by Ward, Robert
Maybe, I thought now as I drove by the Old Trail Bar, where my grandfather had spent many an afternoon drinking with his hunting buddies, maybe I had known all along I would have to risk writing about Jeremy and Val and those first not-so-innocent magical days, even if no one wanted to hear it anymore, no one but myself. For I suspected that without taking that risk, the risk of fully understanding one’s own heartbreak, one could never really write from one’s deepest tangled self, and beyond that (and infinitely more important), one would never be fully alive.
And I thought again of Jeremy, who burned to live faster, deeper, who risked everything on his own wild ride.
And when had I last risked so much or felt such crazy joy?
I turned left at Chateau Avenue and drove slowly down the leafy street. It looked almost as it had twenty years ago. The great Victorian houses sat back off the narrow sidewalks, their wide, wraparound front porches like an invitation to come and sit and talk. In front of one, I saw a young black man and a white woman walking with their child. When they heard my car come slowly idling by, they turned and looked out at me, not in any obvious way, but there was concern in the man’s eyes. Not wanting him to think I was some cruising redneck, I stepped on the gas a little and headed downhill to the bottom of the black cracked macadam street. Then, suddenly, I was there, pulling into an open parking space right in front of 1529.
Of course, the house had been rebuilt. Now, instead of the old shingled place there was a huge white clapboard mansion, restored and picture perfect, with white wicker chairs sitting on the old veranda. Someone had put a gold American eagle out front on the newly seeded lawn, and in the driveway, there was a black Cherokee Jeep. When I rolled down the windows of my car, I could hear a power mower humming away out back. The owner would be around front to finish the job soon, probably some Baltimore yuppie homesteader. I knew these people too well, having done a magazine piece on them for The New York Times. I had spent weeks with their babies, their boats, their ersatz Greco-Roman tapestries painted on their Bolton Hill dining room walls, and I’d heard, until I nearly choked, their endless smug conversations about their new kitchens, their country houses on the Eastern Shore, and their absolutely favorite subject—How Much More Value for Their Money They Got Living in Baltimore Instead of Awful New York!! They were a group of smug, terrible bores, and the thought that one of them now owned our old commune made me sick with jealousy and loathing.
But before I worked myself up into a wolverinelike snarl, I had to stop myself. Wasn’t some of this a fantasy? And weren’t at least part of my feelings simply a result of my own guilt for leaving my hometown to begin with? After all, what did I actually know of this guy? Why should I judge him so harshly? Hell, he would probably like me, maybe he even read my books. The truth was that there was a harshness in my heart, a foulness. I’d never really forgiven myself for the things that happened so long ago.
A second later the owner did come around the side of the house, an overweight man with a pink alligator Izod shirt on and a pair of baggy khakis. He looked down at me, and I smiled back at him. He gave a little wave, but there was confusion, even fear, in his face, and I have to admit that seeing it gave me a kind of twisted guilty pleasure.
I knew I should go at once, before my riotous, drunken feelings took over completely, before I got out of the car and said or did something stupid and ugly. But I didn’t leave. Instead I sat there with my lousy attitude, sat there listening to the death drone of the power mower and dreamed my sweet, bad dreams.
After that first wild night with Val, I didn’t quite make it to class. In fact, I didn’t get out of bed at all until three in the afternoon. Sweet Val was long gone by that time. She had a modeling job at Maryland Institute, and in the morning she reached down and kissed me on the lips and disappeared. In some kind of doped-up alcohol stupor I remained unconscious until Jeremy knocked on my door and entered, smiling at me.
“Ooooh, the beast arises,” he said.
“Oh, God, my head is swollen,” I said. “I’ll be fucking dead soon.”
“Here drink this,” he said and handed me a brown potion.
“What in God’s name is this horror?” I said.
“It’s just a little Coke syrup in some soda water. We’ve used it in my family for over a thousand years. Don’t worry, I won’t poison you. I need you to do me a little favor.”
