Moise and the World of Reason

by Tennessee Williams

  “It looked like a Parker House roll?” inquired the young student doctor with his first show of interest in our talks together.

  “What’s a Parker House roll?”

  “A roll of bread which originated in a Chicago hotel called the Parker House,” he answered impatiently, “and was soon taken up by bakeries all over the country. It was curved and indented at the center and was served lightly crisped and warm. Now continue about this. You saw her pubic area. Was it hairless, still, at the age of, what was her age?”

  “Same as mine.”

  “Now or then?”

  (His pace as well as interest was quickened.)

  “Then. Thirteen, like me.”

  “And this inch by inch exposure of her female organ, was it, did you feel it was intended to excite and seduce you or just an innocent way of cooling herself off in the hot Alabama attic, which, what, innocent or seductive and your reaction and hers?”

  “Hers was first.”

  “How, what, go on.”

  “Yes, she went on with it.”

  “The exposure?”

  “Yes.”

  “By?”

  “Slipping down the pale blue nylon panties inch by inch, too, till they were at her ankles and then lifting her feet out of them and kicking them lightly aside and spreading her—what? Parker House roll? Wider?”

  “Oh, then a deliberate act of seduction.”

  “I, uh, yes, I suppose so.”

  “Were you, then, capable of erection?”

  “Yes.”

  “And were moved to erection in the steaming attic?”

  “Yes, and”

  “What?”

  “I”

  “Look, you’re tongue-tied and blushing for no reason, this is a purely clinical discussion. Get right down to the bare facts of it.”

  “I did.”

  “Did what did you do?”

  “Got down.”

  “On what?”

  “Knees between her knees.”

  “And, and?”

  “Licked.”

  “Her?”

  “Parker House roll.”

  “Performed cunnilingus on this thirteen-year-old child, you little pervert?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Christ. Can’t you get it through your skull that you are the subject of the discussion?”

  “Then why are you erected?”

  He covered it with his flipbook.

  “Go on, continue, what next?”

  “She said, ‘Go on,’ too, same as you.”

  “And you went on?”

  “Yes, as requested.”

  “Did you insert your tongue between the lips of the vulva?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then did you?”

  “What?”

  “Contact her clitoris with the tip of your tongue?”

  “What is that word you?”

  “Clitoris is the female counterpart of penis except that it is inside, not out, and is what triggers her climax in copulation.”

  “Oh, was that what it was?”

  “Was what what it was?”

  “A hot, liquid thing happened inside her Parker House roll and she grabbed the back of my head and hollered, ‘Can’t you lick in deeper?’ She seemed to be out of her head and I didn’t like the taste of it or my head being grabbed, I’ve never liked head-grabbing except by”

  “Your living nigger on ice?”

  “Yes, by him, when he prefers to be sucked than to fuck.”

  “Christ, you goddam little”

  “Pervert?”

  His eyes turned fiercely bright.

  “Did you or did you not penetrate her, then, with your penis?”

  “No, no, no, no, no.”

  “Shut your dirty mouth.”

  “That’s what I did.”

  “Bit?”

  “No, split the attic and never went back there again and I heard a while later that she was expelled from the school and the principal was discharged and they left town together and a while later my grandmother told me this little girl I played with in her attic had been found dead in some bushes of a park in Tuscaloosa, murdered, my grandmother said, fiendishly molested as your grandfather was, but in bushes, not in a replica of the Blue Grotto.”

  “You are babbling nonsense.”

  “No, sir. Maybe I could be elaborating a bit but not fantasizing for your benefit, sir.”

  Now what I tell you now is fantasy, I think. I think that I only imagine that when he lifted his flipbook from where his possibly imagined erection had been, there was a liquid stain there. Imagined or not, the consequential thing is that I thought, or imagined, that I now had the ability to excite with words, good and bad, that I was now truly committed to writing which might be, and probably is, despised for its visceral (organic) content.

  I saw or I imagined that he had become unstarched and therefore dropped the flipbook back over the unstarched white and scribbled a bit and then said to me, “I have just written my final note in your file.”

  “What is it, please?”

  “Arrested at puberty. Hopeless.”

  I saw him no more, and when I recounted to Moise this last interview, the end of which was probably fantasized, she smiled at me and said, “In my opinion, he put the shoe on the wrong foot, dear. People sometimes do.”

  One season I did prevail upon Lance to take me on tour: with the ice show. It was the season after my stay at the island resort.

  “Sugar, that won’t never happen to you again.”

  “Then take me on tour with you?”

  “How would you skate? On your ass?”

  “On your back.”

  “Shit, I got enough monkeys on my back.”

  But I did prevail, he took me on tour that autumn with the ice show and it resulted in a crescendo of disasters.

  The manager of the show was a red-neck from the Texas panhandle with a horror of desegregation.

  “Lance, what’re you doin’ with this white-skin child?”

  “This child of God ain’t white but an albino.”

  “Albinos are pink-eyed.”

  “That is an old wives’ tale. This is a genuine young albino which is blue-eyed.”

  “Show me papers to prove he’s an albino nigger befo’ he checks in a hotel with you, Lance.’

