The second looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He was round-faced, and the whites of his eyes and his teeth were rich yellow. He smiled at his reflection.
“Her name Ruby,” he said, and paused. “She know me as Sweet Daddy.”
“Sweet Daddy! Sweet Daddy!”
The two men scuffled again, hooting and slapping at each other’s hands. Up and down the bar there was laughter, a rich and exultant chortling, as though something plentiful and delicious were being passed among the men, and tasted.
Those nights in the bar were like nights spent in a foreign country, a place I loved and tried to learn. I learned as best I could. Some things I learned myself, by watching: I saw that you never drained your glass of beer. Always a small measure was left at the bottom, out of courtesy. Other things I was taught. Sitting on my stool one night, I swiveled around to talk to someone behind me. I sat leaning back, talking and laughing, my spine resting easily against the bar. I felt a hard finger drill into my shoulder blade. I sat up and turned to find Shirt Walter’s long black face thrust next to mine, stern, admonitory.
“Never turn your back to the bar, Billy,” he said severely, as though he were reciting a law.
I swiveled meekly back around, shaken by Shirt Walter’s face, his tone of voice. He now ignored me, moving farther down the bar without a glance. I sat silent, chastened. I was also baffled: I didn’t understand the rule, but Shirt Walter’s glare prohibited questions. I was chastened, but also grateful to know that Shirt Walter was watching over me. He wanted me to know the rules. I felt surrounded by the powerful presence of my friends.
One night I noticed a man I didn’t know, craning his neck to look at me from halfway down the bar. He glowered at me, muttering, turning away, then peering back. Finally he set down his drink and headed toward me. He was heavy-set and very dark, with wide-apart eyes and a small flat nose. I saw him coming and put my drink down. I could feel my heart pounding: I was scared.
When he reached me he grabbed my shoulder, pulling me away from the bar.
“What you doin in here, white boy?” he demanded. He pushed my shoulder away contemptuously and set his hands on his hips. He cocked his head. “Dis no place f’ you.” He reached out again, maybe to grab me, maybe to push me.
His hand never reached me. Harlem and Nighttime Paul stood on either side of him. They took him under the elbows, not gently, lifting him off his feet in a bundling rush all the way down the bar and out the door.
When Harlem and Paul came back, they were without the man. Harlem sat down again next to me. He picked up his drink, calm, unhurried.
“Don’t pay no attention to him, Billy,” Harlem said. “He nothing but a fool.”
I felt safe with Harlem. I trusted him.
That summer I spent my Saturday nights with Harlem whenever he asked me, climbing the wooden stairs up into his dark, spangled world, saying the password at his closed door. I never told my parents where I was going: my mother would have worried, my father disapproved. My parents wanted to keep me tucked safely in their world—white, dry, cautious—but I had found somewhere new: Harlem’s hotel and the Eagle Arms, Shirt Walter and Cash Money; the suddenness and vehemence of the talk, the laughter, the intimacy, the vividness. Mysterious, immensely glamorous, it was like a secret chamber, a vast nighttime cave I had been granted permission to enter. And no matter what dangers presented themselves, I was protected there, by my wise and powerful friends.
At the end of the summer, Harlem and I said good-bye. We shook hands slowly, clasping each other’s elbows and smiling.
“So, Billy,” Harlem said, “you off to college.”
“That’s right,” I said, shaking my head. “Four years of books and winter, man, hard work and bad weather. Pretty bad. Not like you: you’re going down South to lie around in the sun, you dog.”
Harlem and the other caddies lived in Westchester only in the summer; the rest of the year they lived in West Palm Beach. They owned no winter clothes, and I admired this. They seemed to have outsmarted winter, to have simply made a decision to avoid, smoothly and without effort, the bleaker part of life.
“That’s right,” Harlem said equably. He smiled. “No winter for me, no sir. Sunshine every day, that’s right.”
“You dog,” I said again, grinning back.
