Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  Norman had now steered the cigarette boat deep into the regatta’s helter-skelter and was trolling slowly, ever so slowly, with the thousand-horsepower engines growling growling growling growling ever so lowly lowly lowly… around this boat… between those two… along the lineups of boats tethered together side by side, closely, ever so closely… looking up at the people… who were dancing and drinking and squealing and laughing laughing laughing laughing—we’re here we’re here where things are happening! happening! happening! happening! to the beat—always the beat—of octophonic speakers electro-thunging out beats, beats, repro-beats, and the singers, always girls, became nothing more than beats themselves… no melody… only repro-beats… stringed bass, drums, beat-girls…

  The closer they got to the key—they still hadn’t laid eyes on it—the more boats they found lashed together, side by side, at the widest part of the hulls. It turned the boats into one big deck party, despite the different levels. A girl in a G-string bikini—so much blond hair!—teeters upon the narrow juncture where two boats are joined together and squeals with—she squeals with what? fear? coquetry? flirtation? the sheer exuberance of being where things are happening?—as guys hurry over and reach up to steady her. Another girl in a G-string bikini leaps over the juncture and lands on the other deck. The boys cheer with slightly ironic gusto, and one keeps yelling, “I would! I would!”… and the speakers boom boom boom with a beat a beat a beat a beat.

  ::::::and what does Norman think he’s doing?:::::: In front of the lashed-together lineups Norman would unleash a sudden burst of fuel, and the thousand-HP engines would ROAR and everybody on the decks would peer down and cheer drunkenly and ironically. There were many small boats also weaving in and out of the boat mob… dinghies, motorboats, and every so often the kayak—that same kayak!—the paddler in the front now drunkenly singing… something… and the guy and the girl in the back drunkenly extending one leg and then the other… and Magdalena can look over and see the girl, lying on her side… and her bare bottom has the woven stringlike thong of a G-string bikini in the cleft and the boy, wearing baggy board shorts, has one arm under her head with the hand grasping her shoulder. It looked damned uncomfortable, trying to lie down in the bottom of a kayak… Half the girls dancing on the decks, all the decks, had on thongs… cleaving their buttocks into pairs of perfect melons just ripe enough for the picking… and that girl right there, not ten feet away, climbing out of the water up the ladder of that two-deck motor launch—her buttocks, her backside, her… her… her ass—no other word comes right out and says it—her ass has swallowed her sling-low red thong so completely, Magdalena can hardly see that it exists at all… The water has furled the girl’s hair into a wet mass that hangs down her back far below her shoulder blades, and the water makes it dark, but Magdalena would bet anything that it’s actually blond—las gringas!—so many of them on those decks! Their blond hair bounces when they dance. It flashes when they throw their heads about to squeal… to flirt… to laugh laugh laugh laugh on the decks where things are happening… at Elliott Key… at this sexual regatta she finds herself enclosed in, making her want, despite sane thinking, to show them all—all those gringas!—what she’s got. She makes herself sit up very erectly in her cigarette boat chair and pulls her abdominals in and flexes her shoulders back to make her breasts stand up perfectly, and she wants all esos gringos y gringas to stare at her and she wants to catch them staring… that one!… that one?… that one over there?—

  Norman feeds another gulp of fuel to the engines, and they really ROAR this time, and he starts smiling a comradely smile and pointing at nobody in particular and waving at—empty spaces, so far as she can tell, and gunning the big engines with a bigger louder roar than ever, then cutting back as quietly.

  Magdalena said, “Norman—what… are… you… doing?”

  A knowing smile: “You’ll see. You just keep looking luscious, the way you do right now.” He thrust his own chest out in an admiring pantomime of hers. Magdalena was pleased in spite of herself.

  They were trolling ::::::for what?:::::: along the biggest lineup yet. Magdalena counted thirteen boats—or was it fourteen?—all of them on the large side, and at one end, two sailboats, one of them a schooner with enormous sails. This huge lineup excited Norman. He began going all out with the sound-offs, from growl to ROAR… the broad confident grins… the waving at imaginary people…

  They were halfway down the lineup when a boy up on a deck shouted, “Hey, man! Didn’t I just see you on TV?”

  Norman put on a big congenial smile and said, “Could be!”

