A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  My favorite smoker was Chuck, a gangly, pimply, popular guy with the gift of gab and the ambition to be a writer like Hemingway. Chuck was rumored to have the biggest dick on campus, but I never got to check it out. He was from a rich family and after listening to his stories of life at home I pieced together a glamorous feature film of two-seater planes, a sheep ranch in Montana, a fishing camp in Canada, a private island off Georgia – though Chuck didn’t give a damn about possessions, all he wanted to do was stuff two fat black whores into his rattletrap Chevy and head south with them and a case of beer and of painful but not quite incapacitating clap and holler curse words at Arkansas cops and pass out from tequila, fatigue and sunburn at a two-bit rodeo in some dusty Texas town before he revived long enough to slip over the border into Tijuana, where he’d find those magic mushrooms or whatever the hell they were and that fabled gal in a straw basket hung on ropes from the ceiling, just her cunt exposed as she’s lowered on to your stiff prong as you lie back and let the big-eyed nine-year-old girl assistant slowly, solemnly spin the basket and fan the flies off your face.

  Chuck forged an invitation from his mother to me, something I could show the school authorities, and he drove me for the weekend to his family’s deserted beach house. His parents were off in Florida. Everything here was gray and thawing, the sky and the lake anagrams for each other, iceberg of cloud above a cumulus of ice. We played a record of Big Bill Broonzy over and over again as we lounged about and looked out the plate-glass windows at a surrealists’ world in which whatever had been hard seemed to be going soft. We drank beer after beer (Chuck pried the caps off with his teeth), we fell asleep in our clothes on adjoining couches, we were continuously hung over, we set out giant steaks to thaw, we awoke at dawn or dusk, who knew which in that long weekend of freedom, melting ice and nausea.

  Although I certainly wasn’t a straight-A student I’d at least always been conscientious in school. In one sense my doggedness was a way of hedging my bets, so that no matter how despairing I might be I was implicitly counting on my eventual happiness. Even as I made much of present miseries I was cautiously planning my bourgeois future.

  There was nothing cautious about Chuck. He had his own trust fund from a grandmother who owned a cosmetics firm. He had a loud, maniacal laugh, he was big physically and knew it and half-scared people with his craziness, his drunk sprees, the way he’d twitch or shoot his cuffs or without warning scythe the air between you with a closed fist and shriek like a samurai. He scared the masters because he didn’t want or need their approval and because he’d set himself up as an arbiter of absurdity. If a teacher said something banal or foolish or pompous in class, Chuck would quake with silent laughter until he was weeping and had slid halfway out of his seat on to the floor, a helpless sprawl of laughter. He appeared to be in actual pain and every eye was on him.

  No number of demerits or revoked privileges or low grades intimidated him. He had no particular ambition to go on to college, nor did he doubt his own intelligence which, in the American fashion of that day, had been Tested; he’d been Certified as falling well within the Genius Range and declared that most appealing of creatures, the Underachiever, a status he jealously preserved except in English class, an honors section conducted by a half-blind white-haired amphibian who paddled at the air with one wounded web, who pronounced poetry as “putrid” minus the final d and who was so absentminded he’d once heard the bell for class and stepped off a high library ladder into thin air. This eccentric teacher was also a Genius; every summer he played Falstaff in an outdoor theater and he’d once written a textbook on semantics. For Dr. Schlumberger, Chuck knocked himself out composing a novel about an oil driller in Oklahoma much given to epic drunks and fornications – a novel in which terse dialogue and tersely narrated violence alternated with nature descriptions of a shocking delicacy, silverpoint tracery against a wash of Chinese white. I read and praised Chuck’s book, and that made him like me. And the book made me like him, for though he continued to slouch about and swear and weep with laughter and refused to say an intelligent word, nevertheless I’d had that written glimpse into his temperament, and just as oils can be made fragrant by saturating them in the perfume of flowers, in the same way in my imagination Chuck’s character had been transformed by this literary enfleurage.

