JD

by Mark Merlis

  Villard smiled, not sadly. “I need to visit the boys’ and girls’ room.”

  “Over there,” Robert pointed. Martha noticed.

  When we were cleaning up, Martha said, “It’s funny. I don’t think I’ve ever met one of your … Or if I did, I didn’t know it.”

  “I don’t know if I’ve met any of your … either.”

  “You haven’t. And they certainly haven’t been in this apartment.” Her tone suggested that I had broken some rule--one, of course, that I had never been informed of. She picked up a tray that still held half a dozen crackers with piped flowers of some kind of cheese gunk. “I don’t know whether to store these or just throw them away.”

  “I bet Mickey would eat them when he gets home.”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “Don’t tell me that Mickey has met this guy.”

  “Of course not. Now tell me that Mickey has never met any of your guys.”

  That shut her up just fine.

  This morning, of course, I am thinking about what Ignaz Gruenthal said. Or thinking about excuses for ignoring it. He only read half my book; he never got to my strongest arguments. He’s an old bluestocking who only reads fictions when he’s sick and probably won’t read poetries till he’s dead. He’s a Doktor Doktor Doktor who just doesn’t like it that anybody else should dare to have an opinion about how the world should work.

  Or he may be right. Maybe we could get to a world of perfect freedom, where Dennis O’Grady and Geoffrey walk around proudly sporting their Fellatio Party buttons, and maybe the bosses will still be grinding boys up in the factories and sending the superfluous ones, wearing their Samuel Gompers jackets, off to war.

  October 21, 1966

  We’re in Baltimore for the Norman Axelrod deathwatch, which began a little sooner than expected.

  Martha and Mickey are down at University Hospital along with her mother. I’m in Norman’s study, with the memorabilia of his doughboy years and the big globe that opens into a bar, typing as well as I can on his antique Remington upright. The keys stick a lot, I was lucky to find that the drugstore down the street carries Corrasable Bond.

  I remember, the first time Martha brought me here, how big this house seemed. Georgian Revival, from the twenties I guess, three stories, four bedrooms and a study, two entire bathrooms! Decorated like the old Aurora Press offices, with oriental rugs and furniture you were afraid to sit on. Right now, though, the house seems tiny, straining to contain: Martha’s mother, Martha’s sister and brother-in-law and niece, Martha and me and Mickey. After some complicated human shell game, it’s wound up that Mickey and I are bunking together, me in what was Martha’s girlhood single bed, still with ruffles, he in a sleeping bag on the floor. He informed me that I snore.

  I am here for Martha’s sake, but otherwise supernumerary. Obviously, I’m not wanted at the hospital, as I do not appear on the terminal pages of Norman’s appointment calendar. Most of the family hangs out down there until they drag home around eight or nine and heat up whatever the maid has left in the icebox for them.

  Martha’s brother-in-law, Stuart, doesn’t go to the hospital, either, and we tried to be buddies the first couple of days. But I ran out of sports chatter pretty quick: all I follow in the Times is the guff about New York teams I need to know so I can talk to the guys in Faherty’s. We had nothing to say about our respective professions, admiralty law and comparative literature. (I said maybe the two intersected in the novels of Conrad, but he hadn’t heard the name.) So now he sits in the living room and thumbs dejectedly through one of Norman’s vast library of Civil War books while I hide out in the study.

  I putter around some during the day, walk the mile or so to the Baltimore Museum of Art, a noble edifice with about seven decent paintings in it. I discovered that the little wooded park right across from the museum is replete with recreational opportunities, so I’ve been visiting every day. But I’ve pretty much been through every guy there who wasn’t a schlub or a possible cop, so today I figured I needed to find some new hunting ground.

  I called--on Norman’s dime--Louie Fishbein in New Haven. Louie did a visiting professor gig at Hopkins a few years back and might have learned the territory. He remembered a couple bars down in the Mt. Vernon neighborhood, just south of the train station. He thought the one called Larry’s would be the best bet. So I’ll head down this evening, five-thirty or so. Maybe too early in the evening to try to score, but I really should get back here before dinner.

