King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  Though I probably wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was in shock. The iron ore machine, chanting hipsters, and what appeared to be a very questionable alcoholic ex-nun were more “deviance”—to use a favorite word of the era—than I had experienced in a lifetime.

  “Sister Lulu?” I said when I was able to formulate any words again. “Was she actually a nun?”

  “Yes, of course she was,” Raines said casually, as we walked up the block, “that is, she was right up to the day she was caught having sex with her mother superior.”

  That stopped me dead.

  “What?” I said.

  “Yes, afraid so,” Raines said. “It’s such a sad story. Tragic actually. It happened this way: Sister Lulu was confessing that she had unhealthy sexual desires. She’d had this dream that she was caressing the very white-skinned long leg of a faceless woman and then that caress became a lick, and the sister’s tongue went higher and higher into the creamy thighs of the other woman. Once there she saw this little black beauty mark, and just seeing it sent her into a monster orgasm. All the while as she is telling this, she becomes aware of a kind of panting and sighing on the other side of the confessional booth, and when she describes the beauty mark … well, the mother superior starts moaning and she says, ‘My child, those are my legs!’ It seems that Sister Lulu had seen the mother superior in a state of undress during one of the convent’s Christmas pageants and transposed those legs into her dream lesbo experience. Well, nature took its often-perverted course after that and somehow the two of them ended up inside the confessional booth. Sister Lulu was pulling up her habit and burying her face in the mother superior’s sweet spot when another nun came along and saw the booth actually shaking up and down, and I’m afraid that was it for Sister Lulu. She was drummed out of the convent, excommunicated, actually.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, floundering for words, “that’s unbelievable.”

  Suddenly, I burst into laughter. Not because of the story exactly, but because for a fleeting second I had an image of Dr. Spaulding’s horrified face as I told him this tale. Perhaps his glasses would fall off and he would make some horrible gagging sound. But my laughter was short-lived, for right behind this perverse fantasy came a wave of guilt. What in God’s name was wrong with me? Why would I want to shock my mentor, my friend, the man who I most admired? It was terrible and cheap of me, and I felt low for it.

  Raines shook his head sadly: “Ah, but the Church made a big mistake with Sister Lulu, for she is a deeply committed person. It’s an honor to have her live with us. She gives our whole operation an elevated tone.”

  I assumed he was putting me on, but when I looked over at him, I saw that he had said this with no trace of irony. Finally, not knowing what else to say, I concurred lamely: “Yes,” I said, “I’m sure she does.”

  He gave me a big smile and opened the door to his hideous huge green and white 1962 Nash, a massive tub of a car that looked like a striped tank.

  I got in, shut the door tight, and locked it. I was about to comment that I hoped this would be a brief trip as I had work to do, when my head snapped back so violently I felt a bright pain in the back of my neck.

  Raines had slammed the big Nash tank into reverse and smashed into the car—a red Corvette—parked only inches behind us.

  “Sorry,” he said, then slammed the gear into forward and catapulted into the fender of the blue Ford Fairlane in front of us. There was a loud crunch of metal on metal, the smash of headlight glass, and my head whipped forward, causing me a bolt of pain in the front of my neck.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “What in God’s name?”

  “Sorry, my boy,” Jeremy said. “These people have wedged me in, and we’re having to blast our way out.”

  “Right,” I said, grabbing the armrest and shoving my feet up on the dash for stability.

  Once on the street, Raines drove like he was being pursued by the very hounds of hell. The car veered wildly from the right lane, went over the centerline, and headed for the parked cars on the other side of the York Road.

  “Jesus, look out,” I said. “Are you blind?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” Raines said. “Legally blind actually if I look at things straight on, but luckily my peripheral vision is superb.”

  “Which would explain why you are squinting and looking at me instead of the road,” I said, terrified.

  “Relax, Tom. I can see you’re a worrier. You and good old Dr. Spaulding have that in common. Absolutely worthless trait. Anyway, it only appears I am looking at you, believe me. I’ve got this peripheral driving thing down to a science.”

