King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  She put both her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. I was surprised by the strength of her fingers.

  “You just need to loosen up a little,” she said. “You should try yoga.”

  “Only if you’ll teach me,” I said, turning and smiling at her.

  She made a face—”naughty, naughty”—and said: “Maybe you aren’t as uptight as you seem. Anyway, whether you like it or not, you have to stay and hear my poetry.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. When do you read?”

  “Right now, I hope,” said a voice, a faintly familiar voice, from behind us. I turned and looked into the lopsided grin of Jeremy Raines. He wore his same filthy business shirt and battered gray suit. And his hair was mussed in the same endearing cowlick. In spite of myself, I couldn’t help but smile at him.

  “You made it!” Val yelled. She left me at once and threw herself into Raines’s arms.

  He picked her up effortlessly and spun her around like a dancer. There was something immediately appealing about this move; he was grace personified.

  I felt a pang of ridiculous jealousy shoot through my chest. Of course he would be here and she would know him. They were both outcasts, and he would be at home in this world in a way that I never could be.

  When he had set her back down on the floor, he offered me his hand, and I reluctantly accepted.

  “I didn’t know you were a fan of poetry and jazz, Raines,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, my boy,” he said. “A great fan, one of the greatest fans. You should have come back to the house and taken a look at my record collection. All the biggest names …”

  “And all hot,” Val said, poking a finger at his ribs. “Jeremy used to work at the Music Mart up in Govans, where he permanently ‘borrowed’ half the jazz bins. Remember the night it was raining and we grabbed about ninety albums and took them down to the Hellhole?”

  “Only too well, my dear,” Raines said, and then both of them cracked up. “That was indeed a night to remember.”

  What had he meant by that? I tried hard not to think about it. But she smiled happily at him, the same adoring look that had graced the faces of Eddie and the Babe the day before.

  Val looked up at the bandstand, where one of the black jazz musicians was waving to her. She kissed Jeremy on the cheek, squeezed my hand, and grabbed her little black notebook, then headed up to the podium. A waitress in a short black lace skirt, black fishnet stockings, and red pumps came by our table. I started to order a beer, but Raines shook his head.

  “For poetry you need something with a little more bite,” he said. “Try some tequila.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s exactly what I need.”

  I had never had a shot of tequila before. I thought of the Champs old tune, bullfight posters, and dusty Mexican towns. The drink seemed exotic, romantic. Naturally, Raines would know all about it.

  Then, as Sam Washington stepped up to the microphone, it occurred to me: Jeremy Raines was some kind of hybrid, businessman-beatnik. He didn’t wear the long beard or the sandals, but he was clearly as mad as any angel-headed hipster in some Allen Ginsberg epic. That was the connection between himself and Val. But was that all? It was all too easy to imagine them both naked and rolling across some great unmade bed, and I literally shook my head to get the image out of my mind.

  I sighed and listened to Sam Washington on the stage: “Welcome to Monty’s Poetry Festival,” he said. “We got all kinds of cats reading tonight, big cats and small, short cats and tall, every kinda cat to entertain and enlighten ya all.”

  The crowd went crazy over that bit of doggerel. At least sixty people clapped and whistled and, in some cases, snapped their fingers to show their pleasure. Out by the bar, I could make out two other members of the Raines clan. Short-legged Eddie and the sexpot, Babe. Tonight both of them were wearing hats: Eddie, a rakish black beret, and the Babe, a floppy purple sunhat with a long goose feather. As absurdly Bohemian as ever, I thought, yet I felt a twinge of affection for the two of them and found myself waving their way. And lo and behold, they smiled and waved back. They even seemed happy to see me.

  “Now the first of the cats we have for you tonight,” Sam Washington said, “is the swingingist and sexiest alley cat we have seen in many a night—Miss Val Jackson.”

  The place erupted in applause and whistles.

  She stepped up on the stage and when the spotlight lit up her face, I felt a chill move down my arms and legs. God, she was beautiful.

  She put her hands over her eyes, shielding them from the hot lights and smiled.

