A Boy's Own Story (24 page)

After we rang the bell for several minutes and Chuck pounded the door and sang a love song in warbling falsetto, which elevated the dog into new ecstasies of rage, the door at last was cracked open and a tall Negro man looked out. He had a tight black silk kerchief on his head and a few short white curly whiskers growing out of a shiny mole beside his mouth.

Inside, two young black women and one woman who was white and middle-aged were sitting in slips in front of a television set. One of the black women had on pink-rimmed glasses and was knitting. The room beyond them, a waiting room lined with crude wooden folding chairs, was deserted and harshly lit. Three pictures leaned forward off the dirty walls, one a reproduction of a painting of Jesus praying in Gethsemane while his disciples dozed unmindful of the approaching Roman guards. The other pictures were of cloth behind glass, each embroidered with a motto: "Peace on Earth" and "Bless This House"—puns, I guess, but who could be certain. The house smelled of cooking fat and pork.

"Now, you boys sit in here," the white woman said, indicating the waiting room with a precise push of her hand, as though her hand were a croupier's rake, "and choose your women." We filed in under the harsh light. Chuck's nose looked huge and cratered, his teeth as big as a dog's. I felt my penis and scrotum contract, inchworm above a buckeye, but I was counting on the whore's discretion—the guys need never know of my failure.

"Girls, get your lazy black asses in here so these men can look you over."

One of the women, who'd fallen asleep in front of the television, had to be prodded awake. As she waddled past us on tiny, high-heeled slippers, the soles engulfed by her fleshy feet, she rubbed her eyes, protruded her lower lip and made a fretting sound. So massive and quivering were her breasts and hips under the slip that the garment seemed to be the body of a vaudeville horse which at least two people were inhabiting. At the same time her physical grandeur did nothing to diminish the impression she gave of being a little girl, an impression heightened by the sass with which she planted a fist in her hip and asked nastily, "Seen enough?" We nodded. She said defiantly,
"Good.
I goan back to mah TV shows."

The other black woman, the one who'd been knitting, kept her glasses on and the embryonic maroon sweater in her hand as she sleepwalked past, counting stitches, never looking up. Hers was also an ample, indoor body of seraglio proportions but her face seemed older, thinner—in fact, she was a dead ringer for our white dietician at school, if a
ringer
is a racehorse entered under a false name and posing as another, less successful one. (Horse, dog, inchworm—nature takes her revenge on stories from which she's been excluded by smuggling herself into them under the guise of imagery.)

"Well?" the white woman said.

"Is that it?" Chuck asked.

She smiled a not especially pleasant smile and said, "There's always me," with an edge to the
always
to suggest how long she'd been in harness, how weary of the road she'd become.

"I'll take you," Chuck said. His voice didn't crack, he didn't soften the blow of his words with a giggle, nor did he drop his eyes. He knew exactly what he wanted.

"Yeah, me too," each of us said in turn on a descending scale of confidence ending with my whisper.

"Then come on," she said, walking away from us and unzipping her dress in a single gesture. She paused at her bedroom door and glanced back. The dress had somehow evaporated into just a wisp of teal-blue smoke in her hand as she tossed it aside. There she stood, door open and behind her a shaded floor lamp dangling fringe; her naked body looked pale as a night moth and as powdery. Her pubic hair had been shaved into a black rectangle. Her legs were ropy. She went in and disappeared from sight. The sound of running water could be heard and a cat's paw of steam stretched out into the bedroom to bat at a ball of cold air. A cricket chanted in the radiator. (Teal, moth, cat, cricket—the chorus of animals chirps and twitters, ready for its entrance into the enfeebled, cicatrized world.)

Chuck put his hands on his knees like a retired farmer and levered himself up out of the chair. "I don't know about you boys, but ol’ Chuck's not taking no sloppy seconds."

I'd never heard before the expression
sloppy seconds.
Cursed as I was with an overly literal imagination—so that such stock phrases as
motherfucker, pussywhipped
and
shitfaced
took on horribly vivid pictorial detail for me—I couldn't help seeing now a bruised and drooling indentation. For the first time my inchworm twitched, in response not to this damaged cloaca but to the idea of the five penises beside me, each a masquerader behind a domino of buttoned or zipped cloth, all mysterious and of an unknown girth, slant, heft, scent and hardness. I hotly envied the white whore what so obviously left her cold; I would have been content just to watch from her closet.

