Getting only a languid sigh from Sam Niles he switched to a livelier melody and sang, “Gee, but it’s great after eating my date, walking my baby back home.”
Finally Sam Niles spoke. He said, “Harold, I don’t mind your dumb songs but if you don’t stop stratching those pimples on your neck with that penknife, I’m gonna stick it up your ass.”
And then Harold tried to forget about losing the heroin by remembering a disturbing dream he had last Thursday and had not yet discussed with his partner. And as he concentrated he folded his tongue into a long pink tube and blew little spit bubbles which plinked wetly on the dashboard and made Sam Niles grind his teeth.
“Sam, there’s something I’d like your advice about.”
“Yes, yes, yes. What the hell is it this time?”
“I think I’m getting impotent.”
“Uh huh.”
“I haven’t awakened one morning in the past week with a diamond cutter. Or even a blue veiner.”
“You’re not impotent.”
“How do you know that, Sam? I mean how do you know it’s not happening to me? I was reading about impotency recently and…”
“Stop reading, Harold. That’s part of your problem. You read about these diseases and then you’ve got the symptoms.”
“You think it’s hypochondria but…”
“You’re going to choir practice too often. Cool it for a while. Too much booze makes a limp noodle. Also you’re getting old. Twenty-six. You’re over the hill. At your age you should drink Vano starch instead of booze.”
“It’s not funny Sam. It’s serious.”
“Really scares you, huh, Harold?”
“Indeed,” said Harold and Sam Niles gritted his teeth again. He had come to hate the word “indeed” because it was one of Harold’s favorite expressions.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Harold. Being impotent wouldn’t be too bad for you because Carolina Moon and Ora Lee Tingle are just about the only broads you ever ball lately and I think you only do that to be a respectable member of an unrespectable group that gets drunk once a week and gangbangs two fat cocktail waitresses.”
“That’s not fair of you to say that, Sam. You know some of us don’t approve of more than one guy mounting the same girl the same night. You and Baxter and Dean never do it. You know I don’t.”
“You did it last week!”
“I didn’t!”
“Then what the hell were you and Ora Lee doing off in the bushes?”
“Only fooling around. I just can’t board the train like horny old Spencer or that pig Roscoe Rules.”
“Did you have a blue veiner?”
“A diamond cutter as a matter of fact.”
“Then what makes you think you’re impotent?”
“Because I haven’t woke up for a week with anything but a limp noodle!”
“So you’ll be low man on the scrotum pole at the next choir practice,” said Sam Niles, turning a Bloomguardism against him.
“God, that’s cruel, Sam.”
“Harold, you’re not impotent. Take my word. And you’re not going to end up in a rubber room like your mother. But I might end up there if you keep using me for your shrink. Now if you only wanna wake up with a hard on, then ask the captain to put you on the morning watch. When you’re out there at about sunrise, waking up in a radio car, after trying to sleep with an upset stomach from the crazy hours and the greasy eggs you ate at two A.M., and the nervous sleep in some alley where you’re worrying about a sergeant catching you and you’re longing for all the normal things people do at that hour like being flaked out in a warm bed with a warm friendly body, you know what? You’ll wake up with the hardest diamond cutter you ever had. Try it if you don’t believe me.”
“Morning watch, huh? Don’t think I’d mind that. How about it, will you go with me?”
“No, I think you’d be better off going it alone with a new partner. Who knows? Maybe you’ll catch one with an MS in abnormal psych.”
Harold Bloomguard thought it over for five seconds and said, “I think I’ll stick with you, Sam. We’ll just have to come up with another solution for my impotency.”
Then they received a routine radio call to the south end where a black man had thrown a pot of hot soup on his teenage daughter and beaten the mother over the head with the pot lid. But since he was gone and the girl had already been removed to the hospital by ambulance there wasn’t much to do but take the report from the mother and phone the hospital for the treatment information on the child.
