by John Barth
“Like Faulkner trying to imagine his Yoknapatawpha without having ventured beyond it,” Ned will suggest, “or Twain doing Tom and Huck without ever having left Missouri. Or Yours Truly Ned Prosper writing the Great Bridgetown/ Stratford/Seasons/Third Thought Novel without wetting his pecker in the Gulf of Mexico and plenty of other places. Gotta get ourselves some Capital-P Perspective, man!”
Our girlfriends happening to be in conversation of their own farther down Naples Beach—where we’ve arrived, parked the Olds near that resort-town’s trademark fishing pier, and are scouting a place either to set up our tents or at least to maybe beach out overnight in our sleeping bags—Narrator grants his comrade’s point, remarking however that he can’t imagine Marsha’s going along with it, and wondering aloud “What’s this third thought/seasons stuff?” which he’s never before heard mentioned in connection with Ned’s novel-in-the-works.
With a smile his friend replies, “Too early to tell; still working it out. But on that other subject I’ve had a little talk with Generous Ginny, who for some reason or other thinks you’re a pretty hot number. And she’s having a little talk with your thus-far one and only, who might turn out to be a cooler chick than we’ve given her credit for being. Let’s just see.”
Greatly surprised and not a little curious, ought Narrator to have been indignant as well? No doubt. But we-all were by then several drinks into our neo-Neapolitan visit and stripped to our swimsuits in the already summer-feeling south Florida sunshine, in keeping with which we’d switched from our customary beer to more tropically appropriate dark rum and Coca-Cola. What’s more, in conversation just the night before with other spring-break campers up on nearby Sanibel Island, Ned and Ginny had contrived to purchase some actual marijuana cigarettes: “reefers,” which people like ourselves in the early 1950s were not unaware of, but still associated with black jazz musicians and urban street-types, although we understood the weed’s popularity to be spreading. The idea had been to save our experimental stash for Key West, the intended turnaround point of our expedition—but “Qué será será,” as the Doris Day hit song will have it four years later.
Half a century and more after the spring break here Flashbanged “by George I. Newett”—while Cyclone Nargis devastates Myanmar, and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama still go at it in the Democratic primaries for nomination as either the first female or the first African-American U.S. president—any college kids reckless enough to try skinny-dipping off the crowded beaches of bustling southwest Florida while both half stoned and half drunk would likely find themselves nailed pronto with an assortment of more or less serious charges, from Indecent Exposure to Possession of Controlled Substances. But in late March 1952, with only a scattered handful of blankets and beach umbrellas near the elevated Naples Pier and nearly nobody in sight just a couple hundred yards down-beach, where this frolicking foursome had staked out, “Better get our butts wet again while we can,” declared Narrator at about four that afternoon: “Looks to me like we’ve got weather coming.” For indeed, although the afternoon sun remained bright and warm as it descended over the Gulf—toward Mexico!—a dark cloudmass appeared to be moving their way from the south.
Says Ned Prosper, “I’ll second that,” and rising unsteadily, draws Ginny Hyman to her feet. Once up, however, she shakes free of him, looks conspiratorially down at Marsha Green, and says, “Butts and boobs wet, yes; bathing suits, no. You with me, Marsh?”
“You bet.” And to the very considerable surprise of their male companions, by some apparent prior agreement the two girls peel off and toss onto the blanket their swimsuit tops, then wiggle out of the bottoms (neither item particularly scanty by later standards: The “bikini,” though invented in France in the mid-1940s and named for the South Pacific test-site of U.S. atomic bombs, won’t become popular stateside until after Brigitte Bardot’s 1957 film And God Created Woman and Brian Hyland’s 1960 pop song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”—by when mere A-bombs will have been supplanted by H-), and stagger laughing and naked together hand in hand into the all but surfless water.
“Well, now: Wow!” marvels Narrator at the sight of their equally fetching forms, one of whose dainties are of course well known to him, the other’s more interesting because here displayed for the first time. “What an eyeful!”
“Never mind the eyeful; let’s go grab us a handful,” Ned proposes. “Gather some rosebuds while we fucking may.”