Chuck returned to us surprisingly quickly but with a smile on his face and a huge transverse rod (that seemed worthy of its campus-wide reputation) in his trousers pointing up to the right of his belt buckle—one o'clock until it ticked down to two. As the second boy went in, Chuck wandered out into the other room, asked for a beer and got it and sat down to watch TV. He called me in to see something. I found myself sitting on the overstuffed arm of a chair covered with a fabric that felt like unshaved beard and suddenly there was a dimpled black hand on my knee belonging to the huge little girl who'd been dozing but was now contentedly half-awake and sipping a rum and Coke. "Want some?"

"No," I said.

She breathed out a faint snort. "Don' know why all you fellas go for that ofay bitch."

"Okay?"

"Yeah, she a ofay cunt."

"Ofay
means 'white,'" Chuck muttered between mouthfuls of potato chips, his eyes drinking in a shootout on the screen. He cocked his thumb up out of his fist, sighted his way down his forefinger and fired at the television; his body was jolted to one side and he buried his head in his armpit for a second, played dead, sniffed, said, "Yuck, time for my monthly shower."

"Hey, honey," the woman beside me was saying, "I got me a crazy little crib downstairs. Why don' you and me party? Wanna party? That ofay cunt take ten bucks. I give it to you for eight. Eight for straight, ten for round-the-world."

"What's that?"

She hissed a goose giggle into her pink palm. When she lowered her hand she was still grinning. "Don' you know nothin'? You kids sho 'nuff
green.
Round-the-world means I start at yo' mouth and kiss you all round, top to bottom, round the world, with a long wait on your south
pole!"
Another hiss behind her hand.

I felt sorry for her. I thought she might really need my ten dollars. After all this was Saturday night, and yet she didn't have any customers. Somehow I equated her fatness, her blackness, her unpopularity with my own outcast status. She'd show me sympathy, which would magically awaken my virility. In her adoring eyes I'd become a slender-hipped young prince under a gold crown of hair, skin as smooth as petals under a light green tunic. I'd protect her. I'd earn money and buy her freedom. We'd be outcasts together as a mixed couple, she a Negro whore and I her little protector. But no matter, for if this fantasy kept me a pariah by exchanging homosexuality for miscegenation, it also gave me a sacrifice to make and a companion to cherish. I would educate and protect her. I would nurse her back to decency after her years of debauchery.

We went downstairs into a cellar room curtained off from the furnace by a flannel blanket suspended from aclothesline. Her night table was a wooden crate. Her mattress had no sheets on it and was resting on the floor. She pulled her slip over her head and said, "Get your clothes off. I don' have all night."

She didn't even watch me as I undressed. As I pulled my underpants off I worried she'd laugh when she saw my fear-shriveled penis, but her indifference to me was complete. I creaked awkwardly as I lowered myself onto the bed beside her. Her fingers started blindly grubbing for my penis, which she found and yanked. Then she sighed, heaved herself up
onto
an elbow, finally lowered herself and plopped my penis in her mouth. Nothing happened. I could scarcely feel anything.

"I don' have all night," she said again as she unthreaded a hair from between her teeth and looked at it suspiciously.

"Sorry," I said. It dawned on me that neither of us was enjoying this and that she was as eager as I for it to be over. "For some reason I'm not in the mood tonight," I said. "Let's just talk a minute and then go upstairs. And if any of the fellows should ask—"

"Yeah, yeah," she said, "Ah'll say you was great, a real stud. And in the future, my man, drink gin. Gin make you hard. It do. It make a man hard."

The following summer I spent with my father at his cottage—the summer of my exciting, frustrating idyll with Kevin. When I returned to school the next September I was switched to a new room in a new dormitory next door to the housemaster's suite. Mr. and Mrs. Scott seemed an odd pair, he a grinning, skinny, forgetful little Latin teacher behind glasses cloudy with thumbprints, the fly of his gray, unpressed Brooks Brothers trousers sometimes open, usually half open, his hair worn in a salt-and-pepper crew cut, his shoulders fallen, perhaps broken under a perpetual burden of sin and duty and uxoriousness, which must be either one or the other. He was at his sweetest with Tim, his four-year-old son, a lovely wide-awake kid who alternated between bouts of boyish roughhousing and almost seraphic spells of listening. Yes, listening to adult conversation, to the radio, to the muted shoutings of the dorm during free time, to practically anything, even silence, which for him came across as a plenum, supersonic scrape and lift and settling, the sound of the feathered jets of the spheres.

