Having talked more and faster while waiting at the pharmacy’s half-door—we soon washed down first pills with street-bought papaya juice. She said her father was a doctor in Savannah, from a society family, the Oren Byrneses, but he’d fallen for a waitress named Fern Jewel Williams—which was bad enough, but young doc actually married her, and at the Episcopal church—and was at once disowned.
“My mother, when she worked, wore her chewing gum on the side of her neck.”
“What?”
“See, the waitresses weren’t allowed to chew it on the job, so, between breaks, Fern Jewel just mashed her Juicy Fruit five-pack right onto her neck, where, during smoke breaks, she could get at it faster.”
“How appetizing. Say her maiden name was Delbert? She must’ve looked like Ava Gardner, or was your father determined to go slumming with the first exotic hash-slinger he saw?”
“She does look like Ava Gardner, actually. Looked. Now she plays bridge and wears florals only. A mistake these days, given her evermore couchy size. She polishes the silver but never gets blue powder out of all the tongs and garlands. She sits in their big house and wonders why she and the ‘Doctor,’ as she calls Dad—it’s too groan-makingly waitressy—never get invited to what she called ‘the top parties.’ Mind if we stop over there and I break that li’l window and use its broken glass to cut both wrists? Because, whenever I’m down there, Fern stays busy trying to bully me into wearing English chintzes and cultured pearls. Picture me. Because, I won’t do it. She also keeps telling me what to paint—cottages with azaleas blooming all around them, ‘their flowers like drifts o sea foam,’ she actually said that. Still has the soul of some bus-stop pie-pusher. Imagine me in pearls, painting cottages with dust ruffles of herbaceous borders? I cannot go back. I would kill myself first. Or them. No, see, I would do me first. They made sure of that. I hate that part.”
I felt amazed to see her nearly cry, all while staubing along under her Dale Evans backpack, kicking at wastepaper, chin tucked way in. But when she came upon a chalked sidewalk hopscotch, she, glum, did half its dance while plowing head-down forward. We passed a huge newsstand sign for a gambling game called lotto, and she said from one side of her mouth, “Every man in town named Otto plays lotto, wanna bet?”
“So.” I would now try and make her happier. “Those pearls. You tend to wear yours around your neck or—being her daughter—more stuck against one side of it?”
“You are a sick motherfucker, you know that?”
“Me? No, I’m still being polite. This is Standing on Ceremony. I’ve only lived here long enough to catch it once.”
“Why do I keep thinking that you’re talking like somebody else? Talking how you think you should, now you’re really in big-time New York. Who is it’s got you so hypnotized?”
“That’s for me to know and you to beg for.”
“Savannah society wouldn’t let me ‘come out.’” She stomped on some discarded curbside french fries, nearly slipping. “So I came up north to. I’ll show ’em.”
I told her, funny, hers was my same un-coming-out story.
Well, she said, maybe getting snubbed for waitress genes was good. Maybe if Angie had debbed—she might be married to some blue-blood rabbit-faced orthodontist? might live with their nineteen kids named Taylor or Tyler on one of the lovelier squares?
“I doubt that very much,” I stated, sure.
“Thanks.” She met my gaze. Her insecurity was the only surprise she could offer, now I sensed she was somewhat immortal. But pearls? this little dynamo Sherman-tanking forward while sulking over pearl-wear?
We now walked quickly, as we both naturally did. We would not be late for him.
It’s odd, thinking back—my first impulse on meeting Angie was taking her direct to Robert. Call it self-destructive, or the simple cost of love.
I sometimes replay our lives: What if I had kept her all for me, just my friend? And why would anybody want two such stars as pals? What did that make me? A supply ship? Black hole in Waiting?
And when she saw him first, saw him even from outdoors, even through the big unwashed window of Ossorio’s, saw all six blond caramelized feet of him, saw him gesturing and listening, saw his boots up on the radiator, slung near the trim older man, Angie jabbed glass with her paint-stained index fingertip, not bothering to look back at me, “That one. That one, hunh? Hmm. Hartley Mims, you do have an eye. I mean, for my eye. —Shall we have him ‘wrapped to go’ or both just eat him here?”
