I drove the streets that snaked through the hilly residential area before taking the river road down almost to the ocean, where I stopped to cool my feet in the fresh water. Two girls wearing white hats, sunglasses, and deep tans were batting a ball back and forth on the tennis court nearby. The midday sun was scorching, and each swing of their rackets sent a spray of sweat flying across the court.
I watched them for five minutes, then returned to the car, put the seat back, closed my eyes, and listened to the whack of balls mingled with the sound of the surf. The whiff of ocean on the southern breeze and the smell of burning asphalt carried with them memories of summers past. It had seemed as though those sweet dreams of summer would last forever: the warmth of a girl’s skin, an old rock ’n’ roll song, a freshly washed button-down shirt, the odor of cigarette smoke in a pool changing room, a fleeting premonition. Then one summer (when had it been?) the dreams had vanished, never to return.
—
When I drove up to J’s Bar at 2 p.m. on the dot, the Rat was sitting on the guardrail engrossed in a copy of Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. “So where is she?” I asked.
The Rat closed the book and slipped into the seat beside me. He put his sunglasses on. “It’s a no go,” he said.
“No go?”
“Yeah, I gave it up.”
I sighed, loosened my tie, tossed my jacket in the backseat, and lit up a smoke.
“So where are we headed?”
“The zoo.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
28
Now I’ll talk about the town. I was born and raised in it, and it was there that I slept with my first girl.
The ocean is in front of the town, with mountains to the rear and a giant port next door. It is a tiny place. I quit trying to light up on my way home from the port because by the time I struck the match I had missed the highway turnoff.
The population is slightly over seventy thousand, a number that’s not likely to change in the next five years. Most families live in two-story homes with attached gardens, and they own one car, though quite a few have two.
I didn’t pluck these figures out of the air—rather, they are officially announced at the close of each year by the statistics office at city hall. Their attentiveness to the number of two-story homes is a nice touch.
The Rat’s home had three stories topped off by a glassed-in roof garden. The Rat’s father’s Mercedes-Benz and the Rat’s Triumph TR3 sat grill to grill in a basement garage carved into the slope. Strangely, the garage had the most homey feel of the entire place. It was big enough to accommodate a Piper Cub and was packed with old televisions and refrigerators, a sofa and coffee table set, stereo equipment, sideboards, and anything else that had been replaced by newer, more up-to-date models. The Rat and I spent many pleasant hours there drinking beer.
I knew almost nothing about the Rat’s father. We never met. When I asked the Rat what he was like, all I got was the flat statement “Someone a whole lot older than me—also male.”
Rumor had it that the Rat’s father had been penniless before the war. On the eve of hostilities, though, he had managed, after much difficulty, to lay his hands on a small chemical factory, where he began producing insect repellent cream. There was considerable doubt as to its effectiveness, but, fortunately for him, the war spread to the South Pacific at that juncture, and the stuff flew off the shelves.
When the war ended, the Rat’s father moved his stock of ointment into warehouses and began marketing a sketchy health tonic; then, toward the end of the Korean War, in an abrupt move, he shifted to household cleaners. Rumor has it that the ingredients were identical in all cases. Not inconceivable.
In other words, the same ointment slathered on the heaped bodies of Japanese soldiers in the jungles of New Guinea twenty-five years ago can today be found, with the same trademark, gracing the toilets of the nation as a drain cleaner.
Thus did the Rat’s father join the ranks of the wealthy.
—
Of course, I had poor friends too. One of them had a father who drove a city bus. Now, there may be rich bus drivers, but my friend’s father was one of the poor ones. I hung out at his house a lot since his parents were rarely there. His father would either be driving his bus or at the racetrack, while his mother worked part-time jobs all day long.
He and I were in the same high school class, and one particular incident made us friends.
I was taking a leak during our lunch break one day when he slipped into the next spot and pulled down his fly. We didn’t talk, but we finished up at the same time and washed our hands together.
“Hey, I’ve got something here that’ll knock your socks off,” he said, wiping his hands on the seat of his pants.
“Oh yeah?”
“Wanna see?”
He pulled a photograph from his wallet and passed it to me. It showed a woman with her legs spread wide plunging a beer bottle into herself.
“Pretty wild, huh?”
“No kidding.”
“I’ve got even better stuff at home if you want to come over.”
And so it was that the two of us became friends.
—
The town was home to many kinds of people. In the eighteen years I lived there I learned a great deal. My emotional roots are there, and almost all my memories are connected to the place. Nevertheless, the spring I entered university, I heaved a deep sigh of relief when I left.
I still come back for spring and summer vacation, but basically all I do is drink beer.
29
The Rat had been in the pits for about a week. The approach of autumn probably had something to do with it, and perhaps the girl he had asked me to meet did too. The Rat didn’t have anything to say on the subject.
I tried prying some information out of J when the Rat wasn’t around.
“What do you think has got the Rat down?” I asked him.
“I can’t figure it out either,” he said. “Maybe it’s because summer’s ending.”
