The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (50 page)

“Ah, hell, don’t worry about it,” Rick said as he took a healthy sip of the fresh drink that had appeared in front of him, “It’s an old story; fresh kid tries hitting above his weight, gets sucker-punched by latter-day Delilah, misplaces the blame and goes away mad. And, of course, still nuts about Delilah.”

Ziggy, slow to respond, recalled the wry smile to duty. “Shit,” he said, “Guess who else is.”

Rick nodded. “You, me, and that champion asshole Preston Rogers, as worthless a motherfucker that ever lived. And who knows who else?”

“Damn if I know. I didn’t allow myself to think like that about white girls. My momma would’ve whupped my ass till sunup if she ever saw me even lookin’ like I was thinkin’ about white girls atall. Hey.”

“What?”

“Preston
Rogers. Dr. Rogers’ boy. He knocked her up, didn’t he?”

“Not for lack of trying, but it turns out he didn’t. She was late with her period, I guess for the first time, panicked and dropped it in
Preston’s lap. When he wouldn’t go for it, she slung it right on over into mine. I don’t know if you remember, but we were next door neighbors, which is why I got interested in her in the first place. Her tits sprouted early; she was 12, I guess. I was a year younger, and I honestly didn’t know what to think about a girl whose chest all of a sudden had started looking like my mom’s. I didn’t even respond to her teasing until I was 12, and by then she’d showed ’em to me probably half a dozen times.

“There was this space between our garages, about a yard wide, and at the front there was a trellis at the end of the fence; kudzu had taken it over, so you couldn’t see in there at all, from either house. The first time it happened, I heard her calling me, but I couldn’t see her. ‘Come around to the back, goosey!’ She said. I finally figured out where she was, and went in there. She was just standing there with her shirt pulled up. I didn’t know what to say, but after that, any time I heard ‘goosey’ I knew she was there. By the time she quit doin’ it, I was havin’ wet dreams two or three times a week. And I didn’t know what they were. So you might say, hell, I might say, she was my first love, and you know what they say about first loves.”

For the first time, they’d gotten ahead of the waiter. After Ziggy shouted, “James!” he said, “‘They’ always have something to say about everything under the sun. What’s the popular notion about first loves?”

Rick chuckled. “Why, Zig, that you never get over ’em.”

Ziggy’s face seemed to Rick to have materially elongated. “Goddam!”

“Zig, Zig; not you too.”

“Looks like it. You coulda gone all day without tellin’ me sump’m like that.”

This civil rights movement’s damn troublesome already, Rick thought as the cab driver did his best to dodge the potholes on
Maine Avenue
on the way back to
Fort
McNair. Now I’ve gotta find my way back to
Langley
tomorrow with a fucking hangover. I expect it’ll be a light one, compared to Ziggy’s. Good thing that his pals came down from upstairs and took him out of there. Jesus, we really stepped off into the deep end! Once we both admitted we were still in love with her, school was out where Trisha was concerned. Probably not the first time a confessional turned into a fracas, if you could call it that.

Maybe if I hadn’t said that she was kind of stingy with her lovemaking, the stagecoach wouldn’t have gone over the cliff. Where I was headed was that I didn’t love her because she was a superior fuck; I love her because she awakened feelings in me that no one else ever has. But I didn’t get to the second part before he interrupted me, saying that he felt the same way, but that black people never expected whites to be as good at sex as they are. That, as my mother used to say, “flew all over me.”

I shouldn’t have told him that whopper about having sex with lots of colored girls; hell, I’ve only had a couple over what we might call my career, but the other part of what I told him was true. I really never could see much difference, black or white; some individuals just enjoy it more than others. Anyway, that really got him going. Next he tells me that Jack and I are “promiscuous,” and reminds me of how we used to “take advantage” of “those poor Bishop twins.” Then he goes on about Jack’s family, saying his grandmother was killed while she was running around on her husband, and that his mother carried on with Moses Kubielski for years, and with Sheriff McDaniel for years before that. Said he loves Jack for what he’s done for his brother Ralph, but that he can’t excuse the kind of behavior that Jack and I’ve indulged in.

