Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

“Let me see what I can do,” I told them, went back to my new job and talked to the boss, a Mr. Mike Moriarty, which I thought was kind of funny, seeing that all the bibles in the place were Protestant King James, not Douay. You can see how super-orthodox I was, me in my

  sexless, ascetic, daily Mass and Communion glory. If I’d been a Jew I would have been one of those guys in New York with the long beard and long hair, black coat, black (felt) hat. The Catholics just didn’t happen to have any dress codes.

  “I wonder if I could get a couple of hours off in the afternoons. Summer school classes at Loyola....”

  “A little pay-cut, but it’s possible . . .”

  The guy whose job I was taking was retiring. Black, a little creaky, and on the edge of eternity.

  “I’m gonna teach you everything I know, man . . .”

  Tapes and boxes and tape-cutters. For him it was a science, not just a job; everything down to fine points, perfection. To this day, when it comes time to pack anything, just give me a whistle and all my old skills instantly reactivate.

  Maybe I felt a little like a traitor packing Prostestant instead of Catholic bibles, but a priest had gotten me the job, right? It couldn’t be that far off track.

  And I started classes a couple of weeks later, a course in English Romantic poetry, professor a slim, elegant kind of guy, Dr. Martin Svaglic, perfect hair, perfect button-down collared shirts and perfect silk ties, perfectly shined shoes.

  Keats, Shelley, Lord Byron; I was home.

  No more protein metabolism in rats, no more mummified old lady cadavers, but “I weep for Adonais—he is dead,” Shelley’s poem on the death of Keats, Keats himself, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,” Wordsworth and his bright blue sparrow eggs, Blake and his fountains of Life and Death, “To see a World in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,” everything, really, one vast exercise in Here and Nowness so that if I followed the lead of the English Romanticists what I would do (as I had always done) would be to tune in carefully on everything around me,

  walk down Michigan Avenue along the lake, stop in the bookstore the fine arts building, study the Tribune Towers, the Wrigley building, fine-tune in on the snow or the rain or sun, look at the faces of everyone around me, move precipitously into one vast ecstatic NOW.

  It was me, wasn’t it, what I’d been doing all along?!

  I read all the assignments, wrote all the papers, and then along came this huge rumbling final exam, like one of those mile-long freight trains. OK. No problem.

  When Wordsworth wrote “She was a Phantom of Delight, who was he really writing about?”

  How does Wordsworth’s “Stepping Westword” exemplify the very essence of the Romantic Movement?

  What is Samel Taylor Coleridge’s opinion of Wordsworth? Do you agree or disagree with him?

  What are Thomas Love Peacock’s four ages of poetry? Relate Peacock’s views to the Romantic-age ambience he himself was living in.

  Shelley’s “Adonais” was written on the death of whom? What is Shelley’s overall view of the person he was writing about?

  Relate Keats’ last letters to his “Ode to a Nightingale.”

  When they saw the questions, everyone in the class almost went ape-crazy. Except me. I was 100% at home, had read Perkins’ English Romantic Writers from cover to cover with great relish. It was like listening to all of Rachmaninoff’s piano works over and over and over again until my hands would practically start to play them.

  I dashed off my answers in half an hour, put my paper on Svaglic’s desk and off I went.

  Midsummer in Chicago. Hot as hell away from the lake, but along the lake shore, pure heaven.

  Always this sense of death, transience, which pushed me more precipitously into The Now. I was Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth walking around in Chicago in the mid twentieth century, ecstatic with every moment of it. And being sex-free had its advantages. I was pure eyes, pure perception, wind across my face, a little corned beef sandwich heavenly in itself, the smell of coffee in the air filled with sambas and cha-cha-chas . . .

  Back to work packing bibles, a little worried about the test, but what the hell, I was just beginning, nicht wahr?

  And then the next day, our last day of class, Svaglic came in with all the papers graded and said:

  `”I might as well tell you the dynamics of my grading methodology. I used Hugh Fox’s paper as the standard against which to grade all the other papers. Extraordinary paper. Sounds more like a tenured professor than a beginner.”

