Drinking was a sporting endeavor in Lillienthal, and many stories worked their way through its boozy depths. My father had a scar on the back of his head from one night in Peoria—I remember him sitting at the kitchen table, and Mom standing behind him, swabbing it with iodine. He told us he’d been in a bar with some other men—on a business trip—and he’d been sitting in a chair with his feet up, and somebody had come by and knocked them down. We were outraged that anyone should have laid a hand on him; who would dare? But drinking, we knew, had come into it. Drinking had come into it when Mrs Maxwell had her hysterectomy, and when Mr Maxwell didn’t come home, and drinking had most certainly come into it when Mrs Ryan’s brother Willie had been arrested. And now, drinking had come into it with me.
Part of being an artist was drinking—and part of being a man. It wasn’t good that I had run away from home, but it would’ve been worse if I hadn’t been drinking. Drinking was a net that descended and caught one, a familiar bugaboo that kept other bugaboos obscured. If drinking wasn’t exactly patriotic, it was a long way from being un-American. The boys who’d come back from the Korean War were notorious drinkers; we’d see them coming Out of Mizlo’s Tap, weaving down the street, hollering, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Their Korean silk jackets bobbed along; the villages north and south of the famous 38th Parallel shone like small white blossoms on their backs.
Franklin drank, up at school, where he had joined a fraternity. He told me how one night he and the other brothers drove off with a whole houseful of furniture they’d carried out of a model home on the edge of town, carting it back to the fraternity annex in a pickup truck. He told me about how they’d all got drunk one weekend and had an “orgy” with two girls who were in town with Shipstad and Johnson’s Ice Follies. I went up to see him that spring, and got as drunk as the rest of them, but no orgies or burglaries transpired, only a Saturday night of endless dispassionate necking to Ray Coniff albums—me and somebody’s sister, who disappeared at midnight.
The fraternity house was an inappropriate setting in which to tell my brother what I’d really done when I took off for New Orleans, but I did tell him. He listened, and said I should do whatever I felt like, but I could see he was perplexed. What about my girlfriend Sammy? he asked.
I couldn’t tell him any more than I knew myself. I told him what had happened, without going too far into the details—I realized the details weren’t what he wanted to hear. His listening had the effect of making it matter-of-fact, and for that I was grateful. I had begun to be afraid of the future, afraid of it tilting and sliding back on me—not exactly afraid, but unsure. I felt myself getting more and more attenuated, and sometimes thought I might blow away entirely. His calmness kept the freak in me at arm’s length—a weird nocturnal specter like the hermaphrodite on the midway, its leering face half-rouge, half-stubble—and I was able to drive back down to Lillienthal with my equilibrium restored. I saw, though, that to keep my self-image from getting too garish, I had to keep the externals neat and wholesome. You could do what you liked, so long as you kept it your own affair.
I dreamed of James, and woke to take finals in History and Natural Science. I called information in New Orleans late one night and tried to get his number there, but they had no listing. I tried to write letters to him, but they didn’t sound like me at all—or, rather, they sounded too much like me. I couldn’t write in anything but breezy, and breezy wasn’t at all how I felt about him, about us. But I sent him a letter anyway, written on a Gauguin note card I’d got from the Art Institute, saying I missed him, saying I wanted to come get a job in New Orleans that summer. I drove down to the levee at night, and sat in the car: I saw lights on the River Queen, but never went on board. I listened to Johnny Mathis and Elvis Presley records and played Laverne Baker’s “Jim Dandy” till even my brother, Dennie Lee, complained. And lifted weights and did a hundred sit-ups, and wondered how I’d look with long hair. The summer got nearer and nearer.