Well, that tore it for me. Told him that as far as I knew there weren’t degrees of promiscuity, and that aside from what he’d been doing with Trisha, that I’d make a small wager that in
Korea, he’d been as promiscuous as the next Marine. He then proceeded to tell me that I was full of shit, and that if he could he’d marry Trisha tomorrow, he would, just to keep me from “further sullying her.” The real fun began when I suggested he give his mother a call and ask her who she thought had “sullied” Trisha. I figured that’d smoke him out. It did, but when he stood up to swing at me he tripped and went down like a loblolly pine in a pulpwood tract, out cold. Just as well, because I felt, just for a second, like I could very easily kill him.

Guess I’ll always love her, in one way or another, but things really came to a head back in ’58, that New Year’s in
New York, after we beat the Giants in Yankee Stadium for the NFL championship. Now they call it “the greatest football game ever played,” won when Alan Ameche punched in from the two-yard line in the first overtime period In NFL history. Looking back now, it’s clear to me how hard I worked talking her into coming. She had absolutely zero interest in going to the game; said she’d catch a late plane. But she’d only been to New York one other time in her life, and I’d sprung for that suite at the Plaza- a fucking suite, that even after the Colts’ front office got an inside rate for me, was too damn much- but being on the NFL championship team, even as a rookie who didn’t play a single down, plus having my girlfriend in New York for New Year’s, hell, that weekend I was on top of the world.

Most of the team and staff rushed through the post-game locker room hoopla to catch the plane back to meet thousands of Baltimore fans at the airport, so I hopped into a cab and stopped off at a liquor store to pick up a couple of items. Somewhere in her fractured past, Trisha had come nose-to-nose with Piper Heidsieck champagne, and I wasn’t about to pay the Plaza’s price for it- shoved two cold bottles into my two-suiter, made it to the hotel by about 6:30 and checked in. If her Delta flight was on time, I had almost an hour to get ready. I took a quick shower, ordered up the makings for Martinis, specifying the largest glasses they had and an ice bucket full of ice, which would do double duty with the champagne.

I’d just hung up from checking with the Concierge about theater tickets when the bellman’s discreet rap came. I opened the door to him, Trisha, her three pieces of Samsonite and a kiss for me that left no doubt as to why she’d come. She stepped back, her face saying that she was just too amused at the thought of the two of us being here. As the door closed behind the bellman, I dug through my quip file for a comment, settling for “Nice outfit.” Black two-piece pants suit, what I think they call a bolero jacket with a bouncy, frilly white blouse, everything silk. Black shiny boots like the sheen of her hair, cut shorter than I’d ever seen it into what I’d later learn was called a Sassoon.

“Thanks! Just managed to swing it with my J.P. Allen employee discount. Didn’t see many like it in the terminal. Well, actually none.”

“The hot luggage too?”

“Hey! The outfit was all I could handle. The bags’re Norma’s, my roommate.” Spying the cocktail setup beside the window, she said, “Buy me a drink?”

“Settle for Piper Heidsieck?”

“Fuck me before dinner?”

Doing it with somebody you love is totally different from doing it with somebody that you just really love to do. And in a four-star hotel. Well, things got even better as we went along, eating, drinking and gawking our way around
Manhattan
for the next two days. We even worked in a visit to Jack’s mother, who was so glad to see us it was embarrassing. Jack had called Christmas Day and no, he couldn’t make it up over the holidays, there was a deal brewing (credit him for the pun, she was quick to say) for the company to be sold, he also had Moses’ old car up for sale and that might take him out of town for a few days. Anyway, she was having a few people in for New Year’s Eve, if we hadn’t made other plans. We agreed to “pop in” before
midnight.

