Vanity of Duluoz Read online

  X

  On Armistice Day, next game, my Pop Emil Duluoz came down all the way from Lowell just to see me play against Garden City, in Long Island, and also to check on how my studies were going, how the situation was in the boarding-house in Brooklyn, go see a few shows, eat a few New York steaks, take me out to see the town and generally amuse himself. Naturally I wanted to show off for Pop. Funny man that he is, and used to locker rooms as a former wrestling and boxing promoter around Lowell, he hung around as we changed and joked with us and the coaches didnt mind one bit: and my father’s presence amused the rest of the team. ‘That kooky Dulouse’s got a hell of a nice father.’ None of their own fathers ever dared to come in the locker room. We went out and took the field against poor Garden City and somewhat hurt them, if you ask me. For instance at one point, after throwing a block for Biff Quinlan I look up from the ground and see his big feet plowing onward about 20 yards with his head down, over the goal line, knocking kids aside in every direction. And a few plays later, to show off to my father and remind him again, some poor Garden City kid is waltzing around his left end precisely as Halmalo had done, but he a stranger in this case, I pull the same trick, come up full speed, low, get inside his interference and hit him head on in a legitimate and clean tackle at the knees that knocks him back 10 feet. Off the field on a stretcher.

  Now I begin to feel bad about football and war. And showing off. But after the game (HM 27, Garden City 0) my father is beaming and all delighted as we shower. ‘Come on Jacky me boy, we’re going out and hit the town tonight.’ So we go down to Jack Delaney’s steak restaurant on Sheridan Square, myself little knowing how much time I was destined to spend around that square, in Greenwich Village, in darker years, but tenderer years, to come.

  Ah it’s Good Friday night and I’m going to write what I want.

  XI

  In a way, tho, I was paying back my father in good kind for the humiliation of his being fired because I had not wanted (had not wanted?), hadnae wanted to go to a Jesuit school, let’s put it flatly. Not only did I want to go to Columbia College in New York City so I could dig the city instead of, say, South Bend, or Boston, or Durham NC, but I didnt like the idea of being told what to think by professors in big black robes and end up . . . well, I dont know where I got the idea that Jesuits are not to be trusted, but I’ve been reading about that in history these past years, the only hitch being, lo and bingo, I’m now one of the world’s worst secret Jesuits, everything I do is based on some kind of proselytization, everything I’ve written, just take a close look. ‘I got this position where the Jesuits aint got no right to be sore at me and where the non-Jesuits may sigh and rest,’ I’m sayin to myself tonight. To each his own.

  What do the Jesuits really say? That everybody’s got to be a Catholic because there’s no other way out of the impasse of medieval theology. But if like Pascal, Blaise Pascal, their ‘enemy’ in the seventeenth century, they simply should say that Christ is the Son of God because nobody can prove otherwise, I should have bought them. Yet I’m a Jesuit today, secret General of the Order, like Ulysses S. Grant the general that rocks in the rocking chair with a bottle . . . but more of this later when I get into the history of the vanity of what resulted from the football and the college studies that led to the writing and the thinking, wifey dear.

  So here comes the game against Tome. Tome is an undefeated team (prep school) from Maryland and has absolutely no regard for our awesome reputation now in New York City. Here they are all lined up. I’ve again had my two hot fudge sundaes in Brooklyn that morning, that ‘shadow’ has twice passed the windows of the ice cream parlor, again I ride uptown with Uncle Nick. This time he’s looking at me funny.

  A cold sunny day, all the gang from the school yelling on the sidelines, and midway in the first quarter I get a punt spiraling down to me from the blue and hope to God I wont drop it because I’m not going to raise my hand and ask for a fair catch, which would mean, catch it and touch it down to the ground meekly. I know they’ll be right on me when I catch it. But once it’s in my breadbasket and there they are looming over me, the Tome ends who’ve come barreling down the field to nab me, I dart to the right laughing and go scooting along past their outstretched hands and come up to the sidelines where I see my chums cheering: Bill Keresky, Gene Mackstoll, Jimmy Winchel (more about them later) and I yell: ‘Hey Bill! Hey Gene!’ and seeing a guy from Tome is coming up to bump me into the crowd I reverse, that is, reverse is too slow a word, I jack off to the left, leaving everybody (‘Jack be Nimble, Jack be Quick!’ said the little picture Ma had hung on my bedroom wall in Lowell) and there I am sweeping into the whole gang in midfield. I’ve caught the punt on my own 28-yard line, I’m now at midfield. They’re all there. Lebreon throws a block across a Tome guy so I jack right again and sprint to the sidelines again. Once again a Tome guy. I jack off left again, leave him there, another downfield block by Hartmann, another by DeLucia, another by Theodore, even Quiffy Quinlan is rolling around some guy’s legs; I see that all I have to do is keep my eyes open and slant right in another 30 yards as fast as I can. I get to the 5-yard line, am in trouble with a cluster of three Tome men, come right up on them staring right at them like I’m going to try to bust head on into their midst and scatter them, which they laugh to think is impossible, being big, but brainy suddenly jacks off right again, leaving them there doing the minuet, and we win the game 6–0, another big upset in the prep school east in 1939.

