slut?”
“You’re giving it the grand opera treatment, baby. I’d say Mama has
every right to be happy. She seems perfectly happy this way.”
“But that’s shameful. Don’t you have any pride? Any sense of decency?
My God, I’m only sorry I didn’t know what you were turning into. It would
have saved me a lot of foolish daydreaming about you.”
I had a feeling that even if I were less muzzy-headed it wouldn’t be easy
keeping up with her. “Coccolina, the last time you and I went around holding
hands, you couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. Now what kind of
daydreams can a twelve-year-old kid work up on an ice cream and pastry
high?”
“What kind? Romàntico. Romàntico. Pinwheels in the head. That’s what
kind.”
“Now let’s not —”
29
”Don’t you dare sit there and look amused about it! You don’t know
anything about girls, big or little. I was crazy about you.”
“More coffee,” I said.
“Get it yourself.”
I got it myself and poured a very large slug of cognac into it. Bianca
said, “You wind up drunk, and then how do I get you back next door?”
“I won’t wind up drunk. Besides, why worry about next door when right
here seems to be all ours for the night?”
She fixed those large watery eyes on me. “You mean, because you can’t
get into bed with Milos’s girl friend you’ll settle for bed with me?”
“Forget about Milos’s girl friend. Look, now that I know what’s going
on I’m taking the plane back to New York tomorrow, but meanwhile the night
is ours. Io ti bramo, carissima. Che ne diresti?”
“The way I look right now? And with this cold? That sounds absolutely
perverted.”
“It happens to be perfectly natural. And possibly curative.”
“No. Now listen very carefully. I haven’t gone to bed with any man yet. I
will certainly not do it under these conditions.”
“But —”
”No. It would be wrong, that’s all, because you wouldn’t be caring, and
I would. You know how those daydreams always ended? You’d walk in here,
and I’d be so slender and glamorous — certainly I wouldn’t be spraying germs
all over the place — and you would say, ‘Here I am, Bianca. Now I know you
are the only one for me,’ and I would see you meant it. Then when you said,
‘Che ne diresti?’ I’d say, ‘Of course. That’s the way it was always meant to
be with us.’ An idiotic dream, you understand. Part of the growing-up
sickness. But I’m almost eighteen now. It’s time I was over it.”
“It is,” I said. “And since I’m not that eager to rush back next door after
the great enlightenment, do you suppose you could just sit and talk to me a
while as if I were an old friend and not a product of your fevered
imagination?”
“No. Now please go. Please.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m in no mood for a friendly talk. I don’t feel like your
friend.”
30
I went the way I had come, over the terrace wall. I had the impression
when I rejoined the party that no one there had missed me for a moment.
31
There were still three days left of the
holiday vacation when I walked into the dormitory, and the place was almost
empty. In the lounge, the TV set was tuned in to the Capitol where Lyndon B.
Johnson was being re-enthroned, but there was no one in the lounge to cheer
the coronation. My own quarters also looked more than usually barren. It took
me a few seconds to realize that this was because Oscar, in my absence, must
have finally relocated himself and had cleared out every vestige of his
unpleasant person.
Easy come, easy go. The immediate objective was to crawl into bed and
sleep off jet lag and the remnants of my Roman hangover. And possibly to cool
off an overheated conscience. My passport wallet was unusually plump,
stuffed with almost four hundred dollars, the remainder of the astonishingly
generous expense money Milos had thrust on me soon after my arrival at his
home. When I departed it, after the coolest of farewells, it had taken
considerable rationalizing to keep me from thrusting it back at him. After all, if
my mother had any suspicions of Sophia’s place in her husband’s life, I had
done a yeoman job of allaying them with my wooing.
That, I suspected, had to be one reason Milos had wanted my presence
on the scene, no matter the expense. Now, however, conscience was jabbing
me again, but not enough to keep me from falling sound asleep as I weighed the
idea of shipping him back his money first thing tomorrow.
I was wakened by a hand prodding my shoulder and a voice asking me
something about a break. A break? I tried to open my eyes but couldn’t.
“What?” I said.
“You can see what a break it’ll be for me, Shaw. It’s a hot story. UPI’s
been on the phone with me about it. If I can get an exclusive —”
”UPI?”
“The press service. I’m a stringer for them.”
I managed to open my eyes and focus them on this intruder. Don
Schaeffer, a staff man on the college paper. The one who had done the
admiring column about my soccer prowess. “What the hell are you talking
about?” I asked.
“What do you think? That spread in the Weekly Graphic.”
32
The Graphic. One of those national tabloids that feature sensational
headlines, soft-core porno photos to illustrate fake news stories, and a large
section devoted to lonely-hearts ads, bring your own vibrator and whip. “I still
don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told Schaeffer.
