by T. C. Boyle
“Ho, ho, ho!” the voice boomed, “All you little boysies and girlsies been good? I been checkin’ my list!”
I popped my head over the couch and there he was, cool and inexplicable. I couldn’t believe my eyes: it was Neal. Neal escaped from San Quentin and dressed in a street-corner-Santa outfit, a bag full of booze, drugs, cigarettes and canned hams slung over his back, his palms hammering invisible bongos in the air. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he cried, and broke down in a sea of giggles. “Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice, yes indeed!”
At that moment Jack burst in from the kitchen, where he and Allen had been taking a little catnap over a jug of wine, and that was when the really wild times began, the back-thumping high-fiving jumping jiving tea-smoking scat-singing Beat revel of the ages. Ricky Keen came to life with a snort, wrapped the jacket round her and stepped out from behind the couch like a Beat princess, I reached for the wine, Jack howled like a dog and even Bill shifted his eyes round his head in a simulacrum of animacy. Neal couldn’t stop talking and drinking and smoking, spinning round the room like a dervish, Allen shouted “Miles Davis!” and the record player came to life, and we were all dancing, even Bill, though he never left his chair.
That was the crowning moment of my life—I was Beat, finally and absolutely—and I wanted it to go on forever. And it could have, if it wasn’t for Jack’s mother, that square-shouldered fuming old woman in the Christmas dress. She was nowhere to be seen through all of this, and I’d forgotten about her in the crazed explosion of the moment—it wasn’t till Jack began to break down that she materialized again.
It was around twelve or so. Jack got a little weepy, sang an a capella version of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and tried to talk us all into going to the midnight mass at St. Columbanus’ church. Allen said he had no objection, except that he was Jewish, Neal derided the whole thing as the height of corny bourgeois sentimentality, Bill was having trouble moving his lips and Ricky Keen said that she was Unitarian and didn’t know if she could handle it. Jack, tears streaming down his face, turned to me. “Buzz,” he said, and he had this wheedling crazed biggest-thing-in-the-world sort of edge to his voice, “Buzz, you’re a good Catholic, I know you are—what do you say?”
All eyes focused on me. Silence rang suddenly through the house. I was three sheets to the wind, sloppy drunk, seventeen years old. Jack wanted to go to midnight mass, and it was up to me to say yea or nay. I just stood there, wondering how I was going to break the news to Jack that I was an atheist and that I hated God, Jesus and my mother, who’d made me go to parochial school five days a week since I’d learned to walk and religious instruction on Sundays to boot. My mouth moved, but nothing came out.
Jack was trembling. A tic started in over his right eye. He clenched his fists. “Don’t let me down, Buzz!” he roared, and when he started toward me Neal tried to stop him, but Jack flung him away as if he was nothing. “Midnight mass, Buzz, midnight!” he boomed, and he was standing right there in front of me, gone Beat crazy, and I could smell the booze on his stinking Beat breath. He dropped his voice then. “You’ll rot in hell, Buzz,” he hissed, “you’ll rot.” Allen reached for his arm, but Jack shook him off. I took a step back.
That was when Mémère appeared.
She swept into the room like something out of a Japanese monster flick, huge in her nightdress, big old Jack-mothery toes sticking out beneath it like sausages, and she went straight to the fireplace and snatched up the poker. “Out!” she screamed, the eyes sunk back in her head, “get out of my house, you queers and convicts and drug addicts, and you”—she turned on me and Ricky—“you so-called fans and adulators, you’re even worse. Go back where you came from and leave my Jacky in peace.” She made as if to swing the poker at me and I reflexively ducked out of the way, but she brought it down across the lamp on the table instead. There was a flash, the lamp exploded, and she drew back and whipped the poker like a lariat over her head. “Out!” she shrieked, and the whole group, even Bill, edged toward the door.
