Incidentally,
from the point of view of psychic economy, one would doubt whether abstinence
is healthier than venereal disease. The
latter one can get rid of if one seeks the proper therapeutic help. The pathological character changes however,
can hardly ever be completely eliminated.
Wilhelm Reich The Sexual
Revolution
If
we evolved a race of Isaac
Aldous Huxley
Billy
and Chris were standing in the living room, both holding onto the Law School
Aptitude Examination preparation book, looking at a problem. It looked like they were struggling to take
the book away from each other.
“OK,
that’s it,” Billy said, as if he had
finally been convinced.
“Here
comes the mathematician. Now we’re going
to see how smart you are Einstein.”
He
shoved the book in my face.
“Look
at number three.”
There
were two geometrical figures and a third one off to the right, and five others
below those. I asked, “So what are you supposed to do?” I was buying time and I tried to figure out
which one of the five was related to the third one in the same way that the
second was related to the first. As he
explained, I thought I saw the answer. I
said, “C”
Billy
said, “No, that’s not it.”
I
said, “I can’t believe it. It looks obvious.”
Billy
said, “Unless the book is wrong, its
D.”
Pinson
looked triumphant. My face colored and I
was embarrassed at being embarrassed. Billy continued, “I thought it was C as first. But look closely at the black dot and where
it travels from the first box to the second.”
I
couldn’t see anything except an incomprehensible jumble of figures, and
Chris looking triumphant. I remembered,
from the research that I had been doing, Einstein’s repeated and insistent plea
to the always fawning mob of reporters: “I have no special talent,” and Gauss
telling his lazy, undisciplined and foppish contemporaries: “if others would
but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have,
they would make my discoveries.” I
pretended to see it, “Oh yeah. Obviously.
The black square moves the same way from the third box to the
fourth. Hmmm... Let’s try the next one.”
I
stared at it for a few seconds. The
blood rose to my temples and my heart began to beat faster. Pinson looked over my shoulder. He said,
“It’s E isn’t it?”
I
said, “Let’s see.” I couldn’t see
it. I acted nonchalant.
He
grabbed the book from my hands and looked at the answer. He said,
“E.”
Billy
looked at me as if we were in the presence of a higher form of intelligence and
as if to say that my pride would have to yield to reality and he was there to
watch the painful process, one that he had been forced to go through and which
gave him moral superiority over those of the human race who were unable to
accept their weakness and limitations. I
remembered my step-brother graduating first in a class of 5000 engineers at
In
a kind of controlled rage, I took the book back. I said,
“Let’s try number ten.” I riveted
my attention on the figures for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty. I said,
“A.”
Billy
only wanted to see either one of us or both of us get it wrong. He said,
“OK, Pinson you’re on.”
Chris
took the book with a slightly distracted air as if it were beneath him to even
bother to look at it. After a few
seconds he said, “B.”
Billy
looked up the answer. “It’s A,” he said in amazement. Einstein’s one up.
I
said, “Let’s try another one.” Suddenly the funny but reassuring memory
came to me that I almost always beat my step-brother Jacob at Hopalong Cassidy
Canasta when we were kids. I looked at
number 11 for about thirty seconds and then the answer seemed to pop into my
head. “D.”
Pinson
looked worried. He stared at the
figures. His face reddened. Billy looked at me and gave a little
irreverent giggle. After less time than
I had taken, he Pinson said, “I may be crazy, but I think it’s E.”
Billy
looked up the answer again. “D.”
“You
got me,” Pinson said.
I
said, “One more.” I was trying to prove a point to myself. I needed to prove it, much more than Pinson
needed to be smarter than me.
Billy
said, “Number nineteen,” and handed the book to me. I stared at it in silence. It wasn’t easy. There were rotations and circles turned into
triangles; filled figures became empty and vice versa. But finally it seemed obvious. It must have taken forty seconds but it was
obvious. I said, “D again.”
Pinson
had been trying to appear as if it didn’t matter at all, but he grabbed the
book, almost with a look of horror on his face.
He stared at it and it seemed to me that he wasn’t thinking, but just
feeling, and saying to himself, hardly consciously, and unable to stop
himself, “I am just a stupid shit, a
complete phony, Jack is obviously smarter than I am.” At that moment, I was certain that every
human ability was simply due to ambition and early training. I blinded myself to idiots and the retarded,
to people with photographic memories, to natural mimics, to the criminally
insane, the tone deaf and color blind: to the halt and lame of the brain as
well as those with exceptional ability.
My ribs shook in triumph. I was
so emotional that I found myself going into the kitchen, pretending to get
something to eat. I found myself staring
at the refrigerator. I wasn’t
hungry. I opened it anyway. A six pack of
I
yelled nervously from the kitchen, “Got
an answer yet?”
“Fuck,
it’s impossible.”