  The boy shouted, “60 Minutes, right?”

  Now Magdalena could see which boy. “You were on fire, man! You really had that little fucker… you had him like I mean all fucked up!”

  From what Magdalena could tell from down here, he was a good-looking boy—early twenties?—with a head of long, thick hair brushed back into great sun-bleached brown leonine locks like Tarzan’s and a perfect tan that made his long white teeth light up every time he smiled. He smiled a lot. He was tickled pink to have a noted TV schloctor doctor looking up at him… whatever his name might be.

  “I got it!” shouted the boy. “Dr…. Lewis!”

  “Norman Lewis!” shouted Norman. “I’m Norman… and this is Magdalena!”

  “I would!” said the boy. He sounded drunk. He had a jumbo container in one hand.

  “Me, too!” said another boy.

  Magdalena didn’t go for that. It came across as mockery.

  Ironic whistles… Quite a little cluster of people had gathered at the railing. The suntanned boy with the teeth shouted down, “Hey, Dr. Lewis—Norman—why don’t you and Madelaine—”

  “Magdalena!” said Norman.

  “I would!” said the boy. Obviously he was very proud of this rhetorical leap of vaguely sexual logic.

  “Me, too!” said the other boy, and all the kids laughed. There was a real throng of them up there on the deck.

  “Why don’t you and Magdalena—”

  “I would!” two of the boys at the railing shouted in unison, and others took up the cry, “I definitely would!”

  “—come up and have a drink!” the first boy continued.

  “Well…” Norman paused, as if such an invitation had never occurred to him… “Okay! Great! Thanks!”

  The suntanned boy told him to just turn about and swing around the end of the row and double back to the stern of First Draw, where there was a ladder.

  “Great!” said Norman. He turned the cigarette boat about and started off with a big ROAR of the engines, quickly cut back to a growl growl growl growl. “As long as they saw you on TV, you’ve got an aura,” said Norman. He was very happy with Dr. Norman Lewis. “Memory tends to decay rapidly, but I knew I’d have a little mojo left—and I was right.” He paused a moment. “Of course, it didn’t hurt to have the mighty Hypomanic. They love cigarette boats, all these kids. Cigarette boats have… water cred! I knew revving up those thousand horses would get their attention. And you, kid”—he stuck out his lips as if he were about to give her a big comic kiss—“you didn’t hurt, either! Did you see them? They were eating you up alive with their eyes! Didn’t you love that I would business? I would! I would! I would! There’s nobody on that boat who’s even in your league. Face it. You’re gorgeous, kid.”

  With that he put his hand on the inside of her thigh.

  “Norman!” At the same time, she didn’t object to his interpretation of the catcalls.

  His other hand was on the wheel. Intently he stared straight ahead, as if there were nothing on his mind other than steering this growling cigarette boat around the bend.

  “Norman! Stop it!”

  So he removed his hand from her thigh—by sliding it up toward her hip… and then walking his fingers down her lower abdomen and under the band of her bikini bottom.

  “Stop it, Norman! Are you insane?!” She grabbed his wrist and jerked his hand up. “Damn it, Norman
—”

  She suddenly fell silent. His fingers creeping under her pants, in plain view of everyone—so gross! And so juvenile! Such a plunge into naughty-boy exhibitionism! All that, on top of his open admission that he, Dr. Norman Lewis, nationally known psychiatrist, had trolled a whole line of boats in a humiliating, self-debasing way calculated to achieve such a small, retarded goal… crashing the deck party of a bunch of kids—a bunch of kids! A bunch of boys still speaking in teenage slang, a bunch of girls scampering naked over boat decks with thongs cutting their bottoms into two fresh melons and disappearing into God knew what—and yet it excited her. She could feel… the onset of a heedless bacchanal starring her own gorgeous body. A stirring in her loins… until she regretted not wearing a thong. Was this black bikini where Norman went exploring small enough to consummate the concupiscent urge to… abandon… every conscious thought that held her back? But Conscious Thought was tougher than she imagined. It hoisted her up erect. ::::::Stop it… and now!::::::

  “Stop it, Norman!” she said. “Everyone can see us!”

