The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  A terrible lesson! Soon Helene was identified with this placid Cotton Exchange lawyer, who still breathed unsaid longings at her through his gills. She didn’t care about that. The problem was with other men. In New York there are no Other Men. Men in New York have no … confidence, whatsoever. They see a girl with a man four or five times, and she is his. They will not move in. Happy ever after! Helene and Terrier! Stupid! New York men would not dream of trying to break up a romance or even a relationship. That would take confidence. It would take interest. Interest—mygod, some kind of sustained interest is too much to ask.

  That is why it was so absolutely marvelous when Helene saw Porfirio Rubirosa again at C————’s. She hadn’t seen him for a year, but he immediately remembered and began pouring absolutely marvelous hot labial looks all over her from across the room and then came over, threading through the rubber jowls, and said:

  “Helene, how do you do it! Last year, the white lace. This year, the yellow—you are … wonderful, what is the expression? One hundred per cent wonderful!”

  And the crazy thing is, one—Helene—knows he means it because he doesn’t mean it. Is that too crazy? You are a woman, he is a man. He would break up this stupid Cotton Exchange Terrier universe just to have you. Well, he didn’t, but he would. Does one know what Helene means?

  Why should Helene have to end up in these ridiculous drunk evenings with Davenport? Davenport is not a serious person. Davenport practically enters with orange banners waving, announcing that he will never get married. He is like a peteiz-cuinte paca who runs, rut-boar, all night, and if they put him in the pen, he dies, of pure childish pique. He stops breathing until the middle of his face turns blue. Dear Davenport! One morning—too much!—they overslept and Helene woke to Kurt’s Nanny rattling in through the drop lock and had to make Davenport get up, skulk around, get dressed and sneak out when Nanny was in the kitchen. But little Kurt, with his idiot grin, saw him, coming out of the room. Davenport was, of course, still mugging, pantomiming great stealth, tiptoeing and rubber-legging around, but Kurt Jr.—incredible! what do three-year-old children think about?—he cries out, “Daddy!” Davenport is slightly shocked himself, for once, but Helene has this horrible mixed agony. She realizes right away that what has really hit her is not the cry—Daddy!—but the fact that it might bring Nanny running to see Davenport sidewinding across the wall-to-wall like a trench-coat gigolo or something.

  No more Davenport! Short nights with Pierre. Pierre was a Frenchman who had come to the United States and grown wealthy from the mining industry in South America or some such thing. South America! he used to say. The slums of the United States! Helene used to rather like that. But Pierre used to wind his watch before he went to bed. A very beautiful watch. At parties, at dinner, anywhere, Pierre always grew suddenly … vague, switching off, floating away like a glider plane. He even grew vague in the downy billows. Now he is there, now he isn’t. Pierre may be French but now he is thoroughly New York. In New York a man does not have to devote himself to a woman, or think about her or even pay attention to her. He can … glide at will. It is a man’s town, because there are not fifty, not one hundred, not one thousand, beautiful, attractive, available women in New York, but thousands of these nubile wonders, honed, lacquered, buffed, polished—Good Lord, the spoiled, pampered worthlessness of New York men in this situation. Helene can even see the process and understand it. Why should a talented, a wealthy, even a reasonably good-looking and congenial, cultivated man in New York even feel the need for marriage? Unlike Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati or practically anywhere else in America, single men are not shut out of social life in New York. Just the opposite. They are terribly desirable. They are invited everywhere. A mature man’s social life inevitably flags a bit in New York after his marriage. A single man, if he has anything going for him, is not going to get lonely in New York. What does he need a wife for? What does a man need children for in New York? Well, Helene doesn’t mean to even think that. Of course, every man has a natural desire for a son, just as she has a natural desire for a son, she loves Kurt Jr., he is a beautiful boy.

