Who, Me?

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

  “I’m just fulfilling the way I was raised: ballet, opera, symphonies, ceramics classes, art history, violin, piano, reading, reading, reading . . .”

  My father raising his hand, peace, peace, pax vobiscum, peace be unto you . . .

  “Your mother and I have already anticipated the possibility of your saying just what you’ve said and we’re prepared to let you come back and live here, use my car sometimes in the evenings when you’re going out on a date or something, room and board, and there’s a little fund we’ve set up based on your earnings from your summer jobs digging ditches and the like. I don’t know if there are any scholarships at Loyola, but, you are our son, after all, and . . .”

  Tears in his eyes? From too much smoking or did the old man really feel for me?

  My mother getting up, tears in her eyes, too, extending her arms my way. I stumbled over and got embraced.

  “You can move in tonight.”

  “But I still have my things down at—”

  “You have plenty of things here. We were going to throw them all out, but didn’t.”

  “OK, I can get the rest of my stuff tomorrow. Should I keep working at the bible factory?”

  “No need. I’m sure the salary will have no major effect on world economic trends,” my father smiled wryly.

  My mother going over to the phone in the hallway, dialing . . .

  “He’s back, going to study English. I thought I’d just let you know.” Let who know? My mother holding the phone in her hand, extending it my way, “She’s your lawyer, I guess . . .”

  Who else? My grandma?

  Of course.

  “Gram. How are you?”

  “I hate Arizona, that’s how I am. How about Prague or Vienna or Chicago? How about Mr. Herz, the fishman, or Stein, the tailor, Lerner, the dentist, crabby old bitchy Mrs. Delicatessen Gorman? Or old Mr. Kelley, the druggist, or his son, Bob, who I always liked to call Bobbie just to irritate him? I miss Chicago, I miss you,” then a change in tone/volume, careful pianissimo, “put the phone firmly against your ear so nothing ‘leaks’ out. Listen to me: do want you want, follow your—what do you call them, ‘inner voices,’ what you want, what you want. Be like Peggy, the Spitz I used to have in Cicero when I still had my own house . . . go for that food, go for it, go for it. What you need to do, want to do, what’s YOU, OK?”

  “OK, Gram, I’m glad you like Arizona. Dry heat, that’s the best kind, not like here all tropicalish and sweatsy-wetsy . . .”

  My grandmother going crazy with laughter.

  “You’re too much. You’re better than Jake, and he’s almost a pro . . . I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Come and visit!”

  “I will, I will.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  And then a click. That was it.

  Then coming back into the living room, my father still sitting there like Judge of the Secret Court.

  He loved my grandmother, too. In the old days when we lived next to her on Cottage Grove, between patients he’d go into her little apartment and play cards (pinochle) with her, and admitted to me one time, “It’s not that I didn’t need the money, but lots of times I’d hope that no patients would come in . . .”

  Always a little tea, some cookies.

  He’d been Mr. Boney Thin in the old days, around the time of the first world war, but by now he was practically a basketball on legs.

  “OK, my boy, you’ll get your tuition paid, some carefare money, that sort of thing, and forty dollars a month, ten dollars a week for, how shall I put it, ‘cultural activities,’” he said, stopped, waited for a reaction.

  “OK, sounds good. I wonder if I could borrow the car, say, tomorrow night? I’ve met this new girl over at Helen’s place, and—”

  “Mr. Thorn could have done so well with his shoe store if he’d only he’d been a little more persistent. Now he’s . . .?”

  “Oh, I forgot, that’s right. He’s back in the bank where he began forty years ago—which shows persistence, stability, consistency anyhow—in charge of the safety deposit boxes, something like that—”

  “Which shows a lack of imagination, vision,” my mother insisting.

  My father getting up, holding up his hands, one my way, one her way.

  “OK, you two; pax vobiscum, OK? Peace be with you both!” Turning on the television. The Ed Sullivan show. “It’s like a miracle, isn’t it?

  Television. And, incidentally, if you want to use the car tomorrow night, fine. Only just don’t leave the tank on empty, OK?”