I
was elated. “Can I get you a beer?”
“No
thanks.”
Billy
said, “I’ll have one.” His tone of voice celebratory: the great Pinson was going down to defeat.
I
returned and handed Billy a beer.
Finally, Pinson said, “Just to be
different I’ll say C.”
Billy
sat down, put his beer on the table and ceremoniously looked up the
answer. “D,” he said almost reverently
and looked up at me.
“Let’s
try another one,” I said. I was really rubbing it in, paying Pinson back for his arrogance.
He
said, “No, I give up. You’re too smart for me.”
“It’s
just a knack,” I said, hiding my triumph with false humility. “That’s why they have those books in the
first place, so you can learn how to do the problems. Besides, I only scored 690 on the math
He
didn’t seem convinced. In reality, I had
only scored 650. I asked Pinson, “Have you ever heard of Henri Poincare?”
He
answered, “Yeah, somewhere.”
“He’s
supposed to be one of the greatest French mathematicians of the twentieth
century. Anyway, he flunked the college
mathematics entrance examination and they almost didn’t let him into the
university. He hated mathematics, never
studied it and didn’t know anything about it.
He changed his mind, obviously.
Most people know about Einstein.
He didn’t learn to talk until he was five years old.”
“What?” Billy looked at Pinson as if I were crazy.
“It’s
true. His mother thought he was
retarded. At the Swiss Polytechnic
Institute, he graduated in the bottom ten percent of his class and his
professors said he would never amount to anything. It’s true.”
They
didn’t seem convinced.
“I’ll get the book if you don’t believe
it. David Hilbert was considered to be
an average graduate student.” I knew
that neither one of them had heard of David Hilbert. Pinson
asked, “You don’t believe that there are
any differences in native intelligence?”
He asked the question gingerly, pretending that he thought I might be a
madman and that he was afraid of making me angry.
“I
believe there are a lot of people who are stupid for one reason or
another. The brain is very
delicate. It can be damaged very
easily. Memory is one thing that seems
to be inherited, but I don’t think it is really as valuable as most people
think. The Soviet Psychologist, Luria,
studied a man who had a photographic memory, for more than twenty
years. He wrote an entire book about him
called The Mind of a Mnemonist. He had
lunch with him every day for many years.
They sat there in front of a blackboard and Luria would write things
down on the board and make notes in his notebook about the clothes he was
wearing, what they talked about and anything else. The guy never made a mistake. For twenty years! He remembered literally everything. He recited lines from the Divine Comedy
perfectly, in Italian, after they were read to him once fifteen years
before. And he didn’t know Italian and
had never read the Divine Comedy. He had
total recall. He was actually unable to
forget anything. He used elaborate
methods to forget things but they never worked.
But there was one thing he couldn’t remember --- faces. He said they changed so much from one day to
the next that he could never remember them.
But he never studied science or any profession or anything serious. He made his living demonstrating his memory
and that was the only thing he ever did in his life.”
Pinson
seemed impressed but Billy was bored and said with superiority, “I learned very early that knowing my limitations
was very important. If you hold too high
an opinion of yourself you will be afraid to do anything because you will be
afraid of failure. I argued for a long
time with my shrink about that. He
finally convinced me. I consider myself
lucky. I know what I’m capable of and
what I want. Now I’m getting it. I have a plan and I’m following it. My shrink called what you are saying “Narcissistic
Withdrawal,” refusal to compete because you can’t be number 1. It sounds like you are still fighting that battle
with your half-brother.”
I
said, “Step-brother. Well, maybe you’re right. But I think I recovered from that. I mean I saw what he did by just working all
the time. I mean he didn’t just study a
lot, he studied constantly. Weekends,
holidays. It was almost comical. I learned the lesson that what seems like
genius can be just hard work. And then I
read books about intelligence and achievement.
I found out that
“Newton
was of the most fearful, cautious and suspicious temper that I ever knew,” said
Whiston, his successor in the Lucasian Chair.
Jack
added “Why did Einstein go around saying: I have no special talent?”
“Einstein
will never amount to anything,” said his mathematics teacher at the Swiss
Polytechnic Institute.
Billy
said, “It’s obvious, you’re still trying
to be a genius. Still competing with
your half-brother. So you won’t settle
for anything less than being a genius like he is.”
Pinson
said, “That’s a lot of shit Kidd,” and
gave a little deprecating wave of his hand.
Pinson usually called Billy by his last name when he was pissed off or
thought he was full of shit. Pinson said
to me, “Don’t listen to him Jack. Going to a shrink for five years ruined him
forever.”
Billy
just laughed to himself, as if it was impossible to argue with Pinson and you
just had to put up with him.
Pinson
said, “We don’t aim high enough
Billy. We make people into heroes and
then everyone else is a goat. He’s
right. We worship Movie Stars, Sports
Heroes, Geniuses.”
