by Ward, Robert
She was staying with her aunt, said she had to go right in, but then as I turned to walk away, she suddenly pulled me to her and cried in my ear: “Was I any good at all?” “Yeah, sure,” I said. “You were fine … really fine.” “Good,” she said, “Cause I want to be a good lover for my husband … I’m going to get married in three weeks.” “Great,” I said. “I think you’ll do just fine.” She smiled when I said that, then kissed me in a dismissive way, so I turned and walked down the dark boardwalk. Great, I thought, my first sexual experience and I’m a warmup fuck.
As I headed down the warped boardwalk, feeling the cool ocean breeze, I pretended that my parents and my grandmother and aunt all lived in a big hotel near the ocean, that we were some kind of Italian family who ate huge meals together, who drank wine and argued and fought, but who loved each other in a sentimental, earthy way. Single guests and divorced people registered at our hotel because we were so kind, so warm … so family.
When I got back to our house, it was eleven o’ clock and the lights were out, but my grandmother was sitting on the front porch.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “You look a little messed up.”
I looked down at my pants. They were wrinkled badly, covered with sand and the cuffs were wet.
“Went for a walk down on the beach,” I said.
“You’re going to be all right, you know,” my grandmother said.
She didn’t smile when she said something serious and personal, like people do to try and take the edge off, but looked at me in her steadfast way.
“I know,” I said, embarrassed.
“Your father loves you,” she said. “He doesn’t know how to show it, but he tells me. When he came over to visit us last month he cried because he can’t reach you.”
“Yeah, well that’s wonderful,” I said in a harsher voice than I felt.
“He wants you to do all the things he never did,” my grandmother said. “He thinks … I think … you can be great at whatever you try to do.”
“Whatever that is,” I said.
“Whatever that is,” my grandmother said. “You don’t have to be in a big hurry to decide.”
She reached out and put her hand on my cheek, and I had to pull away for fear of crying right then. I didn’t want her to go, I didn’t want her to get old, I didn’t ever want that summer to end.
But the next morning we saw them off, my aunt smoking her Raleighs and laughing about a sailor who whistled at her as she packed the trunk in her red short shorts. These were my people, I remember thinking as they pulled away. These are my real people, and I will never love anyone as much as them again.
And I never did until that first night at Raines’s house. After we came from the pool, Val and I found ourselves in what she said was her bedroom. I was surprised by this, for she had already mentioned that she kept an apartment downtown. But she didn’t bother to explain and I never asked. Indeed, there was barely any talk at all; what had happened in the pool was for me too profound for words. I felt stoned and connected to the world in a way I never had since our family fell apart, though I didn’t know that then, of course. All I knew for sure was that I had met people who seemed alive in some new way; they were guerrilla fighters of the psyche heading into new territory without any maps. And yet they seemed to be led by Raines’s mad, brave, vision. Never mind that Raines might be insane. It occurred to me now that a little insanity was exactly what I needed. That and Val Jackson. There had never been such a woman for me—her perfect, smooth but muscular body, her small but beautiful breasts, her long white legs, the patch of red pubic hair that looked like a flame. I fell on her and kissed her, licked her body, her pussy, her ass. I wanted to know her beyond syntax, beyond even sensation itself. We made love in the bed, then in a wicker chair, slamming up against the wall so hard that plaster rained down on our stoned heads. Then I was facing her lovely, perfect ass as she leaned out the window and screamed “William Carlos Williams” to the entire neighborhood.
Of course, to this day, I remember the sex. Who can ever forget their first really great sex, the sense that when you enter into another person you know them, become them, and then, beyond that, that you both become something else, that you are transported out of your selves completely to become some nonself, a nonbeing, like some force of nature, pure sensation. And yet, beyond that as well, for one is aware of the consummate tenderness of love. One doesn’t want only sensation because one wants to reflect on the beauty and perfection of one’s lover. One wants to engage her mind as well as her cunt. And so we talked. Fucked and talked and drank and smoked again until dawn. I found my own voice with her that night, found myself able to talk to her about anything, about my dreams of someday becoming a writer, my terrible pains with my father and Miss Kissable Lips, and I had the delicious sense that I was being understood, truly understood by a woman for the first time. She sat up in the bed, her face in her hands, her elbows resting on her knees, naked and unashamed, and she listened, laughing, nodding, comparing my story with her own.
She said that she understood my mother’s desire to stay in Baltimore, for her own parents were army people. Her father was known as the Colonel and she had already lived in South Carolina; Japan; London; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Bethesda, Maryland. The Colonel, it seemed, was now working for the CIA, having something to do with Intelligence in Vietnam. I told her about my own father’s small part in World War II, his code-cracking unit, and she smiled and said, “So you’re an Intelligence orphan, too? It figures we would meet like we did.” I smiled, not understanding. So she boxed my ear and said, “Well, think of it. You feel most at home all by yourself in secret in the library and your father feels best all by himself either in the bathroom or staked out at some data-processing machine. You’re both intelligence junkies, secret freaks. What else would an intelligence officer’s son or daughter become but a writer, a person who knows the secrets.”