After dark they received another routine call, this time on the north end to a small house inhabited by a disheveled white woman, who was barefoot in a torn dress, with three small children literally hanging on her clothing. She lurched from dragging the weight but also from the pint of bourbon she had consumed that afternoon.
Sam Niles let Harold Bloomguard handle it since somehow Harold always did anyway, excitedly jumping into a conversation with a distraught married couple or the victim of a burglary with every sort of advice, wanted or otherwise. Harold’s notebook bulged with the addresses of referral agencies that ostensibly provided a remedy for any malaise Los Angeles had to offer.
The tired eyed woman had called them to report that her teenage daughter had threatened to run off with a forty-nine year old piano tuner who lived next door. Harold Bloomguard promised to arrange an appointment with juvenile officers at Wilshire Station the next morning, then he advised the mother to try to help police ascertain if she had been taken advantage of by the older man.
“If she been what?” the woman asked as Sam Niles turned on his flashlight and prepared to descend the porch steps.
“Taken advantage of,” Harold said as Sam was halfway down the walk heading for the radio car.
The woman nodded dumbly and Harold said, “Well, I’m very glad we could be of service. I certainly hope we can help the young lady get back on the track tomorrow, ma’am, and if there’s any way we can expedite matters prior to your appointment, you just call us back and we’ll be here at once.”
“Ex-pee-dite?” mumbled the woman as the lassitudinous Sam Niles, hands in his pockets, hoped the little bubblegummer’s keys had been well pounded by the piano tuner so she could get out of this house, even to go to the home for unwed mothers.
“So long, ma’am,” Harold said cheerfully as he took off his hat and opened the door of the radio car, turning back to wave at the stooped woman who now had no less than seven children flocked around her on the sagging wooden porch in the dim light of a naked bulb. “By the way, wherever did all these children come from?”
“From fuckin,” yelled the woman, wondering how the little policeman could be so stupid as not to know that.
“Now you know where they came from, Harold,” Sam said as he drove away.
It was always like this with Harold Bloomguard and always had been. Yet for reasons impossible to explain Sam could not rid himself of the clinging little man any more than the weary woman could rid herself of the clinging children.
But I didn’t fuck to get him, thought Sam Niles. I just got fucked the day I accepted him into my fire team in Nam. And then Sam Niles felt the fear sweep over him as he thought of Vietnam and for a second he actually hated Harold Bloomguard. It always came this way: first fear at the memory and then a split second of incredible hatred which he assumed was for Harold Bloomguard who knew the secret of the cave. And relief for Harold’s never having revealed the secret to anyone, for never having mentioned the secret even to Sam Niles.
If he’d just bring it up once, thought Sam Niles, but he never did. And that was perhaps the reason he could never rid himself of Harold Bloomguard.
“You know, Sam, I think it’s time I got married,” Harold suddenly announced, interrupting Sam’s fearful reverie.
“Anybody I know? Ora Lee maybe? Or Carolina?”
“Don’t be silly Sam.”
“If it’s Ora Lee be sure to rent her out to us once a week for choir practi
ce.”
“I’m serious, Sam,” Harold said as Sam Niles winked his headlights at an oncoming car and cruised west on Beverly Boulevard, glancing in store windows, most of which were darkened by now.
“So who’re you going to marry?” Sam asked, not truly interested.
“I dunno. I haven’t met her yet. I wonder what she’ll be like?”
“Just like the girl that married dear old dad,” said Sam Niles, thinking it would be rather difficult to find one like the mother Harold described to him, who up until the day he went overseas had twisted the tops off the catsup bottles and pried the lids from the cottage cheese containers, replacing them gently so that Harold would not strain himself when getting something to eat.
But she was never there to care for him again, after a certain summer afternoon when Harold was in Vietnam and her psychiatrist was on vacation in Martinique and Mrs. Bloomguard decided she was Ann Miller and did a naked tap dance in front of the Pomona courthouse and had to be taken to the screw factory to get rethreaded.