  “Not that far.”

  “Who is this girl you met?”

  “You mean what’s her pedigree?”

  “OK, genug, genug—enough, enough,” turning to my mother, “What’s the difference, he’s not going to marry her.”

  Wasn’t I? That remained to be seen. Going back to the phone: go for it, like Peggy, my old Spitz going for her goodies . . .

  That fall I entered Loyola full-time. No more job as bible-packer.

  And I started taking out Mary Joan full time, too.

  Oh, brother, did she love tonguing into my mouth and, oh, sister, did I love tonguing into hers.

  We’d go to, say, a Chicago symphony concert, some nice Rachmaninoff, a nice piano concerto with Rudolph Suerkin up there banging away, Rafael Kubelick on the podium, Professor Schwarzenberg from Loyola a couple of boxes down waving hello at me.

  Then after the concert over to the Camillia House at the Drake for a little drink (whiskey sour) and dessert and a little dancing.

  Or we’d go to the Tip Top Tap at the Allerton Hotel, then the highest restaurant in Chicago, before it got dwarfed by the Hancock building.

  Then out into the car, find a nice romantic place by the lake to park and we’d start to explore each other’s bodies, mouths . . . only somehow my hands never went below her belt, nor did her hands go below mine.

  She was so sensuous, though, all liquid black: liquid black legs and breasts, nothing quite “tight,” just loosely sensuous.

  I was being activated sexually but I didn’t know it.

  I just loved loving, being loved. What was happening was that I was changing physiologically, going through a kind of second puberty, the first just anatomical, this one a supercharged hormonal transformation.

  She came up with a diamond, my mother came up with a ring (“setting,” as she put it), and lo and behold, before I knew it we were engaged.

  Engaged!

  “It’s so wonderful!” Helen said, all thrilled, “she’s such a great person. Just imagine the children, die kindern (the children) . . .”

  “Sie werden ganz schön sein (they’ll be very beautiful),” agreed Joe.

  Always a little German. We’d gone to college, nicht wahr, and wasn’t that what college was all about, a little peppering of our daily speech with a little exoticism?

  My parents weren’t too thrilled with Mary Joan’s father being just a carpenter and all, but they managed to “use” him to fix up the roof on their new two flat “house” on East End right by the Avalon theater that had just been turned into a black Moslem mosque, a “sign of the time,” as my mother so adroitly put it. But the mosque was way down at the end of our block, “nothing to do with us,” she added.

  Mary Joan’s father had given us a “discount” for his work, but my mother wasn’t quite satisfied: “Twenty percent off . . . only I suspect what he did was to jack up his original price twenty percent, I don’t know . . .”

  She didn’t know, but always acted as if she did.

  Anyhow, a wedding date was set for the following June.

  “I just love June weddings,” Mary Joan all ecstatic, “everything blooming . . . the two of us blooming, too . . . the whole world blooming . . . ‘Glory be to God for dappled things, for skies of couple-color like a brinded cow, for rose-moles all upon trout that swim . . .’”

  “Only we’re not dappled, at least I hope
not.”

  “Who knows, we may be by then . . .”

  Impressed by her quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit poet I was studying (fall semester) under Father Norman Weyand S.J., a Jesuit who had just written a big solid book about Hopkins.

  Mary Joan talking about getting her M.A. in English, taking some education courses at the University of Chicago now. Always bright, her forehead just a little too big, like her brains were bulging out, which you didn’t notice too much because of the way she combed her hair over it.

  Sensuous, overly-brainy, all slinky, at the same time super-Catholic. We visited her M.D. brother in Milwaukee, my parents overjoyed that there at least was an M.D. in the family, everything was pointing toward marriage, an abundant family, Church-condoned sexuality.

  And then two things happened that turned everything sour and vomitty.

  One night after seeing Casablanca and then having a couple of whiskey sours and parking by the lake and smooching for a couple of hours, I came home and felt especially squirmy, sweaty, goofily energetic. Brain turned off, for the first time ever I started going purely by instinct, impulses, whatever they were. Mr. Brain was turning into some sort of little furry animal left with nothing else but unconscious, subterranean-becoming-surface-of-the-earth drives.

