There is a curious sea story about Pig Bodine, which Winsome had heard from Pig himself. Winsome was aware that Pig wanted to make a career someday of playing male leads in pornographic movies. He’d get this evil smile on his face, as if he were viewing or possibly committing reel on reel of depravities. The bilges of the radio shack of USS Scaffold—Pig’s ship—were jammed solid with Pig’s lending library, amassed during the ship’s Mediterranean travels and rented out to the crew at 10 cents per book. The collection was foul enough to make Pig Bodine a byword of decadence throughout the squadron. But no one suspected that Pig might have creative as well as custodial talents.
One night Task Force 60, made up of two carriers, some other heavies and a circular screen of twelve destroyers, including the Scaffold, was steaming a few hundred miles east of Gibraltar. It was maybe two in the morning, visibility unlimited, stars blooming fat and sultry over a tar-colored Mediterranean. No closing contacts on the radars, everybody on after steering watch asleep, forward lookouts telling themselves sea stories to keep awake. That sort of night. All at once every teletype machine in the task force started clanging away, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Five bells, or FLASH, initial contact with enemy forces. It being ’55 and more or less peacetime, captains were routed out of bed, general quarters called, dispersal plans executed. Nobody knew what was happening. By the time the teletypes started up again the formation was scattered out over a few hundred square miles of ocean and most radio shacks were crowded to capacity. The machines started to type.
“Message follows.” Teletype operators, com officers leaned forward tense, thinking of Russian torpedoes, evil and barracuda-like.
“Flash.” Yes, yes, they thought: five bells, Flash. Go ahead.
Pause. Finally the keys started clattering again.
“THE GREEN DOOR. One night Dolores, Veronica, Justine, Sharon, Cindy Lou, Geraldine and Irving decided to hold an orgy . . .” Followed, on four and a half feet of teletype paper, the functional implications of their decision, told from Irving’s point of view.
For some reason Pig never got caught. Possibly because half the Scaffold’s radio gang, also the communications officer, an Annapolis graduate named Knoop, were in on it and had locked the door to Radio as soon as GQ was called.
It caught on as a sort of fad. The next night, precedence Operational Immediate, came A DOG STORY, involving a St. Bernard named Fido and two WAVES. Pig was on watch when it came over and admitted to his henchman Knoop that it showed a certain flair. It was followed by other high-priority efforts: THE FIRST TIME I GOT LAID, WHY OUR X.O. IS QUEER, LUCKY PIERRE RUNS AMOK. By the time the Scaffold reached Naples, its first port of call, there were an even dozen, all carefully filed away by Pig under F.
But initial sin entails eventual retribution. Later, somewhere between Barcelona and Cannes, evil days fell on Pig. One night, routing the message board, he went to sleep in the doorway of the executive officer’s stateroom. The ship chose that moment to roll ten degrees to port. Pig toppled onto the terrified lieutenant commander like a corpse. “Bodine,” the X.O. shouted, aghast. “Were you sleeping?” Pig snored away amid a litter of special-request chits. He was sent down on mess cooking. The first day he fell asleep in the serving line, rendering inedible a gunboat full of mashed potatoes. So the next meal he was stationed in front of the soup, which was made by Potamós the cook and which nobody ate anyway. Apparently Pig’s knees had developed this odd way of locking, which if the Scaffold were on an even keel would enable him to sleep standing up. He was a medical curiosity. When the ship got back to the States he went under observation at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. When he returned to the Scaffold he was put on the deck force of one Pappy Hod, a boatswain’s mate. In two days Pappy had driven him, for the first of what were to be many occasions, over the hill.