  “A nice crowd of Baltimorons,” she said. “Here’s a little love poem for you.”

  There was a ripple of knowing laughter, and I strained forward in my seat. I saw Jeremy Raines’s eyes on me. He was obviously waiting for my reaction, but I ignored him and gave my full attention to Val.

  “This one is called ‘Summer Boy Blues,’ “ she said.

  She began in a low, purring voice, the unmistakable voice of sex, and as she read, she moved around, wiggling her shoulders and her ass, almost as if she were dancing naked in front of a mirror in the privacy of her own bedroom. I felt my stomach twist into a knot, and my mouth went dry. The only other poetry reading I’d been to had been at Calvert my first year. For Senior Week we heard Marianne Moore, who was about ninety-eight years old and dressed like a witch. She whispered and posed and tried to look like a pixie, and everyone found her lovable but me. I couldn’t wait for her to leave and head back to her iron lung or wherever it was she lived when they didn’t drag her out in front of the public. But this was something different. All of my earlier academic caveats disappeared in one flash of that body and in the sound of her voice. I could not take my eyes off of her.

  “So it was another killer hot day in Crabtown,

  and so I had nothing to do,

  and no one to do it to,

  and I wanted to scream a little,

  break a few windows,

  and say soft, ironic feminine words, like Emily D.

  “heard a fly buzz when I died,”

  but instead found Nikos, the sweet Greek sailor boy,

  burned out and lonely,

  sitting at the bar at the Acropolis,

  drinking cheap Ouzo,

  watching a belly dancer with a Moby Dick gut,

  black-haired Nikos talking about some little dark-haired

  village girl he left behind,

  and I said,

  “Don’t cry sweetheart … I’ll be her … only better ‘cause

  I’m a Baltimore girl, and we aim to please,”

  Oh I scared myself saying those words,

  But he was kind and sweet and sad,

  And put his fingers inside me,

  On the docks sitting beside an old abandoned anchor,

  Overlooking the sad ships,

  and said over and over again,

  “Elena, Elena …”

  And I dug being Elena,

  And rubbed his cock for him,

  Something I would never ever do as burned, dead,

  Catholic Val,

  And he cried again,

  And I kissed his face,

  And opened my legs,

  Right there on the steaming cobblestoned streets,

  And fucked him to rid him of his homeland blues,

  And for dear sweet Elena,

  And for my own ragged ass self,

  And for Francis Scott Key,

  And the Star Spangled Banana,

  And for all the Catholic dead-faced nuns who never got to make love to anybody,

  ‘cept each other in the lilac hours after Vespers,

  And he came rockets red glare,

  And stopped his crying,

  And laughed with me,

  As we sat there,

  All reborn on the shining, oil slick Holy

  Baltimore docks …”

  When she stopped, the place went crazy. There was hooting and screaming and cheering.
Behind her the black jazzmen played a hot little blues riff, and Val nodded coolly and gave her perfect killer smile, then walked off the bandstand nonchalant and so very cool.

  I found myself in a torment of conflicting emotions. I was clapping wildly, knocked out by her bravery and the power of her writing, but at the same time feeling jealous and shocked. God, did she really do these kinds of things? Screw sailors down at the docks? Guys named Nikos? My cheeks burned, and when I looked at Raines, he was smiling at me and I wanted to hide my face. Damn, I didn’t want to look like any square. And then Val was walking toward us, touching hands with her admirers all the way to our table.

  “That was amazing,” I said, hoping to God I wasn’t blushing. “Absolutely terrific.”

  “You liked it?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Too much.”

  Val smiled shyly and sat down. Now there was almost no trace of the hypnotic figure who had held the entire café spellbound only minutes before.

  “Wonderfully done, my dear,” Jeremy said, handing her tequila on the rocks.

  She gave him the sweetest smile I’d ever seen, almost, it seemed, the smile of a grateful and loving daughter to a wise and beloved father. Then she drained the glass in one gulp and said in a Mae West voice: “That’s my only new poem. Before the next poet comes on, I think maybe we should retire to your study, J.R.”

