way. Fortunately, the world
wasn't made so that men were that powerless,
and if someone showed a tendency to test me with
unreasonable demands I would immediately balk.
Even as she was leaving, bitter at my indifference and
convinced it was my nature, there was a part of
me that wanted to say, But you don't understand,
I've got this big bloody heart that I want to give to
someone and be deeply in love with, it's just not you.
. . . I did advance the bucket theory -- that my
affection, apart from sex, was like a fluid that
slowly dripped into a pail. Keep tipping the pail
and there was never very much to enjoy, but let it
alone and don't test it for a while and it would
eventually fill up to come splashing out to surprise
us both. Never seemed to happen, though she claimed
to have tried it.
But there was still
another complication: That fall I'd had a skin
infection on my groin, for no apparent reason except that the dry
skin that I grew up with that spared me from much adolescent acne
sometimes caused a lot of scratching -- and maybe
her over-vigorous fingernails carried something too
-- and it started to flare up. Anxious as I was to get rid of any
blemishes on my balls I would compulsively peel
the skin -- as with a sunburn
-- layers that came back worse
than ever and I would drink until I could fall asleep despite
the pain I eventually caused, and usually in the morning it would feel
OK. Scabbing over again. Finally, one night that didn't work -- the
pain was still excruciating -- and Jenny drove us to
the emergency hospital on 25th and Wells Streets,
where the examination brought back to me the line, "One
was so small it was nothing at all. . . ." There I
got some pills, antibiotics I assumed, though I never
was told exactly what I had. I mentioned the
sleep problem and the doctor gave a me a small bottle
of Nembutal right then.
I washed down two
with wine that night, and soon drifted away. The flakes
cleared up quickly, and I restrained myself. I was
apologetic about the scabs that had even encroached on my
dick, and reticent about sex, but she hesitantly revealed it
actually felt good to her. But after that when I had to get up
early for an exam or something and knowing how hard it
would be, I would take some pills and drink wine and go under
while playing my most stirring music.
Capriccio
Italien, for one, and the heavily emotional
Warsaw Concerto.
Smart-ass that I was, I found I could irritate even
musicians when I stumped them by asking who the
composer of that one was. Bonus points for naming
the British movie that contained it; double bonus
for the American title. When drunk I would forego the
more cerebral Dvorak and Schoenberg records I brought back
from the Garsons, sometimes just wallowing for no real
reason except youthful weltschmerz.
Sadly, the older cat, the orange-striped Max Orion, didn't come
back one morning, and we pictured him squashed by a bus,
but the little gray one -- eventually left behind by Jenny, though
it was supposed to be her responsibility -- was still
there, planting both front feet in his food dish and
scattering it when he ate. That was why we called
him Pig, and he was especially annoying, since he
hadn't been properly socialized and squirmed and
struggled whenever I picked him up. Though he would
creep into my lap when I was sitting up in bed and
knead the thin blanket covering my legs with his front
paws and suck contentedly on a nub of fabric, purring
away, that's all he would permit. No
petting.
half in
a fog and then mostly blanked after washing down some
sleeping pills with port wine and plumbing the depths of
sound, realizing how the kids could take downers at a
concert and still stumble around awake as the blasting
music was more exquisite for having penetrated layers
of drugs, saying I only want to be affectionate, come
here you little bastard after it jumped out of my arms
and away and I tried again but it would have none
of me and I started lighting firecrackers and tossing
them as he ran around the room and eventually hid under our
one old easy chair as they got closer and I lit one and
pitched it underhand under the chair where it exploded as he cowered
ungrateful little fucker until I settled down for a while in a
stupor and he eventually crawled out blood and drool
trickling from the mouth and stealthily onto my
lap . . .
I felt terrible when I woke
up the next day, of course, not only because of the
hangover, since I thought I couldn't abide cruelty
to children or animals. Bullying may never be
right, but adults could look out for themselves or
at least were on notice that they should do
something or suffer for it, and that was the way it
was. I had been pushed around myself until I bulked
up.
"Well, goodbye . . ." were Jen's final words
as she lingered in the doorway -- probably expecting
my last-minute protest -- before taking her
remaining few possessions for the short trip to
Allan and Ieva's. Even if I hurt a bit, I could never
directly say so; I would just come on a little romantically
until we were screwing, and it happened that way soon
enough at the new place. But for the time being,
I had decided to finish another story -- rounding off
the lot -- and polish them again on the portable
typewriter. I generally ended the sessions
by drinking, and if I was too much awake beyond
that, listening to music -- immerse myself in the emotions,
actually, of Tchaikovsky warhorses like his violin concerto, or even
Ravel's Bolero, but I felt
everyone did that once in a while. I
envisioned Anne-Marie or Aileen or even Barbara Firley
from St. Leo's Grade School, all pussies I thought I
wanted to eat at one time or another. Somebody,
but I wished Jenny would appear at the door.
Allen and Ieva
were my friends, of course, and were were still part of
a group that published an off-campus magazine, first
rather effetely called Milieu, then -- maybe
even more pretentiously -- riverrun, as
Milwaukee at least had three main rivers. By this
time, Julian Feindorfer had taken over exclusively as
editor, writing around the country to get submissions
from established poets. One that he actually got
was Charles Bukowski's
Fire Station poem, while
he allowed each of us to print a few of our own. So we
gathered for discussions, or just to party with other
graduates.
Allan allowed as how he was dumpfounded at the job
Jules had done.
And he was happy that if any errors made it into print
he wasn't the escape goat any more.
Jenny was generally there, of course, and
though I knew she was always loyal when we were a
couple, she didn't have any compunction about
getting laid when she was unattached -- either
because she just liked sex or because she wanted to
validate herself with anyone who paid her
attention. The difference to me was important,
though I never came to any conclusion. But it
wasn't hard for her to get responses -- while I had
to follow all the traditional routes, with lots of
empty stretches.
So it wasn't
unusual that we should end up together for the night,
after the first time when I came over early and she was
doing some ironing in a filmy white gown that swirled
openly around her, naked otherwise.
"I guess I
shouldn't be doing this," she said, pulling the
robe shut over the prominent pink areolas. She was still putting the hot iron up when I
came around behind her, twisting her head back and toward me,
adding a nuzzling the way women did while prolonging
the pure groping of her tits and grinding her ass
into me as we approached something more mutual. Lightly I pinched and
rolled her nipples around, while she smiled a
little. "Is that a banana in your pocket or do you
have an erection?" Since her humor
hadn't changed much since she was 16 and sent me a
Hanukkah card, though neither of us was Jewish --
unlike a lot of the students at Washington High, where
we both had gone, and the surrounding neighborhood in the
Sherman Park
area -- I assume she heard
that somewhere recently. She tended to like
chanting the Beans, beans, the musical fruit
rhyme, and drove me further up the wall when I would
come out of the bathroom -- no matter if it was late in
the evening on a date -- by observing I bet you feel
10 pounds lighter, though of course in that context it was not relevant at all, and you'd think she
would figure it out from my blank-faced shrug. Not the femininity I
pictured when I thought of the tantalizing Anne-Marie, or even
Aileen.
She always had her
own kind of wit, though usually of the loudmouth,
putdown type: Not too swift, are you? would
be typical, except -- as she pointed out -- around
me. Then she was the opposite of her usual
bowling-queen, factory worker type. But I was
careful those days only to come on physically; if
she responded, I wouldn't be caught asking for anything more
permanent.
Even though she was fucking Matt Wilensky and
dating some others I barely knew about, I didn't
care at the moment, though when Wilensky was over
there at night I had qualms. One of those times she
asked why I was hanging around when obviously
Wilensky was waiting for me to leave, and I had to
tell her truthfully that earlier he had asked for a
ride home. A blow to her ego I didn't mind
delivering. I
had to add haltingly that I hoped she was taking care of
things so that Matt hadn't been staying with her right
before I did. And leaving his own distasteful
quivering prints, I thought, jealousy and hygiene
mingling in my thoughts. So I guess I projected
some ambivalence as we drifted back together, letting
her look for a new place for both of us.
The old building
on Prospect Avenue, famous as a party house
known simply by its number, 1833, was being
converted into yet another nursing home, and I had to
move anyway. So we ended up in the lower front of
a four-unit building on E. Kane Place, on the
Milwaukee River bluff and behind a similar building on
the street in the front.
Eventually it would be remembered by some as the home of
Jeffrey Dahmer's last victim; before that, Kane
Place and the Avant Garde would be
featured by local writer Tony Hozeny in the stark short
novels Driving Wheel and
My House is Dark.
And quirky local reporter and columnist -- for the
Sentinel and alternative press -- Michael Horne
lived for a while in the same building, down the street
from the original hippie food co-op that became the thriving
Outpost Natural Foods on Capitol
Drive.
After we relocated, I was
driving cab again, my work-study job over, and I
threw my earnings, meager as they were, into a coffee
can after every 11-hour shift -- or, generally, around
dawn -- to add to Jenny's wages from Allen-Bradley
to pay the rent. It was a lot more than we were
used to spending as students for the two-bedroom,
furnished flat with appliances. But her return to factory work made
it possible to afford, even as I chafed under images I had of the
view the farmer saw plowing behind two horses in a
cartoon I had seen, complaining about the same old scenery,
walking behind the horse's ass with the same view as I
had of the same old butt in the air on our ratty
bed. 
Even if I
occasionally had her go down on her knees and crawl to it in
front of the tall, circulating fan on a stand on the kitchen
linoleum for whatever variety I could think of, it was more
to humor me than anything else, with a face almost as
endearing as ever looking up, occasionally flicking to my
eyes with her own doe eyes to gauge my pleasure as she
remembered to employ her tongue on my sac. It could
bring to mind the satisfying refrain, "The other was large and won
prizes." But I had also been noticing her nose
was more pointed than I liked, nostrils a little too
prominent. Still, I
was off in my mind somewhere thinking of how it would
be to have someone to really talk to. Aside from
bill-paying and our jobs, we didn't have much diversion.
Just a cheap dual-speaker radio I bought at Arlans discount
store, the old TV that sat on a crude bookshelf with my
paperbacks, and the battered phonograph.
The radio, I made a point of specifying, would go with me if
we split again, since I paid for it.
She received that remark in silence,
shrugging.
She cooked some
meals and I did the dishes, then read the paper, while
she watched TV until her bedtime, shows like Ed Sullivan and
The
Fugitive. Mostly I would type and re-type my rejected
poems and stories.
The factory didn't do much for her intellectualism. She would come home
sweating and
strip and flop naked on the floral-print soft chair,
the screens on the rear wall facing her letting in a
little cool air from the Milwaukee River,
while I sat on the couch opposite her, revising my material
with the portable typewriter on my lap.
From near the brush-lined water, bugs -- the smallest living
bits of green I've seen -- somehow made it in through even
the window screens.
Slumping down to spread her legs a little, talking maybe
about her foreman or whatever. Once she quoted a
fellow line-worker, a married black woman who said her motto
was, "When the weather's hot and sticky, that's the time to
dunk your wicky." I took the hint -- it
didn't take much -- but reading and some desultory
attempts to write during the mugginess occupied my limited
time when I wasn't cab driving. And there was usually
that case of Weber beer to be worked on.
So it was no
surprise that I didn't object when she moved out again
-- she always had her parents' home to go to -- though
it meant a lot more cab driving for me, usually two 11-hour
shifts a week, and less
writing. But the manuscripts were coming back as
fast as I sent them anyway. Almost as irritating,
though I had gotten rid of the sloppy gray cat when I
moved, she had stuck me with another we called
Killer. Also gray. We kept him inside,
where his annoying qualities included leaving dark, wet
footprints in the bathroom sink where the faucet
dripped -- to his fascination -- and on the patterned
oilcloth on the kitchen table when I was working.
Butter couldn't be left out, of course, covered or
not, or it would be stuck to with gray hair. He did learn to retrieve crumpled
pages and cigaret packs when I tossed them across a room, at
least for a few rounds of fetch before he grew bored. But because it seemed most of the
Humane
Society cats came with fleas and ear mites, it had
became my task to wash him in the sink with a special liquid
and swab inside his ears with a lotion, once a week,
tolerating me and the Q-Tips, even though he lost his cat
�lan, pitifully soaked to half of his dry size until I
toweled him off before he could scoot off, still damp, to
crawl in the dust under the bed. Something he
immediately did anyway when released.
