Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  Bonny stood in the shadows under the arcade, her gray notebook held to the breast of her blue sweater. “Hi,” she said.

  We headed for the Caff, where we sat at a table under the high amber-glass windows away from the others. When she put down her notebook, I checked her sweater where she’d once worn Johnny Pierce’s fraternity pin. She had something else to remember him by. Her face was pink.

  She took a wad of twenty-dollar bills from her wallet and pushed it at me. I started to count it. “It’s two hunded dollars,” she said. “Do you think that’s enough?”

  “My friend Calvin said about one fifty.”

  She made a releasing gesture with her hands.

  “Do you want some coffee?”

  “I’ll get it,” she said, starting to rise.

  I said I’d get it, and left her sitting in the amber light while I brought back two cups of coffee. It seemed important not to spill any in the saucers.

  “Thanks,” Bonny said. Her fair hair was pinned back with a silver clip. She looked scrubbed clean, as though she’d just washed all over with Lifebuoy and a rough cloth.

  “You’re a friend of Johnny’s,” she said.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Well, a fraternity brother.”

  I shrugged. Whenever the subject of Johnny Pierce came up, I’d find myself pretending total disinterest.

  Bonny looked down at her hand holding the cup. “Johnny told me he is going to get killed. He saw it in a dream. He saw the way it would happen.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about it,” I said.

  I saw the muscle clench at the angle of her jaw. “In a ball of fire,” she went on. “But he was going to enlist in the Air Corps anyway.”

  Fucking con artist. “Listen,” I said.

  “There isn’t anybody else I can tell,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. I meant I was sorry there was no one else but me she could tell. Didn’t girls tell that sort of thing to each other, whispering on the way to the ladies’ room? I gritted my teeth to think of Johnny Pierce conning her.

  “Do you want me to make a date if one of these places looks okay? I guess they’re kind of clinics.”

  She nodded.

  “Some morning? Mornings are better for me.” I could cut school easier than work.

  “Are you going to take me?”

  “If you want me to.”

  She raised the cup to her lips but didn’t drink, and set it down in the saucer again. She was left-handed.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  I waited awhile for the anger to peak and start down. “Did you ever read The Great Gatsby?”

  She shook her head.

  “Somewhere there it says that there’re people who make messes, and other people that clean up after them.”

  Her blue eyes flashed at me.

  “You asked me to find out about this and I said I’d do it. Wouldn’t you do that if somebody asked you?”

  “Yes,” Bonny said, ducking her head as though I’d rebuked her.

  “Besides,” I said, “on the way out to the Sirocco, you asked me if I’d take care of you, and I said I would. Got to go,” I said, and rose and picked up my books and binder. Bonny watched me with her pink face. “I’ll call you when I know something,” I said, and left her there.

  From the door I looked back at her, sitting in the long slant of amber light with her cup half raised, and wondered if I was punishing her.

  * * *

  Professor Chapman was reddish-haired, balding, maybe forty, wearing a thick tweed jacket. He looked as though he had never done anything athletic in his life, but he was a good teacher and he’d written books about writers. I’d come for his office hours. His office was small and cluttered, with metal bookshelves on three sides and a window on the parking lot.

  Sitting at his messy desk, he held out my paper on The Portrait of a Lady with his face screwed up like a bad smell.

  “You are capable of better work than this, Daltrey.”

  I knew it was a lousy paper. No time! “I hate all that jerk-American stuff. Henrietta Stackpole!”

  “Why didn’t you make such a case?” He removed his eyeglasses and polished the lenses with his handkerchief, brown eyes squinting up at me. “I want you to write me another paper.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I recognize that it is difficult to get one’s mind on the England of seventy years ago when there is a war on, but James is instructing us in the regulation of our lives, and I believe that that is important in any era.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “You are an intelligent student, and you would not be satisfied with the grade I would give you on the basis of this paper.”

  “I like the ghost,” I said. “The ghost of European evil. It’s like the Nazis.”

  Mr. Chapman smiled with his thin lips. “Indeed, it is things like the ghost that make this a great novel, despite the jerk-American stuff. Why don’t you write your paper on the ghost?”