Now on the radio at the moment was a song about Davy Crockett, which upset Winsome considerably. This was ’56, height of the coonskin hat craze. Millions of kids everywhere you looked were running around with these bushy Freudian hermaphrodite symbols on their heads. Nonsensical legends were being propagated about Crockett, all in direct contradiction to what Winsome had heard as a boy, across the mountains from Tennessee. This man, a foul-mouthed louseridden booze-hound, a corrupt legislator and an indifferent pioneer, was being set up for the nation’s youth as a towering and clean-limbed example of Anglo-Saxon superiority. He had swelled into a hero such as Mafia might have created after waking from a particularly loony and erotic dream. The song invited parody. Winsome had even cast his own autobiography into aaaa rhyme and that simple-minded combination of three—count them—chord changes:
Born in Durham in ’23,
By a pappy who was absentee,
Was took to a lynching at the neighborhood tree,
Whooped him a nigger when he was only three.
[Refrain]:
Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance.
Pretty soon he started to grow,
Everyone knew he’d be a loving beau,
Cause down by the tracks he would frequently go
To change his luck at a dollar a throw.
Well he hit Winston-Salem with a rebel yell,
Found his self a pretty Southron belle
Was doing fine till her pappy raised hell
When he noticed her belly was beginning to swell.
Luckily the war up and came along,
He joined the army feeling brave and strong,
His patriotism didn’t last for long,
They put him in a foxhole where he didn’t belong.
He worked him a hustle with his first C.O.,
Got transferred back to a PIO,
Sat out the war in a fancy château,
Egging on the troops toward Tokyo.
When the war was over, his fighting done,
He hung up his khakis and his Garand gun
Came along to Noo York to have some fun,
But couldn’t find a job till ’51.
Started writing copy for MCA
It wasn’t any fun but it was steady pay,
Sneaking out of work one lovely day
He met him a dolly called Mafi-yay.
Mafia thought he had a future ahead,
And looked like she knew how to bounce a bed
Old Roony must’ve been sick in the head
Cause pretty soon, they up and they wed.
Now he’s got a record company,
A third of the profits plus salary,
A beautiful wife who wants to be free
So she can practice her Theory.
[Refrain]:
Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance.
Pig Bodine had fallen asleep. Mafia was in the next room, watching herself undress in the mirror. And Paola, Roony thought, where are you? She’d taken to disappearing, sometimes for two- or three-day stretches, and nobody ever knew where she went.
Maybe Rachel would put in a word for him with Paola. He had, he knew, certain nineteenth-century ideas of what was proper. The girl herself was an enigma. She hardly spoke, she went to the Rusty Spoon now only rarely when she knew Pig would be somewhere else. Pig coveted her. Concealing himself behind a code which only did officers dirty (and executives? Winsome wondered), Pig he was sure envisioned Paola playing opposite him in each frame of his stag-movie fantasies. It was natural, he supposed; the girl had the passive look of an object of sadism, something to be attired in various inanimate costumes and fetishes, tortured, subjected to the weird indignities of Pig’s catalogue, have her smooth and of course virginal-looking limbs twisted into attitudes to inflame a decadent taste. Rachel was right, Pig—and even perhaps Paola—could only be products of a decky-dance. Winsome, self-proclaimed king of it, felt only sorry it should ever have happened. How it had happened, how anybo
dy, himself included, had contributed to it he didn’t know.
He entered the room as Mafia was bent, stripping off a knee sock. College girl attire, he thought. He slapped her hard on the nearest buttock; she straightened, turned, and he slapped her across the face. “Wha,” she said.
“Something new,” said Winsome. “For variety’s sake.” One hand at her crotch, one twisted in her hair, he lifted her like the victim she wasn’t, half-carried, half-tossed her to the bed where she lay in a sprawl of white skin, black pubic hair and socks, all confused. He unzipped his fly. “Aren’t you forgetting something,” she said, coy and half-scared, flipping her hair toward the dresser drawer.
“No,” said Winsome, “not that I can think of.”
III
Profane returned to the Space/Time agency convinced that if nothing else Rachel was luck. Bergomask had given him the job.
“Wonderful,” she said. “He’s paying the fee, you don’t owe us anything.”