Occasionally he would get out, and
I wouldn't have a clue where to look, but little kids from
one of the two adjacent buildings would bring him back to my
door. I had no idea how they knew where he lived.
Sometimes I came home at dawn and sat in the doorway to the
hall in the middle of the building and drowsily drank beer
while the sun rose high enough in the east to be warming and
some of the same kids -- I scarcely knew whether they were
boys or girls or what unit they were from -- would huddle up
against me in their thin jackets, everyone very cheerful and
cozy for the moment. Soon the beer would take over and I could
go in to sleep while leaves drifted down like weightless
brown and golden wedges.
But I couldn't
keep up with rent, and I didn't need the extra room,
shabby though it all was, and I started looking for
another place. At the same time I applied for --
or least was on the lookout for -- different
jobs, hoping for one a little more in keeping with my
degree. But I was surviving, and I knew that
although it might take a few weeks, I would encounter
somebody to go out with and that I would get laid
again.
So every so often
I had to explain to myself how I ended up about to
marry Jenny.
It started with
the flu, as I said later to those who would ask.
By then, I had a line on a
job at The Milwaukee Journal and had given notice
to move when I succumbed to that year's flu, a virulent type
that flattened me and then left me unduly weak as I tried to
gather my stuff and look for a new apartment. A
cubbyhole was all I wanted, but suddenly all effort was
beyond me. As
time ran out, I called Jenny. In all sincerity, I
asked if I could just park my belongings and myself at
her new place a few blocks south on Brady Street.
By most appearances she was
happy, with a female roommate, though she told me later
that she had moved home and waited for me to get
in touch.
"When you
didn't call at my mother's I figured I had to do
something -- I wasn't going to live way over there and
have her waiting for me to come home every night, and I
figured it was over for sure."
Of course it never occurred to me
that she was expecting anything, but I certainly wouldn't
have made any domestic overtures.
So she found
Sherry Lerner, a slightly younger UWM student who had
an older brother, a disk jockey on WOKY who had changed
his name to Peter Wolff. Rather plain, her main
distinction was that she was taking the Pill regularly,
though she was a virgin -- without a boyfriend -- just
because something could happen real soon and she wanted to
be ready. So of course, she appreciated
Jenny's expertise, and the apartment above Mary's Diner
on Brady was just right for both of them -- and on the
bus line to the Journal Co. on State Street. Jen herself had moved on from
Emko foam -- first suggested by Aileen as better than her
haphazard approach -- to the newly popular Pill. This
time the chatty gynecologist seemed very concerned that her
boyfriend might find her too tight, which could have been
flattering to one of us. But she had to volunteer
that, if anything, the opposite was true, which at least he
attributed to her extreme lubrication.
But with two bedrooms it left
only the couch in the front room overlooking the busy
street -- George Webb's hamburger parlor and the
A&P supermarket on the other side -- for me, though
at least I could pile my stuff in a heap in the dining
room. The malaise dragged on, though I was soon
at least well enough to think about getting out -- the
Journal
job came through and I started as a library clerk,
doing research in the files for reporters and sometimes
the general public, whose calls we took because the
paper wanted the citizens to think of us as the
purveyors of fact -- while Jenny had her own
life. It turned out the library -- sometimes
known as the morgue in movies -- was staffed mostly
with young women, hired because college students taking some
time off when they weren't sure anymore what they wanted to
do in life were somewhat more educated and capable than kids
just out of high school, but still willing to work cheap.
At least for a while, until they went back to school or
drifted further into bohemia or got married.
Men like me, with
or without a degree, were rarer, though not
unheard of -- some didn't fit anywhere else and
stayed for decades -- and I passed the 35
words-per-minute typing test with some finagling
by management just so they could qualify me.
Jenny and Sherry,
who had some contacts through her brother, were by then
taking trips to Chicago and various clubs, though neither
could drink legally. It was there Jenny met a
stocky, light-skinned black guy, whose name immediately
went past me when I met him at her flat, though
all the freckles and reddish hair made him distinctive
enough. She said he was
Adam Wade's cousin, and
part of his entourage -- they had met at one of Wade's
shows -- and she had been going down there to see him
for a while until he came back with her.
Well, all right --
the Journal Library after all was
full of women, some of whom told me they liked my
newly-adopted sport coat and colorful striped-shirt look, a
change from beatnik utilitarianism -- until I went to bed
the first night on the couch just off her bedroom in the
front. First I drank my usual
six-pack or so after coming back from Ehlert's tavern
just down the block. There was no door between
us, just a curtain and it wasn't long until I heard -- or imagined I
heard -- the thrashing and rumpling and murmurs that
seared themselves into my brain as what could only be
his mounting her and her lifting her legs and
responding with her hips as she always did.
Probably reaching a hand down and cupping his
balls. Or maybe not. Maybe they were just
talking quietly and simply shifting to get comfortable,
but I couldn't stand a second more of it and went for
the phone. The mental picture was unbearable.
She said later
that she thought I had just called an old
girlfriend, but the only place I could think of
on such short notice was my mother's in West Milwaukee,
where she had an extra room, mostly used as a showcase
for some antiques and collectible dolls. By then
it was early morning and I had to work that day, but
she didn't question me much and just sleepily said sure when I
asked if I could come over to stay until
tomorrow. So I slept amongst the polished
showcases after taking the carefully-costumed dolls off
the high, solid bed, itself an antique.
The room with its air of old, well-preserved sterility and
the frozen dolls was a sharp contrast to Jenny's vivacity,
writhing far away. But what to do the
next day? After work, still weak from the
illness and distraught, I called Jenny and said
bluntly, "I think we ought to get married."
Simply, I had
thought that if I were that horribly, sickeningly jealous I
had to be in love -- Journal cuties forgotten
-- and might just well give in to it. I did
wonder how yet another singer, first Al Jarreau, now
Adam Wade -- a Johnny Mathis
sound-alike with a few modest hits -- had intruded on my
life, even if not as directly, though he probably added to
the freckled, rutting intruder's appeal.
She didn't give me
an answer then, naturally enough, but we made a date to
meet at Kalt's on Oakland Avenue
the next night.
I had my clay stein of
dark German beer while we ate corned beef sandwiches --
caricatures of famous performers, mostly at the Fred
Miller Theatre next door looking down on us -- as I was
mostly silent, since I had no real reason to try to
convince her of anything. I knew what she felt.
"Well, Don,
you know marriage means forever. And I have to
tell you I was, you know, pretty promiscuous when we
weren't together."
I knew that, of
course. Fucked half the East Side was more like it,
though I figured I would have done the same thing if I
could. "Well, at least there won't be
any surprises," I said. But I was having
misgivings already, opportunities at the Journal Library rising in the distance.
And there were those unbidden pictures in my mind of her
fucking those guys I used used to see her with on campus. There had
been a rally of feminists one bright noon hour when some
actually burned bras or anything symbolic they thought
appropriate, tossing them one after the other into a
flaring trash basket. It drew a crowd to the edges,
myself among them, where I saw her rummage in her purse and
shrug and sacrifice a blue box of Tampax. The event
brought us face to face and in talking I mentioned the
twinge I felt when I saw her around with one guy or another.
As she had told me one time, not taunting but almost
dreamily, "There's something about young men and their
bodies . . ."
"They may be friends, but I know sooner or later it's gotta
be one you're screwing. Maybe it shouldn't hurt, but
it does."
"Donald, you take sex too seriously," she had claimed.
Now that was a thought. Of course, I wanted to be hip
and like others in our supposedly liberated generation, but
while it might have been an option if I could always find a
cooperative partner at will, the fact was it took time and
planning. My best scenario was a week after a breakup
to hit the bar again and find some chick to talk to.
Then a date on the next weekend to establish rapport.
Even in those fluid times, another week or more -- if all
went well -- to get to the bed. So it was a serious
business, though she seemed blithely unaware.
The corollary was that she thought of me as more desirable than
I really was. So she was quickly
speculating on dates, planning how soon she could tell
her parents, and before I knew it I was engaged to get
married in June. "What about Maurice?"
I asked, remembering that was his name.
"I know how to get rid of him.
I know what he hates." She looked a little sly -- smug
-- and I decided not to ask, though she had insisted on
telling me how he preferred to get inside a woman and then
never ejaculate, just wait until she came -- if she could,
considering his inactivity, and by her own hand -- and then
pull out.
So I surmised it had to do with his manhood, or lack of it,
though I didn't want to dwell on the details. I assumed he
would be as chastened as I was when she once demonstrated how
cooperative good sex should be when she went all passive and
limp, to prove her point, and I quickly wilted in the
middle of the act. The ring could
come when we got around to it, and though I found a
small apartment in a red brick building festooned with vines on the Oakland
bus line where we could live together for a while, she
eventually moved back home for the symbolism of coming
fresh to the marriage. How could
I argue with that? But first we
cohabited in that already-hot spring month in the stifling
small room with no cross ventilation, where I left the cold
shower running continuously and the bathroom door open to
cool the air. We were shocked by the ceiling
collapsing, saturated, dispersing plaster dust even covering
the oven from where we salvaged her tuna casserole.
So she inadvertently left me
to revert to my bachelor ways at the Downtown Journal offices on State Street,
where I tried to block the looming future marriage from my mind.
There was a Sentinel
night copy girl -- the Sentinel and
the AP shared the
block-sized building -- named Matty. Her skirts were a
shade too tight on an ample rear, often exposing tops of
dark stockings rolled down to just above the knees on
plumpish white thighs when she sat down backwards on an
office chair to chat. She
was still getting over her black boyfriend, who had
been a student killed in some sort of mysterious police
action at a university dormitory in Stevens Point -- all
that she would volunteer -- though she would ride around
with me in the sports car on days when I was off, even taking me to the
boyfriend's family barbecue in Racine. I was the
only other white person. So she used me, holding
out the possibility of grabbing those big tits someday,
but I was plunging much too quickly toward a
marriage. And I wasn't black, while, as she said
candidly, the deceased and his buddies treated me
like a queen.
And a rather ditzy
blonde -- just out of St. Joan Antida's Catholic school
for girls but already pregnant, it turned out --
started shortly after I did, and I supervised her in
one of the staff's simple chores, using a ruler with a
handle to clip out articles for marking and
filing. With her long, straight, yellow hair --
no dark roots for her -- I found Eleanor really
appealing. I thought of her as the Dutch girl
counterpart of the little Dutch boy I saw in
myself once when I stared at my reflection in the grade school
window. The idea probably came
from an image in a book, since my family mainly emphasized
their German and Bohemian heritage. But though she was actually
Polish, it turned out that I was also Dutch and
French, one distant ancestor having moved to Holland from
Bremen and married into some newly-arrived
French Huguenots, founding our line as an
aristocratic-sounding de Bourghelles. But Ellie's coming baby had a father
in the picture: Mac Ristic was
a surly painter recently graduated from Layton
School of Art, who was
moving with her to the East Side, and she
soon quit. Still, our paths
crossed every once in a while, leading eventually to an
aborted affair. But clipping newspapers was not her
forte, though whether out of simple ineptness or the quick
boredom of the gifted, I couldn't tell.
Our brief fling came after an abusive time with Ristic when I
ran into her walking to Glorioso's deli on
Brady Street. She was enthusiastic about astrology, as I
soon found out when she eagerly offered to research my
chart. Only to immediately turn cool when she
learned I was a Scorpio.
Apparently the stars said we weren't compatible, though I
liked her fine, and at my diplomatic
quibble one night with the scientific basis for that
finding, and who decided this stuff in the first place? immediately
concluded I had proved her point and leaped from the couch.
I was too skeptical and scientific, a
real journalist, always needing answers
when there were many things that couldn't be explained, like
who wrote the Bible. Not really
true,
I wanted to point out. Starting at least with the
Nicaean Council in 325 AD, where books of the
Bible were
said to have been voted in or out, lots was known or at
least speculated on about individual authors of scripture.