  At that precise moment a small black dog darted across the road, and Raines gave a mad little laugh and swerved the wheel wildly to the left, barely missing him. I put my hands over my eyes, sucked in my breath, and mumbled a short prayer.

  “Fast little bugger, isn’t he?” Raines said.

  “Raines,” I said. “Slow this projectile down. I mean it!”

  “If it will make you relax, Mr. Worrier, I will happily,” Raines said, taking his foot off the gas petal.

  We managed to drive a hundred yards without incident, and I caught my breath.

  “Look, what in God’s name is going on here anyway? Why are we going to Hopkins?”

  “Well, my boy,” Jeremy said, as we pulled into the wrong turn lane on the York Road. “It’s all very simple, really. I have this small talent for inventing things. Nothing had really taken off until I came up with Identi-Card.”

  “Identi-Card?”

  “Cards,” Jeremy said. “Identity cards. Don’t you see?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Okay, you’re a Calvert student. Take out your student activities card.”

  I pulled out my battered black wallet and did as he asked.

  “Now look at it. It has your name, your social security number, your address, and your signature. That proves it’s you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Wrong,” he smiled. “What if I stole your card and wanted to cash a bad check on it? What would stop me?”

  I wanted to answer the question, but we were headed directly into a National Bohemian beer truck, and I was forced to reach over and grab the wheel. I gave it a last-ditch desperation turn to the right, and we were clear—narrowly.

  “Christ,” I said. “How have you lived this long?”

  Jeremy smiled and ran his left hand through his cowlick.

  “Oh, I am here for a very definite reason,” he said. “I have things to do. You see, my ultimate goal is to make people happy and to do that you need money, lots of it. Now, what if I wanted to bang a check on your card?”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess all you’d have to do is forge my signature.”

  “Exactly,” Jeremy said, “But if you had your picture on your card, I couldn’t do that, could I? You’d be protected.”

  “That’s your invention?” I said. “Identity cards … with pictures?”

  “Uh-huh. You’re unimpressed? Well, dig this, my friend. There was a guy out in Los Angeles, name of Bott. He invented those little speed bumps they have on the freeway. They’re known as Bott’s Dots, and they made him about a hundred million dollars.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m serious. That machine you saw. The old iron ore machine. That machine is the embosser. When we’ve taken all the pictures for, say, the freshman class at Calvert, we run the card through the embosser, and we have the student’s individual serial number indented in the card. That number and the picture make him secure. Neat, simple, and we’re the first to think of it.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. “And how many schools have bought this idea?”

  “Only Calvert, the University of Baltimore, and Johns Hopkins so far,” Jeremy said. “But there are fifty colleges in this area and many, many more in D.C. By this summer, my boy, Jeremy Raines is going to be the King of Cards and velly, velly rich. And by the way, I need partners, pals, g
uys and gals, to get mind-bogglingly wealthy with, so it’s not lonely at the top. Interested?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I have enough trouble just getting my studies done. I intend to spend the next six months in what you would consider a very dull way. Locked up in my room reading novels.”

  “Ah, yes, Spaulding’s influence,” Raines said. “Well, that’s a worthy pursuit. Which ones?”

  “Well, for starters, I’m reading The Ambassadors by Henry James.”

  “Oh, Henry James,” he said. “He’s one of Spaulding’s favorites. Always talking about James’s rare sensibility. Well, I have to confess I never read much of him. He seems to go on and on, though I did like the Turn of the Screw, but I have read just about all of his brother, William. Now there was an amazing man. Still they were a great family, afraid of nothing. Just been reading a little Wilhelm Reich myself, you know him?”

  “A psychologist?” I said with a certain distaste in my voice.

  “Yes,” Raines said. “And I don’t blame you for sneering. I even agree with you. Most psychologists are moronic, bourgeois idiots. But Reich’s different. Fearless. The man invented a box, orgones. Understands the power of orgasm, which, of course, has made him very unpopular in his profession. But he’s a pioneer. That’s the kind of shrink I want to be. Right now, I’m working on a new theory, motivation through hypnotism. You ought to let me put you under. Could improve your whole outlook.”