It was near quitting time. She started straightening things on her desk. “Come home with me,” she said quietly. “Wait out by the elevator.”
But he remembered, leaning against the wall out in the corridor: with Fina it had been like that too. She’d taken him home like a rosary found in the street and convinced herself he was magic. Fina had been devoutly R.C. like his father. Rachel was Jewish, he recalled, like his mother. Maybe all she wanted to do was to feed him, be a Jewish mother.
They rode down in the elevator crowded together and quiet, she wrapped serenely in a gray raincoat. At the turnstile in the subway she put in two tokens for them.
“Hey,” said Profane.
“You’re broke,” she told him.
“I feel like a gigolo.” He did. There’d always be some 15 cents, maybe half a salami in the refrigerator—whatever she’d feed him.
Rachel decided to lodge Profane at Winsome’s place and feed him at her own. Winsome’s was known to the Crew as the West Side flophouse. There was floor space there for all of them at once, and Winsome didn’t mind who slept on it.
The next night Pig Bodine showed up at Rachel’s at supper time drunk and in search of Paola, who was away God knew where.
“Hey,” Pig addressed Profane.
“Buddy,” Profane said. They opened beer.
Soon Pig had dragged them down to the V-Note to hear McClintic Sphere. Rachel sat and concentrated on the music while Pig and Profane remembered sea stories at each other. During one of the breaks she drifted over to Sphere’s table and found out he’d picked up a contract with Winsome to do two LPs for Outlandish.
They talked for a while. Break ended. The quartet drifted back to the stand, fiddled around, started off with a Sphere composition called “Fugue Your Buddy.” Rachel returned to Pig and Profane. They were discussing Pappy Hod and Paola. Damn, damn, to herself, what have I brought him to? What have I brought him back to?
She woke up the next morning, Sunday, mildly hung over. Winsome was outside, pounding at the door.
“It is a day of rest,” she growled. “What the hell.”
“Dear father-confessor,” he said, looking as if he’d not slept all night, “don’t be angry.”
“Tell it to Eigenvalue.” She stomped to the kitchen, put coffee on. “Now,” she said. “What is your problem?”
What else: Mafia. Now this was all deliberate. He had put on the day before yesterday’s shirt and neglected to comb his hair that morning to put Rachel in the mood. If you wanted a girl to go pimping for her roommate you didn’t come right out and say so. There were subtleties to be gone through. Wanting to talk about Mafia was only an excuse.
Rachel wanted to know naturally enough if he’d spoken to the dentist at all and Winsome said no. Eigenvalue had been busy lately holding bull sessions with Stencil. Roony wanted a woman’s point of view. She poured coffee and told him the two roommates were gone. He closed his eyes and jumped in:
“I think she’s been slipping around, Rachel.”
“So. Find out and divorce her.”
They drained the coffeepot twice. Roony drained himself. At three Paola came in, smiled at them briefly, disappeared into her room. Did he blush a little? His heartbeat had speeded up. Dingy damn, he was acting like a young blood. He rose. “Can we keep talking about this?” he said. “Even small-talk.”
“If it helps,” she smiled, not believing it for a minute. “And what’s this about a contract with McClintic? Don’t tell me Outlandish is putting out normal records now. What are you getting, religion?”
“If I am,” Roony told her, “it’s all I’m getting.”
He walked back to his apartment through Riverside Park, wondering if he’d done right. Maybe, it occurred to him, Rachel might think it was herself he wanted, not her roommate.
Back at the apartment he found Profane talking with Mafia. Dear God, he thought, all I want to do is sleep. He went in to the bed, assumed the fetal position and soon, oddly enough, did drift off.
“You tell me you are half-Jewish and half-Italian,” Mafia was saying in the other room. “What a terribly amusing role. Like Shylock, non è vero, ha, ha. There is a young actor down at the Rusty Spoon who claims to be an Irish Armenian Jew. You two must meet.”
