Tough Guys Don't Dance

by Norman Mailer

  “Hey,” I said, “if you ever stop talking, we might have a conversation.”

  “One night soon. Let’s get drunk.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “In the meantime, if I had placed my stash in a patch in Truro …” He paused.

  “I don’t keep a stash there,” I said.

  “I’m not saying you do. I don’t want to know. I’m just saying if I did leave something there, I would contemplate getting it out.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you everything.”

  “Just want to tickle my stick?”

  He took a good pause before he replied. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been a State Trooper. You know that. And I know them. Most of those guys are all right. They’re not high on humor and they never would be your kind, but they’re all right.”

  I nodded. I waited. I thought he would go on. When he didn’t, I said, “They are not nice about marijuana.”

  “They hate it,” he said. “Keep your nose clean.” He gave me a whale of a buffet on the back and disappeared down into the basement offices of Town Hall.

  I found it hard to believe that our State Troopers, who considered it part of their job description to be lazy in fall, winter and spring so that they would be gung ho for a prodigious three months of suffering through summer traffic and its associated madness on Cape Cod, were now, in November, going to come pouring out of South Yarmouth Barracks in order to search Down-Cape through every petty field of marijuana in Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro. Still, they might be bored. They might also know about my plot. Sometimes I thought there were as many narcs as dopeheads on the Cape. Certainly in Provincetown the trade in dope information, disinformation, deals and double-crosses had to be the fourth largest industry right behind the polyester day tourists, the commercial fishing, and the congeries of gay enterprise.

  If the State Troopers knew about my field—and maybe the proper question was, How could they not?—should I assume they were also well-disposed toward my wife and myself? One could doubt that. Our summer parties were too famous. Patty Lareine had large vices—madness of the heart and serious disloyalty being two I could name on the instant—but she also had the nice virtue of not being a snob. It might be said that she could hardly afford to be, given her redneck commencements, but who did that ever inhibit? If, after the trial, she had stayed in Tampa or made a daring move to Palm Beach, she would have had to play by the tactics that ambitious predecessors had perfected: slice, snip, soft-claw, and tenderize her way into marrying even higher respectability than Wardley—that was the only game with high stakes for the ego that a rich and notorious divorcée could play on the Gold Coast. An interesting life, if those are your talents.

  Of course, I never pretended to understand Patty. She may even have been in love with me. It is hard to find a clearer explanation. I am a great believer in Occam’s Razor, which states that the simplest explanation accounting for the facts is bound to be the correct explanation. Since I was no more than her chauffeur in the year before we got married, and since I had “crapped out” (those were her words) for deciding I did not care to murder her husband; since I was also an ex-con who could certainly assist her up no marble stairways in no mansions in Palm Beach, it was never comprehensible to me why she should desire my medium-attractive presence in marriage unless she did feel a salubrious melting in her heart. I don’t know. We had something in bed for a while, but that can be taken for granted. Why else would a woman marry down? Later, when it all got bad, I began to wonder if her true passion was to reveal the abyss beneath my vanity. Devil’s work.

  No matter. Once we got to Provincetown, my only point is that she proved no snob. You couldn’t move to Provincetown if you were a snob, not if social advancement was your goal. Some year I would like a sociologist to crack his teeth on the unique class system of our local society. The town, as I would probably have enjoyed explaining to Jessica Pond if I had had the chance, was once, a hundred and fifty years ago, a port for whalers. Cape Cod Yankee captains made up our establishment then, and they brought in Portuguese from the Azores to man the boats. Then the Yankees and Portuguese intermarried (just as the Scotch-Irish and Indians, Carolina cavaliers and slave women, Jews and Protestants were wont to do). By now, half the Portuguese had Yankee names like Cook and Snow, and by whatever name, owned the town. In winter the Portuguese dominated just about all of it, fishing fleet, Board of Selectmen, St. Peter’s Church, the lower ranks of the police force, and most of the teachers and students in the grade school and high school. In summer the Portuguese also presided over nine tenths of the rooming houses and more than half of the bars and cabarets. Yet they were a down-in-the-grease up-to-the-elbows gearbox of an establishment. They kept to themselves, and enjoyed no high houses on any hills. The richest Portugee in town might, for all you knew, be living next to one of the poorest, and but for the new coat of paint, you could not tell the houses apart. No Portuguese son I heard of went to any great university. Maybe they were all too respectful of the wrath of the sea.