Not at all certain what if anything is afoot, but much relishing the novel experiences of being “high” on “grass” and bathing naked à quatre, Narrator dutifully shucks his swim trunks as Ned has done, and with him makes his wobbly way waterward, sneaking a glance en route to confirm that his flaccid, foreskinned penis does not compare unfavorably in size to the present state of his companion’s (the generation of American WASP males just then being born—the “Doctor Spock babyboom boys”—will be the first to be routinely circumcised for hygienic reasons, as the sons of Ned Prosper and George Newett would have been if the former had lived to sire children and the latter been fertile). Already chin-deep in the chilly water, the near-hysterical girls splash each other and their approaching beaux until we four are one tumbling tangle of wet limbs and dripping hair, laughing and groping, hugging and squealing and scolding. Against which fine firm butt-cleft does that afore-cited foreskin feel itself briefly pressed? Who briefly but literally has Narrator by the balls? And who cares?
Only the first visible lightning and audible thunder bring us ashore, still holding one another for sport and support as we stumble merrily across the shell-strewn strand to our side-by-side blankets, hurry our still-wet forms back into swimsuits (Does giggling Ginny really have a tampon-string dangling down there? Fumbling dizzily with his mist-sprayed specs, Narrator can’t quite see), gather up our stuff, and hurry as best we can through rising wind up the now all but deserted beach to take shelter under the pier until the brief but violent thunder-squall passes, the raucous four of us huddled on one blanket and wrapped together in the other while lightning-bolts explode all around.
FLASHBANG!
The storm moved quickly up-shore and dissipated; the sun re-emerged in time to sink into the Gulf even more spectacularly than it had into the Chesapeake back in that Solstitial Illumination of George Irving Newett’s Post-Equinoctial Vision #1—but this slow-motion “Flashbang” account of his Dream/ Vision/Transport/Whatever #2 is not yet done.
“Maybe spare us the specifics?” Amanda Todd will suggest in the twenty-first century. “‘The Devil’s in the details,’ as the saying goes.”
Agreed, love—but the devilish details don’t go without saying. Granted, any B-plus sophomore Creative Rotter could predict what’s about to happen, more or less....
“I.e., that these early-twentyish WASP-American college seniors experimenting with dope and Sexual Liberation back in mid-century are about to cross some line that will provoke a consequential Flashbang blow-up in their interpersonal relations, yes?”
Yes and no, in fact: Yes to the first part of that prediction; No to the second, where our Flashbang will presently peter out with a whimper.
“Oyoyoy, on with it, then: Peter in, peter out, and Devil take the hindmost.”
That just about sums it up, actually:
To set up camp for the night, we first go back to the station wagon (but by no means go “on the wagon”; in fact, along with the pup-tents we retrieve from the back of the Oldsmobile a bottle of Gilbey’s gin and another of tonic-water to supplement our all-but-done-with rum and Coke) and then trudge down to a still-undeveloped stretch of the twilit beach. Ned and Narrator pitch the tents on the storm-wet sand; the girls, still murmuring among themselves in what sounds sometimes like teasing, sometimes like arguing, cobble up from our sorely depleted larder some sort of rudimentary sandwich supper, which we wash down by Coleman lantern-light with world-temperature gin-and-tonics. Then, in lieu of dessert, we smoke the last of the marijuana, which wa
s meant to be saved for Key West, but what the hell.
“What the hell indeed?” wonders Marsha Green, aloud. “Just what the hell do we-all think we’re up to, anyhow?”
“Up to our necks in eating, drinking, and being merry?” is Narrator’s guess. “For tomorrow we become Responsible Adults, or next week latest?”
“And then poof! We’re dead,” says Ned, “having hardly had a taste of Capital-L Life. Never mind Naples Flori-duh: Gotta see the real Napoli, Venezia, Pa-ree! Gotta see Tahiti, the Pyramids, the Great fucking Wall of China!”
“Me,” says Marsha, “I’m so effing stoned I can hardly see my effing hand in front of my face. Are we crazy, or what?”
“Crazy ’bout you, babe,” sings Ned, and makes bold to shift herward from beside Ginny, kiss her tousled hair, embrace and collapse with her onto the blanket, laughing and spilling their drinks.
