Vanity of Duluoz Page 15

  I said ‘There, Big Slim, we must have a lot in common.’

  ‘That aint no Harvard lie, boy, and no Oxford lie, nuther. Now I’m goin to show you how to cheat at poker.’

  ‘I dont play cards, dont worry.’

  ‘I dont know how else we can spill our time in this bizarficated ruthouse . . .’

  ‘Well just tell me stories about your true life.’

  ‘Well one time I flattened a cop in the Cheyenne Wyoming railyards, like this,’ and this big fist like Jack Dempsey’s in my face.

  ‘Slim dont hit me with that, will ya?’

  ‘Look, I also got, soon’s the lights go out, some chewin tobacco, then, here in this paper carton we can spit . . . here’s your chaw.’ So we start in on chawin and spittin. The psychos were all asleep.

  III

  Big Slim says then ‘Boy, one time I was in Atlanta Georgia and saw this burlesque gal do a show and went down to the corner bar after the show to have a short beer and whiskey, and she walked in there, ordered a drink, and I slapped her right on the rump and said “Good girl.”’

  ‘Was she mad?’

  ‘Was she ever? But I got outa that okay.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘When I was a young boy my mother put out a pie on the window in Ruston Louisiana and a hobo came by and asked her if he could have a piece. My mother said to go ahead. I said to my mother “Can I be a hobo someday Maw?” She said “It aint for the likes of the Holmeses.” But I didnt take her advice and became a hobo just in love of hoboing and all that pie idea.’

  ‘Pie Clue.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Slim, have you ever hurt anybody?’

  ‘Nossir boy, except that cop in the yards at Cheyenne.’

  ‘What was your work?’

  ‘East Texas oil fields boy, and bronco buster just outa there, cowboy, oil worker, hobo, tug worker in New York City Harbor, and seaman.’

  ‘Deck?’

  ‘What else boy, you think I’m goin to hang around in the engyne room with a bandana round my brow?’

  ‘So what do we do, Slim?’

  ‘Keep your mouth shut, we’ll secure some butter knives tomorrow night supper and put em in our lockers and then we can break the locks open . . . You hear them freight trains out there bringing crap to this Naval base? We’ll bust locks and go out in our pajamas and hop that freight right straight down to a haystack I told you about in Baltimore, and then we’ll go to Montana, Butte, and get drunk with Mississippi Gene . . . Meanwhile,’ he says, ‘jist chew some of this tobacco and tell me some of yore stories.’

  ‘Well Slim I aint as colorful as you are but I sure ben around . . . like that time in Washington when I waved my dicker at the White House, or Sydney Nova Scotia when we pushed a whole shack into the bay, or in Lowell Mass. when a guy was tryin to kill my Polish buddy against the car with a rain of killin punches, I told him to stop it, he said “What?” I said “Stop it!” “Who are you?” “Fucketh you, man,” and his father had to drag me off his back, he was really tryin to kill that poor kid.’

  ‘Yair, you pretty strong lil ole boy but conjure up in yo mind if you will, what I would do to you with this fist?’

  ‘Lissen Jack Dempsey that do drinketh, forget it?

  ‘But my Polish buddy liveth,’ I said, looking Big Slim right in the eye, and he knew what I meant. (An incident I didnt throw in during the early chapters of this entire nuthouse novel.)

  Slim liked me and I liked Slim, we were both strong men, and gay, independent and free-minded and the Navy I think sorta appreciated it because you’ll see later.

  IV

  One afternoon I was smoking a butt under the bed at the end of the ward when all of a sudden the dingblasted admiral himself opened the door and ushered in two men. I blanked the butt and sneaked out looking suave. It was Leonid Kinsky and Akim Tamiroff, the Hollywood actors, coming around to entertain the entertained nuts of the nuthouse ward. But it was strange. I really thought they’d seen me smoking, but no, just coincidental, Big Slim was napping, the manic depressive was napping, the hairy guy was napping, the Negro was trying to find a card game and the guy who’d shot himself thru the head was sitting glumly in a wheelchair with a bandage around his head. I go right up to Akim Tamiroff and tell him, ‘You were wonderful in The General Died At Dawn.’

