The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  “I don’t dig this guy,” Max said. “What’s his story? Is he a fruit or something?”

  “He’s not a fruit,” said Julia. “He’s just lonely.”

  “Julia and I met him at the bar,” Harry explained. “He was alone and he asked us if he could buy us a drink. Just like that. He makes four hundred dollars a week.”

  “He is an uptown operator, Max,” Porter said. “But he might be good for laughs.”

  “You’re a cool son of a bitch, Porter,” Julia said.

  “Are you so hot?”

  “Oh nuts to you.”

  “Even though the guy is uptown, he’s an interesting sociological study,” Porter said to Max.

  “You don’t say.”

  “What are you drinking?” Max asked me.

  “Scotch. He’s been standing everybody liquor. You can’t stop him.”

  “Who would want to? Give me a drink, will you?”

  I let Max take a drink from my glass. Goodwin came back with a chair. He sat down on the outside. “You will have a drink, won’t you, Max?” he asked.

  Max said he would. Goodwin ordered from a waiter passing us with his hands full of empty beer glasses. He was one of the good waiters.

  “Subito, subito,” he said. He liked to speak Italian every now and then. He thought it was amusing. He spoke it with a sharp northern accent. Everyone liked him. He was never sullen. The place was very noisy now. The bartenders were shouting for the dining room waiters to pick up their drinks. People were standing in both doorways talking and drinking and looking all around. You could not tell whether they were on their way in or on their way out.

  A headache was beginning to work up the back of my neck and head and I was feeling the drinks. I was thinking about Grace’s abortion and about the big fight and about going away for a few days to Harry Lees’s father’s place up on the Cape. And about a job. Goodwin’s being there made me think about the job. An uptown job. There were no other jobs. They were all uptown. And you had to go uptown to keep them too. I did not want to do that.

  “You’ll have another drink, won’t you, Blake?” Goodwin asked me.

  “No thanks, Goodwin. I’ll nurse this one.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Thanks anyway.”

  Max smiled at me. “Why do you play tag this way with corruption, Blake?”

  “I’m not playing tag. I just don’t want another drink.”

  He kept on smiling. The others were watching him. “That isn’t what I’m talking about. You know that.”

  “What are you talking about, Max?” Goodwin asked.

  “I’m talking about your buying Blake a drink. Blake feels it’s corrupt to let people buy for him. And he feels nervous because you’re buying it the way you are.”

  He was right. And he was not stopping there.

  “How am I buying it, Max?” Goodwin asked him.

  Max laughed softly. “You’re buying in,” he said.

  “Oh nuts, Max,” Julia said. “Why do you have to get so salty when people want to have fun?”

  Goodwin’s smile had gone now. He was looking in his drink. Harry was looking at me. We were both thinking the same thing. I guess Goodwin had it coming to him. Here or someplace else.

  “You’re right, Max,” Goodwin said, looking up. “You’re quite right. That’s what I’ve been doing.”

  “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it,” Max said. “I just said that’s what you’re doing and that’s what Blake was feeling bad about. Blake thinks things like that are bad.”

  “How long have you known everything?” I said.

  “Let’s forget it,” Lees said. “I’ll tell a dirty joke.”

  “Why should you feel bad about this?” Max asked Goodwin. “You get in however you can. In this case you buy in. One way is as good as another.”

  “You really think you have everybody taped, don’t you, Max?” I said.

  He smiled and shook his head and patted my arm. “Slow down, man. Slow down. Don’t take everything so personally.”

  “Do you dislike me for doing this?” Goodwin asked, looking at Porter now.

  Porter shrugged. “I don’t know you well enough to either like you or dislike you, old man.”

  “Come on. Let’s drop it,” Julia said. “Tell the dirty joke, Harry. Or whistle ‘Dixie.’ Do something.”

  Harry told the dirty joke. It was not so dirty. But it was funny. It involved a Jewish man catching something from a hustler in Atlantic City. Porter laughed very loud when it was over, laughing that ha-ha-ha, loud laugh. Goodwin laughed too. The joke seemed to have relaxed him.