  Well, this is the last straw about Pierre. Pierre winding his watch. There was enough about Pierre without this final night when he got just euphorically high enough on wine and began expanding on the metaphysics of man and woman. Some metaphysics. Some brain. It turned out Pierre had decided about ten years ago, when he was thirty-two, that he ought to get married. This was more or less a theoretical decision, one understands. It would be fitting. So he set out with a list of specifications for finding a wife. About so tall, with this type of figure, he even wanted a certain gently bellied look, but firm, one understands, a certain education, a certain age, not over twenty-five, a certain personality, a certain taste for decor, and on and on. It was all quite specific. He never found her, but, then, one gets the impression that he did not look all that hard and was never very disappointed about that. And so, finally, this night, with his watch wound, Pierre announced that, well, now he was forty-two years old, and he had mellowed, and life is a complex drama, and blah-blah-blah, and now he is amending his specifications to include one child. Not two, one understands. Two are underfoot. But one is all right. And what gets to Helene when she thinks about it is that for a moment there her heart leapt! Her spirits rose! She could see a breakthrough! For a second she no longer thought about the Horror number for New York divorcees—forty, age forty, after which the packing under the skin begins to dry up, wither away, Don Lee can’t do a thing about it, Mr. Kenneth and Kounovsky are helpless, all that packing under the skin is drying up, withering away, until one day, they make an autopsy of the most beautiful woman in New York, in her seventy-seventh year, and they find her brain looking like a mass of dried seawood at Tokyo Sukiyaki. The packing is gone! For one moment she no longer had that vague, secret dread of the fate of the ten other divorcees she knows, all failing miserably in the only job they have, viz., finding a husband.

  But—sink—the folded-napkin life with Pierre. Pierre’s specification. Thank you for including me in your stem-winding Weltanschauung. So that was it with Pierre.

  And now, in a few minutes, the new Buyer will be coming around, he’s an editor at Life, not a top editor, one understands, but he looks good, he has none of that ironside Hotchkiss in him, he seems to know things. Helene—well, journalists—but Helene met him at Freddie’s and it went well, and now he is coming around for the first time.

  So Jamie is fitting the last ebony ball onto the paw feet—Jamie comes around like this at any time; it brings some kind of peace to Jamie to be down on his knees in the wall-to-wall. Or something. And, ultimately, the doorman calls up, the buzzer rings, Old Nanny fools around with the drop lock and brings him in. And—simple mind!—it happens again. Helene can almost feel her eyes rolling up and down him, inspecting him, his shoes, which are cordovan with heavy soles—how sad!—but she goes on, inspecting him, she can’t stop it, sizing up every man who comes through that door as … Mr. Potential.

  The nanny had to leave Kurt Jr.’s room to go to the door and now—oh, wonderful!—the little—boy—comes waddling out—and, like someone frozen, Helene sees that simple, widening grin on his face and knows precisely what it means and can say nothing to ward off what she knows she is going to hear. Big Lifey stands a little nervously, sloshing around in his cordovans, grinning stupidly at this little waddling Child in the Plot, while Kurt Jr. keeps coming and—pow!— throws his arms around big Lifey’s leg and looks up—idiot appeal!—and says, “Are you going to be my new Daddy?”

  Ah—one thing has not changed. Helene has wheeled about, can’t think up a thing to say, it doesn’t really matter—and Jamie is still bent over on one knee, fooling with the chair. What would it be like with Jamie? And why not? She can size up Jamie. Perhaps she has been sizing up Jamie since the first time he walked through the door. There is something about Jamie. There is … beauty. It is … very odd, nice, fey, sick, but Jamie—never mind!�
�has a beautiful small of the back, poised, pumiced, lacquered, and it remains only for her to walk over, travel just a few feet, and put her hands upon him like a … vase.

  The Pump House, Windansea Beach, La Jolla, 1965

  THE PUMP HOUSE GANG

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  Our boys never hair out. The black panther has black feet. Black feet on the crumbling black panther. Pan-thuh. Mee-dah. Pam Stacy, 16 years old, a cute girl here in La Jolla, California, with a pair of orange bell-bottom hip-huggers on, sits on a step about four steps down the stairway to the beach and she can see a pair of revolting black feet without lifting her head. So she says it out loud, “The black panther.”

