Barefoot to Avalon

by David Payne

  And when the music’s over, Eric sends me upstairs with the pastries, the whole box—I can’t believe his generosity! In my room, I remember what I’ve forgotten for an hour—Boston—and I lie there crying and eating till there’s nothing left but crumbs and that little paper doily. I can’t quite bring myself to throw it out, so I put it in my drawer and leave it there most of the semester.

  And when I wake up in the morning, I put on my blazer and my tie and go to Latin with Mr. Coffin, whose ­manner —like his name—suggests an old Nantucket whaling captain. I fear and admire him, and from the start apply my strongest effort. Every Sunday, I review the whole semester. So while the other boys are doing cannonballs off the bridge, enjoying the last warm weather, or smoking dope and venturing into the woods beyond the stadium, I’m chanting conjugations and declensions in my room at Main Street. By mid-semester, these sessions last from breakfast till lunch and are paying dividends.

  My success in Latin extends to basketball: I try out for the JV team and am the only freshman in the school to make it. In an early game, I post up in the lane and when the pass comes in I nab it, feint left, then pivot right off my right foot and throw up a left-handed Lew Alcindor sky hook that hits the box and splashes through the net like easy money. And the coach runs down the sidelines shaking his fist and shouting in the gym where everyone can hear him, “Way to go, Payne, you’re a quick study!” The hair rises on my forearms, and bullshit? No trace of that response lives anywhere inside me. I only wish someone might set the court on fire so I could run barefoot through it for him, and as I sprint back on D it never dawns on me that this will be the summit of my sports career at Exeter.

  And when the first snowflakes fall, I put on my new herringbone with the black half collar and wear it proudly on the footpaths. But no one at Exeter has a coat like mine—not even the boys from Park Avenue and those with Kennebunkport compounds. So after class I fold it up into the smallest package possible and carry it like a shameful secret underneath my elbow back to Main Street and go coatless through the winter. My Nowell’s blazer follows. At a church rummage sale one night on Front Street, I buy an old tweed coat for fifty cents. Grayish black with little nubbly twists of fabric, it resembles an industrial airport carpet from the 1950s and I fall for it with deep love and wear it every day to class for four years. And, after the blazer, my new oxford shirts, my tassel loafers, stiff and new, still carrying the shine I put on them in Boston, all the beautiful things my mother bought me, into the black steamer trunk, which I wrestle into the deep recesses of my closet.

  And I’m spending more and more time with Eric. In his room I hear Blonde on Blonde and Let It Bleed and Live at Leeds and Jethro Tull and Clapton and the Velvet Underground and Zappa. And I, a Southerner, first hear the Allmans and Levon Helm singing “The Weight” on Big Pink by way of Manhattan and my new friend Eric. We go on to jazz, to Bird and Monk and Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk—the nose flute! One Saturday, we get high and listen to Bitches Brew straight through, all four sides, with a concentration I rarely give my classwork. Following Eric’s lead, I begin to grasp that there are tropes in Davis’s trumpet work and Shorter’s sax, exploding genius nuggets filled with pathos, comedy, wisdom, rage, disdain, and when these burst overhead like fireworks, Eric and I slap five in admiring recognition and when they fizzle we’re merciless and brutal critics.

  –I charge him with conformity!

  –Sentence?

  –Freedom!

  –Ten years’ hard liberty!

  –A member of the unchained gang!

  –A life sentence!

  In Eric’s wordplay there’s a suggestion of what Coltrane does with raindrops on roses, the way he takes the phrase and splits it like an atom to see what hidden energies he can discover, and even if I can outjump him on the landing, here Eric always beats me, and when he laughs I can’t tell if he’s laughing with or at me, and I love him almost like a brother, and sometimes I want to crush him in the dust the way I want to crush George A., and I wish I had one thing, one thing to give Eric because the flow is so unequal, always Eric-David, never David-Eric.

