Last Notes from Home (27 page)

Rex of course had a plate in his head to remind him what siblings were capable of doing to each other. Then we made our good-byes, and when he said he’d miss me, my luscious pal, I told him I’d miss him too and was sorry he wouldn’t get to see me play as I’d doubtless make the jayvees the next year.

“The jayvees, my ass. With what I taught you, you’ll make the fucking varsity. Besides, I’ll be getting home to see you play.”

Rex was both right and wrong. I did make the varsity but Rex never got home again until they brought him back in a box to be interred. And, alas for me, Rex did remember the shooting of my sister until the end of his brief life.

Now abruptly it is three years later, a brilliant February Sunday afternoon in Manhattan, and, together with teammates from the John Jay High School, Katonah, upper Westchester, New York, I am swaggering—in only the way guys destined to win the sectionals in White Plains could swagger—west on Forty-second Street, heading for the Paramount to see one of what nowadays are called the Big Bands, when who should be coming straight at me but Rex on his way to pick up a date for “brunch,” a word I’d only learned since moving to la-di-da Westchester. When Rex at last convinced himself it was I (for I had gone through puberty and had changed a good deal more than he), he startled everyone by kissing me full on the mouth and all the time we talked he kept patting me, pinching me, embracing me. At first unable to understand that my friends weren’t also from Watertown, Rex finally grasped that though I’d graduated from there, my grades were too low for college, and to get them up I’d attempted to take a postgraduate, had been vigorously denied admittance, and hence had been forced to go live with my aunt in Katonah. Certainly I was playing ball, I assured Rex. He was looking at the best team in north Westchester (four of our five starters got scholarships: University of Texas, Bowling Green, Springfield, and Bradley). Our next game was Friday night at home.

“I’ll be there. You better fucking believe I’ll be there! I know where that Katonah is. That’s way the hell up and gone on that twisting fucking Route 22! Right?”

It was coming back from the game on that twisting fucking Route 22 that Rex bought it all. The autopsy would reveal that the metal plate had outworn it usefulness, something had exploded in Rex’s head, and he’d been dead even before his Ford Sportsman Convertible hit the tree.

How I played so well that night is beyond understanding, at least beyond my understanding, though of course I wanted desperately to play well for Rex and, under the circumstances, am glad that I did. I do know that in the first minute of the game I withdrew into myself utterly, perhaps became some pure essence of basketball, and everything I threw up went in. We scored first, went into our full-court press, as we did against “running” teams, and I intercepted their first in-bounds pass, broke for the basket and though I was coming in from the left side decided to take the lay-up with my more sure right hand. Suddenly, though, a previously unseen defender was up in the air with me to block, I simply shifted the ball to my left hand and made the play. When I was pressing this same defender, who was taking the ball out, frantically waving my arms in his face, he sneered, “You lucky piece of shit,” and Rex, who was standing right next to him—all that night Rex would run up and down the side of the court to wherever the action was—heard it.

“Lucky?” Rex cried in anguish. “Lucky? Why, you dumb Guinea! Lucky? I taught him how to do that! Right, Ex? You better believe it, Guinzo! I taught him that! In the days before he shot his sister! Right, Ex? That’s a fact! In the days before Ex shot his sister! Ho, ho, ho!”

And it goes without saying that every time I scored that night Rex continued to chant his high awful hysterical liturgy. That proper John Jay crowd—some of those kids used to arrive at the games in chauffeur-driven Cadillacs (a long way from Watertown indeed)—sat in stunned pop-eyed disbelief. And Ex?—well, a redfaced Ex just withdrew further and further and further into basketball.

“Yeah! I taught him that! Right, Ex? In the days before he shot his sister! Ho, ho, ho!”

But it never was, Alissa, despite my refusing to dampen your girllike enthusiasm for what you considered your startling acuteness. From page one Tony Last was never alive, with his tenacious love of the conventional and his infantile passion for that nothing pile of stone called Hetton Abbey, falling battlements, Morgan le Fay ceiling, and so forth. One can hardly empathize with the anguished unallayable sorrow of a man born dead. Had that been Waugh’s Basil Seal, the one true character Waugh ever created, I could have agreed and said, “Yes, Alissa, that indeed is hell.” But of course, among his other endearing attributes—being a liar, a roué, a cheat, a cad, and so forth—Basil Seal was altogether too resourceful, would never have sat still for his imprisonment by Todd, and eventually, like Hemingway or a gorilla, would have walked from the rain forests chomping jovially on bananas, as I hope one day to do, though in my case I’ll walk out munching pineapple.

