by Carson, Tom
I did. For a man who had once cut a Gordian knot by whirling Robert Oppenheimer around three times before shoving him at a wall map, it was child’s play to rearrange these only superficially random ingredients into a recipe. As I boarded my train and he called “Goodbye” and “Thanks, sir,” I had no idea if he would take my advice—carefully hoarded until just before boarding time, to maximize its effect—that he should try for the CIA. Yet a year or so later came a postcard signed with a name I had long since forgotten, now briefly recalled, and soon forgot again, and showing the surprisingly small stream that is the Mississippi that far north. It let me know the sender had been accepted by “the shop,” and thanked me warmly for my guidance.
Needless to say, I didn’t answer. Unless you’ve got a pressing reason, you don’t start a correspondence with a future spy. In any case, my only real concern had been to while away an hour, as un-idly as I could, before a train turned up to take me from somewhere to somewhere, and that hour was long since done.
As I recall, two or three other cards came over the next few years, until the sandy-haired, gray-eyed chap I’d steered to the Agency evidently concluded that I was indifferent—or else grew less grateful to me, I suppose, though I don’t really. The last one came from Guatemala, I believe, and since it turned up in my AEC mailbox not many weeks before the coup down there, I imagine he was involved with that in some way. But I scarcely paid attention, for this was in 1954—the year of an encounter that was to have far greater consequences for me.
As at so many other crucial junctures of my life, it all began with a thump of Good King Priap’s scepter.
I was leaning casually against a wall at Kay Josephs’ piano bar on Ρ Street in the lost blocks between Georgetown and Dupont Circle, right near the bridge above Rock Creek. If these two dimly lit rooms below street level in fact went by another name, the secret never passed the lips of Kay himself, an enticingly obese but disappointingly poised gent with a taste for hints, mints, and taunts. Denied the help of either a sign or telephone-directory listing in finding its way to his door, his all-male clientele had to rely instead on word of mouth, bathroom-stall graffitoes, and the guesswork invited by the chartreuse glow in the row of windows that hugged the sidewalk, too low for less gonadically goaded pedestrians to even notice they were there.
And to be candid, may I say that I find less enchantment in today’s boisterous blatancies than I did in that urgent, quasi-conspiratorial furtiveness, so reminiscent of espionage in everything but its object. Among its other special joys, repression guaranteed that a high proportion of Kay Josephs’ customers would lift their usual gin rickeys to mouths figuratively and sometimes literally twitching with an abject belief in their owners’ ghastliness—and while neurosis hardly equaled physical deformity when it came to putting a crowbar in my pants, this self-loathing did add zeal to my generosity in letting such wretched creatures briefly share me with myself, like pigeons on a heroic statue.
Despite the rich field of masculine misery it offered to my good king’s selflessness, their unhappiness otherwise left me mystified. But then I wasn’t homosexual, and indeed rather looked down on the breed. Confirmed in Schenectady and never revised, my own attitude was simply that it made no sense to deprive half the planet’s population of a chance to taste of life under good Priap’s rule, on no better grounds than their particular spoonful of chromosomal alphabet soup.
Indeed, the only worry that I was obliged, willy-nilly, to share with these pansies was fear of the vice squad. The all too frequent surprise visits of D. C.’s finest explained the stacks of old Washington Posts left thoughtfully parked by Kay at all exits, enabling his clients to cover their faces should they chance to appear in the next day’s edition. For the mute assertion of the bearer’s normality they provided, sports sections were in particular demand, resulting in arrest photographs that often seemed to depict men dismayed by the Redskins’ latest loss or setting grainily marched off to lockup for their faith in the Red Sox. I believe that such explanations were often fobbed off by parents on credulous children perusing the paper, thus not only preserving the tykes’ naïveté but impressing them at an early age with the useful message that loyalty to a team is no laughing matter in America.
Needless to say, this apprehension was especially fraught for those of us who worked for the government. On an average night at Kay Josephs’, that category probably included half if not two-thirds of the men eyeing one another along the bar or tentatively holding hands at one of the tables as Kay’s piano player, known only as Clam even to regulars like myself, let two nimble pet white mice race back and forth along his keyboard. As a result, sheer probability may well have abetted my vague impression—acquired during our brief preliminary chat at the bar, so I believed, although more likely it came from newsreel images whose sullen mask I’d not yet matched to the pomaded head bobbing at my beltline—that the new subject kneeling to Priap at the moment in Kay Josephs’ supply room, to which Kay supplied a select few of us with our own key, had some sort of official status equal to my own. Or possibly a more prominent one, I thought, having suddenly recalled that he and not I had unlocked the door.
Although distinctly unattractive, with eyes that slid around in their weak sockets like two smoldering oil drops in an enameled saucepan, pudgily smirking lips, and the pasty complexion that in Washington advertises one’s importance by indicating business too pressing for one to ever see the sun—although in his case I certainly can’t see why he and Schine, on their junketeering raids in search of disturbing library books and suspect embassy personnel at U.S. facilities overseas, couldn’t have booked themselves into at least one country where they might get a tan—this chappie wasn’t really my type. However, the primary problem wasn’t physical. Despite the servility suggested by our respective attitudes, the mere lip service he was paying Priap told me he had mistaken the good king for a mendicant in his kingdom, instead of acknowledging that he was a supplicant in mine. A man in his position was supposed to be giving pleasure, not receiving it—and, despising that kind of selfishness as I do, I grew increasingly bored and annoyed. However, I could tell His Majesty was on the verge of delivering an edict even so, and cupped both the ears beneath me to yank forward the face they were attached to for the finale, as I always did.
