“Oscy, I got bad news.” It was Hermie reporting in from halfway between forlorn and not giving a crap.
“What?”
“You’ll have to lend me a dime.”
Oscy slipped Hermie a surreptitious dime, but his thoughts were elsewhere. “Catch the boobs on Miriam?”
“You catch ’em.”
“She throws ’em, I’m gonna catch ’em. I will be ready.” Oscy was ranting like that when Hermie saw something that quickly unsettled him. “Yes, sir,” said Oscy, “when those boobs come flying at me, I will be there to catch ’em. When they come at me from out of the wild blue yonder, I will be there—”
Oscy suffered a lightning elbow to the liver, a very obvious danger signal. He stiffened, wondering what the hell it was that was making Hermie so nutsy. Hermie was pointing with a very nervous finger.
It was the woman. She was with a group of adults, all apparently waiting to see the movie. Her lovely hair fluttered, and her eyes caught Hermie. She squinted at him, perhaps receiving the radio transmissions from his throbbing brain. Then she smiled. That smile of smiles. And she came over to him. “Hi, Hermie.”
“Hi, there.” He kind of waved his palm in a semicircular motion, like a hepcat, and he immediately made a point of remembering never to do that again because it was just too damned unnatural and beneath him.
“Going to the movies?” she asked. Not a particularly clever question because why else would he be hanging around the movie house, waiting on line, with his money ready?
He countered with a sophisticated “Yeah.”
And she ended it all with an esoteric “That’s nice” and turned away, aiming her bright charm once again at her companions.
Oscy was knocked out. “Hermie! She really knows you!”
“Jesus, it’s so embarrassing.” Hermie was unhappy.
“What?”
“Her. Seeing me with…that.” He was pointing his thumb over his shoulder at dumb Aggie, who was smiling hysterically at the night and the world. Maybe her mouth was frozen that way. Maybe she found something secretly funny. Maybe she had a snake up her ass.
Somehow the woman was there again, right next to Hermie and smiling. “Excuse me, Hermie? I was wondering. Could you come by my house Thursday afternoon?” Hermie could feel Oscy sag beside him, the idiot practically fainting. The woman continued. “I’m afraid I have some heavy things to move and”—she smiled and shrugged helplessly—“no man.”
Oscy had undoubtedly been winged in the neck by a curare-dipped dart. He grew rigid, then limp; he was collapsing against Hermie at a forty-five-degree angle. Hermie had to lean back at him at another forty-five-degree angle to hold him up. They looked like a tent. “Sure,” said Hermie to the woman. “Okay.”
“Oh, good,” she said, and then added, “Actually, I think the morning might be better. We’d have more time. Is ten o’clock all right?”
“Sure. We’ll have coffee.” Oscy was dead. He had died right there, leaning against the body of his dear friend, Hermie, who was saying something like, “Sure. We’ll have coffee.”
“You like it black, right?”
“Right.”
“See you Thursday,” said the sunny voice. And she was back again with her friends.
Hermie held onto Oscy, who was a zombie, one of the living dead, but still with the power of speech, and it spoke unto Hermie in a flat monotone. “You…are…in.”
“Shut up, Oscy. You’re dumber than Benjie.” Hermie didn’t want anyone to see Oscy going out of his mind like that. He held him by the arms and shook him back to life. “Come on. Snap out of it.”
Oscy came around and soon the huge smile split his face into north and south. “You’re in, Hermie. I can’t believe it. She’s mad about you. Coffee at ten. Shit!”
“Will you shut up?”
“No. I can’t shut up. I’m all a-dither. Where is that Miriam? I’m gonna squeeze the crap outa her! Soon as the lights go out, I’m gonna grab onto those boobs and swing on ’em like Tarzan!” He pounded his chest and was about to emit the wild call of the ape-man.
But Hermie clamped his hand over Oscy’s face. “You’re something. Can’t you even wait until after the cartoon?”
Oscy pulled his mouth free, and again his brilliant smile escaped. “I can’t wait! I can’t wait!” Oscy had finally revealed his true identity. He was the Werewolf of London, and no one was safe.
