“What did you see as you fell? What did you hear as you sank?/Did it make you drunken with hearing?”
The boy would not have understood these lines in any other way but the literal. That is, had anyone known to avail him of the poem from which they come. But who would have known?
Go fish. And blues in the night.
A more innocent time
TO BOMBARD THE SMALL AND INEFFICIENT gas refrigerator with grapefruit would be his weekly, perhaps daily delight, yet he was astigmatic, myopic, amblyopic, cross-eyed, knock-kneed, bowlegged, and box-ankled. To heave huge turkeys, each shot several times with a.38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, into the kitchen sink, seemed a promising idea, not, however, to be realized by the likes of him, who could not catch a ball, the pitiful bastard. To pull up the skirts and slips of all the pretty girls on their way to Sunday mass was a romantic ideal, and yet, he broke his steel clinic glasses every week or so. What about throwing the guys who had ripped his shirt right off the fucking roof, one after the other? But had he ever, once, managed to hit the ball past the infield? Killing that large, handsome German shepherd with a perfect slab of perfectly poisoned meat would have surely benefited mankind, but the poor chooch was afraid to put his head underwater. To become a priest, kind and brave and strong among the disgusting yet worthy lepers, was a noble calling, but how could he find time to study when he couldn’t stop polluting himself for a minute, the pasty-faced, underweight, nervous degenerate? He could easily kidnap Dolores and Georgene from in front of Fontbonne Hall and carry them off to Rio and CARNIVAL! and unspeakable sin, although he would not let them know that he still, on occasion, wet the bed. To sink, with nary a moment’s hesitation, the Staten Island ferry, so as to drown the secret Nazi agents who spied on convoys in the Narrows would have shortened the war by a month, but he was having serious problems with long division. To use his Amazing Hypnotic Powers, from time to time, and solely for the refined amusement of his closest academic chums, so as to compel Miss Ramsay to happily strip naked in front of the hearty group gathered in the detention room was a pastime that appealed to his sense of fair play, but hard, hard to do when she pinched his earlobe and called him a dunce. To smoke a quiet pipe before the cheery fire while mulling over the details of the latest gruesome ax murder always hit the old anglophilic spot, but not for the sort of rough fellow who smoked Wings, Twenty Grand, and Sweet Caporal loosies. To show Liz and Mary how to do the Harlem Glide could have been a charming way to pass the time, had the young women been willing to tolerate the importunate if unintentional prodding of his manly erection. He argued, convincingly, that a Tom Collins was more refreshing than a John Collins, that upstart drink, but his buttocks showed through the large holes in his threadbare corduroy knickers. And who better to warn the grizzled pilots of the Queen Mary and the Normandy, as the great ships approached the Narrows, of the foul Sargasso Sea of floating condoms that threatened their safety? But had not two Garfield Boys cut his tie off with a switchblade and stolen his lunch money? To batter the persons of the neighborhood bullies, in, of course, strict accordance with the Rules of the Ring, while casually remarking on Annette’s tiny though shapely breasts, was always invigorating, but the shirt-cardboard inserts in his worn-out shoes were soaked through. To carry swiftly messages of highest priority, down pitch-black streets, from one air-raid warden to another, could help to bring the Axis to its knees, but 3¢ chocolate sodas and Mrs. Wagner’s strangely malevolent pies had given him a faceful of pimples. Most seriously, he would have liked to explode a magical bomb that he had invented one night in bed, a bomb that would do the Job, that is, maim, dismember, roast, fry, broil, and obliterate all his enemies, but for the fact that a group of charming and brilliant, sober and judicious proxy killers were about to do the trick. Twice.
Turkeys that have been shot, however accurately, with.38 caliber slugs, are not edible. A man named Pasquale Colluccio demonstrated this fact to me when I was sixteen, and to my complete satisfaction.
In Brooklyn, in what many people have been taught by crack journalists to call “a more innocent time,” floating condoms were often called “Coney Island whitefish,” whereas condoms discarded on the ground after use were, quite simply, “scumbags,” semen being, of course, “scum.” Bodies torn apart by bullets fired into them at close range were often come upon in vacant lots in Bath Beach and Canarsie. “Hello! There’s Santo Throckmorton, the jewel thief!” The occasional newborn infant would be fished out, dead as Santo, from ashcans filled with clinkers and “scumbags,” or recovered from the ladies’ room in the Alpine, Stanley, Electra, Bay Ridge, Dyker, and Harbor.
An “ashcan” was the name given to a very large and powerful firecracker, responsible, each Fourth of July, for the loss of the fingers and eyes of many neighborhood youths. These occurrences might be placed under the heading of “Good Practice” for the good and righteous war that was just around the cozy little corner. We showed them.
It is often forgotten that they also showed us.
Someone, after Hiroshima, was reported to have remarked, anent the scientists who had created the bomb: What did they think was going to happen when it exploded?
“Music? Music? Music?”
Lest it be forgotten
AFTER AN HOUR OR SO OF TRYING TO GET her brassiere off, or her skirt up, or both, he lies back, next to her, on the couch, thinking that maybe he’ll just go home, when she accidentally brushes, with the back of her hand, and through his slacks, his still-erect but by now leaden penis, and he realizes that he’s going to come. It’s like a joke. Let’s say, unequivocally, that it is a joke.
Some ten years later, the boy, now, of course, a man, very drunk but not so drunk as his wife, spreads her legs open as they lie, he is somewhat surprised to realize, on the living room carpeting. She is humming, over and over, the first bar of “Ruby, My Dear.” He cannot understand, for the life of him, and it’s not, let’s face it, much of a life, why he is unable to pull her panties any further down than her thighs. Can’t make a fucking thing right anymore, he says to her, but she pays him no mind, or, in any event, she does not reply. Then he puts his head on her naked belly and they both fall asleep.