Whenever Tim clung to his father's leg or sat on his lap and asked questions, Mr. Scott seemed most in focus. An admiration of his handsome, intelligent, good-natured little boy brightened and fattened the wavering flame in Mr. Scott's eyes and sweetened the vinegar of his smile, for usually Mr. Scott smiled as if in queasy anticipation of a practical joke about to be played on him. Indeed, the students
had
offered him "a new bike" at an end-of-semester ceremony last year, but when he came bounding up the aisle with a glad grin they greeted him not with some sleek English racer to replace his battered old Schwinn but with a Bike athletic supporter (sour smile, "Very funny, you guys, a big yuck for your side").

His students counted on his being dazed. In Latin class, when he called attendance, someone different responded to each name each time, nor did Mr. Scott appear to notice when the same person answered to three different names in a row. Kids were always taping on his back the message "Kick me." When he had to make an announcement in general assembly, he'd be unable to read his own writing. Soon he would have shoved his glasses up onto his forehead and he would be holding the paper an inch away from his eyes.

He himself was the product of prep schools and his natural position in this rough, raw society would have been as one of those skinny little kids who don't hit puberty until sixteen and who learn to take a lot of teasing until then and know how to dish out a few practical jokes in return (dead frog under the pillow). He was one of those kids who serve as manager of the football team and become the mascot, the sort of boy who's dying to be included by the team but hides on the day the yearbook photo is being taken: lovable, starved for affection, elusive. Yet here he was having to play disciplinarian. Whenever someone made a commotion during chapel, Mr. Scott's eyes flared for a second with sympathetic mirth, which he immediately doused in favor of the stern visage of the leader, boy giving way to man. As a man he was a fake, and this very fraudulence was what dazed him, sank his self-esteem, introduced confusion into his voice.

I was asked to baby-sit for the Scotts, and since little Tim and I got along I was invited back more and more often. Tim liked a bedtime story I made up about the ghost train that floated outside his window and that only he could see and hear as it went "Whoo-o-o...," its whistle a high, sad, soft wail lost on the winter wind. The whole point of each episode was the repetition of that sound, which I'd hoard until the end; then his eyes would grow wide. The sound seemed to correspond to that heavenly ruckus he alone could hear, that burn-off of angelic fuels at the center of the universe.

Something about that child seemed so wise and cool but tender, and for a moment the idea of rebirth did seem convincing to me, for how else could one explain the wisdom of many lives, cleaned by the refiner's fire, and placed large and bright and constant within this merest excuse for a body? I felt Tim understood all my own fears and hopes, understood everyone and everything. When I'd brush his hair and see the blue artery ticking in his temple or wash his face and observe the awakened capillaries in his cheeks rush full of bright red blood, or help him out of his shirt and into his pajama tops, as I glanced in that interval of nudity at the inhaled diaphragm pressing up and into the minute ribs, this live and breathing glove pulled over the cupped, inflexible hands of bone guarding his heart—oh, at such moments I sensed that only the thinnest tissue separated me from spirit itself and that the roar Tim was listening to was not far away but here, inside, here.

Tim was the agent who humanized Mrs. Scott for me. If he loved her, if he could let her tickle him, if he could cling to her knee as she read to him, then she must not be a monster, all appearances to the contrary. When I dropped by their apartment in the afternoon she always had the curtains drawn and was always sunk into a stupor on an old, feeble couch broken in the shanks and bleeding from the arms. Mrs. Scott squatted heavily on this piece of furniture, her chin on her palm, as though she were Death meditating on its latest convert. Sometimes I'd want just to fly through, to kiss Tim or to leave my Latin assignment with her husband, but she couldn't be ignored. She drank in all the oxygen around her and reversed the magnetism of all metals; one was drawn to her even by the fillings in one's teeth. Her hair was black and dirty and cut into a pageboy only because hair must be worn in some style; undoubtedly she would have preferred it thick with twigs and matted with mud. She always wore a formless madras blouse flown like a flag announcing defeat over the battlements of her corpulent body. Her teeth overlapped. Her eyeteeth were unusually long and pointed and wet.