King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  Just walking into the library cheered me up. Since I was a small child, I have always lived in libraries. To me they were and still are mystical places, where deep magic reigns. Just walking through the great glass doors gave me a feeling of power and freedom. Somewhere, somewhere in this vast treasure trove of books and ideas, there was something that would spark off my intellect, something that would take me one step closer to being the man I intended to be—a scholar, a gentleman, a credit to Calvert and Dr. S.

  I intended to get right down to serious research, hustling into the card catalog system, but instead I became hypnotized by the silent beauty of the place. I began walking around the aisles of the library with no fixed goal in mind. It was liberating just to be around so many books. They were and still are my friends, my benefactors, the father and big brother I never had. Just seeing their spines, their titles, their covers, sends me into a state of grace.

  I glided through philosophy, touching the spines of books by Russell, Kierkegaard, and Kant. I cruised through history and promised myself that one day I would read all of Spengler and Wells’s Outline of History. Then I arrived in the fiction section, the holiest of places.

  I felt a kind of glow come over me, a glow that was completely irrational, I know, for only a few minutes ago, I had proven myself as yet unworthy of understanding real artists, but still the books called out to me in a voice that was beyond Dr. Spaulding’s powers to discourage me, beyond even my own feelings of self-loathing.

  Books, thoughts, words, powerful floating images, whole worlds imagined and described by great artists—and all of it sitting there silent but powerful, like some great sleeping giant—the colossus of the library.

  Now I glided from row to row, running my hands across the spines of the volumes, like a native touching a talisman. When I came to an old favorite, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, I took it out, opened it up, and smiled down on the illustrations of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver. God, how I had loved that book as a child. I remembered sitting by the goldfish pond at the downtown Enoch Pratt Library, reading it while the light of a Saturday afternoon glanced off the sparkling water. And I remember offering a little prayer: Oh, Lord, do not let the library ever close. Let me stay here by the pond, lost in my adventures with Jim Hawkins and Blind Pugh and good Squire Trelawny.

  I remembered being sick with rheumatic fever, my mother, young and happy then, wearing a blue apron and reading to me, while she lay cold compresses on my head. I even recalled the lovely odor of that first copy of the book, the fresh smell of the ink and the new pages.

  Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with a desire to do something crazy, foolish. I wanted to smell the book in my hand. Why, I wasn’t sure. Surely it wouldn’t smell like the old edition I had loved as a child, but even so it was Treasure Island. In my strange library trance, I began to entertain the idea that it was the great pirate story itself that gave off the odor of romance. Why not? It was entirely possible that stories had their own smells. Catcher in the Rye smelled like fresh chestnuts bought from some horsecart vendor near Central Park; You Can’t Go Home Again smelled like old suits left in ancient closets, the sacred, heartbreaking smell of yesterday’s lost Sundays; and War and Peace smelled like sulfur and smoke and the odor of dying men on a great blood-drenched field of Russian poppies.

  I looked around, saw no one, and put the book up to my nose. I inhaled deeply, and to my surprise there was an odor. Not precisely the one I had remembered as a child, but one reminiscent of it, the dank smell of old pirate ships, rotted rafters, and unbathed men drinking down flagons of cold, foaming grog. Oh, yes, I could smell it—the odor of Treasure Island bore me back into the past so swiftly that it nearly made me dizzy. I could see my old bedroom; the cowboy curtains on the window; my “pet skeleton,” Skelly, hanging off the door; my cedar chest with the mothball odor inside; my little orange bookcase with my Golden Books; my Mickey Mouse and Plastic Man comics; my coloring books lying in a pile next to the bed. And there was my red plastic radio sitting on the night table next to my bed, on which I could dial Jack Benny or Bob Hope or the Lone Ranger. Sniffing the book, I was again in my room and I was happy, and downstairs … downstairs there was laughter, my young parents’ laughter, as they entertained other young couples. I remembered them eating Ritz crackers and onion dip off a blue plastic lazy Susan that my mother had gotten from S & H green stamps. They were drinking martinis and dancing to a Prez Prado Mambo beat. Oh, Lord, they had been carefree and happy once. But now all that laughter and sweetness was swept away, gone, lost forever. The memories came in a great wild rush, and I felt dizzy and held on to the side of the bookcase to ballast myself.

