Landscape With Traveler Page 4
I told the dispatcher what had happened and he started yelling his head off at us, calling us all the names he could think of and ending with, “and now you missed the goddamn bus!” I never could figure out why he was so mad. Royale’s Cajun blood began to rise and he was ready to punch the guy in the face, but I told Royale very firmly to cool it and let me handle the situation. So I pulled myself up, eyebrow (one only) and all, and said in the most stilted “East Coast” style I could muster, “My good man, you really must believe me when I tell you we are aware of the lamentable fact that we have missed, as you say, ‘the goddamn bus.’ But that being a fait accompli, we now find ourselves in need of your assistance in determining a course of action to remedy the situation.”
As an usher I’d seen so many movies with Cary Grant or Bette Davis, etc., that I had no trouble in stringing together endless diatribes in that manner. Well, the man was so nonplused and thereafter so totally cooperative that he immediately phoned ahead to have our seabags taken off the bus. He couldn’t have been nicer, in fact. Royale was impressed beyond words, talking about my amazing triumph for the rest of the evening, though, having witnessed the scene in the showers, etc., this shouldn’t have surprised him that much.
The next bus was two hours away, so Royale dragged me to a bar. I told him I wanted an ice cream soda, but he wouldn’t believe I was serious. In fact, I hardly ever lie, but people rarely believe what I say. Strange. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing all of this down. It’s one thing to hear someone tell you something, but it’s quite another to read it. For some reason the written word is ever so much more real. Well, in the bar Royale downed a huge amount of whiskey and got totally drooling drunk inside a half hour. Less even. Then he drank some more.
We played the inevitable scene in the toilet with me holding him to keep him from falling in (and his neckerchief, too, to keep it clean). At first he couldn’t make it and just kept spitting and gagging so I had—at his insistence—to stick my fingers down his throat a few times to get him started. Even now, I can feel in my mind the sensuous hot, wet softness of his tongue and throat.
Once he got going, he puked his bloody guts out, a monumental, epic vomiting session the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else (except maybe the time I ate thirty or forty kourabiedes—those great Greek cookies made out of nothing but ground-up almonds, butter, and sugar—and topped that with three big plates of spaghetti!). Royale was a little Vesuvius in full eruption, heaving and groaning and spewing out an amazing quantity of dinner, wine, whiskey, and unidentifiable slime. It was terrifying to watch and feel him—by now I was holding him around the waist from behind—wretch, rearing like a wild stallion before each regurgitation. I really thought he’d die from a heart spasm or something. It left him so weak he had to kneel and hug the toilet for a few minutes before I could get him back on his feet and clean him up. He was still drunk as ever and weak besides, but I lugged him over to the wash basin, stood behind him, and while he leaned over and propped himself up as best he could I reached around and washed his face for him, got him straightened up, and combed his hair.
I was half-carrying him out when he decided, naturally, that he also had to piss. So I pulled him over to the urinal. He tried his best, but as soon as he let go of me or the wall to undo his pants he’d fall over—flat out on the floor the first time—so finally he held onto the plumbing while I got in back of him and unbuttoned all those Navy buttons and pulled out his cock and aimed it for him, praying that no one would come into the men’s room.
I’ve unbuttoned a few flys in my day, but this was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done. Going through all the motions, with the buttons, pulling out the cock and pointing, I almost pissed myself until I realized (I was a little drunk, too) that it was Royale’s cock instead of mine. There was a funny surrealistic stretching of time, probably a combination of my own tipsiness and the fear that someone would come in and see us in our innocence and misconstrue the whole thing.
It gives one an odd, good feeling to handle a friend’s penis with no thought of passion. One can give rough treatment to an erect, demanding cock, but unexcited it feels so tender and trusting, so unbelievably soft and vulnerable as it cuddles in your hand all humid and warm that it seems infinitely delicate. I was afraid I would hurt Royale’s as I stood holding it, feeling the strong flow of his urine pouring through it, feeling it move softly with its final squirts, then milking it and flipping off the last few drops before tucking it back inside and buttoning him up. I felt no more sexual interest than I feel when bathing a baby boy. I felt instead a deep tenderness toward this man who had given himself over to me—dare I say put himself into my hands. I was aware of him sexually, but on another, almost theoretical, plane. There was a lovely sensuality in our contact. But the overriding feelings were of sympathy and tenderness.
It seemed he was pissing for hours, but at last we were out in the cool Arizona night. I dumped Royale on a bench and went to get us some containers of coffee to try to sober him up a bit before we had to get the bus. To no avail, and as a result he was still so drunk they wouldn’t let us on the bus. Again he wanted to make a fuss, but I led him away, and then he started crying, sobbing on my shoulder that he was ruining my leave, that not even a brother would be so good to him (which got to me, brother-searcher that I am), hugging me and kissing me and drenching me with tears and drool.
So we went sadly and wobbly back to our park bench where Royale slept for two hours, his head on my shoulder, till another bus came and we successfully faked our way past the driver. It was now about one in the morning. Royale slept some more as we started rolling along, but then got sick again and I had quickly to open the window and shove his head out or we’d have had a scandal and likely got thrown off in the middle of the desert, or so I thought at the time. Luckily, all the passengers were asleep—those to the rear of us on our side with closed windows, thank goodness—and we escaped detection.