  I am a little dismayed, but not astonished, to learn that Jonathan was hunting for recreational opportunities while I held my dying father’s hand. What did I expect him to do, stuck in the house with the—I agree—stupefying Stuart?

  The entry is dated October 21, a couple of days before Daddy died. I think the twenty-first would have been the day Daddy started drifting in and out. At one lucid interval he asked to see Mickey alone. I wasn’t sure about letting him, but Mickey’s cousin Emily—her wedding just a few weeks away, and she had to spend her time in a hospital—took me aside and told me Mickey was grown up enough, I couldn’t keep him from this.

  Mickey was back out in three or four minutes. Daddy could barely talk by then, and Mickey was not one for filling silences. Mickey’s expression, as he emerged from the room, was grim—not mournful, more nearly angry. I asked him what they had talked about. He said, “You know, my future and stuff.” I waited, on the off chance that he would care to amplify “and stuff.” But he said, “I’m going to go walk around the block.” Which he must have done twenty or thirty times, because he was gone more than an hour.

  His future. Daddy was quite specific about it: Mickey was going to go to Warwick, Daddy’s alma mater, and he was going to join Beta Theta Pi, Daddy’s fraternity, and then he was going to go to law school. Because even Daddy had observed that Mickey was shrewd and tight-lipped and careful with his words. Daddy had it all planned and Mickey had always gone along, so I suppose Daddy must have laid it out one more time and Mickey must have said, “Yes, Grandpa, yes.” So his grim face that day might have meant: I have made a promise and I’m going to live up to it. Or it might have meant: I have lied to a dying man.

  October 22, 1966

  I got to Larry’s last night a little past six, because I got lost. At the oval bar there were five customers, one of whom had his face buried in his folded arms. The four visible faces had all turned toward me with a flashing expression of hope when I walked in and then snapped away in heavily pantomimed disappointment. I ordered a beer, just to have a little talk with the barman, leading to the key question: would the crowd at Louie Fishbein’s other suggestion be any different?

  “Manning’s? On a Tuesday night, hard to say. You from out of town?”

  “New York.”

  “Ah. Can’t say where you’re going to find much action this time of night. You could always try the working boys. A legendary Baltimore attraction.”

  “I’ve never been much for hustlers.”

  “They’re kind of different here. They’re not runaways, or addicts, like the guys in New York or wherever. Just working-class kids out to make an extra buck so they can take their girl out Friday.”

  “Really?” I said, out of purely sociological interest.

  “Really. It’s kind of a tradition--guys from Highlandtown or Pigtown--nobody thinks they’re queer or anything. Sometimes their daddies did it before them.”

  “Huh.”

  He went off to nudge the face-down customer back to consciousness, then ambled back my way. I said, “There’s really a place called Pigtown?”

  “Yeah, cause they used to herd the pigs through the streets.”

  “Is that far?”

  “Is it--? Oh, you don’t have to go way down there. Out of here you turn right, then right again at Cathedral. Go down to the 7OO block, place called the Alcazar, there’s always guys in front of there or around the corner on Monument.”

  I overtipped and followed his directions. Pretty soon I saw …
a kid. Maybe sixteen, leaning against the wall of what must have been the Alcazar, smoking a cigarette, bestowing on me a glance that said--in an instant--that he had taken me in, we were there for the same purpose, we could work it out. Halfway down the block another guy, even younger I thought, and then around the corner on Monument: a vision. Golden-haired, with a seraphic smile, his baseball jacket open, showing his taut little chest in a white T-shirt. I don’t know how long I stood there, just looking at him. Long enough that he frowned, shrugged nervously.

  I went back to the first guy. Partly because I respected his businesslike demeanor. Partly because the angelic kid almost scared me--or rather, what I felt in those seconds I looked at him scared me, already maybe the first stirring of the kind of passion people fuck up their lives for. So: the safer kid.

  We said hi, established that neither of us was up to anything in particular. Did I want some company? Sure, but I didn’t have any place we could go. No problem.