At my touch, his neck jerked back like that of Naja—the taxonomie name, of course, for cobra, Mary-Ann. “Hands off the coif, pal,” he snapped, giving the unpleasant sneer that, along with the smirk, comprised his sum total of facial reactions. “That’s a twelve-dollar haircut you’re messing up.” In what little light came from the street through the smudged window above our heads, his teeth had gleamed like bullets from a…
Machine gun!
He set back to work, but my loins had become a republic. Now demoted to mere Citizen Priap, their former ruler went into exile, to Roy’s evident disgust. After I’d gulped half a Laggilin for my heart condition as he watched, we departed the supply room in acrimonious silence, and chose stools far apart at the bar. A few minutes later, I saw him dangling his key before another prospect, whose repulsive physique—he looked like an Olympic swimmer—was soon following my recalcitrant former subject’s hunched shoulders and, in rueful hindsight and palmsto-pants frottage, gratifyingly greasy hair down a corridor.
As this type of encounter, though not the wilted conclusion, was no rarity in my life, I had all but forgotten it when my office telephone gave a suspiciously strident ring some weeks later. Without preliminaries, in an arrogant whine, a voice I didn’t yet recognize told me something interesting about my own life that I had never known. To wit, that—in the course of several long conversations we’d had at Los Alamos nine years earlier—Dr. Robert Oppenheimer had spoken sympathetically to me about Communism, and had even suggested I might read some Marx.
“He did no such thing,” I protested. “We never had a single conversation like that. Who is this?”
“Jesus, don’t answer right off the bat, P
rof,” the voice said. “This is important. Give yourself time to think. Maybe he even offered to loan you his own copy of Das Kapital—well, no, that won’t fly. But still: are those little chats with the Doc while you and he were building the big one together starting to come back to you at all?”
“No, they are not,” I said. “They never happened, and this conversation is preposterous. Who is this?”
“This is Washington, D.C., where preposterous is as preposterous does, pal—and it all depends on which story you’d rather see in the papers. The one about the pinko scientist up in Princeton who lost his security clearance, or the one about the faggot who got bounced out of the AEC for playing unlicensed hot-dog vendor at Kay Josephs’.”
Suddenly, I knew who this was—or rather, realized who the stranger servicing me in Kay’s supply room had been. The reason our preliminary chat before repairing there had been so brief, I now saw, was that his face was sufficiently familiar to me from newspapers and television that, without quite placing it, I had unconsciously behaved as if we already knew each other.
“Well, Roy,” I said furiously, since under the circumstances I thought that he could hardly insist on being Mistered, “what if I were to mention to anyone who interviews me that—well—that you were the one on his knees?”
“That’s sure not true now, is it? Anyway, I fished up some sad sack out of Kay’s talent pool who now knows every detail of our little rendezvous, right down to the pattern of the ugly tie that kept on getting in my eyes, I mean his. And guess what, Prof? The poor bastard’s broke, and we also look kind of alike. You so much as say that I was even in Washington that night—which it turns out I wasn’t, you’ll be happy to know—and I’ll call it either a case of mistaken identity or a deliberate smear.”
“What I’d call this is an awfully steep price to pay for one lost erection,” I said angrily
Roy sounded genuinely taken aback. “Christ, this isn’t personal. Even if I’d wound up swallowing a whole milkshake, I’d be doing exactly the same thing. I guess you don’t know me very well.”
“How do you know me?” I asked. “I mean, how did you find me—how did you know who I was?”
“I know who everybody is,” Roy said.
All the same, he plainly didn’t know everything about everybody, providing a source of some merriment to us both over the next thirty years. Not the least reason his attempt at blackmail had left me spluttering was that it was so unnecessary, since if Oppenheimer needed smearing all Roy had to do was ask. I had lost all sympathy for my onetime chief some years earlier, when to my incredulity he and a majority of his fellow hand-wringers on the AEC’s Advisory Committee had voted against developing a hydrogen bomb. I had even considered resigning my own post in protest, but soon realized I’d do better by both bomb and self by remaining in place, and quietly passed word to Teller—still out in Los Alamos—that he had a friend in court.
Subsequently, at least in Washington, D.C., Oppenheimer had become an increasingly vague presence in the corridors of nuclear power, devoting the bulk of his time to his other post as head of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—a party to which, I noted with cold rage, I was distinctly not invited. Clearly, my ex-boss feared the competition of younger and more limber minds, since once in New Jersey he preferred to keep himself surrounded by a dismal clutch of has-beens and mediocrities—with Einstein, who hadn’t had a new idea since 1905, as the most glaring example of the first category, and Oppenheimer himself leading the pack in the second.
