Al said, “Or we have other attractions if you’re really from out of town.”
“No,” the girl said, “we’re interested in you.”
“Well, I’m not in you,” Al said.
“Look,” I said, “my bag’s still in the trunk and I’d like a drink — what if we leave our friends here and go home to Annette.”
We had stopped, but the girl and boy made no move. The music wasn’t so loud as you might expect. Maybe between us and it, the wind current veered and took it up the river. The girl said, “How come you’re visiting him this weekend?”
Al fingered my radio, then gave up. The Cannibals had a quiet audience. Maybe the two cops, smoking in their front seat, had just forgotten the bright bubble on their roof and its radial red alarm swinging round and round.
I was explaining that I wanted a little fresh air after New York and Al and I were very old friends and I’d wondered what impact you’d had, Dom, on this sort of campus area as yet relatively untouched by ideological tourism—“I mean, how many black students have they, and what poverty is there in a radius of thirty miles, and how many speed freaks are you going to find trooping in in olive-green insulated boots?” (“O.K.,” said Al, “so they’re olive-green, so what?”)
But the boy and girl, whom I still hadn’t turned to look at, weren’t impressed. I might as well have given them the compulsory VD lecture the Corpsman gave a bunch of seamen and seamen apprentices the week after Al got on the Barataria.
Two girls came and sat on my front bumper and Al wanted me to honk them off but there was no point in it. Our passengers wanted to know why I hadn’t taken my case out of the trunk but had just been rushed off on an errand after two or three hundred miles driving.
“Because I was being run out of my own house,” Al said. “That’s why. And if you ask why I didn’t tell that student Greatorex to take his bike and go, well don’t ask me.”
The boy said it must have been something else; and I heard one or both of them there in the back adjust their positions. Al turned my ignition key and jammed in the lighter, and for the moment before it popped out, his mysterious vulnerability caused in me a euphoria that so dissolved all strategies of hesitation that I nearly asked him what he’d said to Tracy in ’53 when she — for it must have been she — phoned (for she was assuming I’d gone straight home from the ghastly gathering which Bob and Petty attended more vividly than if they’d come — straight home from Bob’s mother’s drying pumpernickel and imperishable Danish salami) and I nearly asked Al what, for that matter, he had meant there in my mother’s apartment when I checked the guest room at one a.m. and he murmured from under his pillow, “Make out? Nothing like a matoor woman,” and so I couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not.
A black student came and leaned over my left front fender to talk to the left bumper-girl who took his hand and kissed it and made room for him. Al said he’d passed a black student of his in the library and said, “Slaving away?” and the guy stood up and smiled and took offense.
Dom, can you hear the music blowing like a wind through what I’m saying? And I thought even then — yes, spring ’68—that my memory (which didn’t need to be aroused by Annette’s soft kitchen kiss) is over-sensed, and that other people forget some things merely because they’ve grown up. Dom, there’s so little noise in my paratrayal of this scenic interlude at the old landing! — must be my normal vectorphasia compounded into your settled space and neutralized like a TV grid devoid of sound.
The black boy and the two girls leaned together on my bumper touching one another and talking as if the music wasn’t there, but if the music hadn’t been there neither would they, much less the fire to our left.
“It’s all right,” said Al abruptly, “I like this, I like it. We need this.” He stretched way back with both arms and continued with one, I guess to touch the girl. “My car the last year in high school had a knob on the wheel,” he said.
Our passengers’ refraining silence seemed to be politely breathing to us, “Say more, be relevant, give.”
“Well,” said Al, “if our Big Shot who bailed out this morning with a thousand-buck check in his trousers thinks he’s out to change the consciousness of America, why’s he talk about shit all the time? That’s old stuff, here’s our Distinguished Lecturer spending fifteen minutes telling how up here he was shitting country shit, and what am I supposed to think when he leans over the lectern at me and a thousand others in the Babcock Memorial Theater with sliding seats and says, ‘Country shit is different from city shit. It smells better and there’s much more of it. In the city we don’t waste so much.”
I said I thought you couldn’t decide, Dom, if you were a heretic or a heretic-hunter, and I pointed out that from here you had left to cover a break-through at the phytoplankton lab on the coast just two hours away, and obviously you were serious.
“Well, Baba called it incredibly bad taste and I agree; but I didn’t agree when Baba said with that Mayflower decency of his that he was sorry for the poor chap. The rest about a retired cop on jury duty — you should have heard it, I was counting out the thousand one by one. Our Distinguished Lecturer had jury duty with this retired cop who he said had a prostate condition, so after the cop tried to get on a jury by telling the assistant D.A. he had no prejudice at all against the two Puerto Ricans up for theft and in fact had two grown boys of his own, our Distinguished Lecturer kidded him later because of course the defense challenged the cop who before he got on this panel had been scowling and biting everyone’s head off back in the jury pool including the chief clerk who was always joking over the microphone; and our Distinguished Lecturer said the cop should have known no young New York Jewish liberal fresh from his bar exam and appointed by the court would believe such lies even if he misread the constipated creases around the retired cop’s mouth and the lack of lines at the corners of the eyes. Cy, it was a lecture in fictive anatomy. I wish I’d said that to Baba.”
I said I wished I’d come, and Al told the two in back they should have been there if they were going around calling this lunatic a great man—
The boy cut in, “I said he was a great man”—
“Why he’s a New York Jewish liberal himself,” Al persisted, “who thinks we all ought to get psychoanalyzed and unhung. Up, that is. You could agree with him at least about the James Bond movies. I throw away TV Guide every Friday midnight just like Raymond Burr, the third most important man in the U.S.” The girl giggled but the boy, who must have had his camera out of its case and clicked it against something, here spoke up: the Bond-Broccoli films were beautiful, their images were fundamental, like the scrap-iron press that came down on a car and crunched it into one flat jagged pack.
“What they call ‘mixer metal,’” I said. “Right,” the boy said. “Ninety seconds maximum,” I said. “Right,” the boy said.
The girl said, “Remember Odd Job?” and the boy said, “Beautiful,” and they laughed and when Al said he didn’t see what was so fundamental, and I hoped the boy and girl were getting ready to leave because it sounded as if they were handling their equipment, the boy said, “Like what’s more basic? like the human being crunched into cubic centimeters, what do you call that, a groove?” And the girl added, obviously to Al, “What is fundamental for your generation?”
The prowl car was coming back into the landing, and I hadn’t even seen it leave. There was only one cop now and his light wasn’t popping. The Cannibals seemed to break one steadiness with another, there were endings there maybe but not climaxes. The small crowd had spread over the area, they weren’t packed together. Our bumper-three rose and separated.