  In this game, too, somewhere in the third quarter, I let loose a quick kick I’ll never forget. (Now if Quinlan, Corelli et al. want to reminisce about their great play in that game and the others, let them, but this is my turn.) I actually squatted down as if to catch the center pass and run, backed up, plunked the ball, just right of my twisted-in foot, and spiraled through the air a 55-yard punt that then proceeded to roll another 30 yards or so in the wind and ended up resting on the Tome two or some such awful development for them. And I even threw a pass, I think my second pass of the year, an idea by Ump Mayhew as element of surprise, and completed it, to Quinlan, who caught it and ran a first down out the sidelines.

  Mainly, you might say, it was myself that gazed on our coach Mayhew with amazement, more than the amazement with which he gazed at me, because for the first time in my official football career a coach had actually let me play every minute of every game in exactly the manner I was born to play.

  And my Paw wrote him that.

  And after the Tome game was over and we were the heroes of New York City prep football, up comes that ‘shadow’ behind me, touches me on the shoulder, it’s Uncle Nick, he says to me: ‘If you not eat so many hot fudge sundaes this morning, you score six more touchdowns.’

  Book Three

  I

  After that it was the usual resting on laurels, waiting to go to Columbia the following autumn, casual movies, casual love affairs (?) (no such thing), casualties not crass, in any case, in other words, since I didnt play basketball (too short) and didnt want to run outdoor track I had nothing to do all winter but enjoy my new friends, the classes too, a whole mess of idle stuff that can be summed up in a few succinct cameo sentences in a paragraph: as wit:

  Weekends at Ray Olmsted’s apartment with his parents and kid brother, in Yonkers, the affair with Betty there, skating on the Yonkers pond and a few kisses here and there. Sharpy Gimbel yelling ‘Hi’ from his convertible at the dance. Excited talks over scores with Izzy Carson in his West End Avenue apartment. A cigar given to me by a cigar manufacturer. New York Giants football games at Polo Grounds with Gene and his father. Central Park at dawn. Chuck Derounian the Armenian kid playing me old Bix records in Washington Heights. Hors d’oeuvres at Jake Kraft’s on Fifth Avenue, incredible thick rugs and huge marble statuettes and fragrance of coats in the hall. Walks in the blizzard across the Brooklyn Bridge, alone. Running down Fifth Avenue downtown pellmell with a small paralyzed man in my arms, with . . . wait
a minute, pushing a small paralyzed man down lower Fifth Avenue in his wheelchair, taking him in my arms, putting him in the cab, folding in his wheelchair, he saying ‘Thanks, that was a great run! I’m a music publisher, my name is Porter.’

  (True.) (Cole Porter on a secret spree?)

