We had done it on an extremely drunken night, when we were all three urinating off a small walkway bridge over the Mystic River. Artie and I were weaving and laughing and telling jokes. Dubby was in Hamlet-like dudgeon, in part because it had been a miserable week in math. “What’s going to become of me?” he said suddenly. “I’m a complete failure. A complete fuckup.” At which point, Artie turned to me and, behind Dubby’s down-pointed aiming head, mouthed the words my poor mother.
“My poor mother,” said the D. “My poor, poor, poor mother. Can you believe what she has to put up with? Look at me. I’m worthless. I’m a piece of human shit.” He started intoning some lines from Hamlet—he’d played the lead in ninth grade—about his too sullied flesh melting away.
Then the next thing I knew, Dubby was no longer on our side of the bridge but the other. Then he was no longer standing facing us but dropped down to about ankle level, hanging over some very dark and February-cold New England water. Here, where the molasses had come in from Jamaica and the rum had gone out, Dubby was about to take what might have been a mortal dunk.
“Why not,” he cried. “My life is ruined anyway.”
Artie and I dropped down together and grabbed Dubby by the wrists and began to haul him up. He struggled against us. “Come on, it’s no big deal. Just a little swim.” Dubby was a fabulous swimmer, but the water was ice, and within he was more alcohol than blood.
As soon as we got him yanked over the pole, the argument began with Artie, who was to become a highly successful lawyer, announcing that we had saved the Doober’s life and that henceforth he was our slave-robot as well as friend and the Doober insisting that it had all been a play, with his lines from Hamlet about the sullied flesh being part of the act. He said we were getting way too cranked up about nothing. We said he was a suicidal psychopath and owed us his life, or in any event owed us a share of his remaining beer—Dubby always bought more than we did. Having made no oath to the gods to consume a certain set amount that evening, Dubby relinquished the cans and we let him alone, for a while.
So I had Dubby to look down on as he tried to slide out of life like a snake from its skin. (Maybe.) And then, too, I had some other tricks to hold back my fear—the fear that was in part Frank Lears’ creation, for it was he who, with my hardly realizing it, was beginning to make me mistrust everything around me, he who was destroying my equanimity, my peace of mind.
AFTER A time, I found my little surrogate community, and my debauched high priest, too, to replace football and the coaches. For the world teems with people who will impart wisdom free. Though, to be fair, it is often the people who have most soundly screwed up their own lives who are convinced that they have the most insight to offer the young.
My new sachem, replacement to Mace Johnson and Johnny Kavanaugh and the Fat Father, alternative to the maddeningly non-conclusive Franklin Lears, is the Walrus.
The Walrus is actually named Walter, but he has been given his nickname in a timid burst of counterattack. He has been given the nickname because he has given many of us—workers for Boston Distributing Incorporated, BDI—nicknames of a less flattering sort. Johnny Edsel, the Walrus’s right-hand man, whom we have always called Ed and who has the distinction of taking the BDI truck home on Friday nights, has been renamed Fat Eddie by the Walrus. And the Walrus likes Edsel, whom we all now refer to simply as Fat, a good deal.
The Walrus himself is hardly svelte. He is thirtyish, smooth and sleek and imposing, with a handsome, slightly aristocratic face, a large nose, and soft hazel eyes. Better dressed, he would play well enough in Vegas. He is regal in his walrusdom, not old or hoary or sadly gray, but rich in presence.
Somewhat like Lears, the Walrus is a philosopher of life. As Plato celebrated the forms that exist on high, as Schopenhauer endorsed the life-spirit, as Socrates (and, in his way, Lears) favored open-minded doubt, ignorance of all things, as Hegel touted the zeitgeist, in order to begin to explain what mattered, the Walrus too has a key to experience: It is sex in general and fellatio in particular.
The Walrus has hired us, about a dozen Medford High guys—me and Rick and Cap and Dubby and Johnny Edsel (now Fat), Johnny “Gumshoes” Patello (nickname courtesy of the Walrus, in honor of Johnny’s reluctant pace), and a few more to roll up inky advertising circulars with rubber bands, the kind of things that Lechmere Sales and Mal’s Market put out, and distribute them, on Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays, all day, to the porches of homes through greater Boston. We strolled down the streets like monarchs, flipping these rolled-up batons of paper onto the door-steps of the working class. Occasionally, displeased at the arrival of unwanted paper, they toss them back, occasionally with advice that involves their intimate repositioning. The best place to toss the circulars is at storm doors, which, on a direct hit, make the noise of the Last Judgment.
