Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  I had no idea who the last-named person was, but I forged ahead anyhow. “Too bad none of us in the cheap seats ever see what you’re talking about,” I said, trying to get his goat. But that wasn’t even true, because I just had. You see, when he said “I hate that,” his voice had more jump in it than at any other time in this conversation. Generally, he just sounded tired—bone-tired, skin-tired, skin-and-bone-tired. And I had thought about how the only department of the vast human endeavor in which my own voice spoke with a similar decisiveness and un-overrulable confidence of judgment was that which takes place in bed and occasionally taxicabs and such, and had reflected that here was where Sammy and I might have shared the same mutual respect, as one great athlete and Olympian to another, that he and Frank did in the realm of entertainment.

  Then it occurred to me that had I only been half as up-front about the whole black-white thing as his hands had been on my gazongas when we were standing before the hi-fi, bringing the topic up before we hit the hay and alluding to myself rather than Momma, race might have been another such meeting ground. Put simply, whatever fearful and vicious notions might be clogging and clouding our brains in this regard, no white Southerner can be said to be uninformed on the subject, and black people know this even if our shared history has given them precious few reasons to throw roses at it ever since the first slaver dropped anchor and hoisted the “FOLKS FOR SALE” sign in lovely Charleston Bay. So do we know this about them; so had Sammy known this about me, and I him, from the moment our hands had fleetingly touched as I passed him his drink. He’d felt the Dixie in my fingers, I a trace of the old sun and the ships, the ships, the ships—the ships so gaily setting forth from West Africa, monstrous with creaking rigging and their white sails swollen like bazooms upon the sea, centuries ago—in his palm. We might have talked about it all. But I had waited to bring it up until the moment when he might have been enjoying a brief illusion that race was out of the picture, and it was too late now, for any of it. You can’t establish things in retrospect, Sprout. Besides, he was about to throw me out, right on my upside-down heart.

  “This isn’t fair” I faltered, as he marched me down the stairs; although how, and to whom, and if I was even referring to his actions, were all unplumbable to me.

  “That’s very interesting.” He faced me at the door.

  “You’d never do this to a girl,” I said, and we both heard “dare” and “white” intrude although I hadn’t spoken either word, “if you weren’t rich and famous.”

  “Let’s not get into sophistry, baby, I don’t swing that way. If I weren’t rich and famous, a chick like you would holler rape the second I smiled at you on the street. We both know I can only do that from a stage, or in a movie theater where I’m twenty feet high and you’re eating popcorn, pretending that you don’t ever wonder what it would be like if it was me feeling you up and not the cracker who brought you.”

  Opening the door, he nodded toward the street. It sank in that I was now going to be cast outside Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs, a town with which I was unfamiliar, and that I didn’t have a dime anywhere on my begowned and flustered person. Somehow, when you’re a Gumstump and you already know you ain’t wearing underwear, you never think you’ll need to bring a purse.

  “Sam-w-my,” I said, careful how I said it-”I bet you twenty dollars you can’t mispronounce my name.”

  That did stop him, and he looked at me differently for a second. “You’re right,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

  But then his mouth got tight again, and his right eye grew as hard and expressionless as his left one (and how could I have ever had the slightest doubt?) always was. “So go get famous,” he said. “In this country, believe me, it’s the only way.”

  “Believe me I am trying that,” I said.

  “Believe me, I wish I could wish you luck.”

  “Just maybe I won’t need it,” I said.

  He looked briefly incredulous. “Are you kidding, baby? I don’t know what you’ve got when you’re standing up, but talent’s the dice, not the throw. Why do you think Frank only feels at home in casinos?”

  “So do’I,” I said.

  “So do I,” he said.

  “Well, I guess I’ll be heading on now,” I said.

  “I guess you will,” he said.

  “At least give me a hug goodbye first,” I said, thinking that there might be money in the robe and maybe I could grab it and then run off real fast before he could catch me.

  I do think Sammy hesitated. But then he said, “Forget it, baby. I’d sooner hug Richard Nixon. Hit the road. Scoot. Beat it. It’s all been lovely, sweetest, but I’m tired now, and I’ve had enough.”