Jack did nothing to stop her. He gave us his brooding lumberjack Beat posing-on-the-fire-escape look, but there was something else to it, something new, and as I backpedaled out the door and into the grimy raw East Coast night, I saw what it was—the look of a mama’s boy, pouty and spoiled. “Go home to your mothers, all of you,” Mémère yelled, shaking the poker at us as we stood there drop-jawed on the dead brown ice-covered pelt of the lawn. “For god’s sake,” she sobbed, “it’s Christmas!” And then the door slammed shut.
I was in shock. I looked at Bill, Allen, Neal, and they were as stunned as I was. And poor Ricky—all she had on was Jack’s pea coat and I could see her tiny bare perfect-toed Beat chick feet freezing to the ground like twin ice sculptures. I reached up to adjust my beret and realized it wasn’t there, and it was like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. “Jack!” I cried out suddenly, and my creaking adolescent voice turned it into a forlorn bleat. “Jack!” I cried, “Jack!” but the night closed round us and there was no answer.
What happened from there is a long story. But to make it short, I took Mémère’s advice and went home to my mother, and by the time I got there Ricky had already missed her period. My mother didn’t like it but the two of us moved into my boyhood room with the lame college pennants and dinosaur posters and whatnot on the walls for about a month, which is all we could stand, and then Ricky took her gone gorgeous Beat Madonna-of-the-streets little body off to an ultra-Beat one-room pad on the other end of town and I got a job as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific and she let me crash with her and that was that. We smoked tea and burned candles and incense and drank jug wine and made it till we damn near rubbed the skin off each other. The first four boys we named Jack, Neal, Allen and Bill, though we never saw any of their namesakes again except Allen, at one of his poetry readings, but he made like he didn’t know us. The first of the girls we named Gabrielle, for Jack’s mother, and after that we seemed to kind of just lose track and name them for the month they were born, regardless of sex, and we wound up with two Junes—June the Male and June the Female—but it was no big thing.
Yeah, I was Beat, Beater than any of them—or just as Beat, anyway. Looking back on it now, though, I mean after all these years and what with the mortgage payments and Ricky’s detox and the kids with their college tuition and the way the woodworking shop over the garage burned down and how stinking close-fisted petit-bourgeois before-the-revolution pig-headed cheap the railroad disability is, I wonder now if I’m not so much Beat anymore as just plain beat. But then, I couldn’t even begin to find the words to describe it to you.
THE FOG MAN
HE CAME TWICE A WEEK, rattling through the development in an army-surplus jeep, laying down a roiling smoke screen that melted the trees into oblivion, flattened hills and swallowed up houses, erased Fords, Chevies and Studebakers as if they were as insubstantial as the air itself, and otherwise transformed the world to our satisfaction. Shrubs became dinosaurs, lampposts giraffes, the blacktop of the streets seethed like the surface of the swamp primeval. Our fathers stood there on their emerald lawns, hoses dripping, and they waved languidly or turned their backs to shoot a sparkling burst at the flower beds or forsythias. We took to our bikes, supercharged with the excitement of it, and we ran just behind him, the fog man, wheeling in and out of the tight billowing clouds like fighter pilots slashing across the sky or Grand Prix racers nosing in for the lead on that final excruciating lap. He gave us nothing except those moments of transfiguration, but we chased him as single-mindedly as we chased the ice-cream man in his tinkling white truck full of Drumsticks and Eskimo Pies, chased him till he’d completed his tour of the six connecting streets of the development—up one side and down the other—and lurched across the highway, trailing smoke, for the next.
And then the smoke settled, clinging to the dewy wet grass, the odor of smoldering briquettes fought over the top of the sweet narcotic smell of it, and we were gone, diss
eminated, slammed behind identical screen doors, in our identical houses, for the comfort and magic of the TV. My father was there, always there, propped up in his recliner, one hand over his eyes to mask an imaginary glare, the other clutched round his sweating drink. My mother was there too, legs tucked under her on the couch, the newspaper spread in her lap, her drink on the cluttered table beside her.
“The fog man was just here,” I would announce. I didn’t expect a response, really—it was just something to say. The show on TV was about a smiling family. All the shows were about smiling families. My mother would nod.
