Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  ‘’Are you an artist?”

  A nod.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I look at your picture?”

  “If you like. They’re only sketches.”

  She would be overcome. She admits she’s always wanted to be drawn by a real artist. I offer to sketch her. She says she lives near, and her dad’s at work, and her mum’s out shopping. We are in her bedroom. She is rather shy at first.

  This scenario never did take place; even the ducks which surged to everyone else in the hope of bread learned to ignore me.

  * * *

  And then I met Tony.

  The circumstances of our meeting were comic; we were introduced by our mothers. Tony’s mother attended my father’s church. Tony had not been in Croydon when we first arrived because he had been away at boarding school, but his parents had now brought him home because he’d been so terribly unhappy there. Tony, my mother assured me, was “such a nice boy.” He would be a nice friend for me and a good influence. Any boy my mother considered “nice” was obviously a twit and an undesirable of the first water, and I have no doubt he felt the same way about me. When I first saw him, I saw an extremely handsome boy, dark, with black curly hair. He was wearing a suit; his manners were impeccable. When left alone, we sniffed around each other like rigid-legged dogs. I made the first move by offering him a Player’s; he declined with thanks, taking out his own Craven A and fitting one into an amber cigarette-holder.

  We were soon inseparable. In a rush of communion, we exchanged our most valued pieces of information. He told me about sexual acts between women and animals in the Roman gladiatorial shows. He explained that, as human scent would not arouse an animal, the trainers had cloths, which had been wiped over the parts of a female animal in heat, and then sealed in airtight boxes. Just before the act was to take place, the cloth was rubbed on the woman so that the animal would think the woman of its own species. He spoke of donkeys and panthers. I told him the real name of “sucking off” was fellatio and gave him my copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I got The March of the Moderns from the library for him; he lent me a book called Venus in Furs which was really very boring but I liked it. I told him I’d never done it; he said he had done it in a rowing boat with his cousin who was nineteen, but then confessed he was lying.

  We bought snuff together and tried it; it was horrible.

  He told me he hadn’t been withdrawn from the boarding school but expelled for writing an anonymous letter to the matron.

  I confided in him my fears about the three holes and which was the right one and he said he was pretty sure there were only two. He said he had seen his cousin’s in the rowing boat but he couldn’t tell about the labia majors and minors because it was just hairy, but from the sound of it he thought they were probably part of being a virgin and were inside.

  He said you couldn’t catch it off a toilet seat.

  He said he didn’t believe anything anybody told him.

  He said he’d even thought of doing it with his mother.

  Tony’s father and mother were interesting. His mother was tall and elegant, her face bony and beautiful. In some ways she was worse than my mother because she was extremely evangelical and used to request casual callers, the grocer’s boy or the plumber, to kneel with her in prayer. She was earnest with strangers in buses and trains; she sang hymns a lot. It was Tony’s opinion that she only had a few more years before they put her away for life. Tony’s father was equally interesting. He was a rigid, trim, crisp man who had been a major in the war. He did not go to church at all and he drank and made Tony call him “Sir” and called me “old chap.” He also actually used words like “tiffin” and “chotapeg”; I think I recognized him even then as a character from a novel. Whenever I thought of him the words “patent leather” came to mind. He called my father “padre,” which I think secretly pleased my father considerably.

  Tony’s father had a .38 revolver and a box of bullets hidden in a dresser drawer under his shirts. One afternoon we shot Tony’s toolshed in the garden twelve times. Tony had suggested that we shoot it just once, but we then decided with the strange logic of children that his father would be less likely to miss twelve bullets than one. We stained the fresh wood of the bullet holes with mud. We studied the illustrated instruction pamphlet in a box of his mother’s Tampax; we stole two contraceptives from a big box full of them in his father’s drawer and tried them on.

  Tony was clever in all sorts of ways that I was not. He had rigged up an electrical device of wires under the stair carpeting which caused a red light to flash in his bedroom if anyone was approaching; invaluable, he explained, if one were smoking, wanking, or reading good stuff.

  Tony stole more money than I did because his parents were richer, but we shared equally.

  We bought brushes and tubes of oil paint and painted abstract pictures in his bedroom. In our painty jeans and reeking of turpentine, we sat about on Saturdays in coffee bars eyeing girls and hoping they’d think we were from the art school.

  A girl we both knew at the church youth club had a penfriend in Yugoslavia who came that summer for a holiday. She was quite beautiful and her English was beautifully broken. We were both very attracted. One day we met her and she was wearing a kind of singlet thing that revealed her armpits. In these armpits were long tufts of brown hair. This aroused us immensely as it was the first time we’d seen such a thing. I was aroused and repelled. Tony said he’d like to put his mouth to her armpit, enclose all the hair, and suck it slowly, sweat and all. It was this wonderful quality of imagination in him I most admired.