Even if it was just conjecture. And far from being a
dedicated scientist, though it was my job as a reporter to
ask questions, I was perfectly content to live without the
answers, while it was the astrologers who needed even a
pseudo-science to deal with uncertainties. Already I was wistful
over her winsome doll face and impressive ass packed into
tight jeans decorated with cursive gold embroidery, slipping
away as I
realized it
was futile to try to grapple with
her viewpoint, and so it was all
over with us. Immediately
after her hall door closed I was glad I had returned the
copy of Linda Goodman's Sun Signs that warned
women about
Scorpios:
"Just behind
his frosty reserve is a huge pot of boiling steam that
bubbles and seethes continually"
and
"If you're in love with a Scorpio male and the word passion
frightens you, put on your track shoes and run as if
King Kong were pursuing you. He is."
But on the other hand, I would read, not necessarily, as
the whole book was a masterpiece of equivocation.
But I still had to get back my copy of Paul Goodman's
Nature Heals, though at my almost immediate knock she brusquely
demanded to know, "Who is it?" Even while damn
well
aware who it was.
And that was
before I had the right opportunity to confront her other
quirk. Like only one other woman I knew -- one I had
met at Barney's -- she had avoided ever
being naked to the waist, even wearing a nightgown that she
kept buttoned down the front. She always stopped me from fondling whatever
breasts she was concealing there, the few times we actually
made it to bed before her blowup. Since it was clear
she was self-conscious about their small size, I quickly
decided to ignore them and bare her thighs and whatever else
I could expose there, happy to find her modesty didn't
extend to her genitals. She had
left her young son with her mother, so with Joan Armatrading
singing Down to Zero on her small record player on the bare
floor of her bedroom, Mac's coveralls still on the back of
the door -- though she claimed he was out of her life -- we
had barely satisfactory sex. But then, I subscribed to
the theory that even when it's bad it's good.
Though she had the sensitivity after a while to turn off the
deeply lugubrious Armatrading, whom I actually liked, I had
found her shrinking-violet act off-putting enough to take
the spontaneous excitement out of everything, and hardly
managed to get it in. But I had
learned a long time ago that squeezing the base of my dick
would force it to be hard enough to at least slip past the
outside lips, where the right motions could allow the
pleasure to take over and I would stiffen more and let go
and soon be pumping away. Still,
after my tentative thrusting she surprised me when we were
sitting up side by side, backs against the headboard, when it was over by remarking,
"I don't know whether you know it or not, but I climaxed
then." This was startling enough, since she was quite
passive, but also because I don't think I ever heard a woman
call her orgasm a climax in that kind of intimate conversation.
But of course the relationship was already doomed, though I
had studiously avoided any mention of her tits until she
would specifically acknowledge what her problem was and give
me an opening to reassure her, whatever it took.
With only one other coupling in my own bedroom, it didn't
happen, though I would always retain the fleeting impression
of a small but perfectly adequate -- in my opinion -- breast
under my hand in her delicate black bra before she immediately flinched and moved
my palm away. So I never got to explain that tits
could be tiny and yet be cute just because they suited their
possessor. But the
Library also employed the tall, rather sturdy Betty
Chesak, though she put me off when I joked around and called
her my Tawny Goddess. Still, she was clearly
flattered. And we could at least talk about the
Chicago Symphony and its latest director,
Jean Martinon, since she loved the classics. But she
had a boyfriend, a violinist, and was happy just to pass on
some of her poetry once in a while when she learned I had
published some myself, and theoretically helped edit
Feindorfer's magazine. Like most of us who
were at home there, she enjoyed learning new and obscure
facts, and I did find out that she was another who couldn't
recall Richard Addinsell, much less the movie
Dangerous
Moonlight. Or Suicide Squadron. The only other poet to have been in those
environs for a while I actually knew: Jerry
Berndt from Madison. Also a filmmaker who showed
his first film at the UWM Student Union.
Word got around all too soon that I was engaged,
since Jenny sometimes came to pick me up in the new
white Triumph we had bought even before the wedding,
with her credit at Allen-Bradley's credit
union. I was never going to get my hand up Mattie's
skirt to the smooth white skin that somehow looked damp when
she flashed a bit, and I never had much time to get to know anyone
else, though candidates drifted in and out over just those
few short months. Some, I knew,
wouldn't care about my marital plans. I realized the
rare attractive female reporters who came into the file and
reference area for help didn't even look at me much, maybe
out of a sense that they were superior, though I was as old
as some who had started reporting right out of college.
I thought about calling the
engagement off, with common sense coming back, at least
partly from a conscience that said it was the right thing to
do before things got more complicated. Though the sex was exciting
again for a while, I knew it was only because we had
been separated and I hadn't been getting
laid. I came the closest to bailing when Jen came to
visit on the East Side and we sat in the
car before I took her home after quick afternoon sex when
she just pulled up her skirt and I had some of the old time
urgency and where she cried again.
Her hair was in a dark shag cut, and her small, darting
tongue and bright lips -- she was always olive-skinned in
the summer, especially -- made her adorable, as usual, and I
traced a light pattern on her dappled cheek in the sun-baked
car with my finger. The kind of touch she always
liked, and she looked pleased. I
decided maybe events would provide an excuse to split
someday, when I wouldn't feel I was to blame, but how could
I bring myself to back out now? So I found myself
being married in the small Methodist church near her
house, with Allan Jensen the closest we had to an
official photographer, and Bibiana and Gregory Garson in
the audience, then in
the basement of the church for
cake and refreshments but no alcohol -- the church
didn't approve -- where we unwrapped their
Fugs
album. Then to her parents' house.
Plenty of drinking there, before our getaway to the
Hilton Downtown for the weekend and more
drinking for me, even a rare bottle of wine for the both of
us in the restaurant, where I played at sniffing the cork
before eating the prime rib and baked potato. Extra
for the sour cream. At the Possley's we
circulated in the front rooms, doors and windows open
to June sunlight and breezes, for a while standing with
my Uncle Al, who had married my Aunt Marjorie after the
death of her first husband, the detective. I had liked
my Uncle Stephen Whitty, though having been a cop who had
even been in the paper for a shootout in a house on the
West Side, he could
be intimidating -- especially when he warned me about the
pitfalls a juvenile delinquent would face. So maybe it
was fitting that I stole his gun from my aunt after he died. But he had his whimsical side.
He liked to tell people, "I may be witty, but the guy who
wrote Snowbound was Whittier." That
usually led to his other witticism: "I'm a poet and I
don't know it, but my feet show it -- they're Longfellows." Uncle Al, a gruff factory foreman well-liked by the
family, stood with us near
the staircase -- Jenny still in white with white teeth
heightened by her tanned olive skin, I in my dark blue suit
and striped blue and white tie -- while he proffered
advice, much as he had when he went with me when I was
18 to buy a used car. Not knowing how similar the
circumstances were:
"You know,
marriage is forever." Shit, I thought, that
seems to be the common sentiment.
"That's a long time."
My stiff bourbon and seltzer in a large tumbler rimmed with
gold tinkled as I gulped it. The Possleys had brought out
the good monogrammed glassware. Combined with the
drinking at the hotel it wiped me out at the end of a long
day, and there was no sex on our wedding night, though I
surprised myself with a never-to-be-topped -- not even close
-- five rounds of sex the next day after a morning swim in
the rooftop pool before checking out.
If she was disappointed that splaying her naked legs out on
the bed with her dress pulled up and the black patch between
them like spilled ink so obviously available, it was soon forgotten.
But our married time wasn't to be that
long, after all. Jenny had found us a place on Bartlett Avenue
on the East Side, and we were back to work on
Monday. By that time I had gone from working days
a few in a row, then nights until 11 p.m., to
volunteering to take all night shifts. I
could drink when I got off and sleep late and still get up a lot more easily, the only thing that
made it possible to last some 13 months. That was
about as long as I could hold any job.
There were diversions to keep
us going. A variety of drugs was becoming more
common, and people at Hooligan's and
O'Reilly's and
Barney's were sharing. Though I had gone from
being a beatnik to the young gentleman, I thought --
befitting my white sports car, complete with driving
gloves -- even sending for a book of Esquire
tips on dressing correctly where I learned how to tie
my shoes with laces pointing down like little trees and
tucking in my shirts by making a fold in the back before pulling up and zipping my pants, unlike TV and
movie actors who were always stuffing their shirttails
down past their belts -- hippies were moving in.
I could read about them in my own paper, as returnees
from the coast talked about starting up their own local
underground press, and the first be-in was held at the
lakefront in Juneau Park.
And I had sold my weights to
Jenny's brother, knowing full-time work was all I could
handle, and smoking again as well. I could stay at the
bars afterwards. Now that we were married she could
even join me, using the car herself if she needed to, though
she was liable to fall profoundly asleep and neglect to pick
me up for hours.
Pot was all
over, and speed was popular, and people would drop over
occasionally and we would drink beer and listen to
everything from the Jefferson Airplane to
Chico
Hamilton, a house-warming gift from Matt Wilensky. Or we
would visit other couples. She had made a friend,
Gail, at UWM, who dated and then married a part-time
bartender named Cecil. He took classes at UWM and
worked nights at Stauffer's, Downtown at the top of the
Marine Bank high rise on Water St. and
Wisconsin Ave.
overlooking the city and far onto the lake. He could afford a really nice apartment, since his
method of tending bar included ringing up premium drinks one
step below their listed price and dropping the extra quarter
into his white shirt pocket. All night long.
Once on a Saturday
afternoon Cecil stopped in while I was drinking a pint
of wine and gave me a Black Cadillac and we went off to
the
Shag house, where they lived, mostly,
and rehearsed
for their gig at O'Brad's on Locust Street.
There was a hookah burning some grass in the middle of a
floor scattered with cushions, and Cecil said they were also
stoking it with opium. Already heart
pounding from the speed and a little dizzy from the
wine on top of it I crouched down and inhaled a few
times. When I stood up all I could think of was
that I had become a rising human thermometer while my pulse raced
and all the pressure was ascending my spine to my head in a column
of pleasure I had never experienced before and I felt my
face must be glowing bright red. Evidently I
looked normal, because I could relax a little and slide down
with my back against the wall to sit in silence while conversation went on around me
until I could lurch to my feet and leave for supper. It was Cecil who,
before he married Gail, told Jenny about her idea of
sex, which was to put down a towel and lie flat on her
stomach while he entered her from behind as best he
could until he was finished. It didn't keep him
from getting married, though Gail herself even asked
Jenny if she came every time she did it.
"Of course, she was expecting I would say no, or something
like that, and when I said yes she shut up real fast." I had to point out that Cecil's
scenario shouldn't be that surprising -- we knew couples
where the guy was always insinuating that he wasn't getting
enough and the woman would be coyly letting it be known that
he wouldn't stop trying to corner her. But the truth
was, her attitude gave him the pretext to proclaim his
studliness. Just let her keep him milked for a week or
so and see what becomes of all that ardor, I said. And
it wasn't likely that the guys hadn't found out about their
partner's tepid nature early on.
At Cecil's, Jenny and
I finally dropped our first LSD. The first half of the
experience was delightful, like good pot, until Cecil
-- who had plenty of supposed Sandoz lab stuff --
decided we weren't high enough and gave us another dose
-- pushing us into complete paranoia to the sounds of
Desi,
Dino, & Billy. I
remembered leaving his apartment building on Downer
Avenue, his telling us don't wake the neighbors and I
saw -- sensed -- the ground as being
full of jumbled white bones, all his dead Indian neighbors now sleeping in
the earth, as the
Blues Magoos and
Western Union by The Five Americans kept reverberating in my head. Psychedelia
was big in 1966, and it all ran together in our brains like
a spaghetti of twisted colored cables. Jenny had to drive
us, and we locked the doors at home and swore
not to let anybody get in to get us, while we rode it
out. Pictures of the artists on album
covers like Nancy Wilson, looked
alive, like real people, while I couldn't bear to look at
human flesh -- hers or mine -- since I had X-ray vision and
could see tube-veins and cells.
Eventually, I could look at
real skin again, though touch was still exquisitely
heightened.
