But the quest for tail went on unabated through our high school years and into and through college. Some Jells got their first experience with sex from Frances Spurling, a cheerful nymphomaniac of fifteen who lived with her parents behind a seedy white frame grocery store on Roswell Road, who would call up the boy of her choice and say, “Your bananas are ready. You can pick them up at three.” Or four, or whenever her parents were not about. And the boy would go, trembling and swaggering, over to the store and park behind the stock shed out back and steal into the filthy, black, cobwebby interior, and Frances, her underpants down around her meaty ankles, would be awaiting him on a pile of gunnysacks, and would grab him and stuff him inside her with no more ado than if she were manning the grocery cash register, and buck wildly for a moment, until he spilled his nervous seed more in bewilderment and haste than passion, and then dry herself off with the gunnysack and push him, still zipping up, out the door, saying, “Bananas are a dollar a pound this week.”
My own inevitable encounter with Frances came the Halloween I was fourteen, a good year after everyone else I knew claimed to have been ushered through the gates of Heaven by her. For sheer ignominy, little in my life has ever matched it.
The year before that, Snake Cheatham had organized a small and highly elect club, a sort of secret society among the Buckhead Jells, called the Touchdown Club, and membership was based solely upon one’s having scored with a woman. Since there was no conceivable way to prove this with any Pink in her right mind, the initiation rite agreed upon was a visit to Frances Spurling, the successful completion of which she rewarded with an X made with red ballpoint ink on the wrist of the new initiate. It was diabolically clever and simple: Frances proved to be incorruptible in this matter, and would not award the coveted red X unless the deed was, indeed, accomplished. Since she received from each initiate the sum of two dollars cash money for each rite of passage, the temptation to accept the occasional discreet bribe must have been great, but Frances hung tough. Once on the path to the storage shed behind the grocery, one knew one had no recourse but to perform.
Charlie Gentry and I were the last of the Buckhead Boys to join the Touchdown Club, and finally let ourselves be goaded and humiliated into this Allhallows foray simply because there was no other even faintly honorable alternative.
“Tonight or never, Bondurant and Gentry,” Snake jeered that afternoon. “And if it’s never, the whole school’s going to know about it in the morning. Frances awaits you at nine. X marks the spot.”
Charlie and I set out that night with the spirits of the Atlanta dead and the hoots and jeers of the all-too-live Buckhead Boys in our ears, desperation and utter despair stopping our voices.
“I’ll probably get asthma and die,” Charlie said finally, pedaling woefully along beside me out black Roswell Road on his bicycle. “I’ll probably choke to death right there on top of old Frances, or wherever you’re supposed to get. I hope I do.”
“Listen,” I said, shame nearly strangling me. “I’ve got a red ballpoint pen and twenty-five dollars. It’s all I’ve saved for the past two years. I’m going to offer to buy her off, and if she says no, we can just make an X on our wrists and say we did, and she’s lying.”
“No,” said Charlie, who would rather face Torquemada than lie. “We can’t do that, Shep.”
“Well, I can,” I flared. “You and your principles can fuck old Frances Spurling till midnight, if you can’t bear to lie about her. Thank goodness I’m not as pure as you.”
“I’m not pure,” Charlie said miserably. “I’ve got seventeen dollars in my pocket myself. But if she won’t take our money we’re dead, because Snake says she has her own secret way of making the X, and nobody but her knows what it is. It won’t do us any good to lie.”
We pedaled on in silence, doomed.
But the great god Pan was kind to us that night. When we reached the stygian storage shed behind the dark grocery and knocked timidly on the door, and at the muffled “Come in,” pushed it open and went inside, it was to see Frances Spurling, by the light of a khaki plastic Girl Scout flashlight, sprawled out on her gunnysacks looking distinctly unseductive in flannel pajamas, a big, bulky wool bathrobe and huge fleecy slippers. Even Charlie and I could tell it was no costume for deflowering youths. Our hearts leaped up in our racketing breasts.