  Put on some long underwear. Why? Ask no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.

  Got down on the floor and started pedaling up in the air.

  Exercise?

  Something I’d never done before.

  My penis getting bigger and bigger, catching between my legs, me keeping pedaling, and then after a few more minutes suddenly something totally new and revolutionary happened to me: I had an orgasm.

  This strange white stuff all over my legs.

  Smelled like peroxide.

  Semen. It must have been semen. Even I had semen.

  I remembered back to the time when we were living in our apartment on 82nd Street and one of our neighbors took me out into the fields west of us and masturbated, “Look what I can do, man! Ever see anything like this?!?” I went home and told my mother and she told his mother and he got his ass kicked.

  I must have been about eight; he must have been about ten.

  What a retard I was. Fourteen years later it had finally happened to me, too.

  It was horrible. I’d suddenly turned from fairy, elf, pure brain-cloud, into The Beast from the Center of the Earth.

  Sin, sin, sin.

  The evil flesh had taken over.

  One thing was very clear in the radical Irish Catholic dualistic (Albigensian) system I had been raised in: the flesh was evil, the spirit was good. We were on earth in order to die and go to heaven. Of course there was a footnote about the flesh being blessed and good when we were reproducing ourselves in marriage, but that was kind of begrudgingly stuck into the system. What the system really rejoiced in was celibacy, pure spirituality, balls and tits and pricks and clitori all sublimated and turned into pure heavenly spirit.

  I was at confession the next day. I had to make a special appointment with Father Jeremiah O’Callaghan, but I did it. No secrets between us.

  “Bless me, father, for I have sinned . . .”

  “And what is your sin, my son.”

  “I, uh, masturbated—I guess that’s the word—by myself . . .”

  “OK, my son. Try to get your mind on other things. Read St. Augustine’s Confessions, The Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton. Avoid temptations. Mass and Communion every day. I probably shouldn’t mention this, but reading some of Suzuki’s work on Zen Buddhism wouldn’t hurt. The Buddha, of course, is not the son of God, our savior, but he was quite good at taming the flesh. Say five Hail Marys and five Our Fathers for penance. And now an Act of Contrition . . .”

  I said my Act of Contrition and left the confessional with a blessing.

  Pure again. Cleansed. If I got hit by a car on North Michigan Avenue I’d go right to heaven for an eternity of perfect beatitude in the City of God.

  A date with Mary Joan that night again.

  Should I break it and spend the night instead on my knees?

  No, that wouldn’t be fair, would it?

  So there I was in my father’s back Buick Super (the one with the three holes in the side) at her place at seven-thirty.

  We were going to see Brideshead Revisited, my favorite novel, made into a film.

  As always she was as slinky as a black nylon rattlesnake, hiss hiss, slide, slide. Oh, those legs . . . and breasts . . .

  When I’d bought her a blouse down at Marshall Field’s recently one of the clerks had said “You have the most perfect bust-line I’ve ever seen,” and when we were walking out Mary Joan smiled, “I don’t know how many people have told me I have a perfect bust-line. For me it’s just ‘normal.’”

  Not that I’d ever seen (much less touched) her tits, but there they were all sheathed in lace and nylon, whispering to me “Don’t you want to play with me? Let’s go out in the parking lot and have a little fun!”

  Je-sus!

  We went to the movie and then to this place on the near North Side. Rush

  Street. Greek. She wanted Greek. Gyros.

  “How do you pronounce it?” I asked as I ordered, “Gyro as in gyrate or giro as in girl-crazy?”

  “Girl-crazy?” asked the puzzled waiter, “gyro as in ‘in turn,’ because the meat turns, this big block of meat turns as it cooks . . .”

  When he left Mary Joan was all impatient with me.

  “Do you have to turn everything into an etymological history-of-language exercise?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  We ate. It was delicious. I’d never been to Greece but wanted to go there; time-travel back to ancient Greece.

