by John Skoyles
“Must be some grenadine in that,” Porter pronounced as Vince dabbed his chest with a handkerchief.
“I like it,” Nonie said. Vince offered to buy her another. “I’d like to hear the duck get his rocks off again,” he said.
“I always thought Daisy Duck had cute tail feathers,” I said.
“You’re sick,” Vince said. “You’re the sick one!” He went to the bar and ordered a Daisy, and Barkhausen said, “It’s the same as a Donald, but without the swizzle stick.”
As the anesthesia took effect, I heard Dr. McGovern telling me not to worry, saying, “I’m just a plumber, that’s all I am, a plumber.” I woke in a room between two other patients. Newspapers splashed with blood and urine covered the linoleum near our beds. A very old man passed gas with the sound of thunderclaps, yelling, “I’m letting terrible wind!” On the other side, a patient who had a kidney stone removed spent hours on the phone with his children, who lived with his divorced wife. He told them over and over that he was going to be all right, at the same time creating worrisome scenarios until I could tell they were crying. The old man swung out of bed toward me, lifted his johnnie and dripped a trickle of bloody urine onto the headlines. He continued to fart and the middle-aged man continued to torment his children. I had to be catheterized and when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, Hester appeared with a bouquet of daisies.
“Why are there newspapers all over the floor?” she said.
“There are many accidents in the urology wing,” I said. She put the flowers in the urinal. “I’m surprised to see you,” I said.
“Porter told me. How are you?”
“A little numb,” I said, “but okay.” Dr. McGovern came in with a nurse and said I could leave the next day.
“Is this your doctor?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “He’s my plumber.”
“That’s what I am, a plumber,” he said.
She whispered, “I need a doctor. That’s what John tells me.”
“Ask him if he’s a doctor,” I said.
“Call my office,” he said to her, tapping the bed railing and assuring me the discomfort would fade.
Hester stared after his white coat as he left the room and exhaled dramatically. “It’s not queer coincidence he arrived just as I did,” she said in Stanley’s voice.
I became drowsy and dreamt about plumbers and doctors, and Hester and the real doctor.
I did not seek out Hester when I recovered. I stayed in my room, celibate, sober and unhappy. Barkhausen dropped by one night with a bottle of Glen Flagler, a thank-you gift from a man whose life he helped save with CPR. I had been reading Rimbaud, and his theory of disengaging the senses gave me an excuse to drink, so we downed half the bottle and then left for the Old Colony. As soon as we got our drinks, Vince walked in, bragging about his new advice column for the Advocate, “Vincent’s Two Cents.” Two women in a corner, a dyed blonde in jeans, and a tall brunette in a giraffe print dress, whispered and gestured. The blonde kept rising to get more beer.
“Cookie’s the blonde,” Barkhausen said. “The other one’s Valley. They act in local plays. I’ve driven them to Cape Cod Hospital a number of times.” He twirled his index finger by his temple, making the cuckoo sign. When I said they were kind of attractive, he called over, and they ignored him, murmuring again, head to head, but soon they languidly moved our way, as if they hated us. They switched to Scotch when Vince bought them a drink. Cookie’s face was pitted from acne, and her painted-on, swooping eyebrows gave her a startled look. She went to the restroom and came back saying the toilet was so filthy she had to helicopter. Valley fluttered her dress to alleviate heat, which made the giraffes jump. The almost dignified look imparted by her high cheekbones was robbed by an overload of mascara. They argued over whether Paul Morrissey made Warhol’s films, and were surprised I’d seen most of them. They leaned toward me, our knees touching. Vince kept buying drinks and I knew at last call we’d be facing a decision. The girls went to the ladies room a few times, more disoriented after each trip. Barkhausen mentioned the Glen Flagler and soon we were on the outside stairs to my place. Barkhausen told everyone to be quiet. He leaned over the railing toward the water and we heard a great whooshing sound. “A humpback,” he said, and we listened again to the watery explosion. “It might be stranded.” He ran onto the beach. “I’m telling Stormy Mayo,” he called into the air and disappeared to find the head of the Center for Coastal Studies.