FINALLY, I HEARD FROM JAMES. His letter came the day after I received word that I’d been given a scholarship to art school at Iowa City. I had, in the twenty-four hours between letters, nearly convinced myself that an Iowa college was what I wanted. It was what my parents wanted for me—a career that would successfully blend creativity and practicality, talent and cunning. I had no trouble seeing myself as an advertising man. But then my enthusiasm abruptly jumped the track. James wrote that he was staying in a rooming house in the Quarter, and that I could come and stay there, too. He said he had been lucky with the cards, that he was working on the river weekends. He said he would be happy to see me! It was all I needed to change my plans, my life.
My parents didn’t want to hear about New Orleans. Dad had arranged an interview for me with an advertising man across the river. If all went well, I was to work as an apprentice in his small agency, learning paste-up and copy, getting the jump on my college classmates. It wasn’t the summer I saw before me now. I saw James and only James. I was coming on fast toward my eighteenth birthday, and was as full of myself as a tree is full of sap. If I could just get away and live a more romantic sort of existence, I would become the person I wanted to be. Nothing could have stopped me from getting out of Iowa. And nothing did.
NEW ORLEANS IN EARLY SUMMER, with the sun shining through the balconies of the French Quarter, creating blocks of swirling Arabic letters on the brick and stucco walls behind them, mixing chirping Patois and languid Gulla with the broad flat vowels of Texarkana, confounding the eye and ear at every corner—New Orleans in June is a sweet chunk of marzipan one could chew all one’s days. In late summer, that same sweetness will cloy, and produce what are known locally as the vapors, the aversion to all things warm and honeyed. Women will put a dash of vinegar in their soups and bathwater; men will sprinkle cucumber and lemon into their handkerchieves, and decorously mop their brows. But that is later. June is a dream, crisp and clear and golden.
On Borchardt Street, where James’ rooming house stood, the trees on either side branched up and met in a thicket of green and scarlet, and the light that came in through to the street and sidewalk below was dappled—at midday it was like walking through confetti. The flowering bushes that spread out along the fences and sent purple and yellow vines up along the clapboard walls contributed all the more to the festive effect. Small birds darted in and out among the blossoms and white butterflies hovered over the small vegetable patches that crept around from side gardens, thrust themselves up next to the gate.
James had gained some weight that spring, his spidery frame now more that of a man than a boy. And his hair, which had been coarse and unruly, had come under lye and pomade and lay back from his forehead in soft shining waves. When he met me at the station, he was wearing a hat, and rings on his fingers I didn’t remember—but his smile was the same, and led me to him like a beacon.
We took a streetcar from the station, and walked the last bit to Borchardt Street. I had brought a suitcase, stuffed with summer clothes and drawing-pads, and we took turns carrying it. I was going to be a real artist that summer, justify my impulse, and everywhere I turned in those shining streets and alleys I saw sketches and paintings, quick bright flashes of color.
“So now you’re on your own,” he said as we walked along, and he looked at me sideways, appraisingly. “And nobody’s going to be worrying about you but me …’’ It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t need to answer. The way he talked and the way he looked at me made me feel I’d been stitched on to him, like the sleeve on his jacket, or the band around his tan fedora. We walked slowly, stopping once to buy shaved ice and syrup, but I was already in bed with him pressed against his broad black chest, inhabiting his New Orleans life and my future.
The boardinghouse was painted a dull mustard color, and the windows were framed in a deep green. Inside, it was dark and cool, and smelled of candles and frangipane. Someone rose from a chair.
“This is Mrs Odum. Mrs Odum, this is my friend Mr McGinnis.”
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Mrs Odum was a big woman, but delicate. She offered me a tiny warm object—her hand—which I shook, and she moved to the side of the room on two other tiny objects—her feet. Elsewhere, she was vast. There was something pleasing about the odd conjunctions of her frame, and also about the disharmony of her costume—it seemed she had left some of herself behind, or sent it on ahead: her hair was tied by a purple scarf, and her smock was orange and blue, beneath it trailed a hem of vivid pink. She was here, but not here, tentative as an unfinished sketch, present only as an idea of herself.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr McGinnis. Make yourself at home. You’re just off the second landing there”—she waved her birdlike hand upward—“and Mr Jefford here will show you”—she bent to pick up a bit of lint, straightened with a sigh—“what’s what.”