  Everybody sighed to kiss Babsy Schler who must be the ugliest bat on earth today by now. Interviewing Glenn Miller backstage at the Paramount Theater for the school paper, Glenn Miller saying ‘Shit.’ Interviewing Count Basie in the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, for the school paper, Count saying: ‘I want quiet brass.’ Hanging around lunchcarts hoping to meet Hemingway heroes. Lounging around with the Irish gang of Horace Mann, Hennessey, Gully Swift, O’Grady, with feet slightly stuck out and a certain accent. Same gang on street corner on Columbia campus when I visit Hennessey for weekends there, now with Jacky Cabot and others including one silent slender lad: William F. Buckley, Jr! Sunday mornings on Park Avenue looking out the Venetian blinds of David Knowles’ bedroom, his parents away, his maid coming in with breakfast. Every one of them I went to their house. Dean John Goldthwaithe introducing his son to me in front of the rose-covered granite cottage on HM campus, son turns out to be president of a giant airline today. Everybody in the school wants the two pretty girls in the office staff down in the lockers. Class photo Duluoz fails to show up, too busy somewhere. At a school play the Gerson twins come out of both ends of a box: both look alike: one of them later saw ‘insects in the snow’ in Red China. Jimmy Winchel, pimply, playing the violin and chasing after girls all the way to the Riviera, it turned out, after which he had to charge to Brazil with two million. Jonathan Miller looking at me thru slitted eyes because of what his father said. Gully Swift playing pingpong. Reginald W. Klein putting on an English accent, saying he’s going to be a poet. Mike Hennessey looking at me and saying ‘Flazm’. Marty Churchill making extra money, tho rich, by walking an old invalid down upper Broadway every night at eight. Ray Olmsted combing his hair with Tyrone Power eyebrows. Jacob U. Gelsenheimer serious on the viola. S. Martin Gerber looking thru a microscope. Ern Salter patting his belly like comedian Jack E. Leonard. Biff Quinlan shaking his head at me. Irv Berg on the microphone. Joe A. Gold, later to be killed in the war, having me for weekend at his apartment on Riverside Drive, his two small older brothers discussing silk stocks. Bill Keresky looking at me and saying ‘Schlazm’. Gene Mackstoll jerking down Broadway as tho being yanked at by the Invisible Man. Also looking at me and saying, ‘Frazm’. Lionel Smart, eyes shining bright, making me listen to Lester Young on clarinet playing ‘Way Down Yonder in New Orleans’ and the other side, ‘I Want a Little Girl’. Cy Zukove swimming in the pool with great athletic forward drive.

  II

  Not such a hot cameo. How about this? (I want to give you an exact but short picture of what it was like at that really remarkable school.) Because they were a bunch of wits. Now wits abound in Lowell too, wifey, like you know, but these are big-town New York wits and to explain it:

  Say, I do, that among the fantastic wits of this school Jimmy Winchel ranked practically number one. I was just an innocent New England athlete (well not so innocent, but of wit in the witty sense, yes) but I was suddenly thrown into what amounted to an academy of incunabular Milton Berles hundreds of them wise-cracking and ad libbing on all sides, in the classroom when possible, on the field, at recess, in the subway going home into downtown Manhattan proper, over the phone at night, even years later in letters exchanged from college to college. We were all in stitches all the time. The chief claque of official huge wits was led by Bill Keresky, Gene Mackstoll, Marty Churchill (né Bernstein), Mike Hennessey, Gully Swift, Paul O’Grady and Ern Salter but when mention of Jimmy Winchel was made there fell a kind of stricken convulsion just at the thought of him. He was insanely witty. So much so that now, today, as I read about his recent escapade with the two million dollars I mentioned, I laugh, not because I think it’s funny (and anyway Jimmy’s paid it all back honestly, or tried), but because Jimmy is so funny, it’s almost as tho he’d pulled this last fantastic joke to tear the funnyguys of HM apart for once and for all (in some dim way at the back of his mind when he absconded to Brazil I do seriously believe this to be true, God bless child even when he get old).

