by Hob Broun
Our newsroom, a large oblong space where bottling operations had taken place in the days of the old milk factory, was irrevocably, if invisibly, divided between the “radio side” and the “TV side.” These phrases were often spoken bluntly, challengingly, in the manner of a Maverick saloon rat, lacking only the casually accurate jet of tobacco juice. If the resentment of the radio tribe—purveying their drab and archaic product to cabbies, potato farmers, and the bedridden—was intense, so likewise was the scorn in which they were held by the glamour boys and girls on the other side of the line.
I straggled sure enough, barely avoiding classification as a deserter.
“If you’re just here to take up space…” warned my supervisor.
Where were my ambitions? My dreams of network glory? Right where they belonged, in the Dumpster with yesterday’s firsthand combat accounts.
“This is no stand-pat type of game,” my supervisor declared, fingering the ivory polar bear at the far edge of his desk.
I said: “Milk but no sugar, right?”
Straggling home from work that night, I came up against Sabra, my moll of high school, in a crowded subway car. She was slender as an asparagus and ripe with patchouli oil. Her eyes glistened. We swayed coyly under an advertisement for breath mints.
“You’re looking great,” I said.
“Your job really sounds exciting,” she returned.
We got off at the next station and found a nearly empty bar. Sabra ordered Kahlúa and milk and I broke the seal on a third pack of cigarettes.
“So I just found a place near Morningside Heights,” erasing milky residue from her lips with curled tongue, “and I’m sleeping in one corner, with paint rags and spackle cans all around.”
I blew across the rim of my beer glass. “Noxious fumes. You should protect your singing voice.”
Behind the words shinily coated with an oozing caution, we reviewed our past, the missteps and misgivings of frightened romance.
“Oh, that’s a lost cause more or less. I’d like to get into personal management now.”
The unfinished business between us would be completed that night, we were confident of that. And as we concurrently imagined each ideal and tender phase, an occult mental fusion—confirmed by what we could see of ourselves in the other’s eyes—flamed inside the forlorn brownness of the nearly empty bar. Sabra’s olive face lightened, expanded, and the Formica seemed to heat and move under my hands. Dazing cranial pressure slowly released and our breathing stopped. I squeezed shut my eyes, wanting to prolong this astonishing conjunction, but it was finished the very moment I did.
Sabra had curtained herself behind a tumble of black hair. My knees shimmied as I crossed to the bar to reorder. Someone dropped a quarter in the jukebox and the garish tones of Sergio Franchi invaded the brown room.
What do you say afterwards? Desperate to fill the emptily echoing air, you may blare out the first and worst thing that comes to your mind. I asked Sabra about her sister.
“Rachel lives in France now. She’s the organist at the cathedral in Arles.”
During the summer between my junior and senior years, Rachel, both tireless and regally calm, had shown me how it was done. By late August ten pounds had drained from me and been soaked up by her designer sheets. Sabra, feigning disinterest, had spent the summer snorting heroin and learning her Sarah Vaughan records by rote.
Now here was a wedge of history to be reckoned with, a site we could spend all night picking through with trowels and sieves and little archaeological brushes. This was history of a kind not so easily disposed of, a deeper stratum. But the reflexes of the newsroom made me incapable of shame.
“A Jewish girl playing liturgical music for the froggies,” I said. “Do you have her address?”
“It’d make quite a feature piece for the weekend news,” the little sister said hopelessly, jotting on a napkin.
We emptied our glasses and went home, she to her noxious fumes and I to a spiral notebook in which I made a few lugubrious attempts at letter writing before shredding Rachel’s address.
It is said that when sparrows in the city of Peking became an infestation, citizens gathered by the thousands in the central square to shout and sing and scream, keeping the terrified birds in the air for many hours until they fell to the pavement twitching with exhaustion and died, also by the thousands.