  Yes I had told him about my switch from Medicine to English.

  He handed my paper back to me with an A+++ on the top.

  Was this heavenly or not?

  Glory be to God for dappled things, for skies of couple-color, like a brinded cow, glory be to God for A+++’s.

  After class (which only lasted fifteen minutes), instead of going right back to work, I went down to the cafeteria at Lewis Towers, Loyola University’s downtown tower/campus, had myself a big cup of coffee and a big whole wheat muffin, saw this tiny little student sitting by herself looking kind of lonesomeish, asked her, “May I join you?”

  “By all means, I’m feeling kind of lonesomeish.”

  An Irish accent. Dublin.

  “My exact same thoughts.”

  “Well, you know how it is in Yankee territory and all . . . so what’s your story?”

  “Just finished a course in the English Romantic poets, got an A plus, plus, plus. I’m a medical school drop-out/flunk-out switching over into English. I live over in the Northwestern dorms, work packing bibles on the near south side . . .”

  “Well, I’m trying to become a nurse, and as a matter of fact, I work in the bakery at the Allerton Hotel just down the street from here. You ought to buy your bakery goods from me, not that we’re hurting for business . . .”

  “OK, you’ve got a customer. I’m Hugh Fox.”

  “I’m Annie McLaughlin. And don’t you have a trace of Irish accent yourself?”

  Which got me laughing.

  “I switch into it automatically when I confront an Irisher, I guess. I was raised by the Irish: nuns, brothers, two Irish grandfathers who unfortunately died before I could get to enjoy them.”

  “Enjoy grandfathers; I like the sound of that. That’s my biggest problem here, the lack of family . . . I may go back; as dismal as Dublin is, this is dismaler, if I may invent a word.”

  “Neologism . . .”

  “Oh, aren’t we fancy.”

  Lovely to meet her, her and her shark-meat colored skin and salmon-colored hair. Finished off my muffin and coffee, glanced at my watch.

  “Well, it’s off to work I am.”

  “God, you sound Irish, ‘it’s off to work I am.’ I’ll be seein’ ya around, me boy . . .”

  Me boy: just hearing that and it was like coming home.

  I actually started buying all my bakery goods at Annie’s bakery, mainly nice, puffy hard-crusted rolls (I lived on peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches) with deliciously fur-soft cloudy interiors. And she’d always throw a couple of extras into the bag for me.

  She would have been/could have been a great wife for me, cute, warm, open, giving . . . but that night, after I’d gotten my A+++ I called my old buddy, Helen Thorn, and she invited me to the south side to her place.

  “I’ve got my best pal here. You’ve got to meet her, Mary Joan Ludwig. You’ll love her . . .”

  I got on the IC (Illinois Central) and went out to the far south side, no hint that I was about to leave Paradise, bite the forbidden apples on the Tree of Life and forever be cast out into the outer darkness.

  Helen, like all of us, lived in this dark red-brick apartment building.

  We’d gone to the same grammar school together. I lived just a few blocks away and we’d always hang out together.

  Her father had a shoe store down on 79th Street, and her mother was . . . just her mother. It was the era when most of the
time women were the home-makers and men were the money-makers.

  Helen had met this guy, Joe Moag, who was working on the railroad full time in order to pay his college tuition (at Loyola too), and he eventually ended up as a professor at Northwestern.

  He and I were good pals, used to spend lots of Saturdays mainly at his place, talking about Huxley and Orwell and Jane Austen, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and someone everyone was reading in the 50’s, but you never hear about nowadays, James T. Farrell . . . Francis Thompson, Thomas Merton . . . like both of us had read everything readable.

  I rang the doorbell, and the door lock buzzed in reply, opened up.

  Mrs. Thorn, kind of bent over, grey but sprightly, let me in.

  “Howya doin’, Hughie? How does it feel to be out of medicine at last?”

  “Never felt better. I’m home. Where I belong.”

  “That’s what I figured. You and Helen’s boyfriend, Joe, you’re good pals, right?”

  “Very good.”