  ‘Why tank you.’

  ‘And you, Monsieur Kinsky, how’s things in the Communist Party?’

  ‘Oh, Hokay?’

  ‘Sorry, but, Mister Tamiroff, you were wonderful in The General Died At Dawn and also in For Whom the Bell Tolls and as the French Canadian Indian deadshot in De Mille’s, you know, Cecil Northwest picture . . .’

  ‘Tank you.’ They had more fun than we had. I dont know what they were doing there? Dunt be silly.

  V

  Then here comes my pa, father Emil A. Duluoz, fat, puffing on cigar, pushing admirals aside, comes up to my bedside and yells ‘Good boy, tell that goddam Roosevelt and his ugly wife where to get off! All a bunch of Communists. The Germans should not be our enemies but our Allies. This is a war for the Marxist Communist Jews and you are a victim of the whole plot. Would I were old enough, I would join the NMU and sail with you, go down, be bombed, I dont care, I am a descendant of great seamen. You tell these emptyheaded admirals who are really stooges of the government around here that your father said you’re doing the right thing,’ and with this, and while being overheard by said admirals, stomped out fuming on his cigar and took the train back to Lowell.

  Then in comes Sabby in a US Army uniform, sad, idealistic, crewcutted now, but dream-minded, trying to talk to me, ‘I have remembered, Jack, I have kept faith,’ but the nutty manic depressive from West Virginny shoves him in a corner and grabs him by the private’s sleeves and yells ‘Wabash Cannonball’ and poor Sabby’s eyes are misting and looking at me saying, ‘I came here to talk to you, I only have twenty minutes, what a house of suffering, what now?’

  I say ‘Come in the toilet.’ West Virginia follows us yelling, it was one of his good days. I said ‘Sabby dont worry, the kid’s okay, everybody’s okay . . . Besides,’ I added, ‘there’s nothing for me or you to say . . . Except, I s’pose, that time when Bartlett Junior High School was burning down and my train was taking me back to New York prep school and you ran alongside, remember? in the snowstorm singing “I’ll See You Again” . . . huh?’

  And that was the last time I saw Sabby. He was fatally wounded on Anzio beachhead after that. He was a medical corpsman.

  VI

  Anzio: that was, as we say nowadays, Churchill’s goof. How can you have a bunch of men wait ashore under hill-protected fire? Right down on them. And after that Mark Clark had the nerve to march on Rome when everybody in his right mind knew that he should have marched to the Adriatic and cut off the Germans in half? No, he wanted to be laureled in Rome. This is my laurel wreath: he may be damned for the dead of Salerno too.

  But you cant court-martial the troubles of war.

  I didnt add that last sentence because I’m yellow but because a general cant keep track of everything any more than I can.

  VII

  I sat in the window staring out at the spring trees with a kind kid from Athol Massachusetts who didnt talk to me any more after our initial night of harmonizing on ‘Shine On Harvest Moon’ . . . He was dying of what I dont know . . . He stopped talking to me . . . The sailor corpsmen came around to console him, bring him trays of food, he threw it right back at them . . . I said ‘Why dont you sing?’ . . . He answered not . . . Finally, after me and him spent a week looking out the window in absolute silence, they took him away and I never saw him again . . . They say he just died there in his padded cell. He sure could sing. French kid from Mass.

  The guy with the bandage around his head had shot himself clean thru with a pistol, the bulle
t went in one way and came out the other, poor man wasnt even dead as he’d wished, and sat there glooming in a chair with a woeful blue-eyed stare under white shroudy bandages, like some kind of inverted-for-real Genet Hero. In one channel and out the other. A kind of corridor in the brain. Empty heads abound everywhere. Try it sometime. Don’t be too sure.

  But what inordinate gloom possessed him to try that? Like when the Navy discovered that me and Big Slim were hiding butter knives in our drawers, they ordered two big husky Navy corpsmen with straitjackets to come over and take us into control and into an ambulance and over to the train and down to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, just the state where Slim wanted to go. As I was standing around doing nothing, the two big Naval corpsmen with straitjackets were saying ‘I’m not worried about the little guy Dulouse, but what about that big sonumbitch Holmes? He’s six foot five.’

