by Ward, Robert
“No,” I said, feeling suddenly as though I wanted to scream at him. “I don’t know. Apparently, you disapprove of Raines. I mean, how do you know so much about him?”
“I had him as a student,” he said. “Last year.”
“So?” I said, “What did he do, flunk out or something?”
“No,” Dr. Spaulding said, “he got an A. Raines is a brilliant student. But he has already gone down another path, he and those sloppy pseudo-Bohemian friends of his.”
I waited a full second before I spoke, but finally I couldn’t stand it any longer.
“I resent that,” I said. “Those people are friends of mine.”
“All the sadder,” Dr. Spaulding said. “Tom, I don’t generally interfere with my students’ lives and I debated long and hard whether to say anything about this to you. But those people. I know they’re experimenting with drugs. No good can come of it, Thomas. It’s all so second-rate. I mean, Raines and his friends think they’re so avant-garde, but what they’re doing has already been tried. The Dadaists tried it, and it led to second-rate art and a lot of suicides, and Rimbaud believed in stripping away the senses and it led to his giving up poetry and an early death. Not to mention the surrealists who created nothing of value, and then, of course, there are the beatniks, who are a pathetic crew of third-raters. Thomas, I know what it’s like to be young, smart, and overly sensitive and be stuck on a campus where most of the people are, well, small-minded little educationalists, but believe me you are better off standing alone for now than going on with those hopeless, confused …”
I could stand no more.
“Oh, really,” I said, standing up from my chair, though to this day I have no idea where I got the nerve to defy him like this. “Well, what should I do? Pretend I’m, ah, European aristocracy, sit around with my tea and my madeleine? No, make that my beer and crab cakes, remembering Oriole and Colts games from golden days past. Or maybe I should choose among my thousands of invitations to all the ‘best homes’ and play croquet and titter about the symphony and the love affairs of the countesses and dukes. I don’t know where you’re from, Dr. Spaulding, but me, I’m from around the corner in good old Baltimore. My old man lives in the bathroom night and day, and my mother lives in a fantasy world made up from soap operas and the Reader’s Digest, and we don’t get invited to the fucking Hunt Cup and we don’t get to go on ‘crew sails’ down on the Chesapeake, and I didn’t get to go to Harvard, because I didn’t have the right connections or the right sensibility either, I suppose. The truth is I love living with Raines. He doesn’t sit around worrying about what would be considered propitious or correct or which action would best reflect his ‘highest species potential,’ he just gets out there and makes the world listen to him. He’s the first person I’ve met in this goddamned city who’s not shaking in his boots, and if he’s a con man and a lunatic, well, that’s okay, too. At least he’s not some quivering academic, hiding behind his bound volumes of the Great Masters while the real world passes him by.”
Oh, I was filled with myself that day. The second I finished the speech I realized how much of it was pure falsity, how sorry for myself I’d been, how I’d had many of the same ambivalent feelings toward Raines. It was just that I couldn’t bare to hear them coming from Dr. Spaulding.
Yes, I had been melodramatic and corny in my rage, and yet I also knew that much of the anger that had come out of me was real, and not only that, it was the very first time in my life that I had recognized it as such.
I was shocked by my fury, my resentment of the rich, and my own anti-intellectualism.
Still, even though much of what I had said was not only true but liberating, I felt nothing at that moment but a stunning and instant remorse.
Dr. Spaulding turned and stared at me as though he were seeing me for the first time, and I hated and feared what I saw in his eyes.
“You’ve made yourself clear, Thomas,” he said. “You may leave.”
Feeling numb and fearing I might burst into unmanly tears, I fled from the room.
I staggered to my car and drove down the York Road. The hashish had worn off, and my head throbbed so badly that I felt it might explode. I had no idea where to go. Certainly not to my parents’ home. Who knew what kind of insanity I might lay on my father? And not to Chateau either, for though I had denounced Dr. Spaulding in classic B-movie fashion and was aware now, to my huge embarrassment, how much my Great and Heroic Speech had sounded like some Warner Brothers late-1940s anti-Nazi movie. (“You see, Spaulding, it doesn’t really matter what happens to me, ‘cause there will be a million more beatniks marching through the streets and you European Aristocracy-Loving Sensibility-Selling Nazis will be slaughtered in your caviar, pal.”) Still, I told myself, what did he know? It wasn’t as if we were stoned night and day, and it wasn’t as if Raines didn’t have a plan, and it wasn’t as if I had committed myself whole cloth to him, like he was some goddamned Svengali and I had fallen for his every line. Or had I?