As the crest
subsided I could finally fuck her -- I couldn't pass
that experience up -- in extraordinary sex with a dick
that seemed twice normal size feeling every molecule as
I was sliding into a grasping cylinder of warm, slippery canned
peaches, while the elasticity of every muscle in our
bodies seemed to knit together and I came, seeming to
pump from way down inside my spine for what seemed to
take an eternity.
Later I tried to write some
poetry, which was completely worthless except as notes
from the navigation. Unusually relaxed and very
peaceful the next day, I called Bibiana to report my
insight from one of my poems: The point is
that there is no point. So much for the
universe. That was as profound as it got, though
as I believe to this day, it may very well be true,
though not a practical adage to live by.
The final impact of that night hit me later on a quiet
weekend when I settled down with some beers and then a joint
only to become terribly depressed, to the point of thinking
humankind should protest the very universe with a massive
suicide, a die-in. A few more tries convinced me it
was the grass, and I recognized that I had to give it up.
Back
at work I began to think more about how little I was
paid, while reporters came in and out and went off to
write things I could do with a little training.
And some of the women there paid more attention to them
than to me. The Journal published a
few small human-interest pieces I wrote in a column
intended for occasional contributors -- using vanity
thumbnail photos to make up for lack of payment
-- and I began plotting my future in
journalism. Plotting because I didn't see how
I could be happy without dropping Jenny.
How could I be a dashing newsman in a trench coat like the
UPI reporter who stopped at
Barney's occasionally, and ignore all the women I
would meet for 40
years or so because I had a wife at
home? Just going back to UWM brought
the anticipation. The very air in the library seemed somehow confining
and frigid, as I clipped my newspapers and answered phone
calls from the public -- I never forgot who Notre
Dame's Four Horsemen were or what the o in Gran
Turismo Omologato, or GTO, meant once I looked them up,
though we were told to ask whether it was for a bar bet and
decline to help if it were. Was there an organization who could advise the caller
on breast feeding? I had the La Leche League's
phone number at hand . . . Of course I once hated any
job that didn't have hours I could plan on, just as I
avoided overtime -- figuring I made enough to live on --
especially when it cut into bar-closing hours after second
shift. But I began to
appreciate how reporters could come and go and wander
around, no doubt fudging their time sheets or whatever.
How hard could it be? Or copy editing -- ideal for an
English major -- might offer the best of several worlds.
Though only one
library clerk was said to have ever gotten out as a
reporter, I made arrangements to meet one night with
Sentinel
City Editor Bob Wills. He told me
that even if I took courses it wouldn't do me much good
there, since both papers almost always required master's
degrees. But by then I was committed, and looked
around for a way to finance my future, eventually
taking my bachelor's degree to work for the county as a
social worker. That meant I was getting up early
again, and to make the transition I drank quietly every
night to get to sleep, and going in while holding on rigidly at the edge
of normalcy. Meantime, as the
Vietnam War, well under way,
continued I could read about the casualties in the morning
paper. Eventually, a familiar name, a guy who had hung out in
the old neighborhood, Pete Feierabend, popped out at me. Raw
as my nerves already were, I cried a little at my
desk as I drank from my mug of morning tea. He hadn't even been born here, but came
from Germany.
As for myself, I
applied for conscientious objector status, under the
new Dan Seeger decision that said I didn't have to have
a religious objection to all war -- philosophical would
qualify -- but was turned down by my local draft board
after I wrote a lot of bullshit quoting everybody from
Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.
Of course, I didn't want to kill
anybody, certainly not Vietnamese fighting a nationalistic
war for independence, but I wanted to keep my own ass from
being blown away, though I had no idea how I might feel
about a different war. According to the law, I had to be opposed to
all
wars, and I had already had several clashes with the
draft apparatus before the Seeger decision, even took
the physical, but they maintained that even
though I was over 26 I was liable for the draft until
35 because of my previous student deferment. It wasn't
enough that all students got one and that when I
enrolled and signed some papers one specifically said
that submission of this form shall not constitute a
request for a 2S deferment. On the
government's own document. Ironically, I
could have been exempted if I had taken the
government's offer a few months earlier and gotten
married then, but when Jenny pointed it out I turned
her down.
How could this
be? I pursued that question for quite a while but
officials were evasive until one woman on the phone
told me that, well, if I didn't want a deferment I
should have specifically requested in writing that I
not be given one. The next step was a local
appeals agent, a lawyer and a holdover -- he personally
and his function, which I don't think many people even
knew about -- from World War II. He
seemed surprised to hear from me -- from anybody -- and put
me on hold, or thought he did, while he told his secretary
to hold his calls because I've got a windy one here.
Basically, he told me that he felt justified in intervening
only if I were blind or deaf or missing a limb and the draft
board still didn't care.
So the
board, after lecturing me on why it was my duty to go,
in the tradition of a great-Uncle Howard, a Milwaukeean
who had been a captain in WW II, turned me down.
The president of the board also told me that they
thought I couldn't have written my statement without
professional help. I thought it was pretty good
myself, though I certainly wrote every word.
Their attitude at least gave me an
opening, though, as I pointed out in my letter to the state
appeal board that under the draft statutes the board's one
and only function was to determine the sincerity of my
beliefs, not whether I had gotten any help, and not to shame
me by bringing up patriotic relatives. I didn't panic,
since I didn't know of one person who really didn't
want to go who ended up drafted, in addition to those
who deliberately chose jail or Canada. The wait
seemed interminable, though.
When I came home
from the Welfare Department late one
afternoon Jenny in a red blouse was leaning out of the
upstairs window holding a white cardboard sign lettered Good News as I parked just off
the alley. The appeals board had ruled for me 5-0,
which meant I was liable for alternative service -- a
hospital or mental ward or something similar -- until age
35. I had already decided not to apply as a medic;
they were certainly heroic, but each one freed up a soldier
for combat -- and probably had a shorter lifespan. I wrote a letter
trying to have my current employment as a social worker
counted as fulfilling the requirement as a community
service itself, though I knew I had stalled the
machinery long enough to be in a category -- over 27 --
that was unlikely to be even called short of a homeland
invasion. They wanted the young and flexible, not
troublemakers like me. But despite
Jenny's endearing concern, we weren't getting along,
although technically I never committed adultery. If she didn't ignore the cat box or fill the path to
the bedroom with the detritus she shed -- scarves,
jewelry, bras -- she was always putting a purse, that
could have been filthy from resting any place, on the
kitchen table. So I went to O'Brad's
-- named for an Obradovich -- by
myself, and met the first prospect: Sarah from Green
Bay -- which of course made me think of a Dylan
Thomas poem and how bright . . . frail deeds might
have danced as indeed we were dancing. I was also seeing a woman the
recently-divorced Cecil was dating too, a former
romantic possibility from UWM and
Cheshire,
named
Cynthia. She'd apparently gotten healthy enough to
stay in school and date, and
finally found herself a lover -- only to have him flop down and die of a
cerebral hemorrhage walking down the sidewalk next to her on
Brady Street.
Ultimately, though, Cynthia decided that since I was technically
married -- even if restless -- it wasn't right
to be seeing me. Unfortunately, she implemented her
decision by standing me up on a cold night when I waited in
Joe Ermi's bar on State Street
across from the Journal building until
closing time. And my bus had stopped running.
But I had
realized that not only did marriage usually make me more adept
at handling women, they were going to be all around --
especially if I went into journalism. How could I
spend time in the co-ed classroom to become a new reporter
while looking at what my old
friend Ray Malina had called the same old hair pie?
Jenny was certainly nice if I paid attention to her,
but otherwise would provoke me with all kinds of
domestic obstruction instead of taking up
intellectual pastimes on her own, or even reading anything
besides Time magazine.
And she balked when I wanted to alphabetize the spice rack.
Of course, I couldn't expect
her to be a poet, but even her work as a draft
counselor at the Milwaukee Organizing Committee with
the current crop of radicals wasn't very impressive to
me, since she was only learning things about the
movement I had already gone through, and parroted
friends who couldn't teach her from works I didn't
already know about, like Fanon's
Salt of the Earth or
Regis Debray's Revolution in the
Revolution. With
nothing she could impart to me -- my ideal would have been an
exotic black painter also into literature and
maybe philosophy -- I knew also that with all that
pussy out there I would have been stultified by sticking
with just a wife, no matter how cute. No poet
herself, as she said, and the most she attempted
-- as far as I know -- was the scrap of paper I found:
Why doesn't he like my friends?
Why does he think I'm dirty?
He fucks my fanny
He fucks my mouth
I want to fuck his body inside and out
Poignant
enough, I suppose, surprising me, though I would argue that I
had nothing against her friends, it was just that I
already had my own, and her messiness was under her
control. The supposed uncleanliness of her cunt was
up to her, since she had a supply of douche
powder and I put up a hook in the bathroom next to the
mirror alongside the toilet for the bag, at her
direction. And turnabout -- or in this case, lack
of it on my part -- was only fair, since she rarely wanted me to
come in her mouth. With good reason, I suppose,
thinking it might deprive her of a climax.
Otherwise she
could be spontaneous if we
were in some unconventional spot -- in the alley behind
Barney's where I bent her over the trash
bin, or a bedroom at someone's party.
So it was kind of an impasse,
though in my experience oral sex wouldn't have been an issue
with a lot of women who were uncomfortable at anything
beyond straightforward sex in the dark. They were
often the gorgeous ones I lusted after only to be
rejected, silently whimpering to myself But I want
to know what you taste like, even if I really
wouldn't have, not for long, considering my laziness .
. .
So with
Sarah to pursue I moved out, taking journalism courses
at UWM a few nights a week and working at the
Welfare
Department. I drank bourbon and seltzer every
night starting when I got home -- even in the bright
sun while sitting on the porch watching the curbside
trees rustle -- so I could get to sleep early, waking
in the night to drink again, until I reached the point
where I was waking up with a craving just an hour or so
before I had to get up. But I was convinced I had
to do it, shaky with screaming gritty nerve-endings and
hung over all at once, even if slightly drunk, every
morning, until the founding of Kaleidoscope changed
everything while I was barely hanging on.
By that time in my
freedom -- though Jenny came to visit me, causing us to end
up telling the court commissioner two different versions of
the date on which we last had intercourse, apparently
information she thought was crucial to the divorce -- I had
completed my training at the
Welfare Department.
But though I thought I was ready to move on from Jen I felt
a stab when she went into the bathroom with the door open
before climbing onto the unmade sofa-bed, bending over for
something. From behind her I had a good view that
shouldn't have been anything unusual by now, but in the
short skirt she caused a spontaneous reaction:
"Jennifer Groeling, where are your panties?" Her bare
ass and hairy snatch from the rear had been a jolt.
"Oh . . . I forgot about that. They had holes in
them, so I just threw 'em in the wastebasket. No,
actually I was going to go over to O'Reilly's and bend
over at the bar and freak everybody out . . . Oh, don't
worry, I didn't leave the house like that."
I had no reason not to believe her -- and I didn't check the
wastebasket, at least not then, since I thought it would have revealed too much of
my momentary feeling of connection. Still, I was
secretly pleased when she mentioned she was keeping her last
name and not going back to
Possley. Too much
trouble to change everything.
Unhappily, by that time I learned Sarah had juvenile
diabetes, and though she wanted to keep up with me when we
were drinking, it had proved to be a bad strategy when
controlling dosage. I woke up with her sitting naked
in bed, lots of freckles on her back and shoulders, drooling
and incoherent, her face flushed, tits now forlorn and unerotic. It was an insulin
reaction -- she had explained the difference between that
and the cold, clammy unconsciousness that meant a diabetic
coma -- and
though I tried to get her to drink some orange juice,
it just dribbled from her mouth.
I had already become disenchanted when I learned her disease
prevented her from taking the Pill because it would mess
further with her hormones and any spontaneity would have to
pause while she went into the bathroom to prep herself --
assuming we were near a bathroom and she had her foam at
hand. I found it's very hard to stuff a
totally limp woman into a bra and panties and her skirt
-- let alone her girdle -- and I had to then go downstairs
and get the young manager to help maneuver her to my
car so I could drive her to
Columbia Hospital's
emergency room. I plopped her into a wheel chair,
where I left her girdle and the rest of clothes on her
lap, and they took her inside.