I drank the stuff—it was sweet tasting, like candy—and I doubted if it would relieve my headache. But there was something reassuring about it.
“What favor?” I said doubtfully.
“Well, you see I mentioned to you that I got the University of Baltimore to buy my cards?”
The cards again. I had become so sentimental the night before, had convinced myself through dope and sex and blind-only-child-dad-goes-berserk-in-the-bathroom need that Jeremy was my friend, my mentor, but now all this gab about the cards reminded me that he was first and foremost an operator. And he was obviously operating on me right now.
“So?” I said.
“Well?” he said. “Tonight at six, I am supposed to be at that venerable institution with cameras in hand and take the pictures of all three hundred members of their freshman class.”
“Good luck,” I said, falling back in the bed, as he slashed back the curtains and unwelcome blinding sunlight flooded the room.
“Well, my boy, you see, I have this little problem,” Jeremy said. “Thing is, I’m slightly understaffed. I have to be off selling our product to yet another school. So, I was wondering if you and the Babe and maybe Val could go down there and take the pictures? There’s nothing to it, really. I can show you how to use the camera in five minutes. Then you just snap away, flirt with the pretty girls, and it’s all done. Oh, and one more thing, you’ll be paid handsomely. A hundred bucks for the three of you.”
I scratched my head and looked through the gauze over my eyes at him.
“A hundred? That’s pretty good money. Can you afford it?”
“I can, my boy. See, this business is very, very lucrative. Each one of these contracts is worth ten thousand dollars. Now imagine that we get all the schools in the Baltimore-Washington area and just think how much money we’re going to rake in.”
“But can you get all the schools?” I asked, wondering how I could get out of this.
“Of course we can. While you were sleeping I was over at Hopkins. We reshoot there tomorrow. I just got Morgan College to sign up. And by tomorrow I think I’ll have Goucher.”
I laughed and shook my head, which was a mistake, as pain flooded my temples.
“This damned thing just might work,” I said. “You could get rich.”
“Yes, I can and I will. But not just to become another of those Hunt Cup bores, believe me. What we are going to do here is finance our own plans to become miraculous.”
His reference to the Hunt Cup sent a little warning bolt through my stomach. Only hours before, Val and I had had our conversation and suddenly I felt spied upon and wondered if she had reported to him what I had said.
“You’re familiar with the horsey set?” I asked, pulling my aching body from the bed.
“God, yes,” Jeremy said. “My family used to have a little shack out there in Calvert. They play polo. They get drunk. God, what a boring way to waste one’s life. The whole world’s changing, my boy, and all my relatives want to do is have a perfect, unbruised martini.”
“Yeah, right,” I said with my usual irony, but secretly hoping he was right.
“There are even some people I’ve been in touch with,” Jeremy said, “a small movement out in San Francisco. They think you can drop out of society altogether, without any money, some kind of saintly Zen trip. But while I admire their courage, I know they’re dead wrong. No matter what kind of new ideas you get behind, they all take money. That you can bet your proverbial ass on. Take rock ‘n roll, that’s all about money, of course. No reason why it shouldn’t be. Well, these little I.D. cards are going to be ou
r meal ticket, so that we can finance our experiments.”
“God, you talk like a lunatic,” I said, using one of my mother’s favorite Baltimorisms. But I didn’t mean it; I was intrigued, greatly so, and I suddenly thought of Dr. Spaulding and it seemed (and I felt an intense creeping shame in my guts for feeling this) that when I talked to him I was in a stuffy museum somewhere, but when I talked to Jeremy, I was talking to a man from the future.
“Yes, I expect I do,” he said. “But just the same, how about humoring me a little and taking the pictures for me tonight. Val’s going to be there.”
“Look,” I said, “I like you. I had a great time last night, but I don’t know about getting involved in your card games. I need to read, study …”
I expected him to give me a hard sell, but instead he merely threw open his palms and smiled.
“Your call,” he said. “I just thought I would give you a chance to make some easy money as a way of paying you back for that mess we got into the other day.”