As they patrolled the nighttime streets and Harold complained that perhaps he should never get married because his mother’s insanity might be congenital, Sam Niles was reminded of his own fifteen month marriage which had just been finally dissolved last year.
His ex-wife, Kimberly Cutler Niles, was a tall athletic student he had met in a college night class. She was a blonde tawny cat of a girl with daring amber eyes that looked inquisitively and boldly at you. She was bright, articulate, personable. She said Harold Bloomguard was a doll and asked Sam to invite him home to dinner often. And incredibly enough she could cook. Not like a twenty-two year old student wife can cook but like a cook can cook. She was tidy and their little apartment was always immaculate. Harold Bloomguard loved her like a sister. He was ecstatically happy for his best friend, Sam Niles. Kimberly was darling. Sam Niles hated her guts.
But he didn’t hate her at first, that came later. They were probably married three weeks before he started to hate her. But he didn’t know that he hated her after three weeks, he just knew that she made him terribly uncomfortable. She was as terrific in the sack as he knew she would be the first night they met in class. She had introduced herself by shaking hands smoothly and firmly and saying, “I knew you were a Taurus. I just love bulls.”
And moments later she was chatting glibly about tennis which interested Sam, saying, “You’re a pretty good sized boy but I’ll bet you could get into size thirty-three tennis shorts. My brother left some at my place when he went away to school. Want them?”
“Sure, I’d like to play with you,” Sam said with a hint of a smile so he could withdraw gracefully but she delighted him by saying, “You could probably get into much smaller tennis shorts given the opportunity couldn’t you, Sam?”
And Sam Niles had a blue veiner going on a diamond cutter and was impulsively married within four months, wondering, as did Kimberly Cutler, how the hell it all happened.
The first thing Sam Niles didn’t like about being married to Kimberly Cutler was having to sleep in the same bed with another human being. It wasn’t that Kimberly wasn’t carnal and syrupy, she certainly was. But prior to marriage he had seldom had to spend a whole night in a bed with anybody. And early on, Kimberly’s doubts were heightened by Sam’s saying that he’d like to trade their king size bed for twins.
“That’s unnatural,” Kimberly told him as they lay in their king size bed unable to sleep.
“What’s unnatural about it?”
“Newlyweds should sleep in the same bed, for God’s sake.”
“Where does it say that?”
“Sam, don’t you enjoy me in bed?”
“That’s dumb. Do I act like I enjoy you?”
“As a matter of fact you act like a man who does a pretty good act of making love. Oh, I don’t mean fucking. You like that all right. I mean loving. You don’t really give yourself. You hold lots and lots back from me. It’s purely physical, your love-making.”
“All this because I want twin beds. Kim, it’s just that my old man and old lady were drunks and we were so goddamn poor I grew up on the floor. Or when we could rent a pad with a bed I always had to share it with two brothers. And I’m talking about a little bed, an army surplus cot. Christ, I felt like a married man at seven years old, always crowded into bed with one or both brothers. I just can’t bear it anymore to be …”
“Close?”
“Yeah, close.”
“You never want to get close to anybody.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I’m saying that you won’t let yourself get close to anyone. I can’t understand how you could be friends with Harold so long. He’s a sweet little guy but he’s like glue. How do you stand it?”
“Whaddaya mean?” Sam asked, then added, “Jesus, I’m starting to sound like Dean.”
“There’s something about Harold. You’ve yelled his name in your sleep.”
“So maybe I’m fruit for Harold.”
“You don’t like people, Sam. You’ve had a mean rough life with weak parents and you hate them even though they’re dead. You won’t even see your brothers and sisters unless you have to. It’s very sad. You don’t really want to be close to anyone. Not even me.”
“There oughtta be a law against people taking Psych 1b,” Sam Niles said.
