Tornado Pratt

by Paul Ableman

  And there was more: I wasn’t certain that this guy Dixie wasn’t Alex’s lover. I’d asked her once, coarsely:

  “Does he ever screw you, Alex?”

  And she’d laughed harshly and protested that he only liked college boys. Yeah, right, he had a queer trim to him okay but I also sensed virility. I didn’t think Alex would lie to me but I knew that the one thing people find it almost impossible to be truthful about is the social life of their genitals.

  So now, in the passage outside Alex’s apartment, I stood reeling. All night my palms had been clasped round my skull to prevent nightmares leaking out. Finally I’d slept and, about nine, awakened to a joyous gulp of sunlight that was suddenly flapped out by a raven wing as I recalled my ruptured reason. Then I’d determined that night-fall would either find me with an ally or smeared thin on some sidewalk. And now this toxic Dixie was polluting my refuge.

  Then—it was comic, Horace!—I thought I was still debating the issue with myself but I found myself parting the air in the wake of a powerful tractor. I caught a glimpse of map-lined walls and of Dixie’s surprised face and then Alex had towed me through her huge main room and into the bedroom beyond. She ordered:

  “Get into bed!”

  “What?”

  “Three of these—bed—sleep!”

  After taking the sleeping pills, which I wasn’t accustomed to, I slept till nearly midnight. When I woke up the first thing I saw was my own radio. Then I looked round the room and saw piles of my things. Alex came in and I asked her:

  “You bring my things over?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why, Alex?”

  “You’ll need them. You’ll obviously have to stay here for a while.”

  I was affected, Horace, by her kindness but even more by her intuition.

  “How do you know, Alex?”

  “You had that zombie look. My husband had it. Did you go out and pick a fight?”

  “Yes, I—hell—”

  “Amazing. He did the same. Now, do you want souvlakis or a steak?”

  The only thing Alex couldn’t quite understand, Horace, was my determination not to consult a professional shrink. She had extensive acquaintance amongst brain masseurs and put a lot of faith in them. She tried to persuade me of their merits and particularly of one of them that had cured her husband, but in the end I erupted:

  “Shit, Alex, they don’t cure anyone. I want to stay myself, Alex, so if you don’t stop advocating mental mutilation I’m going to have to high-tail it out of here. And that wouldn’t be so good because I have an idea I really need help this time.”

  She gave in to me—or appeared to. Maybe ten years later, I discovered, with irritation only neutralized by Alex’s sad emphysemic condition then, that she’d been secretly in touch with a shrink the whole time I was nuts—the best part of a year—and that he’d monitored my condition and given her advice on how to handle me. But by then, I didn’t care too much, Horace, because I knew that my work in the world was done and I also knew that, like all the men that have ever lived, I too had been a failure.

  BATS IN PRATTMAN’S BELFRY

  There was a little moving disk of sanity, like a follow-spot, around Alex and I tried to stay in it as much as possible. I’d lumber about with her on professional calls, to visit editors and sometimes literary celebrities she was interviewing. On these occasions, I’d usually be confided, like a lovable but sometimes clumsily destructive dog, to a servant or secretary. But Alex soon learned that there was nothing much to fear. I’d sit docile in a corner studying a framed certificate with appalled wonder or gazing warily at a paper cup.

  I let Alex infantilize me to a considerable extent, tucking me up in bed with sleeping pills, occasionally, if I hollered in the night, scrambling purposefully in beside me and holding my head pressed firmly to her nylon-sheathed breast until I went to sleep again. Because of my habit of sitting immobile in the water with the soap clutched in my hand, she took to bathing me, lathering me energetically all over, including between my legs. None of these intimacies develped any kind of erotic impetus, mainly because the thought of having sex that year was about as inviting as the thought of eating slops from a pig trough and that, in fact, was what food seemed like to me.

