Like People in History (2 page)

"Tierney ended up in a nut hatch, didn't she?"

I beamed with pleasure. I could take Wally anywhere. Chip on the shoulder or not.

"Not until after
Laura.
In this film she was unbelievably beautiful," I said, remembering the clean new print on videotape I'd recently seen.

Wally had meanwhile become aware that he was being eyed by the bartender, a model-actor-waitress of no discernible attractions. To be nice to me and nasty to the flirter, Wally grabbed and kissed me, perfectly in profile to the bar.

"So when are you going to give him your gift?" Wally asked.

"I thought... as we leave?"

"You're still not sure whether you should give it to him, are you?"

"Of course I'm not sure. They're not Sen-Sen!"

"You got them. You spent two weeks among some of the scrungiest faggots I ever laid eyes on, in dives even I wouldn't go near, for two weeks, collecting enough of them. And you're not giving them to him?"

"Look, Wally, I know you don't approve."

"I told you before..."

"Some smidgen of religion or something your grandmother once said or an item in
Senior Scholastic
or..."

"Whatever you do, just fucking do it, okay!"

"...so I can't blame you, for not approving," I continued, unfazed. "But he came to me. He asked me. I couldn't refuse him. Could I?"

"You've never refused him before."

"That's not true."

"When?" Wally demanded.

"I have."

"When?"

"Sometime I'll tell you when."

But of course he was ninety-nine percent right.

"Well, I'm tired of the suspense," Wally said. "I'm not hanging around here for you to do it. I'm leaving now. I'll be downstairs at Hunan Hell eating Hummingbird Scrota in Oyster Sauce."

I could have stopped him, but the truth was I was conflicted enough without having Wally's presence and disapproval to add to it.

And there was Alistair, still enthroned, surrounded by admirers new and old, common and semi-regal, and I didn't know when I could, or if I could, or even if I
should
, give him the sixty electric-blue-and-red Tuinals with which he fully intended to end his life tonight.

"So how do you think he looks?"

I smelled the White Woman before I heard his words: an odor close to that of brand-new Naugahyde in a late-sixties-model Ford. Actually I felt him before I smelled him. He's like one of those Black Holes in Space: he absorbs everything around him for about a yard circular. Molecules shed their magnetic and electrical charge when he approaches: it's depressing and draining, like the few minutes immediately preceding a spectacular thunderstorm. Except, in his case, the storm never arrives.

"He looks tarted up," I said.

"That's what he wanted."

"At least the tic's gone."

"Did you notice his hands? He can hardly use them. I have to cut up his food. Sometimes even feed him. He's got medicine for it, but he says it makes him so sleepy he calls himself Parko the Narko."

This was the cutesy name I'd been waiting for.

"You're a saint, Dorky. You'll go to heaven with your shoes on. Bally oxblood wingtips," I specified.

"I don't mind. I'm..."

"...nothing. Alistair's everything," I finished the sentence.

"You're in a bad mood," the White Woman concluded without rancor, and swept his electron-removal unit to another section of the party.

Well, we'd talked and I'd been rude to him. As usual.

"Someone told me that absolute hunk is your lover."

The speaker was the bartender, mercifully silent until then.

"I don't get it," he continued, fatuous as predicted. "You're nothing special."

"I have a huge dick. Size of a small child's arm."

"You're kidding," he said, checking my crotch.

"Left it at home tonight. Actually," I intimated, crooking a finger for him to lean over the bottles and glasses and lemon wedges, "I do have a secret weapon."

"You do?"

"I do. It seems that Socrates was right: Virtue does attract Beauty."

"Huh?"

I breezed away into a corner where I could sip my vodka-less tonic and mope. I'd expected that "Huh" and that crack. In fact, everything so far tonight had been so as usual I felt in my pocket to make sure the two wrapped plastic vials of Tueys that alone made this night Significant and Different were still there.

Then, to make it even more as usual, someone located the record collection and put on Gloria Gaynor's first LP.

As usual. All of it as usual.

Except that I hadn't lied to Wally. I
had
refused Alistair something he'd asked for, something he'd wanted badly. Refused him more than once. Once at the very beginning.

That early October day in 1954 seemed no different from any other as I left school for the day. It was still too early for leaf change and recent rains had swept away the summer dust that collected in the gutters of our ordinarily spotless Long Island neighborhood. Three o'clock in the afternoon gave us fourth-graders plenty of time for games and mischief before sunset led to homework, dinner, and if we were good, "Captain Video" followed by "Your Show of Shows" on TV.

As we fled the school building, Augie turned to me and yelled, "My house! Half an hour! Magnets!" He charged off right, toward home, the overstuffed, aged leather satchel he used as a schoolbag bumping against his leg where it had already rubbed smooth a notch in each of his corduroy trousers.

August Herschel was my class friend, a heavyset boy with curly coffee-with-cream hair and cloudy blue eyes set deep in what was already a grown-up's face. Not the brightest boy in the world, he was good-natured and loyal, always curious and eager to follow my more arcane suggestions for amusements. Also a terrific pitcher in our Saturday afternoon baseball games up at the lots on Vanderveer Street. Augie liked me, and had sworn undying friendship to me since the second grade, when, at a Thanksgiving pageant given by our class in the school auditorium, I—dressed as an Iroquois—had only half inadvertently dumped most of the contents of a papier-mâché cornucopia filled with colorful but hard little gourds on top of May Salonen, Augie's least favorite classmate, knocking her down just as she was about to make her big speech, causing her to forget her lines, burst into tears, and resist any attempts at comforting by our teacher. This had forced down the curtain on the stupid play, and given us the rest of the afternoon off.