About forty paid spectators took their seats in the old wooden theater that had been erected in 1845 by Mexican prisoners of war. Oscy had carefully steered his entourage into the last row back on the left-hand side. Between the people who came to see the film and Oscy and his quartet, there were some twenty unoccupied rows. That was no-man’s-land. It separated the logical-thinking people of the island from the two fledgling sex fiends and their intended quarries.
The newsreel showed Harold Ickes complaining that people were hoarding rubber. Also, Sevastopol had fallen somewhere in Russia. Also, girls were knitting argyle socks for their boyfriends who were having a hard time not flashing them around in the Army. Liberty ships were plopping into the water all over America. Frank Sinatra was causing girls to swoon in their pants. And Lew Lehr kept contending that monkeys were the cwaziest people.
Then came the cartoon in which a cat chased a mouse, which then killed the cat about a dozen times, only the cat kept coming back for more, and so the mouse accommodated it. The mouse, in sequence, hit the cat with an anvil, a boulder, a building, and an aircraft carrier. It shot the cat with an arrow, a rocket, a torpedo, and an elephant gun. It also gassed the cat, stabbed it, drowned it, and set fire to it, all to the music of the Loony Tune National Symphonic Orchestra. That was one helluva game cat.
Oscy laughed like hell all through the cartoon because he always rooted for the mouse. Hermie, on the other hand, couldn’t quite sympathize with the cat because it was always the one who started the trouble. Still, he felt a certain compassion for the oafish feline because, like himself, it was only trying to make its way in an uncomprehending world.
The seating arrangement had Miriam on the extreme left. Then Oscy. Then Aggie. Then Hermie. Behind them, the back wall. To the left and right and front of them, air. All throughout the newsreel, but not during the cartoon, Oscy kept sneaking sidelong glances at Miriam’s breasts which leaned forward like the Rockies turned on their side. Miriam was well aware of Oscy’s covetous leer but pretended not to notice. Experience had taught her that all hands were not called on deck until somewhere well into the feature film. So she concentrated on her fifteen-cent bag of popcorn, feeling very safe, at least for the moment. An old pro was Miriam. Those boobs of hers had never missed a cartoon or a newsreel.
As for Aggie and Hermie, one might assume that they hadn’t come in together. Hermie intently watched whatever was on the screen, either afraid or unwilling to take notice of the girl beside him in the sweet fluffy peasant blouse. Everything above Aggie’s breasts was bare, including the upper part of both arms. Everything below the breasts was covered with a mass of gay ruffles and half sleeves. The sleeves, it should be noted, ran from above the elbow to six inches below the points of her bare shoulders. She looked like the Countess of Monte Cristo with her dress pulled down to near off so that she could be properly flogged across the back. Yet she incongruously sat munching her own popcorn, and whatever thoughts went on behind her soft gray eyes, no man was privy to.
Finally, the feature film came on, and everyone in Oscy’s quartet tensed up. It was post time, and in the evening’s competition were two fine fillies, one full-blooded stallion, and Hermie, who was somewhere between a scared colt and an out-and-out gelding. The horses were in the gate.
Bette Davis was put through her usual rigors. And Paul Henreid, the dummy, had gotten himself too involved with her and should have known better because he was a married man. John Loder hung around, taking up the slack. Hermie liked John Loder because he was so RAF and gentlemanly and good-mannered. But it was a lead-pipe
cinch that John Loder was going to end up with nothing but the air because he was so busy behaving in a lovely manner when what he should have been doing was throwing Bette Davis onto the couch and giving her a real nice screw. Hermie knew that he had a lot of John Loder in him, probably from an uncle on his mother’s side who was born in London and may well have been nobility except that he ran a grocery in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn for which he could have been rightfully stripped of all claims to the throne. That was some uncle. His thumb weighed twenty pounds. Hermie’s mind was zigzagging. He knew it was because of the pressure. He could feel the heat of Aggie’s body next to him, and from time to time he could get a whiff of her cologne, which dazed him. She was so hot that he could have slipped a raw egg into her cleavage and it would have come out of her pants poached. Something was moving off to the right. Beyond Aggie. It was Oscy.
The crazy son of a bitch was like an octopus, reaching, encircling. But Miriam had been there before and had at least as many arms as Oscy. For a moment it looked as though they both were swimming. The important thing to report was that Oscy was getting nowhere.