  Then, suddenly from behind me there was a sound, a rustling, and when I turned there was a girl, a girl I had seen once or twice on the campus, a most interesting girl with short red hair, a small adorable pugnose, and a midnight blue turtleneck sweater. She wore a knee-length black skirt, skintight, which revealed her tight little ass and terrific pale white legs. I had seen her hanging around with the arty crowd, poets and actors, and I’d wanted to say something to her but had been too shy to know how to proceed. And now, astonishingly, here she was staring at me.

  Me, with my nose stuck in the binding of a book.

  I felt absurd, foolish beyond belief. God, how long had I been standing here? Minutes probably. She may have been watching me the entire time.

  I slowly took the book away from my nose, though reluctantly, for now she could see my reddened face.

  “I think there’s a law against that,” she said.

  Her voice was unlike any voice I had ever heard. It was deep, throaty, theatrical. I was so struck by the quality of it that I felt my own embarrassment diminish.

  I knew then, in ways you can only know when you are young and trusting, that I could simply tell her what I had been doing and she would understand.

  “Did you ever … smell a book … I mean they do have smells,” I said.

  She looked at me and smiled. A smile that was pure innocence and yet promised something else entirely.

  “Of course,” she said. “And different books have different smells. I have some poetry here, smell this one …”

  She reached down to a large Spanish leather handbag and pulled out a small volume of poetry.

  Then she walked toward me (and, God, that walk, that same incalculable mixture of schoolgirl innocence and full-grown woman) and laid it in my hand. The book was none other than the City Lights paperback edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. I nearly recoiled from it and suddenly feared that Dr. Spaulding would come around the corner and catch me reading this “ersatz sensation monger.”

  “Take a whiff,” she said.

  I hesitated for about a half second and then, smiling like a complete fool, put the book up to my nose.

  “It smells like old wine, some coffeehouse out West somewhere, smoke, jazz,” I said, feeling every bit both a fool and a liar. This book had only the smell of her perfume on it, something like fresh roses, and I felt dizzy, breathless.

  “That’s what I smell in it,” she said. “God, I didn’t know anybody like you went to Calvert. My name is Val Jackson.”

  “Tommy,” I said, offering my hand. “Tommy Fallon.”

  We stopped and looked at each other for what must have been a full ten seconds. I looked at her face; her prominent, almost masculine cheekbones; her huge blue eyes; her red hair; and her thick, sensual lips. I could have stayed there all day.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve got to go. I work downtown as a waitress and I’m doing a paper on Ginsberg.”

  Ginsberg, I thought. Dr. Spaulding again appeared in my mind shaking his head, but I suddenly found it extraordinarily easy to ignore him.

  “You’re an English major then?” I asked, feeling my heart racing.

  “Of course,” she smiled. “Do you like poetry?”

  “Sure,” I said. This wasn’t entirely true. I was much more a prose man, but just then it s
eemed as though I could learn to like it.

  “Then why don’t you come downtown tonight,” she said, smiling in a way that made me feel weak in the knees. “Monty’s Bar. Eight o’clock. I’m reading there.”

  “Eight?” I said. “Well, I’m supposed to be doing some research, but maybe.” This was a patent lie. I had nothing at all on my plate, but I had to do something to slow myself down.

  She reached out and touched my hand, and I felt an electric shock go up my arm.

  “I hope you will come,” she said in a low buzz of a voice. “I want you to come.”

  Then she was gone, into the elevator, riding up into the stacks.

  I stood there numbed and felt my heart beating wildly in my chest.

  “Val Jackson,” I said once and then again. “Val Jackson.”