I
couldn’t pass up the opportunity to continue my lecture, “That’s right. But I think it is worse than that because we
also worship mediocrity. The most
mediocre people become multimillionaires producing the worst imaginable movies
and novels and hit records. Businessmen
get rich selling cigarettes and candy and food that destroys the body. But they do all their selling with beautiful
women and ball players, and that’s what keeps everyone going after it. The women and ball players aren’t going to
give up the easy bucks, and we can’t look at anything less than a ten anyway...”
“You’re
completely wrong Jack,” Billy said in a shrill voice that rose towards
hysteria, “You’re just describing yourself.
You can’t look at anything less than a ten. You can’t have a ten so you won’t look at
anything.”
I
said, “I thought you were the one who
doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
“That’s
got nothing to do with it.”
“Well,
I don’t see how you can accuse me of not looking at anything less than a ten
when you don’t have a girlfriend yourself.”
“I
have had many opportunities to have a girlfriend. Doesn’t it even occur to you that I might not
want a girlfriend?” He looked at me for
a second, to let it sink in. “I’m not ready for one. I have one goal right now and that is to get
into law school. I don’t have time for
anything else. When the time comes then
I will.”
Pinson
said, “He always has everything figured out.
It’s the psychiatrist’s fault.”
Billy
yelled, “That’s a cheap shot Pinson and
you know it.”
I
had never seen him that pissed. I wasn’t
too worried. They had been friends for
more than two years. Pinson suddenly put
the palms of his hands together in mock prayer and chanted, “Domine, in nomine Patris et Filii et
Spiritus sancti, qui vivit et regnat per omnia secula seculorum, mea culpa,
vultis etiam parodnos? .....Aaaamennnnn.”
Billy
dissolved into appreciative laughter. I
muttered my appreciation for his Latin and took the opportunity to retire to my
room to work on my essay on intelligence.
I tried, wholly without success, to arrange some of the material that I
had underlined in the books lying on the floor by my bed:
Jefferson
said, it was the common belief, in 1776 that all men were created equal,
“whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or the
elementary books of public right.”
On
the account of the greater rarity of intellectual ability in women, they have
often played a large part in the world on the strength of achievements, which
would not have allowed a man to play a similarly large part. In one department, and one only, women seem
to be little, if at all, inferior to men in ability, that is in acting.
Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius,
1903
Borderline
deficiency is very, very common among Spanish-Indian families of the Southwest
and also among Negroes. Their dullness
seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they
come... the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to
be taken up anew and by experimental methods.
The writer predicts that when this is done there will be discovered
enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences
which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture... Children of this
group should be segregated in special classes... They cannot master
abstractions, but they can often be make efficient workers... there is no
possibility at present (1916) of convincing society that they should not be
allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a
grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.
…only recently have we begun to recognize
how serious a menace (feeblemindedness) is to the social, economic, and moral
welfare of the state... It is responsible for the majority of cases of chronic
and semi-chronic pauperism.... the feeble-minded continue to multiply... organized
charities... often contribute to the survival of individuals who would not
otherwise be able to live and reproduce... If we would preserve our state for a
class of people worthy to possess it, we must prevent, as far as possible, the
propagation of mental degenerates in curtailing the increasing spawn of
degeneracy.
Professor Lewis Madison Terman, Stanford University, The Menace of
Feeble Mindedness, 1916
From Domhoff’s book:
Of
the thirteen men who have been Secretary of Defense or Secretary of War since
1932, eight have been listed in the Social Register.
By
controlling every major opinion molding institution in the country, members of
the upper class play a predominant role in determining the framework within
which decisions on important issues are reached.
Who Rules America, William
Domhoff
Henri
Poincare took Binet’s I.Q. test, AFTER he had become a world famous
mathematician and scored at the imbecile level!
But I can’t find the passage. I
think it was in Cancro’s book: Intelligence, Genetic and Environmental
Influences. No, that doesn’t seem
right. Apparently Binet didn’t consider
intelligence to be mostly innate anyway.
Why is it called the “Stanford-Binet” I.Q. test?
Newton’s
principle interest was Biblical Chronology.
He even believed in astrology. He
said he regretted the tremendous labor he spent on the Principia because it
took so much time from his real interest, Biblical Chronology. He believed the world was created in 4004 BC
(!)
As
a child, Fischer’s play cannot be compared with that of Morphy, Capablanca or
Reshevsky at the same age. Fischer had
to work hard to develop his skills. His
need to win at the game involved him in the most thorough and systematic study
of tactics, and this, comparatively slowly, began to produce results. At an age when Capablanca and Reshevsky had
reached master strength, Fischer started playing in YMCA. But, in a game against Byrne, when he was
still thirteen he was suddenly catapulted from total obscurity into world fame
with these encomiums:
“Black’s
seventeenth move will be talked about for centuries to come. With this one move and subsequent follow-up,
Bobby Fischer established his place among the great chess prodigies of all
time.”