Hermie stayed with the film as it spun on. Bette Davis’ mother died sitting in a chair, and Bette Davis, who already had enough trouble in life, decided to feel guilty. Claude Rains, a doctor or something, told her to cut it out, but if she didn’t feel guilty, there’d be no movie. So she went on feeling guilty for at least another ten minutes, during which time Oscy abandoned the Australian crawl and switched over to a new approach. Stealth. Slowly he moved his left hand with which he reached across his lap and touched Miriam’s left knee. Simultaneously his right arm went behind her chair and her back and over her right shoulder, thinking it hadn’t been noticed. Again Miriam was equal to the occasion. The hand on the knee was flicked off. The hand over the shoulder was smartly smacked, and it withdrew. Attack repulsed.
There was no change in the Hermie/Aggie theater of operations. Hermie continued to watch the film listlessly, upset at the fool John Loder was being forced to play. More time passed. Aggie was eating a lot of popcorn. After a while Hermie tried looking over at Oscy/Miriam but without moving his head. It would have been easier if his eyes had been in his right ear.
Oscy had Miriam’s left thigh in a death grip imposed by Oscy’s determined right hand. Miriam countered by employing a death grip of her own via her right hand clamped upon Oscy’s forearm. Oscy’s hand could move no farther up Miriam’s thigh. Rommel versus Montgomery. A standoff.
A moment later Oscy retaliated. His free hand soon applied a death grip upon the wrist of the arm that had a death grip on his forearm. But with her last free hand, her left, Miriam locked a death grip on the arm that was death-gripping her death-gripped arm. An awful lot of blood had stopped flowing what with all that death-gripping. The pair of them sat there like four crossed wires.
In the Hermie/Aggie sector Aggie, touched by the drama on the screen, moved closer to Hermie, not so much out of desire as out of compassion for all human beings in distress. Hermie noticed the imperceptible move because a current of air wiggled and her tiny shifting measured a loud 193 on his seismograph. Dizzily encouraged by Aggie’s brazen demonstration of lustful desire, Hermie decided to make his move because it was do or die. The film was spinning out whether Bette Davis liked it or not, and there wasn’t much time left in which Hermie could grab a squeeze. Up in the air his right arm went in its intended journey behind Aggie’s back. But in the process he miscalculated the distances involved, and thus his hand smacked Aggie in the nose.
“Ooooh,” she said, as if it were her fault. And she smiled imbecilically and said, “I’m sorry.” Hermie smiled back, because one fights fire with fire. What the hell she was apologizing for was beyond him. But whatever madness motivated the smiling girl, the physical contact Hermie had made, the hand to the nose, had set his blood racing every which way in his confused arteries. And so he counted to thirty, an arbitrary count to be sure, and attempted the arm behind the chair bit once again, but with a little more care. Deftly his arm managed the difficult move without a hitch and came to rest on the back of her chair. Aggie made no move either to protest or to stop. Good news, Hitler. The Netherlands would not resist.
Hermie’s fingers curled and moved like a tarantula. Slowly they crept up the back of the chair, coming lightly to rest on Aggie’s warm shoulder where they seemed to solidify and die. And still Aggie didn’t move. Norway would not resist. Hermie took a deep breath of cigarette-smoky air and coughed. After he finished coughing, he let his hand stay where it was, letting it plan its next move.
On the western front all was quiet. But new strategies were festering. The blood had stopped flowing in both of Oscy’s arms, and gangrene was considering entering the scene. Faced with no other choice, Oscy gradually lessened the pressure on Miriam’s thigh. Miriam then relaxed her grip on his arm. He then freed her other arm. She freed his other arm. Thus unlocked from one another, they rubbed their respective limbs and got all their blood to flowing again.
Oscy then sat back, disappointed and angry. She had proved too much for him. He’d had it. Miriam went back to watching the movie. Quickly Oscy reached across her lap with a villainous and unannounced hand, causing Miriam to damn near lurch straight out of her chair and right up to the roof. But Oscy smiled wickedly at her, merely dipping his claw into her popcorn bag where, legally, he had certain eating privileges. He also stuck his tongue out at her. Fortunately, Miriam didn’t see that. Had she seen it she would have realized that she was with a nine-year-old and the combat would have ended then and there and for all time.