We changed buses in Houston, me to go to Brownsville, where my family had moved after I left for boot camp, and Royale to Louisiana. We had breakfast in the bus station this time, and that was the last I ever saw of him, still thanking me with tears in his bleary eyes. I love you, Royale, wherever you are!
17
In
Boot
Camp
In boot camp I’d become friends with Billy Bowdoin, the Recruit Company Commander of our “sister” company, and we were both going on to Jacksonville, Florida, to Airmen’s School. We were in the same company there. I liked Jacksonville—it was worth falling out of your bunk at five in the morning just to see the incredible sunrises. They were so beautiful they made tears come into your eyes, or sometimes so awesome that everyone was struck dumb and just stood gaping at the sky.
Billy was from Florida, a theater bug and “artistic” type in general (in the good sense, I guess), and I had some good times with him. I still played the piano pretty well then (I had studied from age six to seventeen), and we’d go off through the pine woods on the base to a quiet little chapel in the regular Naval Air Station on smoky, fragrant autumn Sunday afternoons, and I’d play Mozart sonatas for him.
He fell in love with me—his first experience with that kind of feeling—and it was unfortunate, since I felt nothing but friendship for him. So there was an undercurrent of tension between us once that began. I was not interested in sex with Billy and thought it kinder to be honest about it. He wouldn’t stop trying and became very tiresome.
However, we went together to Tallahassee a couple of times, and spent the weekend with a professor and his wife who were old friends of Billy’s. They were German and had known many artists and “intellectuals” in Berlin in the ’20s and ’30s, like Klee and Brecht and Weill—you name them and Anna and Dieter Kurtz knew them. He was a composer and professor of humanities, rather pompous but a very nice guy under it all. Their walls were full of Klees, Kandinskys, and Mackes.
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br /> Anna Kurtz bore a striking resemblance to Dietrich, and smoked long thin black cigars. Anna had a remarkable figure, though she was in her mid-fifties, and loved to parade around dressed only in a leotard. Unlike Emil Jannings’s professor, Dieter appeared oblivious to Anna’s obvious flaunting, and never mentioned anything or seemed to notice it. Once, at dinner, she commented, à propos of nothing I can remember, that it wasn’t the length of a man’s penis that mattered to a woman, but the thickness. “Yezz,” she said, “zee zignezz und zee payshenzz. Und zee payshenzz perhapz more even zen zee zignezz.” Then the conversation continued as though she hadn’t spoken.
On the bus back to Jacksonville that night, Billy told me how once Anna, Dieter being absent at that moment, had asked to see his cock, so Billy had taken it out and let her look it over. She didn’t touch it, he said, just nodded, and he stuffed it back into his pants, fearing Dieter would walk back into the room. I imagine had the opportunity presented itself Anna would have expressed to me a similar request—subsequent to her appraisal of his endowment Billy had learned this was a common practice of hers—but it never happened that we were alone together.
18
Billy
Bowdoin
and
I
Chose
Photography
School
After Jacksonville, both Billy Bowdoin and I chose photography school in Pensacola. We saw little of each other and soon were merely “shipmates.” I was working as a typist—yeoman, I should say—in the Commander’s office, while waiting for the next session to begin in the school, and they liked me so much that they held me over for the class after that, just to get all the paperwork done and in order.
I was by that time the “favorite” of the second in command, a nice fellow who had a great beach house and a speedboat and even a little Piper Cub. I had extravagant privileges such as a permanent liberty card, a permit to wear civilian clothes, exemption from bed-check, etc., and was consequently despised by my barracksmates, almost to a man.
I was acting in the Little Theater in town besides all my other pleasures and indulgences, and in general was having a high old time of it. Also the instructors in the school, when I finally started classes, were leery of me. I was good at photography but in a too offhand way for them, and too “arty.” I liked to take pictures of moody landscapes and they wanted me to take technically perfect photos of nuts and bolts.
I passed anyhow, however, and when the billet sheets were passed around I had first choice—the continuing genius! I wanted to go to Japan, but there were no billets for Japan on the list. My friend the Lieutenant Commander had created a special billet for me in Pensacola, but though I noticed it on the sheet, he didn’t tell me about it, and I ended up, much to his hurt and displeasure, choosing the Naval Photo Center in Washington, because Portia, an old college friend of mine, lived there and it would be fun to see her again. Besides, I liked the idea of seeing a city after all these towns.
Before I left Pensacola, however, I accidentally almost killed my “patron” and myself. We were flying out over the Gulf in his plane, which he turned over to me once we’d taken off, and he was down on the floor between my legs giving me a going-over—he was another sex maniac—and I started climbing at too steep an angle that stalled us and sent us into a spin. He managed to get untangled from my legs and the controls and cables just in time to pull us out of it at about fifty feet above the water. Oddly, I wasn’t at all scared—even still had an erection! But he’d had enough and took us home to bed.