The Rat’s mood darkened as autumn approached. He sat at the counter glancing at some book or other, and if I tried to talk to him, all I got in response was a half-assed crack of some kind. When the evening breezes turned cool and the first whiff of autumn rose in the air, he gave up beer for a steady diet of bourbon on the rocks, shoveling coins into the jukebox beside the counter and kicking the pinball machine around until the Tilt sign flashed, much to J’s alarm.
“I guess he feels he’s being left behind,” J said. “I can see why.”
“How so?”
“Everybody’s heading off someplace. Back to college or back to work. You too, right?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Think how he feels.”
I nodded. “And the girl?”
“Believe me, he’ll forget her before long.”
“Did something bad happen?”
“You got me,” J said, and went back to his work. Swallowing my questions, I went over to the jukebox, chose a few tunes, and returned to the bar and my beer.
J came back about ten minutes later.
“Hey,” he said. “Didn’t the Rat tell you anything?”
“Nope.”
“That’s strange.”
“Really?”
J stood there for a minute, polishing the glass in his hand.
“I bet he wants to talk to you about whatever it is.”
“Then why doesn’t he?”
“He’s afraid. That you’ll make fun of him.”
“I would never do that.”
“Still, it looks like that sometimes. That’s how I’ve always seen it, anyway. You’re a sweet kid, but part of you seems—how should I put this?—above it all, like a Zen monk or something…It’s not really a criticism.”
“No offense taken.”
“But, you know, I’m twenty years older, and I’ve been through a lot more. So I get sort of…”
“Old-womanish.”
/> “Yeah.”
I smiled and took another swig of beer.
“I’ll talk to the Rat.”
“Good idea.”
J stubbed out his smoke and went back to work, and I made a trip to the john. While washing up, I peeked at my face in the mirror. That bummed me out so much I had another beer.
30
There was a time when everyone wanted to be cool.
Toward the end of high school, I decided to express only half of what I was really feeling. I can’t recall the initial reason, but for the next several years this was how I behaved. At which point I discovered that I had turned into a person incapable of expressing more than half of what he felt.
I don’t know what that has to do with being cool. But if a fridge that has to be defrosted all year round can be called cool, then that’s what I was.
And so I continue writing this, plying my consciousness with cigarettes and beer to prevent it from sinking into the sludge of time. I take one hot shower after another, shave twice a day, listen to the same old records over and over again. In fact, the out-of-date sounds of Peter, Paul, and Mary are playing behind me right now.
“Don’t think twice, it’s all right.”
31
The following day, I invited the Rat to the swimming pool of the hillside hotel at the top of the town. It was the end of summer, and the pool was somewhat hard to get to, so only about ten people were there, half of them American guests more intent on soaking up the rays than on doing any real swimming.
The hotel had originally been the villa of a prewar aristocratic family. It boasted a beautiful garden with a sprawling lawn, and if you walked up the slope, along the rose hedge that set the pool apart from the main building, you came to a small hill that provided a striking view of the ocean, the harbor, and the town.
The Rat and I raced a few lengths in the twenty-five-meter pool before settling back in deck chairs with a pair of cold Cokes. I caught my breath and lit up a smoke, while the Rat watched a little American girl paddling around by herself in the water.
The sky was clear and blue, and crisscrossed by the frozen white trails of jets that could still be seen on the horizon.
“Feels like there used to be more airplanes when we were young, doesn’t it,” said the Rat, looking up at the sky. “Of course, most were American military planes. Like those twin-fuselage propeller jobs. Remember?”
“You mean P-38s?”
“No, the ones I’m talking about were transport planes. A lot bigger than P-38s. Sometimes they’d fly so low you could see the Air Force insignia…And I can remember DC-6s, DC-7s, even Sabre jets.”
“That’s really going back.”
“Yeah, back to Eisenhower’s time. When a U.S. Navy cruiser came into port the whole town crawled with sailors and MPs. You ever see an MP?”
“Yeah.”
“So many things have disappeared. Not that I cared much for the soldiers.”
I nodded.
“The Sabres were great planes. Except they dropped napalm. You ever see what napalm does?”
“In war movies.”
“Humans come up with all kinds of stuff. Really well-made stuff, too. Who knows, in another ten years we may be feeling nostalgic about napalm.”
I laughed and lit a second cigarette. “You into planes?”
“I used to dream of being a pilot. My eyes are bad, though, so I had to give it up.”
“Really?”
“I love the sky. I could look at it forever, but when I don’t want to I don’t have to.”
The Rat fell silent for five minutes. Then all of a sudden he started up again.
“Sometimes I feel I can’t take it anymore,” he said. “The whole thing about being rich. I just want to escape. You know the feeling?”
“How the hell would I?” His naïveté was astonishing. “Still, you should get out. If you really want to, that is.”
“That could be the answer, you know. Find some town I’ve never heard of. Start all over from scratch. Not a bad idea.”
