Go Naked In The World

by Chamales, Tom T. ;

  And if it was that way, Pierro really had something. And even if it wasn’t that way by his own direction he had something. Whether he was cognizant of it or not. What difference did it make how or why he kept his talent in him so protectively as long as it came out when it was supposed to come out—with all the augmentation and amplification and pressurization of having been held in so long.

  But what was he going to do with himself? with his life? How do you ever find out what you really want? and how did you go about getting it? how did Pierro ever know when he was so young exactly what he wanted to be? how did you derive a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment from something you had done? what must you do to find this sense of satisfaction and accomplishment as Old Pete often found it? how? when? why?

  Suddenly it seemed the whole panorama of his life was a race and he was running last. He knew he wasn’t cut out for business. The whole dreary drudgy idea, the pattern of the businessman’s life had a repellent, sickening effect on him. It loomed in front of him like a giant birdcage that he could walk in and out of and he was afraid that some day someone would close the door on him.

  But what? what could he do? what did he know how to do?

  There was something in him that had to come out. He had to find a way to get it out, to free himself of it. Something that would give him a chance to feel and know things. To blend all of the things that were in him: the matter, the spirit, the flesh. To blend all that into some sort of refinement. If he could do even a part of that—life, he believed, would have hope and meaning for him.

  But where? where? where? he wondered—do you begin?

  He was walking fast now towards the west and had crossed Michigan Avenue feeling the night wind as it funneled down the now almost empty streets in the dark of the early morning passing by the little bars that were crowded and noisy with reveling soldiers and sailors and their women exuberant with their pay or furlough or overseas money in their pockets and vigorous and bold from the whiskey or beer that they had consumed desperately as if this-may-be-my-last-fling before heading home to their wives or to the farm or to the South Pacific where a war it seemed from here could not possibly exist it was ingrained in them from the day they took the oath this business of what a soldier or sailor did when on pass or leave ingrained in them like the basic rudiments of close order drill and the care and cleaning of their weapons so damn well ingrained in them that this proficiency of taking a pass or leave increased inevitably it seemed in exact proportion to their ability and value as a serviceman increased—there were a lot of good soldiers and sailors in action this night, Nick thought.

  He came onto Rush Street; the street where the cabbies brought the conventioners and at the same time collected from the management of wherever they had dumped their load. The cabbies no longer getting so much a load but taking a lesson from the Reuthers and the Becks now collected so much a head.

  Rush Street was neon lit like a small town on a weekday shopping night and the traffic was just as heavy with bustling smalltown men in their too-tight suits and overly starched collars laughing and joking those titillating laughs and jokes that seemed to erupt out of men that had not been out of town away from their wives for a length of time. They were never the same then as when you met them alone, Nick knew. But together you might say they were almost alone because somehow their personalities became lost within themselves and out of this mass of personalities a new personality emerged non-dominated by any one single personality; self-directing, self-relying, independent of all of them.

  This was the street. Rush. With its hundred dollar broads and ninety cents for a half-ounce of diluted drink. And its show broads and hat-check broads and chippies who would sit at your table and drink with you and talk to you about things that made your palms sweat and your loins ache and drink like no woman you had ever seen in the wide world drink and if they did not get all your money that way would get it later after the spot closed one way or other whoever you were you would certainly be as primed and overripe ready as you ever could be. It was a goddamn art in a way.

  But that wasn’t all that was on the Street which was only one block from Michigan where the plush lakefront apartments were and only around the corner from those brownstone town-houses that were on the sidestreets between Michigan and Rush. The call broads and hoods and faggots and le’s and pushers and heisters and flowerwomen were not all that was on Rush. There were fine restaurants with intimate little bars and elegant restaurants with well-lit big bars and bohemian restaurants with their checkered tablecloths and their chianti wine. You took your choice. It was all there.

  The Four Winds was one of the better places catering to stockmarket brokers, gamblers, politicians of stature, professional men, high-class call girls, upper bracket entertainers, playboys and playgirls. It was a tropically decorated place with a piano that never banged; thatched walls, oil-on-velvet paintings of nude Tahitian girls and a ceiling of palm grass giving the feeling of a native roof.

  They would not let him in because he was in uniform. He told the doorman to get Hy Dennis which he did after Nick had waited almost ten minutes in the entranceway, which was not a bad wait considering the view he had of what was coming in and going out.

  Then he saw little Hy coming toward him as round and bald and red-faced as ever.

  “Well,” Nick said.

  Hy studied him perplexedly for a moment, an almost embarrassed perplexity. Then: “For God’s sake, Nick. Nick Stratton.”

  “Hello, Hy,” Nick said slowly.

  They shook hands warmly, Hy noticing the sad old warmth of Nick’s smile, a smile he had never seen Nick wear before.

  “What kind of a place you running?” Nick asked in a new voice.

  “The Mayor, on demand of the Mothers of American Soldiers, put out a proclamation. We’re supposed to protect your virtue. The law I can handle. But not that many mothers. So I put up the rope. Come on in, kid, you look great.”

