5:45 to Suburbia (2 page)

O
N THE
afternoon of Charles Gibson’s 18th birthday, someone down the hall in the DKE house was playing
Second Hand Rose
on the phonograph; and Charlie was at his desk, bent over a composition for Poli. Sci., which began: “A year and three months ago today Lenin died at Gorki. It is appropriate to pause and remember — ”

Whatever it was that was appropriate to pause and remember, Charlie had forgotten, for lately his mind was a jumble of tangled thoughts. He was a sensitive, serious sophomore who wanted to be a writer (a poet, preferably; except it didn’t pay a goddam thing), and therefore a good 70% of his thoughts were centered on sex; a good 10% on sex with Mitzie Thompson (though Charlie switched the noun to ‘love’ in his mind where she was concerned); and the remaining percentage on what a bastard his old man was, what a crashing bore it was to be broke all the time, and what an effort it was to concentrate on anything “important” (meaning his writing) in a fraternity house at the University of Missouri.

Currently Charlie was under the influence of E. E. Cummings and Ezra Pound, when he was not under Mitzie’s spell; and this afternoon he was coping with all three, as well as Lenin and
Second Hand Rose,
so that beside the composition, on a scrap of yellow second sheet, there was scribbled the beginnings of a poem entitled simply:
mitzie before breakfast.
So far there was only one verse:

“What’re you doing, Chazz boy?” a voice called from the doorway.

“Not too much.” Charlie wouldn’t have to look up to know it was Otto Avery speaking. He detested the way Avery persisted in calling him Chazz boy. But he did look up. He watched Avery saunter toward him, and thought, God, he’s suave; he really is — no matter the rest, he really
is,
and said blandly: “What was the name of that revolutionary journal?” deftly pushing the yellow second sheet under his arm and out of sight. But Avery had noticed. Would he do anything?

“Which one?” Avery sat on the edge of the desk.

“The one Lenin edited. I’m writing a composition.”

“Iskra,”
Avery answered, filching the piece of yellow paper with a sudden jerk of his hand. “Meaning ‘The Spark’.” A grin came to his lips.

“Give it back,” Charlie said.

“Mitzie before breakfast, eh?”

“Oh, come on now, damn it!” Charlie stood up and made a grab for his poem, but Avery was taller and quicker; he held it out of Charlie’s reach.

“Chazz boy,” he said, “is there something you ought to tell Uncle Otto?”

“Go to hell, for one thing.”

“I’d had no idea the affair’d been consummated.”

“Did you want something when you came in?”

“Really, Chazz boy, I think you should have at least confided in
me.
I’m quite hurt, Chazz. You know, I’m
offended.”

“Are you through with it?” By now his face felt hot, and he was sure it was very red; but his voice sounded only sullen, slightly bored.

“Mitzie rates some sort of punctuation, don’t you think?” Avery chuckled. “A semicolon, or a dirty old comma, or something, Chazz boy?”

“I’m busy. Give it back and clear out.”

Avery looked at him. Avery was uncommonly good-looking; he acted years older than he was — he was only nineteen, but he had polish. And very light blond hair with those keen blue eyes that penetrated their subject in a terrible, formidable gaze; and money, Avery had, and wit, and some certain power Charlie was forced to appreciate. Charm too.

“You really have it for Mitzie, don’t you, Chazz?”

“Get out!”

“You really think she’s the bee’s knees, don’t you, Chazz?”

“I’d like it back, Avery!” Charlie held his hand out.

“Oh, I’m going to give it back to you, Chazz. Chazz, you don’t think I’m not going to return your poem to you, do you?”

“Well then, do it.”

“Sure, Chazz, sure.” Avery picked up a pencil from the desk, took a notebook from the back pocket of his knickers, and walked to the bed. “Sure, Chazz, boy. I’ll give it back…. First I have to make a copy.”

He sat on the bed and made the copy and Charlie sat frozen at his desk. Down the hall the phonograph record had been changed, and as Avery wrote, he sang along with it in some spots:
“Here’s the Japanese Sandman, Sneaking on with the dew, Just an old secondhand man, He’ll buy your old day from you.”

• • •

Charlie was thinking: My God, I’m going to bawl. I feel like bawling!

