Any other bride would have tossed her kid sister her bridal bouquet—but not Mary Ann, she threw me her rubbed-raw riding crop. I thanked her but told her I wouldn’t touch it with the proverbial ten-foot pole. She grew nervous and asked why, at which point I moved in with the coup de grâce, returning the extra key to her diary, telling her I wouldn’t need it anymore since she had cleverly burnt that volume. Her mouth dropped open so wide she could have sucked in the Three Musketeers and their horses—and she was furious. Then she denied the whole thing, saying that it was just the random writings of a pubescent young girl. I’m sure some of it was but I didn’t want to let her off the hook so easily so I smiled, very maturely, and asked her how husband-to-be tasted on flapjacks.
Mary Ann was nineteen when she got married. She and Walter moved to Chicago which I thought very apt since where else but the Windy City for a girl so vitally concerned with blow jobs.
What I never did tell her about was my little moment with Walter. I didn’t tell her out of sheer perversity, knowing that if I did tell her, she would have immediately called off the wedding and I didn’t want that. I wanted them to get married. They God damn deserved each other.
Two nights before the wedding (I don’t remember where Mary Ann was, probably getting her mouth oiled) my father was in his studio and my mother was nagging the caterers, and I was alone in my room. I was in front of my mirror, wondering why the hell I was being forced to pay such a debt to society when my only crime was that my legs began under my earlobes and my skin looked like a relief map of the Dakota Badlands. At fifteen, it must be said, I was a mess. I more nearly resembled my father: tall, even-featured, watery blue eyes—not without promise. If I paid proper attention to my makeup I might just one day be pretty. My hair, blonde but getting mousy, might one day be untangleable as I was giving it the hundred lashes a night it truly deserved. I was narrow-hipped and firm-assed and my legs, thanks to dancing and gymnastics, were coming along pretty good. It was just that everything was out of synch. My legs were eighteen but my chest was twelve and a half. The rest of me was somewhere in between at irregular intervals.
Boys were interested in me but I quickly found out why. It was because of my sister’s peerless reputation as a cocksucker. A boy would no sooner bring me home from a date than he’d have his tool in his hand, suggesting I give it a ten-minute tongue-lashing. One nice young man, Douglas Pennington, he didn’t even wait until he took me home. He met me at the door with it, asking me if it met with my approval. I slammed the door on it and never saw him again—at least not in an upright position. As to the door, it never closed flush from that night on. I guess there’s a little bit of Douglas Pennington in the old house yet.
Anyway, back to Walter Harrison, frontier accountant and my soon to be brother-in-law. There I am, stark raving nude in front of my mirror and the classy sonofabitch doesn’t even knock. He just walks in and looks at me and says, “I’m looking for Mary Ann.”
Brilliantly I said, “She’s not here.”
“Oh,” he says.
Now mind you, I’m bolt naked in front of the mirror, I’m fifteen years old, my sister’s betrothed (a dark, greasy type about thirty, with skin the texture of a diseased sycamore…all of it to be transferred to Chicago where he’ll never see me again so what does he have to lose) is looking at me and I can see by the way he’s standing that some evil thoughts are in his pants. Also, he’s more than a little bit drunk, which is understandable for a man about to marry the bitch-goddess of all time.
Anyway, I reach for my robe—only it’s in my closet, and all I come up with is a doily from my dresser, after first knocking off half a dozen bottles of my very best cheap cologne. My room immediately begins to smell like what I assumed a whorehouse smelled like because Walter got immediately excited.
“Don’t cover up, Ginnie,” he smiles. “You’re very pretty. What the hell, we’re all in the same family. You look like what Mary Ann must have looked like a couple of years ago.”
“I think you’d better get out of here.”
“Come on, Ginnie. A pretty kid like you? You’re not going to tell me you don’t play around.”
“Walter, I’m only fifteen years old!”
“Yeah? When I was fifteen—”
“I’m having my period.” What the hell, when you’re in a tight spot, you try.
He laughed and moved toward me, trying to look harmless but looking about as harmless as Godzilla. “Ginnie—”
“Really, Walter. It’s the first day and I always have a very heavy flow.”