  “I look like hell.”

  “Rough? eh? Nickie.”

  “Nice. Lovely. Paris in the spring. The Mediterranean in the summer,” Nick said. “No, Hy, nothing like I thought it would be. Certainly not glamorous.”

  “They went up to the crowded now standing-room-only bar, Hy leading Nick by the arm.

  “Scotch,” Nick said.

  “The usual,” Hy said.

  For a place that wasn’t supposed to get going until really late it was a very crowded place, Nick thought.

  “When did you get back?” Hy asked.

  “Tonight.”

  “How’s the family?”

  “I haven’t seen them. You know, Hy. It was late and they weren’t expecting me. If I went out there late they’d get all excited and we’d be up talking all night. I thought I’d stay downtown tonight. After three years, Hy, one night doesn’t make much difference.”

  “I guess not,” Hy said. “I hear Old Pete is going great with the theatres.”

  “That’s what I hear,” Nick said with such obvious unconcern that his concern and irritation at the very mention of Old Pete came through. He looked around the bar. “American women sure look nice.”

  He did not see anyone he knew but was conscious of several people staring at him; probably, he thought, because he was the only one in the place in uniform. Hy had turned and was talking to one of his captains, then turned back again.

  “On leave, Nick? Discharge?”

  “It’s a kind of tour of duty to my home address. Not leave, really. I’ve got the points for a discharge, though,” Nick raised his scotch glass in a salutary gesture.

  “Good luck, Nickie,” Hy said in that sincere way of his.

  They drank.

  “Where’s your ribbons?”

  “Not me, boy. I went through that in New York. What’s this one for, Major? And that one, Major? And that red one would look better in the top row, Major.”

  “You get hit?”

  “Hy, you going to stand there and look at my face an
d ask me if I got hit,” Nick grinned.

  “Your face ain’t bad,” Hy said. “Your nose is flattened a little. And that scar. It’s that moustache and gray hair. You look old, Nick.”

  Nick sipped on his drink. There was a different kind of animated excitement in this room, he felt. With no soldiers, no sailors, and no curfew, the war seemed suddenly again distant and far behind him, his home far away from him. There was however an underlying provocative kind of suggestiveness exuding prey-like, filling him with a kind of fearful excitation that he could not let go of as similarly he could not let go of it before battle began. But here no one was being killed.

  It was like an enormous womb that everyone had crawled into securely where, he thought, animal-like there was no work and no worry, all dark and warm and secure, only to eat and drink, to enter into stimulation out of association a condition akin to heat, and then to rush from this womb to another smaller more intimate womb where the animal-like desire would be satisfied and once again you were awakened into that world of reality which you were forced to face primarily so that you would be successful enough to be able to afford only the very finest, the most secure of all wombs in the manner in which you have now become accustomed—

  God Bless America. And V for Victory.

  He was standing between two stools and now the man on the stool to his right got up revealing on the stool next to him a striking brunette. She had on a simple black dress, a diamond wristwatch which was unmistakably very expensive and on her little finger wore an emerald and diamond cocktail ring. Sitting there, her finely proportioned legs crossed longly, wearing no hat, around twenty-five years old, she exuded a poise far beyond her years, it seemed.

  She sipped on her drink and set it down. Her eyes began to wander just as you would expect them to wander then suddenly met his own gaping eyes. She smiled politely, did not even abruptly turn her head away, just politely and graciously and darkly with no trace of flirtatiousness or hint of sensuality or sexuality, just smiled pleasantly.

  To Nick it was a startling experience. No one had ever smiled at him quite like that before. He turned away. He did not usually turn away from an attractive woman, and especially if she smiled at him; but the graciousness, the kindliness, that she had extended to him made him suddenly feel her superiority as a human being; and being the way he was he would repay her graciousness and kindliness by not staring or gaping or embarrassing her with some kind of an approach.

  You never approached a woman like that in the right way anyhow. They had the axe over you not only because you wanted that which was the ultimate goal of your attraction but because you admired them for the control they had over themselves, the practical way they ran their lives, the attributes you did not have. So that by the time you did approach them you were so cognizant of your own shortcomings and imperfections, merely by being in the same vicinity of such serenity and faultlessness, that you felt you were stepping out of your league.

  After the contest, whichever way it went, Nick knew, the party was over. Any way you looked at it, whether she beat you down or pulled you up, she had won. Then if she wanted to sleep with you, you knew somehow that it wasn’t going to be like it could have been had it worked right to begin with. She had beaten you, she felt guilty about having beaten you, and so she slept with you. Either that or if you had to have it so bad with her that you listened to her every word, and made her think that you believed her every word, which if you wanted it that bad Nick Stratton you would have forced yourself to believe every word, then again you would not be going to bed with a woman but with a goddamn mother that was giving her most obedient child a present.