  “How do you make four hundred a week?” Max asked Goodwin.

  “I am an account executive at an advertising agency.”

  “You must live pretty well.”

  “Well, I guess I do.”

  “Let me guess. You live on the upper East side and you probably have a charge account at Abercrombie & Fitch.”

  “You’re doing very well.”

  “And you read the New Yorker regularly and think it is really terrific. And you often tell your friends you heard something funny the other day which you think you will send to the New Yorker.”

  “Go on.”

  “Your idea of a vacation is to go to Fire Island and you probably listen to WQXR very often. You see all the shows at the Museum of Modern Art.”

  “You are batting a thousand. Go on.”

  “You see all the French movies and you think they are much better than the American movies.”

  “You’re doing great.”

  “You still think you would like to live in Paris for a year. Because that is where things happen.”

  “I do, too.”

  “What are you doing down here?”

  “Oh, looking around.”

  “Pretty expensive looking, isn’t it? One way or another.”

  “That is what the four hundred is for, Max.”

  Max smiled and finished his drink. “You’re O.K., Goodwin, you’re O.K.”

  “Thanks, Max.”

  “Underground Max,” I said. “Working overtime.”

  “You’re underground too, Blake, old boy. You’re the Arrow Collar man of the underground.”

  “Would anyone like to hear another joke?” Harry asked. “This is getting too serious for me.”

  “By all means another joke, Harry,” Julia said.

  “Jokes drag me,” Porter said. “One joke was enough. Tell something else, but not a joke.”

  “That is your trouble, Porter,” said Harry. “You are a one joke man. Spread out. Be a two joke man.”

  “Don’t let it worry you, old sport,” Porter said, laughing and slapping him on the back. “I leave the clowning to the clowns.”

  “I’ll tell you about the time I got drunk in Boston and a couple of jokers put me in the dumb-waiter. I fell asleep. The next morning a lady tenant in the building pulled the dumb-waiter down to put her garbage on. She saw me and screamed and fainted. She thought I was a dead body.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” Julia said, shrieking.

  “What was it like? Back in the womb?” Porter asked.

  “Yes, and I liked it.”

  “It is amazing,” Goodwin said. “Did it really happen, Harry?”

  “No. I made it up.”

  “Well I’ll be damned.”

  “Are you disappointed?” Porter asked him. “Do you want everything to be true?”

  “Perhaps I’m naïve.”

  Goodwin signaled to the waiter as he passed and asked for another round. “Just this last one,” he said, smiling at us.

  “Don’t apologize,” Julia said.

  “Let’s make it quick, though,” Porter said, “because I have to be leaving. I have to finish some work.”

  “All right, man, all right,” Max said. “Take it easy.”

  The waiter brought the drinks. None for me or Porter. I wanted to go home. They drank up. Porter was looking
nervously around the bar. Afraid he would miss something or somebody. Max was looking at Julia. Examining her nearsightedly. Goodwin and Harry were talking about clubs. I was the first to get up.

  “You may not believe me,” Goodwin said, getting up with the others, “but I’ve really enjoyed this. I want to get together with you again. How about coming up to my place next week for dinner? Will you?”

  “We would love to, Goodwin,” Max said.

  Goodwin wrote his name and address down on the back of a card he took from his wallet. “Next Tuesday, say at eight,” he said. Then he left a big tip for the waiter. I knew none of us would go to Goodwin’s house.

  “They’ll think you’re crazy,” Julia said about the tip.

  “I don’t care,” Goodwin said, smiling. “I’m driving uptown. Can I give anybody a lift?”

  We all said we were walking. All except Julia. She said he could give her a lift. Harry looked at her, surprised.

  “But I thought I was going to walk you home,” he said.

  “Forgive me, darling,” she said. “But I’m tired, really beat. Honestly.”

  Lees cocked his head and looked that way at Julia. “O.K.,” he said.