  PRATT SURFACES

  It was in Acapulco that I began to recover. We’d tried a few trips to mountain and sea and they hadn’t helped so Alex thought she’d try the plutocratic vulgarity of Acapulco. It wasn’t the place itself but a cruel incident one night, which might, I guess, have happened anywhere, that tripped the vital relay and set me fumbling back towards the world. Alex asked me to dance with her. I declined and she persisted. After a while I became irritable and muttered:

  “No dice, Alex. You’re no—”

  I bit that one short but she pounced on it.

  “I’m no what?”

  “You’re—the same.”

  “The same as other people, you mean?”

  “Hell, I’m grateful for everything. If it hadn’t been—”

  “Oh, shut up! Don’t be so mealy-mouthed. I want to know what you mean.”

  “About what?”

  “About me—other people—dancing. You said I was the same—the same as what?”

  “I—I can’t remember.”

  “I disgust you. That’s it, isn’t it? We all do. People disgust you, don’t they?”

  I watched a girl spin off a high-board and cleave the blue crystal of the floodlit pool. I asked:

  “How did you know that?”

  “Well, of course I know it! My husband had it. He had a very similar crisis. I had a minor one myself. Jane did—Jane Merlandine—oh, dozens of people. It’s quite standard.”

  “How do you mean, standard?”

  “Good God, don’t you know? Haven’t you read any psychopathology?”

  “Some—not much.”

  “You’re a stubborn imbecile. Any good psychiatrist—Tornado, you’re suffering from a schizophrenic withdrawal. This symptom—dehumanizing people—is quite normal. My husband—oh, I wish you’d met him. A splendid man—even if we couldn’t get on together. He had all your things but he was cured—permanently cured—in six months. Because he wasn’t a pig-headed, egotistic—oh, to hell with you!”

  It was the first time Alex had given way to natural irritation. I was a trifle alarmed but probably the shock was beneficial. But the most important thing was the sudden revelation, as it seemed to me, that what had happened to me wasn’t unique, that I shared it with a whole class of my fellows. This was a little humiliating and I perceived wryly that I’d been, in some corner of my mind, gloating on the heroic proportions of Tornado Pratt’s crack-up. But—okay!—so it was standard. On the whole I was relieved. I’d had enough by then. I gazed about, mentally, at the seas and skies and glowing cities. They seemed like dross but other men had seen them that way and returned to them in the end.

  I date my slow recovery from that moment, Horace.

  About a month later, Alex had to fly back to New York to interview Hemingway and I told her I was going to stay on. She said “okay” but she must have been worried because she set a fat couple to spy on me. Wherever I went in Acupulco this fat couple, or at least half of it, kept plodding into view. The male half of the couple was called Emmet and the female half was called—what was she called? She was a startling blonde, almost an albino, and her tanned back and belly made her look like a photographic negative. Her hair stood up like a comic nigger’s and her blue eyes were like dizzy targets. She’d call:

  “Hi, Tornado, hi there.”

  If, for example, I was taking coffee on the sidewalk of a café she’d inevitably waddle past and remark:

  “Hi, Tornado, hi there.”

  “Hi—yeah—”

  “I’m peeling all over—it’s because I’m Dutch, I guess.”

  It was irritating, the way she attributed everything to being Dutch even when there was no obvious connection. Incidentally, Minna—that was her name, Min
na—wasn’t Dutch at all. She was American. I have an idea she admitted once that she’d never even been to Holland but that may be just an embellishment. Very likely she came from Dutch ancestry but how would that explain, for example, the fact that she preferred wine to beer? No way. But if, say, I was having a drink before dinner, or maybe after dinner, in the bar of the hotel, sure as corn is yellow, she and Emmet would plod round the crimson bush into the bar and join me. Then Minna would order wine and amplify:

  “I always drink wine—it’s because I’m Dutch, I guess.”

  Whenever she used that phrase: it’s because I’m Dutch, I guess—Emmet would stiffen slightly and glance at her. He couldn’t stiffen much because he must have weighed upwards of two-hundred and fifty pounds and was only average height but even the small amount of stiffening he achieved revealed how moved he was. He had an extremely logical mind and regularly perceived the flaw in Minna’s claim. But he’d learned that she’d never concede it graciously and so he usually refrained from challenging her. But once in a while, or if she produced some really outrageous non sequitur, like:

  “Mosquitos never sting me—it’s because I’m Dutch, I guess.”

