Go Naked In The World

by Chamales, Tom T. ;

  When Nick and Nora had arrived at the place a little before midnight the bar was wartime standing room two deep, couples and groups standing against the walls informally, and crowds around the two twenty-six dice tables. It was a softly lit place, rustic and comfortable and made to look richer than it was by the rich appearance of its clientele. Nick had managed to say hello to his bartender friend Louie. And Louie had bought them a quick drink, and told them that some of Nick’s friends had a table in the back in the dining room.

  It had turned into quite a party. Ellen the Fair was there. And Raul Lewis whom Nick had roomed with two summers when they were counselors at a summer camp up in Wisconsin was there with Ellen. And Nick’s best friend just about, Tuttle Smythe, was there. Tuttle and Nick had played football and hockey together and in the summers a lot of golf and tennis, and once had hitch-hiked to Florida together. Had roomed together Nick’s short time in college (five months). Quit college together. Gone into the army together, and were then separated. Raul and Tuttle were both in uniform. They had both gotten back within the last month, they said, and only earlier that evening had been talking about Nick. Tuttle was with a tall brunette girl; wistfully thin, wide-eyed, and gracious. Nick remembered having met her before the war and was not surprised that although Tuttle had been back from Italy only two weeks, he was already engaged to her. Tuttle had been in love with one woman or another ever since Nick could remember. It had usually only taken him five or ten minutes after meeting up with someone attractive to make himself believe that this was it, the real thing. Tuttle was a thickly, solidly built chap with rosy red little boy cheeks and straight neatly combed blonde hair. He looked about the same. As if for him there had been no war. And Ellen looked about the same; still something the way a nun looked; small and soft-pretty faced, with a firm little nun’s body and large brown eyes.

  They had all become very excited seeing each other again. There were other people at the long table. Tuttle’s younger brother was there. He had only recently been drafted and was in the navy up at Great Lakes. And some friends of Raul and Ellen were there, and one other fellow who had lived around the North Shore when Nick was younger. Nick couldn’t remember his name, and had stumbled through his introduction to Nora.

  All together they were about twelve. There was an organist playing the popular songs: ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’, ‘Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer’, (God, Nick had thought once between numbers, how even popular music had taken to religion with this war) ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’, and ‘When You’re Away Dear’.

  They seemed so very young to be Nick’s friends, Nora had thought when they first sat down. She felt so much more mature than they, and she was glad when Raul’s mother and father joined their table. Raul’s father looked like an exact replica of Robert Benchley, and was half drunk, and was very humorous in a quiet half-asleep Benchley way.

  “You’re really thinking of staying in, then?” Tuttle was asking Nick.

  “I might.”

  “You always were a funny duck,” Raul said. Raul had four rows of ribbons on. He had soft wavy red hair, and a red-freckled jester’s face, and didn’t look over seventeen. He was twenty-four, one year older than Nick.

  “Well you finally got to be a pilot, boy,” Nick said to Raul. “How do you like it?”

  “You’ll never get me up there again,” Raul said.

  “He got shot down,” Tuttle said. “Over Italy. He was a prisoner.”

  “Where were you after France, Nick?” Ellen the Fair, the Square, the angel-faced rich bitch said. “You stopped writing after France.”

  “I thought you stopped,” Nick said.

  “I never did. I wrote you a lot after your last letter.”

  “Maybe while I was in the hospital. I was in the hospital quite a while.”

  “What did you do exactly?” Ellen asked him.

  “Fought, exactly,” Nick smiled.

  “What are we going to do now,” Raul said. “That’s what’s bothering me.”

  “Why don’t we go into something,” Tuttle said.

  “What?” Nick asked. “What do we know how to do?”

  “Contracting ought to be good,” Tuttle said.

  “I’m no business man,” Nick said.

  “You can learn,” Tuttle said.

  “I’d like to go into advertising,” Raul said. “But how do you go about getting into advertising?”

  “Why don’t you try working,” Raul’s father said.