I smiled and kissed her on the neck.
“Don’t tell me I’m like my father,” I said, laughing. “I don’t want to be anything at all like him.”
“Of course not,” Val said. “And I don’t want to be anything like my parents either, but believe me, it’s hopeless. Genes are destiny.”
“Obviously he hasn’t read any of your poetry,” I said.
“He thinks I’ll end up marrying a military man and having nine little cadets.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it,” I said, kissing her again. “I just can’t believe you’re here … in Baltimore.”
“I love Baltimore,” she said.
“Why?”
“Everything your father hates is what I like about it. People grow up in neighborhoods. They meet the girl down the street. They get married, have kids, stay put. I’m going to make a million dollars with Jeremy, get myself a row house in Bolton Hill, and never leave the city for the rest of my life.”
“You?” I laughed, playing with her beautiful red hair. “Come on …”
“Why do you laugh?” she asked.
“Because you’re not the Baltimore type. I don’t see you wearing a muumuu and getting down and washing your three ivory steps or playing bingo twice a week up at the Catholic church.”
“You’re wrong,” she said, tracing her finger over the head of my cock. “I am the greatest three-card bingo player in the United States. Listen, what I want is to have all my friends stop in anytime and go to the Lexington Market for crab cakes and watch Oriole games and go see fireworks at Fort McHenry every year.”
“And skate on the ponds at Homeland in the winter?”
“Is that a Baltimore tradition, too?” she asked.
“It is for the rich. That and the Hunt Cup every year.”
“Are you very rich?” she asked, smiling and kissing my nose.
“What do you think?”
“I think … not very. You’re far too nice.”
“Right again,” I laughed, stroking her back (oh, the sheer loveliness of it).
“But I have some rich friends, so sometimes I get invitations.”
“I don’t suppose you’d take me. I don’t guess they like girl poets out there in fashionable Homeland.”
“They don’t know any,” I said. “Rich people don’t read books you know. Well, some of the women do when they get bored with charity works, but none of the men, ever. They play golf and tennis and drink.”
“Well, that sounds boring, so the hell with them,” she said. “When I get bored I like to read poetry and have sex. I especially like oral sex. Would you care to partake?”
“Anything to please you,” I said, trying to keep the genial light tone going. But my heart was racing and seconds later I saw her perfect head in between my legs and I was in love all over again.
All I have told you came streaming back to me in a wild rush of images, hundreds of them, some painful, some so sweet that I could almost touch and taste them again, but all filtered through a scrim of nostalgia and loss so heavy that tears sprang to my eyes. Which upon reflection now was not exactly the appropriate emotion to have sitting and drinking bourbon under a tree in midafternoon on the campus of the school you attended over twenty years ago. For suddenly and with no warning, there was hovering above me a campus rent-a-cop, a man with a faded blue uniform, a walkie-talkie, a shelflike forehead, a dumb, predatory look in his eyes, a large nightstick, and a small but lethal-looking gun.
“Hey, you,” he said, in an East Baltimore accent (which sounds to a non-Baltimorean remarkably like a mildly retarded cockney). ‘“Es ain’t some refuge for da homeless, ya knaow. ‘Es here is Calvert College. Maybe you oughta go uppa shelter in Towson.”
Hearing this vast ignorance delivered in the classic Baltimore accent, I immediately made another mistake: I laughed. The rent-a-cop squinched up his eyes until they looked like frozen peas and assumed the posture of all irate gendarmes since the first centurion glowered down at the first harmless beggar. That is, he stuck out his belly and rocked his weight back on his hind foot while reaching for his truncheon.
“Something funny, mister?” he said. “Maybe you’d like a little taste o’ dis?”
He took out his sap and smacked it into his huge red palm three times.
“Wonderful,” I said. “I’m here to get a Ph.D., and you’re threatening to cave my skull in.”
“Ph.D.?” he said. “You? Now that’s a laugh. I seen you over here drinking and I have a mind to whack you one uppa side a head and then run you in to ‘ah state boys!!!”
I don’t know what possessed me … no, that’s a lie. I know precisely what possessed me. All these thoughts of Jeremy and our wild, lawless, dope-filled days. That and the voices of the blacks and the Puerto Ricans and the El Salvadoreans I’d interviewed for The Black Watch as they told me one tale after another of the police running riots in their neighborhoods, beating and shooting and stun-gunning their sons.
“You know,” I said. “You’re real fat and real dumb.” His eyes opened wide as he raised the truncheon.
“Good,” I said, “let’s do it. You hit me a few times and then haul my ass in. We can have the Ph.D. conferred from jail. I’d like that. Calvert College would like that.”
That stopped him, and he looked at me sideways.
“You’re not kidding?” he said. “They’re giving you a Ph.D.?”
I said nothing more but got up and brushed the leaves from my clothes.
He looked like he dearly wanted to swing his club, but then begrudgingly, he put the nightstick back in his belt loop.
“Damn,” he said. “Damn world’s falling apart atta seams. Get outta here now, mister, before I loose my temper!!”