  Somebody farther down the stairs, one of the boys with the major hair and khaki shorts, says, “The black feet of the black panther.”

  “Mee-dah,” says another kid. This happens to be the cry of a, well, underground society known as the Mac Meda Destruction Company.

  “The pan-thuh.”

  “The poon-thuh.”

  All these kids, seventeen of them, members of the Pump House crowd, are lollygagging around the stairs down to Windansea Beach, La Jolla, California, about 11 a.m., and they all look at the black feet, which are a woman’s pair of black street shoes, out of which stick a pair of old veiny white ankles, which lead up like a senile cone to a fudge of tallowy, edematous flesh, her thighs, squeezing out of her bathing suit, with old faded yellow bruises on them, which she probably got from running eight feet to catch a bus or something. She is standing with her old work-a-hubby, who has on sandals: you know, a pair of navy-blue anklet socks and these sandals with big, wide, new-smelling tan straps going this way and that, for keeps. Man, they look like orthopedic sandals, if one can imagine that. Obviously, these people come from Tucson or Albuquerque or one of those hincty adobe towns. All these hincty, crumbling black feet come to La Jolla-by-the-sea from the adobe towns for the weekend. They even drive in cars all full of thermos bottles and mayonnaisey sandwiches and some kind of latticework wooden-back support for the old crock who drives and Venetian blinds on the back window.

  “The black panther.”

  “Pan-thuh.”

  “Poon-thuh.”

  “Mee-dah.”

  Nobody says it to the two old crocks directly. God, they must be practically 50 years old. Naturally, they’re carrying every piece of garbage imaginable: the folding aluminum chairs, the newspapers, the lending-library book with the clear plastic wrapper on it, the sunglasses, the sun ointment, about a vat of goo—

  It is a Mexican standoff. In a Mexican standoff, both parties narrow their eyes and glare but nobody throws a punch. Of course, nobody in the Pump House crowd would ever even jostle these people or say anything right to them; they are too cool for that.

  Everybody in the Pump House crowd looks over, even Tom Coman, who is a cool person. Tom Coman, 16 years old, got thrown out of his garage last night. He is sitting up on top of the railing, near the stairs, up over the beach, with his legs apart. Some nice long willowy girl in yellow slacks is standing on the sidewalk but leaning into him with her arms around his body, just resting. Neale Jones, 16, a boy with great lank perfect surfer’s hair, is standing nearby with a Band-Aid on his upper lip, where the sun has burnt it raw. Little Vicki Ballard is up on the sidewalk. Her older sister, Liz, is down the stairs by the Pump House itself, a concrete block, 15 feet high, full of machinery for the La Jolla water system. Liz is wearing her great “Liz” styles, a hulking rabbit-fur vest and black-leather boots over her Levi’s, even though it is about 85 out here and the sun is plugged in up there like God’s own dentist lamp and the Pacific is heaving in with some fair-to-middling surf. Kit Tilden is lollygagging around, and Tom Jones, Connie Carter, Roger Johnson, Sharon Sandquist, Mary Beth White, Rupert Fellows, Glenn Jackson, Dan Watson from San Diego, they are all out here, and everybody takes a look at the panthers.

  The old guy, one means, you know, he must be practically 50 years old, he says to his wife, “Come on, let’s go farther up,” and he takes her by her fat upper arm as if to wheel her around and aim her away from here.

  But she says, “No! We have just as much right to be here as they do.”

  “That’s not the point—”

  “Are you going to—”

  “Mrs. Roberts,” the work-a-hubby says, calling his own wife by her official married name, as if to say she took a vow once and his word is law, even if he is not testing it with the blond kids here—“farther up, Mrs. Roberts.”