  But she had allowed his hand to remain there for a beat too long, and her Stop it had no moral strength, merely social decorum. By the way Norman was eyeing her, with a little smile playing on parted lips, she knew that he had detected every neuron of her conflicted feelings and realized what a weak and vulnerable state she was in.

  When the Hypomanic reached the stern of the First Draw, there was quite a contingent of gawkers waiting at the top of the ladder. Magdalena climbed up first, to another chorus of “I would!” “I would!” “I would!” “I would!” She could feel their eyes cupping her breasts and massaging her lower abdomen, which was bare all the way down to her mons pubis and swelled out ever so slightly, just enough to give it a little curve. They couldn’t take their eyes off her!

  “I would!”

  “I would!”

  “I would!”

  It was hard to hear even that much. Here on the boat itself the BEAT the BEAT the BEAT came POUNDING POUNDING POUNDING POUNDING out of the speakers. She could see girls on the deck up front, dancing with one another… next thing to naked. A whole flock of G-string girls!… with thongs disappearing into their buttocks’ clefts… They rode their pelvic saddles bareback, they jerked their heads and sent their blond manes flying—blond americanas!—suddenly she felt trapped… in a vulgar horde of aliens…

  Now young guys in bathing trunks… their skin that looked like custard, like flan… Latin guys had muscles you could see—but she realized she was thinking about Nestor—so she dropped that subject. A guy, maybe what?—twenty-five years old?—a guy with skin of flan was standing right in front of her, and he said, “Hey, you with him?”

  She knew he meant Norman, who was coming up the ladder behind her.

  Norman took Magdalena by the hand and went straight to the guy who had invited them aboard in the first place. He turned out to be a tall, slender man, in his early twenties, probably.

  He was wearing a pair of the au courant extralong board shorts. They had a go-to-hell Hawaiian print all over them. Nevertheless, up this close he seemed to rate promotion from boy to young man, in nomenclature at least.

  When he saw Norman, his mouth fell open, his eyes popped open, and he said, “Dr. Lewis! This is so cooool! I just saw you on 60 Minutes—and here you are… on my boat! It’s soooooo cooooool!”

  The awe seemed to be genuine—and Magdalena saw genuine gratitude spread over Norman’s face in the form of a smile that said, “That’s more like it.” He put out his hand, and the young man shook it and felt compelled to say, “Actually, this isn’t really my boat, it’s my father’s.”

  Norman said in the friendliest possible way, “Please tell me your name!”

  “I’m Cary!” That was it—Cary. He was part of this, the first generation to have no last names. Using a last name was considered pompous… or else too much of a tip-off as to your background… ethnic, racial, sometimes social. Nobody used a last name until he was forced to fill out a form.

  Norman said, “And this is Magdalena, Cary.”

  Cary flashed those incomparable teeth of his and said, “I would! Honest, that’s a compliment!”

  Laughter and “I woulds” broke out among the crowd that had gathered around them to see the supposedly famous Dr. Lewis, whoever he might be.

  “I would!” Laughter.

  “I would!” Laughter.

  “I would!” Laughter.

  “I would!” More laughter.

  “I definitely would!” Whoops of laughter over that one.

  “That’s a big compliment,” said Cary. “Honest truth!”

  A wave of embarrassment… and bliss… Cuban girls were no different from americana girls in most things. They spent half of every day asking themselves… or their girlfriends… “Did he notice me? Do you think he did? What kind of look was that, would you say?”

  Magdalena couldn’t dream up a single reply that wouldn’t… kill the bliss of it. If she openly took it as a compliment, she would sound like an unsophisticated little Latina, and if she tried some becomingly cool and witty piece of self-deprecation, she would come off as an awkward creature who had a fear of being envied. Wisely, she did the only safe thing. She stood there blushing and fighting off the smile… and what bliss it was!

  The sun had sunk a bit, but it couldn’t have been later than 5:30 when Magdalena heard a chorus of those ironic whooooops that young men seem to enjoy… They were on the deck of the next boat over… and there she was… a blond girl who had just removed the top of her bikini. She had her back arched and her arms out wide… with the bra dangling from one hand… and her breasts popped out in a way that said, “No more hide-and-peek. Now we… live!”

  “Come on!” said Norman… with a lewdly happy face. “This you’ve got to see!” He took her hand and hurried her over to the railing to get a better look. “Now it begins!”