So, yeah, I met her at the VD clinic. If I hadn’t been an early sexual risk taker (if it hadn’t been for that fun-in-a-minute Ed), I would never have encountered the girl who’d become Wendy to us Lost Boys. All of us who found ourselves able to fly while wearing pajamas.
I noticed her ass first; but the rest, her now-acknowledged gifts, still trailed most happily behind, bass ackwards.
Later, after we were both starting to go out more, some partying sophisticate would grill Ang and me about who’d first introduced us. The questioner, now knowing Angie’s reputation, expected it would be some art world bigwig. But, I believe, to our credit, we never minded stating, “Oh no, us? We met at a free VD clinic. Just dripping, boy, but were we ever sick!”
The stranger would often laugh and say, “Yes, right … I’m sure.”
And then we’d all get to chuckle. Each of us believing what we must.
And everybody laughing at something else.
New York!
Nature Merit Badge
’d sprouted from a long line of amateur naturalists. In my childhood home, the only works of art were calendars and Audubon.
At the grandfolks’ house, every book you opened showered across your hands the particularities of some dried fern. A slip of paper noted, “Pressed on August 1, 1921.” Why? I mean, this plant was in no way unusual. Still, you hated to just throw it out now. Maybe the leaf was just a token of a day that had included it.
A scavenging attention to wildflowers and animals stuck with me in this new landscape—one merely mineral, mainly vertical, only manmade. My eyes kept trying to naturalize the building blocks, canals of asphalt linking them. For us hicks, nature is a habit. Hard to break.
Mom once parked our station wagon on a country road to let my brothers and me watch some huge redtail hawk talon up mice fast, then eat them slowly. We kept North American Birds in the glove compartment. I now set my trained eyesight loose on wild Old Amsterdam.
The first thing to register and become necessary fast? This town’s variety of glorious human skin tones. Before, it’d all been North Carolina black and white. Here I’d fallen into Santa’s paintbox; new color preferences, odd snobbisms, evolved. Puerto Rican boys from eleven to fifteen, the brown of perfectly browned marshmallows; Lycée girls’ pink cheeks burned beautiful by costly Eastside soaps; the coal-blue ashy skin tones of ancient Haitian ladies out shopping for root vegetables whose names I still lacked. Once home at Christmas, during Presbyterian service, I felt anemic, stuck on bread and water. I now felt lost among complexions merely Scot-Presbyterian (boiled New England dinners). I craved others’ color like some subtle-tasting “blackened” Cajun food, the unaccountable delicacy of wild game.
I was my grandma’s heir, born a cataloguer famous for her sense of smell. Urbanized, I soon faced cataloguer’s hell—“All this noticing; No place to store it.”
What to do with a note jotted longwise across a page of phone numbers: “Second Avenue at 7:00 p.m. August 1, after a rain in this heat, turns the exact purple of French lilacs”? What to do with friendship, random sex, the family history of art movements, the names of the puffy Indian bread and the flat kind? Learn. Save. Save against the dawning of a personal National Debt, against the moment of your death and others’.
So I, impressionable, pressed the city. To my front, between book pages, betwixt my legs. I pressed each frond it offered me as I’d save some soft fern I knew would stiffen only into a leather lifelikeness.
Where to keep
the mash notes and engraved calling cards and the cosmically apt fortune cookie fortunes? In the back of my address book, naturally.
Protestant Work
’m sure my bird-watcher’s contentment here sprang partly from my parents’ horror at this raptor combat zone.
Before I headed out for wage earning, I rose by 5:30, loading up on a generic oatmeal that could fill you, wallpaper paste, till early evening. I put in my hours before the typewriter, recasting one page, retyping it again/again, until I’d mostly committed its grudging sloggy music to memory. Saying it aloud made me feel somewhat safer in a place this ragged. Syllable rosaries.
Corrections were pasted then repasted right atop first tries. One reason for succinctness? Lower glue cost. Less typing. I must choose from among the three adjectives that barnacled in rows before every noun.
I knew a page was done when—containing so many sandwiched scar-face layers of paper and gummy rubber—it actually rested upright. Every page I earned in Manhattan, learned—like our stiff island battlement—to stand up on its own.