“Ah, stop fooling around, Shaw.” He pulled a rolled-up newspaper,
tabloid size, from his overcoat pocket and held it up to display the front page.
“It came out this morning.”
I looked. And what I beheld was a large photograph of my n. father,
many years younger, tête-à-tête with Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And I didn’t so much read that glaring headline as seem to hear it
bellowed into my unbelieving ears.
SEXUAL FEARS MADE STATESMAN INTO BLUEBEARD, SON
REVEALS
Of course, none of this was really happening. I had fallen asleep fully
clothed and landed in the middle of a nightmare.
I took the paper from Schaeffer. Real. And looking at the small print
below the photograph which advertised Story and Other Pix on Pages 4 & 5,
I knew that worse was to come.
“Well,” Schaeffer said, “what about the interview?”
He retreated a couple of steps as I stood up. “Out,” I said, speeding him
on his way with a hand against his chest.
I closed and locked the door. I laid the paper out on the study table and
opened it to pages four and five which, side by side, presented a vivid display
of my father’s personal history.
Dorothy. Olivia. Darlene. Wendy. Phyllis.
I was directly quoted only once in the text. In the opening paragraph I set
forth the premise that my aging dad was seeking his Fountain of Youth in
perpetual remarriage. The rest of t
he text had been, like that quotation, lifted
from the journal in my desk drawer, but whittled down and sharpened to the
worst effect. The total presentation did what it was intended to do. No one
reading it could doubt that I had spilled all this to an evil-minded interviewer.
A good hater, Oscar Wylie. And shrewd. Because he had not only
murderously scored against me but must have been paid by this rag for the
pleasure of doing so. Thirty pieces of silver, no doubt.
33
If there was a record for covering the distance between the dormitory
and the Performing Arts Center, I broke it in that headlong run. I found Oscar
in his workroom, the small room he had wheedled out of the Dramatic Arts
Department, full of Movieolas, dismantled cameras and projectors, and the
rest of the stuff necessary for bringing out his genius. He was at a table with a
couple of assistants doing some close work on a piece of machinery. One look
at me in the doorway and he knew what I was there for.
When I moved he dodged around the table, but too late. I caught him
flush in the mouth with a punch so hard that it sent him reeling into the
cluttered shelving on the wall. The assistants grabbed me and I shoved them
off with no effort. But now when I moved toward Oscar he was holding
something shiny in his fist, waving it menacingly as he sputtered warnings at
me through a spray of blood from his mouth.
It could have been a length of pipe, an iron bar, a machine gun for that
matter. It was all the same to me, all of no account, because I joyously knew I
was capable of charging a battery of cannon if that was the way to him.
That was my mistake.
34
Iwas in the college infirmary, I knew as
soon as I opened my eyes, and those figures hovering over me were the doctor
in charge there and the nurse who doled out cough syrup and pills with a
miserly hand. For the rest, I understood that I was stretched out on a receiving
table still fully clothed, and that my face had a weight resting on it. I ran a
finger over the weight and discovered gauze and tape covering my nose from
cheekbone to cheekbone.
The doctor shoved my finger away. “Know who you are and where you
are?” he said.
I told him, and he said, “Perfect score,” as he checked my eyes with a
pocket light. He seemed satisfied with the results. “In layman’s language,” he
said to me, “a badly busted nose and a pair of lovely black eyes. Your father’s
already been notified about this, and we’re waiting for him to call back and
tell us what he wants done with the body — kept here or sent home.
Meanwhile, you can look through your wallet on the table there and sign a
receipt for it. It’ll be kept locked up until your discharge.”
He left, and a little while later the nurse left, and I was there alone. I
looked into the wallet and found the four hundred dollars and my passport as I
had last seen them.
The receiving room was on the ground floor. Outside its window a
block away was the cabstand where one could get a cab to the bus terminal, a
bus to New York, a plane to Paris.
The plane to Paris.
THE
KING OF
VONDEL PARK
Part II
36
In the last week of June, in the year 1971,
I became King of Vondel Park.
De Koning Vondelpark.
The event was manufactured by journalist Berti van Stade in her column,
The Woman’s Eye, which regularly appeared in that estimable daily, Het Oog
Amsterdam.
A tall young man, 26 years of age, lean and muscular. An
unkempt shock of hair, a drooping mustache, a massive beard, a
broken and battered nose. Tattooed on a powerful forearm a tulip
crossed by a dagger. The clothing? Sandals, a pair of jeans hacked
off at the thigh, no more. Dark glasses conceal the eyes. Altogether
a piratical figure, yet, as soon becomes evident, a most attractive
and compelling one.
Who is he? His name is Jan van Zee, and he is indisputably
king of that troublesome territory in our midst, Vondel Park.
