This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  Other customers were extant, and as his little party left the establishment he discovered that day had become night. In the lot next door there were indeed a congeries of tents, linked by garlands of illuminated lightbulbs. Ah then, time for the show; no orgy was planned; the girls were simply capturing someone for the audience, which from the looks of things would be spare enough, though the big mouth of a loudspeaker mounted above the ticket booth was blaring bizarre promises to one and all: Strange and Exotic Rites Hitherto Forbidden, Weird Pleasures of Alien Peoples, etc. Inside the booth, when they reached it, Reinhart saw a square-jawed man with gray hair and the complexion of a slice of ham. He looked at Reinhart, likewise, and said with the timbre of loose plumbing: “Come on Joe see the girlies ya can’t lose.”

  “He’s with us, AI,” announced Billie-Jo.

  “On da house,” Al said mechanically and struck a little bell.

  Reinhart made some effort to pull himself together as they trudged up the dusty midway towards a large tent at the far end—though hardly far: it was obviously a crappy little show, and between here and there the route was flanked only by several small canvas lean-tos covering plank counters and wheels of chance, each administered by an individual saturnine, nay, downright sullen of mien.

  These persons exchanged greetings with Reinhart’s guides, who made certain smirks and gestures that they assumed he did not notice, Grace all the while with her nails in his arm. It amused him and still fitted his needs to be thought a patsy: victims make the best investigators, having no positive principles to clash with those of the subject under study; they want only to survive, and with such a negative obsession the vision stays unclouded.

  Heroic girlie posters rose before the large tent, three of them side by side, a big triptych to the left of the entrance flap; to the right stood a platform from which a barker would harangue the crowd when one assembled—if that ever happened, which seemed unlikely at this point, Reinhart being, so far as he could see, the only non-employe at large. The posters were worthy of note, representing a trio of long-stemmed American Beauties, limned, as the saying goes, by some unsung master, and on a base of tin, for they had here and there been dented by rock-throwers—and it was interesting to speculate on the identity of the latter: homosexuals, kids below the age of desire, or an enraged citizenry banning the show from their town? Whatever, the one on the left showed a rusty nipple through her bathing suit.

  Yes, bathing suit, and a conservative model at that, for when an amusement is really dirty, the illustrations are modest; and vice versa, as everyone knows who has scanned the stills outside a movie house. Reinhart had actually never attended this type of entertainment before, but when in high school he had talked to others who had, and this was the setup: a center curtain divided the interior of the tent into two equal parts and also bisected the stage, which lay in the middle. For the first act, the audience was admitted to that compartment nearer the midway; the girls paraded briefly in G-strings and fringed brassieres, then slipped behind the curtain onto the back stage, and the audience, upon payment of another fee, filed into the rear. Here, the reports had it, promises were fulfilled and compromise was unknown: the girls stripped to the buff and performed in little tableaux that robustly acknowledged the interests of ardent virility. As in burlesque, there were classic routines: e.g., a flowing festoon of femininity, each girl with her hands on the breasts of the next, called the “Milkmaids’ Delight.” In another, half the performers became human wheelbarrows with outspread legs as handles and hands representing the forward wheel, and were trundled about the stage by the remainder of the company. There was also a simple whorehouse scene, for which one of the male roustabouts was enlisted: the girls formed a naked rank, he selected one, led her to a canvas cot, and the lights went out as he unzipped his fly. For it was a general rule that not even such a show displayed a man in the altogether, this type of diversion being smutty but not perverse.

  The tent was empty as Reinhart entered on the arms of his friends, though the lights were lit. Plain dirt lay underfoot, and seating arrangements were never provided. The whole plant could be struck and folded away in an hour, and the troupe on the road towards their next location, which, like this, would be on county ground where jurisdiction was lax, outside some city limits.

  “When’s show start?” Reinhart mumbled; he hadn’t spoken for a time and his lips were thick.

  “Ain’t going to be none,” said Billie-Jo as Grace left them and went through the curtain to the rear. “We can’t get no audence. I think all of the fellows in this locality have turned queer.”

