Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Finally: “Jules, what are you doing here?” It was not the greeting that I had traveled three thousand miles to get. “I hitchhiked all the way from New York!” I said to jog her memory, hoping to encourage a more enthusiastic response. Her face was dark, clouded, not welcoming. “I wish you’d given me some warning. I’m going away for the weekend.”

  This was the weekend! This was Friday! One day after my transcontinental arrival. But Doris had plans. Was it reasonable for her to change her weekend plans, no doubt made days in advance? Her plans to go camping in Yosemite National Park, she and Paula and a boy named Wayne, who owned a car. Possibly when she came back from her weekend plans she could fit me in—say, on Monday (unless Monday was her day for washing her hair).

  Who was this Wayne? Over all those thousands of miles, I was the boy I had fantasized her traveling with. Who was this Wayne to usurp me even if he did own a car? And why was Doris staring at me as if we had just met, and why was she talking about Wayne?

  Her lack of pleasure in seeing me was so obvious that I might have been expected to scream in rage. But rage was an emotion with which I had no direct contact. Previous experiences suggested that rage numbed me. Often its timing was off, surfacing days or weeks after my reasons for it had grown moot.

  Instead, I thought ruefully of Wayne, that slimy con artist who had wayned his way into my future wife’s affections. I would not let him get away with this. He was not going to drive Doris and Paula to Yosemite and leave Ed and me back in Berkeley. “I’ve been dying to see Yosemite.” I grinned, as if Doris’s announcement had been not a rejection but an invitation. “Ed and I would love to go!”

  “I don’t think there’s room in the car,” Doris said.

  Paula came to the door. “Hello, Jules.” She looked prettier than I had remembered, prettier than Doris. Ed introduced himself; I didn’t have the language for it. Paula must have liked his looks. She said, “I don’t know why they can’t come to Yosemite.”

  It became clear on the trip that the not-too-good-looking, not-talkative, not-at-all-interesting Wayne was not there to replace me. He had come as the chauffeur and seemed satisfied, perhaps flattered, that these two New York girls had chosen this particular small-town University of California sophomore to drive them wherever they wanted to go. He hardly spoke a word on the drive.

  Neither did I. I stared out the window. There was much to stare at: this was northern California, more expansive in everything—hills, mountains, sky—more drama in the scenery than anything I’d seen going west. Breathtaking! But even if it hadn’t been, even if there had been nothing to stare out at, even if I had been watching nature on an off day, I still would have stared out the window. Staring out the window was the only thing that kept me from jumping out the window and running all the way back to the Bronx in a sprint of woe and self-loathing the like of which I hadn’t had serious contact with in a long time.

  Out the window, everywhere I wasn’t looking, rose the gorgeous goyische California mountain ranges soaring at impossible heights, the monumental West flexing its muscles. Every shrub, every tree, every ravine and gorge seemed to take my measure and agree with Doris that I was too pathetic to bother with.

  But that dismal observation came from only one part of me. I was made up of infinite parts, and all my other parts took up arms against the presently prevailing self-loathing part. They insisted on seeing the bright side. Yes, there was a bright side, I just had to make it happen, take this rotten egg that hit me and turn it into a soufflé. Charm Doris back to her senses. Under the great sky, beneath the canopy of opera buffa trees, below the cascading thousand-foot falls and rainbow riotous vegetation, magic would occur. How could it not in such a setting?

  Transformation! I believed that twenty-four hours from now Doris and I would be rolling around on the forest bed in each other’s arms, laughing in tears over our stupid misunderstanding. This episode was a meaningless moment in the lifelong saga of Doris and Jules. We would tell stories about it to our grandchildren. She would laugh again. I would make her—being funny was my old standby. Could Wayne make her laugh?

  I would be devastatingly interesting, a charmer, companion, friend. Once more, Doris and I would bond. Yosemite would be our sexual Arcadia. The majestic views gave promise of hope. That was all I needed. My spirits lifted.

  Nothing worked out at Yosemite except the scenery. Mountains, trees, and waterfalls supplied the backdrop for Doris’s repeated rejections, which were offered with diffidence, not a tinge of pity or regret. High on a mountaintop with God as the background artist, I said to her: “If you didn’t love me anymore, why didn’t you write me? I wouldn’t have come!”