  Helen coming out of the dining room.

  “Ah, there he is . . .”

  Coming out and giving me a hug, bringing me into the dining room where Mary Joan was.

  Eve. The Garden of Eden.

  What a looker! Skin as white as correction fluid, but the blackest of hair, eyes and eyebrows, dark red lipstick, dressed all in black, very Vogue-coverish.

  “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “And me you,” I lied.

  Helen had seldom mentioned her before. She was a meteorite out of a cloudless night sky.

  She got up, shook hands, and then kind of came toward me, consciously seemed to stop herself, almost guiltily, as if she wanted to embrace me, splice with me, and had to make an effort not to.

  “I’m a reader myself, English major at St. Francis Xavier College . . . I’ll probably end up teaching English somewhere . . . who’s your favorite author?”

  “Favorite, favorite? I don’t know, maybe Aldous Huxley—”

  “Well, I’ve only read Point Counter Point and Antic Hay. You know, the volumes in the Modern Library Classics.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  Smiling, sitting down, crossing her legs. Darkish stockings, black suede heels. Not like Helen who in summer usually looked like she’d just gotten off or was about to get on a tennis court.

  “Let me get some tea, it’s so humid,” said Mrs. Thorn, and we all sat down at the table and relaxed.

  All sorts of tensions in the air. I may have been catharistically asexual—all mind, no body—but when I looked down at her legs, up her thighs, hidden by a black silk skirt, I felt something revolutionary sprout inside me, a burrowing, ferreting instinct, the word mange, mange, mange vibrating around in my head, eat, eat, eat . . . what was all this about?

  “So what will you be doing this fall, still going to Loyola?” she asked me as the tea appeared, full of ice cubes and little pieces of mint.

  “Probably. I got an A+++ in my first course in English, the Romantic

  poets, and I called my parents last night and told them—”

  “And what did they say?” asked Helen, going and getting some graham crackers and coating them lightly with peanut butter, arranging them in a circle on a plate, then passing them around.

  “Well, they’re going to call me tonight at midnight.”

  “And?”

  “No idea.”

  “Maybe you could call them right now.”

  “Give it a try!”

  Handing me the phone.

  “High drama!” said Mary Joan, getting all twitchily nervous, “feel my hands,” putting her sweat-soaked hands in mine as I put the phone on the table.

  They were practically dripping wet.

  And she kind of held onto my hands, didn’t want to let go, her dark gypsy eyes full of talk: don’t ever let me go, ever, you’re the one I’ve been waiting for, this is the way it always has to happen, a match tossed into a gasoline-vapor-filled room . . .

  I dialed. Three rings. My father answered.

  “Hello.”

  What was I expecting, “Good evening, this is Dr. Fox, what can I do for you?”

  “Hi, it’s me . . .” a long silence, imagining his hand over the phone telling my mother, It’s him, our loser, “I’m over at Helen Thorn’s just a couple of blocks away . . .” More silence.

  Then,

  “We’re going to have to talk. Why don’t you walk over here—home—take a streetcar, whatever . . . but we’re going to have to talk.”

  “You couldn’t come and pick me up?”

  No answer. He just hung up.

  “So they want me to go to their place and talk,” I explained.

  “What do you mean ‘their place’?” asked Helen, “You mean ‘home,’ don’t you?”

  “It’s not home right now. I’m the Outcast of the Islands . . .”

  “That’s a novel by Joseph Conrad,” smiled Mary Joan, “I love Conrad, don’t you?”

  “Never read anything by him except Outcast of the Islands.”

  “He’s been in pre-Med and Medicine,” Helen explained, “forced into it . . . he’d already read all kinds of stuff, but—”

  “My life has been a bit cluttered by gastrocnemiuses and abductors, vagus nerves and amino acids—”

  “Gastroc—what?” Mary Joan, amused.

  I reached down and gently grabbed the back of her left leg.

  “That’s the gastrocnemius.”

  “Don’t stop,” she giggled.