But we are all individuals here, each in our own precious compartment, walls smoothly spackled and painted sea foam or egg yolk or terra cotta, but rest assured, a color of our own choosing. Multiplicity, diversity—privileges for which to kneel in gratitude and launch red glaring rockets. Inalienable conflict, indivisible confusion. And in our little compartments we hoard like survival rations our opinions freely arrived at (here, here!), our memories of perfidy and injustice, our strategies for advancement and revenge. One nation, underdog. One rugged individual after another pleading for attention. Looka me, ma! Looka me!
And, when it all becomes too much, you may embark—no questions asked—for a tropical isle where unique coral formations may be seen, or for France, where a cathedral organ awaits your special hands.
Back at my desk assistant’s desk next day, I methodically filled the ashtray and beheld the urgent diversities that unrolled from my machines. The governor of Wisconsin revealed that a serious fiscal shortfall was due to his compulsive golf betting, elections in Paraguay were once more postponed, a former middleweight champion appealed for the return of school prayer, black nationalists continued to occupy the lobby of the Dunes Hotel, rivers in the Southwest crested dangerously with more rain expected, preparations were under way for the state visit of Golda Meir, a diabetic Omaha baker was arrested for rape and dismemberment, and angry Sikhs in the state of Punjab had flung a dozen pigs’ heads into the courtyard of a mosque.
Noticing my supervisor glaring out of his glassed-in office, I waved energetically, increasing the amount of space I was taking up. Too much, indeed. I considered phoning Arles on the WATS line, but no, what could not be cured had to be endured.
Then Gosden was pressing against the back of my chair. Gosden, hanging on to five weekly minutes of nostalgic pipe slobber on the “radio side,” who, after liquid lunches, would corner mailroom boys and replay his exploits in the European theater (“Murrow, Mountbatten…I knew them all”), who had no worries about information control and the public trust, had come to wheedle stamps.
“Help yourself,” I said.
“Good show, good show.”
And plunging toward the open drawer, Gosden somehow tangled with the casters of my chair, causing it to slide backward and me to pitch forward, striking my nose on the console telephone. Pain webbed over my face. Blood poured from my nostrils.
Gosden, trapped in a historical site of his own, must have thought we were under attack. “Down, you fool. Get down,” he yelled, bellyflopping to the floor. “We’ve got too many reasons to live.”
“And God bless us,” I said, straggling off to the bathroom. “Every one.”
33
IT WAS, UNAVOIDABLY, A season of vehemence, the already turbid New York air dense with convolutions. To argue became obligatory, the refusal to do so an opinion in itself. Private problems were absorbed into public furor, small shoots amid the infinite jungle of Plot. Meals were hurried and phone calls protracted. A Senate Select Committee was investigating the Watergate affair.
I had quit CBS, was getting along on family handouts taken without apology or gratitude. I spent my time indoors mapping previously unknown tracts of insensibility. Out there, I knew, people were continually affronted, were exhausted by their outrage and in terror of being at a loss. How childish. How unnecessary.
I was systematically testing every recipe in a bartender’s guide issued by the old Hotel Luxor and on the initial morning of Maurice Stans’s testimony mixed a pitcher of Sazeracs.
“In Republica Dominicana this would never happen,” commented Nito, who had the apartment next to mine. “The
re a leader is permitted to lead.”
Nito worked part-time as an animal-control officer, sometimes sat in on timbales with a conjunto that played dance halls in the Bronx. He was very seldom surprised by anything. I could appreciate the wisdom of accepting corruption as part of the natural order, but that was off the point.
My position: “It’s not about politics.” I pointed to the set, where Stans, a member of the CPA Hall of Fame, read his prepared statement in a grain belt monotone. “This is a passion play. A rite.”
“High mass?” Nito made the sign of the cross. “I would rather watch the Ursula Andress movie.”
“Stay tuned. Study our national culture.”
“But where are the breasts?”
I took pride in those days in my total lack of purpose. It seemed to me a mark of real clarity, of harmony with the future. But in this role of disaffection, I’m afraid, there was too much ham. Even Carla, summering with friends on a farm in Pennsylvania, was sending me checks.
