In God We Trust (26 page)

“It’s Showbiz, Flick, it’s all Showbiz. They’re always doing this stuff like a salute to TV, or a salute to Richard Rodgers, or
My Fair Lady
, for God’s sake. Can you imagine what Duckworth woulda said if they had tried to foist off a Majorette on him, or what the hell do they call them—a Pom-Pom girl, or a Color Guard?”

“Plenty a bazooms.…”

“It’s Showbiz, Flick.”

We sat together, Flick now perched on his high stool, me on mine, staring grimly out into the middle distance.

“I’m watching one the other day, Flick. They must have had a band of about 30,000 pieces. They came out with more junk hanging on ’em. Horns, whistles, smoke bombs, sirens; these guys had it all, and I’ll be goddamned if they don’t start making a formation while this announcer on the TV says; ‘We are now going to pay a tribute to Doctor Kildare, that famous TV doctor.’ And you know what they made, Flick, in a formation while they were playing that theme song from that TV show?”

“A bedpan?” Flick guessed.

I knocked my beer over into my lap and leaped up, brushing the suds off the fine English flannel, the pride of my life. Flick grinned the self-contented grin of a man who knows he’s made a funny. He drew me another beer, cackling all the while.

“Hell, no! A bedpan woulda been great. I’d a cheered! What this band did was march around, and they make a big hypodermic needle. ’Covered the whole damn field! And then somebody blows a whistle and the plunger goes in, and the whole Bass section and about thirty-eight trumpets and six
guys playing glockenspiels go pouring out through the needle. They’re the dope, see, and when they get out of the needle they spell out ‘Ouch!,’ fer Chrissake. Well, I can see about 500,000 Junkies sitting out there, coming to in the middle of the football game and seeing this giant spike. And thinking all of a sudden they’re doing a commercial for Heroin or something. It’s a wonder they didn’t bust the whole goddamn stadium!”

The phone rang. Flick picked up the receiver.

“Yeah? Now, you know I’m going to the game tonight. (Pause) You can have the car. They won’t even know I’m not there. Okay, I promise. I will
not
miss the next meeting; okay? That’s a promise.”

He hung up.

“The wife. Janis.”

I remembered Janis faintly from school as a dark, quiet girl. I hardly knew her. I decided quickly not to pursue the subject any further. You never know.

“What meeting you talking about, Flick?”

“PTA. She drags me to that damn thing every month. They sit around and talk about the Penny Supper. And how to raise more money to buy more World Books.”

“You got kids?” I asked.

“You know it!”

A sudden thought hit me. The PTA. Teachers, parents—the old alma mater.

“Do you ever see any of our old teachers? Like Mr. Milton? Or.…”

I groped for a few names that were indelibly, forever tattooed on the tough hide of my memory.

“How ’bout ah … yeah, old Fatso Appleton?” He was a notorious Shop teacher who ran his Shop classes like an actual
Sweatshop
. I guess he figured we better learn early.

“He’s tougher than ever,” Flick said. “In fact, a couple years ago some kids even tried to start a union, in his Shop, and he imported a bunch of Scab students after they went out on strike. Locked ’em out.”

“Too bad we never thought of that when we were around. What a jerk! How ’bout Miss Bryfogel?”

He thought for a long moment and said:

“No … I don’t see her around any more. She really was something.”

I thoughtfully munched a pretzel.

“She certainly was, Flick. I, for one, will never forget her.”

XXVI
MISS BRYFOGEL AND THE FRIGHTENING CASE OF THE SPECKLE-THROATED CUCKOLD

The sticky-sweet, body-warm taste of Pornography lingers in the soul long after the fires have been banked and the shades drawn. Where did it all begin? What ancient caveman drew the first dirty picture on the wall of his dank granite hole and then, cackling fiendishly, scuttled off into the darkness. At what point in time did some lecherous pornographer—his acne itching, his palms sweaty—proclaim his smudgy craft as Art? Thereby giving rise and hope and sustenance to a whole generation, nay, an immense population of beady-eyed, furtive probers in the rank undergrowth of human debauchery.

