by Tito Perdue
By this time, he was working fifteen hours per week at a used-furniture store where the customers were few and far between. This was the time he read Spengler’s famous work, a distracting project that caused him to lose his job. In this effort, he had had to read lines of text when what he really wanted was to pour the stuff in through his ear.
His next position required him to stand at a food counter and put the people’s purchases, female customers mostly, put them, the purchases not the purchasers, in brown paper bags. He might often be asked to carry the stuff out to the woman’s car, a likeable duty if the woman was less than forty. He has admitted to me that he would try to follow several paces behind so as to watch their hips yawing back and forth. It wasn’t the first time the boy’s confessions made me worry about him. And yet he seemed like a reasonable person, groomed and bathed and not bad-looking, his expression made unnaturally pleasant by force of will. Three days of this and his tips were larger than his wages.
Wage: his earnings were small, becoming smaller after certain subtractions relating to a number of things. And yet he never went so far as actually to steal from the store, never mind how much that was urged by his fellow workers. His policy was never to get into conflict with policemen working on the bounty system. Already he had learned this much, that anyone stealing less than a million dollars at a time could get into serious trouble indeed.
He was a fortunate young person, as he believed. No one troubled him save when one or another of his parents wanted only the best for him. He had his own room in the southwest corner of the house, a narrow cell that however gave him the space he needed for his desk and globe, his reference books, a cheap telescope that let him see into peoples’ homes, and a large black typewriter bought for almost nothing at a pawn shop run by an East European of some kind. The man’s beard was immense and held more termites than the rotting structure chosen for his business. As a person of that kind, he had brought together all manner of odds and ends, especially the former. Our hero used to loiter there at regular intervals, entranced by the rubbish on display. There was a glass cabinet (locked) holding a golden watch or two, a switchblade knife with an engraving on the blade, and a second-hand .32-caliber revolver appropriate for a woman’s purse. Next to the implement itself, six cartridges stood at full height. Dangerous weapons, but not half so dangerous as his increasing education and smart grooming. They looked at each other, the shopkeeper and he.
He studied chemistry but had to resort to the library for a more thoroughgoing text. Intrigued by the atomic schemata and the resemblance between the elements and certain personality types, he looked to the time when thousand-proton atoms might be synthesized. He was optimistic, if not about the world, about science, at any rate. Enough science and the world might become a better place, offering experiences as good as certain moments in certain music pieces.
Wednesday morning, he was called to the Principal’s office and shown to a chair that allowed the two of them to look at one another. Warned in advance, the boy was wearing a tie with a decent pattern on it and his shoes were black.
“I keep hearing about you,” the man said, smiling. “Another perfect record. And not the first time, either!”
The child pretended to look as if he were surprised, even embarrassed, at such good news. He blushed, or tried to, and looked down at his black shoes. He knew of course that his personal development came in spates, sometimes even falling off to garden-variety levels.
“Have you thought of college?”
“Sir? Well, I’d like to. But, you know, I’ve already been too much of a burden on my parents.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s true. You earn your own money, is what I hear.”
He couldn’t deny it. Behind him, the man possessed some of the reference materials the boy held in his own narrow room—a statistical survey of the economies and resources of the world’s countries, an atlas, phone directory, and a formulary with the picture on the jacket of a molecule the boy wasn’t immediately able to identify.
“Well, you certainly must go to college K-----------.” (He used the boy’s name.) “A huge shame not to. Huge. What do you think?”
“Sir? Well, I need to give that some thought.” And then, brightly: “My uncle went to college.”
“See what I mean? You go, too. Promise?”
The boy nodded thoughtfully.
He strode home through scads of girls and after changing shirts and leaving his books behind, loped over to his working place where right away he went to his duties with a smile. He could not say that he had a good opinion of the foodstuffs these people were buying, nor of their behavior. In short, they were slobs. He saw a fat man in shorts, his legs full of varicose veins. Slobs. And yet these were the sovereign rulers of this rich and powerful country that at one time had found inspiration from the Greeks.
Something now began to happen; more and more often he could hear no sounds from anywhere. He lived “inside his brain,” he once said, and no longer allowed “exoteric” things to impinge on it. Calm, deaf, he lifted the women’s purchases one by one and put them away in good order in the brown paper sack designed to contain them. At one time, the getting of food was humanity’s most fraught requirement; today it could be done by persons who didn’t even know where food came from. Was that bad? No, he said, not if it fitted people for higher endeavors than grubbing in the soil.
He was perhaps the most prematurely serious seventeen-year-old on record. How it was that other young people could spend so much time laughing and smiling and jumping up and down was for him one of the most puzzling of things. One could have a lot more fun by being serious. Bending down to earth and studying at close range the little creatures in the dirt whilst planting gardenias on behalf of his mother—that for him gave much more pleasure than any possible cans of beer. He tended therefore to keep largely to himself while at the same time always trying to assuage his parents’ fears.
“No, no,” he might say. “I like what I do.”
“Yes, of course, but . . .”
“Like girls, too, and . . .”
“Too much.”
“. . . and if I wanted friends, I could have as many as I want.”