I had already met a cute girl or two and had been planning a
breakup anyway -- now knowing it would be hard to convince
anyone, especially her, that it had nothing to do with her
illness.
So I never did find out
what happened to her, though Bibiana herself said she heard
a guy in her class claim to another that he had stolen her
-- he mentioned her by name, Sarah Stein, though she wasn't
Jewish -- from a writer that could have
been me, since I had recently edited
Cheshire at
UWM.
What was more odd, besides the Jewish Cecil Stein being my
friend and marrying a Gail Stein, Sarah's roommate -- they
rented a house on
Bartlett Avenue -- was
Stephanie Sue Stein. Though
she was indeed Jewish,
her mother was a local pianist and singer known as Irish
O'Leary. Yet another roommate, Ingrid, had been married to
well-known cartoonist Dennis Kitchen, one of the founders of
the Bugle-American.
A
tangle worthy of a playful writer like Tom Robbins or
Kurt
Vonnegut. Maybe a karass out of
Cat's Cradle.
Of course, the East Side was very incestuous anyway. But in the long run I was
desperate to mingle with other young adults and at least act
the part of a hip social worker, after my service in the
chaos of the Intake Department, calling compassionately on
troubled families and straightening them out, in a sport
coat and maybe a tie slightly undone and askew.
Instead they
activated the unit for which I had been specifically hired
-- unknown to me -- in the almost empty former
Emergency Hospital between
Wells Street
and Wisconsin Avenue. Though, as I
had experienced myself, the hospital had been ideal for a
large urban population nearby, mostly black and poor, the
county had shut it down, leaving the
General
Hospital miles away on the County Grounds
as the far more inaccessible alternative.
So I was now
part of the new crew that did the paperwork for profoundly
retarded children in the
Southern Colony at
Union Grove, after one perfunctory visit
where we could observe the hydrocephalics and pinheads and
such who -- if they lived -- would be transferred farther
and farther north as the parents died. In the
meantime, the new Medical Assistance program of the
Federal
Government required letters to the responsible adults -- if
any -- and the processing of replies that got the state out
of paying for their upkeep. Parents of minors now became liable
for payments according to their budgets, though the
requirements were quite lenient.
So I wanted diversion and socializing -- the company of
females that swarmed the old building if I were at all lucky
-- to distract me from the jumpiness and queasiness of
hangovers and fill the void I was feeling -- as always --
after Jenny no longer played her role in my life after
I relied on her for so many years.
Instead it was an almost empty, bare building where a
handful of us in one room dictated letters by telephone to
be transcribed by the the unit secretary in the former
Gimbel's store on
Vliet Street.
Rattling around the echoing halls I realized I missed her --
even though I had especially wanted a divorce since starting
journalism classes -- knowing how easy it would be to get
laid, rather than struggle for dates and trying my hand at
seduction.
The same unit
secretary -- whose job it was to call each of us at our
desks in the morning to sign us in -- took to calling at the
instant work was to start, to report me if I was a minute
late, though she hadn't been as diligent until I began
sending my typed letters back to her for corrections to her
transcriptions.
"No
one else finds mistakes in my work." But of course
they were there, and I couldn't bear to send them out once I spotted
them.
At least there was one
other unit in the building, doing conventional casework with
single mothers, and one young secretary to deal with several
workers -- a 22-year-old recent graduate of secretarial
school who lived with her mother on the far
North
Side.
I soon got to know Mary, stopping in her office once in a
while on breaks and walking the narrow, winding sidewalks
lined with shrubs on the sunny grounds together during lunch
hour. I could glance to the side and watch some
shapely breasts, though they didn't move around much under
her neat blouses that I wanted to unbutton, planning my next
move.
A little kissing and groping in a dusty storeroom, lined
with shelves -- somehow I was reticent to go further in the
deserted room, just off the empty hallway -- and she even
seemed disappointed that we didn't do more. But I would feel
a firm tit and maybe kiss her throat a little bit as low as
I felt I could open her blouse, and stop because I thought
our absence would be getting noticed. Eventually I was regularly driving
her home -- I still had the Triumph.
I could check her out in the daylight, looking for flaws,
like a trace of a mustache, but she didn't have a single
imperfection, and was probably the prettiest girl I had ever
dated. She told me it wouldn't matter if someone
wasn't a Catholic if she really liked him, though the most
daring thing she had ever done was to go out drinking with a
girlfriend while under 21, and getting caught. Her mother
thought I could have been a professor, since I wore my
standard office sport coats and striped dress shirts,
sometimes with a long topcoat when I picked her up on
weekends, and a well-groomed mustache.
Though it was a nice trim house, north of
Capitol
Drive, they were essentially a middle-income family
with few cultural pursuits, and I would find Mary gazing at
me when I talked about something going on on the
East Side or anti-war activities with a soft,
fawning expression, slightly vacant. Though I stayed home weeknights
drinking so I could sleep --
O'Reilly's in
view across Franklin Place on the other
side of the intersection with
Ogden Avenue,
but telling myself I wasn't doing it for fun and wanting to
be where I could drop off in my bed as soon as I felt drowsy
-- we started dating on weekends. I would pick out
movies like The Family Way with
Hayley Mills or Roger Corman's early acid adventure
The Trip -- future cult
item or cornball journey I wasn't sure, but I thought it was
time to subvert her Catholicism with sex and drugs, and I
enjoyed the flashes of nudity myself.
It didn't take long until I got her into my efficiency
apartment on the couch, next to the foldout bed where she
placidly acquiesced -- even though a virgin -- as I got her
out of her sweater and bra for the first time.
"Can you tell one is bigger than the other?"
I could, of course -- I even told her it was quite common --
but I hardly cared as I started in on them both and had her
nipples stiffened and glistening with saliva as she looked up
with her eyes closed. My plastic desk radio was
playing softly: Linda
Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys.
When both of us were sitting up in the bed, propped up with
the pillows and naked as I quietly marveled at her perfect
form and knowing she wasn't going to stop me I got my hand
between her thighs and guided her to fondle my cock for the
first time -- actually to see it for the first time.
Or any adult male's, though she did have a younger brother.
"The girls
in school said the guys want you to touch it, but I didn't
think I could."
"Well, they
were right . . ." I didn't want to rush things, and we
didn't have any birth control anyway -- that was something I
would have to figure out in the future -- so I just used my
fingers on her pussy and guided her hand up and down.
I explained the little bit of pre-come was natural and then
it spurted to run down her fist as she kept it moving
awkwardly until I stopped her with my own hand.
"I didn't know it would do that . . ."
So much for sex education in a modern Catholic school, I
thought. I pointed out in a mock-lecturing voice, "You
see, that's how babies are made -- " My best professorial
manner, thinking of her mother.
"I know, but --"
"But what?" "I guess I thought you had to
be inside me."
I left things at
that. I hadn't lost interest in sex, obviously, but
taking on all the alcohol every day meant I also looked
forward to getting quickly to the part where I could just
relax with a strong drink and look with satisfaction on any
pussy or bare ass next to me, not worrying about proving
anything.
Procol
Harum was popular then too, and rendered a lyric I could
relate to, despite its mysterious vision:
. . . and would not let her be
one of sixteen vestal virgins
who were leaving for the coast
and although my eyes were open
they might have just as well've been closed
But as far as explaining
it to Mary, who asked me, I could only invoke
surrealism, though as an English major I recognized a
reference to the Tarot and Chaucer:
. . . And so it was that later
as the miller told his tale
that her face, at first just ghostly,
turned a whiter shade of pale
It was a few sessions after that when I got her
comfortable with sucking me off, and turning end-for-end
so I could see twin cowbells swinging as she went down
and I burrowed in with my tongue to get our own
teeter-totter going. But with some of her previous
shyness remaining, I still had to buy the Emko foam for
our first time and insert it in her, laying the tube on
a tissue on the side table. That ended my patience
-- and the bourbon and seltzers beckoned me to really
plunge into my alcohol, the hell with finesse -- and
drive into her cunt and turn her over for good measure
and do it from behind as she instinctively raised her
rear with her head down. It
was bloodless and fine for me, though I lost track of
what she was feeling -- something I could make up for
eventually, I hoped. The
day after, early Saturday night, she said in a booth at
O'Reilly's, "You know, it hurts a
little bit when I sit down," but she was quite
clingy and happy otherwise, and our sex life -- and
dating life -- was established.
And quite predictable,
especially after I left social work, as I generally
ignored her then except when I felt an urge would be coming
on and I would call her, still at the Welfare
Department, and arrange to pick her up
after work, or at her home to go out for drinks and get
to bed as soon as possible. Gregory Garson,
in touch with the growing underground scene, had thought of me to
deliver the paper
for a modest amount of money while
going to school, and even loaned me their VW Microbus
to load up in Port Washington and make the rounds every
two weeks. Fortunately, it was a very mild
December in 1967 when I started, lots of rain, and I found a cubbyhole --
once servant's quarters in a mansion on Cramer and
Locust -- at $50 a month, and quit my job and made
contacts to sell my unpaid-for new white Triumph, since
Jenny didn't want it. When the
roads were dry the warm weather
made driving to the printer's loading dock in Port
Washington and trudging around with the bundles for a
few cents a copy easy, though I ended up having to earn
my money twice -- if I wanted to get paid I had to
peddle several bundles and keep the full quarter
apiece, at the bars I was used to drinking at, like Hooligan's and the
Tuxedo and O'Reilly's, for $35 or so
for two weeks. Of course I was
hassled some by the vets at the Tux --
though O'Reilly's and
Hooligan's were cool -- with more than one
wanting to know why my paper and I were defending draft
resisters and dirty writers. I kept my responses
simple, just looking forward to my mugs of beer,
recalling
Martin Niemöller
and replied, Some day it may be my turn. But I slept as late as I wanted,
getting up to hurry to editor John Kois's house a few
blocks north on Oakland Avenue in the
afternoon and try my hand at writing. I was
starting to use what I learned in journalism classes.
Several of us would knock off
sometime after 10 p.m. -- to Kois's dismay, since he
hardly ever drank, just kept on working -- and go down
to Barney's and relax with the rest of the
regulars.
Sometimes I
would take Mary to visit the Garsons. Once Bibi said, "She seems
quite, you know, fond of you . . . but it looks like
you're just exploiting her."
"Well, exploit means to use someone without giving anything in return --
"
"Oh, and you have so much to offer
--" If there was any jealousy, I couldn't really tell,
but it was certainly a little sarcastic.
"Well, she got to come
over to meet you and Gregory . . ."
And she had said once,
"You know, your friends are so interesting.
I never really met anybody like that." But
after one session of visiting when we listened to
records -- the latest
Beatles
album -- You say
goodbye and I say hello hello -- from November of 1967,
she said, "You know, it seems like I'm saying hello and
you're saying goodbye."
Even though I had taken her to see the Rep's
Othello at
the Fred Miller Theatre, and Ravi
Shankar at
Marquette
University, I knew she had a point. And when I
gave her a copy of Anne Sexton's
The Sorrow
Dance for her birthday she was mostly
buffaloed by the whole idea of poetry exchanged by
adults. Or anybody.
But I had to say,
"No, no . . ." And, I thought, hadn't I even made a
point of playing Jimi Hendrix'
The
Wind Cries Mary at the Garsons' for her?
That proved to me I could be caring. Because I knew she sensed
this odd feeling of emptiness I had without Jenny much of
the time and she even asked if I wanted to "get a
place" together, though I know how close she was to her
mother, who would have been left alone.
Forays into entertainment had become rare, unless I was
invited to a party. Underground press reporters
and hippies didn't have much money.
But it was
hard not to think about sex when hippie chicks came to the
office where I sat at one of the old manual typewriters
nursing a quart of beer. Especially
since we still
ran luscious nude spreads by Peter Tibbs and
Jim
Middleton, and what would come to be called sexist ads
that implied the dropout babes mainly loved to smoke dope and
fuck. I
could still depend on just taking her home as long as I
had the Triumph. Once while desultorily necking
with her in front of the house, I pulled back from
feeling her tits and reached across her to open
her door, thinking it was
overdoing things to do much right in front of her
home, while her hand was moving slightly on my
crotch. "That's all right," I said, for
some reason feeling indifferent, drunker than usual.