  They start to walk up the sidewalk, but one kid won’t move his feet, and, oh, god, her work-a-hubby breaks into a terrible shaking Jell-O smile as she steps over them, as if to say, Excuse me, sir, I don’t mean to make trouble, please, and don’t you and your colleagues rise up and jump me, screaming Gotcha—

  Mee-dah!

  Some old bastard took Tom Coman’s garage away from him, and that means eight or nine surfers are out of a place to stay.

  “I went by there this morning, you ought to see the guy,” Tom Coman says. Yellow Stretch Pants doesn’t move. She has him around the waist. “He was out there painting and he had this brush and about a thousand gallons of ammonia. He was really going to scrub me out of there.”

  “What did he do with the furniture?”

  “I don’t know. He threw it out.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you going to stay?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll stay on the beach. It wouldn’t be the first time. I haven’t had a place to stay for three years, so I’m not going to start worrying now.”

  Everybody thinks that over awhile. Yellow Stretch just hangs on and smiles. Tom Coman, 16 years old, piping fate again. One of the girls says, “You can stay at my place, Tom.”

  “Um. Who’s got a cigarette?”

  Pam Stacy says, “You can have these.”

  Tom Coman lights a cigarette and says, “Let’s have a destructo.” A destructo is what can happen in a garage after eight or ten surfers are kicked out of it.

  “Mee-dah!”

  “Wouldn’t that be bitchen?” says Tom Coman. Bitchen is a surfer’s term that means “great,” usually.

  “Bitchen!”

  “Mee-dah!”

  It’s incredible—that old guy out there trying to scour the whole surfing life out of that garage. He’s a pathetic figure. His shoulders are hunched over and he’s dousing and scrubbing away and the sun doesn’t give him a tan, it gives him these … mottles on the back of his neck. But never mind! The hell with destructo. One only has a destructo spontaneously, a Dionysian … bursting out, like those holes through the wall during the Mac Meda Destruction Company Convention at Manhattan Beach—Mee-dah!

  Something will pan out. It’s a magic economy—yes!—all up and down the coast from Los Angeles to Baja California they take off from home and get to the beach, and if they need a place to stay, well, somebody rents a garage for twenty bucks a month and everybody moves in, girls and boys. Furniture—it’s like, one means, you know, one appropriates furniture from here and there. It’s like the Volkswagen buses a lot of kids now use as beach wagons instead of woodies. Woodies are old station wagons, usually Fords, with wooden bodies, from back before 1953. One of the great things about a Volkswagen bus is that one can … exchange motors in about three minutes. A good VW motor exchanger can go up to a parked Volkswagen, and a few ratchets of the old wrench here and it’s up and out and he has a new motor. There must be a few nice old black panthers around wondering why their nice hubby-mommy VWs don’t run so good anymore—but—then—they—are—probably—puzzled—about—a—lot of things. Yes.

  Cash—it’s practically in the air. Around the beach in La Jolla a guy can walk right out in the street and stand there, stop cars and make the candid move. Mister, I’ve got a quarter, how about 50 cents so I can get a large draft. Or, I need some after-ski boots. And the panthers give one a Jell-O smile and hand it over. Or a guy who knows
how to do it can get $40 from a single night digging clams, and it’s nice out there. Or he can go around and take up a collection for a keg party, a keg of beer. Man, anybody who won’t kick in a quarter for a keg is a jerk. A couple of good keg collections—that’s a trip to Hawaii, which is the surfer’s version of a trip to Europe: there is a great surf and great everything there. Neale spent three weeks in Hawaii last year. He got $30 from a girl friend, he scrounged a little here and there and got $70 more and he headed off for Hawaii with $100.02, that being the exact plane fare, and borrowed 25 cents when he got there to … blast the place up. He spent the 25 cents in a photo booth, showed the photos to the people on the set of Hawaii and got a job in the movie. What’s the big orgy about money? It’s warm, nobody even wears shoes, nobody is starving.