  “I didn’t know I didn’t love you,” she said.

  “When did you find out?”

  “When I opened the door and saw you.”

  Her exact quote, I swear. If I didn’t stagger back at the statement, I should have. It was a haymaker, but only a setup for the knockout blow to follow. “Now that you’ve insisted on coming, please don’t spoil everyone’s good time.”

  It seems like minutes later that I was thumbing a ride to Los Angeles. Ed chose to stay behind. He was making out with Paula. Maybe Doris was making out with Wayne. How was I to know? If I had gotten it all wrong up till now, how could I be sure of anything, other than my need to make a run for it?

  I AIN’T A-GONNA BE TREATED THIS A WAY

  Dizzying scenery and dashed hopes took me straight into L.A. I had made plans to stay with my aunt Alva, a tiny, birdlike woman with a falsetto voice who was the widow of Sol, my father’s brother, one of the rich brothers—real estate, I think, or maybe jewelry. Maybe both. Sol, like my father, Dave, was gentle, good-humored, sweet-natured. He had been a benefactor to our family during the darkest days of the Depression. Alva was less nice. She didn’t go in for spending money but nonetheless made you know that she had more than enough, certainly more than the now-and-again-impoverished Feiffers.

  Two things you should know about Alva. One was that she kept the toilet seat in her bathroom glued down, the ultimate denial of men. The other thing you should know is that she had a favorite nephew who was to become famous, and it wasn’t me. In my two days with Alva, she found little to approve of. She didn’t like my humor, she didn’t like my manners, she didn’t like my politics. The politics she liked were those of the nephew she favored, Roy Cohn. Roy, at the time, was working as an assistant prosecutor on the Rosenberg case. Alva’s suggestion was that I might look upon him as a role model. This led to an argument on the guilt or innocence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  Now, back home in New York, if you had asked me about the Rosenberg case, I would have said, “They’re probably guilty of something. But even if Julius did spy for the Russians, he didn’t have access to the kind of information that was important enough to warrant a death sentence.” In other words, I took my usual nuanced position.

  But that was my New York opinion. In LA., in the company of Aunt Alva, with her glued-down toilet seat and a favorite nephew who, even before he went to work for Joe McCarthy, was making a name for himself as a hard-nosed, play-dirty, right-wing anti-Communist gun for hire, I had a second opinion. The Rosenbergs were framed and completely innocent. What choice did I have?

  Alva went bananas, her falsetto crackled with indignation. How dare I take such a pro-Communist view in the light of cousin Roy’s sensitive job with the Justice Department? If the FBI or his bosses found out what I thought, didn’t I know what danger I could bring down on Roy, how I might injure his career?

  In those dark Cold War days, guilt by relation had indeed taken its toll on a number of innocent people who lost their jobs because their loyalty was put into question. If I could do that to cousin Roy—oh, what a wonderful dream …

  But first Aunt Alva would have to turn me in, a temptation I sought to encourage. On the very next morning, waiting for the bus to take us to Knott’s Berry Farm, a tourist site for little lads and geriatrics that Alva w
as pleased to show me, I glanced over at a nearby newsstand and noticed copies of the People’s Daily World, the West Coast equivalent of the Daily Worker, both published by the Communist Party. The Daily Worker was in our home on a regular basis. Mimi brought it back from party meetings. I never bought the paper myself, or its West Coast equivalent, until I happened by a newsstand in the company of Aunt Alva and considered the effect my buying a copy would have on her.

  Alva’s falsetto tirade was music to my ears. An octave higher and she would have shattered glass. But what completed the experience was the little old black woman standing with us at the bus stop, who, upon hearing Alva’s denunciation, chimed in with her own tirade against me and all young people of whatever color who didn’t follow in the Lord’s path and show respect. Alva and this little old lady raving away at the injustice of the generational turnover as we waited for our bus, and I silently drinking it in with a joy I hadn’t felt since Doris opened her door to me and I watched her face fall.

  JOE

  Hitchhiking had done for me what it was meant to, and now it was time for me to head home: one more valuable experience that I had gotten so much out of that I never had to think of repeating it.