  And in a way that I don’t grasp yet, the time I spend with Eric, the stoned, ebullient nonsense we engage in, has started to become as important to me as what happens in the gym or classroom. As I once shot baskets in the drive till dark and after dark fell, so here in Eric’s room we’re building another sort of reflex, sinew, timing for another sort of contest. In English class, I’m starting to turn confident and fierce in my opinions and though I’m still crying over Boston in my dorm, the periods are shorter. And as the b-ball season winds down, the coach I would have run through fire or broken glass to please at first has begun to seem rigid and tyrannical, and what wins me points in English class on the court subtracts them massively, and whole games go by in which he never looks in my direction and I don’t unsnap my warm-ups.

  And one day in my PO box there’s a letter. I recognize Bill’s writing and take it back to Main Street and open it with trepidation. I’m expecting some accounting over Boston, but, no, it’s an invitation to go duck hunting with him at Christmas, just the two of us, with a private guide at the Mattamuskeet Lodge in the lowlands of Hyde County.

  I know this trip will be expensive and that he’s trying to square it with me. I put the letter under my desk lamp and reread it several times over the ensuing days, and finally it’s clear to me that what I need to be there—I hurt you, David, and I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry—isn’t. So I write back and say no thank you, that the idea of going somewhere and “shooting and killing things” doesn’t sound appealing, and in fact, I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian. My reply is filled with wounded fourteen-year-old petulance, and the rebellion I first encountered among the Bolsheviks in assembly has begun to work its way into my feelings toward him and our family. There’s a part of me that wants to go with him, but it’s late November by this time and I’ve lain crying on my bed too many nights. Duck hunting and the Mattamuskeet Lodge—the tweeds and hand-sewn boots, the guns with sterling trigger guards, the flasks, the pedigreed retrievers, all the beautiful impedimenta—what does any of it have to do with Bill or me or with our family? It’s bullshit, like Letty’s story of her father owning the first car in Henderson. And if I go, I know what will happen. The lodge will be like church and the shotgun blasts and gun smoke will be the bells and incense and the silver flask will be the chalice and when Bill passes it and I take my little sip, I’ll go into a trance the way I did the day he read me “Prufrock,” and we’ll commune and be one again in substance and my love will burn with its old unclouded brightness, and my injuries will be voided by the power of this magic and it will be as if Boston never happened. Only I don’t go, I refuse him.

  So Bill asks George A., and of course George A.’s going—why shouldn’t he? And how can I be jealous, since Bill asked and I declined him? I am, though, and to me this feels like a chess move, Bill’s way of punishing me for rejecting him because he hurt me, and so he sets George A. and me against each other. I learn about this on the dormitory pay phone, the same call in which Margaret says she’s sorry but she can’t afford to fly me home to North Carolina for Thanksgiving. So I eat turkey in the empty dining hall and practice Latin. My reviews now last from after breakfast till 3 and 4 P.M., when dark falls in New England, and I’ve pulled ahead of all my classmates.

  On Christmas, though—our last in Henderson—I do go home. Though Nanny, her mother, is in the hospital dying, Margaret makes the eggnog in the sterling punchbowl the same as always and drapes evergreen along the mantel and swags the mirrors and the portraits of the Manns, her great-great-grandparents, and puts new candles in the sconces and lights and snuffs the wicks because it’s done this way and it would be bad luck not to do it.

  Bill is coming from Atlanta to take us out to Christmas luncheon with the Paynes, his parents, Letty and Bill Sr. He’ll be here at 1 P.M., and after l
unch he’ll drop Bennett and me off and continue eastward with George A. to go hunting.

  I recall us waiting for him outside on the porch. George A., with comb streaks in his hair, is popping wheelies in the drive on his new skateboard. I’m playing basketball with Bennett, teaching him to dribble, though he’s three and doesn’t show much interest. He has a red-and-blue wool scarf, three or four feet long, and he puts it on his head and Margaret bobby-pins it for him. He refers to it as “girl hair” and calls himself “Canelope,” and one day Margaret observes him watching Penelope Pitstop and puts the two together. He’s acting out the cartoon damsel-in-distress, who’s threatened by her nemesis, the Hooded Claw, and must be rescued by her posse every Saturday.

