About Harry Towns

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  From then on, he stayed on his side of the twin beds that were disguised to look like a double, and never again risked breaking his bones by leaping over the crevice. What he did was switch over to running for a while. There was a track nearby, and after a few months of getting nowhere, being a tired fellow with frail arches, he got good at it. She eagerly pitched in and helped him along. A new bulletin-board notation read: “Wash Harry's sweat suit.” She would do anything for him. The only thing she could not do was make believe he had the delicate features of a cabaret piano player. He would waltz out of the sliced-off apartment in his sweat suit, wearing three heavy rings on his fingers that might just as well have been brass knuckles. This was in case anyone in the highly ethnic neighborhood fucked around with him. The biggest challenge was to let young Catholic-high-school runners breeze past him while he kept his pace. There was another type of fellow who would high-kick by in a snotty way, but he knew this style of runner would drop out just as soon as he was around a bend where Towns wasn't able to see him. You couldn't run for miles with those high kicks, and this is what Harry Towns was after. You had to keep your feet low to the ground, almost shuffling. Once, in the early evening, when it was cool, he broke five miles and for a minute or two he felt he could run forever. His chest didn't hurt any more. Watching him from the terrace of the sliced-off apartment, his son said he seemed to be crawling. “I'm shooting for distance,” said Harry Towns, “and I'll bet you there isn't one guy in fifty my age can go that far.” His son agreed with him on that one, but you could tell he wished his dad would pick up the pace a bit. It was probably embarrassing to have a father crawling around the track with young Catholic guys zipping past him. Still, Harry Towns loved the running, and burst out of the building each day as if he were gasping for oxygen. Then he started bouncing around the track. That was his life: running and stews. Maybe if he kept running, he could bounce right along to the end of the line. Running, hot stews, bulletin-board notations, some writing for television, a medium that was ready to step on the gas, and out. What was so bad about that? What was bad was that he saw his life as having a giant lie buried in the middle of it, one that had to be plucked out. Once in a while, he would have dinner with a bodyguard friend of his, and he would say just that—”There's a lie right in the middle of my life. I have to take it out.” He thought of the flag at Iwo Jima, and the ethnically mixed little band on the poster, who were trying to drive it into the ground. He imagined that there was a flag staked between his wife's two beds that were gotten up to look like one. Instead of the stars and stripes, it had the word “Lie” printed on it, fluttering in the breeze of the air-conditioner; unlike the Iwo heroes, it was his obligation to pull it out of there.

  One of the developments that had gotten him back to his family was the loss of his mother and father, back to back, his father in particular. When something like that happened, weren't you supposed to hold on to whatever you had—your son, your wife, stews? He had done that, but now another impulse took hold of him—to stop the shit. To pare himself all the way down to something clean. To get rid of everything and find out once and for all if there was anything clean to get down to. That meant saying good-bye to the doctor he wasn't comfortable with, and the insurance man he had inherited from his folks, and the ancient dentist who pinched his gums. And not writing for television which, let's face it, was not ready to step on the gas. Most of all, it meant setting himself, almost like an Olympic athlete, a fellow from East Germany, so that he got all of his strength concentrated in his legs and his arms and could haul out the lie between the beds.