“Well,” he winks, “there’s other things we can do.”
Christ, I think, has my sister’s reputation gone that far? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The hell, I didn’t. And if I didn’t, the sound of his zipper, opening, would have supplied me with a very audible hint.
“Listen, kid—it’s a modern world we live in. And there’s no harm if people like each other. I mean, we do like each other, don’t we?”
“No, we don’t. I don’t like you at all.”
“Yeah? Well, you like this, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.” Feigning ignorance, “What is it?”
“It’s nine inches for your mouth, baby.”
“No, thanks. I got two loose fillings.” I was always known for my weird sense of humor, only Walter wasn’t laughing. He was just wigwagging himself toward me, like some kind of dopey farmer trying to divine water with a red-headed stick. “You better get out of here, Walter—before I call my father.”
“You just don’t parade around naked and not expect a man to react—you little cockteaser.” He was getting nasty and impatient and larger and closer.
“Boy, I don’t believe you. You’re supposed to marry my sister!”
“Has nothing to do with it. This is you and me. Here and now. You can’t tell me you’re not excited, you little bitch.”
“Boy, Walter—you’re something.” I was trying to get to the bathroom. If I could just get to the bathroom, I could lock the door and—
He was suspicious and moved to cut off my angle of retreat. “Where you going, Ginnie?”
“To the bathroom. I’ve also got diarrhea.”
He stopped—just a split second. It was long enough for me to make my move and I dashed into the bathroom and locked the door behind me—and laughed.
“God damn you, kid! It’s not funny!”
Funny or not, I was suddenly plugged in to a great truth about female self-defense. Laughter. A man comes on too strong—laugh at him. It’s got to be the most destructive thing a girl can do.
He spoke, a little more calmly. “Ginnie, I’m sorry. It’s just that you looked so good. You caught me off guard. I’d hate for you to tell Mary Ann.”
“I won’t. It’s as much my fault as it is yours.” I had no idea what that meant.
“And you won’t tell anyone?”
“Not a soul.”
“Okay. I’m going now, Ginnie.”
“Stay or go, Walter. Doesn’t matter to me.” I turned on the bath.
“And—I’m sorry. I really am. I don’t know what came over me. Ginnie?”
I didn’t answer, just turned on the water full-out and climbed into the tub, filled with wonder at the human race, my own family in particular. But overriding all the strange comedy was my awareness that there were men out there, pointing their penises at me, and damned if they weren’t reaching me, figuratively, that is. Under different circumstances I might just have favored Walter. What the hell, he wasn’t all that bad. He wasn’t a monster. And if he wasn’t nine inches, he was at least eight inches longer than I was prepared to receive at the time.
Nor was Douglas Pennington (my first “door job”) all that disgusting. It was just the situation that was disgusting. Actually, as I thought about it, Douglas’s thing was kind of cute and I hated having to slam the door on it. It was like drowning a puppy. I only did it because he had been so crude. Had he asked me in a nice wa
y, or taken me dancing, or recited a little love poem—maybe we would have been able to work something out.
What it all added up to was that maybe Mary Ann could take her loving on the hoof but I apparently required a little more than a twitching chunk of flesh thrust into my face without my having anything to say on the matter beyond “glub.”
I lay in the warm tub and explored my goodies. I was fifteen and counting and all my equipment was in working order. It would be fun to see how long I could hold out.
CHAPTER THREE
Ben
1949
In a five-story walk-up in the East Eighties I read poetry to myself, not so much to learn from as to become depressed by. For what better way to endure the fruits of poverty than to read how other poets were made miserable by them. Not that I saw myself as a poet, I didn’t. Not that I even saw myself as a writer. It was simply that I identified with poets and writers because they had the wherewithal to set their experiences down, on paper, so that others could see and learn from them and, in some way, benefit. Not that I was benefitting, I wasn’t. I was barely hanging on.