He turned and started out the door. I immediately felt like a prude and a bad sport. He was a new friend after all, and I could use the money.
“Wait up,” I said. “All right. Let me get a shower and some food in my stomach, then show me how to use the camera.”
He turned and smiled at me, then gave me a conspiratorial wink.
“Super, my boy,” he said. “You won’t regret it. The King of Cards never forgets a friend. See you downstairs.”
Then he disappeared out the door. And as I started to put on my clothes, I wondered if he hadn’t somehow hypnotized me after all.
At six that evening I started my career as one of the King’s Identi-Card minions, though at the time I was convinced that this was simply a one-shot attempt to help a strapped friend. The very next morning, I would lock myself in my room and start on my serious reading of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. That was precisely the book I needed to immerse myself in to get back on the right track with Dr. Spaulding; then something occurred to me. Though I had shared most of my life with Val the night before, I had neglected to mention my mentor. The truth was that I dreaded them meeting, for they seemed like two completely disparate elements in my crazy quilt of a personality, the Academic and the Outlaw. Two warring elements that were struggling for possession of my soul. Such thoughts caused me to shake my head, blush. What melodrama … what corn. If anyone else had told me such stuff about their lives I would have been unmercifully satirical, and yet wasn’t it true? Wasn’t I as turned on by the wildness and the craziness at Chateau Avenue as I was by reading Great Literature? Indeed, wasn’t I a little more turned on by the outlaw world? I mean, did dear old Henry James ever stop thinking long enough to fuck a black-clad girl up the ass while the great moon sent down its wild yellow rays? Lord, I was losing my way. I had to maintain a sense of balance, keep my cool, detached perspective.
The thought sent chills down my back and I cursed myself for wanting too much. Why couldn’t I be a good little English major, reading my books, going to the right faculty parties, paying attention to the politics of the department, moving smoothly ahead, or for that matter why couldn’t I be a simple-minded Bohemian like the Babe and Eddie? Doing drugs, walking the wild life outside of all bourgeois constraints. Instead, I wanted everything at once—High Seriousness and Deep Thoughts and Beatnik Drugs and Crazy Poetry and Wild Throbbing Sex—the thought made me dizzy. Suddenly I had a flash of insight into myself that I didn’t want to have. All along, I had felt weak, small, helpless—in my own house I couldn’t even get into the bathroom to take a piss, for Godssake—but suddenly, it occurred to me that I was not this little helpless waif after all. No, underneath the smallness and the little boy lost feelings, there was something else—someone else—born of a thousand hours of lonely only-child fantasies, some thing that was weird, wild, some thing that was maybe not even a “boy” at all, something more like an open mouth, yes, a great open mouth that wanted to swallow the great Slimy Chesapeake Bay Oyster of Experience whole, and that thought was so frightening to me, so unlike any image of myself that I had ever entertained before, that in a panic I instantly put it aside, shoved it at once under the piles of both literary plans (read, read, take notes, and read) and plans to help Jeremy in his University of Baltimore job (do good, be a pal, make money).
But the image of the open mouth was still there just below the surface, smiling, like some floating pair of lips, under piles of dark, glistening seaweed.
Jeremy spent the afternoon showing me how to use the camera. It seemed simplicity itself, but when I arrived in the University of Baltimore student union, I felt like running away. I was already twenty minutes late, and there, waiting for me, was a huge line of angry students waiting for their picture to be taken.
And right in the front of the line were three huge hulking guys with massive muscles. I recognized one of them, Buddy Biddleman, formerly a leading wrestler from Patterson Park High School. Though he was a freshman, he was already twenty-one years old. At one time, every college in Maryland wanted to give him an athletic scholarship, but he had been mixed up in some trouble with a girl—for a while it looked as though he might go to jail for rape. Although the charges had eventually been dismissed (rumor had it that he and his family had threatened to break the girl’s kneecaps if she continued with her complaint), most of the schools had reneged on the offers of a free ride. Only the University of Baltimore, a pathetic school filled with the flotsam and jetsam of the Baltimore high school system, had kept its doors open.
