About Harry Towns

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  They had some more of the great wine and she said, “Just talking to you I feel I'm making love to you.”

  “I don't feel that way,” he said.

  “Then why don't you grab me by the neck and take me back to your room?”

  “I don't do that,” he said.

  She went back with him anyway; the thing he noticed was that he was incapable of making any wrong moves with this woman. If he had gone into a furious bout of nose-picking, she would have found something charming about it. Harry Towns's comparisons generally fell into the sports division. So he saw it as one of those days when every junk shot you threw up automatically put two points on the board.

  “Have you noticed,” she said, during the period given over to analysis, “that in our lovemaking I've been concerned primarily with pleasing you and not the slightest in pleasing myself?”

  “I wondered about that,” he said. After she left, he checked to make sure she hadn't left any more bracelets around.

  He was happy she was gone, but as soon as he was alone in the room, he decided it was not going to go well if he hung around any longer; he might as well leave Los Angeles as soon as possible, more or less on a high note. He boosted his spirits by telling himself that California was fine, but you got flabby there. Inside and outside. New York was mean, cruel, nerve-wracking—but it was only in such an atmosphere that you stayed prepared to do battle. He believed that, incidentally. And he had not yet reached the stage in life where he was ready to “take it easy.” He might never.

  Early the next morning, he bought a small TV set from a tiny Japanese man who said it was a new model and he was very proud of it. Towns couldn't get over how sharp and clear the picture was. He was not mechanically inclined—and didn't particularly want to be. Probably for that reason he loved tiny, intricately made gadgets; he had a vision of filling up a warm, comfortable apartment with them, living in it, and spending most of his time turning them on and off. You couldn't do that to people, but you could do it to gadgets. And they didn't go wrong, the way people did. If a gadget malfunctioned, you threw it away and got another one. He was probably feeling a little let down about people at the moment. Ironically, a sudden burst of love came over him for the tiny Japanese man who was practically a transistor himself. He wanted to bend over and give him a hug. Why couldn't he just do that? The fellow was so tiny that Towns had to wonder what would happen if the man caught a disease that made him lose weight. He would probably just get a little smaller and become healthy again. The fellow fixed up the TV package with a tricky little tissue-paper handle so that Towns wouldn't chafe his hands carrying it. He loved the handle almost as much as he did the TV set. The American version of that handle would have involved rows of factory workers and probably would not have been as comfortable to the hand. Admittedly, it would have lasted longer. In any case, he promised himself that he would go to Japan some day, although he was convinced he would be guilty of hair-raising breaches of etiquette the instant he set foot in the country.

  He didn't want to hang around any longer. As soon as he got back to his hotel, he changed his plane reservation so that he would be back in New York in plenty of time to watch the moon landing on the delicious little new TV set. Then he had a last lunch in Los Angeles in a marvelously crumbled outdoor restaurant, ordering a final bottle of the great wine. It never occurred to him that he could get the same wine in New York. It wouldn't taste the same anyway. Though he had no authorities to back him up, he was convinced that California wines didn't travel well. The driver who took him to the airport said Towns looked like he was in the film business and asked if Towns could get him a copy of a film script, any script at all, so that he could study the form and then try one of his own. Towns couldn't see why they were so hard to get—surely libraries and bookstores carried tons of them—but the fellow said you would be surprised how tough it was to get one. He seemed desperate, so Towns took his address and said when he got to New York he would certainly try to rustle one up. It was the kind of assignment he would take a long time getting around to, although it would always be slightly on his mind. Maybe he would follow through and maybe he wouldn't. He had dozens of those.

  His idea was to take the little TV set back to his apartment in New York City and watch the moon landing there. The timing was set up just right. All that had to happen was for the plane to land on schedule and not get involved in any traffic tie-ups over JFK. One of the stewardesses sat next to Towns in the lounge and told him she had been closed up for a long time, all through her childhood, but that she had opened up the previous fall. If Towns had been going to Los Angeles and not coming back from it, he probably would have asked if she was open or closed at the moment, but as it was, he let it slide. He didn't like to start in when he was on his way to New York. As it happened, the plane landed on time, but the porter who picked up his luggage slammed the TV box onto his luggage carrier and then heaved a massive suitcase on top of it; Towns was sure he had done some critical damage to the set. “Don't you know there's a goddamn little TV set in there,” he said to the porter. In some strange way, he took it all as a direct attack on the tiny polite Japanese man. “I didn't know that,” said the porter. “Anyway, there's no way to guarantee smooth passage.”