  His restraint would snap.

  “Do you think the Dutch are immune to mosquito bites?”

  “I certainly am.”

  “But that wasn’t—you made a generalization, Minna. You implied that the whole Dutch nation is mercifully free from assault by mosquito.”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

  “But you did say that. It’s ludicrous candidly.”

  “Maybe it’s because of the canals.”

  “The canals?”

  “I don’t know for sure but couldn’t it be possible that the canals breed so many mosquitos that the Dutch all get immune, like you said?”

  Emmet would sense that she was changing the basis of the discussion but he wasn’t intelligent enough to cope with it and he’d get involved in a long argument about drainage and tsetse flies and stuff.

  I got fond of Minna, who was kind, but I didn’t like it if I was brooding on the beach—say about time—and Minna heaved herself out of the scrub and called:

  “Hi, Tornado, hi there.”

  I began to feel persecuted. I had my eye on a Dutch girl—not like Minna, a real Dutch girl who was young and, I figured, glancing about for physical gratification, and one time I’d brought myself to greet her in the street and was charging myself up to date her when—Christ!—Minna loomed out of a hairdressers and loused it up by bawling:

  “Hi, Tornado, hi there.”

  You must remember, Horace, that I’d been about eight months without sex, or anyhow without anything but a few home-made orgasms, and I was still pretty tentative about the flesh. Juliet, the Dutch girl, sometimes looked very good to me—haunch and breast, moist lip and languid eye—but sometimes tendrils of my psychosis snaked out and slimed her with cold decay. So it was an effort for me to try and seduce her. I made the effort partly from flashes of desire and partly to consolidate my cure. It was thus very irritating to have Minna and Emmet practically chaperoning me. So one night in the bar I came at them with:

  “Are you two spying on me?”

  Emmet stiffened and jerked like a spastic with guilty distress. Minna asked with obviously phoney innocence:

  “What kind of question is that, Tornado?”

  “Did Alex ask you to keep an eye on me?”

  Emmet went on twitching but Minna assumed a puzzled look.

  “Alex?”

  At this blatant hypocrisy I got real mad. I began to bellow:

  “Yeah, Alex! Alexandra Wilks. You trying to kid me you don’t know the lady? Because don’t bother. I happen to know that you—know her.”

  I did know this because Alex had explained once the origins of her acquaintance with this fat couple but I couldn’t, just at that moment, recall it. This augmented—although it was naturally no fault of theirs—my anger and I begun to rage. I wanted to shake them off and I became crudely abusive. Now Minna joined Emmet in twitching and glancing but she did it in a softer, more jelly-like way. I stormed:

  “I can’t take a step without tripping over one of you—and that’s a lot to trip over. You under the impression that you’re dazzling company?”

  Minna gulped unhappily and—I can’t remember it all, Horace, but every time they tried to interject some explanation or make some soothing remark, I became worse. I can feel it now, Horace, and it chokes me with retrospective shame. That lady was no beauty and she hadn’t more brains than would animate a couple of medium-bright hounds but she’d been real solicitous. A few months later, in Paris, Alex admitted that she’d left me in their charge and that those two, fat Minna and fat Emmet, had devoted themselves pretty exclusively to my welfare and spent the time they weren’t tailing me writing her long letters about my every movement. And now I hear, spiralling thinly out of the past, my rasping and inspired voice, damning them for grotesque slobs, jeering at them as mindless mounds of flesh and avowing that I’d rather sleep in a pig pen than spend another night in a town that they were infesting. Then I jumped into the huge blue car I’d hired and sailed out of Acapulco and down the coast. And, Horace, could you do something for me? Could you track down Emmet and Minna, especially Minna, and apologize to them for me? It’s like a flail of fire whenever I recall them because they were harmless, benign human beings that tried to help me and reaped, for their pains, harsh abuse. I see them there, by the sea in Acapulco, writhing in bulky torment and I can’t think, just at present, Horace, zipping back over my days, what boon Tornado Pratt ever conferred on his fellows that justified him in harassing gentle souls. So, find them, Horace, and—

  AND WHAT?

