I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell

  In memories, as in dreams, you often see yourself from outside, as if it were a movie. That’s how I remember the morning after my father died, in the summer of 1957.

  My sister, Babette, and I slept in beds against opposite walls of our room, which was next to our parents’ bedroom, at the back of the house. I see the scene from an angle near, but above, my mother’s head, everything dim and out of focus, as she sits on my sister’s narrow bed, the one closest to the door, looking down at me beside her. Six-year-old Babette sits on the edge of the bed too, on the other side of me, listening as our mother explains that our father has died during the night. We don’t understand the situation very well, though we realize that being dead is supposed to mean he doesn’t exist anymore, he is completely gone.

  Later in the year, I was embarrassed that the kids in school knew my father had died. I was more conscious of being upset by that than by his actual death, which was just an absence (there wasn’t even a funeral).

  For a while when I was eight or nine my best friend was a kid named Rusty Roe who lived a few houses down the block. He was a year or two younger than me. I was probably still insecure from my father dying. Rusty’s nice father, Chet, who must have been in his late twenties, was an outdoorsman, a hunter and fisherman who subscribed to gun and rod magazines and did taxidermy as a hobby, and who took Rusty and me bass fishing sometimes in a rowboat on a lake.

  There were a couple of years there where I got interested in birds. (According to my ma, the very first word I ever spoke was “bird.”) I loved walking in the countryside, out past the streets, looking for birds, and I could identify them by song and flight pattern and nest as well as shape and markings. Rusty would go with me, and he knew a lot about them too. We’d carry Peterson’s field guides. I collected abandoned nests. I carved birds out of balsa wood and painted them. I bought plastic model kits of birds to glue together and paint.

  One early evening, Rusty and I were playing in his backyard when it got time for me to head home, and he misunderstood my leaving as a rejection. He pleaded with me not to go, and started crying, apologizing and begging, and I realized that there was a part of me that liked that he was crying. Something in me was glad to make my friend cry. I hadn’t wanted to hurt him, but his tears showed how much he valued me and that I was not the vulnerable one. I got some kind of satisfaction, too, in becoming harder as he got servile. The sudden gulf between us made me want to be alone. It was dusk as I left my friend standing in his storm-fenced back lawn, with its little concrete goldfish pond dug by his father.

  While I might be a little nostalgic for the innocence, the grace, that existed before my behavior became consciously calculated, my life was full of pain and fear then, and it wasn’t even really innocent either. My nice third-grade teacher, Mrs. Monk, corrected me once because I was acting modest. She advised me not to “fish for compliments.” At first I didn’t get what she meant, but then I was amazed to realize that it was possible to misunderstand my own behavior, to believe I was doing something for the exact opposite reason I was really doing it.

  My flat, vacant, smudged ten-or-eleven-year-old face. There’s a panorama or montage of local vistas, the empty suburban hills, shifting slowly behind it, all silent and soft and cold, with visible grain, as I glide around the quiet newly built streets on my bicycle, alone, with no one else in sight. Or I’m sitting in my backyard, suddenly self-aware, or aware that this moment is going to happen again someday, portraying my condition and environment (this sentence on this page in this book).

  I probably peaked as a human in the sixth grade. I was golden without conceit. My teacher that year, Mrs. Vicars, made a private special arrangement allowing me to write stories instead of doing the regular homework assignments.

  In seventh grade I fell, though, and it would take me years to climb back. The postwar baby boom had caught up with the Lexington school system and it became so overcrowded that a big old wooden jumble downtown was annexed for the exclusive use of hundreds and hundreds of seventh graders from all over the city. As one boy in a large school of unknown kids my age from all over the city, I lost any history and prestige I’d had. I was nobody, and as I wasn’t assertive, it was impossible to catch up. All I remember of school that year is my anxiety and unhappiness, mixed with pained envy of the thriving redneck hard-asses: commanding, mature Gary Leach, with his short sleeves folded up his biceps, pegged jeans nonchalantly clinging, short hair waxed in precise furrows, as he murmured consolingly, behind me on the school bus, to the lovely weeping Susan Atkinson beside him, “You can cry on my shoulder”; tough, dashing, chipped-front-toothed Jimmy Gill, Jerry Lee Lewis look-alike; muscular, confident farm boy Hargus Montgomery.