  He had the feeling that no little TV set could survive a shot like that so he took it out of the box, attached the battery pack and switched it on at the terminal. Some sputtering pictures showed up. “See that,” said the porter, “she coming in good.” It came as no great surprise to Towns when the pictures bleeped out and turned to darkness. There was a package of warranties in the box, but Towns had no heart to get involved with them. Besides, he had the feeling that once a mechanical gadget was injured, it went downhill no matter what you did to it. He gave the porter a look and then tossed the set lightly into a trash container. That style—casually throwing away something of value—was a bit of a carry-over from Los Angeles. Someone in the terminal said the astronauts were going to be down in forty-five minutes. There wasn't any time to fool around now. Towns kept a key to his wife's house on the outskirts of the city and told a cabbie to take him there. She had not asked to have the key back, and he hadn't handed it over to her either. The cabbie was certain Towns was going to get in the cab and then say he really wanted to go to Brooklyn. All through the ride he kept looking around suspiciously at Towns, expecting to be told to swerve off the highway and head back to the hated faraway borough. When they were well out in the suburbs, the cabbie relaxed and said he couldn't believe his luck, getting a call to go to the country and not Brooklyn. As they neared the house, Towns became a little apprehensive even though he knew his wife was in Yugoslavia and his son was off to camp. Maybe he would find something he didn't like in there, a boyfriend, for example, sleeping in his old bed.

  The house was a little damp, but otherwise it was eerily the way he had left it, with no signs of orgiastic frenzy. A next door neighbor's house was occupied and Towns wondered if his kid was being teased for not having a dad around. If his own father had ever stepped out of the picture—to the extent that Towns had—he was sure he would not have been able to handle it. No father around! He would have run his head into something. Taken himself out that way. So how could his own kid possibly handle it? Maybe he was a stronger kid than Towns had been. Or was he running his head into the wall in some way Towns didn't know about? Then again, Harry Towns tried to stay in there—nice and tight—even when he was traveling—at least as far as the boy was concerned. So that had to make a difference. These notions never once occurred to him in Los Angeles.

  He stayed in the kitchen awhile, eating a slice of Swiss cheese that seemed to be in remarkably good shape. The kitchen was the most beautiful room in the house, jammed with extraordinary knickknacks that had been accumulated over the years of the marriage. He felt a little sorry for himself, spending all that time and money helping to accumulate knickknacks and then never again getting to enjoy them. He had often said that possessions didn'
t mean a thing; all that counted were friendships and how you felt, but he sure did love knickknacks and wondered if he shouldn't have taken a few along. He had scooped up some of his slacks and jackets and a handful of terrific books, but not one knickknack. And it didn't seem fair to swipe a few with his wife away. He went upstairs then, still with a shade of expectation that he would find a guy up there, sleeping in his old bed and waiting for his old wife to get back from Dubrovnik. What if his wife took up with a fellow who was a strict disciplinarian and went around disciplining his kid? Towns would have to come back and slam the guy around a little. He might have to kill him.

  He decided to watch the landing in his son's room. That way, when he went up to visit the boy, he would be able to give him a report on how his room was getting along. The boy had a TV set propped up next to his bed and Towns remembered bawling out the kid when he saw him smack the set a few times to get it into focus. It turned out that the boy was right and the only way to get it to work properly was to smack it around a few times. The boy's room was filled with drawings that featured cartoon apes leaping from the tops of skyscrapers. The boy had some talent as an artist and Towns figured the leaping apes just represented a period he was going through, although he had to admit he had certainly been in that period for a long time. He wasn't too worried about it. All men who had amounted to anything had probably done things that seemed a little weird at the time. He checked around the room, getting the feel of the kid again and remembering some of the time he had spent in there, helping him fix it up. Then he sat down on the boy's bed and spotted the empty animal cage. The previous year, with the boy away at camp, he had gotten a call from the camp director saying the boy missed his pet mouse and maybe Towns ought to bring it up to camp on visiting day. As far as the director was concerned it would put the summer over the top for the kid. Towns was feeling low about the marriage, which was splitting up at the time, and would have brought up an elephant if he had been asked. So he set out in his car and drove to Vermont with the white mouse in the back, throwing him a carrot whenever the animal got a little restless. That night he stopped off in New Hampshire at a motel, with the idea that he would head for camp early the next morning. The motel had a sign that said no pets. He registered anyway, and slipped the animal cage into the room when the owner wasn't looking. He had dinner at a local cabaret that featured a Middle-Eastern dancer who let you put your hand in her panties if you stuck dollars in there, too. Towns didn't see himself going that way, but when his turn came he shoved in two singles. When he got back to the motel, he caught the owner in his car headlights, standing with his legs spread apart and pointing to the grass. When Towns got out of the car, the owner said, “I told you no pets.” The animal was lying on its back in the grass, cold and frozen, a sightless eye fixed at the moon. Towns marked the motel owner's face for life with a heavy ring he wore on his finger and for all he knew he had purchased for just such an occasion. He had to use lawyers, but he got away with it. He thought about it for months afterward and still did; he felt that if he had another go-round at the same situation, he would handle it exactly the same way, not varying one beat. At camp, he told the boy the animal had caught cold and died peacefully and painlessly in an animal hospital. He said he would get the boy any pet in the world, but the boy said he didn't want any more and kept the empty cage in his room with the door open.