  I scarcely remember how I made it through the rest of the day. It seemed as though I were in some kind of waking dream or that I had inhaled laughing gas. I went to class but had no idea what any of my professors said. I vaguely remember having lunch in the student union, but there was an air of unreality to all my doings. I felt as though somehow my real life, the one that I was meant to live, would begin that night.

  I should add that I did not allow these feelings to run unchecked inside my skin. Quite the contrary, I fought the impulse with all my diminished might. I told myself that this woman, this apparition of a woman, Val Jackson, was clearly another impediment to my becoming a scholar and a gentleman. As I walked (or rather floated several feet above the ground) around the campus, I harangued myself for letting a pretty face and a sexy voice dissuade me from my appointed tasks. I sternly told myself that I was again acting like a bloody fool, that it was clear, eminently clear, that this woman was nothing more than some kind of sloppy beatnik. After all, she admired the poetry of Allen Ginsberg! That said reams about her lack of character. And I reminded myself (out loud, and several times I noticed students staring at me as I walked by mumbling to myself) that only this morning Professor Spaulding, who stood for all that I truly valued in literature, had upbraided me for my lack of focus, for the softness of my critical perspective! My God, time was wasting; in another five months I would be twenty years old—barely a teenager. I simply had to start acting like an adult.

  I sighed, deeply disappointed with myself. I wasn’t going to her poetry reading and that was that. Saying it made me feel strong, sure of myself. I took a deep breath of the warm fall air. I knew who I was and I knew what I wanted. With an air of satisfaction that comes from making the correct, definitive decision, I went to the library for the remainder of the afternoon.

  From where I stood at the corner of Park Avenue and Eager Street I could hear the sounds of a vibraphone. The music tinkled out into the night air, music so cool and lilting that it made me (against my scholarly will) tap my feet on the unseasonably hot sidewalk. Now I headed toward it like a lemming heading for the sea. All my resolve, discipline, and fortitude had been washed away by seven-thirty.

  Though I knew I was a ridiculous figure, though I still firmly believed that heading to this coffeehouse was a disastrous idea and made me practically a card-carrying member of the great army of the second-rate, it seemed I had no choice. I had to see her again, even if just to assure myself that I wasn’t really obsessed by her (by her smell, by her walk, by her voice.)

  The coffeehouse was right next to a dark alley. The building had glass doors with a floral design in them and the word Monty’s written in some obvious copy of Victorian lettering.

  I pushed open the door gingerly like a child sneaking into his parent’s bedroom and walked inside.

  There was no question about it, this was the Baltimore version of some beatnik joint. I felt my stomach tense as I looked around. Though I had never been in such a place, I had seen so many pictures in magazines about North Beach joints in San Francisco that I felt I had already been here. In front of me were the compulsory little black wire tables and chairs. Standing at the old oak bar were negroes and white men with long beards and longer hair and two women with black sweaters and black leotards. The women were both attractive but I told myself that they were attractive in a predictable way, a coffeehouse way. After all, there was nothing new here, nothing new at all. (And yet, that was only the academic part of myself talking, mumbling, for I was excited by it all, excited and a little apprehensive that they would not accept me.) I looked to the back of the place and saw an elevated dining room and a bandstand on which were three Negroes dressed in elegant suits playing the cool jazz that had summoned me into the place against my will.

  I looked at the vibraphone man, dressed so coolly in his two-button green satin suit. I watched his hands bang the mallets on the keys, hitting them lightly, skimming over them, and saw the happy blissed-out look on his long, elegant face, and I felt something melting inside me, something mere rhetoric and academic fussiness couldn’t touch.

  He was cool and he was there in the moment, in love with his own body, his own music, and uptight white boy that I was, I envied him.

  Now I walked in a little farther toward the bar, my heart beating fast, my miserable self-consciousness in full bloom. I tried looking around in a blasé fashion, hoping that no one would realize I was the enemy. But Val Jackson was nowhere in sight.