Even
before his international career opened, his personality problems were causing
concern. His interest in the game had
come to exclude almost everything else in life.
The Champions, Peter Fuller
Lafayette
was so impressed with the American Revolution that he actually carried enough
American soil back to France to be buried in!
Athens,
at its height, in the fourth and fifth century BC had a population of about
315,000 people according to Will Durant.
Only about 43,000 were citizens.
The rest were women, slaves and serfs.
He estimates that there were only about 250,000 citizens, each
generation, in all of Greece who were the source of the entire Greek
achievement. A little more than half the
size of Oakland. Plato, Socrates,
Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Thales, Pindar, Solon, Euripides,
Aeschylus, .... the entire foundation of Western civilization from a population
a little more than half the size of Oakland....
For
dinner, I ate beans out of the can and afterwards found myself looking out into
the twilight sky and wondering who the hell I was and what in the hell I was
doing anyway. I was enervated from
sitting all afternoon staring at books, and probably from the chili con
carne. When you feel like a bag of
semi-organized protoplasm, like a hairless-ape sitting inside a twenty mile
thick band of oxygen along with a billion species of insects and animals (your
relatives) crawling, creeping, running, climbing, killing, eating, pissing,
sleeping, fucking, foaming at the mouth and whatever... all floating in the
void on the far edge of a galaxy among billions of other galaxies, well,
sometimes it all seems futile and irrelevant, and suicide seems necessary. Not from depression or despair, but as an act
of intelligent reverence towards a cleaner form of death: why allow the band of apes who think the
world was created in 4004 BC, that sex before marriage is Evil and that
Socialism is a creation of the Devil, to hassle you? But you think of your Marlin Microgroove
Automatic 22 caliber rifle leaning up against the wall in your closet and
realize immediately that there are at least two or three people that you would
like to take out first, and all thoughts of suicide disappear.
Anyway,
“IQ” seemed about as relevant as fame, glory, gloire, renown, and a gaggle of
groveling, fawning, hypocritical friends whose sole claim to fame was that they
knew you. I shuffled back into the
gloomy house, bored, irrelevant and wishing that I had devoted the last five years
of my life to being a tennis bum. Faint
images of white tennis outfits and blond faceless people of both sexes seemed
to fight with images of Vietnam and commentary by Walter Cronkite. Then, for some reason I started to think of
the ten blackballed screenwriters of the McCarthy era and I was thinking that
not one of them had the talent of Melville or Whitman or Emily Dickinson and I
was on that thought, thinking that I would never publish anything, no matter
how hard I worked on it, or if I did publish anything, no one would read
it. If Melville, Baudelaire, Nietzsche,
Kafka and a thousand other really great writers weren’t recognized in their
lifetimes then why should I be? I walked
through the door to the living room, lost in my thoughts, and almost ran into
Pinson. His Popeye forearm was
outstretched and he held out an Olie to me.
“Want
a beer dad?”
“Yeah
thanks Chris. I don’t mind if I do.”
“A
penny for your thoughts.”
He
had an original way of pronouncing cliches.
My explanation for it was that he was so original that he needed cliches
as ballast when things seemed particularly crazy or futile. I popped open the can and said, “Just thinking how fucked everything is.”
“Maybe
a beer will help.”
I
felt better already. I asked, “What’s the Kidd doing? Grinding away back there in his room?”
We
sat in the living room in the semidarkness.
“Yeah,
he studies most of the time back there.
Only his dog Muffy knows for sure.”
We
sat in silence. He said, “That’s funny, I was thinking that everything
is fucked, just a little while ago, myself.”
He
still looked at me with the amused look that comes to people who are used to
being smarter than everyone else. I
said, “Well, I was thinking that we are
basically just bags of protoplasm and the world wasn’t really created in 4004
BC.”
“You
should have gone to my church.”
“Oh
yeah. Catholic wasn’t it?”
“We
hailed Mary every five minutes.”
I
guzzled some mountain-water beer.
Sometimes Ambrosia is necessary, even if it’s only a placebo. I said,
“I suppose you thought you wanted to be a priest.”
It
was so far from the truth that I didn’t even bother to put irony in my
voice. He gave a hearty laugh. He said,
“His name was father Polonsky.
The man was sick. He enjoyed
giving pain.”
“It
sounds like he believed in The Four Noble Truths.”
There
was a silence and then he said, “All
right, I’ll bite.”
“The
Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: 1, All life is suffering, 2, all suffering is
caused by desire, 3, the cessation of suffering is brought about by the
elimination of desire, and 4, the elimination of desire is attained by
following the eightfold noble path.”