  I was feeling some enthusiasm despite myself. I said I liked the way James ran his dialogs. “Isabel says, ‘Is there a ghost?’ and Ralph says, ‘What do you mean, a ghost?’ She says, ‘A ghost, a thing that appears.’ Then they play Ping-Pong with some other word.”

  “That is interesting!” Mr. Chapman said, squinting at me with his glasses back on.

  I said I’d been trying to write stories and was working on dialog. “Hemingway’s supposed to be the best at dialog, but James is good, too.”

  “Ah, and so is Stephen Crane. Why don’t you show me one of your stories, Daltrey?”

  I felt myself flush, like Bonny in the Caff. I didn’t think Professor Chapman was interested in pulp magazine fiction.

  “Henry James would be pleased at your compliment to his dialog,” he continued. “But pay him the further compliment of affording your examination of The Portrait sufficient time and effort.”

  I jammed the paper into my binder and left. Is there a ghost, a thing that appears? It seemed to me that a ghost of some old evil had appeared in my life, involving Richie’s starlet girlfriend who had drowned herself in a swimming pool, and a crazy stuntman who called Richie a throat-cutter. Which might mean some kind of coup de grâce.

  2

  Top down on Chrysie-car, wind snapping at my hair, Calvin straight-arming the wheel, the Tijuana expedition sped south through the small towns between San Diego and the border. Calvin, his pork-pie jammed down on his head, fiddled with the radio knobs, fine-tuning Dinah Washington on a race station.

  From the long curve through San Ysidro, the last town on the American side, the hills of Baja California were visible across the broad river bottom. At the border the two of us were looked over by a brown-uniformed Mexican officer in a salty cap. Calvin wore a fawn-colored suit with the collar of his black-and-white-checked shirt turned out over the lapels of the jacket, a St. Christopher medal on a silver chain around his neck. Beckoned on into Mexico, he accelerated past a trio of ancient trucks with SERVICIO PARTICULAR signs on them, whatever that meant.

  “Looked us over pretty good,” I said.

  He brought a slim tan cigar from his pocket and clenched it tilted between his teeth, FDR style. “Wait’ll we cross back into the U.S. of A. There’s always some peckerwood likes to make trouble. I wouldn’t come down here with Dessy, there’d be a mess gettin back.”

  “Rugged,” I said.

  “What’s that, child?”

  “Putting up with that crap.”

  “You ought to try gettin a haircut.”

  “You get mad a lot?”

  Calvin waved a hand, dismissing the subject. “I’m supposed to see this Meskin friend of my Uncle Red’s at the Molino Rojo while I’m down here. We’ll go drop by there after.”

  I recalled the prom after San Diego High won the City Schools Football Championship. The Tutti-frutti Backfield sat at a table together, Peggy Fleming and I, Buddy Ruger and his cheerleader, and Stan Takahashi w
ith a Japanese girl whose name I’d forgotten. Calvin had worn sweat socks with his tux and black shoes, on the theory, he had explained, that colored guys should wear white socks because white guys wore black. It had been a complicated evening.

  “How’d you get into this racket?” I asked.

  Calvin laughed fatly. “I was a player all my life. I was always playin doctor with the girls. Then at Coolidge I found out white girls liked me. How I ended up with Dessy!”

  “I guess I don’t understand what they need you for.”

  Calvin laughed again, steering the Chrysler along a potholed street past sheds stacked with terra-cotta pots. “I set Dessy up in a nice apartment. I bail her out of jail if she gets pulled in. I give her a foundation. You know? These ladies get very good at manipulatin men. Me, I don’t manipulate.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “Met her at the bus depot. Knew her the minute I saw her. And she knew me! Hand in glove. If I just had me a couple more ladies like Dessy I’d be in business.”

  I asked how Dessy got to be a professional.

  “She’s from some little burg up north, and she’d gone to San Francisco to work in a office. Had to fuck her bosses to keep her job. She slipped into the life that way. She got hooked up with a player that told her he’d kill her if she tried to leave him. So she took the bus to Dago and there I was. She is delicate, though. She gets these headaches. She’ll get so low sometimes I don’t know if I can spring her out of it.”