The girls sat on the couch and Vince and I took the wicker chairs around the coffee table. We drank the Scotch neat because I had no ice. In the lamplight, Cookie’s ravaged face showed her acne was not all behind her. She was skinny, the denim jacket and jeans tight, revealing the build of a boy. When Valley shifted her broad shoulders, the giraffes stretched. Vince, in his khaki pants and banlon shirt, and me in my blue oxford shirt, paired poorly with our guests. Cookie rummaged into her big bag, pulled out an envelope of joints and lit up. Valley popped four beers from my refrigerator and set them next to the Scotch. Valley offered Vince two fists. He tapped the left, and she exposed a red pill. “Zoomer!” she said. She opened the other and said, “You get Buster.” I washed down Buster with a beer and Vince did the same with Zoomer. Cookie sneaked a second capsule into my hand, the way someone discreetly proffers a tip. She said it would add color, and I took that too. The girls were already zoomering and bustering and then they began giggling.
“Do you know your lines yet?” Valley asked Cookie.
“Don’t ask me again,” Cookie said.
“Request permission to ask you again, sir!” Valley said.
“I can’t hear you!” Vince yelled. The two girls snapped their heads toward Vince.
“You know the play?” Valley asked.
“Say ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ when you address me,” Vince said.
“The Brig,” I said. I had seen it on public TV in high school and I remembered it because my mother turned it off.
“Maggot!” Vince said.
“We’re doing it at the Universalist Church next week and Cookie doesn’t know her part,” Valley said. Cookie leaned over the table, lighting another joint and sneering.
“I directed it at the Berkshire House,” Vince said. “Believe me, Cookie, with your looks, you can say anything you want.”
“You’re nice,” Cookie said. Her grateful eyes had turned almost completely white, a half-moon of iris peeking above her lower lids.
“Out of the tomb we bring the flea market maven!” Those were my words though I didn’t think I said them.
“Don’t call me that!” Vince said.
Buster had kicked in, my senses disengaged. Cookie extended her legs under the coffee table, pointing the toes of her cowboy boots toward us. In one motion, Valley stroked Cookie from throat to groin where her hand lingered. She did it again as Cookie stretched like a cat before a fire. Valley motioned to Vince to do the same. Cookie buckled and popped under their simultaneous massage. Valley and Cookie kissed. When they separated, Cookie made a blubbering sound, sending spit bubbles my way. She looked out of her mask-like face, her mascara-streaked cheeks like a shattered windshield, and said, “Every insect has a secret.” She collapsed awkwardly onto the cushions, her neck seeming broken.
I poured a glass of seltzer to revive Cookie. Valley bounced it under Cookie’s nose. Cookie fixed on the bubbles and said, “Tiny igloos!” Then she jumped, knocking the drink to the floor and saying with a mad look, “And in each igloo, an eskimo with a spear!”
Valley lifted the giraffe dress over her head and onto the floor, stood in her bra and panties, and asked, “How many pairs in four?”
Attacked by the question and under the influence of Zoomer, Buster and Buster’s colorful sidekick, Vince and I counted on our fingers, and our fingers multiplied. The giraffes left Valley’s dress and loped across the rug.
“Six, maggots!” Valley said.
“Six in four?” I said.
Vall
ey crossed her arms, pushing up her breasts, and said, “You and me. You and Cookie. Me and Vince. Me and Cookie. Cookie and Vince. You and Vince.” While she spoke, Vince pointed to his chest and then to me and then to Cookie and then to Valley, then to me, to himself again and back to Cookie. Zoomer couldn’t add.
“Everyone into the bedroom,” Valley said. “I’m directing.” We followed, trailed by giraffes. “Take off your clothes,” Valley commanded.
Cookie’s milky eyes opened wide and she said, “Request permission to undress.”
“Too late, Cookie,” Valley said. “You blew the part.”
Vince dropped his shorts quickly, and we stood naked around the double bed. Valley fondled Vince’s prick and said, “It’s so Chihuahuan!”
Cookie pulled me onto the quilt, but when we kissed, I kissed two mouths. The lamp lit twice and the room fractured. I kissed four lips and four breasts among a thousand walls.
Vince said, “I’m married.”
I turned from the bed. “You’re married?”
It was as if I tangled with a spider with smooth arms and legs as I tried again to figure how six pairs were in four.
“And I have a little boy,” he said.
“We’re making a web!” Valley said, kicking a blanket high.
“I’ve got to go,” Vince said.
