I smiled across the way at Harold, who had distanced himself, checked the near-empty theater, and began doing the pantomime I had learned off Ray Wiley, a worldly child of the army base who claimed to have encountered many queers. I wet both forefingers, smoothed my eyebrows with them, and formed my mouth in an O with my lips covering the hole, then held my arms out as if in a flying tackle. We conceived of queers as sort of helpless roving linebackers apt to dive on you and bury their faces in your loins. Wiley told many happy stories about how these men were discovered in their act in army lounges and stomped senseless. You could also use burning naphtha to rout them.
“What in hell?” Harold hissed, flicking eyes around the precincts like a spy.
He came over and grabbed my arm very strongly for such a skinny creature. Harold wore a formless blue serge suit with a clip-on green tie on his flat collar like a salesman at a funeral. I don’t believe he owned a button-down. He had on those heavy black executive shoes too. I noticed him red-eyed. He’d been crying quietly about Godot. Just as I’d wept tinnily for Natalie Wood.
“Behave, fool. You’re not in your own pathetic little country. Something wonderful has happened here, and you’re totally unmarked by it.”
“No. I’m marked, Hare. Truly marked, I swear. It was all there, man, straight on.”
“That and Our Town are the dramas of the century. Now you’ve seen both of them, thanks to me. What do you get from them? Zero. Out here queer-baiting. My God, you remind me of all those wry husbands dragged to the theater by their wives. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.”
“Look, man, I got something from it, all right? I only wish Natalie Wood was in it.”
Harold had pushed too far and I went sullen, out to his hopelessly square car, which looked even more like the grounded rocket of a very confused small nation. I thought about how stern old Harold was a great hypocrite, really, him with his album and glue-on straw from mouth to girl. The Studebaker left the campus with its weak hissing. He wouldn’t let it go.
“You’re not even up to sophomoric yet, is your trouble, cat. Cats know things, they sense things. Young men like Elvis have left you light years behind.”
I got a thicker skin of the sullen around me. Oh yeah? What about your Asian women, the trolls you cultivate now? I wanted to say. What great sense was in that? And, and. . Harold did not wear his heart on his sleeve. He wore it on his forehead, throbbing away at you. I had a mother to scold me already, thank you.
“If you were worthy, I’d take you out for a drink, a liqueur. That’s what your mother expects me to do, teach you to drink,” he suddenly said, picking up on the very mother thought in my head, flicking me, chums again, on the suit sleeve. “I’m sorry for growling, cat. Really.”
“Likoor? Liquor?”
On Harold’s patient directions, the amused bartender at the Holiday Inn made us a sort of booze snow cone with crème de menthe. I guess I was so healthy and unpolluted, I felt it immediately, my first drink, or suck. I lit up like a pink sponge. All the world seemed at my feet, and I could barely stand the joy of Godot, Natalie Wood, and Harold in it at the same time. Even the city name, Baton Rouge, was vastly hip. Red stick, red stick. Very way out. Life was a long wonderful thing. It was so good you expected some official to show up and cancel it.
I tried to impress Harold with scandals I knew of myself, and told him about a shooting on a town square down south. A man had killed two policemen with a shotgun and gone home to threaten his own family, whereupon his oldest son ran him against a house with a truck and killed his own father with a.22, nine shots, the father yelling “Oh my God!” over and over. At the end, the son threw the pistol on the ground and said, “Daddy, why’d you make me do it? You knew I loved you.”
“No, no. That’s. . just baroque misery. So beastly obvious. Nothing but low, mean, stunned feelings result. Nothing is left but the mourners. It’s the province of our bard up at Oxford. Nobody throbs in shame, derided worldwide. Scandal pierces, is poignant, pi-quant, resonant. If I could reorder that sad thing they call a state fair. . You see, scandal is obsession, essence! Instead of the freak show, I’d have the heroes of scandal caged up while folks filed by to review them.”
“Review them? Then what?”
“Why, throw rotten fruit, eggs and excrement at them!” Harold gave that long girlish neigh that grabbed his throat after some of his insights, and too many heads turned in the Holiday Inn bar. He didn’t care.
“Scandal is delicious, little man. All we are is obsession and pain. That is all humans are. And when these wild things go public, and are met with howls, they ring out the only honest history we have! They are unbearable! Magnificent! Wicked! You read where the pathetic object goes off to psychiatric care or some phony drinking hospital, or a dull jail, but that’s only for the public, slamming the door shut on them. What they really are is raving on the heath, little man, in their honest unbearable humanity!”
So, in months afterward, I tried to achieve soul, or stand in the path of it so it would come to me. And I thought deeply about what I could do, what I had, who I was, to possibly rave on the heath someday. I wanted very much a rare, perhaps even dark, thing with a woman — Natalie Wood or her cousin, after I’d sent New York Slim off begging. My imagination could do nothing else for me, otherwise.
Harold sort of faded at the little college. I got tired of him, and at midyear a real Korean vet appeared as a late student on campus. He was much like Harold, they said, and Harold was very annoyed at being somewhat displaced and duplicated. The other fellow went crackers in a motel over in Jackson one night. Harold was called over by a local pastor to help minister to him. He didn’t like this role at all, although he did what he could. The man had true awful memories of Chosin Reservoir and was not poetic at all in his breakdown, also very real. Harold, you could tell, was fairly sorry to help him get back on his feet, and considered his insanity banal. I’d never seen Harold this ungenerous before, but I guess he was threatened by this man at the tiny college, where he used to hold forth among his desperate harem in the grill. He began giving “all of his entity” to a new large buxom girl with red cheeks who played clarinet in the orchestra, and I quit seeing much of him. He swore she was the one, an honest life’s passion. He was glad the waiting was over. I saw them at the drugstore together once. Harold was even paler and thinner and a good deal shorter than the girl. Drained by love, I guess. She had big calves and a very long lap, and seemed completely conquered by him. He was soon to graduate and become a high school teacher in a town north in the state that I didn’t think held much promise for scandal. He went off with no good-bye, the girl with him.
I just remembered that before he left I at last hit the mark on scandal for him, and he saw I was coming around.
“Okay, give me a worthy scandal, little man.” I was taller than Harold.
“This way. General MacArthur is discovered hunching a sheep just minutes after his ‘Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away’ speech to a grateful Congress.”
“Finally. Perfect. Discovered by one of Truman’s aides, some nervous square from Missouri.”
The wild horsey shout.
My parents were much relieved, I detected, when Harold was finally away. The age, the dress, his bewildering pull, never set right for them, and my mother was disturbed when I told her he had found her attractive.