  Jeremy nodded his head and looked at me.

  “Shall we take our new acquaintance, Miss Jackson?”

  “Oh, I do think so,” she said, patting my hand. “By all means. He should see the study, and he should hear the music.”

  “What are you two talking about?” I said, but they were already up and Val had taken my hand. We were heading through the crowd, past the bandstand, and out a back exit to the dark alley behind the bar.

  Once out there in the black night, I found myself with the others as well, Eddie Eckel and the Babe. Someone was lighting a hash pipe, and they began to smoke and pass it around. I watched Jeremy lean on the club’s brick wall and draw heavily on the pipe. He held the smoke in and comically bugged his eyes out. Then he passed the pipe to Val.

  “Oh, this hash,” she said, as she cut off a piece and put it on the pipe. “I love it. You’ll see, Tommy. It’s gold. Nice and light, makes your dreams all Arabian.”

  She took a long drag, then passed it to me.

  “I think I’ll pass,” I said.

  That stopped the party cold, they all looked at me as if I were a sniveling weasel.

  “I just don’t like drugs that well,” I said. “I mean they make me nervous.”

  “Hey, man,” Eddie Eckel said, “you’re making me nervous. You the heat or something?”

  “Cool it, Eddie,” Jeremy said. “It’s all right if Tommy doesn’t want to smoke deadly drugs.”

  “Of course it is. But I wish you’d try it,” Val said, smiling at me. “Bet you’ve never had gold before.”

  “Well, no …” I said. “No, I haven’t …”

  “Oh, it’s great,” she said. “It’s not threatening at all. No great black body rush but to hear poetry and to listen to music behind it. Fantastic.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Try it,” she said. “I won’t let it make you nervous.”

  The others laughed at that, but she put her hand in mine and squeezed my fingers and suddenly I had the hash pipe to my lips.

  I sucked in the drug. It did have a pleasant, light taste to it, not at all like the dark, heavily opiated hash I’d smoked a few years ago with my high school friend, Bobby Murphy. Bobby had connections with the Merchant Marine smugglers down on old Pier 1, and we used to smoke the black hash at his little apartment down on Pratt Street. Those were wild scary times, because Bobby had already started moving into the nighttime world of drugs, thievery, and making book, a world he had now successfully entered. Inevitably, my own literary dreams had taken me in another path, but I missed him and always associated hashish with dark waterfront nights.

  Now I stopped and waited for the pipe to go around, waited for the drug to come on, waiting for the first signs of disorder and night strangeness, the dry mouth, the thumping heart, the feeling that my toes were curling up inside my shoes.

  But none of this happened.

  No, instead, much to my delight-dismay (or to Tommy’s dismay, for suddenly “I” no longer identified with this uptight would-be scholarly twit, Tommy Fallon), I began to feel as though I were floating in that dark black alley, floating over it and glowing slightly, and in fact when I now looked around, I realized that I was no longer actually standing next to the exit door, but was twenty feet away leaning on a parked car with Val pressed up against me.

  That is, my right arm was around Val. And it seemed I was sort of tapping my foot in rhythm to what I felt must literally be the music of the spheres. Inside Monty’s, a poet was reading his work while being backed by some blues music, and it seemed to me that I had never heard music with such a stupendous complexity, such a fantastic density, music that was light and yet killer bluesy, as in darkest midnight blue as in back alley blue as in Claude Monet blue as in blue on blue as in blue boy as in blue lights in blue alleys in blue guitars in blue studios on blue-cobblestoned Baltimore streets as in falling down some perfect blue-leaf-clogged drain of blue love …

  And it seemed that I was saying these things, as it were, to Miss Val Jackson, whom (oh, God, help me why can’t I shut the hell up) I was actually calling Miss Jackson: “This, ah, combination of music and words, Miss Jackson,” I said, “it has this contrapuntal quality. It seems to actually have some kind of physical density as in some kind of light projection, well, not exactly light, no, Miss Jackson, I wouldn’t call it light, I would call it a kind of simultaneous …”

  “Orgasm?”