"No, I want to. . ."
And she had learned a lot, and I
slowly came to her blowjob even though I thought I
wouldn't. On the other hand, if it was some sort
of holy day for Catholics, she would demur entirely.
So it went on, and I planted
the idea of her going to school again, first getting an
apartment nearby, and she eventually found a roommate
on the bulletin board in the Student Union
and moved away from her mother. Occasionally,
especially after I gave up the Triumph, she would come
over after class to Kois's to set headlines in pressable
type or other simple tasks -- Kois playing albums
continuously from his huge DJ collection supplemented by
review copies arriving almost daily by that time -- and
if her roommate was gone we would go to her place.
I was annoyed that she was
still using foam and wouldn't take the Pill, something
to do with being Catholic, and our sessions were rather
quick and mechanical and I knew I just wasn't paying
enough attention to her.
It could always happen that
when we went to an East Side party that Jenny would be
there, and though I thought I was doing well at
ignoring her, Mary said pointedly, "I know you
look for her."
It was true, of course, even
as a flushed Jenny came over to me once in the crowded
bunch of dancers, though her own ankle was in a cast,
everyone passing joints around, and asked if
Mary was the new girlfriend. She had only seen
Sarah, one night at Barney's.
"I bet she really looks
nice with her clothes off. . ."
I had to honestly say yes,
though I also had a resentment that though the East
Side was full of hippie chicks -- most younger than I,
of course -- I had to recruit my dates from the outside
and pursue them in the old-fashioned way. Not
much in the way of free love, as it used to be called,
for me.
So it came to a head when one
night a bunch of the crew was being driven back from
Barney's by Kois on a rare outing, that Mary insisted
on being dropped off at her apartment rather than my
little room, horny though I was. I said flat out
that we didn't have to have sex -- I knew she had been
to mass for something that day -- but that she should
stay. There was always the morning.
It was more or less an
ultimatum, and by that time she had made up her mind --
correctly -- that things weren't going anyplace with us
and refused, and that was it. I did take her
roommate Carlotta out a few times, though I soon learned it was
apparently breaking some chick code, and one of them
abruptly ended it for us.
It was back to trolling the
bars for me, now without a car and living on meager
amounts from Kaleidoscope.
Fortunately everyone knew
it was the liberated '60s, and that women were expected
to get into bed without much convincing, if any, and I
did well enough. Still, I had always been
domestic, and really looked for something stable.
Financially, I struggled on
until Big Fred Krause, who had taken over as the
Kaleidoscope distributor while I wrote more and more --
drinking six-packs at night and looking out on Brady
Street by that time -- said there were jobs on
the docks where he worked days and into some nights as
a fork-lift driver. Other hippies that didn't
want to be tied permanently to a job had the same idea,
and in the autumn of 1971, with a dock strike on the
East Coast and then the West Coast creating a cascade
of shipping for Milwaukee's port, a lot of us found our
way there.
With some restrictions that
loosened over time as business inevitably declined,
once the labor unrest was over, we could check out of
work on any given day or show up to hustle for work -- first as an
extra man, then as a replacement as gangs were beefed
up or someone missed for an assignment -- at the
ILA hiring hall on Jones Island. I hung on at
Kaleidoscope until it folded in December of 1971.
Another Kaleidoscope writer,
Mike Zetteler, followed the same path and finally wrote
his
memoir as a retired longshoreman in 1994 for the
Shepherd Express, an alternative paper that I always
felt Kaleidoscope made possible through its court
battles -- final vindication coming after the paper
folded, in a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court
reversing Kois's conviction
written by Potter Stewart and joined in a separate
concurring opinion by William O. Douglas
that found it was a real newspaper and not obscene
-- driven by our debt and hard times of selling it on the
streets, unable to get a real distributor. But
the Shepherd, following a one-time competitor, the
tamer Bugle-American, which lasted to 1976, first in
Madison, then Milwaukee,
set up a dependable distribution and -- most
importantly, it turned out -- giving it away and thus
selling a lot of advertising.
Even as Barney's itself was
collapsing with Barney Frederick's long-deserved retirement to Florida,
morphing into John Hawks Pub -- finally moving north to
Water St. and Wisconsin Ave. -- some of us regrouped at
Hooligan's and O'Reilly's, coming full circle, meeting
again as happened with Valerie Vetter from Wauwatosa and
me. The daughter of an insurance executive at
Northwestern Mutual, and a lapsed Catholic, she seemed
pleased with flouting her conservative parents -- at
least her father, since her diminutive mother always wanted to
hear the lurid details of her life and helped her
conceal them so that she could live at home and even
borrow the family Cadillac.
She drank Schlitz malt liquor with
a slice of lemon, which appealed to me since I wanted
someone who enjoyed alcohol as much as I did but not
more, and that seemed rather ladylike, not enough to be
a bad influence. I was a little taken aback,
though, when I noticed she usually smoked several joints
a night. But it made her eyes bright and seemed to
make her both cheerful and sensual, and only a little
more spacy. Early on when I
observed that I found it a little strange that she was
getting high alone before I even picked her up she just
shrugged. "Different strokes for different folks."
I learned eventually she liked to drop in some
ghetto phrases from her old boyfriend Alonzo.
"I think a hippie lives
here," she said the first time -- our first
date -- she came to my tiny apartment, where I used to bang
Mary, picking up a
beaded necklace with carved white fangs I had hanging on a doorknob and kissing
it. We brought along another couple, one of them
a black friend she worked with in her short-term
factory job at Globe-Union. She had
fixed Denise up with a slight and energetic black East
Sider everybody knew -- I seldom saw him with anybody
but whites, male or female -- named Johnny Vermier, but
I guessed he was humoring us.
As a tax return preparer --
formerly an IRS agent -- he had enough money to spread
around, always buying drinks and even taking us out for
meals to the point where it was embarrassing, since I
couldn't return the favor. And it was disconcerting the way he chewed with his mouth open and
displayed crooked and dark teeth in need of bleaching,
even though his father was a dentist. Still, he
was good company and the evening was pleasant and we
all wound up on my single mattress on the floor.
Valerie was drunk enough --
and I sensed an underlying nervousness that I
attributed to her feeling she was flouting family and
Wauwatosa conventions by dating an
underground newspaper writer and peddler -- to have
Johnny pull the car over once so she could throw up in
the gutter. But she recovered and somewhere along
the line refreshed her breath so that we could make out
on the mattress until I got her short dress up and my
jeans down to my knees, both of us just about oblivious
to the other couple and then I was inside her.
I was dimly aware of Johnny, partly on top of Denise and
kissing her next to us, glancing over intently for a
while -- understandably -- his tongue lolling out in a
brown face as he grinned.
I heard from Valerie later that
she had been planning on suggesting to me that we move
into the tiny bathroom if things got really heavy
between us, but I seemed oblivious. Though the alcohol had numbed
me to the point that when I later admitted I was
surprised I had done it at all, much less that I came,
she said, "Well, I figured that if that was what
you hippies did I could go along with it. Though
it wasn't as good as it could have been. .
."
I figured she was referring to my
hard-on, though I didn't press it. And I soon
realized she liked to watch herself getting fucked,
looking down at her sparse blondish pubic patch -- not
over my shoulder or at the ceiling or closing her eyes.
Feels so good to me feels so good to me Donald feels so
good to me . . . becoming her usual low chant.
As a former ballet student at the Adele Artinian dance
school, as were many Wauwatosa high school girls, she was
very flexible in bed, and everything led quickly to the point
where she moved in after I traded apartments with a
single UWM student who rented one of the
two full-sized upstairs units. We went to her parents' house to tie her
mattress and bed to the top of my old car in the middle
of the day when her father -- Cactus Jack Vetter himself, the
John Birch Society
sympathizer -- came home unexpectedly. Only her
mother, who came up the front stairs while her father
-- who it seems had sensed something was up and didn't
want her to move out, much less with a guy, came up the
back staircase, to get us out of there fast.
So we waited out his visit
before moving the furniture, padded with a blanket, and
she was committed to the East Side and, inevitably, to
Kaleidoscope. Over time a women's collective and
gay collective evolved, giving each contingent a double
voice, though there was no men's collective. I
guess the idea was that men had too much power
already. The women and some supporters took to
trashing "sexist" billboards -- just about
anything with an attractive woman in it, especially
showing some skin -- that they contended was using sex
to sell, with paint-filled balloons. There was a
strike going on at Allen-Bradley that we, of course,
supported. When
the women doing layout used a large
illustration of the factory with its famous four-side
clock -- the "Polish moon" of the South Side -- with shots of the picketers, I remarked
how the tower looked rather phallic, perhaps
diminishing the role of the marchers.
Led by a panicked Valerie, the
women then obliterated much of the tower and redid the page
at the last minute, unfortunately leaving an unfocused
muddle. Such actions continued, with staff
disputes over accepting tobacco and beer advertising,
but especially ads for magazines such as Ralph
Ginzburg's eros or anything with attractive models, and
especially classified ads of a personal, sexual nature
that demeaned women, which meant ads for escorts or
strippers and such. The culmination of this
resulted in Zetteler writing a favorable review of a
female folk-singer at the Y-Not II tavern in which he
commented on how attractive she was. A female
typist refused to set it in type on the Varitype
machine as being
sexist.
The irony was that it was
Zetteler himself who thought that the paper could provoke
a discussion on how far to go in discussing personal
appearance, especially in the case of an entertainer
who relied on her appeal and obviously sought attention. So he questioned
in print whether such
observations had a place in the new, underground -- and
anti-sexist -- press. Without his remarks, Janis Wasiliewski,
the typsetter, would never have noticed such comments,
as they were a staple of cultural reviewing since
criticism of pop culture began.
So she effectively short-circuited any serious
discussion by the readers of his concerns.
Nevertheless, when Zetteler
threatened to quit unless
the review was printed as it
was, the women voted him down while all the men except
myself abstained
from voting. A gutless tactic, I thought, and Zetteler
himself walked and ended up writing
for the emerging Bugle-American. So it was no
surprise that when Valerie came across old photos of my
recent girlfriend Cheryl, taken by Allan Jensen, a
photographer along with his many other talents, I found them torn
to shreds in the bottom of one of my dresser drawers.
It was
one more case of her growing,
unstable temper. I figured
she would say she found them exploitative, though she never said a
word, but I suspected un-sisterly rivalry and I just got another set from Allan.
Though I had been somewhat
bitter that no hippie chicks came my way, Cheryl had
been a welcome fluke -- I had known her at UWM, where
she worked on the yearbook on the same floor of open
offices above McClellan's restaurant as
Cheshire and
the Post. She turned up at a party at 1833 N.
Prospect where I lived and Jenny later moved in, but
when I was still alone there I had invited Cheryl over
to drink and talk but I didn't get any farther -- she
was in love with a Latvian painter named Eriks, pronounced
without the final
s,
in the
Latvian manner. Once she had
decided on that, as her chat made clear, she knew what
her course would be and he would be hers.
So she married him, usually drunk though he
was -- passing out regularly at Barney's and sleeping
it off in a side booth instead of mingling with patrons
-- so it was a surprise when she turned up one day on
my doorstep with a copy of the want ads. She said
she had split with Eriks, mainly because he was
sleeping around -- and was in the neighborhood looking
for apartments. She had become
an art teacher in Detroit, near
Cranbrook Academy where Eriks studied, but on
moving back took office work in Milwaukee. I didn't know of any
places off-hand, of
course, but after she left it dawned on me that it had
all been just a ruse to see me again. So she kept
their old
flat after all -- not a surprise -- and I could stay
there while an apparently ambivalent Eriks parked all
night in front of the house, even telling her I was
like a vulture waiting to move in.
Which may have been true, although I wasn't expecting a
lifetime deal when I finally quit the
Freeman and left Waukesha,
trading weekend visits for a place to stay permanently
-- but she was demurring about me living with her, hemming
and hawing until I got the hint and dropped the idea,
recognizing her ultimately inscrutable independence.