Cap, who could break the storm doors to smithereens, never does this sort of thing. He lopes along, chuckling to himself, singing softly, and tossing the papers from behind his back or between his legs; when he misses, which is not often, he hops onto what there is of a lawn, recovers the circular, and puts it where it ought to be.
The best time to execute the crack-of-doom maneuver is on a Saturday morning, early. The best place from which to execute it is not the sidewalk, particularly if you are neither large nor fast, but from the front seat, the shotgun spot, of the Walrus’ panel truck, with the Walrus driving at a steady tilt.
Dubby is spectacularly good at this. It’s a matter of hand-eye coordination, not unrelated to his poolroom skills. He can make a street in Jamaica Plain ring like the inside of a pinball machine as the Walrus cruises along, bellowing in delight at each score. Dubby is also superb at engaging passersby in mutually improving discourse, hollering random insults out the truck window.
If the traffic is female and young, the Walrus generally takes over, leaning across Dubby’s seat, resting companionably over the D’s lap, while he lays down his patter. The Walrus never has much success with these women—he never, that is, lures them into the truck or even gets a phone number from them, though he does manage to hold their attention for spectacular amounts of time. As he says, “I’m in a delivery truck with ten guys yapping like monkeys in the back. It’s a miracle they listen at all.” Which is true enough.
Dubby has been catapulted into bliss. He hops into the truck on a Saturday morning with a dozen lemon doughnuts, and by the time we are in Jamaica Plain or West Roxbury or wherever, he has eaten them all, being sure to leave a massive ring of white powder around his face. Though few of us can abide lemon doughnuts, we begin insisting that he share them. No way. He seems to have made a dozen-doughnut vow to the god of gluttony. Instead, Dubby prevails on the Walrus to stop the truck and buys two dozen more for general distribution. The sacrament of doughnuts completed, we settle down to the most important part of the BDI day, which is not the rolling and the throwing, or even the pay, which is outrageously high by going rates, but the Walrus’ sermon.
The sermon can take many forms, and will draw with varying degrees of intimacy on personal experience but, like the sermons of Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather and all the great preachers before him, the Walrus has one major subject, a central topos to which he relentlessly returns. This is salvation through blow jobs.
The Walrus, by his account, is a sexual high priest of the first order. He requests and receives numberless blow jobs from great varieties of women. They are married and single, young and middle-aged, pretty and (he is willing to admit) sometimes ill-favored. But they are united in their willingness to bring the handsome, sleek, overweight Walrus to the headlands of bliss.
Doughnuts consumed, sitting on the wheel wells and atop great heaps of circulars back in the truck, we go silent. The moment of revelation is at hand. “So, Walrus,” Dubby intones. “Whadja do last night?”
“Well, it’s interesting you should ask,” Walrus says in his imitation–W. C. Fields barroom raconteur voice. “Last night I hooked up with C
ourthouse Karen.” We all know who Courthouse Karen is. But we must ask again. It’s part of the ritual.
“Courthouse Karen,” the Walrus begins—and with zest; he is never weary of retelling the tales—“is the daughter of a judge. If you’ll take her out someplace nice for dinner, then bring her to the lawn of the courthouse, provided the weather’s not so bad, she’ll do anything. Anything! But she’ll only do it on the courthouse lawn. Ain’t that something?”
We agree that it is. And then, in chorus, we ask, “So what did she do?”
“So what did she do? What do you think she did?”
Silence. It is that point in the mass.
“Courthouse Karen blew my socks off!”
The van erupts in cheers. Screams, hollers, loud halloos, general din. The communicants are in bliss. And then the Walrus goes on to explicate the pleasures of the particular b.j. This takes some time and involves detailed and intimate description, reference to various advanced techniques.
“But, Walrus,” screams Dubby. “Didn’t you get laid?”