Bad Boy—
Am having dire word of you and your life in the slums. Mom and her inflations, you know. But here anyway a small contribution toward socket wrenches, or whatever you might need. Very muggy here, sleep difficult. The cukes, tomatoes, etc., seem to thrive on it, though. Raccoons come out of the woods at night and beg at the porch for scraps. Did you know they’re related to the panda? Neither did I.
Love and birdwatching,
C
For sure, the heat was on. Gordo suggested I enroll in electronics school. Casually, Alexander Butterfield betrayed the existence of a White House taping system. I slept with all the windows open and listened to sirens. I cracked ice trays into the bathtub and sat there reading about intrigue in the Ottoman Empire.
The Constitution in jeopardy. Our republic foundering. But I found no alarm in my surrounding streets. Nothing new at Katz Laundry, or at Three Bros. Coffee Shop, radio tuned to the Mets game. Elders outside the grocery sipped beer and slapped their dominoes, and of Nixon only amusement—“The fuckin’ guy.” Still, the indignant shock was out there, in some other part of town, or in green counties to the north, beside ponds and croquet courts, where values hard arrived at seemed to warp. Such blather. Such density of ego.
By the time John Dean began the careful relinquishing of his confidences, I had reached Chapter 7 in my bartender’s guide: Punches & Coolers. My cache of lemons attracted canny urban flies and scented the days with a pleasant bitterness. “A cancer in the White House.” The analogy anyone could understand. Clever Dean, nothing left to chance. Writers of enterprise flew off to interview his teachers and tennis buddies.
I filled a two-gallon pot with something called Rum Cockade and invited the Roysters. Chip and Dale had the apartment above mine. They were emigrants from northern Ohio, exponents of social change. Their walls were hung with serapes, the floor littered with cat toys. Their flattened vowels and cumbersome honesty charmed me, though I knew they were in for it. The city, having lured them, would no doubt show no mercy.
Dale assessed the President. “It’s like he wanted to get caught,” she said, swinging her braids. “Like when you’re a kid and do things just to test your mother. To see if she’s paying attention.”
Chip snorted and touched his bald spot. “Special attention for Dickie. He’s so misunderstood.”
Dale worked in a daycare center.
“Mr. Above-it-all,” she said, and drained her third cup. “You should be in a seminary.”
It struck me that this was one of those relationships based on the fact of its never working. Yet how tenderly Chip would comfort his wife a few hours later, cradling her as she retched over the sink.
I ladled out more punch. “Think we’ll ever get to hear those tapes?” What a host.
“Which tapes?” Chip said. “I mean, how do you ever know or not if what you’re listening to is fake?”
“He wants punishment,” Dale insisted. Hugging her knees, mouth hidden behind the tin cup, she was beginning to suggest an ad layout for CARE. “He wants to be stripped naked and flogged.”
“Yes, a ceremony.” I toasted her. “You’ve got a grip on it now.”
“What this country needs,” Chip said grandly, “is less humiliation and more humility.”
Chip had been with the Peace Corps in Guyana.
I slept heavily that night and dreamed I was a bagman for the Mormon Church. Gordon Liddy took me to lunch. The prime rib was rare. We talked about theocracy and gauchos and how to kill someone with a sharpened pencil. Waking in late afternoon, I told myself: Stop fighting the odds and you’ll make a fine apologist.
A few days later I met Dale in front of Katz Laundry. Her little face was pinched and she kept looking over her shoulder. Chip, she confided, was unwell. His vision blurred; he had ringing in his ears. Just that morning, short of breath and twitching uncontrollably, he had been admitted to Roosevelt Hospital for evaluation.
“We wanted to come here so bad. We said, ‘It’s the nerve center.’”
Now Dale pined for the simplicities of Dayton, molded-salad luncheons and covered-dish suppers. Chip was afraid of having to work the line like his father, but could it be worse than this?
Shortly after Judge Sirica ordered release of the tapes, Nito was stabbed in the arm by a junior high kid who wanted his radio. By the time impeachment proceedings were under way, I had moved back to Lake Success, regained my job with the network, and become a commuter. The democratic system, it was widely announced, was proving its special merit. I was relatively sober, flirting with accommodation. And, unbeknownst to anyone, my mother was preparing to leave the world behind.