  Chuck decided we should visit a whorehouse. He picked up four day students from their houses and we lurched and wheezed in Chuck’s Chevy down through the black section of the city. It was midnight and though this was the weekend the streets were deserted; only here and there a few neon lights outlined the windows of a tavern. The bordello was a dingy wooden house behind a larger one. To get to it we had to squeeze down a narrow strip of sidewalk past a sturdy metal fence behind which a neighbor’s German shepherd kept barking and running back and forth.

  After we rang the bell for several minutes and Chuck pounded the door and sang a love song in warbling falsetto, which elevated the dog into new ecstasies of rage, the door at last was cracked open and a tall Negro man looked out. He had a tight black silk kerchief on his head and a few short white curly whiskers growing out of a shiny mole beside his mouth.

  Inside, two young black women and one woman who was white and middle-aged were sitting in slips in front of a television set. One of the black women had on pink-rimmed glasses and was knitting. The room beyond them, a waiting room lined with crude wooden folding chairs, was deserted and harshly lit. Three pictures leaned forward off the dirty walls, one a reproduction of a painting of Jesus praying in Gethsemane while his disciples dozed unmindful of the approaching Roman guards. The other pictures were of cloth behind glass, each embroidered with a motto: “Peace on Earth” and “Bless This House” – puns, I guess, but who could be certain. The house smelled of cooking fat and pork.

  “Now, you boys sit in here,” the white woman said, indicating the waiting room with a precise push of her hand, as though her hand were a croupier’s rake, “and choose your women.” We filed in under the harsh light. Chuck’s nose looked huge and cratered, his teeth as big as a dog’s. I felt my penis and scrotum contract, inchworm above a buckeye, but I was counting on the whore’s discretion – the guys need never know of my failure.

  “Girls, get your lazy black asses in here so these men can look you over.”

  One of the women, who’d fallen asleep in front of the television, had to be prodded awake. As she waddled past us on tiny, high-heeled slippers, the soles engulfed by her fleshy feet, she rubbed her eyes, protruded her lower lip and made a fretting sound. So massive and quivering were her breasts and hips under the slip that the garment seemed to be the body of a vaudeville horse which at least two people were inhabiting. At the same time her physical grandeur did nothing to diminish the impression she gave of being a little girl, an impression heightened by the sass with which she planted a fist in her hip and asked nastily, “Seen enough?” We nodded. She said defiantly, “Good. I goan back to mah TV shows.”

  The other black woman, the one who’d been knitting, kept her glasses on and the embryonic maroon sweater in her hand as she sleepwalked past, counting stitches, never looking up. Hers was also an ample, indoor body of seraglio proportions but her face seemed older, thinner – in fact, she was a dead ringer for our white dietician at school, if a ringer is a racehorse entered under a false name and posing as another, less successful one. (Horse, dog, inchworm – Nature takes her revenge on stories from which she’s been excluded by smuggling herself into them under the guise of imagery.)

  “Well?” the white woman said.

  “Is that it?” Chuck asked.

  She smiled a not especially pleasant smile and said, “There’s always me,” with an edge to the always to suggest how long she’d been in harness, how weary of the road she’d become.

  “I’ll take you,” Chuck said. His voice didn’t crack, he didn’t soften the blow of his words with a giggle, nor did he drop his eyes. He knew exactly what he wanted.

  “Yeah, me to
o,” each of us said in turn on a descending scale of confidence ending with my whisper.

  “Then come on,” she said, walking away from us and unzipping her dress in a single gesture. She paused at her bedroom door and glanced back. The dress had somehow evaporated into just a wisp of teal-blue smoke in her hand as she tossed it aside. There she stood, door open and behind her a shaded floor lamp dangling fringe; her naked body looked pale as a night moth and as powdery. Her pubic hair had been shaved into a black rectangle. Her legs were ropy. She went in and disappeared from sight. The sound of running water could be heard and a cat’s paw of steam stretched out into the bedroom to bat at a ball of cold air. A cricket chanted in the radiator. (Teal, moth, cat, cricket – the chorus of animals chirps and twitters, ready for its entrance into the enfeebled, cicatrized world.)

