Boswell (11 page)
I still have in my files the photograph Sandusky gave me. A picture of a serious young man (like one of those figures you see in a tableau—can it move, does it breathe, is it real?) in a loin cloth. His arms (of course, that is merely a convenience, a convention of language; they are no more
his
than mine) fluid with muscle, his chest… It’s in my files. A cornerstone!
Herlitz, you comedian, you clown, you had some Old World fun with Boswell, hey? That Herlitz! He played a joke. Not just on me—on Freud, on the German generals, on the man with the monorails. He gave us projects. What, you think greatness is fun? Laughs? You think it’s all honors and international congresses and dressing for dinner? No, I tell you. Everybody dies. We’re all lashed to the mast. The man goes down beneath his cause like the soldier beneath his flag. Only his achievement, his
thing,
lingers. Men leave us their lousy things, that’s what. Vaccine or the patents or a greasy wallet with fourteen dollars and change and sixty dollars in uncashed traveler’s checks—it’s all the same. (They take it out of the hospital safe and send it to you in the mail. “Here are your father’s effects,” the letter says, not unkindly. They call them that,
effects.
Who needs his effects? I want
him.
)
So it was his selflessness I couldn’t stand in Sandusky, his heatless heart. Reckless! Let’s not kid ourselves, we all have to vacate the premises. But the
great?
They receive their eviction notices and—poof—it’s into the street at once with their furniture and effects. It’s stupid. Stupid? It’s immoral, what Forbush calls “The Mad Scientist Motif of Modern Life.” You think that’s an exaggeration? When the professor takes out the young girl’s brain and wires it up to the ape, you think maybe he’s got something against that girl? Like hell. The product at any price. So they go on pumping yellow jack into their veins, feeding themselves plague in the afternoon tea, dropping the bomb first on each other to see if it will work later on us. Like Sandusky, they build the body and scorn the soul. Maybe, at bottom, that’s good Christianity —maybe, at bottom, that’s what makes saints—but it’s immoral, damn it. Give me the self-centered who don’t make anything. Give me, by God, the raptless.
I came away shaken from my interview with Sandusky. Well, it was a disappointment, you see, a revelation. After Sandusky I would always know where I stood. It was I who had betrayed Herlitz after all. I had ignored what he had told me, that I was not a great man myself. Boswell, the sneak hero.
So I went on the wagon. I made resolutions. Lay off the great, I told myself, stay away from them. Swear off. You are not up to even the over-the-hill great, their frigid Decembers of achievement.
Ah, it was conscious though. I couldn’t help my
feelings.
What I was really doing was lying low.
An excerpt from my journal:
May 14, 1948. Los Angeles.
A curious thing. Perhaps I
am
a man of destiny—of sorts. At least one of those people to whom things happen. Like two weeks ago when I slept with the whore. I didn’t have anything with me. But in my excitement I couldn’t wait, and since then I’ve been worried about syphilis. It’s really amazing. I know absolutely nothing about syphilis. Ignorant as a bird. I had meant to go to the library to look it up, but I never got around to it. It was really preying on my mind when a few days ago
Time
magazine devoted two pages to it in the Medicine section. A coincidence, I suppose, one I must make nothing of, but that sort of thing happens too frequently for me to brush it aside. I
am
special, unique. Not, I’m afraid, in any way that will ever do me any good, but I won’t be bored, I think. Do others feel their uniqueness as much as I do? Mine is sometimes staggeringly oppressive.
That’s not the reason for this entry, however. (See? Now I have “reasons,” though when I first started this journal it was only because I felt I needed some device to stop time, a sort of spiritual Brownie. I made entries like those phrases travelers put down in guestbooks: “Awe-inspiring.” “I am thunderstruck.” “It makes one feel insignificant.” But the truth is, nothing makes me feel insignificant. Hell, big as it is, couldn’t make me feel insignificant.