  “Hey, now. Boss-man,” said Lance with a touch of derision and threat in his purring voice and cool smile, “since when were nigger albinos given papers to show you? Why, even me, a product of miscegenation as you call it, has no papers to prove it. I got no papers to prove a goddam thing but I prove myself the living nigger on ice when I stop the show every night with a leap and whirl in the air which is the law of gravity defied. You wanta tour without me?”

  Lance won that confrontation, but others followed on a rising scale.

  Lance and I shared double hotel rooms with another light-skinned black man in the show and with the big black dog that this other black skater insisted on having with him on tour. Somehow the red-neck manager took no exception to this, presumably because the big dog was black and not described as albino.

  The black dog and his master were so hung up on each other that the dog kept a sleepless vigil by his owner’s bed, breathing quickly and softly through the lengthening nights.

  Lance and I slept spoons in our single but it happened one night in Cleveland, Ohio, that Lance put me on to a pill to make me stop talking in my sleep. And that night I got up to pee and was so disoriented that when I returned from the bathroom I didn’t know which bed was ours and turned to the one that wasn’t, colliding with the big black dog which instantly bit both my ankles to the bone as if it thought that a little albino like me was about to attack or to rape his master.

  Lance sprang up like a shot to see what caused my outcry. Blood was pouring but I was too gone in the head to care about it. However, Lance called in a hotel doctor who stapled the cuts together. I mean he had a metal thing, a stapler, with whi
ch he closed the dog-bites on my ankles.

  “Shit, this does it, you’re flyin’ home tomorrow.”

  But I didn’t, I wouldn’t, I refused to get out of the cab in which Lance took me to the airport.

  “Okay, but, baby, when trouble starts it don’t observe a stop sign.”

  We went on to Sheboygan, me with the staples binding my dog-bites together. And then one night in Sheboygan, when I undressed for bed, I had difficulty in removing my shoes and it was because my ankles were so infected that they had swollen up like an elephant’s ankles nearly. Then and not till then did I notice the pain and fever.

  “Well, now, li’l blue-eyed albino, I reckon you see why you shouldn’t have gone on tour with a fuckin’ ice show if you’re incapable of seein’ anything as visible as your ankles.”

  Then once again he summoned a hotel doctor, who arrived in a liquefied stupor but nevertheless was impressed by my ankles’ swollen condition.

  “This boy has a staph infection.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Bad enough to kill you overnight, so.”

  He took out of his bag the sort of syringe that I think is only used on horses and filled it with a combination of antibiotics, said, “Drop your drawers,” and pumped the contents of the horse-syringe in me.

  I felt an almost immediate reaction of a frightening kind. I had such difficulty in drawing my breath that I hobbled to the window and hauled it up. Outside there was a blizzard and I was naked except for my shorts.

  “Why’re you standing there exposing yourself to that ice storm?”

  “So I can breathe, I can’t breathe.”

  (I was into shock from the horse-syringe.)

  This sobered up the hotel doctor who snatched up the phone and called an ambulance for me.

  Once again I was hauled out of a hotel on a stretcher, by the freight elevator, and shoved into the ambulance waiting downstairs.

  Of course Lance accompanied me to the emergency ward, holding hard to my hand, and commanding me to breathe: “In, out, in, out,” all the way, and at the hospital’s emergency ward I was thrust into a white-curtained cubicle and anti-antibiotics were pumped into me which took three hours to work and in the adjoining cubicles, behind their white curtains, I listened to the life-death struggle of others in much the same condition as I.

  I must commend the rapidity with which the interns and nurses rushed about, from cubicle to cubicle, closing and opening curtains. I heard death-cries and I heard sounds of life triumphant.

  About four A.M. they declared me out of danger and said that I could be removed to a hospital room upstairs.

  Lance followed me up and gently embraced me before a disapproving white nurse.

  “Well, sugar, we’re doing a matinée tomorrow so I better go catch some sleep.”

  The nurse made a hmmphing sound of starched disapproval. He turned on her with a slow, deadly grin and said, “You take good care of this young nigger albino.”

  When he had gone, I inquired of her if I could have a sleeping medication.

  “After shock? Are you kidding?”

  Well, I got up out of bed and into my clothes. It was painful walking on my elephant ankles down the long corridor to the desk but I got there and said to the bug-eyed receptionist, ‘Will you please call me a cab.”

  “This is a hospital, this is not a hotel that you can check out of, you must wait till you are released.”

  “I am releasing myself.”

  And while she called for assistance to restrain me, I ran stumbling out into the continuing ice storm and it so happened that God had a cab waiting for me.

  (God has cabs as well as sudden subways at his disposal.)

  “Take me to the”

  For a desperate moment, I couldn’t recall the name of the hotel.

  “Where?”

  I saw two interns rushing out to restrain me and terror shot the name of the hotel into my recollection.

  “Hotel Noble, quick!”

  “Stop him, he’s!”

  “What’s your trouble, kid?” the cabbie asked.

  I laughed and said, “Love and a dog.”