  He shook his head. “It’s really terrible if even your kind of woman has the wrong slant. … I don’t mean to insult you, I mean simply with all your experience in the field. … If the men aren’t here, they’re probably out having direct contact with girls, which if you ask me is a lot better than if they came to this show just to look and then go practice self-abuse.”

  “Yeah, turned queer, I figure,” repeated Billie-Jo, in that half-witted oblivion that takes anything for assent. “That’s why we uz so glad to run onto you, Goody. Can tell you’re a real bull, and I’m sure glad you prefer me over that Grace, who is thirty years old and got gray hair all the way down.” She suddenly undid two buttons at the neck and pulled the blouse over her head, coming into view in her show-bra, a loose, faded hammock of greenish-gray tulle with flaking sequins.

  Mind you, they were standing beneath a sagging light bulb, on the dirt floor, before the bare stage, of this empty tent. Reinhart fought against an impulse to reach into his shoe and buy his way out untouched and untouching. He was capable of great sympathy for an entertainer without someone to play to, not to mention a member of the passive sex forced by circumstances to become active. On the other hand, if he had not already lost all desire on the walk along the midway and the entrance into this canvas desolation, the brassiere alone, which was both washed out and dirty, would have been enough to do it.

  B.J. had turned her back to him and was smiling garishly over her left shoulder while her hips rolled up one side and down the other: the standard parody of the female tempter.

  “Will you listen a minute?” he said. Damn that beer; it seemed to have coagulated in his esophagus. “Stop shaking it for a moment, will you? I don’t find your behavior exciting, see. You know what makes a woman attractive?” He knew he was raving, and lowered the volume. “Well, it isn’t anything blatant, I can tell you. It is an air of receptivity to change, with at the same time a hint of defiance to it…. For Christ’s sake, put your slacks back on.” For Billie-Jo had, with the always startling rapidity of a woman undressing, divested herself of the garments in question. Her upper thighs, of which he had the posterior view, were already, at twenty years of age, rather lumpy, and the back thread of G-string emerged from the division of a bottom that hung conspicuously low. The ensemble was exceedingly melancholy.

  Reinhart backed away as she turned and vibrated towards him.

  “C’mon, Goody,” stated she, livid tip of tongue showing, “everybody deserves a good time once inna while.”

  “It’s a sort of radical conservatism,” said Reinhart, desperately returning to his characterization of the female temperament, for, as someone has said, ideas are weapons. “Or vice versa, but the point is, a tension between contradictories. Armed pacifism!” In retreat, he found his heels at the base of the little stairs rising to the stage, and went up one, B.J. pressing him hard. “Pacific warmongering!” Three steps more, and he strode the boards as if in some old melodrama turned inside out, heroine pursuing villain. “You see, the peculiarity of women is that they are all born wishing to be men, and their big problem all through life is to get over the resentment engendered by that seemingly dirty deal. Therefore they must first be assured that being a girl is good—” he continued moving backwards, B.J. having by now undulated to his level—“and secondly they must be disabused, by force if necessary, of the misconception that one can be a man wi
thout having the appropriate organs. I’m not saying it’s the best of all worlds, believe me, but you see it’s the only one we have.” He smiled apologetically, as a man does in righteous expectation of forgiveness for a situation which, though he never made, he profits by; and threw out his hands in that gesture designed to look like supplication but really signifying it’s no skin off my ass.

  A specialist in the spreading of limbs, Billie-Joe made her own interpretation of his open arms, and rushed into them, hurling him against the curtain, into it, and finally through it to the back stage, when an old friend struck him with a carriage whip. It was indeed Grace, who aside from a great deal of hair wore nought but her cowboy boots.

  Reinhart asked: “Say, what’s the big idea?”

  “Down, boy!” ordered Grace, lashing him again about the shoulders, and from the audience sounded several snickers, two chuckles, and that one outright guffaw that can always be expected.