Holiday
theatre tickets for the good shows are tough to come by, but the Concierge came through in the clutch with Wednesday matinee tickets for Once More, With Feeling!. Funny show, Joseph Cotten the wild-ass egomaniac conductor, but Arlene Francis? I kept seeing her behind the What’s My Line? desk. Anyway, we headed back to the Plaza for drinks at the Oak Room, a quickie, dinner from room service, then showered, dressed and cabbed it down to Ríni’s (she insisted that we call her that) around 11:30. Quite a group; mostly from her generation, which didn’t keep the straight minority from dry-drooling down Trisha’s shirt; I swear I hoped she’d make the “goosey” move. Ríni looked terrific, too, and worked hard making us feel at home. Gave up quickly, though, on trying to promote me, a Colt, to Giants fans, however half-assed. Hard not to notice her relief when we made our move to leave as soon after the
midnight
moment as we could decently bring it off. I thought I’d be getting flak from Trisha about our getting involved with Ríni at all, but she’d soaked up the “art milieu” fast, intoxicated, I guess, by Ríni’s being part of an arty New York clique. I said, “You didn’t drink much. Did you just get high on the company?”

“Yeah, a little.” she stretched, extending her legs as can only be done in a Checker Cab, grinning with satisfaction as she did. “How ’bout you?”

“I could’ve done with a little less crooning about de Kooning, and hearing those faggots giggling about Pull My Daisy. What the hell is that, anyway?”

“A movie, although they insisted on calling it a ‘film.’ About the writers and artists that call themselves ‘the beats.’ You know- Kerouac and so forth. It’s just finished, and the people involved are celebrating at a place called the Artist’s Club. They wanted us to go there with them after Ríni’s party died down; apparently it’s an easy walk from here.”

“You mean they wanted you to go with them.”

“Sweetie, you just said they were faggots. They kept quiet about your being a Colt so the other faggots wouldn’t take note, which they probably did anyway. You were a hot item back there, rock-prick.”

“For God’s sake. What a life Ríni must live, with that bunch of piss-ants underfoot.”

“A steady diet of them could be a bit much, but those were some pretty smart folks Ríni had in there tonight. I really had a good time talking- well, mostly listening- to them. Can you imagine trying to get a group like that together in
Atlanta?

Blowing out my cheeks, I said, “No, but if you weren’t too picky about the gender, you could probably scrape up a fair bunch back at your alma mater.”

She turned to me, the grin returning. “ Hell, I think I may move here. You know, Goosey, that’s the reason we should never be under the same roof for more than a few days. Not that those few days aren’t always magic; I do things with you that I’d never do with anyone else. But what I want to do is expand my horizons, and you’re fighting a perpetual rear-guard action to make sure yours don’t move an inch. But I’ll tell you what.”

“What?”

Undoing her shirtfront, she knelt in front of me. “Let’s just enjoy the ride, then sleep ’til
noon
and start fresh. And not just ‘once more, with feeling;’ I want you in me, everywhere, ’til one of us screams ‘enough.’ Then you cool my cunt off with a mouthful of the Plaza’s rich whipped cream. If we never do this again, we’ll remember wall-to-wall sex in the Plaza.”

At what may have been my most obtuse moment, I grinned back. “Want to give the cabby something to talk about?”

“Happy New Year, Goosey.”

I put her in a cab to LaGuardia on the morning of
January 2nd, 1959. As she’d tried to alert me, it’d be quite awhile before our paths crossed again.

Jack’s phone cut sharply into the quiet of the late summer Saturday’s dawn. “Hey, Jack!”

“Rick- You on your way to Bisque?”

“Hell, no; you knew the President signed the
Gulf
of
Tonkin
resolution yesterday.”

“Yeah...”

“Well, Command must’ve known something was up back in June, when I was extended on active duty for 90 days. Hell, son, my battalion’s got orders to
Vietnam; ETA, 1 October. Buddy, if I left my team now, I couldn’t live with myself. I hope you understand.”

“Damn! Of course I understand, but-”

“I know I’m passing up the chance of a lifetime, and I know you’ll have to make other arrangements to crew that Lear Jet, but goddam it, Jack, this was what I was meant to do; I’m a fucking soldier, soup to nuts, and now- right now- I’ve got a chance to make the difference in this world that we talked about down in San Juan. Buddy, I just gotta go.”

“Shit. I know you do, but I hate it. You don’t mind if I hate it for a while, do you?”