  “I don’t want to work yet,” Nick said. “Why should I go to work. Get so goddamn wrapped up in a job that I probably really don’t like. Am not suited for. So wrapped up I can’t ever get out. So goddamn inert wrapped up I wouldn’t even know that I’d be better off out.”

  “You’re still the hothead, aren’t you, Nick?” Raul’s father said. He was in public relations. But secretly, ever since he could remember, he had wanted to be a doctor.

  “Hothead, hell,” Nick said. “You had to work to survive. We don’t. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of it? Take the time to find something that’s concrete. Within our own framework. Our personality. So that what contribution we do make to this living is worthwhile.”

  “Listen to him,” Tuttle said.

  “Where you been,” Raul said. “Up in the Himalayas studying with those monks.”

  “He’s got a point,” Raul’s father said.

  “I know I have,” Nick said.

  A waitress was bringing more drinks and the organist was playing ‘It’s Been a Long, Long Time....

  “What’s Nick started now?” Nora asked Raul’s father.

  “I think Nick’s right,” Ellen said, eyeing Nora.

  Raul’s father was resting his chin on his hand, his elbow on the table. “They’re all feeling sorry for themselves,” he said to Nora. “They think they’re the only generation that fought a war.”

  “I know all about the First War,” Raul said in a bored manner to his father. “For Christ’s sake, Dad, they don’t want to hear about that war.”

  God, Nora thought, if I ever talked to my father like that he would have bounced me clean across the store. That was one thing that really always peeved her: this modern, this American father-son business that was so much the vogue, was really nothing much more than another vogue. Or was vogue the word? No, not vogue. An excuse really. A chance, perhaps, for a man to relive his youth via his son and his son’s friends. It was so obvious, she thought, how the son was used. Inevitably it led to or was caused by a resentment towards the mother. Made the man somehow feel cheated about his own lack of freedom. Nora should certainly know that was a truth. She was paid by the hour to listen to that story. And always basically it was the same story. With the same inevitable result: a self-pitying man trying to make up for his weakness by one stud-bull roaring run on a commodity, which for a change, he really thought he owned because he had paid for it. Which, she thought pleasurably, inevitably only added to his guilt about his own gutlessness.

  Nick with that sardonic half-smile was looking at Raul’s father. “We fought your goddamn war that you didn’t finish anyhow,” he said a little nastily. “Your war. That was our war too.”

  “Take it easy, Nick,” Raul said.

  Nora put her hand on Nick’s. “Dance, Nick?”

  “I don’t dance,” Nick said. “It’s a fact, isn’t it?” Nick asked Raul’s father.

  “That doesn’t solve anything,” Tuttle said. Tuttle was always a little slow. Except with women. School had really been a major problem with him and any sort of serious talk made him uncomfortable. Nick wondered for a moment how Tut had ever gotten through O.C.S. “What are we going to do?” Tut asked as his wife-to-be looked at him admiringly and approvingly. “That’s the problem.”

  “What do we know how to do?” Nick asked again.

  “Fight,” Raul said. “We could organize a gang. And maybe take the rackets over from the Dagos. We all know how to fight.”

  Nick sno
rted. “Now ain’t that somethin’,” he winked at Nora then turned to Raul’s father. “You must be very proud of yourselves. Of your generation. Your culture. Your society. What the hell kind of a society is that? That gives birth to a generation that doesn’t know how to do one goddamn thing except fight.”

  “I wish you’d watch your language, Nick,” Ellen said.

  Nora smiled.

  “Take it easy,” Raul said.

  “Let’s have another drink,” Nick said.

  “Let’s,” Tuttle said. “Well, that’s one thing we’re pretty good at besides fighting. Drinking.”

  “That’s what we could be,” Raul said. “Drunkards.”

  “That costs money,” Nick said.

  “You got any money?” Raul asked Nick. Raul was obviously a little tight now, Nora saw, and the red-freckled no-longer jester’s face was suddenly startlingly old and mournful.

  Nick shook his head.