  ‘Keep an eye on them.’

  ‘What they do?’

  ‘Hid butter knives to break open the locks and break out.’

  ‘Sweet Navy men.’

  ‘We gotta conduct em all the way down to Bethesda so take it easy.’

  ‘Big boy be all right,’ I said to them.

  So here we go leaving Newport Naval Base under the conduction of two big Navy corpsmen with straitjackets, in an ambulance, and to the train to Washington, and Slim is in front of me, ’cause he’s so big, and he keeps yelling back to me ‘You still there Jack?’

  ‘Still with you Slim.’

  ‘You really still with me?’

  ‘Cant you hear my voice?’

  That night on the train trip to Washington we were left alone in separate sleeping compartments, while the corpsmen waited outside, and I took the opportunity to fantasize, or that is, to relieve myself of the horror of masculinity. ‘Heart’ and ‘Kiss’ is only something’s sung by gals.

  VIII

  Down there at Bethesda me and Slim was put first in the real nut ward with guys howling like coyotes in the mid of night and big guys in white suits had to come out and wrap them in wet sheets to calm them down. Me ‘n’ Slim looked at each other, two merchant seamen, ‘Shucks boy, I wish I was back in the East Texas oil field.’

  But the doctor was Dr Ginsberg and had me interviewed, read that half-written novel they’d all puzzled over in Newport RI, and said in a grand tone ‘Well allright, what do you really think you are?’

  ‘I, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m only old Samuel Johnson, I was the nut of the Columbia campus, everybody knew it, elected me vice-president of the sophomore class and said I was a man of letters. No, Dr Ginsberg, a man of letters is a man of independence.’

  ‘Yes, and what does that mean?’

  ‘It means, sire, independent thought . . . now go ahead and put me up against a wall and shoot me, but I stand by that or stand by nothing but my toilet bowl, and furthermore, it’s not that I refuse Naval discipline, not that I WONT take it, but that I CANNOT. This is about all I have to say about my aberration. Not that I wont, but that I cant.’

  ‘And why did you consider yourself some kind of Samuel Johnson on the Columbia campus?’

  ‘Well, talked to everybody about everything in literate detail.’

  ‘And this is the image of yourself?’

  ‘This is what I am, was, and will be! Not a warrior, Doctor, please, but a coward intellectual . . . but only in the sense that I feel I have to defend a certain portion of Athenian ethos, as might we say, and not because I’m yellow, because certainly, I AM yellow, but I just cant take that business of telling me how to be day in and day out. If you want a war, let the men run wild, if war you want. Again I’ve failed in explaining myself. I cannot accept, or that is, I cannot live with your idea of discipline, I’m too much of a nut, and a man of letters, and besides, let me go and I’ll go right back on that North Atlantic as a civilian seaman . . .’

  Honorable discharge, indifferent character.

  IX

  No pension. No pea cap even. It was that Navy dentist who really turned me off. Who was he anyway? Some schmuck from Richmond Hill Center?

  X

  So I had a week left before I was to be discharged. It was May and now we were wearing our Navy whites. I was thereupon called ‘Johnny Greensleeves’ but not because my elbows were lying around girls’ flanks but because I was hanging around drunk drinking out of bottles with a Marine called Bill McCoy, of Lexington Kentucky, in the grass parks of Washington.

  Ole Bill was okay.

  He used to give a sharp salute to officers in the streets of Washington while I stared at him in amazement.

  I was just about the least military guy you ever saw and shoulda been shot against a Cuban wall. But you’ll see later on how I saved a US ship from bombardment. Two months later.

  XI

  So I go out and take a nap after a big drinking spree with Bill McCoy the Marine, in my Navy whites, and the workmen find me there lying on the green grass bankside, and say ‘Are you alive?’

  I say ‘What you mean, am I alive? What’s all this shit?’

  They say ‘We just thought you were dead. We honestly thought you were dead.’