Now he stared at me as I carried the big Rolliflex thirty-five-millimeter camera in and sat it up on its tripod. As I tacked a sheet of blue contact paper up on the wall, I heard him make a crack: “Asshole don’t look like no professional, does he?”
With him were a couple of his gooney-looking Drape friends with their leftover DA haircuts, white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up, and packs of Luckies in them. They brayed at me along with him. I kept working, trying to ignore them when someone touched my back. I must have jumped an inch off the ground, which sent a scream of delight from Buddy and his friends. But when I turned around, I saw not one of the hoodlum crowd but a fat blond boy with pinched eyes: “My name is Randy Roberts,” he said. “Your colleagues, Babe McCallister and somebody named Val, called and said they’d gotten hung up, so Ted Hawkins, our activities coordinator, sent me over to assist you. You shouldn’t have been late, you know. The students are getting very restless.”
He turned and looked at Biddleman, and there was fear in his eyes.
Great, I thought, the Babe and Val don’t make it, probably down at Monty’s smoking hash and drinking wine, and I’m left here facing this psycho on my own.
“Well, thanks for the help,” I said. “I’ll shoot the pictures and you get their names.”
I tried to steady my already frazzled nerves by looking through the camera, but that only sent a wilder panic through me: Everything I looked at was black. Nothing but total darkness.
“Jesus,” I said, “this thing might be broken …”
“It would help if you took off the lens cap,” Randy Roberts said.
This brought howls of execration from Biddleman and his buddies.
“You believe this guy?” Buddy said. “Hey pal, how’d you get the job … blow somebody?”
I felt a helpless anger rising up inside me. I wanted to turn and tear into him, but, of course, I knew how that would turn out, so I said nothing.
“Guy’s a real pro, Randy,” Buddy said. “He’s looking good, by the way so are you, slobberino!”
He moved forward and gave Randy a hard little snap of his index finger on the earlobe. Randy fell backward with a yowl and smashed into the camera, knocking me backward and sending both of us sprawling on the floor.
Biddleman and friends screamed, and I felt the anger rise inside of me again.
“You guys are beautiful,” Biddleman said. “Just beautiful!”
I couldn’t help myself any
longer. I looked up and smiled at him.
“Feel tough today, do you, Buddy?” I said. “Why don’t you go rape somebody?”
That brought things to a grinding halt. There was the kind of silence one associates with the second before a firing squad sends off their volley into a quivering blindfolded man.
Buddy moved toward me slowly.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” he said. “That was unwise.”
Then he kicked me as hard as he could in the right shin. The pain was indescribable. I saw a little shower of meteors cross in front of his gorilla face.
He reached down to hit me again. I wanted to resist, but there was nothing I could do. I was literally paralyzed by his first kick.
Then I saw a black hand reach in and grab his wrist.
I looked up and saw a huge black man push him away from me. Then another black hand came out and helped me up off of the floor.
“He said I was a rapist, Mr. Hawkins,” Buddy said. “You know I couldn’t let him get away with that.”
“Get out of here, Buddy,” Mr. Hawkins said in a deep, angry voice. “Are you all right, son?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said, though it did not sound like my own voice at all.
“I ain’t leaving till I get my picture takin,” Biddleman said.
“Take his picture,” Hawkins said to me. “Then get on with your job. And, Buddy, you get to practice. Fast.”
I felt my hands shake as I got behind the camera.
“You’re a menace, Biddleman,” Mr. Hawkins said. “I’m reporting you.”
“For what?” Buddy said. “I didn’t do nuffin. This asshole started the trouble. Ast any of the guys here.”
The others agreed with him loudly, and Hawkins turned to me.
“Come with me,” he said.
I followed him away from the crowd, around the corner of the student union near a men’s room. Fat Randy Robert’s tagged along with us and tried to take up for me.