“What about school?”
“I dropped out. Couldn’t go back if I wanted to.”
From behind his sunglasses, the Rat’s eyes were following the little girl, still paddling happily by herself in the pool.
“Why’d you quit?”
“I guess I was fed up with the whole thing. But I gave it my best shot. Surprised myself, really. I learned to think about people other than me, but in the end I just got kicked around by a cop. The way I see it, sooner or later everyone returns to his post. Except yours truly. For me, it was a game of musical chairs—there was no place I could call my own.”
“So what’ll you do now?”
The Rat toweled off his feet.
“I might write a novel,” he said a moment later. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s a great idea.”
The Rat nodded.
“What kind of novel?”
“A good novel. From where I stand, anyway. I doubt I have any special talent for writing, but if I stick with it at least I can become more enlightened. Otherwise, what’s the point, right?”
“Right.”
“So the novel will be for myself. Or maybe for the cicadas.”
“The cicadas?”
“Yeah.”
The Rat toyed with the Kennedy half-dollar pendant dangling on his bare chest.
“I went to Nara a few years ago with a girl. It was scorching hot, and we were hiking in the hills for about three hours. We didn’t bump into any people, just wild birds that flew away screeching. There were big brown cicadas shrilling on their backs on the paths between the paddy fields—that sort of place. It was so hot.
“Anyway, we found a nice breezy place to stop, a grassy slope where we could sit and mop off the sweat. There was a broad, deep moat at the foot of the slope, and beyond that a round, tree-covered hill that looked like an island. It was an ancient burial mound, the grave of an emperor. Ever seen one of those?”
I nodded.
“It set me to thinking. Like, why build something so enormous? Of course, all graves mean something. Everyone dies, and so on. We learn from them. But this tomb was just too big. When something is that huge it changes everything around it. To be blunt, it didn’t look like a tomb at all. It was a small mountain. The surface of the moat was covered with frogs and weeds, and the fence was a mass of spider webs. So I was sitting there looking at the burial mound and listening to the breeze coming across the water. And I felt this emotion I can’t put into words. No, emotion isn’t right. It’s more like an awareness of being enveloped by something. It’s as if the cicadas and frogs and spiders and wind and everything else were one single entity flowing through the cosmos.”
The Rat paused to swallow the last of his by-now-flat Coke.
“So whenever I write, I keep that summer afternoon and the tree-covered burial mound in mind. And I think, what could be cooler than writing something for the cicadas and frogs and spiders, and the summer grasses and the wind?”
His story complete, the Rat folded his hands behind his head and looked up at the sky.
“So then, have you tried writing anything?”
“No, not a line. Can’t write a damn thing.”
“Really?”
“Ye are the salt of the earth.”
I was silent.
“But if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?” the Rat intoned.
—
When evening came and the shadows lengthened, the Rat and I moved from the pool to the small hotel bar, where they were playing Mantovani’s versions of Italian folk songs, and we drank cold beer. The lights of the harbor sparkled in the big windows.
“So what’s the story with the girl?” I finally worked up the nerve to ask him.
The Rat wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand and studied the ceiling as if pondering something.
“To be frank, I decided not to share that with you. It
’s just a load of crap.”
“But you did try to talk to me about it before.”
“That’s true. But I changed my mind. There are things in this world you can’t do a damn thing about.”
“Like what?”
“Like a rotten tooth, for example. One day it just starts aching. No one can ease the pain, no matter how hard they try to comfort you. It makes you furious with yourself. Next thing you know you’re furious with them because they aren’t pissed off with themselves. See how it escalates?”
“Sort of,” I said. “But try to think it through a little further. All of us are laboring under the same conditions. It’s like we’re all flying in the same busted airplane. Sure, some of us are luckier than others. Some are tough and some are weak. Some are rich and some poor. But no one’s superman—in that way, we’re all weak. If we own things, we’re terrified we’ll lose them; if we’ve got nothing we worry it’ll be that way forever. We’re all the same. If you catch on to that early enough, you can try to make yourself stronger, even if only a little. It’s okay to fake it. Right? There are no truly strong people. Only people who pretend to be strong.”
“Can I ask one question?”
I nodded.
“In all honesty, do you believe what you just said?”
“Sure I do.”
The Rat studied his glass for a minute.
“Do me a favor and tell me you’re lying,” he said, in all seriousness.
I dropped the Rat off at his house and continued on alone to J’s Bar.
“Were you able to talk to him?”
“Yeah, I talked to him.”
“I’m glad,” J said, putting a plate of fries in front of me.
32
Derek Hartfield was a prolific writer; yet despite his massive body of work, he seldom spoke of life, dreams, or love. In his semi-autobiographical One and a Half Times Around the Rainbow (1937)—one of his more serious efforts (in that it featured no aliens or monsters)—Hartfield seems to have little in mind beyond jokes, sarcasm, paradox, and vitriol. Yet there is a brief passage that reveals something of what he felt in reality:
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