  “Some other time, Harry,” she said.

  We left. Outside Goodwin and Julia got into his Buick convertible.

  “Next Tuesday then,” Goodwin said. “Don’t forget.”

  We said we wouldn’t. Julia waved good-bye and they drove off. Lees just watched them, not waving.

  “She can drop dead,” he said.

  “Don’t take it so hard,” Porter said. “She’s just a tramp.”

  Max said he was going to a movie, a double feature on Forty-Second Street. There was nothing else to do. Porter said that must be the fourth movie he had gone to in the last week. Max said so what. He liked movies.

  Porter and Max were going in the same direction. We said so long and they walked off.

  “I’ll walk home with you, O.K.?” Harry said to me. “I have a lot of time to kill.”

  “Sure. Come on.”

  I did not feel like passing by the Mills Hotel and the bruise-faced drunks there so instead of going up Bleecker as I usually did we went south toward Houston Street. We walked for a while without talking.

  Harry said, finally, “I don’t blame her. She played it smart and went with the better man.”

  “Don’t say that. You’ll begin to believe those things about yourself after a while.”

  “I do already, Blake. That’s the crumby part of it.”

  “No you don’t, Harry. You’re talking yourself into it. Don’t do that. You’ve got to keep up some sort of a front, even for yourself.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “That’s the only way you can make it. That’s the truth.”

  “I wish I could do it.”

  “If I were Porter I would call it a ‘personal myth.’ But whatever you call it, you have to have it.”

  Now the street darkened. I felt the darkness suddenly. I had not remembered this street being so dark. As Harry talked I kept feeling the darkness of the street. Then I saw why. The two street lamps were out. I thought somebody had stoned them out. But this was not so. The glass was not broken. The lamps had just gone out. I could see a bunch of the local hoods standing together way down at the corner we were approaching.

  “Maybe I should get analyzed,” Harry said. “I’ve often thought of that.”

  “It’s tough. A lot of strange things happen to you.”

  “I know it’s tough. You know something? I’m afraid of it.”

  “So are a lot of people.”

  “I’m afraid it will make me just like everybody else. That it will take some special juice out of me. Then I’ll be a mediocrity. Maybe I am one already and don’t know it.”

  “That would sound like a symptom.”

  “I guess it does, Blake. And then I’m afraid of a lot of things it might bring up.”

  I knew that even before he told me. He had always given me that feeling, as long as I had known him. He was keeping the lid on. Sometimes I thought it was better he did keep it on. It was safer for him that way.

  “That’s what makes it tough,” I said. “But you are supposed to feel better after you bring it up.”

  “Like puking.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Blake, do you have bad dreams?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “I mean really bad ones.”

  “Sometimes. Why?”

  “I wondered if you had them like mine. Do you mind if I tell you about a dream?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, I have this one a lot of times. Someone is after me. I think I know who it is, then I am not sure. He is close behind me. I am scared. Scared stupid. So scared I want to scream. Then I run into a building. A building just going up. This person is getting closer. He is dressed in black. Now I run up a flight of stairs. I hear him jumping up the stairs. I think I might get away up the stairs. Suddenly the stairs end in a blank wall. I could scream. I hear him after me. He is almost on me. Then I find myself running in another part of the building. He’s still after me. I run up another flight of stairs. Just then the stairs end in a blank wall again. And he’s almost on me.”

  “Jesus Christ. Then what happens?”

  “I keep running up these dead-end stairways. Then I wake up.”

  I wanted to say something enlightening about the dream that would make Harry feel better. But I could not think of anything that would not sound dumb. So I just said the dream sounded horrible. We were getting closer to the group of hoods.

  “I wish I knew what the goddamn thing meant,” he said. “Do you have any idea?”

  “Nothing that would help.”

  Harry had been talking with his head turned toward me or looking down at the ground and apparently he had not seen the hoods at the corner. But now he saw them. I could feel him tighten as he looked at them. They were standing all over the sidewalk. Blocking the way. They were looking our way now. Harry was staring at them. There were eight of them.