The stunned look on my erstwhile superior’s face as I gave my testimony, and the confusion of his faltering claims to have been barely aware of my existence at Los Alamos, are memories I shall always dote on. So is the recollection of how soon I found myself in a position to tease Roy about his miscalculation of the need for leverage in my case, for as I exited the hearing room, he hailed me from the window of a nearby taxicab.
Still inflamed to the point of being able to count the metal teeth on my zipper by thoughts of the dwarfishly stunted, almost hydrocephalic receptionist—her evident need for Priap’s succor augmented almost to the point of madness by the milky cast in one eye—who had brought me coffee as I waited in an antechamber for my name to be called from the witness list, I made hasty use of a newspaper to hide my condition as I accepted Roy’s invite to climb in alongside him. Nonetheless, when he saw Oppenheimer’s always pained and now tentpoled face peering up at him from the front page of The Washington Post, he smirked knowingly.
“Lincoln Memorial,” he told the driver. “Then just keep going around.” Then he leaned back.
“I’ve had you checked out. Maybe I should be looking at you with new respect,” he told me, instead looking at me with new chumminess.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean 1947. The Filipino talked,” Roy explained. “As soon as you were done with him, he tottered off to find the Secret Service, clutching a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People and babbling that he’d been raped.”
“He was raped?” I gasped, horrified. “That same day? Was it before or after I had sex with him?”
Roy’s expression grew slightly quizzical, but then he resumed his story. “Of course, the gook thought that what you’d written in the flyleaves must be some sort of threat. But the minute the Secret Service passed the book on to us, we realized it was an even smarter plan than the one we’d been working on. It just took us years to figure out you were responsible.”
“And who is ‘us’?” I asked.
“That,” said Roy, “is the reason you’re getting a ride in my taxi, pal. I think it’s time you started working on purpose for the same people you’ve been working for by accident.”
“And who are they?” I asked.
“The same people I work for.”
“Joe McCarthy?” I was puzzled. “That’s only one person. Unless he and his brother Charlie are in it together, of course.”
Roy looked contemptuous. “Joe? That drunken nincompoop? Christ, no. He’s on the skids anyhow, and what did he ever have to do with Oppenheimer? Tom Swift you’re not, Prof, since the hearing you just testified at wasn’t even on Capitol Hill. No, that’s only my cover job—and not for a lot longer, either.”
“What’s your real one, then?” I asked.
“The same thing it’s always been. The same thing it always will be, and don’t let my boyish bad looks fool you—I turned fifty-four this year. I,” said Roy somewhat floridly, “am the lawyer for the American Century. I represent the people this country is for”
“And who are they?” I asked again, mystified again. At which my friend Roy grew less florid.
“How the hell would I know?” he said. “Most of them don’t even know who each other are. I mean, they’re all white, and they’ve all got money, and a lot of them live in Connecticut. But beyond that, pal,” he shrugged helplessly, “we might as well be talking about the fucking man in the moon.”
Having reached the Lincoln Memorial, the taxi began to circle it—something now no longer allowed, incidentally. Beyond Memorial Bridge, every time we came around, I could see the hill of Arlington on the far side of the Potomac, with its crowning mansion that had once fathered and now mothered graves. The view seemed oddly incomplete; some sort of small fire at midpoint would be the perfect finishing touch, I thought nonsensically. If my usually powerful mind struck even me as a tad disordered at the moment, that was because Roy had never stopped talking:
“Here’s how it works,” he was saying rapidly. “No one of them knows more than a dozen or so of the others—just enough so they can go on marrying each other and keep the loot in the family, or families. No one group ever communicates with any other group, since that would increase the risk of exposure.”
“A cell system,” I murmured. “It sounds as if they did learn something from the Communist Party, after all.”
Briefly, Roy looked stumped—a rare condition that he deeply hated. “The which? Oh, the �
�godless ratfink Commie bastards,’ “he recited tonelessly. “Actually, I don’t think they’ll ever admit it, because they’re such godless ratfink Commie bastards. But they got the idea from my clients.”
“If the cells don’t ever communicate with each other,” I asked, having more than once felt the identical curiosity about the Comintern, “how do they figure out what they’re all going to do next?”
“They don’t,” Roy said tersely.
“Then how do they even know what they want?”
“They don’t. They never have. These people have the brains of pineapples, Prof, and the only thing they ever invented was croquet. But they don’t need to know what they want. They just get it, because they’re the people the country is for.”
As a scientist, if nothing else, I was growing exasperated. “But how-”
“Do you remember the story of the centipede?” Roy interrupted, having anticipated me. “How it’s walking along one day on its hundred legs—and then another insect, say a butterfly, floats up to it and says, ‘Jesus, but that’s impressive, Mr. Centipede. How do you ever manage to control all those legs?’ Of course, nobody has ever asked the centipede that before. It’s never even noticed that it’s got a hundred legs—just figures something’s keeping it moving down there, what the fuck, who cares, and now it’s on to the next leaf, munch munch. But thanks to the butterfly, it starts to think, for the first time—and never takes another step until it dies. And ants start chowing down on it while it’s still alive.”