“Run
that by me again one more time.”
I
did. I was afraid that it might not have
anything to do with Polonsky. I took
another swig of beer. He asked, “What is the eightfold noble path?”
“A
lot of Holy Water. You know, not
stealing and cheating and all that stuff and then finally meditation on one
point and eliminating all thought and opposites, and then attaining enlightenment.”
He
asked, “Do you know the works of Alan
Watts?”
“I’ve
read all of his books. He was my
guru.” I felt like saying that, at
present, Watts seemed to me to be mostly, full of shit. Or, at best, that he was a sturdy ladder that
I had thrown away a few years ago and, at worst, just one more rich, sexually
obsessed sado-masochist, who had lately added alcoholism to the list of his
vices, but I didn’t. Maybe I just didn’t
have time because Muffy came running into the living room and smelled my crotch
and Billy waltzed past us into the kitchen to get a beer. We remained silent, waiting for Kidd to come
into the living room. He yelled from the
kitchen, “Big things are being
discussed? What’s this I hear about Alan
Watts?”
With
jocular sarcasm, I answered, “Just a lot
of Holy Water. Nothing to get excited
about. I was just chanting on the
meaninglessness of life. You and Muffy
are bags of protoplasm. Your life isn’t
real. All from the point of view of
eternity, of course.”
He decided to be serious.
“What
is real, Jack? You’re the
philosopher. You tell us.”
I
thought he was being
I
was convinced against all my theories that both Pinson and I were smarter than
him, fundamentally, and it probably showed.
I said, turning back to a concrete example, “Well, for example, Capitalism is supposed to
be superior to Communism, but the truth is, they’ll throw you in jail, or you
won’t be able to get a job if you’re a Communist, so everybody thinks they’re
Capitalists, the way they want them to think, and so they aren’t free. They just think they are.”
“Wait
a minute!” Billy said, “Who’s “they?”
Who is controlling my thought? I
want to hear this.”
“Well,
nobody. Just your fear of being
different. They make examples out of a
few people at various times in history and that keeps everyone in line.”
Pinson
jumped in, “You keep saying “they.” Who?”
“Well,
the rich. The one half of one percent
that owns most of the country. They
control the newspapers, television.”
Billy
said, “Tell us about it Einstein.”
He
was being obnoxious, and enjoying himself too much. But I didn’t really give a fuck about him and
I thought it might do me some good to talk to the wall, so I got serious
too, “Lady Bird for example. She bought that radio and television station
in Austin and now they have a monopoly down there and they got rich with it.”
The
Kidd said, “So Lady Bird is running the
country from Texas?”
He
looked at Pinson and laughed triumphantly.
I
said, “Fuck you Kidd.”
I
could get away with telling him to fuck off.
It was the price we paid for
allowing each other to say any goddammed thing we felt like saying.
We
were sitting on the floor and I leaned back, hunched my legs to my chest and
without touching the floor with my hands, threw my legs out in front of my body
and sprung to my feet. It was something
Billy did sometimes, pretending it was as normal as belching after a can of
beer. I asked, “Anyone want another beer?”
Pinson
said, “I’ll have another one.”
From
the kitchen, I could hear him laughing about something. I said from the kitchen, “Sports is also like that,” I was self-consciously pontificating now,
maybe to piss off the Kidd, I don’t know.
Anyway, I said as I handed Pinson a beer, “People watch games because they think it is
the thing to do. They don’t really give
a shit about football but they watch all the games anyway so they will have
something to talk about with all the other people who watch games for the same
reason.”
Actually,
I knew that Billy never watched sports on television but I suddenly remembered
that Pinson watched football and basketball and baseball on television. He jumped on me, “Shit, I’ll bet a guy like you never played a
sport in your life. You probably did
jumping jacks with your fingers in gym class.” They looked at me as if I were
some kind of wimp who sat around reading books all the time.
“That’s
not true.” I could never get used to the
idea that people didn’t see me as a natural athlete. That was bad enough, but when they saw me as
a “wimp,” “a guy like you,” it was too much.
My anger was stronger than I could admit, and therefore I couldn’t
control my pride. It wanted blood.
“Why
do you think I never played?” The
tension in my stomach returned.
Pinson’s
face hung slack, and his bad eye wandered up to a spot on the wall just over my
head. He tilted his head back so that it
seemed to him that he was looking down on me.
I looked to the Kidd for some sympathy, but only saw a jagged line of
white teeth. I thought hypocritical,
aggressive smiles like his must have greeted the Jews at the Treblinken
ovens. I endured the pain with the
thought that I hadn’t been despised by people who pretended to be my friends
since the fourth grade.
It
seemed to me that Pinson and Kidd only thought that they were reducing me to
the level of humanity by distinguishing me from their heroes but in reality
they were reducing me to a subhuman level.