“But . . .”
“And I’ll have a good career, too. Just you wait and see.”
They suffered for him, right up until late winter when they gave up the struggle and let him take a room that was nearer both to school and to his place of work. He had saved nearly five hundred dollars since September, and with the single sole exception of a former friend of his (now lodged in the county jail), he was the only high school student with his own dwelling place. His prestige increased. And then to put the seal on it, he bought for himself an eight-cylinder car with less than one hundred thousand miles on it.
He had chosen a room that was as long and as narrow, almost, as the one he had used at home. Supplied with a bed (also long and narrow), he added a used desk with cigarette burns on it, a fully usable appliance costing just five dollars. He immediately searched the drawer of course, finding only dust and a chit of paper with something written on it. He then added two hundred sheets of typing paper to the space and hid several large bills of currency in the pile. Other money he kept with him at all times, twenty or thirty dollars where he could get at it quickly. He did not yet carry the .32-caliber revolver acquired at small price from his second-favorite downtown pawn shop. He was a dark-headed boy, precocious and unfriendly. No matter the project, he expected to do better than anyone else. From a distance, he offered a stubborn-looking figure, moving step by step to where he wished to go.
His cultural tastes were immature of course, and until he began to acquaint himself with some of the recordings in his father’s fine collection, he continued to accept much of the music of his generation. He would often borrow two or three of these discs on his visits.
His grades continued good, even if not quite so good as before he had taken it upon himself to earn his own money. He knew
of course that in case of need, his family would still support him, quite a different situation than actual poverty. Came December, he was promoted and now, instead of standing at the counter in an apron and smile, he passed the time in the back room doing inventory. No one pestered him. And, too, there was always a hundredweight or more of overdue fruits and vegetables among which he was free to choose. He began to consume carrots and broccoli and the like.
He was visited more than once by his mother, who sought to lure him home again. She tried cookies, and then again by bringing along a neighborhood girl with a nice face. They were just shopping, he was told, and the girl had agreed to come along. The boy was friendly, offering tea and broccoli to his visitors. He showed them the burns in his desk.
Fourteen
Came the day when he had saved more than a thousand dollars, tender bills of green currency that, along with his car, his shoes, and his apartment (room), were bringing him nearer and nearer to something. And then one Tuesday he was called back to the Principal’s office, a meeting that took place when the girl (to be described even more fully later on) had just recently begun the violin.
He was a man, the Principal, in early to late middle age with a Kiwanis Club key affixed to his lapel. The boy declined the upholstered chair, preferring to remain standing when in someone else’s domain. He had taken out a cigarette, but had then put it back at the last minute.
“I think I have something,” the man said. “And I think it’ll make you happy.”
The boy put on a naïve expression. “Yes, sir?
“Full scholarship. Our own University of Tennessee. Yes?”
“Good Lord!” the boy emitted. “Whew! Boy howdy. But I planned on paying for it myself.”
The man laughed out loud at him. “By collecting tin cans? No, my friend, you have to accept what I’ve done for you. Or what we’ve done for you, I should have said. And use it where it’ll do the most good.”
“But . . . but . . .”
“Exactly. Take the money and run.”
“But . . .”
“Never mind. She wants to remain anonymous. And she can afford the money, too, believe me.”
On his desk, the man had one of those adorable little plastic figurines representing three monkeys sheltering their ears, nose, and lips respectively. He had a globe, a blotter, and for male pupils a wooden paddle about three feet long. By contrast, girls were given reprimands, some of them good enough to summon tears. He had a translucent paperweight holding a frog squatting on a lily pad.
“They’ll be pleased, I expect. Your parents?”
“Boy howdy, they will! Was it Mrs. Smitherson?”
“Smitherton, she spells it. But she wants to remain anonymous.”
He used to cut that woman’s lawn. How wonderful she had no notion of what went on inside the boy’s darkening head.
Fifteen
In June, he accepted his diploma without demurral and drove back quickly to his room to pack his things. The weather was good, and his automobile was functioning properly for its age. He threaded his way among a crowd of brand-new alumni wending happily homeward with their diplomas, tassels, and pleased-looking parents who’d all be dead before the century was over. He spotted a girl who seemed appealing to him till he drew nearer. They were so few, the type he hungered for.
In his suitcase he placed two books, a piece of exercise equipment, a flashlight, money, and a wrench and screwdriver. He had a change of clothes, a third book, and enough in his fuel tank, as he believed, to get him to The University of Tennessee.
He did stop at his parents’ home and after handing his diploma off to the woman, shared a cup of coffee. Wrong, each had his or her own cup—and a slice of lemon pie. He complimented them on their new sofa and followed his father to the garden where the okra and beans were doing well. (Almost certainly the typical reader doesn’t give a squat for these dutiful people without whom he’d be eating uncooked meat and wearing animal skins.)
“Now, son,” the man started off, hesitant to offer advice to someone with his own apartment. “Now son, we realize you’ve done pretty well for yourself so far. So far. We do worry about you sometimes, of course. But . . . that’s the way it is, I suppose. With parents and so forth.”