  Not on your life, I thought, though I smiled and said a noncommittal “hmmmm.”

  The man was mad I thought, part eccentric and part huckster, definitely not anyone for me to get involved with. What I should do, I thought, is politely tell him that I wasn’t interested, ask him to drop me off near the streetcar line, head back to Calvert, and put up a new sign in the student union. But for some reason, I did none of these things. There was something exciting, nervy happening here, and suddenly I remembered high school when I’d played two years of lacrosse. I recalled the way I felt at the beginning of the game, just before the referee dropped the ball in the opening face-off. As I dug my stick into the hard winter ground and glowered at my opponent, my lips would go dry, time would stop, and I could hear the loud thumping of my own heart. It was pure adrenalin, wild and terrifying, and there was nothing else like it in the world. Until now.

  These thoughts were quickly interrupted when Raines nearly ran into a sodium light that stood at Thirty-third and Greenmount. He jerked the wheel, dodging it at the last minute.

  “How in God’s name did you pass the eye test for your license?” I said, panting.

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t,” Jeremy said. “To be totally honest, Eddie E. took it for me.”

  “Come on,” I said. “You can’t get away with something like that. They have your social security number, and they make you sign your name.”

  “Yes,” Raines said, “and that presented us with some difficulty. But you’d be surprised what a couple of hundred bucks can do down at the DMV.”

  “You bribed somebody to pass your driving test?” I said, astonished.

  “I wouldn’t call it bribery,” Raines said. “I’d say we made a couple of new friends, guys who agree with me that the old vehicle laws are far too inflexible.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Yes, indeed. A driver having to be able to actually see the road is practically a Fascist idea.”

  “My thoughts precisely,” Raines said, smiling happily.

  “God, look at the time,” I said, looking at his dash clock. “It’s two-fifty. We have to hurry.”

  “Yes, sir, a professional must always be punctual,” Raines said, nodding gravely. “Though I have had certain … continuing problems in that department.”

  He smiled widely again in an attractively loopy way and jammed his foot to the pedal.

  “Oh, God, no,” I said. We took a screeching left at Charles Street and shot forward nearly clipping a Tip Top bread truck and hitting two ambulances that were turning into Union Memorial Hospital.

  I held onto the door with all my might and looked at the madman, Raines, who was staring at me, a happy smile planted on his face.

  “Never be late, that’s my motto,” he said.

  We parked beneath some great shade trees on the Hopkins campus, and I felt my old shyness taking over. Though I had lived in Baltimore all my life, I had never been on this campus. Boys from my class didn’t go to school here. It wasn’t even an issue; the thought was as inconceivable as my father suddenly being recognized as the new Picasso. “Coming in?” Raines asked.

  “No,” I answered, shocked that he would even suggest it. “I’ll wait here.”

  He smiled and sighed.

  “I’m going to be a while,” he said as he opened the door and hopped out. “Why don’t you come along?”

  “No,” I said. “No, really. Who are you going to visit in there anyway?”

  “The president,” Raines said. “A. Taft Manley. He’s a great guy. Somebody you should get to know.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, certain he was lying. “I’m sure you’re very close friends with the president of Johns Hopkins University.”

  “Matter of fact,” Jeremy said, “he and my father used to work together in city politics. ‘Course that was a while back.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Doubting Tom,” Raines laughed. “Well, then why don’t you come in and find out?”

  He looked at me with a challenging smile, and for a second I felt a little surge of anger. Did he think he could con me that easily?

  “Okay,” I said, “I will.”

  “Great. You’re gonna love Taft. Real down-to-earth guy.”