At the Salvation Army, I bought myself a battered writing table. Robert helped me haul the thing. I painted it a buttermilk yellow. Above it, Scotch-taped to the wall’s peeling enamel, a postcard (gift of Robert) showed van Gogh’s Room at Arles. Bed, chair, table, window, water pitcher, home. Monk’s cell, jail cell, all any guy artist would ever need. During boyhood visits to My Fair Lady, a smudged flowergirl had sung, “All I want is a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air, warm face, warm hands, warm chair (clean hair?) … oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?”
My boyhood bedroom (and its annex treehouse) had surveyed the golf course, a rolling green, consoling as it was artificial. But here, my rental dive stared mostly onto air shaft bricks and whitewashed pigeon dudie (what did those poor things eat?). Only through a gap at the top of one window could you, if you stood upon my desk chair, see an actual fragment of the Hudson shining pink-gold at sunset.
“My apartment overlooks the river,” I wrote my worried parents.
To spare the cost of another plumbing hookup, management, circa 1910, had stuck the bathtub on a pedestal right beside the kitchen sink. My folks would someday try to visit me. They’d stay at some pillow-mint midtown hotel. I knew I’d never let them see this place. I knew how it’d scare them. I knew their fears would infect me. Dad already called New York “The Sewer.”
“So, how’re things up yonder in the Sewer?” he asked every goddamn Sunday afternoon by speakerphone.
One visit to our VD clinic would have sunk them both neck-deep into a vat of yellow Lysol, at soak for a week. My mother loved chocolates but allowed herself only Triscuits. Dad once undertook a brief costly “hobby,” acquired the best German photo gear, took a single decent picture of a bowl of fruit, then sold everything to some sucker from the Club at top dollar in six weeks; Dad seemed relieved. I hated what my folks’ own freon gentility had done to them. At times, I felt a wild private heat still beating from each of them. It had been strongest in New York in ‘56. I vowed to make mistakes not theirs. To make such errors here. I told friends over coffee, “If this boy goes home, this boy goes home in a box.” That was just swaggering; that was just a facile turn of phrase I would live to rue.
I somehow lifted such a force of concentration from New York’s daily chaos. “How can you write with all those sirens drowning you out?” Dad asked. Good question.
My first night here I was waked four times by one shrill woman on the street. She kept screaming to be buzzed in. “Angel? Angel, let me up. Ring me in, I’ll suck you, Angel. Okay then, be like that. Cause you got baaad skin, Angel, everybody say so. —Okay, Jesus? You wake? You so pretty, you never din’t want me yet. Buzz your baby up. I play wiv you then work on you good, Jesus.”
I see these words jotted on the page; I know that they would stun my Republican parents. First with doubt that such things are ever said aloud, then a sickened admission that they might’ve been hollered once somewhere, in the midnight slums of Ecuador maybe. But certainly never within hearing of their Hartley Mims jr., please.
My folks just wanted to protect me.
From my life.
Back home, there was just one way Robert and I could have “fit in” snugly: as the dapper gift-giving adored bachelor uncle, chubbily ready with the groan-making pun, quick to recall others’ birthdays, always shocked and moved when anyone remembered Unc’s own. No thanks.
Free in New York, we were racing, not Biological clocks, but Mirrors. In any gay bar, a so-so looking nineteen-year-old will outrank any thirty-year-old beauty. That’s the rule. —So, deprived of having children, we became ours. Youth seemed our one-time-only grant, pure capital, and we didn’t plan to waste one pearly drop of it. The word “capital” derives from the word “cattle.” Some said, “The New York bar scene is just a meat market.” Yeah, so what else is new in the late capitalist society?—Mooo, bull.
Given the relentlessness of male animals in the first fist of the full-throttle hormonal urge—maybe our right image was not a biological clock but the hand mirror and the hair-trigger combined, pow, pop, fizzle, gaze, reload, repop, looking fabulous. —Triggers and Mirrors all kept saying, “Hurry, laddy, Hurry. —Get over the trauma of turning thirty. Get off the bus. Get you a little apartment. Get unpacked. Get laid. Get to work. Get further laid. Get exhibited or published. Get famous. Get really laid. Get out of New York safe.”