Oh, if ever there was a confused youth, it was I. I found myself pulling over at the Hollow Bar ‘n’ Grill, with its wonderfully comforting sign of a huge blinking swallow and the words Swallow at the Hollow underneath. I walked inside that dark bar, pulled up a stool, and ordered a crab cake and National Bohemian beer. There was a bartender with one glass eye named Eric and he handed me the cake and smiled kindly, and I looked around the place at the rough-hewed men in plaid workshirts, having their morning beers, and I felt sad but somehow at home. Hank Williams was on the jukebox, and I remembered hearing him for the first time when we lived down on Winston Avenue in the late 1940s and my father screaming from the bathroom (even then the bathroom), “Turn that hillbilly music off, mister!” but I had liked it and thought Hank was the real, raw thing. Even now as he sang “Hey Good Looking,” I thought this is Baltimore, this is my home and where I’m comfortable, and then that thought was canceled out by blushing embarrassment and remorse for I knew I’d been a class A fool and probably thrown away my future with Dr. Spaulding.
So I sipped my beer in that dark place and watched the men talk about the prospect for the Colts this year, and I thought about the team and how much I loved them, how I’d waited once for three hours outside Memorial Stadium to get Johnny Unitas’s autograph, and what foolishness Dr. Spaulding would make of that. The door opened and a few other truckers came in and shook hands, and there was real warmth in the way they greeted each other and I thought I like them, they’re the guys I’ve grown up with all my life. Aren’t they worth writing about? Doesn’t anyone care about their lives? And I thought of old Dreiser and how Spaulding had laughed at his “clumsy writing,” but I remembered reading Sister Carrie and being knocked out by it in high school. And was that wrong? Was it just because I was some second-rater? And what of all my friends? Eddie and the Babe and Val? Was it true? Were we all just a bunch of second-raters? And then I remembered Spaulding saying to me one day, “I intended to write more books myself, but after I got out of the army, I got into teaching and I never had the time,” and I thought, it wasn’t the lack of time, Dr. S., because teaching college you have nothing but time; no, it was the fact that you painted yourself into the Snob’s Corner, that everything vital and interesting and alive was terrifying to you, so you called it sloppy and unwashed and stupid, and you x-ed it out, and now you want me to make the same fucking mistake.
But as soon as I came to these thoughts, I wanted to push them out of my mind, for I was as yet too frightened of them to really believe in them. After all, how did I know that any of what I was feeling was really true?
Maybe I was just making up excuses for myself because I hadn’t been studying … elaborate rationales from the BRIGHT BOY WHO SQUANDERED HIS POTENTIAL …
And maybe when I was forty-five and still sitting on these very same bar stools mumbling inanities about the Colts and the Orioles, maybe then I would wish to God I had listened to Dr. Spaulding and chosen the road that would lead to being an Engli
sh professor, a High Priest of Rarified Sensibility.
Oh, my mind was on fire from all the insights, half-insights, lies, truths, half-truths that were buzzing through my synapses. I couldn’t take any more of it, so I drank three more beers and ate another cold crab cake.
Finally, drunk and confused, I was about to leave, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I was so startled that I nearly spilled my beer.
But when I turned and looked up, there was the huge red-faced, gap-toothed, and squinty-eyed Bobby Murphy from my old neighborhood. He was dressed in a dark silk suit and an expensive black Chesterfield overcoat with a silk collar, and now he stared down at me with a mocking but not unaffectionate smile.
“Doctor,” he said. “You look a little under the weather. College life too rough for you?”
“Murph!” I said. And without speaking another word, we embraced unashamedly at the bar. It was then that I saw he had two goons behind him. They were also dressed in black but not quite as elegantly. Neither of them looked at me but were busy casing the Hollow, their eyes roaming nervously around like pinballs.