And I savored that. I resolved to
sit in the intestinal gas of these two assholes until one of them couldn’t
stand his own stench. Pinson was the
first. He coughed for no physical reason
and then, in what seemed to be an access of terror, laughed demoniacally. His large forearms looked larger than they
were.
I
said, “I’m six foot two. Maybe I could play basketball.”
Billy
said, “You’re too skinny.”
The
pain seemed to spread into my lower regions. I began to breath rhythmically. Maybe it was something I ate, maybe it was
just the beans. Suddenly they both
seemed slightly comical. I continued
breathing regularly and then I noticed that Pinson looked like a little kid who
had never made any of the teams and I thought that, like many short men I had
known, he probably fantasized that if he had been over six feet tall, he would
weigh 220 pounds.
I
asked Pinson, very gently, “What sport
did you play?”
“I
played baseball.”
He
looked at the wall showing his profile, closed his eyes. I asked Billy if he played a sport also.
“I
was a diver.”
Pinson
jolted back to consciousness and said,
“He would have made the State Finals for sure but his grades were too
low in his senior year.”
Billy
looked like a shy girl with that false modesty that has become one of our
National character defects. They both
looked like self-satisfied assholes. I
felt like getting out, leaving, pulling up stakes, running. I thought of Van Decken on Dwight Way. I had already run away from him. Then I remembered Florence. She seemed a tiny ray of light, a thesis that
might lead to a new synthesis from this newest antithesis. But I knew I had to face them, I wanted to
face them. My stomach hurt quite badly
and I thought again that maybe they weren’t that uptight, maybe it was just the
beans and the beer. But then again, (and
I thought of Norman Mailer) maybe I didn’t have any guts. I felt cornered. But it occurred to me that when human beings
feel cornered they often tell the truth.
And, of course, we tell the truth to our friends and we know our friends
by the truths that they can contain for us without finally using them against
us. I
said, “I played baseball too.”
Pinson
asked, “Junior Varsity?”
I
could have meditated for a half an hour on the tone of the condescension. After a few precious seconds, I
responded, “No, I played first string
varsity for six years.”
I
judged that, psychically, we were somewhere between the seventh and ninth
grades. Pinson blinked, stared into my
eyes, and his world transformed itself into a terrifying distortion that he
rooted out by simply saying, after many tormented seconds, “I don’t believe it.”
I
seemed to me that he said it like a man denying to himself that he had a
terminal illness.
The
Kidd thought I was joking: Sure you got
a Nobel Prize for Physics at age eleven.
I
said, “I’m not lying. I mean I’m not joking either.” I felt like Jesus Christ at The Last Supper and
I was ready to parade my childhood and adolescent triumphs if necessary.
“I
think he’s telling the truth Pinson.”
I
said, “I played first string varsity in
the fifth and sixth grades and seventh,
eighth, ninth and tenth grades. I never
missed a game in six years.”
Obviously,
I had missed at least five or ten games in all those years. I hated the look of awe that came into their
faces. An image of Melville’s unmarked
grave flitted into my mind’s eye, a gray, dirty stone on a grassy, lonely hill,
and Johnson’s words were barely legible on the imaginary tombstone, “Toil on,
dull crowd, in extasy...” My stomach
burned.
Pinson
asked, “What position did you play?”
He
was cross-examining me. He still hoped
that he could prove I was lying.
“I
played all positions. I pitched. Caught.
Played the outfield. But third
base was my favorite position. I even
played a year at first.”
As
I talked, I, myself, felt like I was lying.
I have noticed that when the truth about oneself is out of character then
one lies to make people think one is telling the truth, or one tells the truth
knowing that one will be thought a liar.
“I
played football and basketball and ran track for six years also. I was first string on the football and
basketball teams also, for six years, and I ran the hundred in 10 flat.”
Pinson’s
face was flushed.
Billy
said, with the same aggressive smile,
“Now you are just getting even with us.
You played baseball, but the rest is just your imagination. You’re putting us on.”
I
said, “Kidd, I really can’t believe that
you think I would sit here and make all this up.”
And
I couldn’t. If I were lying then I would
be admitting myself to be a madman. But
still, we three knew that the desire to play, the desire to succeed among men and
boys is so great that it leads some to the edge of madness: to pathological
lying, to cock sucking, to murder itself.
And so all that was left was a direct physical challenge.
I
said, “Look, whenever you want, I’ll
play catch with you or we can go over to Bushrod and play basketball. Tomorrow if you want.”
Kidd
looked at Pinson and with the terseness of a lawyer accepting a bad verdict
said, “He’s telling the truth Chris.”
Pinson
suddenly turned on me again. He had
started the whole thing and he wouldn’t let it go, “I’ve never heard anyone brag so much in my
life. I’ve never seen anyone who lived
so much in the past.”