  I say ‘Go droppeth a turd.’ And besides, when a sailor in whites cant take a nap on a green bankside then what’s painting gonna go to? Green and white, look.

  Old Bill McCoy the Marine had a friend who was a sailor who was an ex-cabdriver who looked out the window with me in his bathrobe and said ‘It’s real cock weather out thar, wish I was out thar.’ Easy does it.

  Meanwhile, as I was sticking it up my ass with Mobilgas, a nut came to me and said I was not allowed on earth: I said ‘Do you mean that Stan Satan walks the earth today?’

  He said, ‘Man he comes outa manhole covers every day in revolutionary holes in New York.’

  I said I saw that down by that phony Parthenon by Wall Street. ‘Steam comin outa holes.’ He asked me how come I knew so much about hell, not being a denizen. I said ‘Dante has apprised me of his heroes. And Goethe laid the path out. Pascal wept it thru. And the good gray poet Whitman outlined, Melville poeticized it, and my friends discussed it at night.’

  He said ‘Who are you?’

  I said ‘Little Pete’.

  He said ‘Do you want to shoot pool?’

  I said ‘After I make my break, and may not sink anything and you miss some dumb choice, I’ll slice that first ball into the corner with a little scythe, as soft as your Devil.’

  ‘And therefore you’re the Devil.’

  ‘No, I’m his wind. And I’m gone as much from his influence, as this ungraspable handshake.’

  This is where the book, the story, pivots.

  This is known by Massachusetts Yankees as ‘deep form’.

  Funny halfbacks dont have to sell Pepsi-Cola.

  Book Ten

  I

  Tho sometimes I’d just look out the window of the mad ward and watch a little dirt road that wound westward into the woods of Maryland leading to Kentucky and the rest, on misty days it had a particularly nostalgic look that reminded me of boyhood dream of being a real ‘Arkansas Railbird’ with father and brothers on a horse ranch, myself a jockey, none of this drunken sailor shot and especially none of this cute and wise guy attitude toward the Navy, even the writing I’ve just used to describe the US Navy in last few chapters has been cute and wise guy. At the age of twenty-one I could have gained a lot out of loyal membership to that outfit, learned a trade maybe, gotten out of the stupid ‘literary’ deadend I find myself trapped in now, especially the ‘loyalty’ part of it: for tho I’m a loyal person I’ve got nothing left to be loyal about, or for. Does it matter to five thousand sneering college writing instructors that I wrote seventeen novels after a youth of solitary practice amounting to over two million words, by the window with the star
in it at night, the bedroom window, the cheap room window, the nut ward window, the porthole window, eventually the jail window? I saw that little winding dirt road going west to my lost dream of being a real American Man . . .

  Of course Big Slim he woulda laughed at me hearing me talk this way and woulda said ‘Name your windows, boy!’

  I was charged, made to sign my name to a form assuring that I could never file for a bonus, wasnt even given my Navy clothes (nice big pea coat, pea cap, whites, darks, etc.) but just given fifteen dollars to go downtown in my whites and buy me a going-home outfit. It was June so I bought sports shirt and slacks and shoes.

  In the mess hall during the last few days at Bethesda I looked at all those guys eating that good food and yelling and talking and I felt I had betrayed not so much ‘my country’, which I havent as you know, but this here United States Navy. If it hadnt been for that stupid dentist in Newport making me sick at the thought of being demeaned by a guy just because he has a higher rank. Isnt it true that the greatest admirals are the ‘bulliest’ and most intimate characters, ‘one of the boys’, off their high horse?

  Aw well, it was time for me to hit that old drunken waterfront seaman and eventual road hobo trail and at the same time keep up my studies and solitary writings. I hadnt learned anything in college that was going to help me to be a writer anyway and the only place to learn was in my own mind in my own real adventures: an adventurous education, an educational adventure-someness, name it.

  I took a few walks around lilac evening fields of Bethesda Md. with WAVES and such the last week and then went home in the choo choo train.

  II

  Big Slim wasnt discharged till a week later. He too went back to the Merchant Marine. He said he’d look me up in New York.