Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack! (5 page)

P. John answered, “It’s just that a lot of radicals are health nuts and vegetarians. Hitler was. George Bernard Shaw was. Hitler’s the exception, though. Most of them are weak-sister socialists like Shaw.”

“I suppose you prefer Hitler?” Tucker’s father said.

“To Shaw? Certainly. I don’t agree with him all the way down the line, but he didn’t cozy up to the Communists like a lot of jelly-spined liberals.”

“You’re a pretty opinionated fellow,” Tucker’s father said.

“I have a few solid opinions,” P. John agreed. “Law and order. Better dead than red. If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will own guns. … Clichés, for the sake of summary.”

“Oh spare me, spare me, spare me,” Jingle said, “from women with hard hearts, and men with hard hats, and things that go bump in the night.”

Behind P. John’s back, Jingle raised his eyes to the ceiling as though he thought he’d seen everything until Tucker had waltzed in with this weirdo.

When they arrived at the Hockers’, both Mr. and Mrs. Hocker met them at the door, like the First Family on the White House steps greeting guests for a state dinner.

“The girls will be out in a minute,” Mr. Hocker said. “They’re to be home by twelve. Let’s all check our watches now.”

“I don’t own a watch anymore,” P. John said. “A mugger relieved me of it in September, no doubt so he could report to the unemployment office in time to sign for his check.”

Mr. Hocker bit his lip and stared thoughtfully at P. John.

“I have a watch,” Tucker said. They synchronized their watches and Mr. Hocker said, “I don’t want them riding back on the subway.” He shoved a five-dollar bill at P. John for cab fare.

P. John handed it back. “I’m one of your few New Yorkers not on the dole.”

Mrs. Hocker said nervously, “It sounds like fun, this dance, but I bet neither of you boys remembers the fifties.”

“One of my heroes is from the fifties,” P. John said. “Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the great crusader against Communism.”

Mrs. Hocker swallowed hard, and Mr. Hocker barked, “He wasn’t one of
our
heroes. He was a misinformed, insensitive, trouble-making headline grabber.”

For a minute no one could think of anything to say, and then Tucker shrugged helplessly and managed, “That’s what makes horse races, I guess.”

The girls appeared. Dinky was wearing a beige dress which looked like a huge feed bag someone had cut armholes in, and Natalia was wearing velvet again, light blue with gold buttons down the front.

“This is P. John Knight, Dinky,” said Tucker. “P. John, this is Dinky.”

Dinky said, “What’s the P. stand for?”

“Perry,” said P. John. “It’s my father’s name, so I don’t use it.”

“That saves confusion,” Dinky said.

“Exactly,” P. John answered. “I don’t like to be confused with anyone.”

“Natalia,” Tucker said, “this is P. John. P. John, this is Natalia Line.”

“How do you do,” P. John said, and then he turned back to Dinky. “You must have another name besides Dinky.”

“It’s Susan,” Dinky said.

Mrs. Hocker said, “Dinky is our affectionate name for her.”

P. John held his arm out as though Dinky were his partner for the grand march at the beginning of a fancy dress ball. “Shall we be off, Susan?”

Dinky was busy buttoning her coat, but she stopped as if on command, and took P. John’s arm.

It was a majestic beginning as they strode toward the door like royalty, with Natalia and Tucker following behind. But there was no way for the two of them to fit in one doorway. There was a moment of awkwardness, as Dinky dropped behind to let P. John precede her.

P. John kept saying, “After you, after you,” until finally Dinky went first. Then things became more confused as P. John also waited for Natalia to go ahead of him. He kept saying “Ladies first,” and “After you,” the sort of thing parents would approve of. But when Tucker glanced over his shoulder, as they went down the steps, both the Hockers were standing there frowning, waving good-bye with doubtful expressions.

Tucker wasn’t really sure what their expressions meant. Dinky clarified things as they all walked down Remsen Street toward the subway.

“You couldn’t have known it,” she said to P. John, “but one of my father’s pet hates was that Senator Joe McCarthy.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference if I
had
known it,” said P. John. “A man has to speak his mind, Susan.”