  There was one last-minute redeeming experience. Because I was traumatized and couldn’t make myself do any homework, my grades had plummeted from effortless excellence to C’s and D’s and F’s. I hadn’t attached much importance to grades, but it was mortifying suddenly to be lacking that way. But when the student body was given standardized “achievement tests” at the end of the year I got the highest scores in the whole school. They wouldn’t have revealed that to me, but the administration thought I should be talked to, considering my grades. I noticed that teachers all of a sudden acted differently towards me. I was glamorous. They’d stop and look at me as I walked by.

  All those years of junior high school—seventh through ninth grade—were awful. Because of the overcrowding I attended a different school each year, with my classmates always changing and unknown. I couldn’t bring myself to do homework. I had insomnia too, because I was anxious about being unprepared and being such a failure and disliking everything. I would put off the homework, even the most important, until the night before it was due, and then stay up in misery, sweating in my new attic bed among any texts I might paraphrase to patch together and pad a fake paper. The insomnia was like being paralyzed in a spotlight, like being trapped. I knew it was my anxiety about doing badly and about losing status that kept me awake, but I still couldn’t force myself to do the stupid homework or truly figure out what was going on, and all this would amplify itself, like feedback in my head, but it was duller than that. More like crawling skin. Like there was some drug I needed that I didn’t have.

  I hated the raw oppression of being a kid once I became self-aware. I don’t like “alpha” people as a rule, and in the random enclosed societies of schools, you have to deal with them. I didn’t like being stuck with strangers, period, either. I also didn’t like being told what to do, and of course school and childhood itself is about the authority of all grown-ups. I knew as well as any of them what was worthwhile, but because I was a kid and they were bigger and had more power than me, I was cheated.

  I remember making some promises to my adult self when I was still a kid—or extracting some promises from my adult self. I promised not to forget how arbitrary and unfair adult rules are. I promised to remain true to the principles I grasped that adults sometimes pretended to know but hardly ever behaved in accordance with.

  I wanted to have a life of adventure. I didn’t want anybody telling me what to do. I knew this was the most important thing and that all would be lost if I pretended otherwise like grown-ups did.

  Those monstrous, boxlike, snouted, yolk-colored school buses, with their rotten black lettering, symbolized loneliness and humiliation. The weather they rolled through was gray and rainy and I gazed out the window hoping not to be noticed, except by a particular girl.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Yesterday there was a pretty girl sitting in front of my wife and me at a movie and most of the time all I could see of her was her hair. When I sat behind girls in classrooms in grade school, their hair could drive me crazy. It wasn’t even actually alive, but it was more affecting than most people’s faces because of the intimate way it was involved with the girl it belonged to. It was out of my reach while being right there, completely exposed, with all its uncontrolled, feral implications mixed with the messages
of its grooming, and all of that heartrendingly moving for the way its possessor was innocent of the effects. It was like spying on someone sleeping.

  In third grade I was crazy about Mimi McClellan. If I try to picture her, there’s no face. There’s just her dirty-blond hair in a big bouffant. But no one that young would have worn a bouffant like that, when I think about it. And it was 1958 and people didn’t wear that hairdo until Jackie Kennedy showed up two or three years later. I would lie in my bed at night thinking of Mimi McClellan and fantasize getting hit by a car so that she would take my hand and I could tell her that I loved her.

  In the sixth grade there was Janet Adelstein. It is probably Janet’s hair I put on Mimi. Because Janet did have a big dark-blond bouffant, preserved by hair spray: a silken mist, a soft fragrant mesh of crystallization.

  crazy about Mimi McClellan

  The young girls wore white cotton blouses with ring-neck collars, and cardigans and culottes. Maybe a delicate gold-chain necklace, and tennis shoes or Bass loafers and bobby socks. Many of the girls had breasts by then. Janet’s were larger than most.