  I followed him to the cruciform park around Baltimore’s little Washington Monument. He led me to a tall hedge, then he slipped through a break in the foliage. I hesitated, this would be a great place to rob me. He stuck a hand out, whispered, “Come on, mister.” I took the hand and was drawn into a magical bower, hedgerows all around us, overhead the bare black limbs of a tree. Cars with their headlights sped by not five feet from where we were standing, but we were invisible and alone.

  The kid said, “It’s five dollars to blow me or ten if I blow you.”

  “I--I guess I’ll just blow you, but I’ll give you ten anyway.”

  “Cool. Wait a minute, though.” He turned away modestly, unzipped, peed into the hedge, then turned around with his little dick hanging out. With one hand he reached up and grasped a branch of the tree, for balance maybe. I squatted before him--uncomfortably, but I was afraid if I knelt I’d come home with grass stains. As I began to do him I looked up at his face. He looked back--benignly, that is as close as I can come, with a serene half-smile, long dark lashes blinking, and then his eyes closing as his breaths came faster. “Yeah, that’s it, mister,” he said, the words barely out of his mouth when he came, quick as a sixteen-year-old.

  I started to stand, but he grinned and said, “Hey, for the ten you get another shot.” I couldn’t squat anymore, risked kneeling in the damp grass. He took a little longer this time, near the end he was fucking my ears with his fingertips. He zipped up, I stood and handed him the ten, he peered out through the break in the hedge and, all clear, led me back into the world.

  “I need to get a taxi,” I said.

  “Where you going?”

  “Roland Park.” Conscious that, to him, this was where rich people lived.

  “Okay, right at this corner’s good, you’ll get a northbound cab.”

  To my surprise, he waited with me.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  He paused, then disclosed or invented: “George.”

  “You got a girlfriend, George?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I was wrong, it wasn’t the angelic guy I risked falling for, but this sharp-faced boy who had been raised to say sir and smiled a little at the thought of his girlfriend. “Listen, George, here’s another ten. Take her to the movies or something.”

  “Thanks a lot, mister. Jeez.”

  A cab appeared a block or so down. He waved at it, then said, “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

  “No, I’m just visiting for a couple days,” I said.

  “Oh. Okay.” He shook my hand, as the cab stopped for me he crossed the street and headed back toward the Alcazar.

  As I sat back in the cab I thought: I have never in my life had an encounter as straightforward and natural and idyllic as those few minutes with a guiltless, polite, wise kid who was happy he had come twice and happy with his twenty bucks.

  I got back to the house about eight-thirty, thinking I had beat the crowd. But Mickey and his cousin Emily were already there. Emily explained: “Grandpa’s mostly asleep now, and when he’s awake he--well, he knows his daughters, but he’s not too sure who Mickey and I are anymore. So Mom and Aunt Martha figured we might as well come back. Did you eat already?”

  “No. No, I went out for a while. I forgot to ask what Bertie cooked.”

  “I’ll go see,” Emily said.

  Mickey was red-eyed. He had been crying for this man who’d always hated me. I went to give him a hug and realized he was staring at the knees of my trousers.

  After dinner--a chicken fricassee amazingly like my Aunt Lucille’s, which Martha has failed to replicate in almost twenty years of trying--we watched television for a while. Emily had turned it on, I couldn’t very well forbid Mickey to watch. And it was certainly better to share this narcotic than try to make conversation. Martha and her sister got home, she packed Mickey off to bed while we had a couple of drinks. Nobody talked, everybody watched television with the most intense concentration--because if we took our eyes off it we might have to say something. By the time I got to bed, Mickey was in his sleeping bag, asleep or doing a good imitation.

  Of course I am wondering if Mickey knows enough about the world to figure out why Pop’s knees were stained. I am also wondering, if I manage to get away again this evening, will I find George? Probably I won’t get away, sounds like the old bastard is checking out. And if I did return to the Alcazar, of course I will never find George again. Not even “George.”

