As Far as You Can Go (25 page)

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know anything at all. I don’t know what I feel about you or what I feel about Grandma, or about anything.”

“Well——”

“O.K. I’ll sleep on it. Maybe I won’t tell her. Maybe I will. I guess it’s always best to be honest, though, honey, isn’t it?”

“Usually,” he said.

They kissed gently, probingly. She was relaxed, soft against him. But there was a tension, too. The polythene bag wasn’t there, but the tension was almost as bad.

She broke away and said, “Call me in the morning, honey.” Then she slipped out of the car and went down towards the house without waving or turning. Harold sat for a few moments and thought. Then he got out of the car and smelt the evening air. It was a warm smell, a dry smell, warm and dry even though the pleasant coolness of the Los Angeles night was already soothing the baked earth. He thought of the smell of English evenings at Peterham, of the damp and the odour of rotting leaves, the slight humidity always, the aroma of growing things, of grass and trees. Here there was none of that damp growing smell, just a light coolness and a warm smell, as though the earth was drying itself after a bath to wash away the sweat of the day. Yes, things grew in England, they grew and grew all the time, in a solemn lush dampness: the grass was always green. There was no fine grass in California, except, perhaps, on the greens of the golf courses. But there was this sense of relaxation after effort, which the whole earth seemed to share: it was as though the trees shook out their leaves after the heat of the day, and the scrub took deep breaths in the night. Growth was a struggle here, a perpetual effort, a challenge. Was it only in his imagination, six thousand miles from home, that England smelled of rotting vegetation?

He walked to the edge of the hill and looked out down the canyon to the lights below. An absurd city, Los Angeles: they had to bring the water hundreds of miles. A masterpiece of human determination: a triumph of man over waste.
Incomplete
, perhaps: there was a sense of things still to be done.
Los Angeles was in a state of becoming rather than a state of being. Surely any man of spirit must prefer to live where things were still unfinished, where he could still, himself, alter the final design, where he could leave his mark upon the earth?

The lights, the endless lights of the city, stretched beyond the limits of a man’s vision. Yes, a city to bring out the best, or the worst, in any man.

There was no sign of Eddie. He went back to the car and sounded the horn. Eddie appeared almost immediately from the other side of the turning-circle.

“All through?” he said. “It’s kind of nice up here. Cool and pleasant and lonely. The end of a road. I like it.”

“Yes,” said Harold.

“Where do you wanna go?”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. There are some letters I have to write. I have to get back to the hotel.”

“I tell you what we’ll do,” said Eddie. “It won’t take you long. We’ll go see a friend of mine for half an hour.”

“No,” said Harold.

“Ah, c’mon. It’s early. You’ll like her, she’s a swell kid.”

“I’ll take you there, that’s all.”

“Well, let’s go then.”

Eddie’s chick lived in Venice, in a squalid tenement build ing. There were a great many old people about, sitting on steps or walking very slowly and painfully along the street. At the bottom of the steps of the tenement building there was a bunch of youths in jeans and black leather jackets beneath a street-light. They looked about fifteen and sixteen, and carried knives in their thick leather belts.

“Just a moment,” said Eddie. “Let’s see if she’s here. She may be out.”

Harold waited in the car. Eddie went up to the gang and clapped one of the boys on the shoulder. The boy pushed him roughly away and snarled something Harold couldn’t hear.
Eddie laughed rather too cheerfully and went up the steps and into the building. Harold hoped he wouldn’t be long. The gang was eyeing him malevolently.

After a few minutes Eddie came out with a girl clearly not more than sixteen, and in California girls who looked sixteen were liable to be eleven or twelve. It was something to do with the climate. Eddie brought her over to Harold, and said, “Hey, Lou, I want you to meet Harold, he’s from England.”

“Hi, Harold from England,” she said.

“Hallo.”

“She can’t come out this evening,” said Eddie. “Her mom’s sick. She has to stay home and mind the baby.”

The girl made an ugly face and said, “Mom’s always
getting
sick. I don’t know why she doesn’t die.”

“That’s not a very kind thing to say about your mother.”

“It’s the kindest thing I can think of,” said Lou.

Harold was watching the boys out of the corner of his eye. They were watching Eddie and Lou, staring at them,
scowling
.