But he broke his pencil in half instead, and sat there powerless to stop Avery. Worse, he didn’t even try.

“Patience, Chazz boy,” Avery murmured. “This won’t take a minute …
Oh, here’s the Japanese San-and-man — ”

Charlie Gibson met Otto Avery for the first time on the beginning day at the Kedd School for Boys. This was in 1919, and at twelve Charlie was somewhat shy; by no means unusually shy, but simply endowed with a normal amount of timidity which any boy would feel at his first break from home. Any boy but Otto Avery.

It was at midday during recreation in the playground on a sharp September morning that Charlie noticed Avery. Anyone would have noticed him before the other boys, just as in later life he was always the first to be recognized anywhere. He was exactly Charlie’s height then, but more filled out than Charlie, sturdy and broad. Whereas Charlie was slightly sallow-complexioned, Avery was rosy and brown in color, and even then his blue eyes were alternately sparkling and piercing.

He was always laughing, calling out, on the move. He was a friendly, vivacious thirteen-year-old; but there was more in it than that. He used his breeziness to cover his secret designs. Even then, he was plotting how he could use everybody and everything to his advantage, and he was helped by the fact that he never had any morals whatever.

When Charlie noticed him for the first time he was standing in the middle of the yard telling a story to a group of other boys, and although he was as new to Kedd as Charlie was, he had already fascinated new and old boys, and they were laughing and joking with him as though he had been at Kedd for years.

Charlie stood off to the side watching the scene, unwilling as yet to walk up to the group — really, unable to — and envying Avery his self-assurance. Then, as though Avery had felt Charlie’s presence behind him, and felt, telepathically, Charlie’s unsureness, he had whirled around in the midst of a sentence and spotted Charlie and he had called out, “Hey there, boy, c’mon now. Join us!” and then added rather unnecessarily: “There’s nothing to be afraid of!”

It was that final sentence of the greeting that Charlie resented, for he had never been “afraid.” He had never felt patronage of this sort — and the sort to follow and in the face of it, instead of proving to Avery and everyone there in the courtyard that of course he was
not
afraid to join them at all, he simply wilted, wilted and went forth like a nervous misfit, tongue-tied and blushing.

That first day, in Charlie’s mind, ruined every day to come. For from then on, Charlie never got the opportunity to redeem himself, to
be
himself. Avery more or less adopted him, and set about molding for Charlie a personality which was not Charlie’s, but Avery’s image of Charlie. From that moment on at Kedd, Avery patronized and mocked him.

It was at Kedd that Charlie was known by Avery’s name for him — Chazz. “You know, Chazz,” he used to tell Charlie years later, “I’ll never forget how you looked that first morning at school — with your anxiety and politeness and helplessness. You were a mess, fellow, and where you’d have been if I hadn’t looked out for you, I just don’t know!”

Avery looked out for Charlie in a shaming kind of way. Avery was tremendously popular; and Charlie, rather negative and colorless in Avery’s shadow. When another boy, in sport, twisted Charlie’s arm, or kicked his behind, Avery would never let the sport grow to the inevitable point of comradeship, but would come up instead and insist, “Stop that! Chazz is under my protection. Didn’t you know?”

And because Avery was strong and stoutly built, and everyone liked him, Charlie
was
let alone; the sport, which he had been enjoying as sport — even when he was not getting the better end — was terminated. And Charlie became, not disliked by the boys, but more — ignored, never ridiculed by them, save for Avery; but slighted during horseplay, left to
observe
the nonsensical joking, and punching and pillow-fighting that went on in the dorms. Now and then, in a situation where the boys’ spirits were high and they were indulging in foolish pranks among themselves, or wrestling one another on the ground, Avery would approach Charlie and say, “I don’t know why I look out for you. You’re such a goop…. But it makes me feel better knowing you’re under my wing.” He’d grin at Charlie and add, “Aren’t you glad of it?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Oh, yes you are, Chazz boy, you’re glad of it. Uncle Otto knows.”

