by Ward, Robert
Or you don’t get no spending cash
And when you finish doing that
Bring in the dog
And put out the cat,
Yakety yak,
Don’t talk back!!!
And Jeremy Raines was discoursing on the true meaning of this song, which he explained in some strange W. C. Fieldsian voice, saying, “Don’t talk back and don’t look around and don’t do nothing that’ll lead to any ecstasy … oh Lord no no no …” and I thought to myself, this is only some kind of drugged-out thing, this is only some kind of wild night, some kind of one-time aberration, nothing for a sensible man to, say, stage a life from, but it didn’t feel that way, didn’t feel that way to him at all. Because Tommy wanted this very, very badly, oh, yes, indeed. Wanted, needed, loved riding with these people he barely knew but nonetheless now felt were somehow his soul companions.
And how badly he needed soul companions, how often he had been left alone, so alone that he felt someone had stuck a carving knife into his bowels. He felt that too intensely now on his golden hashish high.
And he also needed this strange girl, this lovely girl, wanted her for her bold poetry and her beauty and her anger and her kisses and her breasts that were touching his chest and her legs, ass, oh, God, her perfect ass.
“Hey,” I said, as we drove another car nearly to their death on the Baltimore Beltway. “Just where are we going at a hundred miles an hour here?”
“To Friendship International Airport,” Jeremy Raines said.
“Yes,” I said, “and that is charming, but why? Since all the friends are already here?”
That got a long appreciative laugh, and Val kissed my neck.
“Did you like the hash you just smoked?” Eddie Eckel asked as he hugged the Babe.
“Ah, well, I would have to say affirmative to that,” I said. (Did I say that? Who said that? Who made me say that? It sounded like Raines talking. Was Raines somehow throwing his voice through me? It was possible, entirely possible. Yes, I was a hand puppet. That, I thought, was possible too, and one day, yes, one day, Dr. Spaulding has his hand in my neck and arms and is throwing his voice, as in “One feels such and such” and now, the very next day, Raines is throwing his voice and saying, “Yes, my boy,” and if this is so, then who is it inside this brain, these strong arms, this fast-beating heart?)
“Yes, well said, my boy,” Jeremy said. “Well, you see that’s the point. We love this hashish, too, and therefore we are sending Eddie Eckel to Tangier to buy five hundred pounds of it.”
“What?” I said.
I looked around the car. There were great looming sets of smiling white teeth (Happy Happy Big Teeth!!) and equally happy, if slightly red and lost, eyes.
“You are going to Tangier now to buy drugs?” I screamed.
“Yes, isn’t it wonderful?” said the Babe.
I looked around. More happy, happy smiles. The smiles of saints or morons.
“I will stay at the Aegean Hotel,” Eddie Eckel said. “I’ve heard about a couple of contacts there. I’ll get the drugs and send them back and then we won’t have to ever worry about running out of hashish again for, say, five years.”
“Wonderful,” said a voice.
“Very wonderful,” said another voice, or was it possibly the same voice saying things in a different manner, with a different tone, maybe even with a different set of lips?
“I think it is a wonderful plan,” Val said. “Don’t you think so, Tom?”
She smiled and kissed me full on the mouth. Somebody else handed me the pipe. A few seconds later I lacked a certain critical perspective.
That is, everything seemed entirely wonderful.
And then the strange spatial time displacement took over, and we were all in the airport, walking six abreast through the wide neon-lit hallways, and we were in lockstep like people in some old 1940s’ musical, singing the Coaster’s “Young Blood.”
I saw her standing on the corner,
A yellow ribbon in her hair,
I couldn’t keep myself from shoutin’
Looka there,
Looka there,
Looka there,
Looka there!!!
And now for reasons unknown to yours truly we were all walking backward in lockstep toward the exit gate, and Jeremy Raines was explaining to Eddie the importance of the mission.
“You see, Edward, my boy, if you get this hashish brought back in two weeks, we can sell some of it off and have money to pay people we owe for reshooting and for new film and for the rental on the iron ore machine.”
“Check,” Eddie said. “But you’re forgetting one thing, Jeremy, I need my buy money to get the drugs.”
“Of course you do,” Jeremy said as we all walked sideways toward the terminal, “but I have to wire it to you first thing on Friday, soon as the check clears from University of Baltimore, which is coming tomorrow.”