  I’m teaching him to dribble, only it’s not taking, and 1 o’clock has turned to 2 now and is moving toward 2:30.

  And now it’s 3. I’ve had it.

  –This is bullshit, bullshit! I say to Margaret, who’s shocked at the new mouth I’ve brought back from the dorm at Exeter.

  –I’m sure he’ll call.

  –Fuck this, I’m not doing this again. I’m not, I say, almost daring her to contradict me.

  –Come here, she says, offering to hug me, but I don’t want that.

  And eventually Bill does call, at 8 or 9 o’clock, from some phone booth miles and maybe states away, to explain about the flat tire, the alternator, whatever it was.

  –I’m asleep! I shout down the hall to Margaret’s summons, making sure it’s loud enough for Bill to hear me.

  One day Bennett will call me “Mac,” as in John McEnroe, for my explosive temper, so like Bill’s, the person I so don’t want to be like.

  –This is bullshit, fucking bullshit, I mutter to my pillow.

  And as I lie there, I hear George A. down the hall saying, It’s okay, Daddy, we’ll see you in the morning, we’ll see you when you get here.

  And Bill does come and George A. does go with him. He’ll be a hunter all his life, and in years to come, he’ll invite me and I’ll sit beside him in the blind, watching through binoculars, and never fire a shotgun, and I wonder if George A. knew deep down that I’d wanted to say yes to Bill and couldn’t, and if that was why he would invite me on his hunting excursions. And so perhaps Bill’s move, meant to turn the two of us against each other, only worked with me, for George A., getting the special trip and Bill, had no reason to be anything but happy.

  And spring brings the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, and, after it, barely a week later, Kent State, where National Guardsmen open fire on protesters. Four dead in Ohio. In assembly that day, the older Bolsheviks in black armbands shout down the dean and call for a strike and I put on a black armband and strike with them and skip all my classes except Latin. I’m all in with Mr. Coffin.

  By spring, my Sunday reviews go on till 6, 7, even 8 P.M., and we’ve been through the vast tracts of regularities and rules and are beginning to push into the complex subtleties of the subjunctive—Ut Viri Sitis: in order that you may become men—and still each Sunday I go back to lesson one, Week One, the present indicative active of the first conjugation, amo amas amat, and by 8 P.M., when I’m dog-tired and have done none of my other work, I don’t have the same energy to give tomorrow’s lesson as the miscreants who goofed off in the woods all day doing cannonballs into the river. Now, when I turn my head, I see a couple of them gaining, and I know in some deep place that I’m hampering myself with these reviews, but I can’t bring myself to stop them. In order that I might feel virtuous, my praxis requires me to go back to lesson one, Week One, and redo the whole semester every Sunday, and two weeks before Kent State I have my fifteenth birthday and have no one to tell me that this ritual is all about control, that my effort in Mr. Coffin’s class is proportional to the lack I feel inside me.

  By May, the homestretch, I’m staggering under the weight of these reviews. I’ve started out so far ahead, however, that I still manage to pass first across the finish. Handing back my blue book last, Mr. Coffin smiles and says, Congratulations, Mr. Payne, perhaps you’ll share with us how long you studied to achieve this?

  He must expect me to say an hour and a half, two hours, maybe three, some substantial but not impossible sum that will reprove without discouraging the others. When I answer, Twelve, beaming as I let the cat out, Mr. Coffin’s expression slackens, and he stares at me as though he’s never seen me till that moment. And in the next class meeting, our last, he says that though I’ve earned the right to go into Latin 21A, the accelerated class, some boys of a certain bent, despite their excellence, choose to go into normal Latin 21, and thrive there, and I may wish to consider this route, and I smile and thank him, insulted by his offer.