  So if you wanted to look for some little splash of money, you waited for summer when enclaves of psychoanalysts and art-oriented well-to-do members of the liberal establishment came up from New York to be flanked by a wide panorama of gay society plus the narcs and dope dealers, and half of Greenwich Village and SoHo. Painters, presumptive painters, motorcycle gangs, fuckups, hippies, beatniks and all their children came in, plus tens of thousands of tourists a day driving in from every state of the Union to see for a few hours what Provincetown looked like, because there it was—on the extremity of the map. People have a tropism for the end of the road.

  In such a stew, where the townsfolk were the only establishment we had, and the grandest summer houses (with one or two exceptions) were beach cottages, medium beach cottages; in a resort where there were no mansions (but one), no fine hotels, no boulevards!—Provincetown owned only two long streets (the rest were hardly more than connecting alleys)—in a bay village where our greatest avenue was a pier, and no pleasure yacht with deep draft could come in free of agitation at low tide; in a place where the measure of your dress was the logo on your T-shirt, how could you advance yourself socially? So you didn’t give large parties to strike a note. You gave them, if you were Patty Lareine, because one hundred interesting-looking—that is to say, bizarre—strangers in her summer living room were the minimum she needed to offset the biles and jamborees of her heart. Patty Lareine may have read ten books in her life, but one of them was The Great Gatsby. Guess how she saw herself! Just as bewitching as Gatsby. When the parties went on long enough, she would, if the moon was late and full, get out her old cheerleader’s bugle and there in the night blow a Retreat to the moon—don’t try to tell her it was the wrong hour for Retreat.

  No, the State Troopers would not like us. They were as stingy as airline pilots, and never was so much spent on parties where so little was accomplished. Such waste would irritate State Troopers. Besides—for the last two summers—cocaine was sitting on our table in an open bowl, and Patty Lareine, who liked to work the door, hand on hip, next to whoever was serving as bouncer (almost always some local lad built like two) was never the lady not to take a chance on a new face. Everybody crashed our portal. Narcs sniffed as much of our coke as any other inflamed septum.

  I can’t pretend, however, that I was privately cool about that open bowl. Patty Lareine and I fought over putting it on display. Patty, I decided, had hooked into cocaine more than she recognized, and I now hated the stuff. One of the worst years of my life had been spent buying and selling snow—I took my trip to the penitentiary for a cocaine bust.

  No, State Troopers would not like me much. Yet to think of them arrayed in spiritual vengeance against my little marijuana plot was hard to believe this cold November afternoon. In the frenzy of summer, yes. The summer before this, in all the frantic August madness of a tip that a raid was near, I ran out to Truro in the heat of the day (when it’s consi
dered gross to harvest your crop—spiritually disruptive to the plant) and chopped it down, and spent an irrational night (what with having to explain my absence from a number of parties) wrapping the fresh-fallen stalks in newspaper and storing them. It was none of it done well, and so I didn’t trust Regency’s warm regard for the quality of that year-old product (maybe Patty Lareine had slipped him a couple of Thai nicely rolled and told him they were home-grown). All the same, my next crop, harvested just this last September, did have a flavor, call it a psychic distinction. Although it smelled a hint rank from the Truro woods and bogs, still I believe it offered something of the mist endemic to our shore. You can smoke a thousand sticks and never know what I’m talking about, but I did grow marijuana with a fine edge. If one wished to entertain the illusion that one could commune with the dead, or at least put up with the possibility that they were whispering to you, then my pot was fine. It was as spooky as any stuff I ever smoked. That I attribute to many factors, not least of which is that the Truro forests are haunted. Years ago—it is now more than a decade—a young Portugee in Provincetown killed four girls, dismembered their bodies, and buried them in several graves in these low woods. I was always immensely aware of the dead girls and their numb, mutilated, accusing presence. I remember that when I harvested my crop this year—and again I was in a great hurry, for a hurricane (which later wandered out to sea) was expected to strike us, indeed, the gusts were gale-force—on a hot, overcast, wind-inflamed mid-September day while a fearful surf was smashing on our bulkhead back in Provincetown, and townspeople were racing around to nail up storm windows, I was sweating like a swamp rat among the near-hysteria of the bugs in the Truro woods eight miles away. What an air of vengeance was about!