  I could feel the way Harry was holding himself tight as we came toward the hoods standing there on the sidewalk blocking it. Harry was staring straight ahead at them. I heard them talking now. I could feel Harry’s fear.

  They were standing in our way unmoving. Then we walked through them. Brushing against them. They moved slightly. We passed through them and on. We did not say anything.

  We crossed Houston Street and walked east on it toward Greene Street. There were no cars in the big cobbled street.

  “Those sons of bitches give me the creeps,” Harry said.

  I could feel his fear relaxing now.

  “There are too many of them for us to start anything,” I said. There were many stories around about the hoods ganging up on people.

  “It makes you sick to be so outnumbered,” he said.

  “I know it. But what can you do?”

  “Nothing, I guess. They don’t have any rules to keep them back. You can’t do anything with people who don’t have any rules.”

  “To hell with them, Harry. Forget it.”

  “I guess so. I’ll have to.”

  I slapped him on the back. “Old Renaissance Man.”

  No people were in the streets but us. Harry was walking with his hands in his pockets and his head down looking at the sidewalk. I watched the street lights blinking red and green in the deserted street, no cars to obey them. They were blinking for blocks down the street. We turned into Greene Street and walked south on it.

  “Speaking of Renaissance men, Blake,” Harry said, “what was this Max said about you being the Arrow Collar underground man?”

  “That’s what I am,” I said, laughing a little. “Partly underground.”

  “Do you think you will ever go all the way?”

  “I wish I could tell.”

  “It is like a joke become serious,” Harry said. “I don’t know when to take this
underground business as a laugh or when to take it as a real thing.”

  “Neither do I.”

  We came to my building. “Want to come up?” I asked him. I really wanted to go to sleep.

  “Thanks, Blake, but I had better be going along. I might start in on some more dreams.”

  “Don’t let them get you, Harry.”

  “I have one of the best collections in the country. Like a jewel collection. Maybe I could sell it to the American Association of Head Doctors.”

  “You might try.”

  “Are the busses still running down here? I don’t want to walk back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Adios, kid.”

  “So long.”

  I went upstairs. When I got into bed I did not feel so sleepy any more. I lay awake thinking.

  Who Walk in Darkness, 1952

  Terry Southern

  (1924–1995)

  Terry Southern was the most successful of hipster writers, authoring best-selling novels, hit movies, and journalism that paved the way for the new and the gonzo—he even wrote for Saturday Night Live. A Texan, Southern moved to Paris in 1948 to study at the Sorbonne, but in the cafés and jazz caves discovered what was really going on. He wrote the hilarious porn parody Candy with Mason Hoffenberg, and the novels Flash and Filigree and The Magic Christian. Peter Sellers, a fan of the latter, gave a copy to Stanley Kubrick who was embarking on a film project about The Bomb. Kubrick decided to make the film a black comedy, hired Southern, and Dr. Strangelove was born. In “You’re Too Hip, Baby,” written in the 1950s and collected in Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967), the bohemian Paris of Southerns wild youth provides the setting for a witty take on hip wannabes and a survey of the fault-lines of race.

  You’re Too Hip, Baby

  THE SORBONNE, where Murray was enrolled for a doctorate, required little of his time; class attendance was not compulsory and there were no scheduled examinations. Having received faculty approval on the subject of his thesis—“The Influence of Mallarmé on the English Novel Since 1940”—Murray was now engaged in research in the libraries, developing his thesis, writing it, and preparing himself to defend it at some future date of his own convenience. Naturally he could attend any lectures at the University which he considered pertinent to his work, and he did attend them from time to time—usually those of illustrious guest speakers, like Cocteau, Camus, and Sartre, or Marcel Raymond, author of From Baudelaire to Surrealism. But for the most part, Murray devoted himself to less formal pursuits; he knew every Negro jazz musician in every club in Paris.