  She looked up at me and smiled. I began to laugh a bit. A bit too much.

  “Am I that amusing?” she said.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no,” I said. “Not at all. It’s just that when you said that word …”

  “The O word?” she said, rubbing my cheek with the palm of her hand.

  “That’s the one,” I said. “Well, when you said it, I was suddenly aware that your head started to shimmer. I mean actually light up, so to speak, Miss Jackson. I mean your head looked like a light bulb, as it were, Miss Jackson. Just a hallucination, I’m sure, Miss Jackson.”

  “No,” she said. “Uh-uh-uh-uh.”

  “Uh-uh-uh-uh?” I countered.

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t a hallucination. When I say the word orgasm, my head does light up. But that’s nothing compared to what happens when I actually experience an orgasm. I’ve been known to, well, you heard about the fire down at Pier 1 last year. I have an apartment down there, and it was a very wild night.”

  She put her arms around me. I hesitated for a second, waiting to feel a great surge of embarrassment and self-consciousness—in short the emergence of my usual self. But this didn’t happen. Indeed, I felt no self at all. And yet I felt no fear at the loss of himself.

  I was happy to lose old Tom. Who was he anyway?

  I wanted himself to go away, stay away, don’t ever come back. Screw himself.

  I kissed her, leaning on that great black Buick.

  Then I stopped kissing her and I laughed.

  “What what?” she said.

  “One question,” I said. “When we started this conversation we were standing over there by the exit of the erstwhile beatnik café, isn’t that correct?”

  “Yes,” she said, “we were. Indeed. This is so.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Then riddle me this. How did we get over here? ‘Cause I know we didn’t walk.”

  “We flew on time’s winged chariot,” Val said. “We were like angels flying over the redbrick Baltimore rooftops and all the little kids who are supposed to be asleep were looking out of their windows with great eyes as we sailed over, both of us wearing bright, red robes, and trailing fragments o’ stars. Don’t
you remember that, Tom?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I said. “It begins to come back to me, Miss Jackson.”

  “And by the way, Tom,” she said, “I love kissing you and I want to stay with you tonight. Does that sound like a good idea?”

  “Nah,” I said. “I hate the idea, Miss Jackson.”

  Then I kissed her again, and there was one sensation that cut through the wonderful haziness and that was the pure sensation of God-help-me-i’m-going-to-die-if-I’m-this-happy-for-more-than-fifteen-minutes love.

  I was deep deep oh so stoned deep in love with Miss Val Jackson. (Even so, there behind me for the briefest of seconds were the surrealistically lit eyes of Dr. Spaulding, who was shaking his precise head in his precise way and saying “How unfortunate, Tom. How unfortunate, indeed!”)

  I might have doomed myself forever by telling her then and there, but something else happened, some star-space time displacement, and we were suddenly not in the alley anymore at all but were in a car, Mad Jeremy Raines’s car, and were driving ninety-five miles per midnight hour toward Baltimore’s Friendship Airport.

  Cars squealed and nearly ran off the road. Dogs barked in trash-filled alleys, while old women in flowered-print muumuus stood in their Westport backyards safety pinning up sheets in the fall night winds. While a half mile away stock cars raced around the eternal Westport raceway as thousands of hypnotized redneck fans waited for the one final lap and the one amazing crash that would send them all over the edge of the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower black suit-wearing West Baltimore reality into the greatest golden bowl of demented car explosion happiness, which, unbeknownst to them, I was now already living for Miss Val Jackson with her perfect ass, pure Baltimore poetry, was sitting on my lap in the massive backseat of the huge Nash, crushed up against great cardboard boxes of I.D. cards.

  In the front seat were Babe and Eddie E., who were chattering like crazed black magpies, while Jeremy Raines drove the great Nash bomber through the dark night.

  And somehow we were all singing songs of our youth:

  Take out the papers and the trash