“But why do you stay friends with Harold, Sam? You’re so different. You’ve both been in war and police work, yet he still sees honey where you see slime. He’s always enthusiastic, you’re always bored. Why do you let him crowd you? There’s something, something in the marines. In Vietnam…”
“My mother always told us it cost a nickel a minute to burn a light,” Sam Niles said as he switched off the lamp, leaving Kimberly Cutler Niles to wonder in the darkness. “Of course it doesn’t cost a nickel but I’m a creature of habit. It was just another thing that lousy drunken bitch lied about.”
And Sam rolled over, wishing the king sized bed was a twin, and went to sleep, yelling in the night about a spider hole and a cave, which Kimberly Cutler knew would never be explained, not to her.
From then on the marriage deteriorated very quickly, especially after Sam Niles began to attend various choir practices with various groups of choirboys, much to the disapproval of Harold Bloomguard who tried to hint that he should go home to Kimberly.
Three months later two bitter young people lay side by side in their twin beds, both doing poorly in their college classes because of their miserable relationship. They seethed over an argument they had about one watching television when the other was trying to study.
“So I’ll just quit school in my senior year,” Sam said. “Why’s a cop need an education anyway? No more than a trash collector. That’s all we do, clean up garbage.”
“The garbage is in your mind, Sam.”
“Fine, I’ll just feed on it. That’s what pigs do, isn’t it?”
And then bitter silence until Kimberly made a gambit. “Sam, do you wanna come over here and make love to me?”
“No, I’d rather have a wet dream.”
“Well then go up on Hollywood Boulevard and pick yourself up a queer if I can’t turn you on, you cocksucker!”
“Just like a woman. Never tell a man to go out and get some pussy. Too vain to think another woman might be able to do what you can’t. It’s go get a fag, never a broad.”
“Fuck you!”
“Tennis, anyone?” said Sam Niles, and that was the last word spoken that night.
Two nights later, after they had not seen each other except as she came and went to class and he to the police station, Sam came in after getting off the nightwatch. He found Kimberly sleeping soundly, but as he looked at her long tan body, the blue veiner he brought with him became a diamond cutter. He quickly stripped and got in her bed, nudging her.
“Hi, Kim,” he whispered.
“Oh Christ, what time is it?”
“Two thirty maybe. I wake you up?”
&nbs
p; “Oh no, Sam, I’ve been lying here worrying about you getting shot like those idiotic cops’ wives on television. Where were you? Out drinking with the boys again?”
Then Sam was up close, breathing in her ear, touching her with a diamond cutter, saying, “This’ll keep you awake.”
“Only if you stick it in my eye,” replied Kimberly and she didn’t mind at all when Sam slammed out the door, half dressed.
The next night was perhaps the worst since they were both thinking about sex, hoping they could bring some of the drama back into their lives, neither wanting to make the move across the two feet of carpet to the other’s bed.
“You wanna come to my bed?” Kimberly finally asked pugnaciously.
“What do you have in mind, a prizefight?”
“Goddamnit, do you or don’t you?”
“Aren’t you too tired tonight?”
“I’m too tired every night after I’ve been studying for four hours and you come tripping in at some godawful time.”
“Well I’m a policeman and I work godawful hours!”
“You wanna get in bed with me?”
“Sure, but I’m tired too. Just for once, why don’t you come to my bed?”
“If we had one bed we wouldn’t have to be walking a beat across the goddamn carpet.”
“All right, I’ll come to your bed.”
“Not if it’s too much trouble.”
“You want me to or not?”
“All right, all right.”
Sam Niles pulled himself up and walked two steps and lay down beside Kimberly Cutler Niles, and after three minutes of silence wherein neither of the stubborn young people stirred, Sam finally said, “Shall we both put it in and toss a coin to see who has to move?”
Five minutes later it was Kimberly who was half dressed and slamming out the door.
The honeymoon was definitely over, but like so many people, Sam and Kimberly needed a dramatic moment to convince them of what they should have known. Six days later they got it.
The Choirboys Page 23