Thus defeated, Oscy turned to see how his ally was doing. The first thing he saw in the dim light the movie allowed, was Hermie’s hand lying dead on Aggie’s shoulder like a giant omelet. Fascinated, Oscy continued to watch, wondering what great strategy Hermie was employing.
Inexorably Hermie’s fingers came to quivering life and groped farther, reaching down like fingers playing a slow-motion piano. Down they moved, over the sweet hot shoulder. But Aggie had entered the movie house carrying a light sweater as ammunition against the cold night air she might have to walk home through. And, unbeknown to Hermie, Aggie had let the sweater lie in her arms during the movie so that much of it lay across her bosom. So when Hermie’s fingers came over the top and encountered soft cashmere, they became understandably confused. And they began to pull the sweater slowly toward their palm, bunching it up into a large and crawling woolen ball. Aggie looked down and saw her sweater leaving. She was afraid to stop for fear that she would also be stopping Hermie’s timid hand and she didn’t want the hand to stop. She wanted the hand to go on and on and on. Anyway, the sweater soon found itself scooped up and shoveled into Oscy’s lap, which was immediately adjacent to all the hot action. Oscy accepted it without protest, figuring he’d do his bit to aid the war effort. Besides, one sleeve of the sweater was still kind of caught around Hermie’s wrist, another reason why the crazy fingers were so thoroughly floundering every which way in search of flesh. And then, finally, the fingers broke free of the sweater and were touching flesh. Real flesh. Warm. Firm. Wow.
Hermie’s eyes widened. He began to perspire. He fully expected to be stopped right there. Maybe even be admonished. Maybe loud enough for every head in the movie house to turn and call the cops. But no protest was forthcoming from Aggie. Denmark would not resist.
Aggie grew soft and moved a shade closer to Hermie, practically laying her head against his shoulder. And Oscy watched the whole thing, not sure what to believe.
Hermie’s hand continually caressed the flesh. It stroked. It squeezed and released. Squeeze, release. Squeeze, release. Aggie’s fair breast was pliant and smooth and warmly inviting. But Oscy’s bemusement was based on a sad truth that Hermie’s fingers had yet to learn. The flesh that they were clutching was Aggie’s arm halfway between the elbow and the shoulder. In the traffic and the confusion of cashmere sweater and fluffy peasant blouse, the fingers had gotten sidetra
cked and had ended up a good six inches off target. Had Aggie been a 34 instead of a 22, Hermie might have realized his mistake. As it was, he had no idea he was doing a Wrong-Way Corrigan and just continued squeezing the arm.
Like the good friend he was, Oscy first gently made sure that the sweater was completely out of the way. Then he decided to correct the hand’s erroneous impression of Aggie’s geography. He reached over and gently took Hermie’s hand, trying to redirect it onto its desired course.
But Hermie felt Oscy’s paw on his hand and thought, at first, that it was Aggie telling him to cut out the grabbing. Only, when Hermie glanced down at Aggie’s lap, he saw that both her hands were there, holding the popcorn bag. Therefore, it had to be somebody else’s hand. But whose? Hermie leaned back and looked behind Aggie’s chair at Oscy, who was mouthing something silently, trying to tell Hermie something. Trying to tell him of his latitudinal error. But Hermie grimaced at Oscy as if to say, “Cut it out or I’ll kill you! Go feel Miriam!”
No friend could do more. Oscy had tried to correct the situation more in Hermie’s favor, but there were none so blind as those who could not see, so Oscy just settled back and became a disbelieving observer, watching Hermie’s hand as though it belonged to a great surgeon who was operating on the brain of Albert Einstein.
As for Aggie, she had been on the brink for a half hour, waiting for Hermie’s hand to strike gold. She wanted it to. Hadn’t she made that clear? Her small heart beat so loudly in her ears that when Bette Davis spoke it was Gene Krupa drumming.
Hermie’s hand was half-crazed with passion. Squeeze, release. Squeeze, release. It was convinced that it was stroking Aggie’s breast and it deigned to go even further. It slipped its way under the elastic of the sleeve like a wetback sneaking under the barbed wire into Texas. And there it began to search around in hopes of a nipple.
Summer of '42 Page 9
