A Fan's Notes (41 page)

It was when I detected that Mr. Blue wanted a good deal more than a yes-man and was passionately seeking technical expertise that I grew nervous. Within two days he had interrupted an involved explanation I was making of the New York Giants
’
umbrella defense to shout,
“
How do you get by the smell?
”
“
Pardon?
”
I said (with Mr. Blue I said
“
pardon
”
quite a bit).
“
You heard me,
”
he said.
“
How do you get by the smell?
”
With strident purposefulness he narrowed his blue eyes on me.
“
How the hell would I know?
”
I said.
“
Hold your breath, I guess.
”
I giggled self-consciously. Such levity appeared to displease Mr. Blue, and when it did so, I grew somewhat impatient.
“
Well, for Christ
’
s sake,
”
I said.
“
It doesn
’
t have to smell, you know.
”
Then I essayed a detailed,

admirably wrought, and charming little talk on the art of douching, and the powders, lotions, perfumes, and so forth that were available to render
la petite pussi
as aromatic and palatable as a toasted marshmallow. Despite the
“
artistry
”
of my monologue, Mr. Blue pretended he would have none of it; and all the time I talked he paced the floor, his hands jammed deep down into his jacket pockets, fiercely sucking in his feline cheeks and then blowing out—
ppttoooooeeeee
, as though, toasted marshmallow or no, even the thought of such
“
perversities
”
(as though I were suggesting them!) was more than he could endure and forcing him to emit a furious spit:
ppttoooooeeeee
. Whenever he did that, I
’
d giggle like a damn fool; and to show me that his displeasure was less than in transigent, Mr. Blue would giggle, too, tentatively. Then he
’
d compound my bewilderment by staring at me as if I were the ultimate heresiarch.

Whenever Mr. Blue and I spoke of cunnilingus, and within three days I was aware that Mr. Blue wanted to speak of little else, we found ourselves giggling with a peculiar, naughty-boy relief. By chance I once found myself at a summer camp next to that of a lovely girl of seventeen who, having just graduated from high school, was preparing to enter the university in the fall. Though I had never before met her, I knew her parents. They were a very even, almost sane, couple who went to church Sundays, who thought Richard Nixon an admirable man, and who would have had one sign a promissory note against a five-dollar loan. Nothing was wrong with them save

that they were damnably hung up on all sorts of banalities, orthodoxies, and affectations they imagined had something to do with life; and thus one day on the diving float in front of their camp I was astonished, as even recalling it today I still am astonished, to find myself teaching the daughter to mea sure off a chunk of her arm and enunciate
fungoo
. Explaining that she had seen the fellows on the high school football team do it, she asked me what it meant, I told her, and she tried it herself a number of times—fun-goo, FUN-goo, fun-GOO— becoming moderately adept at it. Before I fully realized what was happening, at her own insistence, though abetted by my coaching, she was mouthing all sorts of obscenities—mouth ing them between waving gaily to her Mom who sat some distance off on a lawn chair knitting a red wool sweater to keep her baby warm at the university.

Never was there any thought of sex between the girl and myself; and I slowly, rather amazedly, came to understand that the girl had been drowning in an unhealthy finickiness of atmosphere and that what she was so touchingly striving to do was pulverize the mystery from the forbidden words: fuck and suck and cunt and prick and cocksucker. Wanting no longer to be repulsively enthralled or struck tongue-tied in the face of the moronic graffiti scribbled on bridge abutments and toilet walls, she desperately yearned to come to an intimacy with forbidden things and thereby negotiate terms with a whole segment of life which had only recently begun opening to her. Not only did she want to learn to measure off her arm (she never got the hang of that, a man
’
s gesture apparently) and bellow
fungoo
, but she insisted that I coach her in offhandedly dropping expressions like
“
Up yours
”
and
“
Suck a big dick.
”
Nor did I have any compunctions about such coaching or fear lest she corrupt her freshman dormitory when she arrived all fresh-faced and filthy-tongued at the college, know ing that once she could casually and carelessly throw away such ribaldries, for her they would never hold trepidation again, would cease to mean anything.

Thus it was, too, that when I thought she had handled an
“
Up yours
”
with a particularly easy sophistication, I became very schoolmarmish and complimented her. What joy my praises gave her! To them she
’
d bound up on the raft, stretch out her arms as though in free flight, and in her bikini do wild, sharp-stepping jigs about the edge of the rocking float, all the time exclaiming,
“
No kidding? Did I really do good?
”
Then she
’
d wave gaily to Mom, who would wave gaily back and continue stabbing her needles into the embryo sweater. When, with an emphatic really, I
’
d assure her that she was becoming an authentic debauchee, she
’
d lower herself slowly back to the canvas of the float, lie face down next to me, fall silent, and become excessively self-absorbed. Then quite suddenly she
’
d begin giggling with that peculiar relief, the relief at inimical things being rendered familiar.