  “Sam-m-my,” I said, “it’s four A.M. I don’t know anybody in Palm Springs. I don’t even know if there’s a bus from here back to L.A., or where I would present myself to get on it. Where am I going to go? What’ll I do, for God’s sake?”

  “You know, frankly, I don’t-”

  And then he heard what he was about to say, and started laughing. It was a kind of laugh that we call laughing with your heart down South, and he never did finish the sentence; nor did he need to. “Oh” he gasped, throwing back his head to drink of the entire indigo sky; and for a second, I had the feeling we’d been worth it to each other, after all.

  You see, I had started laughing, too. It was as funny as the whole ding-dong country spread with mustard on a hot-dog bun, and we stood there, face to face outside of Frank’s pad in Palm Springs, from which I had been banished, and laughed like it was killing us. Finally, in whatever laughter’s equivalent of post-coitally is, we down-shifted to giggles.

  “Yee-hah and adios, Samby,” I said. “I bet you still don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies.”

  “Shalom, my Dixie twat,” he said. “Good luck getting a name.” I was half a block away when I heard him call, “This country…only way!”

  Trudging through alien Palm Springs streets, above whose still dark roofs some morning stars now glimmered, I soon spied a familiar shape that I recognized as the limo. Opening the door to my repeated and powerful kicks, a bleary Slowy blinked at me. At his feet was a nudie magazine he hadn’t bothered to conceal, along with a five-sevenths empty tube of airplane glue. Beside him, one shoe clutched in her lap, snored Suzannah, smelling of lipstick, chlorine, and rank despair.

  “So how’d it go?” asked Slowy, as I scrambled in there with them. He licked his lips, his eyes aglow like two little cameras packed* with unexposed film. “Jesus! Tell me everything. Don’t leave out a single detail.”

  “You’re such a schmuck, Slowy,” I said.

  Next to him, Suzannah’s head came up, and her eyes popped open. “Of course he is,” she said in some surprise. “Hain’t he got a dick, sister mine? Small, but nonetheless present.” Then she conked out again.

  Slowy tapped on the glass. “Driver!” he said, attempting to mimic a high-society penthouse hustler’s playboy swank. “We’re done here. Take us back to the real world.”

  “L.A.?” the driver said. “You’re shitting me, right, sonny?” But he started the engine even so.

  Some time later, I saw in the papers that Sammy had married Mai Britt. There was a picture that showed him looking natty and winking, and the bride just looking mighty blonde; and just my luck. I had slept with a coon, set Momma to whirling like a space-program simulator in the grave to which I no doubt instantly sent her via pure telepathic osmosis, and didn’t even finish in the money. If he’d asked me to marry him I’d have done it, I mean to hell with my mother, with her three teeth and one vowel.

  Sammy, you see, had acquired wealth and fame sufficient to not need to get his civil rights on the installment plan. All the same, I might have felt more wistful about our night of love together had I not heard that he was talking trash about me all over town. Getting called a stupid bitch by Sammy Davis, Jr.—even now, that gets me so all-fired-up indignant I could brain the little one-eyed jig with my bazo
oms. Of all the things he could have said, that was just a lie. He knew I was lots smarter than most actresses.

  Or Southern gals.

  Despite those assets, as you know, my career never did make good on what might have been. I never did nab that Oscar, for all that it was an honor just to be nominated—as I was, all too briefly, by a look on Sammy’s face. I never returned to Palm Springs, in the capacity of either guest or property owner. After Suzannah and I had patched things up and become friends, and she moved into my little house in Echo Park with me, all we got was older.

  But you know something, Sprout? These days, when I gaze down from the modestly glinting asteroid of minor fame that I now occupy, in orbit like a tiny but huge-breasted naked Sputnik high above the good old U.S.A.—and, gazing down, see you and the thousands of blue adolescents like you, all writhing on beds and hunched in basements, having quickly excused yourselves from the dinner table as my old TV show comes on—why, then, I sometimes think Vm what Santy Claus does the other three-hundred-sixty-four days of the year.