  Prep school humor is always a little bit insular. At HM in that year there were three elements mainly involved: (1) A kind of Al Kelly doubletalk, ‘Flazm’, ‘Schmazm’, etc. (as I showed) used when you couldnt find the right word, the humor coming mainly from the particular adolescence of lip delivery (kid humor), and (2) saying ‘mine’ instead of ‘me’, ‘yours’ instead of ‘you’, ‘his’ instead of ‘he’, ‘His is going to write mine a letter’ etc. in a completely madcap extension of phallic reference common among kids, and (3) using the names of classmates who were not ‘wits’ and were not ‘athletes’ but were rather obscure serious scholars behind their spectacles studying about Hérault de Séchelles and the Horstus Siccus and the Hindu Kush and the Manoeuvres Military and Louise de Quéroualles and the neuro-pathological Spirochae pallidum with Professor Lionel Greeting at dusk, and whose names, altho almost invariably hilarious in themselves (Bruno Golemus, Melvin Mandel, Otis Zimmerman, Randall Garstein, Matthew Gdansk), were infinitely more hilarious when you thought of their shabby pitiful demeanors and ridiculous obscurities about the campus and so amenably given to goof-off putdowns (sometimes little tiny weird fourth-formers with undeveloped masculinities, naturally, say, but already strange). So later I get letters at Columbia from Jimmy at Cornell in 1940 that go like this: ‘Dear F – face, after all my flasimode talking to you etc. you must call her tonight and ask her when Dick’s is coming into the city again and leap up to mine. So I’ll see yours Saturday’s. I’m coming into its this week’s load . . . or in other words Dear Wang Load, how do you like this paper, I got so much of the Wang Load stuff that I will probably have to give it to my grandchildren to use for toilet paper. I’m really terribly sorry that I didnt write to yours sooner but mine was a little tired from overwork and I knew that yours wasnt so tired as mine so that if mine overexerted while writing to yours, yours might have to also overexert and write to mine. Does yours get it? Mine does. How’re Gussie Resbin, Minnie Donoff, Kittie Kolpitz, Mordecai Letterhandler, Ishmael Communevisch, Downey Coucle the Irish Tenor, and all the boys getting along? I heard that Gabe Irrgang, Andrew Lawrence Goldstein, Ted Dressman, Ray Flamm and you were really tearing your spheroids off playing football for Coach Lu Libble at Columbia, and that you and Mel Mandel and the Gerson brothers were really going to town’ (these all scholars I’d never talked to, even, sort of expertise secret technicians studying in lower labs). ‘Did you hear about the fellow who went to the doctor and said “Doctor please look at my kidley” and the doctor said “You mean your kidney dont you?” then the man said “That’s what I said diddle I?” . . . PS. By the way, S. Martin Gerber sends his regards to all the boys back at HM including Joe Rappaport and Axel Finnkin.’ And the letter’s signed: ‘J. Winchel, Alias Christian Goldberg.’

  But just to show yours further, wifey, what it’s like to be in that school, Bill Keresky was a classmate of Jimmy’s at Cornell at the time (this is a year later but relevant to explaining the school in 1939) and tried to outdo Jimmy with the following letter: ‘Dear Jack, how’s everything at Columbia’s? Have Hennessey and Mandel made the basketball team yet? Jerkit Winchel trades his ’31 Chevy in for a ’32 Windslammer so we’ve been riding ours around It’s ‘hacas in style of late. It’s been snowing up here and is as cold as a date in midwinter in Flushing. The seniors of the house had us shoveling snow and I almost froze it, I think next week might be initiation and mine is already begging for mercy’s. We had our ends pounded off last week for excessive dubbing during the meal, without our frosh things on. It’s so cold here I thought we could get out of wearing our frosh caps but I found out they have special winter fresh pulloffers that you must wear in winter. They probably even make you wear frosh things und
erneath when you have an affair with a coed’s. Give my best to Flavius Fondle, Otis Outhouse, Duke Douche, Anne Enema, Schuyler Scrotum, Venus Venereal, Wanda Wantit, Schuyler Scuttle, Stephen Straddle, Scrag Scrotum, Terrence Tinkleman, Rod Railspitter, Flogg Itt, Vera Vajj, Pauline Parturient, Nessie Nightsoil, Messy Mingle, Olga Orgy and Phyllis Straddler. Write! Dont miss The Importance of Being Ernest’s starring Reggie Klein and Irvie Sklar. PS Livia Lips, Tina Tip, Chad Chaff, Marmaduke Modess, Manny Monthly, Monty Mound, Bea Between, Pierpont Pussnblood, Staunton Sterile, Charlotte Shriveled, Hank Hang, Eunice Underslung, Forrest Fieldcookie, Meadow Waffle, Terence Tonguebath, Ray Round the world and Flavious Fecal were all asking for you. PP SS Dont forget to drop a note to Apollo Goldfarb and Arapahoe Rappaport.’ It was all moonlight on the lawn, J. D. Salinger middleclass Jewish living-rooms with the lights out and the futile teenage doubledate blind smooching in the park, all these kids who became financial wizards, restaurateurs of great renown, realtors, department store tycoons, scientists, here they were stalking around the halls of the school with incredible leers waiting like tigers to pounce on someone with a sleering joke, the latest, an academy of wits finally as I say.

  III

  Anyway you get an idea, just from this mosaic, what it was like after the football season was over, and then, come graduation time I had no money to buy a white suit so I just sat in the grass in back of the gym and read Walt Whitman with a leaf of grass in my mouth while the ceremonies were going on in the field, with flags. Then when it was over I came over and joined everybody, shook hands all around, graduated with a 92 average, and rode downtown with Mike Hennessey and his mother to his apartment on the Columbia campus, 116th and Broadway, which was going to be my campus in the fall after a summer in Lowell. (Played on the baseball team for HM that spring but not well: I batted about .197, ugh.)