  Chuck put his hands on his knees like a retired farmer and levered himself up out of the chair. “I don’t know about you boys, but ol’ Chuck’s not taking no sloppy seconds.”

  I’d never heard before the expression sloppy seconds. Cursed as I was with an overly literal imagination – so that such stock phrases as motherfucker, pussywhipped and shitfaced took on horribly vivid pictorial detail for me – I couldn’t help seeing now a bruised and drooling indentation. For the first time my inchworm twitched, in response not to this damaged cloaca but to the idea of the five penises beside me, each a masquerader behind a domino of buttoned or zipped cloth, all mysterious and of an unknown girth, slant, heft, scent and hardness. I hotly envied the white whore what so obviously left her cold; I would have been content just to watch from her closet.

  Chuck returned to us surprisingly quickly but with a smile on his face and a huge transverse rod (that seemed worthy of its campus-wide reputation) in his trousers pointing up to the right of his belt buckle – one o’clock until it ticked down to two. As the second boy went in, Chuck wandered out into the other room, asked for a beer and got it and sat down to watch TV. He called me in to see something. I found myself sitting on the overstuffed arm of a chair covered with a fabric that felt like unshaved beard and suddenly there was a dimpled black hand on my knee belonging to the huge little girl who’d been dozing but was now contentedly half-awake and sipping a rum and Coke. “Want some?”

  “No,” I said.

  She breathed out a faint snort. “Don’ know why all you fellas go for that ofay bitch.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah, she a ofay cunt.”

  “Ofay means ‘white,’” Chuck muttered between mouthfuls of potato chips, his eyes drinking in a shootout on the screen. He cocked his thumb up out of his fist, sighted his way down his forefinger and fired at the television; his body was jolted to one side and he buried his head in his armpit for a second, played dead, sniffed, said, “Yuck, time for my monthly shower.”

  “Hey, honey,” the woman beside me was saying, “I got me a crazy little crib downstairs. Why don’ you and me party? Wanna party? That ofay cunt take ten bucks. I give it to you for eight. Eight for straight, ten for round-the-world.”

  “What’s that?”

  She hissed a goose giggle into her pink palm. When she lowered her hand she was still grinning. “Don’ you know nothin’? You kids sho ‘nuff green. Round-the-world means I start at yo’ mouth and kiss you all round, top to bottom, round the world, with a long wait on your south pole!” Another hiss behind her hand.

  I felt sorry for her. I thought she might really need my ten dollars. After all this was Saturday night, and yet she didn’t have any customers. Somehow I equated her fatness, her blackness, her unpopularity with my own outcast status. She’d show me sympathy, which would magically awaken my virility. In her adoring eyes I’d become a slender-hipped young prince under a gold crown of hair, skin as smooth as petals under a light green tunic. I’d protect her. I’d earn money and buy her freedom. We’d be outcasts together as a mixed couple, she a Negro whore and I her little protector. But no matter, for if this fantasy kept me a pariah by exchanging homosexuality for miscegenation, it also gave me a sacrifice to make and a companion to cherish. I would educate and protect her. I would nurse her back to decency after her years of debauchery.

  We went downstairs into a cellar room curtained off from the furnace by a flannel blanket suspended from a clothesline. Her night table was a wooden crate. Her mattress had no sheets on it and was resting on the floor. She pulled her slip over her head and said, “Get your clothes off. I don’ have all night.”

  She didn’t even watch me as I undressed. As I pulled my underpants off I worried she’d laugh when she saw my fear-shriveled penis, but her indifference to me was complete. I creaked awkwardly as I lowered myself on to the bed beside her. Her fingers started blindly grubbing for my penis, which she found and yanked. Then she sighed, heaved herself up on to an elbow, finally lowered herself and plopped my penis in her mouth. Nothing happened. I could scarcely feel anything.