Company
“ artley? it’s your newest oldest friend Angie here. I know this is your writing time, doll, forgive me for phoning but look. I’m outside this junkshop on Eightieth between Broadway and Amsterdam? And he’s got this harp, it’s a mess—in terms of ever playing—but it’s to die for, I mean, for its Look. Full-sized, Harpo-sized we’re talking, every string a different licorice color of catgut, it’s American and 1810, easy. Somewhere between British racing green and celadon, with gilt decoration tarnishing more toward silver. It’s painted in this crude homespun way. Three vestal virgins dancing on the wide part down near the bottom? (Sorry but my harp terminology is in the toidie today. ‘Soundboard’ maybe, its soundboard.) But the thing is so ‘faded Southren Gothic.’ Just propped in one corner of your little place, it would be utterly beyond fabulous, as Robbie says. Looking at it makes me jolly in some of the ways you do, sugar.
“I’ve already got the old guy down to a hundred and sixty and change, and he has not a cul-lue what it’s worth, and I know it’d wreck your budget but I’m at the pay phone outside. Had to try it out on you. No cabbie would let me wrestle this into his trunk even if I lashed it shut with my new turquoise cowgirl belt, but maybe that stepvan Robert’s friend’s girlfriend, the jingle singer? can borrow sometimes? No?—Oh well, seemed worth a shot. How goes your short story about the effect of a divorce on the family dog? Where do you get your sick ideas? I just know The New Yorker is gonna scarf that one up someday. No male writer alive takes half the emotional chances you do, know that, hon? Every sentence sticks out its li’l mouse neck. —Coffee? six then? Ossorio’s, the usual. Great. Anybody mentions needing a Federal harp in the next fifteen minutes … Oh Christ, somebody’s spotted it. Somebody with his checkbook already stopping around. Probably curator of priceless instruments at the Met … Oh well …”
(I still regret not grabbing that. The harp. Somewhere in a mildewed paradise of a thrift shop, might I not eventually find the stringed instrument once predestined as mine? At the time though, even if Heaven had yielded itself whole and on a layaway plan—I just could not have afforded it.)
Remainders
yet heard from friends in Falls. I still loved them. They were often other guys named their fathers’ names or, worse, locked within the straitjacket of great-great-great-grandads’. How could I compare the mellowness of such old-world bourbon-colored Southerners to the modern junk-clear pioneer-intensity of a Robert or an Angie?
My country club chums and I, we had often secretly despised each other. Only from New York coul
d I see that. At eighteen, we’d all wanted out. We each feared we lacked the rocket force to break free of such sandtrap eighteen-hole gravity. The more afraid we felt, the closer we drew together, scared that one of us might make the jailbreak overnight alone.
So we drove family Buicks around mewses and into cul-de-sacs seeking nonexistent parties. Fantastic parties sex-drug-loud. We blamed one another for not knowing where the cooler kids really lived. There were none. There had once been, we’d heard, two. They had hitchhiked elsewhere, at sixteen. The greasers were the only lucky ones in Falls; no namesake shame. They didn’t mind getting arrested if fun required that.
In New York, over coffee, I told my fellow marginal outlaw-greasers, Robert and Angie, “You know what we three are? We might not be a Movement yet, okay. But aren’t we already at least a … Motion?” They, flattered, laughed. Yeah. They remembered this, and took it straight to heart. It was a bargain they would hold me to.
“I do feel right much more settled that I’ve changed my voter registration to Manhattan.” I showed Robert my new card, his head drew back in the way some alarmed snake’s will, neck broadening with the joy of supporting such a Greco-Roman face.
“You, Hartley Mims, are hopeless. The Apartment Finders took you to the cleaners. They stick you with that toilet-closet and you write them a nice blue thank-you note? You’re so ordinary, you’re extraordinary, know that? Still hooked on right and wrong, aren’t you?”
“Why? Should I not be? Show me something better. Take your shirt off, Robbie. And, you—are you so extraordinary you’re ordinary?”
“Dream on, clown.”
“Are you a registered Democrat? Or, no, don’t tell me, an Independent, right? Right?” His head was still pulled back. Gustafson gave me a look flatly mystified. Was I so simple that I puzzled him? Wasn’t that, in itself, a ground-floor form of attraction? Or overly limited?—There was so much to learn.
Plays Well With Others Page 7