I came to Los Angeles to wrestle. I’ve been here almost three days. I must be particularly careful in Los Angeles. My resolution. And the temptation is great in a city like this. If one doesn’t absolutely shut his eyes the possibilities that he will run into the great are enormous. Washington, D.C., is the same way, so is Manhattan. So I must be very careful when I’m there, too. In Washington the great are too busy, and in New York they are frequently strangers in town themselves, but in Los Angeles they’re at home. Instead of this relaxing them, as one might think it would, it makes them even more self-conscious. This is their territory, but somehow they expect to be spotted. Perhaps they are even eager for it. Even in slacks and sandals they seem to throw out hints of their presence as sure and solid as a scent. Of course I am particularly vulnerable to this, and the temptation is always to forget what I learned from my encounter with Sandusky, to throw it all up and devote myself to some strategy which will engage their attentions. Also, there is the fact that I wrestle. I am, after all, something of a public figure myself—though, strangely, I am not really colorful or flashy enough to be a feature attraction, or even, for that matter, a contender in the more important preliminaries. I start the evening, or end it, or am the other guy on unimportant tag-teams. Nevertheless, I have often spotted stars in the audience. They flock to exhibitions of this sort. They sit there, their collars opened, their hats high on the backs of their heads, and scream obscenities at us. The women are even worse than the men. They come in furs or evening dress and study us darkly. We athletes are sort of American bullfighters. They admire us for what they think is our simplicity, our animality—which is only surface, after all, while their own is buried and therefore more urgent. Before the ballplayer, the wrestler, the boxer, the bullfighter, there was the gladiator, before that the Christian martyr, before that some shepherd on a slope of the Apennines.
So whenever I am here I must exercise my full will. It’s a real test of the resolution I made over a year ago. (In Cedar Rapids what danger am I in? Some obscure millionaire? A governor, perhaps, if I’m lucky?
Lucky?
What am I talking about? Which side am I on?) And then one doesn’t simply fly into Los Angeles two hours before a match and then out on a late plane two hours afterwards. Bogolub, the big promoter out here, insists on the wrestlers having at least two sessions in the gym before they go on—even sub-eventers like myself. I once complained to him that I thought the act got stale if it was rehearsed too often. “I don’t think so,” Bogolub said. He’s a tiny man, white-faced, like someone with a heart condition. He goes in a limousine which he drives himself to all the gyms in the city to watch his wrestlers. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think practice makes perfect.” “I can’t agree,” I told him. “That’s what makes horserac- ing,” he said, pointing vaguely toward the ring. I shrugged and went off to work out on the mat—my kind doesn’t even get to use the practice ring—with the ox I had been matched with. About ten minutes later the guy had pinned me according to plan and I was lying there underneath him, thinking absently of my Uncle Myles and how I had been either on top or underneath more men in my life than girls, when I saw Bogolub watching me carefully. It was almost a quarter of an hour after our talk, but he continued as if there had been no interruption. “In addition,” he said, “you’re just a tanker. The biggest men, the
biggest,
work out the routine in the gym before a match.” He’s an interesting man. He’s invented most of the famous wrestling personalities—a Herlitz of the Mat World, as it were. (There I go. Since I resolved not to chase the great I find that more and more of my time is taken up with the parochially important or the simply unusual. Why, for that matter, did I even challenge Bogolub? What am I? A dumb tanker. If I want to wrestle in Los Angeles I have to play by his rules.)
So in Los Angeles the question of how I can spend my time is very serious. I could stay in my room, I suppose, but what’s the point? Somehow I keep forgetting that I am still a very young man. In another context, with parents or perhaps just friends, I might even be considered a kid. Loneliness makes for precocity, but there is a danger that it makes for world weariness, too, if you let it. What right have I got to be world weary? A dumb tanker! There will be no drinking myself unconscious in hotel rooms for me, yet, no going down to some all-night cafeteria for a two-o’clock cup of coffee and a quick shot of human companionship. Just because one is resigned does not mean one is through. I promise you at least that much, Boswell. You are not through, in no sense washed up, you and your middle-aged heart. Just because you have it figured about life—
everybody dies
—there’s still no reason to turn yourself inside out, to go through the world skeleton first, to make every morning shave a
memento mori.
I try to keep myself presentable, like some old lady in a home for the aged with eau de cologne up her smelly crotch. That’s the ticket. Appearances, the heart’s red hair ribbon.
That’s
what makes horseracing! So I force myself.