  “I don’ have all night,” she said again as she unthreaded a hair from between her teeth and looked at it suspiciously.

  “Sorry,” I said. It dawned on me that neither of us was enjoying this and that she was eager as I for it to be over. “For some reason I’m not in the mood tonight,” I said. “Let’s just talk a minute and then go upstairs. And if any of the fellows should ask –”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “Ah’ll say you was great, a real stud. And in the future, my man, drink gin. Gin make you hard. It do. It make a man hard.”

  The following summer I spent with my father at his cottage – the summer of my exciting, frustrating idyll with Kevin. When I returned to school the next September I was switched to a new room in a new dormitory next door to the housemaster’s suite. Mr. and Mrs. Scott seemed an odd pair, he a grinning, skinny, forgetful little Latin teacher behind glasses cloudy with thumbprints, the fly of his gray, unpressed Brooks Brothers trousers sometimes open, usually half open, his hair worn in a salt-and-pepper crew cut, his shoulders fallen, perhaps broken under a perpetual burden of sin and duty and uxoriousness, which must be either one or the other. He was at his sweetest with Tim, his four-year-old son, a lovely wide-awake kid who alternated between bouts of boyish roughhousing and almost seraphic spells of listening. Yes, listening to adult conversation, to the radio, to the muted shoutings of the dorm during free time, to practically anything, even silence, which for him came across as a plenum, supersonic scrape and lift and settling, the sound of the feathered jets of the spheres.

  Whenever Tim clung to his father’s leg or sat on his lap and asked questions, Mr. Scott seemed most in focus. An admiration of his handsome, intelligent, good-natured little boy brightened and fattened the wavering flame in Mr. Scott’s eyes and sweetened the vinegar of his smile, for usually Mr. Scott smiled as if in queasy anticipation of a practical joke about to be played on him. Indeed, the students had offered him “a new bike” at an end-of-semester ceremony last year, but when he came bounding up the aisle with a glad grin they greeted him not with some sleek English racer to replace his battered old Schwinn but with a Bike athletic supporter (sour smile, “Very funny, you guys, a big yuck for your side”).

  His students counted on his being dazed. In Latin class, when he called attendance, someone different responded to each name each time, nor did Mr. Scott appear to notice when the same person answered to three different names in a row. Kids were always taping on his back the message “Kick me.” When he had to make an announcement in general assembly, he’d be unable to read his own writing. Soon he would have shoved his glasses up on to his forehead and he would be holding the paper an inch away from his eyes.

  He himself was the product of prep schools and his natural position in this rough, raw society would have been as one of those skinny little kids who don’t hit puberty until sixteen and who learn to take a lot of teasing until then and know how to dish out a few practical jokes in return (dead frog under the pillow). He was one of those kids who serve as manager of the football team and become the mascot, the sort
of boy who’s dying to be included by the team but hides on the day the yearbook photo is being taken: lovable, starved for affection, elusive. Yet here he was having to play disciplinarian. Whenever someone made a commotion during chapel, Mr. Scott’s eyes flared for a second with sympathetic mirth, which he immediately doused in favor of the stern visage of the leader, boy giving way to man. As a man he was a fake, and this very fraudulence was what dazed him, sank his self-esteem, introduced confusion into his voice.

  I was asked to baby-sit for the Scotts, and since little Tim and I got along I was invited back more and more often. Tim liked a bedtime story I made up about the ghost train that floated outside his window and that only he could see and hear as it went “Whoo-o-o . . .,” its whistle a high, sad, soft wail lost on the winter wind. The whole point of each episode was the repetition of that sound, which I’d hoard until the end; then his eyes would grow wide. The sound seemed to correspond to that heavenly ruckus he alone could hear, that burn-off of angelic fuels at the center of the universe.