  And—naturally—

  NATURALLY WHAT?

  Naturally—tell them—

  TELL WHO?

  Tell—who—was I—was I talking about, Horace? Was it—yeah, it was—it was Mike Dobie, wasn’t it? Horace, I don’t owe that bastard anything.

  DON’T YOU?

  I guess—okay, I do. But not much. He was in Puerto Angel, wasn’t he? I keep seeing him in Frisco and—no, hell, that’s got to be wrong because Mike was a medical priest, rooting out measles or something amongst the Indians. I got it. He sent me to Father Debré in Frisco—you see how the confusion has arisen, Horace? Same—similar—names: Dobie and Debré. And they were both priests. But Debré—no Dobie! —was a young priest and—shit, why was I palling around with priests?

  Backtrack. I zoomed up over the Sierras and down into Puerto Angel. There I beheld a girl riding on a donkey. Now I place the motive. Earlier some guy in a bar in Acapulco assured me all the girls in Puerto Angel were screwing like rattlesnakes. At the time he informed me of this I was submerged in a psychotic revulsion from the flesh and so the intelligence did nothing for me. But soon I began to surface and I made a play for a Dutch chick. But I never made it with the Dutch chick because—some fat people—decided to get my ass out of Acupulco. Then I remembered what the guy in the bar had said and I headed for Puerto Angel because I needed a sexual experience to prove I was cured.

  On about my third day in Puerto Angel. I was sitting in a bar in the main plaza when a kind of peasant girl rode past on a donkey. I’d been intending to make it with some tourist chick but they were all up at an Indian religious ceremony in the hills except for two wives from Idaho. Those two showed pronounced interest in me but one was too old and the other had terrible dandruff. I never encountered a woman with worse dandruff and it destroyed any possibility of carnal feelings.

  So when I saw this brown maiden on a donkey, I paid for my drink and followed her on foot. She disappeared into a little courtyard and there I saw her scrubbing her donkey. So I eased into the courtyard and started talking to her. She had no English but my Spanish is excellent and I made rapid progress with her. I was just going to date her when a door opened and her father, an elegant man with silver hair, came out chatting with a young priest. They chatted
in the courtyard for a few minutes and then the father, with just a glance at me, returned into the little house. The priest headed for the archway leading out of the courtyard but, as he passed us, he kind of hesitated and then asked:

  “American?”

  I felt real hostility towards him because I sensed that he sensed I was making a play for the chick and was intervening to ward off my carnal aspirations. I nodded curtly.

  He said, in English:

  “That girl is a holy virgin of God, a bride of Christ, and you shouldn’t try to defile her.”

  “I’m just talking to her.”

  “That’s okay but if you try to defile her you could be in a lot of trouble.”

  “I heard they were all whores.”

  “Then you heard wrong. The last American that came down here and tried to defile a holy virgin was fished out of the sea with his skull split open.”

  I didn’t know whether to believe him but it sure blunted my appetite. I asked:

  “You know this scene?”

  “I should do. I’ve been based here for five years.”

  Then I moseyed off with the young priest, whose name was Mike Dobie and we got deep into talk about religion and the meaning of life. But a couple of days later, I saw an American on the beach screwing a local girl. Back in the hotel, later, I asked the American if he wasn’t risking his neck and he said “no”. He claimed all you had to do was buy the father a case of whisky and you could have as many daughters as you wanted. So I went back to the courtyard to negotiate with the father but no one was in. I turned to leave and—what the hell!—there was Mike Dobie again. He said:

  “I warned you not to try and defile these holy virgins.”

  I exploded with:

  “These holy virgins are laying about all over the beach with their legs in the air.”