  I’m sorry that you’re taking everything about your dad so hard; not just his dying, which is understandable, but his life. On the other hand, I do think that you’re being just a little rough on your ex-girlfriend—what with turning her into an iinbecilic Panama Canal Zone slut, a maddened little pink-eyed dog, my sister Suzannah, and so forth. I mean, I’m sure that seeing her with your teacher must have been quite the kick in the teeth at your age, but believe me: these things happen. Sometimes it just works out that way. Besides, she probably isn’t any older than you are; plus which, she is female, and so is facing seas whose perils you will never know, in a craft so frail you’d be plumb petrified if you set foot in it. We often manage to make port, however. We women have learned to sail.

  All right, Sprout. Close me now. Stick me back under the pillow. Tbodle-oo, and au revoir, and yee-hah. Well, finally!—yes, indeed: those are my eyes.

  That’s really all. I’m not going to show you anything else.

  Aaaaargh!

  Enough already.

  Now, scoot.

  Amoose-vay. Scram.

  Beat it, kid.

  VI

  Professor X

  ROBERT OPPENHEIMER WAS THE MOST SELF-DRAMATIZING MAN I’VE ever met. That drives me batty in a scientist. For instance, in the desert at Los Alamos, just after we’d set off the first bomb, he quoted from the Bhagavad Gita. "‘I am become death,’ “he said in that sepulchral voice of his—so at odds with the sanguine American tone, genially ranging from gee-whiz to oh-well, whose breezy ability to redefine what one did as things that happened kept all but the refugees among us chipper throughout the Manhattan Project.

  Well and good. But what the books don’t tell you is that, after a brief but annoyed silence, one of the thick-goggled physicists clustered around Oppenheimer on the observation platform turned and said, “Oh, blow it out your ass, Bob. We’ve got it made now till the cows come home.” While I don’t use language of that type myself, I did enjoy the sentiment for its humor and its accuracy both, as did the rest of our little band. Soon all of us were chortling as if there were no tomorrow, except for our boss. He kept on moving around in the bomb’s afterglow, as if seeking the best way for its light to sculpt the gauntness of his face.

  Having removed my own goggles early in order to take a Laggilin pill for the heart condition with which I had been diagnosed even then, I watched him closely, as I did all my seniors in the Manhattan Project—obtaining not only pointers on my own future demeanor but, as in this case, useful musts to avoid. In fact, I believe that my final decision to conduct myself as a friendly, accommodating, rumpled sort of fellow, plainly brainy but too lacking in masculine vim and gumption to raise any sort of alarm, was taken at that moment.

  Then and later, I often considered concealing my intellect as well, since in the United States a simulation of stupidity can be highly useful in generating camaraderie’s bovinely democratic heat. But I soon realized that a bushel of the size required to hide this particular light simply hadn’t been made yet, and the calculations that, first taking a few moments to collect my thoughts, I swiftly jotted down on a matchbook adorned with the name of the gay bar I was adorning at the moment informed me that it probably never would. So I settled for inflecting the intelligence that I knew might make me suspect in my cud-chewing compatriots’ eyes with a soothingly ineffectual air of shambling and even somewhat hangdog affability.

  Lest you think I’m some unappetizing sort of fossil, though, I should point out that every physicist at Los Alamos was my senior, in years and office if not merit. My youth made me quite conspicuous, not only for its own sake but because very few scientists of any age, from firefly-trapping tykehood all the way to bushy-browed, Nobel-crazed dotage, can be reasonably described as even physically presentable, let alone comely. Indeed, having racked my brains for your benefit—no trifling gesture, all in all—I find that, myself aside, I can’t think of another. In that New Mexico summer of ‘45, as I strolled among the various Quon-set huts and labs on my various labors, I would often feel my brisk solitude trespassed on by the besotted stares of, simply, every sentient creature on the site—male or female, young or old, unattached or spoken for, smart or stupid, citizen or refugee, superior or inferior, in civvies or in uniform, ugly or attractive, two-legged or four-legged, walking or crawling, plausible (many) or out of the question (few). In the thick salad of visual rapine to which my presence played the crouton, all eyes were straining to measure my broad shoulders, caress my tousled hair, and mentally palp the tautness of the glutes, throbbing in their imaginations and to my own pleasurably certain knowledge with the subcutaneous cinammon of muscles healthily gorged on their own blood, beneath my deliberately baggy trousers and loose lab coat.