  Tony also introduced me to a new art form; he had a large collection of jazz records. He played for me Louis Armstrong, Bix, Muggsy Spanier, Kid Ory, Bunk Johnson, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet, and Mezz Mezzrow. The music spoke to me immediately because its joy or sadness was easy to feel. I became a fervent convert. But the music had for us another great virtue; our parents detested it and churches and newspaper editorials thundered against it, invoking the Fall of Rome. And better still, it was played by Negroes, who were perfectly all right as long as they were in Africa suffering from leprosy and yaws, but otherwise not all right. And better than that, these were wicked Negroes who drank and whored, cut each other with razors, and died young.

  We read Shining Trumpets by Rudi Blesh and Mr. Jelly Roll by Alan Lomax and countless other works of jazz hagiography. Our imaginations lived in New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago; they were our Jerusalem and we swore pilgrimage.

  Tony favoured trumpet men: King Oliver, Punch Miller, George Mitchell, Celestine, Bix, Bunk, Ladnier, and the always wonderful Satchmo. The call sounded out over the privet hedges and rockeries into the decorous suburban streets until the telephones complained. I soon came to favour the pianists and bluesmen—Cripple Clarence Lofton, Jelly Roll, Speckled Red, Yancy, Meade Lux Lewis, and those massive women: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bertha Chippie Hill.

  To know anything of jazz in those days was like being part of an underground, a freemasonry, which led to immediate trust and friendship; more accurately, it was like being an early Christian. We listened to the radio at dead of night to pick up faint stations from France and Hamburg that played jazz records; we learned by heart the scanty details of the musicians’ desperate lives; we studied the matrix numbers of defunct race labels.

  We were ravished by the American language. Ten-shilling notes became “bills” and then “ten-spots”; we longed to taste black-eyed peas, chitlins, collard greens, and grits; we would have given years of our lives to smoke a reefer, meet a viper.

  Neither of us could play an instrument or read a note but Tony, always a purist, bought a cornet and carried it on our Saturday expeditions to coffee bars.

  (Years later, when I first came to Canada, I fulfilled the vow that Tony and I had taken. I drove to New Orleans through the increasing depression of the southern States, illusions,
delusions lost each day with every human contact, until I reached the fabled Quarter, and sat, close to tears, listening to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band—a group of octogenarians which, as I entered, was trying to play “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble”; the solos ran out of breath, the drummer was palsied, the bass player rheumy and vacant. The audience of young Germans and Frenchmen was hushed and respectful. Between tunes, a man with a wooden leg tap-danced. I knew that if they tackled “High Society,” and the clarinetist attempted Alphonse Picou’s solo, he’d drop dead in cardiac arrest; the butcher had cut them down, and something shining in me, with them.)

  Whenever I hear Freddie Keppard playing “Salty Dog,” it brings to mind the party that Tony and I gave when we were fifteen. His parents had to go to a funeral in Scotland and had to be away for three days. Tony assured them that he wouldn’t be frightened alone in the house and would be good and not make things dirty and be sure to turn off the gas taps before going to bed. He suggested that I come to stay for the weekend. It seemed to reassure his parents knowing that he would be with a nice boy and that my parents would not be too far away.

  We called the party, of course, a Rent Party. Such a party as we envisaged needed drink. Lots of it. We’d tasted sherry, and Scotch once, and been pale drunk on beer, but neither of us knew much about the subject except that drunkenness was an ultimate good and inseparable from the artistic life.

  The problem was that we were too young to buy the stuff; all we’d ever managed was a bottle of Bulmer’s cider and six beers from an off-licence run by a benevolent old man, but his benevolence wouldn’t stretch to what we had in mind. Tony had seven pounds and ten shillings; I didn’t enquire where it had come from.

  One of our older acquaintances from the El Toro Coffee Bar, one of the jazz fraternity, came to the rescue. He bought for us a large bottle of gin, six quarts of India Pale Ale, two bottles of Australian ruby port, six bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale, and a bottle of something from Cyprus.

  Tony’s father had recently bought a resplendent new radiogram­—a large piece of furniture veneered in walnut which housed on one side a radio, speaker, and storage space for records, and on the other side a record player with a sprung turntable. Tony was strictly forbidden to even touch it.

  We selected our records with care.

  And there were girls. Tony, far more dashing than I with his amber cigarette-holder, good looks, and three-speed bike, had persuaded three girls he’d met at the municipal baths and the girl who worked after school and on Saturdays in the record shop. Other boys were bringing girlfriends.

  As people arrived, more bottles were added to our stock.

  My memory of the evening is not perfect.

  Somehow, who knows how, miraculously, I ended up with the girl who worked in the record shop. She had blond hair in a ponytail and she was wearing a black felt skirt with a big red heart on it and a black sweater. She was beautiful. I have forgotten her name. She was wearing black shoes like slippers, like ballet shoes.

  We were dancing. The radiogram was playing “Skip the Gutter.” The label on the sherry bottle said: Commercial Sherry; it was sweet and I liked it but I stopped drinking it when another boy said it was a ladies’ drink. The ruby port was all right but the gin made me shudder; the India Pale Ale was nicer than the Newcastle Brown.

  In the upstairs lavatory, Tony and I were pissing together, a wavering aim into the bowl.

  Tony said, “I tell you, man, she’s hotter than a Saturday Night Special.”