Still, when Eriks got a job teaching
sculpture in Tennessee she moved there
to reconcile. But it didn't work out and she
hooked up with a hippie commune in Knoxville
where she took to using heroin -- snorting, but
recoiling at needles then abruptly cleaning up and moving back
to Milwaukee -- leaving behind the
image of Eriks leaning over a sink and gagging while
forcing himself to eat cheese, a lifelong aversion.
She resumed her staple, weed, which she brought out in
bed in the mornings to share before we scrounged
leftovers -- her casseroles and such -- from the
refrigerator to marvel at the texture and deliciousness.
Then dreamlike sex that crept up on us with prolonged
soft intensity I hadn't felt when straight, or drunk,
and I once relayed that with some wonder, to be told
simply: "That's the way it's
supposed to feel." As always, speaking
softly, a quiet tone yet one that almost commanded you
to lean in and pay attention. I
figured as a long-time stoner she should know what she
was talking about, and she was endearing sexually in any
case because she had kept a bottle of baby oil handy
since the early days when she was new to me and I had
trouble getting an erection and she gently lubed my cock
with long, slender fingers drawing up lightly to the
head to help me ease it into her.
A practice that soon
became unnecessary. Contented
under the soft, clean quilt I could twist and follow her
with my gaze padding around the kitchen seeing in the daylight
the faint thin trail down her belly from navel to the
dark growth at the joining of her thighs, and the cones
of her breasts that her husband had so often
photographed and sketched.
It was during this period when I really began noticing
that despite her artistic talents -- and becoming a
teacher -- she was still traditional in using feminine
wiles to get a man, or anything. And when we were
watching local TV news about
Louise Tesmer,
once our classmate in English courses at UWM
who had become one of the first female justices of the
peace around, in St. Francis, now
moving on to run for circuit court, she murmured that
"I don't think women should be judges."
Although of course I supported feminism when it became
an issue, I wouldn't have been deterred by her lack of
progressivism -- she worked, after all -- but she
quietly kept me at a certain distance from her core even
if I had wanted a deep commitment. She rather
recognized her role when a mention of Valerie came up,
and I pointed out how I became disenchanted after living
with her for a while, concluding, "I could never marry
her."
"I think I'm a bridge over troubled
water," was Cheryl's measured response. And so she
remained, at least between trips to see Eriks or other
disappearances -- some to stay with her mother in
Menomonee Falls -- though we could
explore again the sex that she had
first instigated following an abortive try on my part --
taking charge after an evening at Barney's and an even later night session of pot at her place that had me forgetting about
anything but continuing the high but instead rousing
when she tossed a bottle of baby oil onto her pillow --
then after it was over alluding to Eriks to observe that
"I didn't think I would come again."
So we rested naked, the patchy shadows cast by her dim
art nouveau lamp drawing the eyes into tracing their
lines and gaps on the wall, music faintly audible.
But I also knew that though I was useful she couldn't
ever love me, which left me feeling a little slighted,
though not really injured.
For compensation I
even filched a black-and-white snapshot Eriks had taken
with her face, pale and lightly freckled, framed in
long, straight brown hair trailing over her shoulder mostly turned away but nipples prominently
displayed, to slip into my wallet. It was around
that time -- not long into our affair -- that I noticed
she never made a move to go down on me, though I had
otherwise come to expect it in any relationship that
wasn't ephemeral. Even though I seldom
reciprocated, and so far not with her.
I obliquely brought the idea up, saying, "If you ever
feel like being oral, just, ah, feel free . . ."
Only to have her go onto an explanation: "I
told
you, I'm not going to stick around for somebody who
doesn't want me, so if he wants to learn to eat cheese
and do without me, whatever he thinks he needs, I'm not
going to hang around there . . . but you heard all that
already."
I couldn't bring myself to correct her, so I let it
slide until I could take another approach. But then, during one of our
periods of separation, I dated a waitress at the
Knickerbocker Hotel coffee shop Val had
once worked with and was friends with even though she
kept suggesting things such as the two of them taking a
bath together, Valerie said. Andrea had an uncanny
resemblance to my ex-wife, especially the gap in her
front teeth and ultra-black hair, though her voice
wasn't husky at all, unlike Jenny's.
When Valerie found out she
wailed about Andrea and her funny teeth and muddy
skin and general lack of charm and probable
lesbianism. I never noticed anything about her
complexion, but I pointed out that by her feminist
standards I should be commended for rising above such
things. It carried no weight with Valerie, and
indeed she continued to use makeup herself. Things
started coming to a head when as far back as our time in
my little room she picked up a kitchen knife and
threatened me with it when I was naked, for buying the
Beatles' White Album when we
couldn't afford fresh fruit in the house. While here she was,
she complained, unable to defecate for several days now. Still, I
found it laughable and just blocked her with a pillow
while I grabbed her weapon.
Things were more serious when
on Brady Street above the Kaleidoscope office she took
offense at something and -- my usual response when she
was irrational -- I tried to walk away, this time into
our bedroom where, since it had no lock, I blocked the
door with the heavy mahogany dresser left by a previous
tenant. As I watched with concern and in some
awe, she proceeded to work on the door with a hammer I
had in a toolkit in the kitchen, battering the thin panel into splinters.
She couldn't get any further,
and a few days later patched the hole with some fabric
before the landlord could discover it, but I was even
more concerned by such a little girl with such a bad
temper. Eventually she started complaining of
vertigo, to the point where she couldn't even stand on
street corners to sell the paper, and at $50 a week --
for which I had to let advertising manager Bert Stitt
use my beat-up Volkswagen in his rounds -- I couldn't
meet the rent by myself in the spacious apartment
overlooking Brady Street. So she moved back with
her parents where someone could take care of her and I
moved in with an old friend from the Tuxedo.
Margaret had a rear cottage to herself west of Humboldt
Avenue in Riverwest,
and since she had been raped by some blacks
after being pulled into a car outside a Holton Street
jazz lounge she didn't want to live alone. It was
still warm out so I rigged up a pallet, just blankets,
and a clock and a radio under the beams of her mostly
bare attic. A few dusty cardboard boxes were
lined up where the rafters met the floor. I could sleep
late after writing at the office until dawn and come
down after she went to work as a receptionist in a
doctor's office, and have the shower as much as I
wanted and didn't bother her partying friends. I
did use empty beer cans to piss in when I got home,
gaining respect for the capacity of the human bladder when I could fill
three half-quart cans after one session to empty the
next day. It was a time when
progressive FM radio was paramount, popping up with
free-form programs like Bob Reitman and
John Kois's
starting on WUWM and Reitman moving
around the dial, few playlists, something always within
my earshot if I could control it and everyone tuning in
their favorite extended cuts, it seemed, wherever I
went. Downstairs in Margaret's kitchen, or in her
living room, it felt like I was instantly in an aural
hip community as I found a promising selection.
It spread to WTOS in Wauwatosa
then was picked up further west in Menomonee
Falls at WZMF, or
wonderful wizzimff as the DJs said -- at least
while the trend lasted. But it also made record
companies less dependent on spending for their
advertising of album artists in the overly controversial
underground press. Valerie did visit me
sometimes, and we had the use of the couch that I
occasionally slept on when cold days started creeping
in during October. I could claim it for myself once I
threw out one of Margaret's party buddies from the Tux
who liked to crash there. He was an ex-merchant marine named Carl Tollsrud who hung out with the veterans and liked to
drink a lot, apolitical if not jingoistic like most of
the vets who scorned the hippies. But when I woke
him up and told him he'd have to kick my ass if he
wanted to stay on the couch he surprised me by meekly
giving way, and we were friendly at the bar after that.
Val liked to lead me
downstairs naked in the warm days, her cool hand holding my penis, but
eventually it got too cold to stay in the attic at all,
and though Margaret even offered to let me sleep in her
bed, I had to decline since I had a girlfriend, after
all, and though my importuning housemate had a round, pretty face she
was awfully fat and I had no real desire for her.
I kissed her once, sitting on her bed, when she asked if I was sure.
Her thighs bulged against the thin nightgown. She had small tits for a chubby woman, I noticed.
"You want to do it again?" I
guessed the rape hadn't left any effects, but in any case
I declined. With the colder
weather arriving and no place to go I made a sudden
decision to contact Bill Schanen III, who had taken over
the printing business in Port Washington
of his father, who had died of a heart attack, caused --
his family believed -- by the stress of losing most of
his contracts in the boycott of the company over
Kaleidoscope, led by
conservative businessman Eugene Grobschmidt. After
letting go the backbone of the reporting and editing
staff and putting out the paper mostly by himself,
Schanen had decided to hire one
reporter, if he could find one to work cheap, while
continuing with sports writing and the commercial
aspects himself. I had left
Kaleidoscope
once before, for my first professional job as a reporter
in Waukesha when I felt I had enough
classes as a special student in journalism to make my
move. Just like in the movies, I snatched an index
card advertising for a beginning reporter from an
unlocked display case in Mitchell Hall,
preventing anyone else from beating me to it, and rushed
to apply at the Waukesha Freeman.
On the strength of a few clippings from the UWM Post
and an inoffensive interview with Goodman from
Kaleidoscope I was hired to fill in for vacationing
staffers, though the only real position open was given
to an experienced applicant. Nevertheless, I
worked up quickly from supplying a few obits to covering
many governmental agencies after the city editor
sandbagged me by having me go with the regular beat
reporter
to a City Council meeting as an observer
to practice my note-taking.
Unexpectedly, he had me write up the second half of the
meeting on my own, centering on a local chiropractor
offended by Kaleidoscope appearing on Waukesha
streets, waving an issue he said contained nude girls
and obscene language, demanding an ordinance to prevent
such outrages. Of course, the city attorney dryly
pointed out the problem with press freedom, and I
thought I captured the tone of the whole exchange with
some faint ridicule for the offended party. Within
the constraints of objectivity, naturally.
In 13 months I figured I had learned everything there
was to know about small-town journalism, and though I
had rented a furnished room there on American
Avenue, I lost no time in
escaping to Milwaukee after work on Fridays, to stay the
weekend with whatever girlfriend I was seeing and
hanging out at Barney's where my friends were. I
felt the underground press was where the action was,
and the counterculture was a significant
development I had to chronicle and be part of.
Much as the Depression and world wars shaped earlier
generations and defined their lives.
So I left as soon as I was out of debt, most of it
hanging over me from the time of my marriage, and went
back to drinking beer while working late into the night
and watching the scene on Brady Street.
Schanen could hardly refuse
to give me a chance -- and how likely was he to
find a competent local reporter at the salary he was
paying, I thought -- especially since he had
experimented once by hiring an amateur who had organized
support for his father after the boycott started, with
her Committee for a Free Press getting publicity around
the country, in national papers and magazines, including
Life. As a result, subscriptions to his
remaining paper, the Ozaukee Press, came in
from everywhere to replace the local readers he had
lost. Oddly enough, the
organizer of the counter-boycott was once a regular at
Barney's, and I had dated Christy and even gotten her
into bed a few times, but she was generally elusive --
maddeningly so, since she was black-haired and
curvaceously attractive, a lot like my ex-wife without
the gap in her teeth. And of course, I thought her
concern over the boycott meant we were intellectually
fated to be together. But she moved on from her
office job to Waukesha, from where she commuted to
Port
Washington as a reporter, something I didn't know until
I scanned the police reports one morning and saw her
name in a minor traffic accident report. By that
time she had been let go by a regretful Schanen, as
fearless but incompetent. So I looked her up and
was charmed all over again when we talked about her
committee and her contact with Village Voice writer
Joe Flaherty. Still, she
was so full of contradictory behavior that I was glad I
still had Valerie to visit me and then Cheryl to give me
a place to stay on weekends in the city, though Christy
was the one I felt I had really been looking for.
She could be distant or unavailable in the charming
house overlooking the park in downtown Waukesha,
with her little daughter Melies,
but if I had a date lined up in Milwaukee
she might call
me at the last minute to see if I wanted to come over.
Once it was to join them for cannibal sandwiches for supper,
which I had to decline since Cheryl was expecting me,
and I was pissed at missing out on the old Barney's
delicacy. But why would she think I could just be
ready with no notice on a Friday afternoon?