  So he stopped running, and told his wife to hold off on the stew one night because he wanted to talk to her in a restaurant, even though it was in the middle of the week. They picked a restaurant that he didn't think was so romantic, and she did. It went exactly the way it had at the wedding. He said, “Listen …” and she covered his folded hands, kissed him, getting back that fragile gently-tissued give to her flesh, and said, “I know.” This was some girl. And boy, did he love her now. She had tiny experiential lines around her eyes; she no longer had a summer fragrance to her, or the face that had stopped his heart, but she stopped it another way. He generally switched off when someone said that mature women were like vintage wine, but he had to confess that the comparison applied here. Maybe that's why so many people used it. A favorite kind of film of theirs was one in which the perfect lovers would part at the end, sadly, but with no question that it had to be that way. One of them, usually the girl, would ask forlornly, “Why, Bill?,” to which Bill would say, “Because we have to, darling.” Then Bill would ship out on a freighter leaving her standing on a dock in Hong Kong. But actually, nobody knew why. It was assumed that everyone knew, but nobody did, and that included the trio of screenwriters who had thrown together the script. Maybe the studio heads knew and were keeping it to themselves. From time to time, Harry Towns and his wife would laugh about that kind of picture, and now they were following the same story line. He couldn't put his finger precisely on the reason he was leaving either. He was unhappy, and that was enough for him. This time, when he packed, he took all of his slacks. He went through his bureaus and took along every trace of himself, although he didn't take any more books, since he had the best ones. His best ones; he would never have taken her best ones. She had come a long way, but she was not about to plunge into If It Die. For all of her new perfection, she stood by and watched him pack, saying, more than once, “Are you sure you've got everything?” It would have pleased him more if she had slipped out to shop for health foods. When she wasn't watching him, his son took over. They worked in shifts. A friend of Harry Towns had been trying to move away from his family for fifteen years, always folding in the clutch. One night, when he was packing for the twelve-hundredth time, and was about to crumble again, his son said to him, “Dad, if you go back on yourself, I'll never forgive you.” He credited this remark with giving him the strength to get out of there. Harry Towns's son didn't make that type of remark, but he did something better—he looked at his father and hugged him in a way that said he didn't have to worry about cuffs any more. They would never be on him again.

  Harry Towns was so anxious to get all his slacks and old bandannas out of there, he almost forgot he had nowhere to take them. He quickly rented the first place they showed him, making sure only that it was a strong departure from the coldness and impersonality of his steel-and-leather apartment, thirty floors above the city. He took one giant room, a kind of studio in a brownstone. It wasn't exactly a bare room, since it had two long smoked-glass mirrors to cover the charm department. It also had a loft that you climbed up to for sleeping. He was worried about crashing through to the sink below, but the landlord assured him it had been built by a Greek who guaranteed that a dozen people could do tempestuous, high-kicking dances up there and it would hold them. Harry Towns didn't pay enough attention to the neighborhood he was in, and it turned out that there was no neighborhood. The apartment was ringed by elegant hotels with carpets out front. Officials in the Commerce Department stayed in these hotels, as well as representatives of Southwest utility companies. If there was a place where you could get a grilled-cheese sandwich, Harry Towns couldn't find it. There were a lot of models out with their dogs, and an Italian hair-styling place that featured extreme and up-to-the-minute cuts, just in from Rome. He couldn't imagine establishing a meaningful relationship with a person who had one of those cuts. From Harry Towns's new window he could see an art gallery and the embassy of a Persian Gulf country. The landlord said the street looked just like Paris, and he had a point there. The smoked-glass mirrors and the art gallery across the street added up to a certain degree of charm. Harry Towns had to admit that. Except that there was no place to get a BLT down. Or a strainer. He got his cold leather and steel furniture out of storage, and it just fit in with the smoked-glass mirrors by an eyelash. It looked a little like he knew what he was doing. It was amazing how much taking all his slacks affected him
. When he had taken only half his slacks, he was more or less comfortable, but now that he had them all, his stomach fell a little. The first morning away, with all his slacks, he got up early and did a little heartsick running in a park next to the hotels, and wound up in a zoo. It occurred to him that he could have breakfast there, except that the cafeteria wasn't open yet. So he stood opposite the antelope cage while he waited for the breakfast place to start serving. In all his years of knocking around, he had never before taken a good hard look at an antelope, and now he did. What in the hell kind of animal was that? What did they need them for? And, on top of that, he started to feel a little like one. He and the antelopes were both waiting around, kind of directionless, their futures uncertain. He might as well have gotten right in the cage and stood around with them. He had a zoo breakfast, featuring zoo Rice Krispies, zoo milk, and zoo orange juice. The next day he had breakfast in one of the elegant hotels with a crowd of Southwest utility executives planning their pitches for the day ahead. He kept having his breakfasts there, even though he wasn't blending in.