She smiled, fluttered through to the hallway.
We mounted the stairs, turned past doors that opened and closed, dark male faces smiling out, around toothbrushes, with circles of shaving cream—towels adjusted, coughs interrupted, somewhere a gentle insistent swearing.
A sign on the landing read: No Ladies Above the First Floor. James pointed to it as we passed, shook his finger in mock-warning.
“Mrs Odum doesn’t much take to other womenfolk. But she surely does love the men,” he said, chuckling and raising his eyebrows.
We stopped, and he pushed open the door of one room, put my suitcase inside it, then closed it and opened another directly across the hall.
“That’s yours, and this is mine,” he said, pulling me after him across the threshold. “And this”—he indicated the great big four-poster bed in the middle of the room—“is ours!”
And didn’t we ramble. The months between us fell away, and we were back on the barge again, the boiler pounding. The church bells in the Quarter rang every hour; they took us into the night, past vespers—like the bell before each round in a prizefight—punctuating the long sweet hours of give and take, the tolling reminding us that we were somewhere in the world.
He liked saying my name, and I liked saying nothing at all, not having to say anything—just holding on. There was a sink in his room, and from time to time we splashed each other with the cool water from the tap. His lips were so sweet, and his long educated fingers so tender. From outside, along with the ringing of the bells, came other music. Musicians who played in the bars and the clubs of the Quarter stayed in the rooming houses of Borchardt Street, and Petaluma Street beyond it. We heard an olio of music up in James’ room, thick and overheated, simmering through the afternoon and evening. We had clarinets for robins and saxophones for bobolinks, and a big bass fiddle somewhere sounded like a bullfrog on a pond. And the children yelling and making mischief, men pestering and women eluding— all contributed to the vines of sound that rose and flowered in our window.
The first few days had no demarcation, eased into one another. I had to get a job, that was the condition of my being in New Orleans, but for the moment I had no obligations. We spent our days and nights getting reacquainted (acquainted, really—what we knew of each other from the river was only the fundamentals) and prowling through the streets and alleys, looking in on James’ friends here and there, stuffing ourselves with hush puppies and gumbo and warm greasy crullers from the Cafe Dumond. James decided I had to have a hat, and bought me one—a white panama that was years older than I was, and I resolved to grow a mustache to go with it. Nobody seemed to notice or care that we spent all our time together, that my bed stayed flat and unrumpled while his was a sea of wrinkled linen. Or that we kept hanging on each other and poking and cuffing and finding any excuse to keep flesh on flesh. Once we stopped at a bar, and never went back. He said people had been real friendly when he’d been there by himself, but the two of us together bottled up that good feeling—we got cold looks from the crowd and the fish-eye from the bartender. It was all men in the bar, all of them older, and shrill voices and elaborate gestures, and a kind of hissing noise when we left.
Nobody minded if we drank in the boardinghouse; we kept beer in the refrigerator and whiskey in our room. Mrs Odum never asked me how old I was—I believe she thought that if I was old enough to be away from home and out in the world, I could do what I liked. She cooked up some spicy stews, and a lot of beer and wine went down with them. There would be six or seven men at table—one other white face complementing mine, belonging to a Mr Chough, who had bad teeth and seldom smiled. I caught him once or twice watching me while his jaws moved up and down on the shrimp and peppers, something quizzical in his gaze, but we had no conversation. More talkative faces hovered over the blue and white crockery, the checkered cloth—Mr Mulkin and Mr McBride lived on the first floor, and kept up a lighthearted exchange on the events of the day; both worked as bus conductors and had plenty to say about the comings and goings of the human race. Mr Mulkin was heavy and wore his hair cropped close to his skull; he had a thick warm laugh that we sometimes heard bubbling up from his room below us, joined by the higher, more ethereal notes of Mr McBride. Mr Harrison lived on the same floor as these two, but was irregular at table. He was younger than they, but older than we, lean as a rail, with dark hooded eyes and nervous hands. We’d see his light on when we climbed the stairs at night, with always a sweetish smell coming from under the door. In addition to these guests there might be a suitor of Mrs Odum’s at table. Insubstantial as her spirit seemed, her fleshly appetites were down-to-earth, and considerably varied; the numbers of cousins and old friends that passed through was high. She had a blood-nephew named Thomas who helped out in the kitchen, and on weekends Thomas’ mother might come to call, but no other Odums appeared. Humming and fluttering by, our landlady moved like a burgee in the breeze; she kept house, cooked and cleaned, and managed still to look as if she lacked the authority even to boil water. She took some pride in her cuisine.