  “How about you, Tut?” Raul asked. “Any money?”

  “No,” Tut said.

  “Dad, you wouldn’t want to invest some money in a real drunk, would you? A real, long term drunk?” he asked his father.

  Raul’s father, who had been half drunk for the past seventeen years, never really drunk, or wild drunk, just pleasantly half drunk, looked around at them, thinking for a moment how very young they were to be so old. How very dispossessed and deprived they felt now when they were just beginning. And yet, underneath it all, you felt a kind of rebellion. As if they were sick of the world we had made for them. Sick because they lived in it. Because to them it was a pretty sick world. And yet they did not seem to know what the sickness was.

  Each war, it seemed, took some of the youth, the innocence, the old-fashioned peacefulness out of America. It wasn’t that wickedness was now more prevalent in the individual, Raul’s father knew; the amount of that had not varied since the beginning of man. It was in the national ideal. The group approach. In a sense capitalism, as America had known it, had run its course. Money had long enough been the god. And to them it was a false god and a false faith in that it offered them no individual salvation. In THE SYSTEM of our TIME, our ERA, a man was unable to see himself individually as worthy of any serious attention. And yet ingrained in him was the materialistic concept. And add to that a national heterogeneity unique in the history of the world. It was a horrifying and complex contradiction.

  But you would have to bet that they would somehow rebel. You would have to bet they would. They had all the ingredients. At least almost all. The dissatisfaction, the restlessness, the eagerness for a change and identification. Nick was living proof of that; the forerunner in a sense. Why, in my day anyone would have given almost anything for the opportunity that Nick has, Raul’s father thought. God, but Nick looked old.

  They were all so much older for their years than was his generation. Christ, they were even older statistically. And I am an expert on statistics, am I not? Can’t I tell you how many bars of Lifebuoy Soap were sold in Indiana in 1943. I sure as hell can. And how many packages of Chesterfields were sold in Detroit in 1942. Well then, figure out on a purely statistical basis how much of the youth had gone out of America!

  Roughly ten million men in the service. Averaging say about two and a half years. Anywhere from, say, seventeen to thirty years old, with the vast majority being around nineteen or twenty. Say an average of twenty-two years old. And figure (Oh you’re good at figures tonight), figure three months before the service and three months after to get acclimated. That’s six months added to the actual two and a half years in service, which makes a grand total of three years. So you have 10,000,000 X 3. Of course you must concede that twenty-two years, the average age, is youth; and therefore the common denominator in this case. 10,000,000 X 3 = 30,000,000. That’s thirty million years of youth. Of innocence, in a sense. Of peacefulness, in a sense. Thirty million years of youth wiped out in this country alone in one stinking war.

  Well, how else you going to figure it out in this statistical age, Raul’s father thought a little sillily. I ought to offer my services to the War Psychology Board or something. God knows I’ve got the education. And there’s few people, really, that know as much about statistics as I do.

  Someone set another drink down in front of him. He had two backed up now, and saw that except for Raul and Tuttle and Nick, everyone had several drinks backed up.

  So they drank big. Like giants. That was the way they were raised. The way they fought. The way they did everything. And if they were going to degenerate, that’s the way they’d do that, too. Big. Like giants. Like one big Roman debauchery.

  “I don’t see why some of you don’t go back to college,” Ellen the Fair was saying. “Not a one of you have a degree.”

  “I got a degree,” Raul said. “In prison camp. The third degree. But you never heard of that one, did you?” he giggled at Ellen.

  “I’d like to go to college,” Tuttle said.

  “So you could play football,” Nick said.

  “Sure,” Tuttle said. “But I can’t go to college and get married too.”

  “Lots of boys are doing that now,” Ellen said.

  “What he means,” Nick said, “is that he can’t go to college with a wife and live in the manner in which he’s been accustomed. Either that,” Nick said sardonically, “or he’s afraid to ask his woman to make the struggle.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Tuttle said menacingly.

  “He’s kidding,” Raul said.

  “Don’t be so serious,” Raul’s father said to Tuttle.