It seemed to me then that our destinations were roughly equivalent. Harlem had another life, elsewhere, and so did I. We were both moving on. Harlem’s life was different from mine, but then, so were all the adult lives I knew. The choices made by grown-ups were incomprehensible to me. My father’s life seemed grim and pointless: the tedious commute in to New York and the insurance company each day, the exhausted return to our small house in Port Chester each night. I didn’t plan to live my father’s life any more than I planned to live Harlem’s. I felt no pity for either of them, only the vast difference between our generations. My sight was clearer than theirs. My own choices would be simpler than theirs, my decisions wiser. My own life lay ahead of me, glorious and unknowable.
That fall I went to a Catholic men’s college outside Boston. It was the first time I had ever lived away from home, away from my parents’ anxious eyes, and it felt wonderful. I could see that this was how it would be from now on, an increasingly expansive universe, giving me more and more room. My own achievement and advance seemed effortless, as though I were riding a wave, a long, slow, endless surge, on which I rose and rose. Simply by virtue of my age and my existence, it seemed, I was rising into power.
That first year, I went South at spring vacation. I was going to a place my parents had never been, had never even dreamed of going. It was easy for me to go there; I felt it was my right. I felt it was my right to do anything I wanted.
Florida wasn’t crowded and built up then, it wasn’t a place for old people in air-conditioned condominiums. In the late fifties, Florida was a romantic place, tropical and opulent. Along its edges were wide beaches, and deep in its interior were mysterious swamps. Florida lay dreamily right at the very bottom of the country, stretching down a long, elegant leg from the rest of the continent, dipping a toe excitingly into foreign currents, warm turquoise waters.
Seven of us drove down, in two cars. We drove straight through, taking turns at the wheel, snoring and sweating in the back seat. When we finally arrived in Delray we cheered. Our motel was a terrible place, a low, unpainted concrete bunker. Still, we cheered because we had arrived: we had escaped from our school, our parents, and winter. We didn’t care how awful the motel was, because we would hardly be there. We were going to sleep on the broad, endless beach, or in the flowery, sweet-smelling beds of the beautiful girls we were going to meet. We didn’t care about squalor. All that was temporary, we would be rich later, and we were powerful now. The possibilities of our world were limitless.
We did most of the things we had hoped to do. During the day we played volleyball on the sand and swam in the surf, wrestling with the long, relentless rollers. We turned browner and browner, mysterious proof of our excellence, our manhood. We talked to the girls who walked past us, up and down the beach. The girls had bouncy hair and they wore two-piece bathing suits: a heavy bra-like top and an exciting underpants-like bottom, tight around the crotch. A virgin territory was revealed: soft white midriffs, supple and untouched, unbearably smooth. We longed for the girls, we longed to have them. At night we drank cheap beer in crowded bars and talked to the girls. Afterward, when they would let us, we took the girls with us and stretched out next to them on the sand, in the wide night. None of us actually had sex—it was the fifties still—but we got drunk every night. There was no one to stop us. There was almost nothing we could not do.
I had brought Harlem’s phone number down with me, and after a few days I called him.
“Harlem?” I said.
“Who this?” he answered. His voice was cool.
“It’s me, Billy,” I said. At his voice I felt, unexpectedly, elated. But there was silence from him.
�
��It’s me, Billy, from Westchester,” I said.
“Billy,” said Harlem, completely there. “My man. How you doing?”
“I’m down here, man,” I told him, “in Delray.”
“Got to get together,” Harlem said. He and Cash Money were going to be out flying around that night, he said. They would fly by and pick me up around ten. They would take me back with them to West Palm Beach, to their dark, powerful, spangled world.
That night I stayed in our room when the others went out to get drunk. I told them who I was going out with, but they pretended not to believe me.
“Oh, very sly, Ryan,” Coccaro said, and punched my shoulder. “Some guy you used to caddy with, of course. Right. We believe that.” He looked around our dank, low-ceilinged room: it was hideous. The beds were seas of rumpled sheets; the floor was strewn with dirty clothes and filthy towels.
“Who is it? She’ll be very impressed by your handsome quarters,” Coccaro said.