  Audience? Unfortunately yes, some fifteen or twenty souls stood in the pit, near enough to rest their jaws upon the rim of the stage, explaining why nobody had been seen either on the midway or in the front compartment: the show was on in the back. Indeed, it appeared that Reinhart had been precipitated into the whorehouse scene itself, with Grace as madam and three more naked girls representing the stable, which Billie-Jo now joined, dropping bra and G-string en route.

  Now it took Reinhart no time at all to see that what you had here were two groups of humanity each of which believed the other to be a preposterous and degrading spectacle. In the girls this conviction manifested itself in a fixed sneer; in the men, an anxious smirk.

  “C’mon, Rover,” said Grace, goosing him with her whip handle, “pick your mate for breeding purposes.” She snapped her fingers at the girls, and number one stepped out of line and pranced about like a toy poodle, behind high and her hand bunched above it like a pompom tail. Number two was squat and bowlegged as an English bull, and her choice of role was obvious. Three coursed the forestage as a greyhound bitch; and Billie-Jo bayed like a hound.

  During these doings Reinhart stood there in felt hat and topcoat, curiously at ease though ostensibly an object of scorn being simultaneously tempted by the whores and punished by the madam. Man of iron? Not really: for example, the lash itself was made of soft felt with a little wing of cardboard at its extremity to provide the sound of pain without the effect. Secondly, the fluids he had drunk earlier still supplied the inner reassurances. With a constant snootful he could have been a great actor.

  Having waited courteously until the last doggie fell back into rank, he proceeded to address the swarm of white faces some four feet beyond his toes.

  “Well, fellows, there you have it. With all respect to these misguided but hardworking girls, I think you’ll admit it’s not much. Finally you must ask yourselves: ‘Why did I ever come in here to see the imitation of a cat house when I could have gone to a real one for a couple dollars more?’ Reality, friends. That’s all I’m asking you to consider, reality instead of fantasy. Is that so difficult?” Craaack, Grace’s fake whip snapped past his nose.

  “The answer is Yes, of course. Don’t think I can’t understand that you have come here because here failure is impossible. Even in a brothel, not to mention the ordinary walks of life, you are required at the minimum to get one up. Let him sneer who has a perfect record in this respect—if he can be found.” He paused a moment to allow the popular expression of cynical mirth, but none came. And before he resumed, Grace gave him a big push in the small of the back and said: “Go home, Jack, your act is over.”

  Next a tough-looking male individual—probably the barker, whose presence had gone unnoticed—appeared and, grasping Reinhart with tattooed hands, endeavored to hurl him off the stage. Too bad that when attacked by thugs, only the night before, Reinhart had not been caught in a rhetorical mood. Now, showing only the briefest twitch of exasperation, he lifted his big fist like a sandbag and felled the intruder stone cold.

  “Jeesus,” said the long-necked girl who played the greyhound, “he’s one of them athaletic preachers from the YMCA. I’m taking off.” And she did, running bare-ass through the curtain, followed by three of her colleagues. Billie-Jo, however, remained and started again to croon her ritual invitations, the perfect model of half-witted solipsism; she would have seen a grizzly bear as merely a big stiff in a fur coat, looking for a good time.

  But indomitable Grace, now wielding the leather-bound whip handle, struck Reinhart with it in back of the knees, causing him momentarily to buckle.

  She said: “Go away, you bastid.”

  Of course the audience took these events as part of the show, and when Reinhart forcibly disarmed her, which involved certain close-quarter work, they were moved to cry ribald encouragements: “Don’t stop now, boy!” “Shove it in.” And so on, advertising, so to speak, their disregard of his earlier commentary. He then appreciated the fact that uttering the truth is one thing and getting anyone to believe it, another—which made him one with all the great prophets. John the Baptist had to get his head cut off before anyone would take him seriously, and everybody knows about the lengths to which went Jesus of Nazareth.

  Reinhart really was convinced at the moment that, unless he got his message across to this representative sample, the entire male element of the great American nation would degenerate into voyeurs and onanists. He decided he must make the sacrifice, and let go of Grace so as to prepare his martyr-costume. Up to this moment, she had taken each incident more ill than the last—one had to admire her spirit while deploring its object—but as Reinhart dropped one by one his garments to the floor, she shed her ferocity to the same rhythm, and when his hat, topcoat, suit jacket, shirt, necktie, and undershirt were gone, and his belt unnotched, had nothing left but fright.