“Christ, it’s good to see you,” I said.
“You too, Doctor, though our meetings are too rare now that you’ve become a college type. You write that big book about Baltimore yet?”
“No,” I said, smiling and feeling a great rush of affection for him. “Not yet, but one of these days.”
“Well, what are you waiting for, wisdom to strike you dead or something?”
Murphy laughed then, a great, warm laugh from his belly, and the thought made me laugh, too, for I saw at once that he was right. What the hell was I waiting for?
“I been reading about you a lot in the papers, Murph,” I said.
Murphy nodded slowly, took out a gold cigarette case, and waved to Eric, who instantly brought him three beers. One of the goons behind him reached into his wallet and got out some table money.
“Yeah,” Murphy said. “I thought that little piece they did on me inna Sunpapers … ‘at was pretty good. You see it, Tommy?”
“Yeah, I saw it,” I said. I was smiling now. I couldn’t help it. Murph basked in his own semigangster celebrity, and yet there was a generosity to him, the sentimental Irishman who believed in watching out for the little guy.
“So what’d you think?” he said. “I mean was the writing any fucking good or what?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was good, but I don’t think she knew you that well. I mean she made you out to be a tough guy, and all of us from the old neighborhood, we know you’re a pushover.”
Murph sighed and put his huge fingers on my arm and squeezed it until the pain was almost unbelievable, but I showed no signs whatsoever of discomfort.
“Ah, remember the old days, down in Govans,” I said. “Playing cowboys and Indians and stuff.”
I was now seeing stars, but that was par for the course. Murphy and I had played this game since we met as kids. He squeezed a little harder, and I gasped a little but kept on talking.
“Yeah, you were always Hopalong Cassidy, Bobby. I been meaning to ask you about that. I mean this guy was a white-haired, fifty-five-year-old homo and yet you wanted to …”
I couldn’t finish the sentence, because I was now on the verge of a heart attack. Murphy saw I was turning blue and eased off the pressure a little.
“Pretty good, Doctor,” he said, laughing. “You’re still pretty tough for a college dweeb. Hey, but that’s not right about Hoppy, is it? William Boyd wasn’t no pillow biter was he?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but Johnny Unitas …”
Both of the goons behind Murph snapped to attention on that one, as if I’d slapped them in the face.
“Oooh, that’s cold,” Murph said. “That what they teach you in college? Lose all respect for your childhood heroes?”
“You’re right,” I said. “Johnny U. is pushing it too far. I stand corrected, Murph.”
“Johnny U. and Jesus H. Christ,” Murphy said, “though I would bet money only on the former. Remember that pass he threw to save old Ewbank’s job? Who was it caught that one?”
“Jim Mutschellar,” I said, remembering it as though it were yesterday. “Away game against the Redskins, the ball bounces offa’ Redskins defensive back named Norb Hecker.”
“Norb,” Murphy said thoughtfully, “he musta’ been a Welchman. They all got bad hands.”
“It bounces offa’ Norb, and Jim Mutschellar catches it,” I said. “Colts win in the last second, and old Weeb’s still in there as coach.”
“‘N’ the rest, as they say, is fucking history,” Bobby said, draining his second beer. “Remember that guy who was quarterback before Unitas, George, ah, what was his last name, anyway?”
“Shaw,” I said. “George Shaw from Oregon. He was good, too, but he got hurt, Unitas came in, and that was all she wrote for George.”
“Wonder where the fuck he is now,” Murphy said.
“You didn’t hear?” I said.
“What?”
“He and Hopalong Cassidy are living down by the Chesapeake Bay in this little tin-roof love hut!”
“You crazy little fuck,” Murphy said.
He swiped out his hand at me, but I easily ducked under it. When I came up he tousled my hair, like he did to his kid brother.
“Hey, I gotta go,” Murphy said. “I got people to do. Why don’t you call me onna phone sometime? You don’t want to get too far from your own, Tom.”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
“Good. My little brother, he still remembers you. You ever need anything—I mean anything—you call Murph, okay?”