  I remember I sliced each stem with a ceremonial patience, trying to feel the instant when the life of the plant passed through the knife into my arm and the plant was cut down to the half-life of its future. Now, its spiritual existence would depend on its ability to commune with whichever human—evil, wicked, contemplative, comic, sensual, inspired or plain disruptive—was ready to smoke it. I tried, in effect, to meditate while I performed the act of harvest, but (it may have been the rabid panic of the bugs or the bodeful imminence of the hurricane) I rushed the job. Despite myself, I began to slash at the roots and gathered the plants too quickly. In compensation, I tried to cure them with care, converting a large closet in our cellar, never used before, into an impromptu drying room, and in the dark air (I had set up bowls of baking soda to keep the product dry) the Mary Jane was provided a real chance to rest over the next few weeks. After I stripped its leaves and buds, however, and packed them in small glass coffee jars with red rubber pressure-washers (I detested Saran-Wrap or plastic bags for stuff as fine as this) and actually began to smoke it, I found that something of the hour of its violent harvest was in each poke. Patty and I had fights to strike new notes of ugliness—we would pass from bouts of detestation to blood rage in the throat.

  Moreover, that crop of marijuana (which I took to calling Hurricane Head) began to bring exaggerated effects down on Patty’s head. It has to be understood that Patty Lareine believed she had psychic powers, which, speak of Occam’s Razor, gives all the explanation one may need for why she chose Provincetown over Palm Beach inasmuch as the spiral of our shore and the curve of our sea contained, she claimed, a resonance to which she was sensitive. Once, in her cups, she said to me, “I’ve always been a swinger. When I was just a cheerleader in high school, I knew I was going to swing. I thought it would be a damn shame if I didn’t get to fuck half the football team.”

  “Which half?” I asked.

  “The Offense.”

  That was rote between us. It soothed the waters. She could give her large laugh, and I might offer two slightly widened lips.

  “Why is your smile so evil?” she would ask.

  “Maybe you should have fucked the other half.”

  She loved that. “Oh, Timmy Mac, you are nice at times.” She took a deep puff of Hurricane. Never did the ravages of her hunger (for what, I cannot name—I wish I could) show so vividly as when she drew in smoke. Then her lips curled, her teeth showed, the smoke seethed—like a strong tide going through a narrow gate. “Yeah,” she said, “I commenced as a swinger, but as soon as I got divorced the first time, I decided to be a witch. I been one ever since. What are you going to do about it?”

  “Pray,” I said.

  That broke her up. “I’m going to blow my bugle,” she told me. “There’s a real moon tonight.”

  “You’ll wake up Hell-Town.”

  “That’s the idea. Don’t let those motherfuckers sleep. They get too powerful. Somebody’s got to keep them down.”

  “You sound like a good witch.”

  “Well, honey, I am a white witch. Blondes are.”

  “You’re no blonde. Your pussy hair says you’re brunette.”

  “That’s carnal taint. My pussy hair was bright gold until I went out and scorched it with the football team.”

  If she had always been like that, we could have kept drinking forever. But another toke put her on the promontory of Hurricane Head. Hell-Town began to stir.