  Ellen was holding her hand up to her mouth as if she had never heard the word before. Looking at her, Nick was forced to grin as he remembered the things she loved to hear him say when they had been in the woods out in the forest preserve together.

  “I think Ellen has a point,” Raul’s father said. “College might be good for you. It would give you that time you need so desperately.”

  “Time, hell,” Nick said, drinking. He was drinking ferociously now and it didn’t seem to have any effect. “Regimentation. Planned development. The way our colleges are, about all you get is narrowed. Taken out of your own narrow environment and put into the narrow environment of your college. Alma Mater. Sure, it can be helpful. Professionally. Or connection wise. But there’s something narrowing about it too. I’ve got a cousin in New York. A lawyer. I had lunch with him last week. Where? at the Harvard Club. We went out night-clubbing. With whom? several of his ‘chums’ from where? Harvard. Sitting up in his office, he was referring a client to a lawyer in Florida. A lawyer from Harvard, of course. Very broadening. I wonder if Harvard’s got a cemetery of its own. So they can all be buried together. They certainly must have their own private exclusive heaven.”

  “Stop it, Nick,” Ellen said. “You know you don’t mean a word you say.”

  “I’m with you,” Raul said raising his glass.

  Nick drank with Raul and then turned to Nora and spoke softly: “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I haven’t seen these fellows in a long time.”

  “I’m enjoying it,” Nora said. “I feel good.”

  “We’ll go soon, all right?”

  “Whenever you say. I’m feeling pretty good,” she said. “You’ve never seen me feeling pretty good, have you, Nickie. Little Nickie.” She put her hand up on his neck and reached over and kissed him and whispered: “Have you, little Nickie?”

  There was a kind of wildness in her now; a kind of turbulence, a self-indulgent animation that somehow up to now she had managed to hold secretly, suppressed in reserve; and now that the gates had opened it had sprung uncomfortably loose. Momentarily it had frightened him, as if he had taken on something that he couldn’t handle and did not understand.

  Or maybe this was what a real woman was like. Or should be like. Maybe he had never been with a real woman before. Ellen would never have tried to enjoy herself under similar circumstances, would always manage to withhold one way or another at least a
particle of her womanhood. As if the womanhood itself indeed were bait. And on a string, too, he thought. Ellen could learn a lot from this woman, he thought, taking Nora’s hand, and taking his drink in his other hand, and feeding some of the drink to her, then polishing it off himself.

  They finished what they had on the table, and had Louie the bartender fix them two huge doubles, and took them out to the car. Everybody had walked out to the car with them. Nick had agreed to stand up for Tuttle at his wedding. And they were all going to meet at the same table the night after next, and Saturday were all going to the races out at Arlington. And Sunday Raul’s father was going to give a party for all of Raul’s friends that were back. And for their women. Nora had to come, Raul’s father insisted. Didn’t Nora agree it was about time someone gave a rip-snorting party for all the lads that had done so much for their country. Your goddamn right it was about time.

  They drove off with everyone hollering goodbye, drank their drink on the way, Nick driving eighty down 41 to Foster Avenue, then cutting east toward the Lake, driving as fast as traffic would permit, his hand on her tanned smooth-skinned thigh, feeling that strange wild turbulence and animation that she exuded, until he too felt it fully, wildly.

  Quickly they were home. And wildly turbulently they made love three times then went to bed. And she woke him at noon after he had slept only four hours and gave him some vodka and tomato juice, and kissed him good morning with the same wild turbulence and animation that only a few hours ago he had gone to sleep on, and remembered suddenly some of the things that he had done for the first time that early morning. And they began drinking and making love again in that same wild and turbulent way, until finally he told her he would have to go. Everyone had seen him, his parents were sure to find out he was home, he would not want to hurt them.

  When she told him that she would not be able to see him for several days, she had plans, it did not penetrate. He was too tired and hungover and somehow the walls of the apartment were closing in on him; if he didn’t get out of there he would scream, he felt.