One night I appended a question. “He’s spraying for bugs, right?” This much I knew, this much had been explained to me, but I wanted confirmation, affirmation, I wanted reason and meaning to illuminate my life.
My father said nothing. My mother looked up. “Mosquitoes.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought—but how come there’s so many of them then? They bit right through my shirt on the front porch.”
My mother tapped at her cigarette, took a sip of her drink. “You can’t get them all,” she said.
It was at about this time that the local power company opened the world’s first atomic power plant at Indian Point. Ten years earlier nuclear fission had been an instrument of war and destruction; now it was safe, manageable; now it would warm our houses and light our lights and power our hi-fis and toasters and dishwashers. The electric company took pains to ensure that the community saw it that way. It was called public relations.
I didn’t know the term then. I was eleven years old, in my first week of my last year of elementary school, and on my way to the power plant in a school bus crammed to the yawning windows with my excitable classmates. This was known as a field trip. The previous year we’d been to a farm in Brewster and the Museum of Natural History in New York. We were starting early this year, but it was all due to the fact of this astonishing new technological force set down amongst us, this revolution in the production of electricity and the streamlining of our lives. We didn’t know what to expect.
The bus rumbled and belched fumes. I sat on the hard cracked leatherette seat beside Casper Mendelson and watched the great gray concrete dome rise up out of the clutch of the trees, dominating the point and the placid broad fish-stinking river beyond it. It was impressive, this huge structure inside of which the titanic forces of the universe were pared down to size. Casper said that it could blow up, like the bomb they’d dropped on the Japanese, and that it would take all of Peterskill and Westchester with it. The river would turn to steam and there’d be nothing left but a crater the size of the Grand Canyon and we’d all be melted in our beds. I gaped out the window at the thing, awestruck, the big dome keeping a lid on all that seething complexity, and I was impressed, but I couldn’t help thinking of the point’s previous incarnation as an amusement park, a place of strung lights, cotton candy and carousels. Now there was this gray dome.
They led us into a little brightly lit building full of colorful exhibits, where we handled things that were meant to be handled, scuffed the gleaming linoleum floors and watched an animated short in which Johnny Atom splits himself in two and saves the world by creating electricity. The whole thing was pretty dull, aside from the dome itself and what Casper had said about it, and within the hour my classmates were filling the place with the roar of a stampede, breaking the handles off things, sobbing, skipping, playing tag and wondering seriously about lunch—which, as it turned out, we were to have back at school, in the cafeteria, after which we were expected to return to our classrooms and discuss what we’d learned on our field trip.
I remember the day for the impression that imposing gray dome made on me, but also because it was the first chance I got to have a look at Maki Duryea, the new girl who’d been assigned to the other sixth-grade section. Maki was black—or not simply black, but black and Oriental both. Her father had been stationed in Osaka during the occupation; her mother was Japanese. I watched her surreptitiously that morning as I sat in the rear of the bus with Casper. She was somewhere in the middle, sitting beside Donna Siprelle, a girl I’d known all my life. All I could make out was the back of her head, but that was enough, that alone was a revelation. Her hair was an absolute, unalloyed, interstellar black, and it disappeared behind the jutting high ridge of the seat back as if it might go on forever. It had hung iron straight when we first climbed aboard the bus that morning, but on the way back it was transformed, a leaping electric snarl that engulfed the seat and eclipsed the neat little ball of yellow curls that clung to the back of Donna Siprelle’s head. “Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea,” Casper began to chant, though no one could hear him but me in the pandemonium of that preprandial school bus. Annoyed, I poked him with a savage elbow but he kept it up, louder now, to spite me.
There were no blacks in our school, there were no Asians or Hispanics. Italians, Poles, Jews, Irish, the descendants of the valley’s Dutch and English settlers, these we had, these we were, but Maki Duryea was the first black—and the first Asian. Casper’s father was Jewish, his mother a Polish Catholic. Casper had the soaring IQ of a genius, but he was odd, skewed in some deep essential way that set him apart from the rest of us. He was the first to masturbate, the first to drink and smoke, though he cared for neither. He caused a panic throughout the school when he turned up missing one day after lunch and was found, after a room-by-room, locker-by-locker search, calmly reading on the fire escape; he burst from his chair at the back of the classroom once and did fifty frantic squat-thrusts in front of the hapless teacher and then blew on his thumb till he passed out. He was my best friend.