“You are one hundred percent certain on that?” asked Eddie, picking up the Babe and swirling her around in a tender arc.
“Dead certain of it,” Jeremy said. “You don’t need to worry about a thing.”
“That’s beautiful, Jer,” Eddie said. “Then we’ll have a lifetime supply of hashish and money to run our company with as well.”
“I think we are geniuses,” the Babe said, kissing Eddie on the mouth.
“Most certainly geniuses,” Jeremy said.
He hugged Eddie too and then Val hugged Eddie. Then for some reason even I hugged Eddie, and he was smiling his dark never-brushed teeth at me and saying: “I wasn’t so sure of you, professor, but now I think you’re going to make one hell of an outlaw. Hope you’re going to move in with us soon.”
And with that everyone was cheering and pounding me on the back, and I felt tears come to my eyes and told myself it was just drugs, just the hashish working its golden magic, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt like friendship and romance and true youthful love … Oh, Lord, this friendship, this excitement I was feeling inside me was something all too real, and I saw my defenses crumbling or rather saw that they had altogether crumbled and disintegrated, blown away like old crab claws down at the tin roof Baltimore docks, for why did I want to go back to my parents’ house or look for some other place to live when I was surrounded by my friends, my buddies, mis compadres, mis amigos, the Identi-Card Magicians (and in my addled, wasted, visionary mind was Dr. Spaulding, only this time he looked very, very small, and his voice was that of a burning locust on an Eastern Shore fall leaf fire, “Most unfortunate, Tom, oh, most unfortunate …”).
“Well, I have to consider it,” I said. “I have to think this thing through very carefully.”
“Of course,” Val said, laughing out loud.
“I’m quite serious,” I said, laughing with her. “Quite serious.”
“Aren’t we all, professor?” Eddie said.
“Yes,” Raines said. “Here’s to seriousness. Here’s to the seriousness of love, laughter, and adventure. Hip, hip, hooray!!”
As he cheered, all of them followed suit, and I stood there smiling at them, at their mad, wigged out, joyful faces. Then suddenly I was cheering, too, cheering and smoking hash right in the Friendship International Airport, which felt as though it was about a hundred feet off the ground. And I was hugging Val and saying: “After long and careful consideration I’ve decided: Hell, yes, I’m moving in,” and everyone cheered again, and Val jumped into my arms, and the Babe hugged me from behind, and I was standing there in a breast-and-legs sandwich and I heard Jeremy Raines say: “The Identi-army finds its newest warrior. Here’s to the mad professor!” And we all laughed at that, and hell, I didn’t even mind being called professor. It sounded to me like some 1960s version of cool Doc Holiday (all I needed was a vest, a terminal cough, and a gambler’s boot Derringer) and Jeremy was some jazzed-out wasted Wyatt Earp. Then Eddie took out the little hash pipe again and looked around for about one-tenth of a second and seeing only, say, half a dozen people lit right up,
fearless and crazy, and all of us had a few more wispy golden angel tokes as we waited for Eddie’s plane to Tangier.