  I never revealed my feelings to her either. A year or two later we chanced on each other somewhere and we talked and it turned out she’d had a crush on me at that same time. That seemed tragic, Shakespearean.

  I can’t remember when I started masturbating, but it was long before I could come. We boys thought there was something perverse and inferior about jacking off. Having sex alone. I had this tactic for excusing it where I wouldn’t start until I could give myself a hard-on without actually touching my penis, but just by thinking. Considering those fantasies now, I wish I could see them as if they were movies—I was so ignorant about sex, it would be cool to see what I was picturing (I know Roy Baker’s mother sometimes figured in them).

  There was a great Mad magazine spread in the sixties that featured photos of 3-D versions of children’s drawings—photos of everyday objects constructed as if the children’s drawings of them were accurate, such as a stubby little airplane with different-length wings that pointed in different directions, and propellers on it that looked like broken matchsticks, and dripping misspelled words on its fuselage.

  Human works that don’t hide the crudity of the approximate nature of their representation are the best.

  At the same time, the little I did know about the mechanics of sexual activity when I was thirteen was plenty. Drawing a picture no more detailed than an infinity sign with a dot in the middle of each loop of it, and below that the outline of an hourglass that had a downward-pointing triangle of scribble in the bottom center of it, was enough to give a boy a giant erection. I spent half the eighth grade having to walk with my schoolbooks held in front of my jeans to hide the sideways bulge. Sometimes a few drops of liquid would escape just from the friction of the fabric and once or twice it then actually shuddered into spurts right there in the crowded corridor.

  When I eventually got a finger inside a vagina, at thirteen or fourteen, it was like being ordained into a new dimension, almost supernatural, as if I had pulled the sword from the stone. I went for a long walk afterwards, furtively passing my fingers under my nose every few hundred yards, the scent insignia of my kingdom.

  I didn’t have full sexual intercourse until I was fifteen. My only interest in her was that I thought she might let me do that. Sex drive overcomes almost everything. Many have died behind their dicks. After all, where does reckless aggression come from but testosterone, and where does testosterone come from? Many have died and many around them have been totally fucked. And often greatly liked it. But this unlucky girl didn’t like it, or very much of anything else, as far as I could tell. She was a waitress at a Big Boy drive-in by the university. She was nineteen, and a hillbilly from Appalachia, and she was not just narrow-minded and ignorant, but dumb as a rock and about as energetic. I flirted with her when I’d go in for a hamburger. I told her I was a premed student. I walked her home from work. Soon she gave me the key to her apartment.

  The making out was not relaxed. It was like hacking through wilderness brush that clung to your ankles and scratched your face, as you struggled on, further and further, your heart racing because the incentive was so powerful. Namely female genitals: dripping wet pussy. In the end, her pussy wasn’t even very wet, she was so nervous and put-upon. Fucking her was horrible, though God knows I couldn’t get enough. Even once her clothes were off and she was lying under me on the bed, she didn’t participate, but resisted uncomfortably and for appearance’s sake, all the way through full penetration, which she refrained from giving any sign of joining, but rather lay there stoically, performing only a last symbolic hip buck or two of denial and refusal. This was to confirm that she wasn’t a disgusting person, but was permitting this terrible, embarrassing act as a begrudged extreme favor to me.

  I understand there still are cultural strata where this is standard behavior even among married people. Thank god for pornography. Thank god for the sexual revolution and the pill, and rebellious, fun-loving girls. Though I can’t deny I am still repressed and American enough to like sex dirty. And I do love hair. Because it’s dead but personal and because I’m moved by the futility of its attempts to warm and protect the places where it grows.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As clumsy and alien as I was after the age of twelve, I was still a romantic hero inside, and I couldn’t help wanting to force a reconciliation between the inner and outer, even if the result was grotesque. Sometimes as a kid I would fantasize a life as an obese bedridden recluse, managing the whole world like a spider in its web, sensitive to every tremor, instantly responding. A kind of prodigal Orson Welles or crazy Howard Hughes, haunted Superman. I believed I was mesmerizing and charming but wisely feared testing that socially.