The Walrus predictably, exuberantly declaims, “Did I get laid? I got laid, relayed, parleyed,” at which point we all join in as a chorus: “Marmalade, Band-Aid, first aid, prepaid, Gatorade, orangeade [“root beer,” someone screams], unmade, Kool-Aid . . .” and on it goes through a vast litany that you’d think only a shaman could keep straight. And of course, among other things, this is a parody of Mace Johnson’s old football litany—lean, mean, agile, mobile, etc. We’ve got a new master now; out with the old. The truck is roaring inside like a madhouse, rocking on its greasy shocks as it cruises through Jamaica Plain. Inspired by the Walrus, lifted on the wings of his tale, we have gone to banana heaven.
The Walrus knows the secret of life. It is having sex as often as possible—and at seventeen, we know that can be often indeed. If you do succeed in having sex with Walrus-like frequency, if you do it with a great variety of high-spirited, willing girls, who never get hurt or mad or seriously want to get married, then the rest of life will be quite bearable, more than bearable in fact, because you can anticipate the sex and you can become a raconteur of great sex acts past. You can work in a broken-down truck, in the company of testosterone-racked, terminally screwy high school kids and you can sustain your high spirits, your feeling of ongoing élan vital, nonalcoholic inebriation.
The Walrus didn’t drink, and had contempt for booze. It was, in his philosophy, a substitute for sex, indulged in by the terminally timid or the absurdly ugly. The absurdly ugly: because the Walrus believed that virtually any guy who made sex his major interest could always find someone to couple with, and if he stayed at it and treated the women well, he’d be surprised at how many willing votives he’d acquire. You can imagine how welcome this piece of news was to us.
“There’s not a guy in this truck,” he once said in his sincere voice, “who is so ugly that he couldn’t get laid all the time if he wanted to, if he’d just put his mind to it.”
The Walrus, for his part, was partial to pretty girls. If you could find a pretty girl to have sex with you, well and good. But plain girls were fine, and even girls whom everyone in high school said were ugly could, if you looked at them long enough and spent some time in their company, be found to have redeeming features. The Walrus repeatedly told us that one of the bullshit aspects of high school consensus was that it cordoned off the supposedly desirable girls, the cheerleader types, and told you you had to chase them and only them and leave the other girls home to do their homework and, in time, to marry boring guys. And that was too bad. Because what girls wanted most wasn’t handsome guys or rich guys but guys who weren’t boring, guys who had something to say and who knew how to have a good time, guys who could make them laugh, and who could produce a half-dozen or so negotiable hardons a day.
“Even you, Dubby,” he once bellowed. “You got a sensahumor. You could get all the girls you want with that. Girls love to laugh.”
Dubby had earned this accolade by pointing out the window a few minutes before, spotting a pair of socks wagging on a clothes-line, and crying out, “Hey, Walrus, those socks belong to you?” Banana heaven ensued.
But the Walrus didn’t just seek to liberate us into the kingdom of the higher orgasm. He had another pedagogic function, too. He was in charge of a certain kind of group discipline, discipline through humiliation.
We’re cruising along the Alewife Brook Parkway, say, on the way to a delivery site. The truck is relatively quiet. The Walrus leans back in the driver’s seat and calls out a name. “Poochie!” Mack Puccinello is a football player—bulky, intelligent, clean-cut, and clear-featured, with a face full of probity, like one of Cromwell’s Roundheads. To hear one’s name bellowed in this way by the Walrus is to shake with fear. It means that it is your turn to withstand whatever carping, cruelty, and random unpleasantness the Walrus, or the rest of the truck, might care to dispense.
“He’s Pooch-Boots now. That’s his new name,” says the Walrus, as though he’s an explorer naming freshly discovered land. Pooch has made the mistake of showing up for work wearing a pair of Timberland-type work boots that are colored an absurdly raw yellow. It is as though all of Poochie’s own rank inexperience, his unworldly character, is embodied in the shoes. The van fires up with echoes of the new nickname. Pooch-Boots! Pooch-Boots! Poooooooch-Booooooots! Yeah! Puccinello blushes and says nothing.
There are two schools of thought on how to handle a Walrus rank-out session. One is to retaliate (my philosophy). The other is to fold your psyche into the fetal position and let it all beat off your back.