They shook. The man was less robust than of just a few years earlier, and his hand had brown spots on it. For one brief moment, the brave boy wanted to cry.
The Sun, so steadfast throughout the day, had begun to pale by the time he came into the western suburbs of the university city. So it must have been when Abelard first caught sight of Paris trembling in the distance. Probably it was also like this when Cortés came at last within hailing distance of Tenochtitlan, or when someone first managed to get a truthful view of Mars glimmering in the summer sky. He drove slowly, his hero’s eye looking for unfamiliar girls in skirts and shoes. He saw a tall structure with balconies, a department store, dazed-looking people wandering in and out of the many stores that led to the university itself. Slowing, he studied the pedestrians, people with spheres instead of heads, all of them pushed forward, it seemed to him, by a system of pulleys and springs.
He was eighteen years old by this time, an autonomous type who had read perhaps four times the books of his age group. He carried his identification in his wallet along with forty-two dollars in cash, a library card, driver’s license, a photo of Gail Russell, and a mnemonic aid for Latin verbs. He still carried the five-inch knife mentioned earlier, also some dozen cigarettes, kitchen matches, and in his back pocket a plastic comb with missing teeth. In the glove compartment he had a bag of fried chicken wings that he had nearly forgotten about. His suit was grey, his belt of leather, and his black shoes had a fair lot of mileage remaining to them still. As to his tie, I have no information as to what he might have been wearing on that day.
He now caught sight of the university itself, an entire city composed of related buildings made from the same limestone. He sought long for a parking space and finally exited the car in front of a massy structure with four regal pennants furling from the architrave. He was received cordially here and asked to complete two forms that disclosed the full amount of his stipend, a more generous sum than he had expected. The registrar, a baldheaded man, somewhat birdlike, clearly had passed a large portion of his time in academic surroundings. The boy was then given over to a blond woman of about thirty-seven who ushered him briskly from the building and pointed him to one of the enormous dormitories that hedged the campus on that side.
“You’re going to like it here!” she said cheerfully. “So many things to do!”
Her face was cheerful, too, or even merry, he would have said. Her lipstick was tulip red and her skirt relatively short for her age and weight. He had sometimes seen, if but seldom, women of this kind in his own hometown. For one mad moment, he dreamt of asking her for a date; instead:
“Is there a cafeteria?”
She pointed. “But some of the kids prefer to eat at The Pestle and Whey.”
“You married?”
“First of all, you’ll want to talk with your hall advisor to get all sorted out. He’ll find you a roommate. Of course you can always swap later on. Some of the rooms are for three people.”
“Can we have dogs?”
“Oh, I doubt it. But you can always ask!” she answered brightly, closing the door behind him.
The boy went direct to the place, found the elevator, entered, and positioned himself in the forward corner across from a pleased-looking student with an ice cream cone in one hand and a Frisbee in the other. Our hero’s assigned room was on the third story, where all sort of postings had been put up along the hall—an offer of football tickets, of transportation to various places, foreign language tutors, and two or three photos of the same girl with her telephone number appended. He approached two students chatting in one of the doorways, one of them much heavier than he should have been.
“Hi!” this one said. “I bet you’re K---------.”
The boy admitted that he was.
“We’re roommates, I guess.”
“Good.” The boy’s suitcase was held together with a belt, and he had no wish to open it in plain open view. For though he was increasingly immune to people, he wasn’t yet ready to expose his belongings to the world.
“Hey,” his new friend explained, “some of the guys are going to get some beer a little later on.”
His roommate was soft both fore and aft, and though he might contain more than two hundred fifty pounds, our hero believed he could have dealt with this person on the grounds of speed alone. And then, too, the fellow had already stowed his clothes and typewriter in higgledy-piggledy fashion in the all-too-tiny closet, leaving little space for K---------’s possessions, which is to say unless our boy were willing to let his things come into contact with the other person’s.
He dawdled until the students had gone for beer and then hefted up his tatty luggage and went to the elevator, now occupied by two further individuals who looked approximately like his roommate.
He drove east and passed through a negro section possessed of its own special odor. Was he really expected to believe this slovenliness had been inflicted on them by others? The adjacent neighborhood was mainly composed of hundred-year-old homes (some with weather vanes) of the sort he favored. He left the car (having stopped it first) and ambled off in one direction (and one direction only) of the complicated city. Suddenly, seeing a policeman, he jumped back out of sight before recollecting that he had done nothing wrong. He halted in front of a down-and-out restaurant full of unaccompanied people sitting quietly in the dark. He passed an elderly negro with an accordion, and then a group of three youths with insolent faces. A grocer dressed in an apron was sweeping the sidewalk in front of his business. He entered a coffee shop and invested in a cup of the same. Someone had left a newspaper behind, and it didn’t need the boy very long to ferret out a listing of rooms for rent. Realizing that he would have to forfeit a good part of his scholarship money for declining the roommate assigned him, he looked for employment opportunities as well. Openings were few. He did find one position where a person could earn just under a dollar an hour by setting bowling pins. Or, he might be hired to care for a woman’s cats. Comparatively speaking, he daren’t complain about the coffee itself.