The whimpers from Cookie never got louder, but kept at a plateau. Valley said to me, “Don’t expect anything more,” and she and Cookie fell asleep in each other’s arms. Boosted by Buster, I cleaned the living room, alphabetized a shelf of books, wrote a hate letter to Hester illustrating it with color markers I found in the Mad magazine artist’s desk, and went to sleep on the couch.
When I woke, Valley and Cookie had gone. I worried about another fern. I berated myself for having sex with them and for getting drawn into the Old Colony cesspool. I looked at my letter to Hester and it was nothing like Rimbaud. I went to the refrigerator for a soda, and found four tumblers of Scotch, an inch or so in each of them, which I had maniacally covered in plastic wrap, a rubber band around every rim. A label on the rug, torn from one of the girl’s clothes, said, “Screamin’ Mimi’s.”
I met with Stanley when he came to judge the applications. He said he heard I had a lot of girlfriends. I joked that I loved women.
“You must love poetry more,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WORMS—A TEACHING JOB—DUNE PICNIC—LOST AT LAND AND LOST AT LAND’S END
In late spring, Provincetown’s forsythia, daffodils, and crocuses came to life and I savored my remaining days by walking frequently from the Bull Ring to land’s end. Getting into the shower one afternoon, I discovered two tiny worms writhing in my crotch. I immediately thought of Cookie and Valley. They had infected me with a disease that was eating me alive. I had turned into a maggot-eaten piece of decaying meat exactly like Maupassant. I didn’t care that I knew the poetry-writing doctor and his nurse. I put the worms in a plastic bag and hurried to the Drop-In Center. I had to give my reason for the visit and I put “VD.” I showed him the bag, and he knocked the worms onto a piece of paper. One had died, but the other moved hump-like across the page.
“These are inchworms,” he said. “They’re falling from the trees this time of year.” He couldn’t stop smiling. “They somehow got into your pants.”
I dressed, relieved not to be being eaten by worms. When I paid the five dollars, the girl at the cashier bit her lip and the nurse came out and made a stupid face.
Ridge finished his year of teaching at McGuire, and the English Department, happy to have a National Book Award nominee, gave him the fall term off. He called one morning and told me I could replace him. Although I hadn’t taught a day, I would be a visiting assistant professor at a salary of $6,250 for the fifteen weeks, an enormous sum compared to the Work Center stipend. He said that if I published a book, a permanent job might open up. He mentioned that with all the competition, a poet didn’t only have to be good, he had to be lucky. I went to the Work Center to share my news. Stanley congratulated me, and Kurt shook my hand in the common room where he was posting the results of the second-year applications. The outside jurors had chosen Barkhausen.
“Not only will the Center be better off for his selection, the town will be as well,” Stanley sang. And it was true. Barkhausen had knitted himself into the community, friends with firemen, cops, and shop owners. He had joined The Beachcombers, the male social club that met every Saturday when one member cooked dinner for all. The year before, I was invited by Vince, but declined because I didn’t want to belong to a club that didn’t allow women. We were in the Fo’c’sle when Vince asked me. Vince then turned to Dugan who said the same thing, but added, “I’m a feminist.” Everyone laughed, thinking a man couldn’t be a feminist, but when Dugan said it again, in that deadly voice, the table fell silent. A man could be a feminist.
Vince got a six-figure advance for his book on Pancho Villa and threw a party in the dunes. Cole Randle, a deaf-mute from Louisiana and the town’s best chef, fashioned huge grills from oil drums for barbecuing. Cole was also the town’s best drunk, once arrested for rubbing out a cigarette on a fire hydrant that turned out to be a sitting black dog. All the barflies in town came, along with bartenders and owners. Even a few tourists arrived which startled Vince, but after mixing a powerful punch, sampling it, adding brandy, sampling and adding, adding and sampling, he mellowed, wading into the surf toward Eddie Bonetti who had descended imaginary stairs into the ocean. His head floated above the waves, and he held a wine glass at each ear as he treaded water. Iron Man sat on the shore wearing a paper hat and spinning his top. He had just gotten out of jail for breaking the wrist of a con artist who sold him a potion that would make stolen objects invisible. Cole dragged a giant aluminum tub of punch between his two grills. Racks of ribs smoked on one; oysters fried in skillets on the other. Barkhausen and I sipped the heady drink and I asked where he was spending the summer. He said he had gotten a good deal from a writer in Truro, Phyllis Sherwood. I said I hoped he liked the work.