He turned and cruised out, his two goons in front of him. They stopped at the door and looked around outside, but Murph pushed them on from behind.
I sat at the bar and finished my beer, awash in the glow of old friendship and remembered our cowboy and Indian games down in the old neighborhood. Murphy and I sitting up in the Mulberry tree at Craig Avenue waiting to ambush Danny Snyder and Eddie Livingston as they crept down by the green hedges and I remembered Johnny Unitas throwing the ball to Raymond Berry in the 1958 Giants game, and all of us in every block in Baltimore racing from our houses when the Colts won the NFL championship. The Murphys and I were one big pile on their row house front lawn. I looked around at the Hollow Bar, at the cigarette smoke and the amber reflections on the beer bottles, and I thought the place was like a church, that coming here had reconnected me to my own past and maybe Dr. S. wouldn’t understand it, but something in my soul once again felt healed and fine and whole.
Unfortunately, the next morning I had all my usual ambivalence about Raines plus a monstrous hangover. My head pulsed, my limbs ached, and I had the humiliating feeling that I had to go back and apologize to Dr. S at once. Even in my extreme state of confusion, I knew, deep down, that he was trying to help me. Still, I wasn’t ready for that, not quite yet. First, I wanted to talk to Raines about his little bag of tricks and just where Val and I fit in. With that in mind, I went down to breakfast early and caught him just as he was finishing a phone call, but before I could say a word, he smiled, grabbed me by the arm, and started pulling me out of the house.
“I think you and I need to take a little ride,” he said. “How about it?”
“Fine,” I said with a certain coldness in my voice. “There’s nothing I’d like better.”
Minutes later, we were swerving directly into the path of a milk truck and Raines was shaking his head: “I’m worried about your attitude,” he said, turning at the last possible second, thus avoiding certain death for both of us.
“Yes, I suppose you’re going to say I’m not a team player,” I said after I’d taken my hands away from my eyes. “Well, you’re right. I happen to be in love with Val and I don’t dig it at all that she’s ready to fuck some English jerk to save your company.”
“Beyond that, how do you feel?” he said smiling.
“Lousy,” I said, holding my head. “And no lame joke
s are going to make me feel better. And if I’m not hip enough for you, then I’ll pay up my month’s rent and get out now.”
Raines smiled and shook his head. His cowlick blew back and forth from the air conditioner’s false breeze.
“Who said anything about hip? I hate the word hip. We just do what is necessary, my boy.”
“And it is necessary that Val fucks Hogg so she can save your ass?”
“No, of course not. I wouldn’t think of it,” he said, nearly smashing into Mister Softee.
In spite of myself, I thought of Dr. S.’s warning. If Raines and I were going to have a friendship, I would have to demand a lot more out of it. I wasn’t going to be fooled by his sweet smile. Not anymore.
“Oh, you are so clever,” I snorted. “You pretend that you had nothing to do with it, but we both know that you control Val. She owes you her sanity, or at least you’ve made her think she does, so she’ll do anything you like. That’s just wonderful.”
“What is it you think I had her do, my friend?” he said as we ran the red light at Charles Street and Eager.
“I don’t know, only that she assumed you would expect her to fuck that British guy’s lights out if necessary. She certainly didn’t come to that conclusion on her own.”
“So you’ve decided that I’m a manipulative, scheming rat?” Raines said. “Dr. Caligari? Is that it?”
I said nothing but looked morosely out the window at the dilapidated redbrick row houses, which leaned out into the street like an ugly child’s crooked teeth.
“Well, it’s true,” Raines said. “I do manipulate things. As a matter of fact, I have a confession to make. I’ve sort of manipulated you and Val from the start.”
“What?” A kind of electric shock went through me. He’d outflanked me again, the bastard.
Raines smiled mysteriously and looked over at me.
“Well,” he said, “as you can well imagine, Val has endless guys hitting on her. I mean she only has to walk down the street and the guys fall all over her but since she got out of the B-3, that’s the women’s schizophrenic wing of Larson-Payne, I’ve been keeping tabs on her a little to make sure she doesn’t make any bad decisions about people.”