  So I fly back to North Carolina, touching down in Greensboro, where Margaret picks me up and drives me to our new home off Cone Boulevard, the Sans Souci Apartments. A three-bedroom with popcorn ceilings that you enter from the stairwell, the apartment’s dominated by the Charleston sideboard with its bellflower inlay and the portraits of Pa and of the Manns, Joseph and Martha, and the facing mirrors in which our images are probably still receding.

  At the beach that summer, I take a job with the town sanitation crew, blazing the trail George A. will later follow. Every night at midnight, when the big truck rolls up at the bottom of our drive, I swing aboard with my sandwich in my pocket, and occasionally I do Omnia Gallia in tres partes for Earl, who works the left side of the truck and gets a kick from my shenanigans. When I get off my shift, I throw on my Birdwells and down to Avalon I go. Distance running, the solitude and repetitiveness of it, has started to appeal to me, a new qigong as Latin’s fading. On our bookshelf in the lair rests my first-year Latin primer, Kirkland & Rogers, its green cloth binding worn white with hard use. I take it out a lot that June and go back dutifully to lesson one, amo amas amat. I rarely get beyond that, though. Somehow the thrill is gone. Instead, I put an album on—Eric has loaned me a sheaf of twenty or twenty-five canonical works—and I devote whole afternoons to The White Album and John Barleycorn Must Die and Trout Mask Replica. By the end of that summer, I know every word of every song and every note of every instrumental riff. And when I return to Exeter in September 1970 for my sophomore year—we’re called Lowers there—I’m one of the sallow, disreputable-looking types. My Levi’s have white-stringed tears, and my jacket looks like sackcloth sewn by prison labor.

  In Latin 21A, I nod to my competitors from the previous year, those who, when they stumbled, saw my eager hand shoot up. I run with them for a few weeks, still with the front pack though no longer at the head of it. In the dorm at night, I find it hard to concentrate and close my book and head down to the Butt Room in the basement, where the boys with permission to smoke play scoreless bridge and shoot the shit till lights-out. And soon I’m not with the front pack anymore, or any pack, I’m all alone in back, not even running, but strolling through the woods alone, noting the moss on the north sides of trees, and the way the breeze sways the treetops and the sun winks through the leaves, telling myself that competition doesn’t matter, that winning’s an illusion, a Taoist in training before I know what Taoism is.

  Still, with Eric the game goes on, year after year, semester after semester. I visit his family at their home on lower Fifth Avenue, where Mr. Hsi, their cook, makes boeuf bourguignon to celebrate Eric’s homecoming. Wanting to repay their hospitality, I make a spinach casserole, calling Margaret for the recipe that lives on a yellowed index card in the tin box in her kitchen. This consists of canned Del Monte spinach and Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup with melted cheddar and, on top, canned French’s French Fried Onions. I go shopping at Gristedes, and when it comes bubbling from the oven, Eric’s parents look at it and then at me with the same alarmed, good-natured stares that Eric turned on me when I thumped down on his threshold in a backward cat crouch. And not long afterward they include me in a family birthday outing to Le Périgord, where Eric’s father orders the dessert souf
flé in French before we sit down in the banquette. Soon, I take the train with Eric to his grandfather’s estate on the North Shore of Long Island, where the library is as large as the gray-shingled house that I grew up in and on the wall there are framed letters from Tolstoy, among others.

  There are darker expeditions, too . . . In Washington Square Park, Eric introduces me to his friends and heroes, the street Odysseuses and Aphrodites, the dealers, hustlers and musicians, the skinny teenage runaways with Dead Sea stares and runny noses. Some streak of dark, romantic tenderness draws Eric to these wounded, sometimes dangerous children, whom we follow on dubious, generally drug-related adventures through snipped chain-link fences, across litter-strewn lots to abandoned buildings on the Hudson, or uptown to Harlem tenements at 2 and 3 A.M., leaping over drunks passed out in the stairwells in dark puddles of who knows what.