Yet it would later make me feel guilty when we agreed
that Cheryl would call me if she got back from her
mother's and I had finished my shift at the
Freeman on a Friday -- but was on my way
to what I hoped would be an encounter with Christy at
Barney's when the phone rang. As
I cleaned up I let it ring for what seemed a thousand
times, somehow sounding forlorn as I headed for the
door, pangs notwithstanding.
It could be a jolt seeing her, since she was certainly
uninhibited. Getting ready while I waited for her
in her living room -- after a break of months -- she
once told me I could take a shower with her if I wanted
something to do. I didn't, since my own routine at
home had been very thorough and I didn't think I could
recreate the effect with her personal products.
And I did hope that I might get a little credit for not
slavering at the chance. It
was equally disarming when on one of the few times we
actually slept together, in the literal and carnal
sense, that I idly asked in the dark -- thinking
probably of Jenny's appeal -- if she had pink nipples.
She simply snapped on the bedside lamp and thrust them
out like prizes. And she was still awfully young,
and firm and . . . pink, of course.
But I could never pin her down to a serious
relationship, or an explanation of why not, and it was no surprise that she took yet
another job and moved away. Still, she ended up with a
divorced guy from Barney's that I
always considered likeable enough but a nebbish that
spent his adult life being pussy-whipped -- which may
have been the key. So I
followed Christy at
Port Washington -- at least for the
four days a week Schanen and I agreed on, at $25 a day
-- commuting from West Milwaukee and my
mother's house. The trip
was a grind, and with the inevitable evening meetings to
be covered -- made worse by me being the only reporter
in the almost empty office with a few clerical staff,
including Schanen's sister -- I would have a day lasting
until 11 p.m. or so, and the drive back. With no
place to go when normal business hours were over until
the night-time events got under way, unlike
Waukesha where I could go home to rest or
shower and shave to get a start on the next morning, I
was stuck with Smith Bros. Fish Shanty
or a pizza joint or Harry's restaurant
to fill the time. Using the hours to write back at
the office would mean a day stretching for 14 hours if I
started at a normal time, so I quickly settled on coming
in at 11 a.m. or so, or even later. After all there was
very little going on in town that needed me; mostly
there were news releases to re-write, as well as the
reports of the myriad meetings. And Schanen
covered sports -- which I disdained anyway -- with
one antiquated lady left to handle all the society doings, while at
least I could stop for beers at the Tuxedo every
night. Naturally, as with
any weekly paper, with only the one deadline Friday
morning before the presses ran, work piled up until
then. We didn't have what was actually the luxury at a
daily paper, a daily deadline that you met or else,
but that at least meant a fresh start every
morning. My solution was to
clear up my backlog starting Thursday until I went to
sleep in the early morning on a layout table and waking
up to finish Friday morning before going home for the
weekend. Schanen was unhappy about my whole
approach to scheduling, apparently wanting me to be
there days and evenings too, though he never thought to
advance me the small amount needed to get a room that
would make it possible. And I did drop hints.
Though I was apparently competent enough
to edit the entire paper during Schanen's winter vacation
to Florida --
my high point being bold headlines and a front page
spread for my interview with a nude dancer at a local
club trying some novel entertainment with her shaved
pussy -- Schanen
eventually fired me. Showing little gratitude, I
thought, for a night like that when I stayed even later
after a City Council meeting on a tip to trudge in my
galoshes through the snow. A few mixed drinks
at the bar -- that I would pay for in the morning --
interviewing the still-naked circuit dancer who explained that her
boyfriend took care of shaving her bush wasn't worth it.
But I had that week's cover story for usually staid
Port Washington.
Girls
Go-Go All
the Way
At Black Hat
Owner of Lounge Keeps Show
Despite
New Ban on Nudity
|
|
He
seemed nice enough about it, complimenting my writing
and suggesting I was more cut out for a national
magazine like Time or something. But
then, I figured he thought my independence just added to
the burden of publishing with a crippled business that
made him a pariah to much of the community, a burden he
was forced to assume after his father had received so
much recognition for his courage. Even if he would
rather be pursuing his career as the genteel publisher of
a Great Lakes sailing magazine and
hanging out with the country club set. So I went back to
Kaleidoscope and the building where I helped out by
showing apartments. But after a wrangle with
the Schanens, who felt I didn't deserve Unemployment
Compensation, and a long struggle with the bureaucracy,
I got a fistful of checks that I combined with my
pittance from Kaleidoscope to survive for the next
couple of months while paying rent on an East
Side efficiency.
But once again needing more income, I left
Kaleidoscope for the last time to work on the docks,
though I contributed some reportage until the autumn it folded after
Dennis Gall bought it and assumed its
debts for a dollar. With money -- and
I started collecting Unemployment Compensation that
winter when the docks were all but shut down -- I could
keep my own apartment, and drink again around the
East Side. Barney's itself had been transformed
from our own corner bar by a succession of owners into
a typical Downtown spot with bands in the back room and
carpeting on the floor in front and higher prices and a
more expansive menu.
Though Valerie had moved
back home so that her folks could watch over her, she
visited me, one time appearing at my new apartment and
going out for a pint of bourbon so I could drink in bed
and wake up properly while putting off a
hangover. Though we hear a lot about mean drunks
and abusers, the fact was that none of the women I had
known to this point objected to my drinking -- in fact,
they encouraged it, believing it made me more relaxed
and affectionate. I'm sure it did, because I
worked mostly on my own and had to maintain a
stone-faced and focused attitude toward getting
anything done. She puttered around in the
kitchenette, commenting as she filled a glass with
cubes, her back turned: "I wish you loved
me as much as I love you," making my drinks, and
ended up in the Murphy bed where I found myself
straddling her as she leaned back against the pillows
and I lazily kept going until I heard her say, "Ohhh . . .
you came in my mouth."
She was not happy about it,
and though I said something about making it up to her
some other time so she could come, I didn't hear from
her for a while after she left. Not that I
worried about it. Then she found me at the bar
and invited me to a party given by her old teacher
friend Cathy Gruver from Wauwatosa, who now had a nice
apartment on the East Side -- the reason
for the gathering.
It was a small group, the
first time we had been together for a while, and we all
played a little Trivial Pursuit. She told me she
had arranged for Cathy to leave us alone when the party
broke up, and when we were she leaned close in her loose
blue sweater. "What's the
matter, you're alone with a beautiful women to make
love
to . . ."
I hadn't been laid for a while
so Cathy's soft, clean bed was ideal for an
interlude. It was a few weeks later that Val told
me she was pregnant -- something that wasn't supposed
to happen. She had been on the Pill, off and on,
since I met her, and I appreciated it for simplifying
things. One benefit: It made her tits a lot
bigger, verging on impressive, and even seemed to give her a more
substantial ass. So I tried to encourage it
without being dominating. I had noticed how
voluptuous she looked with her back to me and in a tight
skirt when she bent over at the low fridge to get cubes
and mix drinks at my place, but apparently at Cathy's I
was distracted by the company or something, so her loss
of padding went unnoticed. Making her pregnancy
quite a a
surprise.
"Hmmm." I knew
she had been going out for a while, but I startled her
by asking, "What about Alonzo?" He was
an elusive figure whose family ran some funeral homes,
and I heard she had taken up with him again for a
while. We were at the Tuxedo, and she
hesitated and drank some beer. Of course, I was miffed
because I felt I had been tricked.
"Well . . . there was only one time with him . . .
and I'd expect you to marry me. But otherwise --
"
"So, if it happened to be
black, we'd know. Only it would be kinda late."
After a while she left in her
father's Cadillac, and I remained at the bar to
contemplate why I hadn't noticed her bra was a little
loose at Cathy's, though the bedroom had been
dimly lit by only an opened doorway and she hadn't
paraded around in the stark daylight the way we had
been doing at Maggie's and even my room.
I guess to her credit she
didn't bug me about it, and I heard her brother had
sent her to New York where it was legal to get an
abortion. Of course, I didn't have any money to
help her out.
Though I had only planned to
stay at the docks to finish the season, I decided it
was interesting enough, and good exercise for me, to
stay a full year's cycle, and waited it out to the
following spring, collecting Unemployment.
By that time, with
Valerie avoiding me after her abortion -- either to
teach me a lesson or guard against getting involved
again in our dead-end relationship -- I had moved in with
Marlene. Eventually I learned Val
had become more erratic and violent, even breaking her
sister's finger in a tussle, until she was conclusively diagnosed
with brain cancer -- inoperable, resulting in her early death.
Certainly a first for me, and I would think of her
upturned, affectionate face and find myself staring
blankly at a wall and considering the finality of it
all. And the impermanence. After talking with
Marlene for a while at
Hooligan's I realized I had met her once at
John Hawks, but she had been somewhat
heavier, so now we made a new beginning after lamenting
the dispersal of the old crowd.
Since it was the
off season on the docks we would enjoy the use of her
couch in the front room -- farther away from her
roommate Carrie's bedroom and keeping the sounds of sex down -- late at night until she
went on to bed and I kept on drinking bourbon until
falling asleep. Because I generally got up at
noon or later, I had a lot of alertness to work off,
and it was usually with dawn poking in through the front bay
window and the morning DJ on WTOS joking around with the
farm report that I finally crashed.
We found an apartment together
in the building where I had already been living on
Pleasant Street --
making $5 for each vacant apartment shown to eventual
occupants as a night manager and collecting rents from
tenants evading the owner during the day.
She had auburn hair and
luminous gray-green eyes and perfectly straight white teeth, and
though she never
got fat
again -- she said she had gone
on a pizza and popcorn binge after a disappointing
relationship -- she was lush enough. One of her
brothers at a gathering at his house commented with an
implied wink that I probably found that she had nice
jugs, and indeed she did, though I said I should
probably not comment. Our first times in bed I
would dip a finger in her wine glass and rub it around
on her nipples and suck it off, though as a hint it
wasn't that effective and she didn't go down on me until
several months later. But it turned out she just
wasn't very experienced. Still, when on an impulse
I stuck a finger up her ass -- something I wasn't given
to, even though Valerie with her tiny, cool tongue had
licked me all over -- on the couch, she didn't object,
and I figured she would be fun in many ways, as well as
bright.
The hair was important to her --
though it was long and swirled around it wasn't the
bright red I disliked nor the henna-based shade of my
mother's -- and when it wasn't done up in a damp towel
was very striking.
That
spring brought the beginning of my first full year as a
longshoreman, though work never again reached the
intensity it had the previous fall, except in the
closing weeks of the season in December. The
rush, as it was called, only lasted until the last ship
out could beat the closing of the St. Lawrence Seaway
and we were all laid off, except for a few year-around
warehousemen, or old-timers on an occasional small laker. That was fine with me.
Unfortunately,
shipping on the Great Lakes was already suffering from
the switch to huge containerized
ships too big for the
Soo Locks and we increasingly relied on a cargo we had
declined, bags of grain and such -- wheat, corn-soya,
powdered milk. flour -- destined as US agricultural aid
to starving countries in Africa. This meant 8
and 12 hour shifts loading 50 lb. bags from pallets to
stuff ships to the deck overhead, baking and sweating in
summer heat and on into the freezing temperatures of
fall and early winter. Raw hides, scraped, fatty
sides out, or greasy and furry if they were higher
quality were sometimes netted in, but usually had to be
loaded singly while we wore the supplied,
often-laundered but decrepit aprons and rubber gloves.
Some steel gangs
were still needed, as well as those for heavy machinery
and the occasional smaller container ships or ones with
added pads welded to the top decks for
containers stacked there, others to be
maneuvered into the wings below with forklifts. But
everything was assigned by seniority, the best jobs --
hooking up loads on the shore, signalmen, winchmen --
going to the old-timers. Sometimes pallets of
general cargo were put in place by forklifts or broken
down to be restacked individually, as were boxes of soy
oil -- more foreign aid. But
deprivation in the wider world seemed remote as I coped
with near collapse after shifts of lifting and stacking
and a new domestic scene with a woman with a luscious
mouth, linked to an
unevenly receding, variegated past.
 [Continued
Here]
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