And though Mr. Blue giggled, he proved, unlike the girl, a hard, intractable pupil. He had made of cunnilingus a shibboleth of Chinese Wall proportions, and his giggling appeared to me little more than an attempt to raze that wall with switches. Despite his absorption with the idea, within him he harbored some fixed and enduring hostility to acting upon it, and for that reason he was quite helpless to unclutter his mind of the fascination it held for him. When he was embarked on the subject, I often shouted,
“
Peace—oh, Mr. Blue, give me peace!
”
Never did it occur to him that such activity was a way of giving a woman pleasure or of paying adoring homage to the very special sweets of her gender; instead, Mr. Blue was hypnotized by the ambivalent notion that such oral endearments would either defile him utterly or unlock the gates to Rosicrucian insights. Just how nutty Mr. Blue was on the subject didn
’
t become totally apparent to me until the fourth and last day I worked for him, when I took him to see the deaf
woman.

At an oppressively fastidious dinner I once said,
“
Pass the fucking butter,
”
putting the emphasis on the obscenity so that my host wouldn
’
t be rattled by doubts and would thereby be unmistakably offered the alternative of knocking me down or, subject to his sense of the decencies, at least exiling me from his table. What distressed and finally enraged me about Mr. Blue
’
s approach to the woman was that she apparently had no such alternative. No sooner did Mr. Blue convince himself of the genuineness of her deafness than he began—the grand legs, the appetizing breasts, and the soiled peignoir must so have conspired to complete his fantasy of the archetypical housewife that the temptation proved irresistible—mouthing aloud all sorts of scabrous suggestions related to his fixation.

Like Seedy, my predecessor from the long-ago, carrying the great portfolio case, I had led Mr. Blue up the sidewalk, with the aid of the pad had made the introductions, and we were now seated about the indigo table with the portfolio case open displaying colored aluminum samples mounted in the interior of its topside. A paragraph at a time, Mr. Blue dictated his closing arguments to me, and after writing them down I passed them on to the woman to read. Like Khrushchev dictating to his translator, Mr. Blue sat there unswervable, somewhat magnificent. As he dictated, the unhearing woman, impressed with having the
“
Alcoa man
”
in her house, smiled respectfully and diffidently at him; and as I (and as Khrushchev
’
s translator was once or twice said to have done) edited his nonsensical spiel onto the pad, she turned and smiled considerably more easily at me. All this time, and while she was reading what I had written, Mr. Blue let loose, enunciating very distinctly, a torrent of four-letter words. Twice I turned to him and said,
“
Shut your fucking mouth,
”
but he only winked, implying that I must of course be joking. Not only hadn
’
t the woman the alternative of slapping Mr. Blue
’
s face; she had waxed so enthusiastic over the color samples that I thought we might actually be making a sale and that, acting as he was, Mr. Blue was going to scuttle that sale. When she was reading perhaps the dozenth paragraph I
’
d prepared, and Mr. Blue was glibly mouthing his latrine chatter, the ordeal reached an unexpected and jarring climax. Detecting that the woman
’
s cheeks had risen to a high and incendiary red, I recalled the doctors
’
pathological prognoses and, my body going instantaneously rigid as a pipe, I thought,
“
My God, she
’
s hearing us!
”
Was it possible? And immediately I thought,
“
Yes—it is possible!
”
Behind a
“
deaf middle-class housewife one might drop cherry bombs or smash inflated paper sacks to no avail, but what if one crept up stealthily and over her right shoulder whispered,
“
How
’
d you like a prick stuck right in your left eyeball?
”
But of course she was hearing him! Jumping abruptly and wildly up, I slammed the portfolio case shut, snapped its fasteners, picked it up, and dashed into the dining room headed for the front door. Just before going through it, I heard Mr. Blue
’
s voice:
“
Hey, what the—
”
Then I was going down the steps, hurrying across the lawn toward the
Cadillac.