  What was now mostly on my mind was my return to New York, my date with the draft board, wangling a 4-F (unfit to serve in the armed forces of the United States because I was too cute to die), and then, on with my life, the first act of which was to move out of the Bronx.

  I was twenty-one, ready to be on my own, guilt-ridden about what this would do to my mother, but certain that it was the right move if I ever wanted to grow up, if I ever wanted to get laid.

  Mimi was something of a model. She had lived away from home since her college years—an apartment on Bank Street in the Village, other apartments, rooming with other young Communists, generally female, sometimes a mix. Mimi was having group sex before I had sex.

  How do I know? Sometime around 2000, a former Communist roommate of Mimi’s, exotically gorgeous and sexy when she was young, sent me her novel to read. The novel was a fictionalized account of this sometime actress’s affair—if one can call it that—with a young Marlon Brando. But that’s not what caught my attention. It was Mimi, by some other name, and her SEX LIFE! My sister, laid by this guy and that guy and some other guy and in threesomes and I-don’t-want-to-know-how-many-somes. My sister, whom I hoped to emulate and strongly disapproved of at the same time, was getting it, getting it, getting it. And I, her baby brother, was not getting it, didn’t know how to go about getting it. Not a clue. Not a notion. Not a Doris.

  A virgin at twenty, when by that age my bohemian Red sister had gone through God knows how many lovers.

  Lover. The word lover was out of my league. I might, by accident, some freak of nature, get laid. Someday, not by twenty-one, twenty-two, maybe by twenty-three … But to have a—what was that word?—lover! My lover and I were discussing the poetry of William Blake in bed this morning, after we did you know what. No, not now, possibly not ever. Jeez!

  Ten tiny little rides over four hours had taken me eighty miles outside L.A. to Victorville, California. Dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a local farmer. Stranded on the road. A hundred feet or so to my right lay the Mojave Desert, which at this point looked like I would have to cross on foot. Very little traffic. Few cars going east. I stood, I waited. I got hot.

  A convertible the size of a football field grazed by at a speed moderate enough for me to see the driver, big, pockmarked, glowering, and his passenger, a kid my age who threw me a shit-eating grin that meant: “I’m hitching too, and I have a ride in this Cadillac across the desert. Ha, ha.”

  It was enough to move me off the spot and start me walking. No more than a half mile down the road, I spotted a gas station and, to my surprise, parked at the gas station was the outsized Cadillac convertible that had so demoralized me.

  The driver was not in the car. The hitchhiker was. He was about my size and reedy, with thin brown hair, a pinched, scooped nose, and an expression that said: “If I ignore you, maybe you’ll go away.”

  After my near mugging in Wyoming, I had made a vow never to get in a car with another hitchhiker. But this young man did not appear to present a threat, and I was stuck in the Mojave Desert, hardly in a position to be consistent.

  I said, “Do you think I can get a ride with you guys?”

  The young man glanced my way with a look that read: “Don’t try to screw this up for me.”

  Before he could speak, the driver returned from the john. He was twice my size, thick eyebrows, wide nose, a scowl that suggested that whatever I wanted, the answer was no.

  I wanted a ride and I said so. He said in a voice that sounded like three packs a day, “I got no place to put yiz. Where the fuck am I going to put yiz? My fuckin’ wardrobe is all over the backseat and this kid here I picked up in Pasadena.”

  I hadn’t noticed the backseat. It was a foot deep in suits, shirts, blazers, pants, all laid out neatly across the full length of the backseat.

  “Where you goin’?” he asked.

  “New York,” I said.

  “Where you from?”

  “The Bronx.”

  He nodded. “If I could I would, but …” His accent was pure Brooklyn. And I was from the Bronx. And still he wouldn’t help.

  “I could put the clothes on my lap,” I said.

  He dismissed this dumb idea with a “Waddaya gonna do?” Then he turned away, as if he could no longer stand the problem I presented, slouched into his convertible, slammed the door on me, and took off.

  A hundred feet away he screeched to a halt. Not turning to look at me, he waved his left hand in the air, a “don’t keep me waiting” gesture. I came running.

  “Move the clothes over. I’ll maybe charge yiz for the cleanin’ bill.”