“You can just forget it for tonight,” Frances said sullenly. “I fell off the roof just before you came.”
“Jesus,” I said, wincing. “You shouldn’t be out here, Frances. Did it…is it real bad?”
“Well, it ain’t a lot of fun, I’ll tell you,” she said. “But there ain’t going to be any bananas tonight, you bet.”
“Lord, I guess not,” Charlie said vehemently, real horror in his eyes. “You want us to call your folks? They probably ought to take you to the doctor….”
“I don’t need no doctor, I just need to get in bed with a heating pad,” she said. “I been out there in the cold waiting for y’ll since eight. I reckon that’s worth two dollars.”
“Well, sure,” I said, reaching for my wallet, deliverance spinning lightly in my ringing ears.
“No,” Charlie said stubbornly. “I’m sorry about your…accident, Frances, but it’s not our fault. We didn’t know…and we came all the way out here on our bicycles. I don’t see how you can ask for two dollars for that.”
“Charlie…” I began desperately.
“We’ll give it to you if you’ll do the X’s, though,” he said.
She glared at him balkily. Then she said crossly, “Oh, shit, all right, stick your wrists out here.”
We did. She made quick, sharp crisscrosses on them, and then held her fat pink palm out for the money. I got mine out. Charlie did too, and then paused.
“Are they the right X’s?” he said.
“They’re the right X’s, you little sonofabitch,” she said. “Now get on out of here. My daddy would shoot you in the head if he caught you out here.”
We went. We went pedaling back down Roswell Road toward the three-way intersection where Snake and the others were waiting for us with flags flying and hearts high, shouting and singing, “We’re off to see the Wizard” and “I’ve been working on the railroad.”
“I’ve been working on old Frances,” we bellowed.
But as we neared the intersection Charlie began to go quiet, and when we got off our bikes and went up to Snake and held out our anointed wrists, Charlie suddenly blurted, “Wait a minute. It’s all a lie. We didn’t. We couldn’t. I mean, Frances couldn’t. She fell off the top of her house tonight and hurt herself. She really couldn’t. We did try, Snake.”
Snake just stared at us for a moment, and then he began to laugh. He hugged himself and staggered around on the freezing sidewalk; he bent double and yelled and wept and howled with laughter; he beat the wall of Wender & Roberts, and covered his face with his hands, and bayed his hideous mirth to the sky. All the others laughed, too. Ben, and Tom Goodwin, and Pres, and A.J.—they laughed and laughed, and it seemed to me that I would hear the sound of that laughter eternities later, safe at last under the quiet earth of Oakland.
“You silly shits,” Snake roared. “‘She fell off the top of her house and hurt herself’! Oh, Jesus! Don’t you know anything? She fell off the roof! She got the curse! She was riding the rag! She was flying Baker flag! Oh, Jesus!”
He did not, after all, tell the entire school that Charlie and I failed in our attempt to screw Frances Spurling. He simply and for four years after that awful night called us, in front of everyone we knew, the Roofing Brothers. I do not know to this day if anyone outside our crowd knew what it meant. Probably everyone did.
It was a high price to pay for not buying Frances’s bananas.
Others like Frances did a brisk trade in the various neighborhoods adjacent to Buckhead, and I suppose it’s a good thing, or the Jells would have, to a man, gone to their marriage beds virgins. But I can’t think there was a lot of romance in it, and we lived, th
en, for romance. Other boys—rogue males like Boo Cutler and Floyd Sutton—were commonly known to screw nearly constantly, anyone who caught their fancy, and this proficiency was as much a part of their lustrous legends as their expertise with drag racing and shine running. We admired it enormously, but, like the dragging, few of us sought to emulate it. No Pink would have dated twice a Jell who put a serious move on her, and Jellhood was more to be cherished, in those days, even than nooky.