  When I got back to the double hotel room, Lance had zonked himself out and I was received at the door by a very contrite black dog who immediately began to lick at my ankles.

  The roommate was awake.

  “It’s you or the dog,” he said.

  “You mean?”

  “One of you has to go.”

  “Since the dog is a wolf, or related to the wolf family, why don’t you turn it loose in the woods since it’s a hazard to mankind?”

  “You don’t belong to mankind, in my opinion, or the dog’s opinion, and the dog could not survive in the woods without me. You got Lance but all I got is the dog.”

  There was no answer to that.

  I crawled into bed and although Lance had never felt warmer or smoother or more protective to touch, I whispered to our roommate,

  “Okay, it’s me, keep the dog, but occupy a single room with him.”

  “Singles are hard to come by.”

  “That I know but I have come by them often.”

  (Yes, like now, tonight.)

  I stop for a while for breath and I look down at BON AMI.

  What is, or rather, what was BON AMI? I know it means good friend in French and I remember that when I inquired of Lance soon after I started using it as a work-desk, he said, “Oh, shit, it’s some old product that’s off the market, I reckon, like you and me are gonna be off it someday.” That wasn’t all he said. Lance resented BON AMI because he liked his sleep and he claimed the eyeless black domino which was given him by Moise in the days when she could provide such things before she ran out of such things to provide. He claimed that it pressed on his eyeballs and blurred his eyesight. Of course this wasn’t the problem. His eyeballs were not the balls to which the domino and BON AMI were an offense. Lance resented BON AMI and the black domino because they interfered with or delayed the rituals of love which were to him an essential for a night’s sleep.

  “Git your ass off BON AMI and into bed, baby!”

  “My ass is not on BON AMI.”

  “Don’t talk back to me, Thelma.”

  “If you call me Thelma again, I’ll”

  “You’ll what?”

  “I’ll call you”

  “You know better’n to call me nothing with this royal straight pointed at you and you with a single pair.”

  The talk would go like that, but I am an obstinate writer, as obstinate as unsuccessful, and if Lance persisted in trying to interrupt me when I was hotter for a Blue Jay than even for him, I would run downstairs and continue on the Blue Jay in the Pier Ten bar which used to be across the street from the warehouse but which exists no longer.

  (I remember one summer night I did this, and Lance followed me to Pier Ten, he came looming in the door, his bare skin above pants level shining like brass which had just been polished, and everybody looked at him while he looked at me, pretending to be unaware of his entrance. He sat down at the bar and began to talk in ferocious language about me.

  “See that prick at the table that thinks he’s a writer?”

  The barman would utter a low-pitched “Aw” and a drunk or two would sometimes turn to look at me at the table and make remarks about me which once incited me to throw a beer mug toward them, but usually, no, the barman would tip them off, if they didn’t already know that Lance and I were dangerous to discuss. Lance would go on, though.

  “Thinks he’s got a literary career but I happen to know that his career is what he is sitting on whenever he’s not standing or lying down.”

  Well, I wasn’t afraid of Lance even when he talked in public in this degrading manner. Of course it did stop me writing anything but one phrase over and over in the Blue Jay, and that phrase was “fucking son of a bitch.”

  Love talk is often rough.

  And after a couple of minutes, Lance would come to the table and he would lit
erally pick me up from it and carry me to the warehouse with my Blue Jay and pencil clutched in my fist and

  Rough love is appreciation.)

  (Now I shove BON AMI from me and begin to root around in its interior for more writing surfaces and I find them. Oh, boy, do I find them. You wouldn’t think that a big crate like BON AMI had enough space in it to contain all the rejection slips and envelopes they came in which are stashed away inside that box. Although some are mere printed forms to the effect that time does not permit the reading of unsolicited manuscripts, some of them, as I’ve mentioned before, are graced, so to put it, with those hand-written comments from the editors which I’ve mentioned before. They appear to be increasingly outraged by the libidinous material of my work, the phrase “sexual hysteria,” or something like it, repeatedly surfacing in these put-downs. Miss Sylvia Withers informs me that the world is full of charming subjects for fiction besides the impurely erotic, which is not a preoccupation of New Humanities Quarterly. Mr. C. Henry Faulk of Guard Before Monthly suggests to me a period of confinement, recommending a monastery in the Great Smoky Mountains where silence and celibacy are practiced.

  (Both of these mags are now defunct, ha ha! The laugh is hollow as the bravado of a defeated boxer. Of course I know that I suffer from a chronically inflamed libido and am frequently subject to hysteria. After all, I am Southern with foreskin intact and the organ is somewhat larger than would be proportionate to most male bodies of my size, I still wear shorts with a twenty-eight-inch waist and barely tip the scales at more than one hundred thirty pounds. Lance used to remark, “Baby, I am well hung but you are hung out of sight for a kid that is five foot seven and a fraction or two, and when my heart breaks on ice while your little ticker beats on, I want you to watch it.” Watch what did he mean? The consequences of bearing between my thighs a peninsula to my body that, if detached, could pass for a banana approaching maturity though not yet yellowed by the sun? No, I think he meant something of a less material nature, something that had more to do with a future which he feared that I would crash into.)