I remember the rest of that night like the brilliant topography of a dream: the dark drive back over the streets of Baltimore, as Val and I sang and kissed and pressed ourselves upon each other in the giant old Nash backseat. The way the Chateau Avenue house loomed up against the brilliant midnight sky, all cupolas and jagged shingled abutments, like a true haunted house, and yet there was no fear inside of me. No, that night the prissy and frightened Tommy Fallon was wiped away and yet “I” was still there, but the “I” was some stronger and better version of myself, not the terrified little academic, cautiously passing judgment on books and stories and his friends as if each of them had to be measured by some high critical yardstick, but instead someone else was moving inside of me, someone strong and confident and joyous, someone who laughed, fell down on his knees laughing, as we entered the basement and Jeremy began to pound comically on the old iron ore machine, while the Babe and Val sang their doo-wop slave song to him. And then we were running outside to the backyard, which I had not yet seen, with its wild holly trees and elms with ninety-year-old branches reaching up eerily beautiful to the yellow star-rimmed moon. And there was a bottle of tequila and another hash pipe, only this one was a huge hookah and the Babe was pouring wine in it, chanting “Hubbly Bubbly, Hubbly Bubbly, man’s got to smoke dat Hubbly Bubbly,” and I sat on the back porch steps and pulled on the giant hookah and the stars themselves were twinkling and darting and shooting and calling my name, and then I saw that—oh, amazing moment—there was a swimming pool in the backyard under the twisted vines. How could I have not seen it before? We were all taking off our clothes and falling into the cold, cold water, and I had never felt such a thrill of wetness since the first time I had fallen in the mighty blue Atlantic at Ocean City, Maryland, age four with my grandmother and father and mother, back when they were all still optimistic and happy and we were still a family and loved one another with no questions asked, or that’s how it had seemed. And now, as if my own mind conjured it up, there was a beach ball, and we were playing some whacked-out game of water polo, and we batted the ball higher and higher into the cloudy night, and we laughed and splashed and then … then miraculously, there on the side of the pool was a completely naked and wild-looking Sister Lulu Hardwell, and everyone stopped in perfect awe at the size of her two unbelievable breasts. She looked down into the pool at all of us and for a second I felt embarrassed and ashamed that I was staring, but she ended that promptly by throwing back her head and giving a wild, wild laugh; then she stopped and sweetly fondled her two breasts, and she yelled into the night: “What’s wrong with all of you guys anyway? Doncha like my two wonderful Ripleys?”
Ripleys?!! Calling her own breasts Ripleys! Yes, Lord, that was true crazed, ex-nun whacked-out poetry, and she dove wildly into the pool, and we all cheered, “Hip, hip, hooray!!” And Jeremy began his own separate cheer, “Ripleys ripleys yeah yeah yeah,” and we joined right in behind him as she came floating up to the top, like some holy religious Lady Godiva, Good Sister Lulu Hardwell and her two floating fantastic Ripleys. And we worshipped them, floating there like two fantastic balloon fish from the briny, unfathomable hashish deep.
And then she was out of the water and up on the diving board, everything moving like strange loving little cartoon blips and Sister Lulu Hardwell made the sign of the cross and said in sweet, clear tones: “Oh, Lord, let this magic night be blessed. Let these friends be blessed. Let the stars and the trees and the moon be blessed. Let naked as jaybird water polo be blessed, and let the blessed chips fall where they blessed may!” And then, with no more blessings to be given, Sister Lulu Hardwell dove into the cool dark pool, and my mouth dropped open. Miss Val Jackson saw my look of pure amazement and came over and kissed me hard.
And then like someone had flicked a channel in the sky, the picture changed again, and they were all gone except Miss Val Jackson, and she in some impossibly tender and sexual way wrapped her legs around my waist and I was entering her right there in the moon-dappled water and we sank to the bottom of the dark pool, and I moved inside her, both of us like moonglow fishes in the deep, deep end, and, oh, Lord, I was long, long gone down the deep blue drain of serious love.
The rest of that night was spent in a great double bed in what became my room at the Chateau Avenue house. Truth be told I had only been to bed with one other girl before Val Jackson, and that experience was memorable only as a textbook example of ineptitude and hopelessness. That poor first girl was a sallow blonde named Maggie, whom I made love to on the beach at Ocean City, Maryland, three years earlier. I had gone down to that charming little beach town with my parents for our dreaded family vacation. We had a funky little apartment that overlooked the beach, but this didn’t make my father happy. He complained bitterly that our rented bathroom was (1) too small, (2) had dirt in its corners, (3) didn’t have neon lighting. “What’s a matter?” my mother quipped as we sat in the straw-mat-rugged living room waiting for his majesty to come from his toilet: “The old-fashioned light bulbs make it harder to see your zits?” This cracked me up, and my mother took one look at me and began to giggle like a school girl, holding her hand over her mouth so that the King of Misery couldn’t hear her insolent happiness, which didn’t work, of course. My father came out of the bathroom and bellowed at her: “You think it’s funny, huh? You think it’s funny I have the goddamn Curse, do you? Well, you won’t think it’s so funny when I … I … walk the hell out of this door and keep walking, right into the sea!” As a threat, this failed miserably. My mother and I began to scream with laughter. I fell down on the floor, holding my stomach, as I imagined my father headed across the old boardwalk and out past the innocent vacationing Marylanders sitting on their Baltimore Colt beach towels. Yes, I could see it clearly: He’d be wearing his Mexican sandals, his Hawaiian aloha shorts, his face covered with acne creams, his cysts bleeding from his chest, and as the happy sun lovers gawked in horror, this ultimate beach nerd would head right into the Atlantic Ocean, like Norman Maine from A Star Is Born. Nothing Dad ever said struck me as funny as this, and I pounded my mother on the back, who was now choking from sheer hysterics. Finally, when breath returned to my chest, I looked up at my father, who stood there staring down at both of us, a blank expression on his face.