“Well, Natalia,” said Tucker, beginning his own little conversation as they walked behind Dinky and P. John, “how’s every little thing?” But he didn’t hear her answer. He was thinking that he had never once in his life referred to himself as a man, as P. John just had. He was also thinking that he couldn’t dance well, make conversation easily on a date with anyone as attractive as Natalia Line, or do anything suave, confident, or even polite. He couldn’t even hold out his arm for Natalia to take. It was like his arm was paralyzed. He was obviously not ready for this first date, and he wouldn’t have minded breaking his leg or coming down with appendicitis on the spot.

Natalia was walking beside him silently, that self-conscious kind of silence between two people when both brains are shrieking: say something about the weather, say something about a movie you saw, or a book you read, or something, anything, hurry, do it,
talk!
… but the tongues could care less.

So much for fixing up a pair of fatties out of the kindness of your heart, Tucker thought; the fatties didn’t need any favors.

He was glad when they got down into the subway and began the rattle-banging trip under the East River into New York, because then you couldn’t hear anything anyone said, anyway.

The whole affair was a nerve-wrecking fiasco where Tucker was concerned. He spent it under huge photographs of Johnny Ray and scenes from
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and pictures of Howdy Doody and The Mousketeers, wiping off his palms on his handkerchief, and stepping all over Natalia’s patent-leather shoes. The more he became aware that he was a failure on the dating scene, the more obnoxious and bumptious he seemed to become.

Once, when he was dancing close to Natalia while the orchestra was playing, “Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes, love never made a fool of you, you used to be too wise,” he began to feel really moved, and then self-conscious about breathing with his mouth so close to her ear. He began to fear he was breathing hotly down her neck, the way sex maniacs did in the confession stories his mother edited, and he tried to stop breathing until the song was finished. This produced a coughing attack so bad it brought tears to his eyes, and they had to leave the dance floor.

Natalia did not say anything to make him feel better. She just stood meekly beside him on the sidelines while he wiped his eyes and blew his nose. He told her that conceivably he could have a touch of asthma like his father. She said a lot of people who had asthma really had terrible anxieties, which made it all worse. Tucker decided the thing wrong was that they were both “inadequates.” They were not yet ready for the social scene.

Then, too, the thing he had never known about the fifties was that all the popular songs were really sentimental and romantic.

He tried to blot out the lyrics by making himself remember all the words to old Beatle hits like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” But the lead singer had a microphone, and the words to the songs filled the room; there was no escaping them. There was “I Need You Now,” and “Hello, Young Lovers,” and “Getting to Know You,” and “Too Young.”

Tucker was also trying to dance without moving his arms very much. He had smelled his armpits in the john and he was perspiring, all right, worse than a Rose Bowl tackle on New Year’s Day.

Every time Tucker looked up, he seemed to see Dinky and P. John gliding by like the Sweetheart Couple at the Valentine Ball. They didn’t even look fat anymore.

Only yesterday, Tucker had expected P. John to get him aside at some point during the evening, and chew him out for suckering him into a date with Dinky. But when they met in the john near the end of the evening, P. John said to Tucker, “Susan’s got a mind like a steel trap. She’s okay!”

Tucker had never given any thought to Dinky’s mind. It was not the main thing the average person meeting Dinky noticed.

Tucker said, “She can really move around for someone that heavy.”

“She’s going to start attending Weight Watchers with me,” P. John said. “It helps when someone goes with you.”

“Well, she’s the ideal one to accompany you,” Tucker answered. “No offense intended.”

“Susan and I aren’t sensitive about our weight,” P. John said. “We’re just realistic about the hard work ahead, getting down to normal. This is the last night we’ll indulge ourselves.”

The end of the evening was sort of like an average couple out on the town with the two Most Populars in the senior class. They all went to Burg-a-Cue on 20th and Third after the dance. While Dinky and P. John cracked jokes and exchanged clever remarks, devouring heaps of french fries and hamburgers, Tucker and Natalia had this really boring conversation about all the bad things restaurants did to food. That, mixed in with the sight of Dinky’s and P. John’s mouths, which were never closed and always full of things being ground up by their teeth and swallowed, also took away Tucker’s appetite.