“Ryan isn’t going to impress her with his quarters,” Sullivan shouted. “He’s planning to show her something else, right, Ryan? You’re planning to impress her with that!”
“Shut up, Sullivan,” I said, and thumped him on the arm, hard.
They were right to think that I was deserting them, though wrong about where I was going. For some reason I didn’t want to tell them about Harlem’s world. I didn’t invite anyone along with me. This was my secret.
Around ten-thirty I heard a low throbbing outside, an engine that sounded like an outboard motor. I looked out into the parking lot: there was an old two-toned Buick Roadmaster, green with a white top, polished and shining. It had white sidewalls and little chrome portholes along the front fender.
I went outside and Harlem climbed from behind the wheel. He came over to me, grinning.
“Harlem,” I said.
“Billy,” he said. We shook hands slowly, smiling at each other. Harlem gripped my arm as though we were old friends, and I thumped him, in a respectful way, on his massive shoulder. He looked even nattier down here than he had up North. He was wearing a light brown suit and a patterned brown tie. His white shirt glowed, and in the tropical twilight of the parking lot lights his eyes were liquid and gleaming.
“Get in, Billy,” he said, opening the door. In the back seat there were two other men. “Look who’s here, Cash.” Cash, who was in the front seat, cocked his index finger in the air and nodded at me in a friendly way.
“Cash Money,” I said, “how you doing?”
“Billy,” he said, smiling and closing his eyes. “Good to see you.”
“This Fred,” Harlem said, pointing toward the man in back, “and you know your man Nighttime Paul. Billy, you get in back wid Paul.”
The car was low-slung, and I bent over. Paul slid over to make room. He was smiling, his face nearly invisible in the dark.
“Hey, Paul,” I said.
“Billy,” he said, and we shook hands. Fred and I nodded, and we set off. I leaned back against the seat. The car was big and had a good, solid feel.
“Hey, Harlem,” I called, “nice car.”
“Oh, yeah,” Harlem said. I could hear him smiling. “Had her awhile now. Beats walking.”
“So, Paul,” I said. “How’s it going? How’s the club down here?”
“Club fine,” Paul said, nodding. There was a pause, and we waited for him to finish. “Members bad.”
We all laughed: it was the old joke.
“So,” Harlem said, eyeing me in the mirror. “Whatchou doin down here, Billy? Not here studyin, are you?”
“Nah,” I said. “We’re on spring break. I came down with a bunch of guys from school. Beer on the beach. Girls in motels. We figured we’d get lucky.”
“An’?” asked Paul. “How you doing?” They were all listening.
“Come on,” I said. “How’re we going to get lucky? We got two rooms for seven of us, we got two-three guys in each bed. What are we going to do, get some girl in there, tell her to pay no attention to the guys in the next bed? Tell her not to notice the guy lying right behind her? Tell the other guys to hide under the spread and be real, real quiet?”
They were all laughing now.
“Real, real quiet,” said Paul. “Yeah.”
“Tell that girl to look the other way,” said Fred, chortling. “Look away, look away.”
“She don’t care, someone else in bed,” said Cash Money. “Why she care?”
Harlem looked at me in the mirror, grinning. “You ain’t find nobody like that, Billy?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said, grinning back.
Harlem shook his head. “Surprised at you.”
“Yeah, well, sorry to let you down,” I said. “All we found so far are some great hangovers.”
They laughed some more at that. Everybody liked the story, the idea of persuading a girl to ignore the two other men in the same bed with her. They all offered variations on this, and possibilities. We all laughed at them, and it lasted us a good long while.
We were on the coast highway, headed back to West Palm Beach. The Roadmaster tooled along, not so fast but very powerful and smooth. Jimmy Smith was on the radio, playing a Hammond B3, the great blues organ. It all felt perfect to me, as though, with all of us in it, in that big solid car, we could go right through anything. Nothing could stop us. Beyond the highway, to the east, the ocean flashed in and out of view. There were palm trees, suddenly against the night sky, ragged and wild, and then a string of neon lights, bars, motels, lit-up places with lights in tropical colors; then the palm trees would hit the sky again, black and uneven. Cash Money got out some weed and passed it around and we put it to our mouths. I hadn’t had any since the summer, with Harlem. We took that heavy magical air into our lungs and right up into our brains, and things got funnier and funnier.