  He decided he had better do something fast. Trips had always helped him before, so he did some fast packing and headed West, going deep inside the country, maybe to see some places he hadn't seen before. Copenhagen and Trondheim were out of the question. He had been cut off from his mother and father and family, and he wouldn't be able to stand having the ocean between him and whatever was left. There were a couple of loose ends to take care of which he wound up not taking care of. One was a trip to his father's grave. He knew what would be out there, so he didn't go to see it. It would just be a small rock, and he would feel badly about not having put in a bigger one. And his father would be under it, where he couldn't see him. So why go out there? He took out his father's old-fashioned vest-pocket watch and squeezed it in his hand awhile and saved himself a trip. Everybody old was dead now, except for an aunt in an institution who kept on being alive. That was her main attribute. She looked a little like his father, and if he went to see her he would at least get that out of it, but it would involve taking an awfully long trip, so he passed. He had never been that crazy about her, even though she had let him go through stacks of movie magazines when he stopped off to visit her on his way home from school. She was half-gone when they took her away, and she had to be totally out of her bird now. He didn't see why he had to take a long journey to see his ancient aunt, just because she was alive, resembled his dad, and had once let him flip through back issues of Modern Screen. Maybe another and better fellow, more pure in character, would have schlepped out there on that basis, but Harry Towns was not that person, so he took a plane to St. Louis, rented a car there, and headed for unfamiliar towns in the South-west, ones with great and adventure-filled names.

  He drove through Yuma and El Centro and Tucson, stopping at barbeque pits for local color and trying to be amazed and enlightened by packs of bikers who called themselves “The Eternal Drifters.” They looked tired from all the drifting, and tended to have bad skin. Towns guessed that if one of them had enough nerve to suggest they stop drifting, they would all quit in a second, because they were on the old side—but so far no one had come forth with this suggestion, and they had to keep at it. Towns felt no urge to tie on with them, even though each pack featured one diamond of a long-haired girl, drifting along with them because no one had told her she was involved in a boring activity. He stopped at a natural preserve called the Salton Sea, forty miles wide, very natural, and empty. It didn't smell that great, but he laid out on a rock, blanketed in stillness, a type of thing he had never done before, and tried to fill himself with a sense of wonder at the vastness of the place. Except that it wasn't that vast. He had been to vaster places. He stopped at a date farm, where the women in charge had little datelike faces, and he ate a lot of date products, shakes, jellies, candies, and special bars that had been made from special offbeat date species, given extra care from birth. He loved dates, but by the time he had his fill, he was nauseated and knew he wouldn't be getting back to them for awhile. The women on the farm had spent all their lives in this work. They looked healthy, robust, and philosophical, although there wasn't one in the bunch who could properly be described as a bundle of mischief. Even though he was still a little nauseated as he drove off, he speculated for a split second on whether he ought to try to move in with them and spend his life in dates.