  I started getting into low-grade scrapes with the authorities in the ninth grade. One morning I used ingredients from an old home-chemistry set to rig an explosion on my school bus. It was only noise and smoke, but I liked it. I was suspended for two or three days for that.

  Later in the year I set up a cigarette slow fuse on a pack of firecrackers in a locker at school. The rapid popping was amplified into one long crashing boom by the metal box. My homeroom teacher leaped into the hall and jumped back gasping, “The clock exploded!” . . . I couldn’t stop laughing, which might have been what gave me away. I was suspended for a week that time.

  Then, out of nowhere, for the tenth grade I got a scholarship to the private school in town. My seventh-grade biology teacher had gotten a job there, and the school, Sayre, had started a two-student scholarship program. Mr. Bailey sold them on me, and my mother got a phone call offering full tuition.

  Larry Flynn, the other scholarship student, became my best friend. His scholarship was weighted towards athletics, mine academics. He ended up the quarterback of the ragtag football team and the star guard in basketball, while my grades stayed bad, but we both liked our situations. The rich girls were inspiring. That slim sweet-smelling pale freckled flesh swaddled in cashmere and combed Egyptian cotton. The public school girls were rawer and in some ways sexier, but they were harder to figure out, for the likes of me. (In the eighth grade when I had my very first chance to have sex with a girl—a typical poor working-class kid from school, and a virgin like me—I didn’t go through with it because it seemed to be hurting her too much. She quickly found herself a less sensitive guy.) I was happier at a school as small as Sayre where everybody got to know everybody.

  I continued to get in trouble, though. In those days people often left their keys in their cars. In my neighborhood you could always find a car with keys in its ignition inside forty-five minutes. I took them for joyrides with friends, trying to learn how to drive in the process, planning to return them before they were missed. I’d sneak out at night and take my ma’s or friends’ parents’ cars too. I guess I was more reckless with those. I was caught in them twice. First, when I lifted the keys to my ma’s.

  After taking forever to tiptoe
in slow motion down the creaky stairs from my bedroom after bedtime, it was out the front door into a huge night that was brighter than the inside because of the moon and stars, while chilled, the sparkling gray grass and car wet with condensation. Friends met me in the yard and we put the car in neutral and pushed it out of the driveway and rolled it partway down the hill before switching on the engine and driving off.

  From Sayre basketball team, 1965.

  Left to right: Richard Meyers, Larry Flynn.

  We decided to go to Cincinnati, ninety miles north. Taking the four-lane interstate was like shooting at seventy-five miles an hour down the aisle of a giant empty supermarket, big signs listing options whizzing up the windshield. We laughed and drank and smoked. The secret risk we might crash was a buzz too. I most definitely wasn’t in complete control. Once we got to Cincinnati, nobody knew anywhere to go so we turned around.

  Back in Lexington, we decided to explore the black neighborhood under the viaduct, and I got lost in the badly lit half-paved streets, and, trying to maneuver out of a dead end, rammed into a pole and killed the motor. When I restarted, the car backfired and weirdly began accelerating uncontrollably. In a minute we were speeding out of control through the middle of town. I was afraid to use the brakes because I thought it might totally fuck the car to do that while it was getting gas. So I switched off the ignition while going full speed. As we coasted to a reasonable velocity I restarted the engine, which made the car backfire again and resume increasing throttle. Pretty soon this ongoing stop-and-start drag-race backfire routine got the attention of the police, and two or three patrol cars appeared in pursuit. After a half mile or so, I braked and we jumped out and ran. They chased us with dogs and hauled us in.