  “Listen, Jack, our permit don’t cover pulling the job on stage, for Christ Almighty!” She dashed for her own heap of clothing, down right, incidentally trampling the recumbent barker, who whimpered “Uncle!” in his profound sleep.

  But Reinhart, still in his pants, waylaid her from behind, lifted her with boots kicking, and said to the audience: “I hope you’re not missing any of this. Your manhood is at stake, friends, and no less. What I ask of you is merely to exercise it: Do, instead of Look. Act, rather than Imagine. Move, in place of Talk. You will thank me in the years to come. And—here’s the irony—the women will thank you, because can’t you see that they don’t want to win!”

  At this point, Reinhart’s trousers fell about his ankles and, while still holding Grace, he found it easy to step out of them, which was more than he could do with any kind of equanimity in the privacy of his own bathroom. Billie-Jo, who with her blank self always accepted the prevailing temper, confirmed that the power now was Reinhart’s: she had wandered down amongst the crowd and, clutching everywhere, found three takers at once. They bore her to the ground.

  “Excellent!” cried Reinhart from the platform above. He was at the first button of his drawers, and had put Grace on her feet while retaining her with his free hand. She had by now ceased to struggle, and hung limp, muttering “My God.” Her hair, close to his nose, had an unpleasant smell, like rancid bacon grease. She was very repulsive to him. Unfortunately he couldn’t have made the same point with Billie-Jo, who was more feasible. However, you might say it was being made for him on the ground below. “Wonderful,” he shouted down, and to himself, with even more gusto: “Old fellow, you may as well accept it: at last you’ve had your success.”

  There remained no reason why he should continue to take off his clothes, and much to be said against it. When she saw his trousers going back on, Grace asked numbly: “Now what?”

  He signaled to the audience, and several of them, inspired by the splendid example their fellows were setting with Billie-Jo, came up the stairs.

  “I?” he answered. “I’m going home. I’m a married man.”

  He dressed quickly while the men negotiated with her, for rape, of course, was
out of the question: he was happy they had not made that erroneous interpretation; these chaps, take them all in all, were the salt of the earth, and though his own tastes might vary from theirs, he felt no undue superiority over them. Sex is a poor area for one-upmanship, considering what we all have done or will yet do, not to mention unconsummated aspirations.

  When Reinhart was once again in full street attire, he bade a jolly goodnight to all and went through the curtain into the front compartment. A premonition told him to spy around the corner of the door-flap before issuing through it to the exterior. He saw a squad of sinister-looking roustabouts advancing on the tent, led by Al the ticket taker, who was middle-aged but carried a piece of lead pipe, and followed by the three girls that had got away. These last had covered their nudity with chenille bathrobes, hems angelically dragging the ground and raising little clouds of dust.

  Now Reinhart did briefly consider slipping out by another route. In some ways, victories are more taxing than failures, and he was very tired. At the thought of mounting still another attack he could only groan. Nevertheless, he would not tolerate the obscuring of the principles he had given so much to establish.

  He marched out boldly, flashing a half dollar in the palm of one hand and waving the bill of sale for the Gigantic in the other.

  “Jenkins of the County Vice Squad,” he growled at Al. Then stowing away his fake badge and search warrant and thrusting out his belly, he said: “I’m running you in for flagrant immorality. And if you don’t drop that pipe, I’ll shove it down your throat.”

  Al let his weapon fall, punched the greyhound girl in the mouth, screaming: “You said he was a reformer,” and wailed at Reinhart: “Wha do you guys want, my blood? I already paid off your partner when we come in yesterday, and since then we ain’t grossed a hundred. Jesus, what a locality. Go on, take it all, take my shoes while you’re at it. Who gives Al a break? Sock it inta Al, it’s the national sport.” He began to sob, his old jowls aquiver.