“What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” then declares Ginny, “and vice versa, right?” Rising to stand unsteadily before Narrator, she touches the bottle of Gilbey’s first to his cheek, then in turn to her cleavage and her crotch, chanting “G.I.N.-gin-Ginny, Ginny-gin-Gin! Let’s put some hair on your chinny-chin chin!”—a tease, Narrator will learn later, concocted for her somewhile earlier by Ned, along with, “Speaking of ganders, Georgie-Porgie, why not take a real gander at what you’ve been sneaking peeks at all afternoon?”
Nuzzling his neck, she takes his arm as if to lead him tentward. As he pulls himself up, “What the fuck, guys?” Narrator wonders, seeing Ned and Marsha, still loosely embraced, grinning up at him from their blanket.
Says Ned with a shrug, “Arms-o’-Life, man: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Marsha—Narrator’s own Marsha!—squeezes shut her eyes and lips and gives the merest nod of assent, as if to say (what in fact she’ll say later, in past tense), “It’s what you’ve obviously been wanting to do, so go do it and be done with it.”
We do.
“So we’re done with it, right? I mean with this whole Flashbangwhatever, and now we can both get back to work and on with our lives?”
We’ll get there, dear Mandy, after one or two devilish details. Your quote-Narrator-unquote was initiated that night into the guilty pleasures not only of “infidelity” (if that term applies to what seems to have been both consented to and reciprocated by all parties concerned, none of them married and only one couple more or less pledged), but to anal intercourse as well, at Ms. Hyman’s direction, she being by then in full menstrual flow, reluctant to bloody up the bedding but not at all to take it up the ass, which (she assured her much-impressed partner-du-soir) she and Ned sometimes did for sport even when she wasn’t Tampaxed. A little Vaseline (which she just happened to have in her pack), a full firm erection (which her aroused tutee happened to have in hand), and Bingo (no contraceptive measures necessary)! ’Twas an experience not to be repeated in George Irving Newett’s curriculum vitae thus far, nor likely to be at this late stage thereof. Although not prudes, neither Marsha Green, to whom he will be happily married for three years and then regrettably ever less so for two more, nor Amanda Todd, with whom he remains happily, totally, faithfully bonded after four decades, was/is inclined to butt-fucking. As Mandy put it pithily when her then-still-frisky spouse suggested same during one early “period” in their marriage, “A, it hurts (been there, done that). B, it’s shall-we-say unsanitary. And C, it can lead to hemorrhoids. You want to get your rocks off when I’ve got the rag on, we’ll think of something.”
End of quote, and of erotic/scatologic specificity.
“Satisfied?” Marsha wants to know later that night, after the men have returned, quite spent, to their usual tent-mates. Narrator is tempted to reply, “On the whole, yes,” but resists the poor pun and says instead, “I guess. You?”
“Don’t ask,” orders his soon-to-be-bride, cuddled sleepily now against him in the tented dark. “And no more of this Arms-of-Life stuff for us, okay? It’s each other’s arms or none. Or else.”
“Agreed,” Narrator assures her, and himself.
Over next morning’s breakfast and camp-breaking, the four of us shake our heads at having been simultaneously so stoned and boozed, but avoid the subject of our partner-swapping. Impish Ginny, however, manages to make a little mwah at Narrator over our instant coffee, and Ned, when the girls aren’t looking, tilts his head toward Marsha and gives Narrator a knowing wink and nod of approval.
We presently repack and trudge carward with our stuff. There seems to be, along with the subtropical humidity, some small voltage in the air, but Narrator, for one, is still too hung over to assess it. Setting down his load at the station wagon’s tailgate, he fishes in the side pockets of his Bermuda shorts, wondering aloud, “Where’d the fucking keys get to?” and then locates them in one of the buttoned front pockets, where he’d secured them along with his Swiss Army knife against getting accidentally dropped in the sand and lost. Without our customary josh and banter, we open and make to reload the old Olds, Narrator beginning vaguely to wonder what if anything is afoot. Then “Y’know what?” Ned Prosper asks or declares, standing at the open tailgate with his spread fingertips contemplatively tented together: “On third thought, I say fuck the fucking Keys: Let’s haul our asses home.”