That was just for openers. From there on, in equally lush prose,
followed the account of how Berti, one of the many who had been outraged
that the city of Amsterdam should allow its lovely Vondel Park to become a
hippie haven, was advised by Inspector Hendrick Spranger, in charge of the
park police, to meet with a strange young man named van Zee and see why the
experiment might work out. Van Zee, it seemed, was paterfamilias of
Amsterdam’s hippie horde, its adviser, travel agent, interpreter, intermediary
with the authorities, and propagandist against hard drugs. Most surprising of
all, he had won not only the respect of the youth movement itself, but also that
of the police in several cities for his moderation and good sense.
And so Berti had arranged for an interview with this wonder-worker
right there in Vondel Park and had been terribly, terribly impressed. And that
was how Jan van Zee — once David Hanna Shaw — came to be de Koning
Vondelpark.
The evening of the column’s publication, Hendrick Spranger showed up
at the Salamander Café in Rembrandtplein on one of his accidentally-on-
37
purpose visits, plowed through the mob like a walrus hunting its mate, and
dropped into the seat next to mine. “Jesus,” he said, “you could choke to death
from the stink of pot in here.”
He was a big, gray-haired, amiable hulk, the only cop I knew whose
presence would not stir up a shock wave in these surroundings, because he
never made an issue of small sins and tried to be fair about large ones. “The
young ones today,” he would say, shaking his head in honest bewilderment.
“Ach, de jongelui.”
Now I said to him, “I don’t like publicity, Hendrick. What made you turn
that newspaper lady loose on me?”
“Pressure from the top, boy. She’s got a lot of clout, that bitch. Also I
knew that if she fell into your hands, she’d be charmed to death, which is
exactly what happened.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not at all, Your Majesty,” said Hendrick.
38
And how had David Hanna Shaw
become Jan van Zee and entered into this curious kingdom?
The hard way.
I had landed at Orly Airport in Paris masked by surgical gauze and tape,
all my worldly possessions on my back, and very few dollars left of my hoard.
As soon as I managed to clear the barrier, no easy job considering my
bandaged and indistinguishable features, I destroyed my passport with a sense
of burning all my bridges behind me. More important, with the hounds
certainly following close behind — at least one outraged n. father and a whole
roster of outraged mothers — it was better to carry no papers than the wrong
papers. Now what I desperately needed to close the books on David Shaw and
open them on an alter ego was a French passport. A forged passport, of
course, such as I was sure could be obtained for a price, although where to
obtain it and how to get up the price were beyond immediate re
ckoning.
Meanwhile, the name of the game was survival. Harder yet, survival
without a carte d’identité. That closed every door to me where proper
identification was required, and Paris, I soon learned, was one such door after
another.
Paris in the springtime is one thing. Paris in January, especially for
someone in my pauperized condition, is another. In the grim time that
followed, it was a moot point whether I suffered more from cold or from
hunger. In a way they alleviated each other, the cold sometimes so marrowpiercing
that it made me forget my hunger, the hunger sometimes so acute that it
left no room for any other sensation. Bearded, unkempt, exuding the fragrance
of the unwashed, I became a beggar, a scavenger, a petty shoplifter in food
stores, a sleeper in doorways.
What saved me was La Société des Cousins.
It did not exist in any records, it was not known in polite society, and I
heard about it miraculously from a café sweeper-up who took pity on me. In
Montmartre, he said, on the Boulevard de Clichy and its adjoining streets were
cheap restaurants that sometimes needed an extra hand in the kitchen for a day
or two. And, most important, where the inability to show a work permit would
be overlooked. If an inspector did walk in, the temporary help would promptly
39
become the proprietor’s Cousin So-and-so in from the provinces to help out in
an emergency.
As I learned, moving from kitchen to kitchen in the guise of Cousin Jean
Lespere from Decazeville, the alleys around the Boulevard de Clichy
swarmed with cousins any busy night of the week. Most were derelicts,
perpetually foggy with wine, moving slow motion through their jobs. I came to
be the golden exception, a cousin really to be desired, as, steadily eating my
way back into form, I handled my chores full speed and with a will.
It was not work for the fastidious. One went shoulder-deep into slimy
pots to scour them properly. Disassembled broiling units to scrape every bit of
crusted fat from them. Got down on the knees with a bucket of soapy water and
brush to scrub dirt-caked floors back into shape. Performed magic on reeking
lavatory bowls. Stayed sober, pacific, and outwardly smiling, no matter how
ungrateful my employers, until I finally won recognition as the best of all
possible cousins. La fleur des pois. The pick of the crop.
Inevitably, such a pearl among cousins was destined for upward
The Luxembourg Run Page 4