There weren’t many other thirteen-year-olds at Kedd who knew as much about sex as Otto Avery did. He was always holding a roomful of boys spellbound with lewd stories about the things a man did to a woman. Like the others, Charlie was fascinated too; and unlike many of them, not particularly embarrassed. Leastwise, not at the stories, nor at the elaborate descriptions in the stories; in fact, Charlie was quite eager to hear. But Avery managed to spoil that for him too. In the middle of one, he would glance across at Charlie and say: “Oh, but I
am
sorry. Chazz boy, I didn’t mean these words to fall on your delicate ears…. I’m sorry, boys — but another time. When Chazz isn’t present.”

“Don’t be stupid!” Charlie would protest hotly. “What do I care!”

“Oh, but
I
care,” Avery would insist. “You’re very sensitive. I know you are, and
you
know I know.”

He would make it sound very cryptic and mysterious before the others, as though Charlie had been confiding in him; as though Charlie had told Avery once that that sort of thing humiliated and embarrassed
him.

When the boys would protest and shout for Charlie to get out of the room then, if it bothered him so, Avery would hold up his hand and announce: “Silence! I won’t have you making Chazz feel unwanted. He’s as good as you are — any of you — and better too.”

It was a wonder to Charlie that anyone spoke to him at all through those two years at Kedd. Later, when he was fourteen and removed by his father to a public school again, Charlie could only marvel at the curious effect Avery had had on him; he could only sit and wonder why he had never been able to push himself out of that shell Avery had forced him into on the first day…. But the only answer he ever came up with, was that he had never experienced the emotion of hate before he met Avery; he had never hated anyone or anything until his encounter with Otto Avery, and he had not known how to cope with it, not understood completely the reasons for it; only wished the whole while that he had never been sent to Kedd.

Out of it all, one incident stuck firmly in Charlie Gibson’s mind. It was the same incident he thought of when he first walked into the DKE house and saw Avery come forward to greet him during fraternity rush week; and it was the same incident he thought of that afternoon while Avery sat on his bed copying the poem.

It happened during the second winter at Kedd. Charlie was thirteen then, and resigned to his status at the school, even resigned somewhat to Avery’s unpleasant attentions. Curiously enough, Charlie often found himself wishing he were more like Avery and wishing, too, that he could force Avery to submit to the same treatment Avery forced on him. But on the afternoon in January when the singular incident took place which Charlie was never able quite to forget, or to understand completely, Charlie had no envy, nor any malice toward anyone.

He had just received his father’s letter explaining that a temporary setback in finances made it necessary to withdraw Charlie from Kedd at the end of the term; and he felt immensely jubilant; miraculously freed, like a prisoner whose long sentence was suddenly, unexpectedly rescinded. As he took his shower down in the locker room after the three o’clock recreation hour, the warm water rushing on his skin felt clean and good. And Charlie felt much the same way, unburdened and nearly happy. He stayed under for an unusually long time, and it was just as he was planning to step out and turn off the faucets attached outside the stall, that the shocking stream of scalding water hit him. Frantically he pushed against the door in an effort to escape, but someone was holding him in.

“I say, Chazz boy, is it hot enough for you?”

“Let me out, Avery!”

“It doesn’t
hurt,
does it? I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“Turn it off!” Charlie began to scream from the pain. “Avery, turn it off!”

“You won’t get hot showers like this if you leave Kedd, Chazz boy.”

“Avery, help me! Help!”

When Otto Avery finally did take his weight from the door, Charlie staggered out through the steam in tears; his flesh seared and stinging, while around him a small group of his classmates stood staring at him somewhat uncertainly. Perhaps a few wanted to sympathize with him, but none indicated it in Avery’s presence. They simply stood woodenly, save for a few who snickered nervously as Charlie leaned naked against the brick wall of the room fighting for control.

Avery said simply, “We’re all sorry we’re losing you, Chazz boy. Things won’t be the same.” Then turning, waving, “Ta ta, Chazz.”

Gradually the others went back to their own showering, leaving Charlie to collect himself; to stop his angry weeping; to dress and leave. Walking from the gym, he found Avery waiting for him.

“So you’re going away,” Avery said.

“I’m glad of it too.”

“Oh, no you’re not, Chazz. You mind it awfully. You mind it as much as you minded what happened just then.” He put an arm on Charlie’s shoulder. “It hurt, didn’t it?”