Well, that’s not accurate. It’s true that sometimes I have to force myself—but not last night. Last night I was feeling pretty good about things. I wanted to see a motion picture. But in Los Angeles you can’t go to a first-run movie without running the risk of bumping into some damned movie star. They’re crawling all over the lobbies on some crazy busman’s holiday. Do I need that kind of aggravation? I figured it would be best to get out of town, so I bought a paper to see what was playing in the suburbs. In Chilanthica there was a revival of
Plenty of
Daddies
with Edward Arnold and S.G. “Cuddles” Sackell and Eugene Pallette. Carmen Miranda and José Iturbi are in it, too, and Margaret O’Brien and Sabu, the Elephant Boy, in his first non-jungle picture. It introduces little Dickie Dobber, whom I’ve never seen in anything else. I see this film whenever I have the chance. One day I’m going to buy my own print, just to have it around.
I called the theater and asked when the last feature started; then I called the public service people and found out exactly how to get there. (Just like the old days. In certain ways I am still a planner, an arranger. My movements are a series of carefully plotted steps, like the directions on how to assemble a child’s toy. It never rains on my picnics.)
The name of the movie house in Chilanthica is the Orpheum. At first this was very satisfying. Nothing had ever happened to me in an Orpheum. It would be like, being bitten by a dog named Rover. But then I thought, Chilanthica is a very small town, there’s only one movie here. “Orpheum” is always the
other
movie in a small town, practically a brand name, the manager’s choice after “The Chilanthica” has been spoken for. It was disquieting. (I’m not that sensitive, but as I say, Los Angeles makes me nervous.) There was only the Orpheum, I kept telling myself,
only
the Orpheum. It was fishy. It was too much like being reduced to primal things. It didn’t make me any easier to note that the movie was on Elm Street. And sure enough there was an ice cream
parlor
(not a shoppe) across the street. Had the town been called Centerville or Maplewood I might have bolted, but “Chilanthica” was enough like the real world. So, like a jerk I bought my ticket and went in. It was, as I say, primal—like walking out onto a bare stage. I needn’t have called; there was only one showing. At 8:30, of course. I stood in the lobby watching some of the others coming in. It was pleasant at first, like the experience with the name, to see their anonymity, to exult in it as one can sometimes revel in muddy river water. A GP; the man who owned the filling station; the druggist; Mother Hubbard from the restaurant; the couple that ran what must surely have been “The Emporium” (he, vaguely big-time, well-dressed, sporty; she, almost but not quite chic). And people. Respectable, safely unimportant. Had I my wits I would have realized how pat it all was, they all were, these maskers, these phony Republicans.
Indeed, as a stranger, I had
their
attention. I saw the man from the Emporium eying me. Too big for a traveling salesman, he was thinking. Maybe a lettuce farmer. Has money for a movie. Maybe the talk about drought is premature. It might be a better year than they say. Have to talk to Margot about the fall line.
I walked off and bought some popcorn from the high school girl at the candy counter. She was a thin little thing with no makeup except for some heavily applied Johnson’s Baby Powder over her pimples. She handed me the popcorn and smiled nervously. She lays, I thought triumphantly. I breathed in deeply, smelling the popcorn, the butter, the salt, the waxy paper around the candy, the spilled soda bubbling down the drain of the Coca-Cola machine, the rust around the handle of the water fountain. Filling my lungs with the pleasant mediocrity of the place, I could settle down here, I thought. A nice place to raise children, hey, Herlitz? They would let me play in the band, go to the dances in the community center. (It was all center, this place, for the inner man.) Just forty-five minutes from Broadway, oompa, oompa pa. I actually whistled it and Mrs. Emporium, Margot herself, looked up and smiled at me. Mother Hubbard smiled at me. They don’t whistle songs like that any more, I thought. Who eats real home cooking these days? I winked at her and she blushed.
Blushed!
Fool, idiot, fall guy, I should have thought. A setup. A shill. The whole town’s a shill. They
don’t
eat home cooking any more! Main Street’s a novel, not a place. They’ve money in the bank, kids on Fulbrights. In the summer they go to Rome and have audiences with the Pope. Some guy in New York writes copy for Mother Hubbard’s soup. The factory is behind the shoppe (not the parlor). It’s served in Rosenthal bowls in executive suits from here to London. There are no people any more. Everybody’s a personage. Interview them, interview them all!