“Are those friends of yours?” he asked.

“They’re the Pirates,” said Lou. “That tall one, he’s my brother, Pete.”

“You tell Pete not to shove me around, Lou,” said Eddie. “He gave me a push. I don’t like that.”

“Aw, he’s just a kid,” she said.

“How old are you?” said Harold.

“Fourteen.”

“There’s no need to boast about it,” said Eddie. “You were cuter when you were thirteen. You’re beginning to look old.”

“Aw, shut up, Eddie,” she said, but she really liked it, Harold thought. She was unfairly sexy for a girl of her age. He supposed Eddie didn’t care about things like legal ages, though. Every time she moved she broke a law with her hips,
or her small breasts bumping inside her sweater, demanding to be touched.

“Well, see you,” said Eddie, getting into the car.

“O.K., honey.”

As Harold started the car two elbows appeared on Eddie’s window, clad in black leather. The face of the tall one, Lou’s brother, appeared above them.

“I wouldn’t come round Lou any more, Eddie,” he said. “Not if I was you. Some people around here, they don’t like you. Too bad. People can be so unreasonable. I’d hate it if anyone got unreasonable with you, Eddie, I’d really hate it.”

“Don’t throw your weight around, kid,” said Eddie, and laughed in his face. “You’re not old enough.”

“That’s not what the gang think.”

“Jesus,” said Eddie. “You kids these days. Don’t you know how to treat an adult? You call him ‘sir’. Now go home, Pete. It’s past your bedtime. And your mother’s sick.”

“If you want to talk about beds,” said Pete, “if I were you, I wouldn’t hang around Lou’s much longer. It makes people kind of restless. Restless and unreasonable. Maybe it’s the weather. Just too bad, Eddie.”

“Aw, go to hell,” said Eddie. “C’mon, Harold, we don’t want to sit around listening to all this crap.”

Harold started to move the car. Pete walked beside it, swaggering in front of his gang, a long thin body with bony hips, the jacket making him look as though he had enormous biceps and shoulders. Then he said “Adios, Eddie” and stood watching the car as Harold accelerated. Glancing in the driving-mirror, he saw. the rest of the gang slouch over to join him.

“I didn’t like that at all, did you?” said Harold.

“Snotty little kid,” said Eddie. He was angry and smacked his fist against his thigh. “Who does he think he is?”

“Christ the Atomic Scientist, I expect,” said Harold.

He glanced sideways at Eddie, and wondered how old he really was. He must be near thirty. The old giving way to new. You can’t be young all your life. There are always the younger ones pushing up from below. For a moment, but only for a moment, Harold felt sorry for Eddie.

“I never expected to hear you say you wanted respect,” he said, smiling to himself.

“The little bastard,” muttered Eddie. Then he perked up and said, “Hey, there’s that bar I was telling you about. Let’s go have a drink.”

“I’ll drop you off there if you like,” said Harold, “but I have to get back and write those letters.”

“It’s just a couple of blocks. It really swings. It’s a little early still, but I guess things will have started by now.”

He directed Harold down to the sea-front, near a pier which had PACIFIC OCEAN PARK written above it in red neon letters.

“You have time for a beer,” said Eddie.

“All right. But only one. And I’m not going on another of your orgies. I want that to be clearly understood.”

“Sure, sure. This is a respectable place.”

They walked for a few minutes along the sea-front. It was a beautifully cool evening, and a half-moon greeted its twin in the placid sea.

“There’s an example of what you were saying, Eddie,” said Harold. “The moon is in two halves, and they’re staring at each other, but they can’t ever get together.”

“I never said that,” said Eddie. “I was talking about
people.
I told you, I hate
things
.”

They came to a shop-front with boarded windows, all painted black. There was the noise of a juke-box playing quite loudly. Eddie led the way down a little alley and to a small door, where a man in shorts and shirt took fifty cents off each of them.

“Hi, Eddie,” he said. “Who’s the new friend?”

“He’s the Englishman. I’m showing him the town.
Anyone
here yet? Or do we have to drink for a while?”

“There’s a few,” said the man. “I guess things are just about warming up.”