He began pushing the food around on his plate, to make it look like he’d eaten more than he had. Natalia had finished a hamburger way before anyone else, because she had hardly said anything besides: “I’ve heard they grind up horsemeat for hot-dog stuffing.”

“Not horsemeat. Pigs’ intestines,” Tucker had replied, which was just a sample of their brilliant repartee.

Tucker supposed Natalia was afraid to say much of anything, for fear she’d rhyme. It was possible, too, that she was too bored even to rhyme.

They took a taxi back to the Heights, and Tucker sat up front with the driver. There was hardly enough room in back for Natalia. Dinky and P. John had her squeezed into the side of the taxi door.

P. John kept leaning forward to see Tucker’s watch. He kept telling Dinky he’d better get her home on time, since he hadn’t made a very good first impression on her father.

“Just don’t tell him any of your opinions,” Dinky said. “He happens to be a very big liberal.”

They made it exactly on the dot of twelve. Mr. Hocker was in the doorway as they brought the girls up the steps.

“Good night, boys,” he said very pointedly. There was no lingering.

At the corner of Remsen and Henry, while Tucker was saying good night to P. John, P. John said, “Let’s do it again, sometime.”

“Sure thing,” Tucker said, but the likelihood of his ever going through an evening like that again was about as sure a thing as hot snow falling or cold water boiling.

T
HE MORNING AFTER THE
dance, instead of sleeping late as he always did on Saturday mornings, Tucker was up at six thirty.

He sat around in the living room in his pajamas, listening to old records, and trying to make sense out of some poetry written by this Sylvia Plath. She had killed herself when she was very young. Everyone in Tucker’s Creative Writing class was carrying around
Ariel
, and raving over lines like:

I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.

I should wear tiger pants,

I should have an affair.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,

Me and you.

Last night when he was trying to sleep in the face of flashes of everything he had done wrong on his date with Natalia, he had finally decided to just never see her again: to begin a whole new life as though she’d never existed.

He had made a mental list of new interests he was going to become involved in: astronomy, tennis, chess, and carpentry; and he doubted he’d have any time left over for girls and dances.

Jingle came by about eight in the morning. Tucker’s parents were still asleep, so Tucker offered to help Jingle carry down some supplies to the store on Montague Street which was going to house Help Yourself.

“I suppose you heard your father and I had a fight last night,” said Jingle.

Tucker nodded. He was glad that it had happened. When he’d gotten in, his father and mother were too busy discussing the argument to question Tucker about his date.

The trouble had started when Jingle wanted to hang blow-ups of people like Mae West and Greta Garbo on the walls of Help Yourself. Jingle said they were good examples of health-food followers. Tucker’s father complained that Jingle wasn’t taking the business seriously enough, and that Jingle was confusing it with show business.

“The trouble with your father is that he has no real style,” Jingle said. “Do you know what I mean, Tucker?”

“Sort of,” Tucker said. Tucker’s mother sometimes called his father and him her “two dark clouds” because they never laughed at anything on television and they never liked the flashy ties she picked out for them at Christmas. Jingle loved her taste in ties and he always bent double watching the boob-tube comedies.

“Your father doesn’t know how to dress up a sentence, or dress himself up, or dress up a business and make it have a little pizazz,” Jingle said. “He thinks it’s enough to just
be
there in life.”

“It’s not, though,” Tucker said. He had learned that lesson the hard way on his date with Natalia.

“You bet your tiny little behind it’s not!” Jingle said. “A boy has to hustle in this world.”

“Who won the argument?” Tucker said.

“Your father has a 70% interest, and I only have a 30% interest,” Jingle said. “So your father will probably get his way. The walls of Help Yourself will be as colorful as a sack of flour.”

“I didn’t know things were that uneven,” Tucker said. “70–30, that’s really uneven.”

“You know how your father is with money. He squirrels it,” Jingle said. “Did you ever know your father to really splurge on anything, like a
Patek Phillipe
watch, or a weekend ski trip to Switzerland?”

“He doesn’t ski,” Tucker said.