No. We necked and petted and lied and leered and ached and cursed and jerked off, but fuck we did not, most of us, until the altar was virtually in sight. I am sure that’s why so many of us married on the very day we graduated from college, and a few even before. I am equally sure that the high mortality among my crowd’s marriages was due to that long enforced abstinence. By the time we got out of college, we simply couldn’t wait any longer to get laid. Whatever compatibility and commonality of interest we had with our girls was centered below our waists.
It was a strange time in the world, and in Atlanta too, so far as sex went. Lucy and I talked about it once, late in the sixties when both of us had been burned by passion and its aftermath and knew, at least a bit better, of what we spoke.
“You know,” she said, looking across at me in the gloom of the summerhouse veranda in a spring twilight. “It’s funny when you think about our parents’ lives while we were growing up. There wasn’t any scandal. I can’t remember any great, glamorous sexual scandals like you hear about among the filthy rich in other places, like Palm Beach or Long Island or Los Angeles, places like that. We had some divorces, and lots of nervous breakdowns and alcoholics, and suicides and all that stuff, but do you ever remember a single soul running off with somebody else’s wife or husband, or getting caught in bed, or breaking up marriages, or any of the good stuff? Can you remember even one crime of passion? I can’t. Lord, look at Mama; if ever there was a woman made to stay on her back and fuck her way through the Northside, it was her; still is, the way she looks. And the way she was before she married Daddy. But never since she set foot in this house has she had a date; I can’t even remember her looking sideways at a man, not to mention flirting a little, or wearing something sexy. She might as well be a nun. And Mama is no saint, believe me. It’s this town. What is there in this town?”
I thought about it. She was right. Sexual scandal had no part in the lives of anyone of my parents’ generation; not that I knew of, anyway.
“I guess it’s because most of us haven’t had our money very long,” I said. “And we’re not all that grounded in our status, if we have any. If you’re new rich, you’re not too likely to risk your social status with scandal. Not that kind, anyway. I guess that comes later, in the older places like Charleston and New Orleans and Savannah, or the really big ones like New York, where nobody gives a damn. It was the early fifties then, after all. Now, when anything goes and everybody’s doing everything with everybody, nobody cares anymore. That generation sinned, of course, but it seems like they were more sins of omission than commission. And the wages were the wages of repression. I think maybe everybody was too busy making money.”
Lucy stretched her long legs out in front of her and lit a cigarette. “Mayor Hartsfield had it all wrong,” she said. “We weren’t a city too busy to hate. We were a city too busy to fuck. What a waste. Money is only money, but a good fuck is a fuck.”
I speak of the Pinks and the Jells as “we,” but it is largely an editorial we. I attended the endless dances, but usually as a nonparticipatory member of the stag line, one denizen of the anthill that gave the butterfly Pinks such vivid life. I almost never went to the dinners beforehand, or the breakfasts afterward. When I absolutely had to have a date, I took Sarah Cameron, with whom I had been at ease from the beginning of our lives. I sometimes joined the swooping flocks after school, but only because the Fury was such a powerful seductress, and I usually ended up dropping clunking, iron-weighted Pres Hubbard off at his house and going relicking with Charlie, or going home to study and then slip fathoms back into the old, nourishing, ongoing communion with Lucy.
I liked the aimless, bright wheeling and admired the glorious mating plumage of the flock, and I knew the drill, thanks to family money and the herculean efforts of Margaret Bryan and sheer proximity to my generation of anointed. It was just that it all felt queer and stilted to me; remote and uninvolving, as if I was engaged in some sort of elaborate charade that no one recognized as such but me. I always felt, watching a ballroom full of pretty girls swaying like a bright, precious garden in the soft little wind of music, that they were not, somehow, real, not truly present; and that I alone breathed and moved and spoke.
But at other times, in the cheerful, antiseptic cacophony of Wender & Roberts, or in mindless, pellmell midrush down the last long hill on Peachtree before the city limits of Atlanta loomed up, it seemed as if everything and everyone around me was real, superreal, hyperreal, and only I did not truly exist. Only with Lucy did actuality flow both ways. I had a sliding perception of reality in those days, but I knew absolutely and without knowing how that for me it lay somewhere else than the Buckhead and Atlanta of the Pinks and the Jells.