At long last we have finally solved that age-old problem, that ancient challenge which drove countless philosophers of the past to the verge of madness; of how to change the base metal lead into precious gold. Even as I write this, battalions of hard-working, Serious, dedicated artists, their tongues lolling, their breath coming in short, uneven pants, foreheads sticky with clammy perspiration, their agents impatiently clamoring at the door of their sacred writing chamber, are contriving at immense artistic cost yet another description; evocation, of a basically simple bodily function, or yet another monstrously imagined portion of the human anatomy. Theirs is not an easy task. Pause and consider. There really aren’t many four-letter
words, and there are just so many ways you can arrange them. Already, perhaps, the end is in sight.

But their task is dwarfed by the legion of ready reviewers whose duty it is to transmute their inchoate lead into magnificent golden works of Art. His arsenal of phrases, like that of the Artist, is also limited, and hence sees repeated use:

“Biting satire.…”

“Scathing indictment of our Puritanical sexual mores.”

“Brilliant parody—a real thrust at the Victorian ethos.”

“Deliciously savage tongue-in-cheek treatment of.…”

“Ribald, picaresque, rollicking novel that has a deep undertone of.…”

“Ecstatic poetic vision, reminiscent of an enlightened D. H. Lawrence.”

I repeat, theirs is not an easy task. Yet willingly, nay,
eagerly
, they sit imprisoned in their digs, eyes bulging, a work of Art clutched in their palsied talons. They suffer great insights for all of us.

What has happened to the old-fashioned Dirty Old Man, not to mention the old-fashioned Dirty Young Man? The answer is obvious. They are now Artists, destined to stand in that great pantheon that stretches back through the mists of time to Euripides, marching forward with Melville and Conrad, Chaucer and Shakespeare. It has been a long, difficult process but we in our time have finally solved the old riddle of the alchemist.

And yet, let us be honest. Deep down in the innermost recesses of our minds there is something that peers out at us with tiny, red-rimmed eyes, its mildewed beak chittering, that reminds us by its lewd cackling that we are scrawling pictures on the walls of our cave. There are times when you can ignore this insistent, omniscient beast, and then there are times when you can’t. There are just so many ways to spell “ass.”

Not long ago I was subtly and forcibly reminded of that inescapable fact. It was Sunday, a gray, milky, Nothing Sunday in the great tradition. I lounged, coffee cup in hand, in my gilded cell, vaguely conscious of a gnawing and unfamiliar sense of shame and discomfort. Knee-deep in the Sunday papers I sat,
futilely warding off those elusive pangs of shame and guilt. I am a Twentieth-Century Man. I should not know these feelings! Then why the vague feverish flush, the clammy palms, the fugitive desire to hide under the daybed? True, I had been in attendance at a monumental debauch the night before and had indulged myself strenuously, but, after all, the Debauch itself is now a recognized art form, and I merely an aspiring, creative performer. Then why this persistent sense of unease? Could it be that I was suffering from an attack of recurrent vestigial conscience? I immediately crossed that out, since, being a representative citizen of our time, I knew that it was an impossibility.

It must be caused, then, by something from without my body and psyche, certainly not from within. But what?

I looked about me. My television set droned on harmlessly in the corner with its endless professional golf match, its perpetual succession of Arnold Palmers, Julius Boros, Gary Players, Jay Heberts, and other heroic figures of our time, hitting little balls with short sticks perpetually over the green hills of TV Land. Surely it could not be
this
innocent vision. I looked about the room again. All was familiar and normally sybaritic.

I sipped nervously at my rich, full-flavored, tepid instant coffee and tried to get my mind back into healthier channels. Forcibly I made myself think of Higher Things. I tried to recall a few of the better scenes from a magnificent 8mm Art film I had seen the week before at the Nouveau Cinematique Realité Festival I had attended.
The Passionate Transvestite
, a superb, delicate, subtly controlled delineation of a sensitive theme, and its attendant feature,
Tilly the Toiler Meets Winnie Winkle
, a wildly robust comedy making light of the Puritanical mores of our day.
Passionate
, as it is known to us cinema
aficionados
, was almost better than
Candy Meets King Kong
, a frank Anti-War statement couched in cuttingly sardonic Voltairean brushstrokes.