Excessively silent, perplexed and brooding, for perhaps half an hour Mr. Blue wove the Cadillac round and round among the blocks in the neighborhood before, my anger finally abating, I turned to him, intent on saying dreadful things.
“
The Yucatdn, huh!
”
I was going to say.
“
Why, you
’
ve never been out of this crumby city. Not only that, you
’
re crazy to boot! A proper loony! If you
’
re going to eat a snatch, eat one! But for lord
’
s sake, shut your bloody yap about it! You
’
re turning me into a spluttering idiot! An
eeeed-yuuhhht
!
”
It was going to be a superb piece of venom, it was! As though it were all in some way his fault, I was even plotting ways to tell the Counselor off. Before he got a chance to roll his eyes about, dribble his tongue over his chin, rap me tentatively on the skull, and calmly say,
“
Straight-shooter, it is, I think, about time you went away again,
”
it would be necessary to disarm the Counselor. Creeping up behind him, I
’
d just start screaming,
“
I
’
m the one who
’
s supposed to be nuts!
”
Perhaps here I
’
d pound myself dramatically on the chest.
“
I
’
m the one who
’
s been locked up! But everyone who comes to this fruity apartment is nuttier than I am! Absolute, unequivocal lunatics!
”
“
By God,
”
I thought,
“
all those madmen will get a real dressing down; sheer murder, they
’
ll see a real paranoiac in action! Ha!
”

Ha indeed; for when I turned and looked at Mr. Blue, I found that I couldn
’
t even begin on him. Sheepish and saddened by my fury, he hadn
’
t said a word in the half-hour we had driven around and had sat there hunched over the Cadillac
’
s wheel, just a runt whose legs barely reached the brake pedal, an earthenware dwarf. He was dirty, hot-browed and weary, old—old. About him there had always been this lapse of personal care intimating slummy origins: if his shoes were shined, his collar was dirty; if he wore a spanking-new tie, his soiled, three-day socks cascaded over his shoe tops. As a
“
factory representative
”
he had never been able, so to speak, to put it all together at one time and make himself convincing. On this day the brow and the face were sweaty with fatigue, the fingernails and hands smudged with dirt, the shirt and collar wrinkled and stained, the pants oil-flecked and unpressed, the shoes turned-over and scuffed, the nostrils and ears gardens for unseemly hairs—everything was wrong. Moreover, studying him I was suddenly sure that it wasn
’
t so much a princely neglect of person as a thing ingrained. He exuded tenement beginnings, an aura of dark and oppressive places, rat-filled infancy, Saturday-night baths, underwear fouled with three days
’
sweat and intimate body dirts; and I knew, too, that that
ppttoooooeeeee
wasn
’
t so much a hyperbolically farcical gesture as an unavoidable one. Rising up from such dreary places, it was little wonder he couldn
’
t accept the labia as a proper altar at which to place one
’
s murmuring devotions. And, as I have suggested, worse for me than anything was how old he suddenly seemed, perhaps even seventy! For all his youth-seeking exercises, his arms looked infinitely frail, the ancient muscles falling prunishly away from the humerus. The femurs of his stubby legs showed so fleshlessly prominent and sticklike through his unpressed trousers that I wondered if the flesh of that other, that
“
poignant bone,
”
hadn
’
t shriveled, too, wondered if his oral fixation wasn
’
t sublimation for the irremediable impotence of age. I almost asked,
“
Can you still get it up, Mr. Blue?
”
But I didn
’
t. Then I almost demanded,
“
How old are you
really
, Mr. Blue?
”
But in the same way I was unable to sustain a need to vent spleen, watching him hunched up over the wheel of the Cadillac that was too big for him, so unkempt and so giving off his harsh beginnings, I couldn
’
t say anything finally.

Nor did it make any difference. One o
’
clock, it was time to go to Moose
’
s or O
’
Reilly
’
s or Big John
’
s for
“
lunch.
”
Doubt less motivated by the tacit knowledge that our partnership was dissolved, we remained in the bar for seven hours that day and got very drunk. Despairing that I
’
d ever get him into any houses, Mr. Blue had increasingly given his tales over to dreams of sales; and that final day proved the one he related the barmy nonsense about the farmer
’
s storm windows and gave the whore fifteen dollars for her dress. Since he spent perhaps fifty dollars that day, I must say that Mr. Blue was a prince when parting with dough. When by eight o
’
clock I had drunk myself sober, I found that I still had four, ice-melted highballs in front of me, and that Mr. Blue was passed out with his head face down in the sour booze of a table behind me. Knowing that I
’
d somehow have to get him home, I told the bartender to take away the drinks, ordered a cup of coffee, and removed the Cadillac
’
s keys from Mr. Blue
’
s clasped hand laid out before his head on the table.