  The blonde with the breasts did a few mild shimmies with her hips, showing her chorus of admirers how taut her pectoral glories were… how they stuck out, defying gravity…

  “What begins?” she said.

  “The regatta is essentially an orgy,” said Norman. “That’s what I want you to see. You have to see something like this once anyway.” But he wasn’t looking at Magdalena when he said it. Like every other male on the boat, he only had eyes for the sprung-free naked breasts. She was casting glances this way and that, vamping, like a comedienne playing the coquette, urgently trying to convey the message: “Oh, I’m just having fun… just using sex as irony… you can’t take this seriously”… as she switched her hips this way and that… comically, of course, because this was not serious… but enough for everyone to see her body in her tan thong, very nearly the color of her skin.

  The girl suddenly stopped her little performance, crossed her arms over her breasts, and doubled over laughing and then rose erect, still laughing, dabbing her eyes with the backs of her hands, as if it had all been so funny. But then she straightened up and shook her breasts… but without the shimmies… and now smiled broadly as she approached three of her americana girlfriends who were laughing their heads off. One of them kept thrusting both arms up in the air the way football referees did when a team scored. The blonde no longer tried to cover her breasts with her arms. She posed with her hands on her hips and kept smiling as she talked to the three girls—didn’t want anybody to think she was embarrassed by what she had done.

  The girl’s success did not lead to a wave of breast baring. It started off randomly. Magdalena and Norman kept touring from boat to boat… deck to deck… thirteen different decks… some this high off the water, and some that high, and some not even that high, and a few not much higher off the water than Norman’s cigarette boat. Norman kept stopping to yakyakyakyakyakyakyakyakhockhockhock with fans—not exactly fans… more like people who had just been told he was important—and Magdalena would stand there with a smile of interest and involvement on her face but then become so
bored that she would look about, and… see that some girl over here or over there… or over there—five or six hundred yards away, even, on some deck on another tethered row of boats—had taken off her bikini top… without benefit of whoops whoooops and woo-ooOOOs… and the sun would sink a little further… and the boys would get a little drunker… so drunk or so inflamed with lust that they worked up the courage to join the girls dancing on the deck. ::::::And there’s that kayak.:::::: It was still coursing among the boats, reappeared below. The oarsman stood up in the front with a paddle, as if this were a gondola. The couple still lay together in back. The girl had removed her string bikini top and lay on her back, flaunting her big breasts. She had opened up her legs. A wisp of G-string bikini cloth barely covered her. The boy, who still had his board shorts on, lay on his side with both legs around the lower half of one of her legs. Todo el mundo seemed to be staring down to see if he was aroused. Magdalena, for her part, couldn’t tell… and then they were gone… in order to present their exhibición to other boats. Here on deck… ripe melons… ripe… By now, late afternoon, all the decks were filthy… littered with every imaginable form of trash and garbage plus, here and there, pools of vomit, some of it still wet, some of it sun-dried vomitus… and everywhere discarded beer cans and beer bottles and big plastic beer cups… iconic Solo cups… favorite at keggers and tailgaters… hundreds of them discarded on every deck… Solo cups… in their traditional tool-and-dye-works red… and in every other imaginable color… pale pink, corn yellow, royal blue, navy blue, aqua blue, viridian green, puce, fuchsia, cellar-floor gray, garbage-bag brown, every color short of black… strewn, crushed, split, or lying sideways, intact… and every time a boat rocked, usually thanks to the rolling wakes of speedboats, the bottles and the beer cans would roll across the deck… the beer cans with a cheap junky aluminum rattle… the bottles with a cheap junky hollow moan… rolled rolled rolled over the flat garbage, the stamped-out cigarettes, the cheap plastic beads, the spilt-beer slicks, the used condoms, the puke fritters… canted canted canted over a pair of glasses with a ruptured temple hinge, an abandoned flip-flop… collided collided collided with the plasticized cups, and soon the decks were GRINDING and HUMPING and the sound systems were getting louder and the BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung BEAT thung and more girls were taking off their tops and were left only with little thongs disappearing into the crevices of their only just now! at just this very taut swollen labial moment ripe melons… ripe melons… and they got down to it… no more steps, no more Lindys and twists such as the girls did with one another… no, get down to it… to GRINDING…