  His name was Joe Lane. He was from Brooklyn, but he wasn’t ready to share with me whether or not he was returning to Brooklyn, in which case I would have made it home from the Mojave Desert in one ride. Joe was garrulous, confessional, a spurned lover (like myself). He had been with his girlfriend, a showgirl whom he had driven out to Hollywood in this very Cadillac just three months earlier, so that she could try a career in movies. Instead, she tried a new boyfriend. Joe walked in on them having sex. “I beat her up, packed up my clothes, and got outta there. Look at the size of this ring I took off her finger.” He pulled a ring out of his pocket. It held an impressively vulgar, shimmering stone.

  “Is it real?” the other passenger asked. His name was Rusty Frey and he was a seminary student at Wheaton College in either Iowa or Illinois—one of those I states.

  Joe said, “I deserve something, the time I put in on her.”

  Joe and I, two New Yorkers from the neighborhoods, hit it off immediately in the western desert. We never stopped talking. Rusty, on the other hand, was not a responder or reactor. While making efforts to be friendly, he said little in our exchanges that could be labeled opinion. We three strangers were a sitcom before TV had sitcoms: “You got this Cadillac convertible making a cross-country trip with a Bronx Jew who’s artistic, a Brooklyn Italian who’s in the rackets, and an uptight Baptist farm boy from the Midwest training to be a minister. It’s fraught with possibilities, like The Fugitive. Every week they get stuck in another town, and all hell breaks loose.”

  Joe Lane did not look like a Joe Lane, and from the start of our ride I half doubted everything he said, which didn’t stop him. Joe was a raconteur racketeer out of the Damon Runyon school. The stories he told hinted at mob connections, no crimes spoken of, no beans spilled, nothing that could lead me to believe that Joe was crooked. Yet his manner, his style, the names dropped: Georgie Raft and Bugsy Siegel in Hollywood, Frank Costello in New York …

  “How do you know these guys, Joe?”

  “You run into people, how do I know you?”

  “Where did you run into Frank Costello?”

  “Places. You meet people the places where you meet them—the trac
k. I’m at the track, I give you names. Mickey Cohn, Bing Crosby, Leo Durocher …”

  Joe Lane was certainly not his name. Lanio? Lanitello? Some other variation? Joe was a mobster for sure, but low-level or mid-level. Nothing big time, I concluded. “Girls, I’m gonna introduce you. I mean, classy. Clubs I’m partners in, don’t worry, they’ll treat you good.”

  It wasn’t just “girls” that Joe was hinting at on this drive through New Mexico and Arizona. Stifling desert winds peppered us with darts of sand (why didn’t he put up the top?), but who cared? Joe was going to get me laid! Joe was volunteering as my connection to B girls, bar girls, bad girls. Considering the state I was in, you could wrap up a half dozen right this minute, please.

  In record time Joe became my best friend. We talked politics, philosophy, movies, theater … “Ethel Merman, she can be trouble but she’s worth it. I’ll introduce you, not to screw, but she’s the type if you’re gonna be known, she’s a good person to know.”

  Joe, I knew. Now that I had run into him, I didn’t want to let go: the Italian father figure of my dreams. And I was his entourage. Back in New York, we’d hang out in clubs together, big-boobed blondes, statuesque, seated between us. “One more for the road, Julie?”

  “Whatever you say, Joe.” Joe would watch over me.

  Happily cast in his shadow, I talked endlessly, using him as my on-the-road shrink.

  About Doris: “She’s a bitch,” Joe ruled.

  About Ed: “He’s a jealous jerk,” Joe ruled.

  Rusty Frey was also a jealous jerk. Riding with these two fast-talking ethnics, he was clearly out of the loop. He limited his conversation to logistics: “How far to Wendover?” “Where do we pick up Route 192?” “Wouldn’t it save us time to exit at 16?” As Joe and I amused and showed off for each other, Rusty fretted. I didn’t care, I was having the time of my life. I suspected that most everything Joe told me was very likely a lie, but I admired him all the more for it. Each night we settled into motels, Rusty and I sharing a room. (Joe: “I don’t share a room wit’ no guys.”) Each morning I expected to wake up and find Joe and his convertible gone. But he didn’t go. It was Rusty who left, this boy minister who argued with Joe about God, theology, the Immaculate Conception.