34
HAVE I MENTIONED TO you the stretch I pulled in San Francisco? Of course, yes, the story of the shoes with the holes cut in them. So. There I was in the city that has always wanted to be somewhere else. The place and the people in it were arch and overindulged and wanted their sophistication to be appreciated. The locale, in short, was all too fitting.
I had a cheap apartment with a view of the Oakland shipyards. Above an Italian restaurant, it was furnished like something out of a thirties detective novel and redolent of singed garlic. My landlady left small packets of anisette cookies in front of my door.
I had a job that brought me into contact with the sort of underworld I needed as an antidote to Lake Success. If I was going to shake loose of that depleting heritage, Le Sex Shoppe was ideal territory. It was undemanding work besides and afforded me nearly limitless reading time—B. Traven and Vargas Llosa were my fascinations at the time. I had barely to glance up from The Green House in order to make change for the peep booths.
I had an Olds 88 that enabled me to learn the city like an anatomy chart. I knew a spot in the Mission where tamarind or hibiscus popsicles could be had, and out the avenues toward the sea, a Korean grocery with the cheapest carton of cigarettes that side of the Bay and homemade kimchi that made your eyes water. In a light industrial zone south of Market, I found a record store called Tommy’s Soul Shack where I could get a bet down on anything from the sixth race exacta at Longacres to the bottom of a fight card in Stockton. In the apartment directly overhead lived a conceptual artist named Irv who made masks out of hair scrounged from beauty salon Dumpsters. Irv was a lapsed Jew from Baltimore, a fellow fugitive. He supplied me with high-grade black hashish at very reasonable rates.
The fabled city at my fingertips? The life of Riley? Well, not altogether. Ambivalence comes with every territory.
I was having an affair with an Armenian art student who wept while she fucked. “What is it? What is it?” I’d say, but Andrea would only pull her dark hair over her dark face and shudder. The tendons in her neck would stand out wire-tight. I’d stroke them, matching her silence for silence. Her mysteries filled me with loathing as often as with tenderness, but I couldn’t say goodbye. Andrea was short, round, not particularly beautiful. Still, I was enormously aroused by her almost complete lack of humor, by the warm morning smell that stayed
all day with her and which no perfume could fully mask. Also, I suppose, I was unduly fascinated by my own reactions to the first woman I had known for whom there seemed to be so much at stake.
Evidently, Andrea was very much in love with me, although I had given her no good reason to be so. It unnerved me. Anyway, she was so bloody earnest about it, blew the notes so hard. Combined with some mutant species of Old World submissiveness, this studious approach of Andrea’s sometimes tempted me to strangle her.
We had known each other but a few days when she came to see where I worked. The presence of a living woman made the customers fractious and a few regulars grumbled across the street to the bar to sit in the dark. With the same sharp attention she would bring to a gallery full of Mirós or Rosenquists, Andrea looked over the merchandise. After a few minutes she carried an open magazine to the counter.
“Would you like for me to do this?” she asked quietly.
The photograph showed a woman cleaving herself with a black rubber dildo. I began to wish I were in the bar.
“You only have to ask.” Her eyes were shiny brown lakes.
The woman in the photograph grimaced; Andrea was expressionless. Her somber zeal bored into my skull like a steel screw.
“I’d ask you out for shots at the Forest Club,” I said, barely able to control myself.
But we had our harmonic periods as well. One of Andrea’s uncles was a grocery broker with a warehouse at China Basin. We’d head over there on a Saturday and load up with garbanzo beans, macaroni, olives, pomegranates, and marinated artichoke hearts. Then we’d go back to her one-room flat and eat like starved nomads while listening to the Giants game on the radio. Then we would ascend.
A previous tenant had cut a hatchway to the roof and installed a ladder. He wasn’t much as a carpenter and when it rained—which in San Francisco could be any minute now—the hatch was a difficulty. But Andrea had a tarpaulin she’d fasten over the top and a spaghetti pot to catch whatever leaked through to the bottom.