  Had my mother had to fuck Mr. Perkins to keep her job? I had a kind of treaty with myself where I had declared myself neutral in anything to do with my mother and sex.

  Calvin swung into the Avenida Revolución, broad and partially paved, cops directing traffic white-gloved at the intersections. Servicemen in civilian clothes, identifiable by their cropped hair, ambled along the sidewalks past shops and bars. We passed Caesar’s Hotel and the Foreign Club.

  Turning two more corners, Calvin drifted to a stop in front of a dingy row of shops. He pointed out a high sign: CLINICA OROZCO.

  The clinic was up a flight of steps. A sour-faced Mexican woman wearing a nurse’s cap let us in and seated herself behind a desk. She brought out an appointment book and a receipt pad from a drawer. The fee was two hundred dollars, one hundred necessitated now, the rest on the day of the procedure.

  The clinic office was clean enough. The medical part must be through the door behind the desk. I peered at an official-looking document on the wall, framed and glassed. There was a green filing cabinet with a coffeepot on top. I didn’t like the coffeepot, but it seemed a minor demerit.

  With Calvin’s help and a calendar, the date was set for Tuesday morning. I counted out Bonny’s twenties, and the nurse wrote a receipt.

  “Cuanto tiempo?” I asked, and she replied something that I took to mean half an hour. The realization of Bonny’s predicament hit me suddenly like a cramp.

  Back in Chrysie-car I asked Calvin what he’d thought of the Clínca Orozco.

  “Seemed okay. She’s probly tried jumpin off tables already. Runnin down the stadium steps.”

  I asked him why professional ladies didn’t get pregnant.

  “They don’t get pregnant unless they come, and they only come with their boyfriend, and he wears a scumbag.”

  I knew that was bullshit.

  “They douche,” Calvin said, laughing. “Sometimes they get knocked up, too.”

  I asked what they did to keep from getting that other waiting-to-pounce horror.

  “They check dicks. They better! They see the doc once a week, too.”

  “I’ll never forget those slides Coach showed us.”

  “Fucken homo!”

  * * *

  We drank rum and Cokes and had a supper of tamales with Carta Blanca beer, afterward heading for the Molino Rojo, the huge Tijuana whorehouse where Calvin’s uncle had connections. I’d been to Tijuana many times to buy six-dollar cashmere sweaters, but never to the infamous VD Park.

  “Supposed to be fourteen-year-old virgins on hand for special guests,” Calvin said, steering Chrysie-car out of the noisy glow of downtown into Mexican darkness. “And they’ve got a pony fucks women for a show.”

  I’d heard of the Shetland pony.

  Groups of pedestrians were headed down the unpaved lane, and a pair of glaring headlights followed us. A taxi jounced toward us, how-do-you-do lights and a whiff of dust as it passed. The Chrysler nosed into a gully and swung in among parked cars. A taxi beside us disgorged men with harsh American voices. Calvin and I followed this group past a wire fence, stumbling on cracked paving. I gritted my teeth to keep from shivering. We were heading between two wings of a building whose eaves were decorated with electric bulbs. Music pulsed with whining strings.

  We followed the music onto a terrace where two soldiers with rifles lounged, smoking. Beyond them a door was open onto a small theater with a floor and seats raked to a stage upon which stood a mariachi group in tight suits and broad-brimmed, braid-heavy sombreros. The place was jammed with gringos.

  In front of the mariachi band was a naked woman. A dog stood on his hind legs behind her, bandaged paws resting on her shoulders. His pink tongue flopped out of his jaw, and his hindquarters humped in rapid motion. The woman interrupted the proceedings from time to time to swipe at her thighs with a towel. She had a dark round face.

  “That hound’s a real stayer,” a man near us commented.

  The woman threw the dog off, proffering her shaven crotch, which the dog licked eagerly. She pantomimed ecstacy.