Right then, driving along, surrounded by my friends, I felt as though I were flying, as though I were rising up into the air, right up into that spangled sky. I felt so lucky, as though, miraculously, I’d managed to do things right. I had moved here, into this world, effortlessly. Somehow, I’d managed to get myself into this beautiful, invincible car, and we were rolling along past the dancing palm trees that heaved mysteriously against the heavens. Harlem had let me into his secret nighttime world again. I was here, I had climbed the stairs, said the password, and been admitted once more to this dark and radiant place.
When we reached the outskirts of West Palm Beach we turned off the highway and onto a broad avenue of large buildings. The car slowed down. The weed had quieted us, though it had made everything around us seem very funny. We weren’t talking much, but we laughed easily, in low, gurgling chuckles. I was sitting in the corner, leaning against the window and feeling happy.
The avenue was lined with great palm trees, in solemn, symmetrical rows. Crossing the avenue in orderly succession were tidy side streets. It all seemed very grand, an ideal of order, and I felt my mood began to shift. I felt myself turn sober and responsible: this place spoke to me in a new way. I was an adult, I was a part of the world. I now felt just as pleased to be here, on this wide avenue, as I had been to be tooling along the honky-tonk highway.
We turned slowly off onto a smaller street. There were shops, and people walking easily down the sidewalks, shiny cars parked along the curb. It looked prosperous and calm, and in the warm evening, in my beatific state, it looked perfect to me, just as it should be: these small neat white stucco buildings, the clean streets, and high above it all the stately silhouettes of the palm trees.
We passed a movie theater, with stage lights glowing around the marquee. A Doris Day–Rock Hudson movie was playing. A couple was just going inside: they were both tanned and blond, and they wore matching madras shirts. For a moment they walked along the sidewalk in step, their tanned bare legs moving in unison. They noticed it just as I did, and they started to laugh. They broke stride, and their legs windmilled in slow motion. I had seen them laugh and change their steps; I had known what the
y were thinking, and why. I felt myself smiling with them. It seemed incontrovertible proof, right then, that the whole world was happy.
Our car seemed to be going slower and slower as we moved down these streets. At one of the stoplights I saw Harlem cock his head and look at me in the mirror. I grinned easily at him, my eyelids heavy, my head loose from the weed. I crooked my finger at him, but he didn’t smile. There was purpose in his eye. I sat up a little straighter.
“What’s up,” I said.
“Billy, round here we going past some folks won’t be happy to see you back there,” he said. “Wonder if you could scootch down some.”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. It seemed like a joke, and I folded my arms on my chest and slid down a bit on the seat. The car didn’t move. Harlem held my eye.
“Need a bit more, Billy,” Harlem said. “Scootch down a bit more.”
“Okay,” I said. I sat up straight and then doubled over, crossing my arms and setting them on my knees, putting my head down on my folded arms. It seemed strange, what Harlem was saying, more than I could fathom. Who would be unhappy to see us here? To see me here? That tanned couple going into the movie? It made no sense. But I did as I was told and stayed still, my heavy head on my forearms.
Still the car didn’t move.
“Billy,” said Harlem. “Way it is, we going to have a little trouble, anybody sees you in the car with us. Going to have to ask you to get right the way down.”
I sat up then, and stared at Harlem in the mirror. No one spoke. Beside me Nighttime Paul looked straight ahead, his face blank, his flat profile stone-still. Cash Money and Fred were silent.
“All the way down?” I said, not moving, baffled. “On the floor?”
Harlem said nothing, watching me.
I got right down then, climbing down into the well of the Buick, first kneeling on the old clean musty carpeting, then lowering myself farther and stretching out full length, flat on the floor of the car. Nighttime Paul and Fred moved their shoes as best they could, turning them sideways, away from my body.
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