  Let me not pretend I was immune to her occult claims. I had never been able to make a philosophical peace with the notion of spirits, nor come to any conclusion. That you might die but still remain alive in some vale of our atmosphere seemed no more absurd to me than the notion that every part of your person ceased to exist after death. Indeed, given the spectrum of human response on any matter, I was ready to assume that some who died remained near, and others went far away, or were altogether extinct.

  Hell-Town, however, was a phenomenon. When you smoked Hurricane Head, it became a presence. Over a hundred and fifty years ago when whaling was still active in these waters, a whore town sprang up on the other arm of Provincetown harbor, where now there was nothing but a long-deserted spit of sand. In the years after whaling ended, Hell-Town’s warehouses and brothel cribs had been put on rafts and floated across the bay. Half the old houses in Provincetown had those sheds attached to them. So while much of what was most crazy in our moods on Hurricane Head may have come to us compliments of Patty Lareine, part of the manifestation emanated, I think, from our house itself. Half of our holding of sills, studs, joists, walls, and roof had been ferried over from Hell-Town more than a century ago, and thereby made us a most material part of that vanished place. Something of a perished Klondike of whores and smugglers, and whalers with wages hot in their pockets, lived in our walls. There had even been unspeakable cutthroats who, on moonless nights, would set a beach fire on the back shore to encourage a sailing vessel to believe it was rounding a light. Thereby the ship might come around for port too soon and run aground on a shoal. Whereupon these fiends would plunder the foundering vessel. Patty Lareine claimed she could hear the cries of the sailors who were slaughtered trying to fight off the marauders’ long boats. What a Biblical scene Hell-Town must have offered of catamites and sodomites and whores passing the infections of the ages on to each pirate with blood in his beard. Provincetown, then, was just far enough away to be able to keep up the Yankee proprieties of widows’ walks and white churches. What an intermingling of the spirits, therefore, when the whaling ended and the shacks in Hell-Town were floated over to us.

  Some of that rut was added to our marriage during the first year we lived in our house. A bawdy force came down to us from one-night stands of whores and seamen more than one hundred years dead. I would, as I say, not enter into disputes about the real or unreal possibility that they lived in our walls—I only say our carnal life did not suffer. In truth, it thrived on the lusts of our unseen audience. It is nice when a marriage may feel like an orgy each night without having to pay the toll—that is, having to look on the face of the neighbor who is screwing your wife.

  If the wisest rule of economy, however, is that you can’t cheat life, it may as well be true that the most vigorous law of the spirit is: Do not exploit d
eath. Now that Patty Lareine was gone, I had to live most mornings with the unseen presence of much of the population of Hell-Town. For if my wife was not with me, her much-vaunted sensitivity still seemed to be on loan to my psyche. One reason I could not open my eyes in the morning was for the voices I heard. Let no one say that a century-old New England whore does not snicker on a cold November dawn. There were nights when the dog and I slept together like children huddling before a fire that is out. Once in a while I would smoke Hurricane Head by myself, but the results lacked clarity. Of course, such a remark can hardly be understood unless marijuana is your guide. I was convinced it was the only nostrum to take when sailing the seas of an obsession—you could come back with answers to questions twenty years old.

  Now that I was living alone, however, the Hurricane Head stirred no thoughts. Desires arose, instead, that I did not care to name. Serpents were laboring up from the murk. So, for the last ten days, I had not gone near my own reefer.

  Can this explain why I acted with such reluctance to so generous a piece of advice from my Chief of Police?

  While I did, so soon as I returned home, get into my car and drive out to the highway and there took the direction to Truro, I was still not at all certain that I would actually move my cache of Hurricane Head. I hated to disturb it. On the other hand, I most certainly did not want to be busted.

  What a nose Regency had for my habits! I could not even say why I had chosen to keep the stash so near my marijuana field, but I had. Twenty glass coffee jars filled with carefully harvested crop were packed into a steel footlocker varnished and oiled against rust. That had all been placed in a hole in the ground beneath a most distinctive tree two hundred yards down an overgrown trail from a one-lane humped sandy road in the forest.