I glowered back at him, dusted my pants off, and started walking toward where I hoped my car was. This was the world of our cities now, even here on this green little campus in Baltimore. No, more and more it seemed that the old prognostications of the Left and the hippies of the 1960s were coming true. We lived, just as people like Eddie and the Babe had foretold, in a world that was fast becoming a police state, cops bashed in the heads of the poor anytime they liked and the middle class turned their collective heads away. What did they care as long as they had their VCRs, as long as they didn’t have to step over the filthy, stench-filled bodies of the homeless as they lay on the city streets, as long as they didn’t have to be bothered by embarrassing, slobbering beggars who might rob their precious sailboats down at Harbourplace? No, I had seen it again and again, even heard it from the lips of my own father on my last visit—the middle class was “tired of the poor”—it had been fashionable to care about them for a few years, but the filthy raving hallucinating bastards simply wouldn’t go away, so now if you had to have a few police to round them up and ship them off (Where? Anywhere! Just get them the fuck out of our sight!), then so be it. And if the poor and the homeless and the mad happened to resent or even, God help them, resist being treated like cattle, then what was there to do but have the cops kick the bloody shit out of them, pummel the filthy bastards into submission but, at all costs, get the sons of bitches out of our sight! That was what really mattered in the end.
I staggered across the campus and suddenly felt panicky again. Oh, God, it was beautiful here, just as it had been when I first walked these hills in the mid-sixties, and I thought for a second that I had been wrong, wrong all along to ever leave Maryland for the concrete towers of New York, though I knew with my rational mind that this was all sentimental bullshit. I couldn’t have stayed. How could I have ever stayed? And yet …
Oh, that way was no good at all. I had to get out of this spiral, like some cornball noir movie where the tough but sentimental detective falls down a spiral web into the terrifying gossamer past.
Finally, I found my car, got in, and just sat there in a daze. I had lived in the world of the past so intensely that I could barely return to the present. I stared at the students walking across the parking lot, short haired, earnest students trudging to class. I watched them, and I told myself not to give in to despair. No matter how melancholy I became, I refused to subscribe to the idea so fashionable among many of my sophisticated friends that each successive generation was de-evolving, moving backward toward some Paleolithic dawn, where the only winner had the cleanest nuclear clubs. That was stupid, self-serving. We were as selfish, as arrogant, as wasteful, and as just plain crazy as any generation that ever lived. Yet, there did seem to me to be something missing in the kids now, some wild spark, some sense of possibility. They seemed afraid (even more afraid than myself), almost eager to let others make their decisions for them.
In that, they were very different from us. We believed we could remake the world.
Yes, in the beginning down at Chateau Avenue, there was a hunger for the full bore American dream, with all its idealism and all its perversity all wrapped into one great bleeding flag with stars and stripes and, yes—I admit it—dollar signs, but not only dollar signs, even Jeremy who wanted money as much as any yuppie ever born was torn. Oh, yes, it was obvious from that first day. He wanted power, he wanted money but not badly enough to buy the clean shirt that would make the proper impression on his customers. And there was, I found soon afterward, another side to him entirely, a side that endeared him to me and to all those who knew and loved him.
I drove down the York Road and looked at the maple trees in full bloom on the side of the road. I had hours to kill, and I wanted to get over to see my father at his apartment, but there was time for that. No, though I knew it would take a good piece out of me, I wanted to see Chateau Avenue again. So I drove through Stoneleigh and saw the old sub shop where we used to stop when we were stoned and eat giant fried oyster subs, Harry Little’s. I laughed and thought, Yeah, Tom, you are really middle-aged now, because when you remember a giant grease-filled sandwich with such overwhelming nostalgia, there’s no hope for you at all. I kept driving down past what used to be Stewart’s Department Store, the oldest and best in town. Now it was gone and in its place was a giant cheap-look
ing Caldron, the kind of store that sold inferior primary-color clothes and tenth-rate power tools and was built for future riots with absolutely no windows. I kept driving past Belvedere and York Road where the Yorkshire Restaurant used to stand, the place where my mother and father and I went to eat perfect imperial crab on humid Baltimore Sundays, but it, too, was gone. Instead, there was a chain pizza place, with a grotesque corporate cartoon, an Italian Gepetto hanging out over the street, his huge cartoon mouth wide open so that he could stuff in another piece of their tasteless trash. A half a block down the street, the old Senator Movie Theatre was still hanging on, but Frank Leonard’s, where I’d bought my first decent dress shirt, was gone and I drove on, with my hands squeezing the steering wheel, feeling my spirits sag again.
This was what I had feared about coming home, falling down the great memory hole, drowning myself in the vanished world. Why put myself through all this again? Why not just shut it all down? Move on, go to some motel, take one of the forgiving downers in my suitcase, and turn on an afternoon movie. Soon I would be blissed out, not really in Baltimore at all anymore, but floating in the pleasant vacuum of dope and television, buzzing through a soft chemical cloud.
It was tempting, but I knew the price one paid for those loose, easy escapes. No, I had to ride the Memory Train all the way down into the burned-out places that lay in waiting, the deserted train stations of the heart.