Now the truck is comparing Poochie to the Pillsbury Doughboy. Now the truck reminds him of a dumb question he asked at a football chalk session more than a year ago. He had inquired in all earnestness how we would block a particular play if the enemy configured itself in a defense that, a year before, the coaches had referred to as “Chinese.” So the word Chinese begins to bang around the truck, sometimes distended, sometimes compressed. Poochie purses his lips, nods his head, and tries to form an expression more mature than anything the Walrus can muster. “You guys,” he intones again and again. “You guys.”
What one must not do under these circumstances is get mad. Because if you lose it, the teasing will never stop. You will be driven crazy by it and forced to quit the job, which pays nearly twice as well as anything else around—“five balloons an hour,” in Walrusese.
The rank-out sessions are of course the Walrus’s way of keeping us under control. Once he draws a little blood, we all dive in pecking, with insults and anecdotes that have been accumulating for the last decade. The Walrus learns a great deal about us in these sessions (we know nothing about him—except what he chooses to tell us), and with this information he enforces his rule. When someone gets insubordinate—doesn’t want to hop off the truck in a particularly foul neighborhood, for instance—the Walrus will draw on the litany of insults that come from the pecking sessions and drive him out. And then, too, the Walrus uses the info simply for kicks, to see us squirm and shake.
But in his way, he is preparing us for life. We are bound to be insulted, all of us. We’ll get it in the army, at the factory, in the office. And if you can’t handle it, can’t hold your own, and if you can’t dish it out occasionally, you will probably not survive. You’ll burst into tears someday, working on Route 93, picking up trash on the median strip, and you won’t be able to come back to the truck. The skill the Walrus is imparting, with no particular sense of altruism, is probably more important to survival in Medford and environs than a rigorous class in geometry or world history will prove to be.
The Walrus may come off as an unsavory piece of work, I suppose. Perhaps he seems a sort of rogue male, trying to desocialize the kids, tear them away from a humane, responsible life. And there’s truth in that diagnosis. The rank-out sessions were rampantly mean; the sex chatter could border on misogyny.
But the Walrus was himself something of a philosopher, if you mean by that so
meone who had gone ahead and, without society’s encouragement, indeed even against its dictates, figured out a way to live. He understood, in his terms, what use to make of the world. The Walrus was resigned to life as it was. He was driving a truck. He would be for some time—off to Jamaica Plain, back to Medford, a swing through Malden. He was, from a certain point of view, a loser, turning around on Ixion’s Wheel. No future, no horizons. And so were many of us going to be. How could anyone doubt it?
But rather than going into a tight cocoon of misery over the whole thing, camping out, as I had seen myself doing in the basement apartment, swilling the Tall Boys, the Walrus had declared himself eligible for some intensity, some life. No second-class citizen, the Walrus. Though the genteel might choke on his presence, Walrus would not have cared: He was going to enjoy his life as well as he could. He was going to try to do little harm. A lot of his coarsest talk about sex was self-protective. You could tell that he actually liked women; he took pleasure in their company—he enjoyed kibitzing with them as well as coupling. And he wasn’t going to accept the standing social wisdom, gleaned from Playboy magazine and the like, about who was desirable and who wasn’t. The Walrus was going to savor, and also spread, the only pleasure that was in his compass.
SOCRATES, the Walrus’ fellow philosopher, was not too good to admit to having a pronounced sexual itch. Though married, he was drawn to beautiful young men. He once said, in talking of someone he loved, “When we touched shoulders and brought our heads together while looking at the same book I felt, I can assure you, a sudden jab in my shoulder, like an insect’s sting: It went on irritating for five whole days and poured into my mind a ceaseless longing.”
In The Symposium, the dialogue that takes place at a raucous Greek dinner party, Socrates gets teased for wanting to sit next to the beautiful young men and enjoy their company, as they enjoyed his. But Socrates was also prone to restraint. Alcibiades, one of the richest, most beautiful, dangerous, and alluring men in Athens, wanted to sleep with the sage. Alcibiades “lived a life of prodigious luxury,” Plutarch, the great historian and moralist, says, of “drunkenness, debauchery and insolence. He was effeminate in his dress and would walk through the market-place trailing his long purple robes, and he spent extravagantly.” For his part, Socrates was surely interested; Alcibiades was one of the sexiest men ever to live.
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