It was my twenty-first birthday and I celebrated with some ninety-nine-cent wine that I had gotten for fifty cents off because no one would buy a wine that cheap unless it was really cheap—like forty-nine cents. There had been three such bottles on the liquor store shelf, so long on the shelf that they were seven years old by the time I got there. Never before had a man purchased three bottles of Villa Cosenza for an aggregate total of one dollar and forty-seven cents. And never before was a liquor store proprietor happier to be rid of them.
I toasted my loneliness by hoisting the first glass to the beauty of Elizabeth Satterly, she of the yellow aura and the unreal countenance. So firmly had I implanted the vision of her into my consciousness that, for the first time since coming to New York, I was aware of the fact that we had never once spoken to one another. Never once over all those years had we said as much to one another as “Good morning”—“What a pretty yellow dress”—“Will the Pirates win the pennant?” And yet I seemed to know the sound of her voice, the lyrical timbre of it—sweet and Tinkerbell, with no trace of Pittsburgh twang or west Pennsylvania slur. Amazing how the dream is novocaine to reality. But the novocaine must, in time, wear off. And twenty-one was as good a time as any.
“So, farewell Elizabeth Satterly,” I said, my voice rattling through the apartment so macho poetic that I really laid into it. “Farewell thy bright walk, thy graceful carriage. Adieu the gray eyes, the honied lips, the gamine breasts never to be mine, ever to be cloaked within the bleak recesses of cruel fantasy, thy lovely voice to ring no more in my ear—because it never rang in the first place.”
I never spoke that way in public, what poet ever did? Did Shakespeare, upon arising on the morrow, ever festoon himself into a sonnet? Or did he just stretch, pass wind, and shout at the girl, “What ho, bitch—fetch me a scone and move your arse”?
My rhyme matched the wine in that both were better abandoned—Elizabeth Satterly and Villa Cosenza, the former relegated to the rear of recall, the latter poured down the sink, sputtering like acid, the sound convincing me of what I had suspected from the outset, i.e., I could have gotten each of the bottles for thirteen cents, the going price of vinegar.
No matter, I thought, it marked a new beginning, a bitter taste with which to bury adolescence and Pittsburgh, two of the more forgettable items of my (up till the night before) meaningless life.
After high school I had meandered. An odd job here, an even odder one there. I had worked in a bakery, a garage, a box factory, and an A & P. In Carmody’s junkyard I was paid to strip anything of value from the carcasses of dead cars. And in Patterson’s Tobacco Shoppe I got hooked on good cigars.
Cigars, light of my life, Somerset Maugham had idealized them via an ode that Ivan Patterson had framed and displayed on one of the walls of his shop. It began with: “There are few things better than a good cigar” and it ended with: “For this men have sweltered long years under tropical suns and ships have scoured the Seven Seas.” It so knocked me out that I committed it to memory and I still remember it, for as Maugham himself put it in that very same ode, “It is the only ambition I have achieved that has never been embittered by disillusion.”
I must have stolen three thousand cigars from Ivan Patterson and they weren’t cheapies. They were Havanas and Jamaicas, Upmanns, Monte Cristos, Temple Halls, and Reina Isabels. By the time I was nineteen I was smoking ten cigars a day and cut quite a figure puffing dollar Don Diegos while striding in my eight-dollar Thom McAns.
My mother took it to mean that I was earning a great deal of money. My father correctly concluded that I was heavily into pilferage. He wasn’t angry, he merely suggested that I broaden my horizons by getting a job in Tiffany’s. He endeared himself to me with that remark and we proceeded to get along better. And when I told him that I wanted to shake Pittsburgh, he gave me the busfare to get out of town. He was never a hugger, never a demonstrative type, but, somewhere beneath his top-grain cowhide exterior, the sonofabitch was worthy of the big shadow he cast, and I suddenly had an inkling as to how my mother could love him despite his glaring insensitivities.
They said good-bye to me as if I were going off for the weekend. That either took class, or they were glad to get rid of me. Somehow my money was on the former and, over the years, I’ve discovered that often the most minimum achievers possess the most maximum class.