“What
are you talking about. I don’t live in
the past.”
“No,
you just spend fifteen minutes telling us of your success in junior high
school.”
It
seemed like he wanted to fight, but I knew that was impossible. “Look, you told me you thought I was some
kind of wimp.” I heard myself almost
yelling. I tried to ignore my
stomach. I continued, “I am just telling you the truth. I’ve lived here for four months and haven’t
said anything about it. Now you’re
telling me I’m living in the past.”
Kidd
responded to my challenge, “You’d better
be ready in the morning Jack. We’re
going to play catch with a football.” He
had the menacing look of a man who needs to look bigger than he is and I almost
salivated at the chance to prove that he was a wimp. But, as with all pleasures that one has felt
a thousand times, the thought became boring.
I
fired a good-natured challenge back at him,
“Don’t worry. I’ll catch anything
you throw and I’ll guarantee you I’ll throw farther and harder than you
can.” But I added with realism and
honest humility, “But you’ll have to
give me a few weeks to get in shape.
It’s been awhile.”
He
laughed in disbelief and I grinned back at him, but I didn’t look at
Pinson. Pinson wouldn’t allow his anger
to be diverted that easily. He got up,
motioned his hand towards a spot about half way between Kidd and me, like he
was pushing us away, and went to bed.
Billy got up too. He gave me a
friendly shove on the shoulder and insulted me again with his hypocritical
grin.
I
hated feeling these adolescent feelings again, feelings I hadn’t felt since
high school. Even though it was the
feeling of being the strongest animal around and having to prove it, I hated
it.
I
became certain, then, that Kidd was incapable of friendship. Muffy followed him into his room, with head
down and tail between his legs.
I
lay on my bed staring at the ceiling and realized that my stomach was more than
just tense. My urinary tract was painful
too. I tried to forget it. I meditated
for awhile and then I got another beer and even took an antacid tablet but I
couldn’t get rid of the pain. I
remembered that the Herrick Hospital drop-in clinic closed at midnight. It was 10:30.
But the pain wasn’t that bad. It
seemed to outline two tubes that left my testicles and wound towards my belly
button and disappeared into my guts somewhere.
It was dull and not like the tense pain in my stomach that was gone
now.
While,
massaging my groin, I noticed that there was a discharge from my penis. VD?
From Florence? I couldn’t believe
it. But I hadn’t had sex with another
woman for months and the discharge wasn’t imaginary. I didn’t know what to do. I had never had VD before. Herrick emergency was the only place I could
go that late at night, because there was no way I was going to go to Highland
Emergency again.
I
remembered the last time I was at Highland: a guy was carried in on a stretcher
with a gunshot wound in his stomach, his girlfriend screaming at his side. I ended up waiting for three hours, in the
middle of the night.
I
wondered if I should call Florence. It
was embarrassing because I couldn’t remember her phone number and I had bragged
about how good my memory for numbers was.
But the pain wasn’t going away. I
knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I lay
on the bed, thinking. I could see her
house from my window. All the windows
were dark. It was a quarter to
eleven. I reasoned that the longer I
waited, the more difficult it would be to go over there. Suddenly I remembered the look on her face
when she said she wanted to be able to call me any time without feeling like
she was intruding or being aggressive. I
had to act fast. I knew I had to go over
there before it got too late to go to Herrick.
I found myself standing in front of her front door, waiting, wondering
if I should knock louder. Then I heard
noise from the other side of the door.
The porch light went on. Mary
appeared at the open door in her faded blue housecoat, looking very sleepy.
“Is
Florence up?”
“Come
in.” It was a strange time to find Mary
attractive, but I did.
“You
know where her room is. Just go up the
stairs.”
“OK.”
Florence
appeared at the top of the steps. Mary
and I walked up the stairs, with me leading the way. We said good night and Mary went into her
room.
Florence
asked, “What’s up?”
“Well,
I thought I should tell you. I ...”
She
asked, in a loud whisper, “I don’t
understand. What can’t wait until
morning?” We went into her small room
through the curtain door. I didn’t know
how to say it. We sat on her bed.
I
whispered, “Do you have anything?”
She
looked at me as if I were crazy.
“I
mean, you don’t have VD do you?”
“Of
course not.”
“Well,
I have a discharge.” I felt
ridiculous. The pain was faint but I
exaggerated,
“It hurts quite a bit.”
Her
eyes got wide. I tried to be
truthful, “I mean it doesn’t hurt that
much, but I can feel it, and I got worried.
I mean I thought it might get worse and since it is late I didn’t know
if I should go to drop-in or what.”
She
seemed unable to say anything. Then,
almost like a doctor, she asked, “How
bad is the discharge?”
“Not
too much, but it’s there.”