  When the woman and the dog had faded offstage, the mariachis played a brassy number. Then, to fanfare, a pony was led onto the stage. He was black-and-white spotted, with his mane parted and tied with blue ribbons. The pony reared to his back legs, displaying a cock like a length of black pipe.

  I was sweating with tension and the body heat of the little theater, half-nauseated from rum and Coke and beer. Men yelled and catcalled. Another naked woman appeared, a girl, slim, young, smoky tan, with a kittenish face and her hair tied back with a blue ribbon that matched the pony’s ribbons. She stepped up onto a box in her high-heeled pumps and offered her rump to the pony, which a white-clad attendant led toward her, staggering on his back legs with his awful hard-on.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I murmured, but not loud enough for Calvin to hear. I was afraid I was going to puke.

  With some steadying from the attendant, and snorts from the pony, the enormous cock was introduced into the girl’s crotch as she grasped her buttocks in her hands and leaned forward, smiling. Men around us were yelling. I closed my eyes.

  “Let’s haul out of here, child,” Calvin whispered.

  Adjusting my own hard-on in my pants, I followed him outside. Another clamor followed us. The two soldiers still smoked at the top of the steps.

  “Disgustin,” Calvin said, flipping a hand like tossing something away. He inquired of one of the soldiers where he could find Señor Carlos Rodriguez, and the man indicated a sign with an arrow and the word DIRECCION, and double doors.

  “See if I can’t procure us a couple of these virgins,” Calvin said, as we entered a dim hallway.

  “Well, I guess I won’t,” I said. “I’m not feeling so hot.”

  His yellowish eyes were sympathetic, “Yeah, bad stuff,” he said. Ahead an older woman occupied a doorway, respectably dressed, smoking. Beside her was a sign as tall as she was, a hand, the palm numbered and labeled in Spanish: a palm reader. “I’ll see you back outside,” I said to Calvin, and ducked into the room past the woman.

  She closed the door and indicated a table and chairs. In a shiny tin cage was a blue and yellow parrot. I was breathing as though I’d been running.

  “Speak English?”

  Nodding, she seated herself opposite me, smoke from her cigaret drifting past her face. She wore a blouse with red embroidery at the neck and sleeves. Her hair was graying. When whores like the kitten-faced girl with the pony got too old, did
they become palmists? I didn’t think anything anywhere near that good happened to them.

  “One dollar, señor.”

  I gave her a bill from my wallet, and she placed it beneath the pack of Chesterfields on the table.

  She pushed my right hand aside and beckoned for the left. She touched a pad of flesh, her head bent so that I could see the part of her hair, like a chalk line.

  “The gender is very strong,” she said. “You must take care that love does not triumph over wisdom.” Her finger tickled my palm; smoke drifted into my eyes. I couldn’t get the kitten-faced girl’s visage out of my head. The woman spoke rapidly in English, but I only half listened as she touched different parts of my hand. The parrot sidled on his perch, watching me with one eye, then the other.

  “Are you a college young man, my friend?”

  I said I attended college in San Diego.

  What did I study there?

  I studied English literature.

  “One must study philosophy in college.”

  I had studied philosophy last year. The idols of the cave!

  “There is philosophy to be discovered in this place, my friend. Here is revealed the profound difference between the genders. Men are animals, and women the slaves of animals. It is only the wise who may transcend their gender!” She sounded like Richie’s Pisan Manual.

  She tucked my hand into a fist and pushed it back at me, and scrubbed out her cigaret in a copper ashtray.

  Outside on the terrace, men were milling. Apparently the show was over. Calvin sauntered toward me. I inquired about his virgin.

  “Wasn’t any virgin and wasn’t fourteen, either. I wasn’t having any of that.”

  * * *

  When we got back to 3rd Street, where I’d left Ol Paint, it was only ten to nine. I phoned Bonny from the pay phone at the White Castle.

  I had to go through her mother again.

  “It looked okay to me,” I said, when she came on. “I made a deposit for next Tuesday at ten o’clock. It takes about half an hour, the nurse said.”

  “That sounds like fun!” Bonny said in a cheery voice, as though we were making a date.

  I said I’d see her at school.