It was no use. Something was troubling me. I stirred restlessly, kicking at the drift of newspaper that covered my ankles. Something caught my eye. And held it. Those sinister fugitive pangs of guilt rose to a crescendo. And then I knew! It was unmistakable!
Draped over the toe of my Italian ostrich-skin, alligator lounging slipper, provocatively half-opened, was the
Sunday Times Book Review Supplement

It held my steady nervous gaze like a hooded cobra about to strike. But this was only the good old familiar
Book Review Supplement
, a trusted friend that had sustained me through many a slippery moment at countless cocktail parties. And yet now, for some unaccountable reason, this friendly, faithful companion had touched off that sinister, faint but insistent sickness of fear and humiliation, deep in my vitals where such things happen.

Ordinarily, on long, timeless Sundays, I save the supplement and the magazine section for last, as a kind of self-indulgent treat, but today, unmistakably, a new and alien note had been sounded. The
Book Review Supplement
had mysteriously stirred some long-dead, or at least sleeping, specter in my soul.

Perhaps my language is a bit overwrought, but there are times when it is not easy to maintain the cool steady eye and the casual hand.

What was there about this innocent fold of paper? I bent forward to look more closely at the cover page. Its familiar staid measured grayness suddenly came into sharp focus. “New Edition of Renaissance Classic”—the heading in bold type, and at center page a black and white woodcut showing a languorous youth lounging under a fairy-tale tree, and over him stood a Florentine lady wearing the flowing gowns of the nunnery. Where had I seen that lad, that spent lad, that lady of the Church before?

And then, eerily, faintly perceptible, a voice drifted out of the bottomless depths of the swamp of my subconscious, the indistinct syllables bursting like bubbles of some loathsome combustible gas generated by the decomposed slime of prehistoric monsters. A feminine voice! What in God’s name is she saying to me?

I strained to hear that ghostly caller. It seemed to come somehow from the very grain of the woodcut itself! Somewhere, in some far-off land, Sam Snead was sinking fifteen-foot putts,
Cary Middlecoff was happily birdying, but there was no joy in my soul that day. I hunched even further, deeper into my motor-driven Vibra-Snooze lounging chair, alert, my senses tingling, ready for danger. The voice came nearer and nearer, and then, clearly, distinctly, I sensed it was asking me a question, a question I had been asked before,
aeons
before. My God! It was now impossible to evade!

“Where did you get that book?”

    With an inchoate cry I leaped to my feet, sending that rank scorpion, that culture shark the supplement spinning into the corner where it lay for a moment, its pages sinuously fluttering like some ghastly living thing.

Shaken to my underpinnings I stumbled, half-crazed with a terror such as I had not known since my days as a ten-year-old innocent. I rushed to my Inna-Wall sliding teakwood-paneled Danish bar and blindly pressed a button. Seconds later, clutching three fingers of Chevas Regal, I tried to regroup.

But Miss Bryfogel pursued me, asking her question again and again, louder and louder! Miss Bryfogel! And then it all began to come back, the whole sordid, fetid mess.

Shakily easing myself back into the comforting depths of my chair, driven by forces beyond my control, I painfully began to reconstruct that awful moment of my fall from Grace and Purity. I once was as pure as the driven snow, an apple-cheeked lad who delighted in the birds of spring and the soft humming afternoons of summer, and I was insanely, madly, totally in love. With Miss Bryfogel. My commitment was complete.

Miss Bryfogel taught sixth-grade English, and for every fifty-five minute period that I was permitted in her presence I lay prostrate at her feet. Her soft heart-shaped face and dark, liquid eyes haunted me in my every waking hour. She never gave the slightest indication that she, too, was stirred to the depths. But I
knew
.