  Was very happy there all filled with my gyro and lettuce and tomato and a coke, looking at her black deer legs that she never quite stopped moving around, rubbing her thighs against each other. Did she masturbate, too?

  “I have something to confess to you,” she said as we pushed away from the table and relaxed a little, the words bless me, father, for I have sinned twirling around in my head full-time. I’d started reading St. Augustine’s Confessions that afternoon, suffered with Augustine as he tried to tame his flesh like the wild horse that it was. “Something that’s been on my mind for a long time. Last summer I was on Cape Cod for the summer. Worked as a waitress. Just to get a little feel for the east coast and everything. I’ve always loved Boston, Harvard, you know, and I met this Harvard pre-med student who was working as a waiter in the same place I was working, and, you know, summer, The Cape, we started going out on the beach at night, cold and all, but started wearing sweaters, carrying blankets with us, and one night—it was my first time and everything, and it only happened once—but it did happen, and I felt it was my duty, maybe that’s the word, to tell you . . .”

  She fucked someone on the beach the summer before?

  THOU SHALT NOT . . .

  It was like getting hit in the head with a stone hammer. Mr. Perfect Me; at least until I’d met her.

  No hesitation, my whole life in the first pew at daily Mass instantly told me what to do.

  “OK, it’s over between us. I can’t, can’t, can’t see myself marrying someone who has been fucking around on the beach. ‘THOU SHALT NOT HAVE SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE.’ Especially you with all your Catholic upbringing. If anyone in the world should know better, it’s you. It’s over . . .” Getting up. Holding her coat for her, motioning to the waiter for the bill, paying it, “Keep the change,” out into the gushy, windy, but still warm (mid-September) Chicago night, a night that whispered to me as so many nights did This is it, be here, in the Here, this is it, expand out into The Divine Now.

  “I didn’t have to tell you. Is this my reward for honesty?”

  “I’m not a priest, I’m not God, I can’t absolve you from our sins. I’m sure you’ll find some other sucker out there who won’t mind your carnality at all.”

  Starting to cry
.

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Better not to say anything else,” I said as I opened the car door for her and she got in, me still lusting after her luscious black-nylon frog legs, wanting her now more than ever, not that I knew what the wanting “meant” in terms of physiological functions. One thing we’d never heard a word about in all of pre-med and my one year of medicine was How to Fuck. Anatomy, fine; physiology, fine; biochemistry, fine; but HOW TO? Never.

  “But I want to explain,” she kept on as I got in and started the car, “it was one of those full-moon nights and he was in pre-med, from this old family in Boston, a Massachusetts Avenue French Chateaux kind of house that had been in the family for generations. We’d visited there once when we went to Boston one Sunday. I guess I was over-impressed and—”

  I reached out and turned on the radio, found some classical music, Schuman’s Kinderleben, turned it up as loud as I could, she stopped talking, not another word during the whole trip back to the south side, pulled in front of her parents’ little bungalow, didn’t get out and open the door for her, so she finnaly opened it herself and, crying, ran up the stairs. I pulled out and simply left.

  Let her keep the ring. It was her diamond after all; I’d just supplied the setting.

  The next morning I told my parents the whole story and they both nodded like two old wise men out of the bible.

  “Good, good, we never liked her . . .”

  “Good, good, her father was a gyp artist . . .”

  And that was it.

  Helen, of course, totally disillusioned with me.

  “What the hell, she’s just human, that’s all. And honest. She told you the whole story, didn’t she? You could always trust her—”

  “Told me after the fact.”

  “Well, she couldn’t have told you before, could she?”

  Amused. Who knows what she and Joe Moag were up to?

  I felt depressed, but justified. My only problem was that THING between my legs that refused to just lie there and shut up.

  “Bless me, father, for I have sinned . . .”

  Got it a bit under control, filled my room with pictures of Buddha, started reading all the Buddhism I could get my hands on, concentrated even more heavily on my studies, the history of English literature, the early period, middle period, and contemporary periods, three courses all at the same time, then a course in the history of the language, a course in the Metaphysical poets, a course in the Victorian novel, a course in T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.