  I was going to go home for a little lunch and then perhaps come back in the afternoon. But instead I find myself in the bar at the Waverly Hotel, sipping a Manhattan—saving the cherry for last, as if I were a little girl. I never drink in the middle of the day and have hardly ever sat alone at a bar at any time of day, because nice girls don’t.

  I am haunted by “George.” Why the quotation marks? He didn’t owe Jonathan his real name or his real self—which Jonathan imagined he had discerned. I am not outraged exactly, I don’t guess George was a mishandled altar boy, but I am awfully sad. Sad on all sides, the poor boy driven to the Alcazar and to old men, maybe by some need beyond money. Jonathan pathetically imagining that this encounter was an idyll. How thoughtlessly he paid the kid twenty bucks and concluded he was happy. Jonathan, heroic advocate for kids without a future, finding one who needed a few bucks. Maybe Ignaz was right, maybe all of Jonathan’s politics was one long rationalization for his self-indulgence. He railed against the society that drained these boys’ manhood, and then he knelt to catch the last drop.

  I am left with the eternal question: did George’s mother know? Suppose the barman’s tale of a Pigtown culture, exotic as Tangier, was true: sons hustling as their fathers had before them? Then would a mother know, when her boy headed out the door, that he was off to get blown by a Jonathan? Was she pleased that he was making a few bucks? Or did she feel the futility of raising a son so that he could be eaten alive—one way or another, at the steel mill at Sparrows Point, unloading bananas at the harbor, loitering by the Alcazar. And then perhaps—as he was just a little older than Mickey—heading off to thesame war, joining Mickey in the democracy of the fallen. Even if George is alive, his mother must have known what I do: men devour their sons—or one another’s sons, as Dennis O’Grady would have it. And we mothers just watch helplessly.

  October 28, 1966

  Back home now. I couldn’t make any more entries in Baltimore, because after Norman died everyone was around the house all the time. It would have looked suspicious for me to be hanging out in his study.

  Everyone was around the house, enacting what I take to be the Episcopalian equivalent of sitting shiva. There was practically no display of grief, whether because this is the way Axelrods do things or because Norman’s passing happened so slowly and predictably. It was like a movie where you know the whole story five minutes after the opening credits and then just watch it drearily unfold.

  The funeral wasn’t until three excruciating days after he died. We were all trapped with one another in the steadily shrin
king house. Martha’s mother kept talking about which of her friends had/had not called, sent flowers, brought over yet another casserole made of chicken and cream-of-something soup. The day before the service the weather warmed up enough that brother-in-law Stuart took Mickey out to try to teach him golf. Mickey came back rolling his eyes, as any self-respecting Ascher would after three hours with Stuart. Meanwhile I taught Emily pinochle, but the game didn’t last long, as she started beating me after about twenty minutes of instruction.

  I set out for a little walk around the block. When I got back, an hour after dark, Martha was only mildly exasperated, even though she presumably guessed what I had been doing. Mickey, on the other hand, was plenty exasperated-- either because he had figured out how a grown man might get his knees dirty or, I hope, just because he thinks it was disrespectful of me to go out fooling around when we’re all supposed to be in mourning. We ate one of the casseroles, we watched TV, but all evening Mickey kept throwing disdainful glances my way, and he pointedly talked to anyone-even Stuart--except me.

  I think I’ve been pretty good about not conveying to Mickey my loathing for the only Grandpa he’s ever known. I only wish …

  I was about to write that I wish he had known my father. Except that my father picked on me: well into my thirties he could still pluck just the nerve that would make me start whining in a voice a full octave higher than usual. So it is just as well Mickey never witnessed that.

  Later that night, as I lay awake in the dark, I heard a little rustling noise from the sleeping bag. Evidently Mickey was able to suspend his bereavement long enough to release a bit of pent-up energy. It will certainly do him good, when he is off at college with an ever-present roommate, that he has mastered the art of silent self-abuse. The end was signaled by a tiny almost imperceptible sound, somewhere between a moan and a squeak. I closed my eyes tight and pictured George--tried to, rather, it wasn’t George’s image before me, so I stopped.