He turned to me then, on the bus, and broke off his chant. His eyes were the color of the big concrete dome, his head was shaved to a transparent stubble. “She stinks,” he said, grinning wildly, his eyes leaping at my own. “Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea, Maki Duryea”—he took up the chant again before subsiding into giggles. “They don’t smell like we do.”
My family was Irish. Irish, that’s all I knew. A shirt was cotton or it was wool. We were Irish. No one talked about it, there was no exotic language spoken in the. house, no ethnic dress or cuisine, we didn’t go to church. There was only my grandfather.
He came that year for Thanksgiving, a short big-bellied man with close-cropped white hair and glancing white eyebrows and a trace of something in his speech I hadn’t heard before—or if I had it was in some old out-of-focus movie dredged up for the TV screen, nothing I would have remembered. My grandmother came too. She was spindly, emaciated, her skin blistered with shingles, a diabetic who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, but there was joy in her and it was infectious. My father, her son, woke up. A festive air took hold of the house.
My grandfather, who years later dressed in a suit for my father’s funeral and was mistaken for a banker, had had a heart attack and he wasn’t drinking. Or rather, he was strictly enjoined from drinking and my parents, who drank themselves, drank a lot, drank too much, took pains to secrete the liquor supply. Every bottle was removed from the cabinet, even the odd things that hadn’t been touched in years—except by me, when I furtively unscrewed the cap of this or that and took a sniff or touched my tongue tentatively to the cold hard glass aperture—and the beer disappeared from the refrigerator. I didn’t know what the big deal was. Liquor was there, a fact of life, it was unpleasant and adults indulged in it as they indulged in any number of bizarre and unsatisfactory practices. I kicked a football around the rock-hard frozen lawn.
And then one afternoon—it was a day or two before Thanksgiving and my grandparents had been with us a week—I came in off the front lawn, my fingers numb and nose running, and the house was in an uproar. A chair was overturned in the corner, the coffee table was slowly listing over a crippled leg and my grandmother was on the floor, frail, bunched, a bundle of sticks dropped there in a windstorm. My grandfather stood over her, red-faced and raging, while my mother snatched at his elbow like a woman tumbling over the edge of a
cliff. My father wasn’t home from work yet. I stood there in the doorway, numb from the embrace of the wind, and heard the inarticulate cries of those two women against the oddly inflected roars of that man, and I backed out the door and pulled it closed behind me.
The next day my grandfather, sixty-eight years old and stiff in the knees, walked two miles in twenty-degree weather to Peterskill, to the nearest liquor store. It was dark, suppertime, and we didn’t know where he was. “He just went out for a walk,” my mother said. Then the phone rang. It was the neighbor two doors down. There was a man passed out in her front yard—somebody said we knew him. Did we?
I spent the next two days—Thanksgiving and the day after—camping in the sorry patch of woods at the end of the development. I wasn’t running away, nothing as decisive or extreme as that—I was just camping, that was all. I gnawed cold turkey up there in the woods, lifted congealed stuffing to my mouth with deadened fingers. In the night I lay shivering in my blankets, never colder before or since.
We were Irish. I was Irish.
That winter, like all winters in those days, was interminable, locked up in the grip of frozen slush and exhaust-blackened snow. The dead dark hours of school were penance for some crime we hadn’t yet committed. The TV went on at three-thirty when we got home from school, and it was still on when we went to bed at nine. I played basketball that winter in a league organized by some of the fathers in the development, and three times a week I walked home from the fungus-infested gym with a crust of frozen sweat in my hair. I grew an inch and a half, I let my crewcut grow out and I began to turn up the collar of my ski jacket. I spent most of my time with Casper, but in spite of him, as the pale abbreviated days wore on, I found myself growing more and more at ease with the idea of Maki Duryea.