  The bartender, a huge Negro man with a scar across his left eye, looked at me and grunted: “What you have?”

  “Ah, beer,” I said. “National Bohemian.”

  “Check,” he said.

  He smiled and reached into the freezer just below the bar and pulled out a cold beer for me. I felt a small sense of triumph. I was only nineteen years old and the drinking age in Maryland was twenty-one. Yet he hadn’t carded me.

  I stood there, drinking my beer, pretending to listen to the music, but my heart was racing. One of the Negro men at the bar was staring at me.

  Finally, I could stand it no longer. I turned and looked at him.

  “Great music,” I said. “Those guys really … know how to, ah, blow …”

  I immediately blushed and felt as though I should cut out my tongue. Where had I ever picked up such absurd talk? Probably from watching movies like High School Confidential, in which Hollywood screen hacks did their own lame version of beatnik patter.

  The Negro looked at me and smiled. He wore a handsome brown leather vest and had a little gold star in his front tooth.

  “I get it,” he said.

  Then he smiled and looked at the blond-headed white girl standing next to him, one of the black leotard twins.

  “You get what?” I said, having no choice but to play this out.

  “I get what you’re putting down,” he said.

  “You do?” I said. My voice had risen to near falsetto.

  “Yeah, I do,” he said in a voice rich with sarcasm. “You a white boy, you probably ain’t even drinking age, and you coming in here trying to come on like a hip nigger from ‘de streets.’ How am I doing?”

  I felt my heart literally sink into my stomach. I had made a complete and utter fool of myself. He smiled at me now, which softened his attack a little.

  “I’d say you’re doing pretty well, Sam,” a voice said.

  I turned, startled, and looked into the eyes of Val Jackson.

  “But you should go easy on Mr. Fallon. This is his first time down here, and we don’t want to scare him away. After all the man is a poet.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, blushing as I stared at the floor.

  “A great poet,” she said, putting her arm around my waist and pulling me away. She wore a red turtleneck sweater and tight-fitting black Le vis. Casual dress and she looked casually sensational. I looked into Sam’s eyes and saw them soften a little.

  Val said, “Tommy, this is Sam Washington. Sam’s an artist.”

  The big Negro man put out his hand and squeezed mine. Now he smiled, and I was stunned by the warmth in his face.

  “Well, you ain’t ever gonna be a nigger,” Sam said, “but you c
ould maybe become a nice loose white boy. And I dig poetry.”

  The Leotard Twins smiled behind him, and I couldn’t help but laugh myself.

  “Come on back, Tommy,” Val said. “We’re about to start.”

  I nodded to Sam Washington, who nodded back and then followed Val to the back of the bar and up the little steps. We sat down at a table just a few feet from the musicians who were now working their way through a wonderful version of a tune that I would identify later as “Green Dolphin Street.”

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” she said, smiling through the candlelight.

  “No?” I said, breathless as I stared at her pale white skin and red hair. “Why not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I thought I detected a faint air of disapproval.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “No. No way,” I said. “I couldn’t wait to get here.”

  “Really?” she said. “Well, I hope you’ll enjoy it. I have a feeling you don’t much like beat poetry.”

  “I like anything, that is, if it’s good,” I said and immediately felt like I was a sixty-year-old prig.

  “Oh, I see,” she said, laughing. “I bet you’re strictly a Pound and Eliot man.”

  “No, not at all,” I said, lying through my teeth. My God, Pound and Eliot were my heroes, and I had sold them out in a snap simply to curry her favor. The serious, unflinching eyes of Dr. Spaulding bored into the back of my head.

  Val laughed at me and her eyes flashed.

  “Maybe you do have some potential after all. I had kind of crossed you off as one of those pipe-smoking liberals.”

  I looked down at the table on that one. It hurt to hear myself portrayed this way. Especially since, not three weeks earlier, I had just bought a briar pipe. She must have sensed she’d hit a raw nerve, because a second later she was up and walking around behind me.