“I
really don’t see why you didn’t wait until tomorrow morning. It’s embarrassing. I mean everybody has discharges.”
“I’ve
never had a discharge in my life.” I
wanted to add, “Even after the whore in
Tijuana and the ones in Nogales.”
She
seemed to think I was lying. She said,
after a very long silence, “I don’t
know. It just seems embarrassing.”
“You
said you wanted to be able to call me any time and not feel embarrassed.”
“Well,
this is different. It is in the middle
of the night.”
“I
don’t see why it’s different. I’ve never
had VD before.”
“You
don’t have VD! Everyone has
discharges. It’s probably clamidia or
something like that.”
“I’ve
never heard of clamidia. What’s
clamidia?”
“It’s
a yeast infection. Most women get it. I had it, but I thought it was cleared
up. That was more than six months
ago. It was with that guy I told you
about.” She lowered her voice and
said, “You know the one that didn’t work
out.”
“How
bad is it?”
She
said, “I didn’t even know I had it.”
“I
mean how bad is it if you have it?”
She
laughed and said, “Well, obviously it
isn’t very bad if you don’t even know you have it. I mean when you have it.” Suddenly, she looked maternal. I was grateful. “You can stay here if with me you want. I’ll take you to the Berkeley Free Clinic
tomorrow morning. This bed is kinda
small but if you don’t mind cuddling.”
I
didn’t mind. She fell asleep quickly but
I just stared at the wall and tried not to move too much. She snored loudly and I thought I owed it to
her to let her continue. She couldn’t
roll over anyway, with me in the bed.
The pain was a dull throbbing in tubes that I didn’t know were there
before that night.
After
about an hour of meditation on the absurdity of my life, and of life in general,
I heard Tilly’s 1968, red Volkswagen pull up in front of the house. The front door of the house opened and there
was muffled talking as they came up the stairs.
Florence was snoring loudly again.
I couldn’t recognize the other voice but it sounded male, and
black. They went into the bedroom
without bothering to shut the door. I
heard shoes fall onto the floor and bedsprings squeak. Then, for about five minutes they gave the
most amazing imitation of pigs that I had heard until then. In a few minutes they too were snoring, and
the night was filled with three cacophonous, unsynchronized snores.
I
tried to meditate again but I was worried that I would break out laughing. I felt like yelling at the top of my lungs
for everybody to turn over and stop snoring.
Suddenly, I noticed that Florence was sweating and seemed feverish. Then, over the snoring, I heard a muffled cry
from Mary’s room. At first, I thought it
was a bad dream, but it was the beginning of an orgasm. It lasted more than a minute.
The
wheezing and snoring seemed like a string quartet accompanying her
performance. She was a violin and a
cello and at one point, near the end, the slapping sounded, at least to my
ears, like timpani and cymbals.
After
the orgasm, illogical as it seems, I was almost certain that she was waiting,
very silently, behind her partially open door, for me to come in and fuck
her. She gave a little cough and then
there was no movement or any sound at all for several minutes, except for the
sound of three people snoring.
Then
I heard her turn over in bed and move around for awhile and in a few minutes
she too was snoring. I stared at a
ceiling for a few minutes and finally broke out laughing. Florence continued to snore, but Tilly woke
up, groaned a little, muttered something, and then, after a few minutes, began
snoring again.
I
stared up at the darkened ceiling and I felt the rapturous smile on my face to
be a gift and not something to suppress.
I breathed regularly, meditating on absurdity. I must have fallen asleep very late because
when I awoke it was after eleven and Florence was not in bed with me.
I
went downstairs. Florence was the only
one in the house, waiting patiently for me to come down stairs. She asked, “How do you feel?”
I
was better. I said, “I thought you said
Tilly didn’t have a boyfriend.”
“She
doesn’t as far as I know.” She seemed
evasive.
“I
thought I heard someone with her last night.”
She
didn’t say anything. I lied: “I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure.”
She
said, “That’s interesting. I didn’t even know she came home last
night. She must have left before I got
up.”
“I’m
sure someone was with her.”
“Look,
it’s none of my business what she does.”
“I
didn’t say it was. I just thought you
said she didn’t have a boyfriend.”
“She
may and she may not. I make it a point
not to know what she does. It’s the same
with Mary. I know she has a boyfriend
but I’ve never seen him.”
I
thought she wasn’t telling the truth but it was our first night together and I
didn’t want to spoil it, so I let it drop.
We
went to the Berkeley Free Clinic. I had
never been there before. The doctor was
a guy who wasn’t much older than me. He
was wearing blue jeans and a worker’s shirt, and he had the John Lennon look,
rimless glasses, a full, dark brown beard, and a ponytail.
It
turned out that it was clamidia. He gave
us both some pills and it cleared up in a few days.