  In the back garden, a boy we didn’t know got stuck and wounded in the monkey-puzzle tree.

  A girl passed out: a voice kept saying Loosen her clothes. It might have been mine.

  Somebody took the jazz record off and put on some waltzes. The light was out. I felt strong but unsteady; she whispered in my ear,

  My mother told me

  She would scold me

  If a boy I kissed

  She licked the inside of my ear.

  Behind the settee, she whispered,

  “I like it.”

  My arm was around her; she made some contortionist move and I was holding a hot, naked breast.

  I summed the situation up in my mind with perfect clarity.

  I said: I am sitting holding the naked breast of a beautiful girl. She is hotter than a Saturday Night Special.

  I knew that all was not well. It was worse when I turned towards her, better if I kept both feet on the floor and my head straight. “Salty Dog” was playing; I played the trumpet line in my head.

  I let go of the breast.

  I stumbled over another couple in the dark room. The only light was the green glow from the dials inside the radiogram. I knew the radiogram was near the door. I lurched towards that light and filled the glowing depth with noisy vomit.

  * * *

  By the end of my fifteenth year my conviction that I would never lose my virginity was becoming morbid. Tony by then had done it, or claimed to have done it, with a girl who worked at the confectionery counter in Marks and Spencers. By way of cheering me up, he said she was ugly; I said that you didn’t look at the mantelpiece while stoking the fire.

  I had attempted a couple of girls at the Methodist Youth Club and the girl who worked at MacFisheries. I had taken her to the cinema but every time I tried to touch her breast she had said “Cheeky!” until I’d become discouraged.

  I brooded.

  The idea of a prostitute grew in my mind. I knew myself to be the kind of person to whom women would always say, “Cheeky!” Mine was a hand which would always be slapped. I had no choice. My shyness, fear, and revulsion were overwhelmed by a kind of fatalism. I felt like a soldier in the trenches waiting for the officer to blow his whistle. The bombardment has stopped. A lark is singing. The whistle will blow and there will be nowhere to go but over the top and on in a steady walk towards whatever horror awaits.

  Tony and I discussed the propriety of the services of a prostitute. He felt that it was all right so long as she was a personal friend. He instanced the cases of Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh. Otherwise he felt that it was not all right. I asked him if he would, then, mind terribly introducing me to one of his prostitute friends in Croydon so that intimacy might blossom before I engaged her services. For two days we did not speak.

  A remarkable chance came at the end of the school year. Three classes were to be marshalled into a trip to London to see Paul Scofield in a production of Hamlet.

  The theatre was near Soho, where prostitutes jostled one on every pavement, where barkers called the attractions of unnatural acts from every doorway, where pimps physically dragged resisting passers-by into bordellos. I determined that, in the confusion of entering the theatre, I would slip away and hide until the coast was clear and then make my way to Soho, gratify myself, return to the station at the appointed time, and claim to have got lost on the underground.

  Tony simplified this. He advised going into the theatre and then simply getting up to go to the lavatory and walking out.

  Everything played into my hands. The master-in-charge was one of the younger teachers and more casual than most; school uniform was not obligatory.

  Tony gave me ten shillings and sixpence and I closed my post office savings accounts, which gave me another two pounds, eleven shillings, and ninepence—the results of birthdays and the visits of uncles. I did not know how much it cost to do it but I’d decided to throw myself on her mercy and if I didn’t have enough, to offer all I had just to have a look at it.

  I did slip away and I did go to Soho. I spent an hour or more wandering about in Italian grocery shops looking at salami and strange smelling foods, browsing in a second-hand bookshop, looking at the menus in the windows of dingy restaurants, staring at the displays of the purveyors of rubber goods and artificial limbs. There were no prostitutes to be seen; I wondered if there were some custom governing harlotry unknow
n to me—like half-day closing on Thursday in shops.

  I read the postcard advertisements in a newsagent’s window; I’d heard about that. I phoned a likely sounding one (“The Service of Miss Roche—Stimulating, Healthy, Once Tried Never Forgotten”) but it turned out to be a registered nurse who administered colonic irrigation.

  I also phoned a Miss Ponce de Leon but a man’s voice said,

  “Piss off, sonny.”

  Finally, in Gerrard Street, a man in a doorway looked at me and I looked at him.

  He said,

  “You look like a fun-loving gentleman.”

  I said I was and he sold me membership in the White Monkey Club for seventeen shillings and sixpence. The White Monkey Club was at the top of a flight of uncarpeted stairs; it was about the same size as my former bedroom and had the same sort of smell. The barman, who wore lipstick and a grubby blouse, gave me a gin and orange; it came with membership. There were three other patrons, each with a gin and orange. A long time passed; the room was silent except for the barman filing his nails. Eventually a woman as old as my mother came in and danced about on the tiny stage to a record of “Pop Goes the Weasel.” At the last, “Pop,” she undid her bra and her tits fell down. And when I got back to the station there was hell to pay.

  * * *

  Ironically enough, it is to Billy Graham that I owe my first brush with a girl’s private parts.

  But that came at the end of the affair, not the beginning.