“Hand Mr McGinnis over those beets,” she directed Thomas. “We want him to appreciate our New Orleans cooking.”
“Do I taste coriander in this stew?” Mr Mulkin wanted to know.
“Yes indeed you do—you do know your spices, Mr Mulkin,” she replied. Her broad face was fresh as a young girl’s.
I found I didn’t have to initiate much in the way of conversation, only let myself put in a few words now and again, smile, and eat my fill. I’d paid out for my first two weeks’ lodging, and had enough for the rest of the month, but after that I was going to have to earn what I needed. I wasn’t worried. I’d already started doing some sketches, down at the end of the street in a tiny park where older women sat and sewed, or just sat, where tinkers and fishmongers stopped for a cigar and a taste of something cool. A chipped statue, whose inscription and dates were nearly rubbed off, stood in the middle of pigeons: a French hero whom James told me had routed the pirates when they threatened to burn the city. The park was where we’d stopped for shaved ice my first day in town, and I soon thought of it as someplace personal and special. It was best at dusk, and if James was taking a nap, I’d slip out of the house with my pad, and come down.
I watched the women at their stitching, and the youngsters jumping rope; at first they all watched me, but after a few days I think I blended in. After I started work at the ribbon factory, I only got to the park after it was turning dark, or on the weekend. Sometimes it was just the old white hero and me in the gathering darkness. The more sporting collection of people would come later to take their ease, after supper and beyond. I noticed how the aroma of the flowers, and all the other smells of life—the horses on the street, and even the wash still hanging from the balconies on either side; geraniums and cobblestones— all became stronger at dusk. That dark grainy mist that fell on the park seemed to make all sensations more vivid—you could hear farther, breathe deeper, at twilight.
James was used to sleeping for an hour in the afternoon; he said it gave him an edge on the night, when sometimes he’d play right through till dawn, stepping off the dock on Decatur Street as the rest of the city was waking up. H
e worked on the Belle and the Avalon mainly, where he knew the crew and where card games were arranged as a matter of course. I tagged along the first weekend I was with him, partly because I was curious about the life, mostly because I didn’t want to lose sight of him. He stood by our big bed, pulling on his rings, and putting himself into his sharkskin trousers, humming whatever snippet of melody had chanced to appear at the window. Watching him dress was almost as exciting as watching him undress. When he was set to go, I walked with him down the stairs, carrying his little valise. It smelled of Florida water and talcum, and always a little half-pint of whiskey in it, in case somebody needed a drink.
We boys had played poker at home when we were growing up, and Dad had tried to teach us pinochle, but I was never much for cards; the stakes we played for in Lillienthal were like no stakes at all, toothpicks and pennies.
The brand of cards James played was a universe away. I stood off to the side of the Avalon saloon, and watched him, marveling at the sleek ease of his movements, the concentration on his face as he calculated and bluffed, then reached for the kitty. To have him so close and not to have any contact with him—no quick glances, no wide smile flashing across the table —was disconcerting.
“Twelve on Ruby,” said the dealer, and the men at the table grunted or nodded or were still.
Men on Men Page 26