  Towns wondered if the astronauts went through things like that, whether they had ugly split-ups with wives who subsequently ran off to Dubrovnik, boys who drew pictures of apes leaping from buildings, if they ever wound up scarring men in far-off roadside motels at midnight. His first impulse was to feel no, they didn't. They were too sober and well-rooted for that kind of nonsense. Weren't they from “the other America,” as it was so commonly felt in those circles that were contemptuous of chilled forks and Brazilia Festival salads? Where were the Puerto Rican astronauts? Where were the black ones? He couldn't recall seeing any spacemen of the Hebraic persuasion running around either. But then again, Towns remembered pictures of the pinched and weary faces of some of the astronauts' wives and it became his guess that all wasn't as tidy as it came off in the national magazines. He knew what those long separations for work did to marriages. There was probably no beating the system even if you were a non-ethnic space pioneer and your wife was an astronautical winner. He decided they were men, too, some good, some not so hot. They had experienced failure, ate too much marinara sauce on occasion, vomited appropriately, lusted after models, worried about being a fag, about having cancer, even had an over-quick ejaculation or two. These thoughts comforted Harry Towns somewhat as he sat down on his boy's bed, gave the TV set a few shots to get it started, and prepared to watch the fulfillment of man's most ancient dream.

  When the plane stopped, the man and the boy got off and were holding each other around the waist, as though one or perhaps both of them had just recovered from diseases that made it hard to take deep breaths. Back home, the boy would not have been caught dead holding his dad in that manner, but this was out West where none of his friends could see him, and it seemed all right to do so. The man was Harry Towns at a sad time in his life; he had been living apart from his family for awhile, making up all kinds of stories for the boy as to why he had to do so. Except that now it looked as though a divorce might be in the picture and he had told this to his young son, straight out. So the boy kept giving him looks every few minutes and saying, “You all right, Dad?” as though the impending divorce might suddenly show up in his face as a rash. Towns would say, “Sure, how about you?” The boy would answer, “Fine.” They kept reassuring themselves in that way but holding onto each other all the same. Towns did not really know the boy very well. He had taken him for granted, as he might have a fine, reliable watch that would inevitably be right there on his wrist whenever he wanted it. Now that it looked as though the family would break up officially, he had moved forward in a clumsy rush to spend more time with the boy, some of it play-acting, some of it an honest attempt to savor the child and store up moments with him as though building a secret bank account. He had asked the boy where he would like to go for a trip and the boy had picked Las Vegas, aware of the gambling, but probably mixing it up a little with Los Angeles although he would never admit this to his father. Towns could have straightened him out on this, but he didn't, figuring he could sneak in a little gambling himself, and at the same time, see to it that the boy had a terrific time. There were some slot machines in the terminal, but a sign said you couldn't play them unless you were twenty-one or over. The boy was disappointed and wondered whether he could slip a few coins in anyway when no one was looking. His father said all right, that he would act as a lookout, but after the boy had played three quarters, Towns got nervous about it and stopped him. “I think they mean it,” he said. “I think they can lose their license.”

  “That's too bad,” said the boy. “Because I know those are lucky ones. I can tell those are the best in Las Vegas.”

  “It's too risky,” said Towns. “Right at the airport. Maybe when we get deeper in.”

  The reservation story had been dismal, but a friend of Towns had gotten them fixed up in a small, little-known hotel on the edge of town, saying that a famous band-leader always stayed there when the Sands was overbooked. It was called The Regent; they took a cab to it and found it to be a noisy, rugged little place, one with a half-dozen slots and two blackjack tables in the lobby. An Indian with coveralls and a great perspired shine on his face was the only blackjack player. “That fellow's an Indian,” Towns whispered to the boy as they approached the desk. “So what,” said the boy. He was always quick to spot it whenever Towns passed on formally educational little bits.

  The room was quite small and Towns was embarrassed about the size of it, feeling that he had let the boy down. But the boy said he loved it; he got into his pajamas and leapt into bed with miracle speed. “It's my favorite hotel in the world,” he said.

  ‘We're going to have a gre
at time,” said Towns, tucking in the boy and clearing back his hair so that he could kiss his forehead. “I'll kill myself to see to it.”

  “You don't have to kill yourself,” said the boy.

  Towns turned out the lights and then went into the bathroom to treat his crabs. He had gotten a case of them a week before he had left for Las Vegas and felt terribly degraded about it, mostly because his new girlfriend was from Bryn Mawr and there was a chance he had passed them along to her just before he had left. There was also a distant possibility he had gotten them from her, but he didn't want to think about that. The thing he hated most was the name: crabs. The medicine bottle referred to them as body lice and that was a little better but still didn't do the trick. The doctor said that if he shampooed his body, they would go away in nine out of ten cases, but he couldn't imagine that happening. “Once you have them on the run,” an adventurous friend had told Harry Towns, “they can be amusing.” Maybe that was true if you were bogged down in trench warfare at the Marne, but to Harry Towns they didn't have a single delightful aspect. He just wanted to see them on their way. He soaped himself up with the medicine, stood around for ten minutes, in accordance with the directions, and then hopped into the shower and soaped himself some more. He got the feeling somehow that he was spreading them to other parts of his body, the hair on top of his head, for example. When he got out of the shower, the boy, hollering through the door, asked him why he was taking so long. “I'm just relaxing in here,” he said.