Profane decided not to argue. So all he said was: “It is probably a nice place, that Rusty Spoon. But out of my class.”
“Rot,” she said, “class. Aristocracy is in the soul. You may be a descendant of kings. Who knows.”
I know, Profane thought. I am a descendant of schlemihls, Job founded my line. Mafia wore a knit dress of some fabric that could be seen through. She sat with her chin on her knees so that the lower part of the skirt fell away. Profane rolled over on his stomach. Now this would be interesting, he thought. Yesterday Rachel had led him in by the hand to find Charisma, Fu and Mafia playing Australian tag-teams minus one on the living room floor.
Mafia had squirmed to a prone position parallel to Profane. Apparently she had some idea of touching noses. Boy I’ll bet she thinks that’s cute, he thought. But Fang the cat came tearing in and jumped between them. Mafia lay on her back and started scratching and dandling the cat. Profane padded to the icebox for more beer. In came Pig Bodine and Charisma, singing a drinking song:
There are sick bars in every town in America,
Where sick people can pass the time o’ day.
You can screw on the floor in Baltimore,
Make Freudian scenes in New Orleans,
Talk Zen and Beckett in Keokuk, Ioway.
There’s espresso machines in Terre Haute, Indiana
Which is a cultural void if ever a void there be,
But though I’ve dragged my ass from Boston, Mass.
To the wide Pacific sea,
The Rusty Spoon is still the bar for me,
The Rusty Spoon is the only place for me.
It was like bringing a little bit of that gathering-place in among the proper façades of Riverside Drive. Soon without anyone realizing it there was a party. Fu wandered in, got on the phone and started calling people. Girls appeared miraculously at the front door, which had been left open. Someone turned on the FM, someone else went out for beer. Cigarette smoke began to hang from the low ceiling in murky strata. Two or three members got Profane off in a corner and began to indoctrinate him in the ways of the Crew. He let them lecture, and drank beer. Soon he was drunk and it was night. He remembered to set the alarm clock, found an unoccupied corner of a room and went to sleep.
IV
That night, 15 April, David Ben-Gurion warned his country in an Independence Day speech that Egypt planned to slaughter Israel. A Mideast crisis had been growing since winter. 19 April, a cease-fire between the two countries went into effect. Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco the same day. The spring thus wore on, large currents and
small eddies alike resulting in headlines. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history’s rags and straws. In the city of New York alone there were at a rough estimate five million different rathouses. God knew what was going on in the minds of cabinet ministers, heads of state and civil servants in the capitals of the world. Doubtless their private versions of history showed up in action. If a normal distribution of types prevailed they did.
Stencil fell outside the pattern. Civil servant without rating, architect-by-necessity of intrigues and breathings-together, he should have been, like his father, inclined toward action. But spent his days instead at a certain vegetation, talking with Eigenvalue, waiting for Paola to reveal how she fitted into this grand Gothic pile of inferences he was hard at work creating. Of course too there were his “leads” which he hunted down now lackadaisical and only half-interested, as if there were after all something more important he ought to be doing. What this mission was, however, came no clearer to him than the ultimate shape of his V-structure—no clearer, indeed, than why he should have begun pursuit of V. in the first place. He only felt (he said “by instinct”) when a bit of information was useful, when not: when a lead ought to be abandoned, when hounded to the inevitable looped trail. Naturally about drives as intellectualized as Stencil’s there can be no question of instinct: the obsession was acquired, surely, but where along the line, how in the world? Unless he was as he insisted purely the century’s man, something which does not exist in nature. It would be simple in Rusty Spoon–talk to call him contemporary man in search of an identity. Many of them had already decided this was his Problem. The only trouble was that Stencil had all the identities he could cope with conveniently right at the moment: he was quite purely He Who Looks for V. (and whatever impersonations that might involve), and she was no more his own identity than Eigenvalue the soul-dentist or any other member of the Crew.
V. Page 25