“Where will you go?” Sarah Cameron asked me once, when I spoke of leaving Atlanta when I was able.
“To New York,” I said, not knowing why I said it, only that it was true.
“How long have you wanted to do that? I never heard you talk about it,” she said, surprised.
“Always,” I said, as surprised as she to find that it was true.
Unlike virtually anyone else in my immediate crowd of Jells except Charlie Gentry, I liked to study, especially history and English literature, and I made impressive grades. The grades were never the point; I could lose myself for hours in the dreaming, sunny flower fields of the school and public libraries, and only after I came blinking and stretching up for air and awareness did I realize how totally happy I had been. It was the beginning of my lifelong passion for pure research, the only love save one that never left or betrayed me. It has been what I have lived with and one of the very few things I have lived for, these many years in the summerhouse.
The resultant grades, though, made my mother smile, and even my father would occasionally nod approval at the pristine string of A’s, though he seldom failed to remark that with my height, I ought to be a first-string guard by now. Lucy, however, applauded them with her whole heart, and Lucy was still, in those days, the sun that warmed me, even though, since that night in the summerhouse, a sun that I knew could also sear me mortally.
It never occurred to me to ask her to any of the dances and parties; I honestly did not, at least consciously, think of her in that way, and she did not seem to consider me romantically. She was still, to my eyes and senses, utterly and powerfully seductive, but she did not yet seem to be conscious of it, and I had, in those few charring moments on that spinning daybed, distanced myself so completely from her as a woman that I could observe her almost as thoroughly and clinically as a sociologist.
And in every other respect, we had not changed for each other; even though I had moved into a world that was far closer to adulthood than hers, we were still safe havens for each other. I think we both sensed that a romantic alliance would have spoiled that, and we still, and always, needed each other in that way more than in any other. So I took Sarah Cameron to the few dances I attended and then came home and spun them out for Lucy’s delectation like a parent bird with a ravenous chick, and she gave me back the great lift and leap of her rich laugh, and her boundless, soaring approval. In those days, as I have said, I was her heart, and she, conversely, was my wings.
I did not see, never saw, really, the look of adoration on Sarah’s small face when she lifted it to me. I can still scarcely credit that it was there. Charlie would tell me occasionally, “Sarah has a crush on you,” and I simply did not believe him. I suppose I thought he was transferring his long, aching, silent love for Sarah onto me, and I hastened, each time he said it, to h
and that love back to him.
I could not believe that any girl could look at me with adoration. I had long since, on some tender and carefully submerged level, accepted my mother’s dictum that I was too immature and sensitive for what she termed “that silly teenaged boy-girl business,” and also my father’s that I was simply not the man for it. Neither, now, was true, but I did not know that. The real truth was that I was not, by now, a sissy, and there had never been anything effeminate about me. I had simply, on that night with Lucy, buried desire deep.
And so we went, I wading aimlessly in the shallows of Jellhood, a great waiting for something I could not name filling what crannies of my being were not occupied by Lucy, she stoically doing her time in the sunless prison of the terrible little girls’ school, both of us still caught, and content with the captivity, in the roles of heroine-victim and savior-saint. I don’t know how long it would have gone on thus, but it seems to me now, from the vantage point of the passed years, that it was doomed to end exactly the way it did.
Lucy graduated from Miss Beauchamp’s with just enough credits to secure her freedom and virtually no academic honors the spring when she was twelve, and that fall entered the eighth grade at North Fulton High. Busy with my long hours in the library and the autumn flurry of Jellhood, and still savoring with her the old, celldeep kinship at home after school, I noticed no appreciable change in her. She still looked to me as she had for a long, suspended time: a silvery willow sapling, a fine colt frozen at the apogee of its childhood. I had long stopped wondering why no one but me noticed the air-charging impact of her. She seemed to slip into the stream of North Fulton without so much as a ripple. I scarcely saw her at all during those first days.
Peachtree Road Page 23