  Either way it only led to one thing: Because you somehow knew that you had been given a present, a compensation of a kind, your male vanity would suffer such a severe blow that you would be bound and determined no matter what the cost to go back again and again until you got it in that fine idealistic way commensurate with the dignity of man, and particularly your own dignity. Only then, after you had it your way, could she possibly understand what you really were.

  He finished his drink and slyly out of the comer of his eye watched her long sensuous white fingers perfectly kept circle around the stinger glass. Somehow, though, she was different from the kind of woman he had been thinking about. It was obvious, looking at her again, that she didn’t belong in any specific category. She wasn’t married, her ring finger said. And the man who had been sitting next to her had left. She was probably waiting to meet someone, or maybe she lives in the neighborhood in one of those town houses and couldn’t sleep: so she took a walk and decided to have a drink. Well, you’d sure as hell think that someone like her would pick another place besides this one. Certainly if she lived around here she’d know about this place.

  She leaned forward to sip her drink and he became acutely aware of a sudden excitement as her profile showed her fine breasts delicately accentuated by the sheer delicateness of the expensive fabric press ever so slightly up against the bar. He quickly took a drink of his own, then looked back at her and she smiled at him just the way she had the first time, politely and graciously, with no trace of flirtatiousness or hint of sensuality or sexualness. He half-smiled back an almost awkward smile.

  Hy walked up between them. “Hello, Nora,” he said to her. “Meet Nick Stratton. An old friend home from the wars tonight.”

  Standing there Nick took her now extended hand and she said, “How do you do, Major.” And she had said it so graciously and so politely with such sincerity that she made him feel suddenly perfectly at ease; almost an equal really.

  “Join us for a drink, Nora?” Hy asked.

  She would, she said, but not another drink just yet.

  She talked to Hy for a few moments regarding a mutual friend of theirs who was sick, cancer they thought, in Miami. And then Hy told her that Nick had only that night returned from three years overseas and was spending the night in town, as he had arrived late. And told her that he was the son of Old Pete Stratton who once ran The Mill out on the north side, certainly she had heard of Old Pete, Hy said. She had. Everybody knew who he was, she said. But she did not say it, Nick thought, with any noticeable change in her attitude toward him as most people did when he was referred to as Old Pete’s son. In fact she was so damn gracious about it that Nick hardly felt the usual blind moment of anger and inferiority and (though he did not know it) probably jealously, and hate and exasperation that he usually felt when he was referred to as Old Pete’s son. Nevertheless he was suddenly infuriated with Hy for having mentioned it. And when Nick was that way he couldn’t hide it, it seemed it had to come out right then and there.

  Scowling, his drink in his hand, he looked down at Hy, who was a good four inches shorter than he: “Let’s forget Old Pete,” he said with a deliberate and forced emphasis; mouth quivering slightly and jaw set. “All right, Hy?” he said, deliberately and sarcastically.

  Hy eyed him for a moment, the round jolly slightly freckled face as jovial and unmoved as when he had first greeted Nick, eyed him with those small almost beady blue eyes that were as void of emotion as a two-day dead Japanese soldier, then turned to the bartender. “Another round. And no check for the Major tonight. Have a good time, Nick. I’ll see you in a while.” He nodded to Nora and walked away.

  Nora was studying him; the animalistic glare of his eyes as they followed Hy away, the taut bunched force of the shoulders showing through the OD shirt, the angered swelling of the veins in his thick neck. He drank, his eyes still piercingly following Hy away, wiped his moustache with the back of his hand. For a moment she thought he was going to spit, then suddenly he set the glass down on the bar and turned to her.

  “Sorry,” he said to her, not looking at her, saying it, she thought, not as if he really meant it but as if it was something that he should say.

  She smiled graciously, amusedly.

  He leaned over resting his left arm on the bar, ordered himself another drink, and looked at her, the ange
r having completely dissipated the inferiority that she had made him feel at first, and now not really caring whether he impressed her or made her or not. He had already irritably decided that he was going to get drunk. Real drunk. Dead drunk. Just like the dead drunk the night before he had sailed from Bombay. That goddamn Hy. The little Jew bastard with his Irish name, and his ‘no check for the Major.’ They always beat you one way or other. Just stood there all shut-up and then with one lick managed to beat you.

  “You live in town,” he asked her.

  “Across the Avenue. On Scott,” she said.

  “You’ve got a nice tan.”

  “I should have,” she said. “I was in Florida until about six weeks ago. Where did you come from?”

  “All over. From France now. I was out in the Far East. Then I went back to France.”

  “That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. I was on a boat from Bombay through the Canal and the Straits. I had some wounds that began to bother me. So they dropped me off at Malta and flew me to a hospital in France. I couldn’t have planned it any better,” Nick said suddenly smiling inwardly as he remembered how Boomer had feigned his own illness so that he could get off the boat with Nick. That was a real Award performance, Nick remembered, Boomer faking his appendix which had been out for seven years and telling the ship-doctor that the scar was a shrapnel wound. “Would you like that drink now?” he asked her.