Vince rang a triangle and everyone lined up before Cole, who drank and laughed and spat as he slammed plates full of golden oysters and slabs of ribs. After a few bites, it was apparent that the oysters were inedible, mistakenly breaded in salt. Everyone went for the ribs, but Cole had doused the meat, not from the squirt bottles that housed his special barbecue sauce, but with cans of lighter fluid. No one could eat anything except the bags of pretzels and potato chips, which blew across the dunes, now chased by the hungry partygoers.
Barkhausen led the Rescue Squad against the artists and writers in a game of wiffle ball. Fielders lunged at grounders, stumbled around bases and stared at the sky. Some hungry players ate the salty oysters, which caused the punch barrel to be refilled over and over until most couldn’t stand, and those who could soon fell. Women were tackled on the base paths. The centerfielder used his glove for a pillow. The pitcher couldn’t reach the plate, so he moved almost on top of the batter, tossing the ball underhanded, as if to a child, and that child swung blindly, as if at a piñata.
The game ended with only a first baseman, a pitcher, and someone curled behind second in a fetal position. I decided to walk to town with Porter. At the top of the dune, we scanned the ravaged party’s useless grills, empties, magical barrels of punch, torrent of loose napkins, and plastic and paper cups dotting the shoreline. Barkhausen was pitching, exhorting his lifeless crew. Post-Elliot swung hard, missing and corkscrewing into the ground, but he hit the next pitch high above the empty outfield. A white butterfly dipped toward it, following the ball to the sand where it hovered, believing it had found a mate, a lost thing like itself, fluttering over the dunes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE HARVARD OF THE SOUTHWEST—TOY AND FUN—NOWHERE MAN—THE IDEA OF AMERICA—A DINGE, A GUINEA, A KIKE—JACK DANIEL’S PEDAGOGY—THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE—GOGOL
Everyone in the English Department at McGuire University in Dall
as had been fired from Yale except for Jerry Morris, a novelist who raised palominos; the Texas literary historian Ron Tonald, and Grady Waycaster, a folklorist who had been Gene Autry’s chauffeur. I was nervous because I had never taught. I was anxious because I had never been west of Iowa. And I was guilty because I didn’t deserve the job.
Ridge sent me a letter with a scanty map on a napkin. Lemmon Avenue was jotted between two parallel lines, followed by an arrow with the words “Into Area.” This sketch led me to central expressway and its automated billboard tracking the Dow Jones. Where Lemmon crossed Mockingbird, I rented a furnished place from a widow named Toy. I declined weekly maid service offered by Fun, her Asian companion. When I left the grocery store on my first day, a pretty girl in sunglasses leaned against the plate-glass window and asked if I wanted a date. I walked across the street for the New York Times, but the shop contained only a few magazines and a back room offering sex toys and pornography. The Tabu Lounge, a strip club next door, upset the local wives, so as a community service, the local paper published the license plate numbers of cars parked there each evening. I had moved into the red light district.
I went to the department secretary for my schedule and stood by Betty’s door, afraid to disturb the elderly woman who was writing, head close to the page, tongue curling from her mouth, almost licking the paper. When she finally looked up, she told me she had just finished printing Hopkins’s poem, “God’s Grandeur,” backward, and was about to check her progress with a mirror.
A memo in my mailbox summoned me to a “post-placement interview luncheon” by the search committee. The formal tone, the McGuire seal on the stationery, the name of the chair of the committee, Worthington Ramsey, all reminded me there had been no search. Unqualified for the job, I was grieved at soul. Ramsey escorted me to the dining hall wearing a bowler and twirling an umbrella bound with rubber bands. He asked where I had been teaching. I said I hadn’t. He said he came from Yale, a colleague of Erich Segal, author of Love Story. He chuckled that maybe I recognized him as “The Nowhere Man” in The Yellow Submarine where Segal portrayed him as “Jeremy Boob, PhD, a man who lives in the Sea of Nothing.” He pronounced this description with pride. I didn’t connect him to the Beatles movie, but I did recognize him from Ridge’s mentioning the medievalist who spoke as if he had swallowed a monocle. We joined Megan, a composition specialist, the only other committee member. She asked where I had been teaching.