They went down a narrow passage and up some stairs, and were in a low-ceilinged room with black walls. There were two or three naked light-bulbs and a bar across one corner. On the walls were drawings in white of naked men and women, but there was nothing obscene. Harold thought it looked less nasty than he was expecting. There were quite a lot of people there, mostly men, but a few girls in tight pants.

“They only serve beer,” said Eddie. “That suit you?”

“Yes, fine,” said Harold.

There was a juke-box in one corner, and bare wooden tables around the bar at which people were sitting, drinking the beer straight out of the bottles. They always seemed to drink that way in the bars Eddie patronized.

“Here you are,” said Eddie. “We want to get down the other end. That’s where you can see best.”

They pushed their way past the tables and through a group of people standing with their backs to the bar. Everyone was flicking his fingers in time to the music. As they came through to the space beyond, Harold saw an extraordinary sight.

Two lines of people were drawn up facing each other, and dancing, without touching, with a very complicated series of steps. It was an intricate and rather beautiful dance, and he concentrated on the feet after a quick glance at the
lineup
, trying to see if he could follow it. He couldn’t. Then he looked properly at the dancers.

They were almost all men, but two or three girls were dancing, too. The sex didn’t, though, seem important. They all had absorbed dead-pan faces and seemed quite unaware of each other, white and negro and Mexican and Indian featuers all set in the same trance-like mask.

“Good God,” said Harold.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “Far out. Wild. Invisible.” He was clicking his fingers, and his feet were moving to the rhythm. The tune was a current pop-song with a heavy down-beat.

Harold watched fascinated. It was like a primitive religious ritual. No one was laughing or even smiling, everyone was serious, some had frowns of concentration. Then the music stopped.

At once, the dancers became human again, laughing and drinking and reaching for cigarettes and talking to their friends. Then it became obvious that most of the men were what Harold’s father would have called “dreadful pansies”, patting their hair with effeminate gestures, posing, generally screaming. But someone put another dime in the juke-box and at once they became absorbed in their dance again. There was one tall young negro who was particularly adept, his light-brown face gleaming with sweat, his eyes half-closed, his steps very elaborate.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” said Harold.

“No, I guess it’s kind of native to the place,” said Eddie. “The way I see it, it’s a way of expressing your resistance to society. Society doesn’t like queers, right? You’re not allowed to dance in public, right? So you invent this dance of your own, and no one can stop you, because you don’t touch, see?”

“I’d have thought the vice squad might have a word or two to say about it.”

“They always allow a few places to keep open. You can’t shut all the gay bars in the city. The cops like to know where the queers are, anyway.”

A man and a woman broke away from the crowd around the dancers and began to dance in ballroom style. At once one of the other dancers came over to them and told them to stop.

“Can’t everyone join in?” said the man.

“You mustn’t touch,” said the dancer. “You’re not allowed to touch. Do anything you like, but don’t
touch
.”
He went back to his own non-tactile dancing.

“Well,” said Harold. “I must say this is rather interesting. But how do you learn those steps?”

“These are mostly layabouts,” said Eddie. “They lie on the beach all day, and come in here for a beer and practise.”

“How do they live?”

“How would I know? I’m too busy to know what bums find to do all day long. I guess some of them have rich friends.”

“How do you live, Eddie?”

“I get along,” he said. Then he went to join the
dance-line
. He wasn’t as good as the others, Harold thought, but then he probably didn’t practise very much.

He finished his beer, waited for the record to stop, then went over to Eddie and told him he was going home.

Eddie nodded vacantly. “See you,” he said.

As Harold was leaving a new tune began from the jukebox. The bar was beginning to fill up. It really was a most extraordinary place.

On his way out the man at the door said, “You didn’t stay long for your fifty cents.”

“I have work to do,” said Harold.

“At this time of night?” said the man. “Earlier or later, that I could understand. But now? Ten o’clock? What kind of an employer do you have, anyway? Or lover?”

“Myself,” said Harold. “And I don’t have a lover.”

He found his car quite easily in the moonlight, and drove back to the hotel. In his room he sat down at once and wrote a letter to Mr Dangerfield. He said he had seen the
miniature
. He said it was still very unlikely that he would be able to acquire it for him. He did not say anything about Diane or Uncle Henry.