“Home?” cries disappointed Ginny. “Who wants to go there?”
But “I’m for it,” promptly seconds Marsha: “No more of this weirdo crap for me.”
In the log of this aborted odyssey that he’s been keeping for possible literary use down the road and will draw upon in the century to come for this reconstruction, George Irving Newett cannot resist noting en route back north that although they failed to reach the continental USA’s southernmost point, he at least attained Ginny Hyman’s. At the time, however—also disappointed, but sensing that Ned’s and Marsha’s minds are made up—what he says is, “So it’s hasta la vista, Hemingwayville? Farewell to Arms-of-Life?”
“Nope,” replies Ned, who’s at the wheel both literally and figuratively. “Just end of this rough-draft chapter.”
From the rear seat, where she and Narrator are wearily but determinedly holding hands, Marsha agrees: “We need a break from spring breaking, is what we need.”
“Shucks,” laments Ginny, but then half-turns in her passenger seat to wink at all hands. “Well: At least this Rough-Draft Chapter ended with a bang, right?”
But not its Flashbang retelling, which closes with neither bang nor whimper—just quietly. Back in Maryland after two marathon driving-days and nights, the foursome split up to end the spring recess with their separate families before returning to Stratford College and Tidewater State University.
“Last night of spring break before last half-semester before graduation,” Ned Prosper observed over his and George Newett’s final National Bohemian beer of that evening in the Prospers’ club basement, where the pair had been reviewing the ups and downs of their aborted odyssey.
“You and your Last Things,” G. imagines he replied.
“Yup. Like, think of that Naples shit as your last fling at bachelorhood before you take your bachelor’s degree and marry Marsha till death do you part. Or divorce, whichever cometh first.” For the couple had indeed resolved en route home, partly in reaction to “that Naples shit,” to tie the knot promptly after Commencement Day in as simple a ceremony as possible, with Ned as Best Man and Marsha’s kid sister as Maid of Honor. After which—and maybe a weekend honeymoon at nearby Ocean City or Rehoboth Beach—bride and groom would take whatever summer jobs they could find before starting their M.F.A. and M.Ed. studies at TSU in September.
“You?”
“Me.” He sipped and swallowed; shook his head. “Me, I’m outta here, man: Neither Arms-of-Marriage nor Arms-of-Academe for this here Cree-ay-tive Rotter.” Ginny Hyman, he assumed we would agree, was a good sport and frisky in bed, but no more ready to be any man’s wife than was he to be any woman’s husband. (He trusted, by the way, that that little pup-tent experiment in pa
rtner-swapping had put no lasting strain on the Newett/Green connection: “Marsha did it for your sake, you know, hoping it’ll scratch that particular itch of yours for keeps.”) As for grad school, they’d been over that already: If G. thought it the Best Next Thing for his Muse, then more power to him—and to that Muse, whom Ned imagined as a Marsha/wifey type. But his own was more a flirty-fickle, catch-me-if-you-can, anything-goes sort of chick, as changeable as wind, weather, or Ginny Hyman. If he was ever to complete his novel-in-the-works (which, unlike all previous manuscripts, he had steadfastly declined to share or even really discuss with his longtime Bridgetown buddy, still claiming it to be in too early gestation even to risk talking about), he and She would have to do it à deux. He intended to work at it as much as possible for the remainder of his final college semester; then, along with academic commencement, he would graduate from StratColl’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (to which he’d switched from the National Guard in his junior year) into the Army’s Language School out in California to pick up an Asian tongue or two—thence to Korea or wherever the Action was, but safely behind the lines rather than in a hellish foxhole on Hill Number Whatever.
G., who’d more or less seen this coming, shook his head. “I wish you luck, man.”
“Me too, and you too—with our fucking muses and elsewise.”
That evening—the last with his longtime friend that George Irving Newett can clearly reimagine—ended with the pair of them recollecting together an incidental but still-vivid scene from their high school graduation days (it would resurface subsequently in G.I.N.’s mostly-unpublished fictive efforts and, he’d bet, in the lost manuscript of Edward “Ned” Prosper’s Seasons-or-whatever novel as well):