19
So
Off
I
Went
to
Washington
So off I went to Washington, a great, beautiful city in those days, which I loved from the start. Portia and I had wonderful times going to the theater and concerts, strolling around the city and seeing the sights, canoeing on the Potomac, listening to records, eating in extravagant restaurants. Wonderful? I wonder. It’s a word I use rather indiscriminately. We were young—twenty-one or twenty-two—and were busily trying to convince the world (ourselves) not only that we were adults, but that we were Prufrock, and we more than half believed it. Only the suppleness of youth could have saved us from the brittle, cool chic we were affecting. Never had invulnerability seemed so absolutely necessary to me as it did then, and never have I wished so much (a desire of which I was only dimly aware and which I disguised as frantically as a teenager his public erections) to be conquered by what I feared. I can’t speak for Portia, of course, since I believed—she did it so beautifully—that she was what she seemed.
20
I
Shared
a
Little
Office
I shared a little office with a Lieutenant Commander in the Research and Development section of the Photo Center. Our section did mainly underwater photography research, which consisted of putting on aqualungs and banging test-model cameras around the pool taking pictures of each other, and then going back to develop the film.
It was a do-nothing job, as are most military jobs, and I mostly stayed in the office playing chess with my officemate. The room had a big glass wall that looked out over the wooded grounds of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where Pound was living at that time. He was my god, and I used to go and stare through the gates at the inmates, trying to see him, but never did. I used to imagine him strewn in a chair, one leg up, cape around his shoulders, large hat flopped to one side, holding court on the lawn like Cyrano de Bergerac come to the convent to visit Roxanne, only in this case it was the others come to visit Ezra. I was too shy to write and ask if I could see him, which is certainly just as well. After all, what would I have to say to God?
In the meantime, I’d started studying ballet with Leon Fokine, who had his school there, and two months after I began male dancers were in such demand that even I was asked to join the company to perform at the Cherry Blossom Festival, where we did, of all things, a big Hungarian czardas.
The guys in the barracks were much amused at my tights hanging on my bunk to dry, and teased me endlessly once they found out what the damned things were. But they came one and all to take pictures of the Cherry Blossom Festival, where they were immensely impressed to see silly Francis Reeves cavorting about on the stage with the beautiful ballet girls. After that they looked on me with more respect, hoping as it turned out that I would introduce them to the “ballerinas,” which I did, but to no avail. Provincial dance students are even more “devoted to their art” than those in New York, who absorb a certain worldliness through simple geographic location.
Another fellow who was in Washington with me whom I’d known at photo school was also studying dance, but modern dance. We met a guy who’d gotten himself out of the Navy by telling the chaplain he was falling in love with all the boys in his barracks. They sent him to the Naval Hospital for psychiatric observation and gave him a general medical discharge after a couple of months.
My dancer friend and I decided that was a fine idea and went with our problem to the chaplain, who was very understanding—too understanding—telling us, in effect to do whatever we wanted but try not to get caught. He may even have invited us to tea—I forget.
21
By
This
Time
There
Were
Three
of
Us
By this time there were three of us who wanted out in order to go to New York and become big stars. We made a pact that if any one of us got caught in the bushes with our pants down, he’d be sure to turn in the other two, as the military investigators always asked for other names. It was unlikely that I’d be caught as I wasn’t doing anything much but going out with Portia, so it was up to the other two, who were named Don and Dan. Dan it was who eventually got caught and in two weeks
he was out. Two weeks later Don was out.
I noticed that I was being followed when I’d leave the base in the evening, but when the guy saw me coming out of a very posh apartment house with a beautiful girl in tow, he’d follow us to a restaurant or bar or concert hall and then go on about his business. A month passed and nothing happened, except that I was always followed.
Then the commander of the photo center sent for me and said he’d had a report about me that had to be checked out. I asked what it might be and he hemmed and hawed embarrassedly and finally came out with it in a very round-about way. I coolly told him it was true and was thereupon whisked out to an interrogation center in Embassy Row, a CIA or CID or something headquarters.
The interrogation was an amusing adventure, in itself, which I enjoyed immensely. It was pure Hollywood, and the agents and I approached our roles in dead seriousness. I was put into a room with a desk, two chairs, and a big, rather oddly placed mirror. I’d seen enough movies to realize that the mirror was not an attempt at interior decoration.
A handsome, well-suited young man entered, sat, and began to ask me stern, vulgarly stated questions like, “Did you ever suck a dick?” I told him politely (with just a hint of firmness) that I would answer no questions until his partner came out from behind the mirror, as I liked to know to whom I was speaking. We both stuck to our guns. “I’ve got all day,” he said with a belligerent patience. “And so,” I smiled, “have I.”
The other man eventually appeared. He was much like his colleague, but even prettier. The questions began again, but now I objected to their language, telling them that I did not speak in that fashion and supposed, since they seemed reasonably well educated and gentlemanly, that neither did they, and proposed that we use language with which we were all more comfortable (the bus dispatcher in Tucson popped into my head, and I had to suppress a smile).