  I followed along behind penguin-gaited Raines as he led me over the perfect Hopkins campus toward the white-domed president’s building. Even to this day I recall my twisted emotions, a growing irritation with Raines. All this mad stuff about I.D. cards with pictures being worth a fortune and now telling me that he was meeting with A. Taft Manley. Did he think I was a total fool? And yet, it was exciting, promising. Was it possible that he wasn’t kidding?

  As I walked a step or two behind Raines, I remembered my high school friend Ned, who had once asked our counselor at City if he might apply to Hopkins. The counselor had patted him on the back in a patronizing way and said, “Sorry, son, you’re not Hopkins material.”

  No, we were the boys who would go to the second-rate colleges (if we were that lucky) and end up in the second-rate jobs. The boys who would end up managers at the Acme or, like my father, in some horrible soul-killing job. Boys who lost the bloom of youth by the time they were twenty-five. Boys who married neighborhood girls who soon ran too fat and lived in redbrick row houses and had unpromising kids and quickly forgot that they’d ever dreamed of anything greater to begin with. Boys who soon developed beer guts and sat on bar stools for thirty years swilling down National Bohemian beer while they mumbled about the glories of the old Baltimore Colts.

  Until recently, I had never really questioned any of this. Of course, I had my wild high school drinking nights with Bobby Murphy and my other friends, and when we were lying out under the stars at Loch Raven Dam, we would say, “We’re never going to work, we’re never going to end up like our old men. Hell, no!” But we didn’t mean it. In the backs of all of our minds lay the knowledge that of course we were going to end up that way. What other way was there to end up? Ironically, of all of my friends, only Murphy had taken another route from his father, a house painter. Bobby was a criminal, into drugs, hustling, betting parlors, and I half-admired him for it, but that wasn’t a real alternative for me. No, the truth was until I had met Dr. Spaulding, I didn’t see another route. That is until today. But, here ahead of me, was a Calvert College student who had not only brought me onto the Hopkins campus, but who strode across the green sward as though he owned the place. Jeremy Raines, whoever or whatever else he was, was not scared. And though I scarcely knew it at the time, I wanted a piece of that assura
nce, that fearlessness. So in a kind of delirium of confused and half-formed thoughts, I ran on behind mad Raines, half expecting him to pull a fast one on me, to try and lose me in a maze of hallways or lock me in the janitor’s room. But he did none of these things. Instead, he did precisely what he said he would, he took me through the great Colonial doors of the administration building, up the deep-pile-carpeted stairs and into the outer office of A. Taft Manley, president of Johns Hopkins University.

  It was the last thing I expected, and I stood there stunned and confused as the secretary, a thin mantis-faced woman with red hair, a maroon dress, and a handsome pair of buckteeth, greeted Jeremy as though they were old school chums.

  “Jeremy Raines, my favorite con man,” she said affably.

  “How sweet of you, Margaret,” he said. “Is Taft around?”

  “He’s in there waiting for you,” she said. “And, ah, Jer, I ought to warn you. He’s not in a very good mood.”

  “No?” Jeremy said. “Hmmm …”

  “Maybe we should come back later,” I said, half turning toward the door. But Raines grabbed me by the collar and yanked me back.

  “Come along, Rog,” he said, smiling at me.

  “Rog?” I said. “What the hell?”

  “My assistant,” he said as she pushed open an oak door and led us into the president’s office.

  I had never been in such a place before. The president’s desk was massive and made of ancient oak. There were brass lamps, and on the walls were a series of degrees, honorary and otherwise, and pictures of racing horses at Pimlico. A tall, well-bred-looking blond woman stood next to the horse. She had a long lean face, not unlike a thoroughbred herself. The office took my breath away, but it was nothing compared to the effect of the great man himself. He stood in profile in front of a floor-to-ceiling window and gazed out onto his campus. A. Taft Manley was just as I had seen him in pictures in the Baltimore Sun—a huge round man, dressed impeccably in a blue pinstripe suit. His head was extraordinarily gray, and his forehead was nobly high. His cheeks were extremely red, and his chins were countless in number. His eyes were round and huge behind his pince-nez.