Suddenly, a little shot of fear wormed its way into my heart. Both Mother and I could pay for this for a long, long time. I expected one of his monster rages, but suddenly he cracked up along with us. He began to laugh, a little at first, but soon the hopeless bathos of it struck him full force, and he was howling and pounding a deck chair. “God,” he said, “God, God, God! How did I ever come to this?” And that self-consciousness, that moment of vulnerability struck me full force, for I suddenly saw my father in all his naked confusion. And my mother saw it, too, and hugged him, and he looked surprised, like a kid who’s received an unexpected gift. And something gave way inside of him. For that week he lost his fear; he seemed to understand that we knew he was driven, that he had no control over the nattering demons within, and we loved him anyway. At least for that one week my father and mother relaxed. He stopped screaming about the bathroom, and by the time my grandmother and aunt had joined us, we had a real vacation together. What was most memorable about it was that when he relaxed, my father could be a loving and happy person. Every night that week he would read one of the great English ghost writer M. R. James’s stories to us. Sitting on our little screened porch, drinking root beer floats, eating crabs on newspaper, seeing my grandmother’s sweet and kind smile as she looked at the roaring surf (“It calms me, honey. I feel closest to God when I stare into the sea.”), hearing my aunt singing “I Can’t Get Started” as she put on her sunglasses and tied her jet black hair back in a red bow, these are the trivial and eternal family details I remember; each of them became all the more poignant because this was the last good vacation our family ever had. As the
week came near its end, I began to feel a small panic inside because I didn’t want it to end, as I knew it must. I didn’t want to go back to our house in Baltimore, with its Curse waiting for us at the door. I didn’t want to go back to screaming and fighting and cries in the night. I didn’t want to see my grandmother go home with my aunt, back to their lonely life near Washington. I wanted it to stay this way, all of us at the beach, in harmony, loving one another quietly, consistently. I felt that I would have given my right arm if only that were possible.
But, of course, I knew it wasn’t. By the next to last night, my father was grumbling again. Someone had “moved his acne cream.” He began to rave on about how “they” moved everything around. “I’m telling you, Tommy, they come in at night and they move your things!” “Who’s they, Dad?” I asked lightly, trying to smooth over his mood. “Who’s they, son? Who’s they? Well, you’ll find out soon enough who THEY are, believe you me.” I could stand no more of this. I wanted to hang on to the kind and silent stream of affection we’d established during the past week, so that last night I went out alone, forsaking our final meal together, and found a girl. She was a blonde named Maggie, and she was standing in front of the pinball casino, Al’s Place, on Ninth Street. Most of my horny adolescent life I’d struggled with my few dates in the backseats of cars, getting nowhere. I’d invented an elaborate and ridiculous line of patter with women, based on mumbling and trying to look furtive and sensitive like James Dean. I even had the red windbreaker Dean had worn in Rebel Without a Cause. But this night was different. I had barely begun my line, “Not much happening at the ocean, huh?” when Maggie turned to me and said, “I think you’re cute … Why don’t we go walk on the beach?” I was fairly flabbergasted by this offer and didn’t know what to say but went with her down near Nineteenth Street, past the place where the hotels stopped (they no longer stop at all anymore, they stretch like a gaudy carnival necklace all the way to Delaware). Minutes later, I found myself lying on top of her, à la Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity. The only difference was that Burt and Deborah Kerr looked like they were really enjoying themselves, whereas I suffered one of the small humiliations of my life. Beach sex may look and sound romantic, but what I recalled was sand seriously chafing my balls and two blue point crabs attempting to enter Maggie at the same moment I did. This frantic and painful copulation ended approximately forty-five seconds after it had begun, and afterward both of us spoke not a word as I walked her down the boardwalk toward the crumbling porch and ripped yellow awning of the Magellan Hotel.