  And I didn’t want to. Wanted to take her off somewhere alone with me and

  do, I didn’t know what, not ever having done ANYTHING of that sort before. But I had to get home, didn’t I? Got up.

  “Well, I’d better get going . . . find out my fate.But—”

  Mary Joan popping up in front of me.

  “Let me give you my phone number. All I’m interested in right now is seducing, getting seduced, getting pregnant, getting married, in either order, and you look like a possibly good candidate, although M.D. at least sounds better than wandering poet,” she giggled, Helen going crazy with laughter.

  “You’re so subtle.”

  “That’s one thing I can never be accused of!”

  Taking a piece of paper off a pad by the phone and writing down her name, number, address, then at the end “tu me caies muy bien.”

  “OK, and pardon my ignorance, but the last phrase.”

  “Just a little Spanish. Literally, ‘You fall me very well.’”

  “Well, you fall me very well, too,” coming over and waiting for her to slip into my arms. Which she very gracefully did.

  “I can rent you my room for the night,” Helen still laughing.

  “Another night!”

  Me leaving. A goodbye to Mrs. Thorn. Dicky, Helen’s youngest brother, on the sofa with her.

  “See you later, take care.”

  Helen accompanying me to the front door with Mary Joan, a peck of a kiss on Helen’s forehead, then Mary Joan coming back into my arms.

  “It’s been—”

  “It sure has!” Helen still laughing as Mary Joan first gave me a nip of a kiss, then stood back and kissed my hand, blew me another kiss as I went down the stairs.

  Walked down to 79th Street and waited for a street car over to East End.

  It had to be a two flat, didn’t it, they couldn’t just have gone out and found some Georgian masterpiece in the suburbs somewhere, could they.

  Rang the bell. They’d taken my key when they’d thrown me out.

  My mother at the door in a few moments, all in white, white shoes, stockings, dress, her hair all marcelled up on top of her head, diamond earrings, a sarcastic grin on her face.

  “My little baby’s back! Come on in!”

  My father up in the living room on the second floor, sitting on this big plush sofa in front of a fake Frenchish (Louis XIV) coffee table. Both new, right, the sofa and coffee table?!?

  “Sit down.”

 
I sat down; my mother got up and came back with some coffee and some chocolate-dipped pretzels.

  “Just a little energy boost.”

  Receiving an impatient, bothered look from my father that said, Helen, just might as well go out in the country and find a mole-hole . . .

  I sipped a little coffee, loved the chocolate covered pretzels.

  “OK, if we can get serious here,” my father started in like he was telling someone they had incurable colon cancer, “your mother and I have decided to give you another chance at medical school and send you to school in Ireland. I’ve talked to the people in Dublin over the phone, after an initial letter, and they are willing to give you a try. And there’s also a place in Costa Rica which is willing to give you another chance, too.”

  Dublin? Costa Rica? Medical school again?

  I felt like getting up, pouring the coffee on my father’s solemnly bald head (“receding hairline,” he always called it, although it was receding down to his asshole) and walking out; instead started whispering to my Inner Me Calm, calm, calm, calm down, don’t let them push you over any more edges, because it all was manipulative, wasn’t it? Game-playing. I was supposed to act like a Jack-in-the-Box and pop out the door, wasn’t I?

  “What I want to do is continue on in English, get a B.A. at Loyola, then stay there for the M.A., maybe go down to the University of Illinois for a Ph.D. T.S. Eliot in his essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ talks about every author being part of a national tradition out of which he emerges, and I’ve been totally soaked in French Catholic, English Catholic, Norwegian Catholic, Spanish Catholic authors, am more European than American; I’d like to get americanized and get my degree in American Literature, be a writer.”

  My father looked all vomitty, sickish, my mother, standing behind him, came in and sat on one of her needlepoint chairs near the window, as solemn as Pearl Harbor.

  “Well,” continued my father, “your mother and I have somewhat anticipated that this would be your attitude, and—”

  “I always thought you’d be a loser, you’re just proving what I always thought,” my mother broke in, over-enunciating as always, very Bette Davisish, loooo-ser, proov-ing, aaaaal-ways.