I arrived in New York City aboard a Greyhound that should have been euthanized and carrying a valise that Willy Loman would have left forever in a subway locker. But I also had a goodly supply of cigars, one hundred of them to be exact, carefully stolen from the humidors of Ivan Patterson—and I had a battle plan to go with them. I would smoke one cigar a day, after every dinner, and by the time I had gone through the hundred, I would be well on my way to success. It was a fine plan, ranking in scope and madness with Napoleon’s plan to take Moscow.
I checked into the Forty-seventh Street Y where a man could live on half a buck a day. He could also die at that price so the object of the game was to strive for something in between until help came from somewhere. I got a job selling greeting cards, mostly because the light was good and I could see what the poets of 1949 were writing:
Roses are red, violets are blue—
If you’re sailing to France,
Don’t take a canoe.
or
Happy birthday, nephew—
Here’s a toast to you—
May all your roses be red—
and all your violets blue.
I was usually ill by noon and by quitting time I was close to retching. But it was forty-five dollars a week, which meant that, if I didn’t eat or buy a shirt, I could live a life of Kafkaesque ease.
My cigars gave me a lift, each one coming as it did after a day of nothingness or nausea. I would light up and watch the smoke curl away blue, a wispy memory that put a button on my boredom and opened the door to tomorrow.
After thirty-seven cigars in a row I made a few concessions to my lack of accomplishment. I would skip a cigar here and there. So, after fifty days I had only smoked forty. And after ninety I had smoked only sixty. I had twenty-seven cigars left when Don Cook came into my life, albeit to stop me and ask, “What are you smoking—Flor De A. Allones or Ramon Cifuentes Partages?”
You could have knocked me over with a Schimmelpenninck, I was that surprised. There was a guy, not much older than myself, though considerably better dressed and screamingly more worldly, homing in on the name of the cigar I was smoking. “Take a guess,” I suggested.
“It’s one of the two?”
“Yes.”
“Flor De A. Allones.”
“Wrong. Try again.”
“Flor De A. Allones.”
“Right.”
“You tried to trick me. Why?”
“To see if you’d stick to your guns.”
“That’s a sixty-cent cigar.”
<
br /> “True.”
“Nobody who wears a mackinaw smokes a sixty-cent cigar unless he stole it.”
“I don’t steal mackinaws.”
That exchange took place on Sixth Avenue and West Fifty-fourth Street. We stood there swapping one-liners, each of us trying to prove himself the more clever. It was a Mexican standoff so we celebrated with a cup of coffee on the understanding that he was paying.
We were a strange pair, me in my mackinaw and Pittsburgh posh attire—he in his Brooks Brothers triumph and Thomas Begg fedora with Tyrolean feather. Still, I had a pocketful of sixty-cent cigars, whereas he puffed a pipe packed with a penny’s worth of Sir Walter Raleigh. Also, the shirt cuffs that peeked out over his wrists had a touch of the fray to them, and his immaculately knotted skinny rep tie was obviously on its last hurrah.
Don Cook was the grandest twenty-three-year-old man I had ever seen, but his grandeur was superficial and seedy. He looked like an ad for sumptuous living that had been capriciously placed in Popular Mechanics. What’s more, he knew that I knew it.
He studied me as if sighting a rifle that couldn’t miss. “Let me guess. You’re from New Haven. No—New Brunswick.”
“New Delhi. Second generation untouchable.”
The smile escaped even though he tried to hold it back, and even his smile was grand, a thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia flashing out of his boney face though the upper incisors were slightly buck. “My name is Don Cook.”
“I’m Ben Webber.”
“I’m originally from Hartford, son of people many times divorced who dressed me in peach linen suits and wished I’d go away.”
“I’m from Pittsburgh and I never had a linen suit in my life.”
Don Cook spoke in public as I spoke when winging poetry aloud. He didn’t do it all the time but I never did it at all. I decided that it was all bravado, a touch of W. C. Fields, a pinch of John Barrymore, a kid leading an invisible symphony orchestra, thinking he’s doing Aïda but suspecting it’s “Melancholy Baby.” “I want it immediately understood, sir, that I am a thorough and irredeemable heterosexual and have no designs whatsoever on whatever body you’re wearing beneath that shit-colored horse blanket.”
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