More important these days, Augie was a solid and accepted member of the rest of the fourth-grade boys. Not that I thought much of that undistinguished ragtag bunch. But after a year-long infatuation with Grace Del Verdi, which had kept me in her and other females' company, what I needed more than anything else in the world now, for my sanity as well as for my reputation at school, was the company—and the acceptance—of boys my age.

I turned left and desultorily fell in with Ronny Taskin and his friends, who walked home the same way I did. Ronny was a tall, skinny boy who worked out with Indian clubs, a holdover from his father's days as a circus stuntman. That remnant of carnival glamour was all I could see in Ronny to give him precedence among us.

"Magnets? What's magnets?" Ronny turned all the way around to ask me.

"Those things that make iron stick to them," I explained. "Augie and I are fooling around with them. Trying to make things move. We broke a light bulb last time."

That last detail seemed to satisfy him that ours was an acceptable activity.

"You should be practicing batting for Saturday," Tony Duyckman said.

"I'll always be a lousy batter. My left eye's too bum," I added, referring to an infant accident which had left me astigmatic and, while dramatic enough in the telling, unfortunately hadn't left a scar, except inside my eyeball, where no one but an ophthalmologist could see it.

The boys broke off in twos and threes, leaving me to dawdle the rest of the way home with Kerry White, a small, thin boy with excessive blond hair, himself a hanger-on of the group. We were silent until I reached the path to our door, where I left him with a curt "Bye," to which he responded with a sunny smile and overeager farewell.

Too bad for Kerry, I thought, even lower than me with the other guys. I opened the screen door, hoping I'd never fall so low as to walk home with five other kids without being spoken to and then be satisfied with someone saying good-bye. I grabbed the kitchen door handle and it didn't open. It was stuck or—locked!

Café curtains misted the kitchen-side windows. Even so, peering through I didn't see my mother anywhere in the room. So I knocked on the door. Then on the kitchen window. When that didn't work, I dragged my schoolbag to the front of the house and tried that door. Also locked. I rang the bell, knocked, shouted, and walked all over the grass down the slope to the garage door, located under the living room windows. No car in the garage. And the door was also locked.

I sat down in despair awhile, reading into these locked doors, that empty garage, the worst: my mother had left. Or, some terrible accident had befallen my father and sister and she'd rushed out to the hospital. I'd not been very nice to anyone in my family of late, and I was feeling guilty. Finally I got up and slogged over to our neighbor's house.

Mrs. Furst didn't know anything. Or said she didn't. She was busily entertaining a bevy of women in their mid-sixties, all of them sipping coffee out of narrow porcelain cups as they eyed an orange-frosted angel food cake. No, Mrs. Furst assured me, she had not seen my mother leave, and she had no message for me. In fact, she seemed to have but one thing on her mind: how long she could keep those biddies from attacking her culinary masterpiece.

Which reminded me that I was hungry too. My pockets contained only nine cents, not even enough for a Mars bar, but I knew that my mother kept a charge account open at a local grocery. I brazenly charged a Yoo-Hoo chocolate soda, a rectangular single-serving pineapple pie, and just to make it look legit, a box of Gold Dust cleanser.

I moped, eating in front of the grocery until several local women passed by and one of them asked me why I wasn't at home. I noticed the time on the "Moderne" 7-Up advertising clock in the window. I was late for Augie.

He was changed into his dungarees, in his backyard, playing with his metal dump trucks when I arrived, and he immediately asked why I was still in my school clothing. When I explained that my mother wasn't home and my house was locked up, he said I could borrow a pair of his overalls. I did, and they were so large I could wear them easily over my school pants and shirt.

The next hour was misery. I was too depressed to think about all the neat things I'd previously planned to do with the large magnet we'd found in his father's toolshed. Every once in a while I would sigh, and when Augie asked what was wrong, I'd reply, "Oh, nothing!" Then I mysteriously asked if he thought his folks would let me move in until I could find a job.

"Sure!" Augie said. But Augie would have replied the same if I'd asked him for all the blood in his body. Worse, he seemed to take my plight altogether too lightly, continuing to fill up, move along, and empty his toy metal trucks with exasperating imperturbability. In Augie's world my anxieties were unthinkable: "You're nuts to worry, your mother probably went out to get her hair done." I suddenly saw myself as Augie must see me: exotic and neurasthenic. And I suddenly saw Augie clearly: too unimaginative, too plain stupid to recognize that a future existed; possibly a not very pretty one.

This led to new guilt at my failure even to be a good friend, and I began talking about Ronny Taskin's pals and the upcoming game. Finally I let Augie pitch balls to me and tried batting them. We were in the middle of that when he was called inside to do his homework and I was sent home.

I didn't run all the way; I loitered on street corners staring at caterpillars fallen to the sidewalk. I counted bicycles dropped willy-nilly on front lawns or parked in tiers upon kickstands in driveways. I dreaded reaching our block. I turned into it reluctantly, so afraid to see the kitchen door still shut against me I wouldn't look up until I was directly in front of it.

It was still locked. I collapsed onto my schoolbag and contemplated suicide.

"His shirt was out of his pants. His shoes were caked with dirt. His mouth was a mélange of pineapple and some brown goo. His hair hadn't been combed all day. He looked like an urchin photographed outside some shanty in Appalachia"—that's how Alistair later on described me at our first meeting.

Alistair, on the other hand, was superb in a brand-new complete Hopalong Cassidy outfit, midnight-black with silver trim, including the arabesque-studded leather holster and silver-plated six-shooter, the authentic black-and-white pony Western boots, and the cream-colored felt ten-gallon hat with black embroidery.

He stepped out of the front seat of my mother's old Roadmaster, dropped a suitcase on the flagstones, and waited until my mother— carrying a larger suitcase—joined him before he said, "We used to have tramps in our neighborhood too. My mother usually gives them a five and tells them to get a haircut."