  One of the things Harry Towns was not good at was staying over at someone's house as a guest, and another was looking up people when he was in the neighborhood. But since he was trying new approaches to life, he looked up a Border Patrol man in a nasty little Southwest town called Brawley. The visit tied in slightly with research he was doing on customs and immigration. Harmon, the fellow in question, had been a famous highway patrolman who had gone sweeping off a bridge in pursuit of two young tire thieves, and broken most of his bones. So they shifted him over to the Border Patrol, where he was now famed for his skill at spotting Mexican “illegals” who had gotten as far north as Brawley without being detected. He was eagle-eyed at this, even though he was a little sleepy and his bones were on the soft side. He was one of those sleepy eagle-eyed fellows. He could pick off Mexicans even when they wore sets of diversionary cow hooves, sold to them on the Mexican side. In two hours of bouncing around the outskirts of Brawley with Harmon at the wheel of a Jeep, Towns got to know all he wanted to about Border Patrol work. He liked the sniperscopes that had been developed in Vietnam and could pick off Mexicans in the dark, but that's all he liked about the work. Harmon tried to get him interested in the grid lines of defense the Patrol had set up to ensnarl the errant Mexicans, but it wasn't for Towns. When his new friend told him the agency occasionally took in old guys, Towns let it go by; he might just as well have taken a shot at dates. Harmon had a dutiful Mexican wife, and Towns couldn't help wondering if, one moonlit night, he hadn't spotted her on a grid line wearing cow hooves and kept her for himself. The Mexican wife served them dinner, and when she had dutifully gone off to grind something, Harmon took a few sleepy puffs on his pipe and told Towns about a girl he admired who was living in Brawley and wasn't like the other Brawley people. By the time he had finished telling Towns about her, Towns knew Harmon was in love with this girl but felt that because he was sleepy all the time and his bones were lopsided, there was no way for him to have a shot at her. He worshipped her from a distance, and slipped her regular chunks of his salary, easily finessing these sums past his wife, thanks to the language barrier. “She doesn't have a wicked bone in her body,” said Harmon, who, come to think of it, related an awful lot of his thinking to bones. There was an exchange of glances between the two men that said Towns was allowed to meet her and, if it went that way, to fuck her, but he wasn't to hurt her in any way. If he did, Harmon would come after him, in his sleepy, soft-boned style.

  The girl came over to meet Towns in his Brawley hotel, and he immediately went into a nonstop recitation about the back-to-back loss of his folks and how he had broken up his family and wasn't sure which way he was heading. He hadn't expected to tell her all that, but he got it in with one burst before she said a word. She wasn't so much listening as waiting for him to stop, and when he did she went for him as though he were a lobster dinner and she hadn't eaten in a week. She seemed to have been waiting for someone to come into Brawley and say he had lost his folks, busted up his family, and was rudderless. This was a fine stroke of luck for Harry Towns, but it was also puzzling because, appearance-wise, she was the kind of girl he generally wrote off, right at the top, as being for other people. He tended to think this kind of girl was out of his league. He kept saying he would get around to girls like this at some later point. After he had won some kind of Outstanding Citizen's award. She was blonde and had a slender, long-legged, playful kind of New England body. He had seen this kind of girl with other men, fellows with massive rolling banks of attractively disordered hair and Juan-les-Pins suntans. He generally spotted them leaving restaurants. Sometimes he got a defect
ive version of this type of girl, one who was old or had a speech impediment; but until he got to Brawley, he had never had the real McCoy. That was supposed to be coming up later, except that later seemed to be now. Right there in Brawley. What did she see in him? That Harmon must have given him some introduction. She couldn't have been more than twenty-four; and she didn't have a limp or a skin condition that was immediately discernible. She was it, a flirtatious, prime, government-inspected, New England-finishing-school, horse-jumping, delicious-smelling, blue-eyed, absolutely A-Number-One specimen of blondeness who, to cap it all off, delivered the goods. Ten minutes after they met she was sucking him off, using inventive little finishing-school tricks, as if she were terrified of missing the mark and being dismissed with a bored wave of Harry Towns's hand. Maybe Brawley had something to do with it. All they had there were Harmon and fellows who worked for feed companies. Not too many screenwriters passed through Brawley, even depressed rudderless ones.

  He tried his best to settle in and enjoy her, but the missing pieces kept nagging at him. He had told her straight out the way he was, not feeding her pâté, caviar, chilled white wine, and shoving cocaine in her nose, his usual style. Instead, he came right out and gave her rudderless. Maybe that's what it was. Maybe if he did that more often (went straight to rudderless), he could be one of the fellows seen leaving restaurants with this type of girl. Her lovemaking had a stop-and-start style to it. Each time they finished up one section, she would sit up with her back arched, put her fingers to her lips as if she were a secretary who had forgotten an important memo, then shrug it off and return for the next section. He liked those pert secretarial pauses, particularly after he mastered the rhythm of them. He could not imagine ever getting tired of them.