  That was yet another reason for me to keep my distracted mask in place, for I had learned quite early on that beauty can place endless demands on one’s time from those who come into this world less favored, and so never stop seeking favors. Their pleas for my kindness I might well be disposed to grant, but over the whole process I was determined to retain control.

  My private education in these matters had been launched at fourteen, when in the space of twenty-four hours I found myself seduced by first the Homburged husband and then the witless wife of a family freshly moved in down the block from my parents’ home in Schenectady. Intrigued, I then set about seducing the same household’s adolescent son and barely nubile daughter, so as to experience this novel application for people from every conceivable vantage point. But the extra effort involved in playing the part of wooer chafed me from the start. From then on, whatever my partners’ capacities, tastes, gender, and number, I preferred having others’ obeisance to offering my own; in addition to maximizing my pleasure with a minimum of wasted activity, this assured me of staying the center of attention while allowing me to solve and then remuddle whatever abstruse riddles then occupied my mind.

  Nor was this the only education I got from that first quartet of encounters. As I shifted both figuratively and literally from one room to another in our new neighbors’ house, my reflexes envigorated by the mental knight’s moves of recalling who was out on errands and which family member I hoped would answer my bold knock at one door or my surreptitious tap-tap at another, the ginger cat whose presence on the premises predated my own emerged as a rival—if not, in the arched back and furious hissing with which she greeted my advent, an antagonist. Naturally growing irritated, I mixed up some special pet food, and got obtrusive Puss out of the way with gratifying dispatch so as to have the household’s caresses to myself. However, I was soon identified as the culprit (in hindsight, this was inevitable, as no other lad in the neighborhood even possessed a chemistry set), and all four corners of my self-designed sexual compass, however understandably enchanted with finding my lithe form next to their less prepossessing ones in bed, felt obliged to put themselves beyond the pull of my charisma. They moved away soon afterward, if only to
be nearer the daughter’s costly sanatorium and the son’s harsh military academy while the parents got divorced without attracting much notice—and I too learned to be more circumspect.

  I’d caught the inventing bug much earlier. At the age of seven, feeling that to stop at two seats had been nothing but a failure of engineering nerve, I first conceived and then successfully soldered together a bicycle built for three. Only after my prototype had been wheeled out to our driveway did I realize I was missing two key ingredients for a field test, whom I would have had to recruit from among quite nonexistent playmates. Aside from the considerable number of them in which susceptibility to my physical charms has been the sole determinant, personal relationships were never to hold a great appeal for me. In my rare forays in that line, the chore of shared inspections of those pale pellets of Freudian earwax that people offer up as revelations has invariably wound up striking me as an insult to a mind with better things to do, and I have never seen much point in discussing myself with people less insightful than I am. At any rate, although my three-seater prototype rusted against a wall in Schenectady until my undeserving parents—substantiation of chaos theory in the flesh!—took advantage of their son’s absence at Stanford to donate it to a wartime scrap-metal drive, I soon turned to physics, the bulk of whose required apparatus, at least at that early stage of the game, already nestled comfortably between my faunlike ears.

  At Stanford, I was soon renowned for my attempts to synthesize molecules and neurons into a new form of matter. Indeed, I was mulling possible names for this hybrid when a Western Union boy brought me my summons to Los Alamos, and got one to the nearest men’s room in return. As he went on his nameless way some eight minutes later, and I quickly popped a Laggilin pill for my heart condition, I could only speculate on which of us had more real cause to call this day a highlight. After all, my intellectual progress had many grander milestones still in store, while his sexual experience had just peaked.