At his more sober moments O’Twoomey has in fact admitted to keeping me prisoner, as when he tells me that when his “business is done” I shall be free to go as I please “with a nice lurverly bonus from me, my dear, for the inconvenience, don’t you know,” for the most part he insists that Random House has waited quite long enough for my book, thank you, ma’am, and that I shall damn well honor the financial obligation of my advance even if it kills him, O’Twoomey. Of course he calls Random House “Whimsical House.”

“I mean, really, my dear Frederick, it sounds so aimless, ‘random’ does. Rather as if needing ten manuscripts to publish, they throw a hundred from the roof and put the first ten they pick up between covers. Random indeed!”

When I pointed out—and why do I bother to do this, Alissa?—that the house he was so sneeringly mocking was the first this side of the Atlantic to publish his compatriot’s
Ulysses,
not only that but that the late Bennett Cerf had taken it to the U.S. Supreme Court to get a ruling on its alleged obscenity, O’Twoomey cried, “Precisely, my dear Frederick. Who but a bunch of godless anarchist nits would devote that much time, energy, and money to heaping that pile of feelthy vile trash on an ingenuous unsuspecting America!”

Forget about Waugh’s Todd, Alissa. There is really no end to O’Twoomey’s dementia, though I expect schizophrenia to be the besetting malaise of the Irish. Not only can O’Twoomey quote at endless length from Joyce’s
Ulysses,
and often does, including the Nighttown section (Til wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!”) and the Molly Bloom soliloquy (“…
feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”)
but he does so with a gustatory relish that borders on the rapturous sexuality of the drooling impotent.

Although O’Twoomey has an extremely dear apparatus called a dish installed atop Lanai Lodge, where our party permanently occupies six of the eleven rooms, or the entire north side of the motel, and can pick up thirty channels, on the theory that it’s not “substantive enough for a writer” and will do my “genius ghastly irreparable damage,” he refuses to allow me a TV in my room (O’Twoomey himself watches the box all the morning and all the evening). He has, however, allowed me a great expensive clock radio, the function of 90 percent of whose feverishly glittering dials I don’t understand, and I am awakened mornings, at five, to the croakings and rantings of the Honolulu disc jockey J. Akuhead Pupule, said to be the highest paid in the world. The J. stands for nothing, an aku is a bonito, a fish much relished here as sushi,
pupule
is Hawaiian for “crazy.” Hence his name translates as J. Crazy Fishhead, under the circumstances a most appropriate guy to whom to awaken.

Aku’s real name is Hal Lewis. Years ago he played the violin in drawing-room and honky-tonk bands in the Bay area. He found his way to Hawaii and married a Hawaiian woman with operatic pretensions named Emma. Recently I saw in
The Advertiser
that in his autobiography Robert Merrill assessed Emma’s voice as falling between lacking and painful, and for days I have to no avail been waiting for Aku to start rending the airwaves about Merrill’s indiscretion. Once Teddy Kennedy said he might challenge President Carter’s incumbency and seek the Democratic nomination in the primaries. President Carter’s mother, Miss Lillian, said she hoped no one would shoot Kennedy. On reading this, Aku said, “What a tacky broad.” Other than waiting breathlessly to hear what J. Akuhead Pupule might say next, and to get the news and the weather on the half hour, there aren’t any melodic reasons for listening. For the past year Aku’s favorite record has been Englebert Humperdinck’s “After the Loving.” When one of Aku’s idolaters telephoned and asked why he played it so often, Aku snapped, “Emma likes it.” The diva likes it? On occasion Aku plays an Emma record, but I don’t have the musical savvy to gauge Merill’s assessment.

Hannibal knocks at my door at 5:15, unlocks it, we repair to the Lodge’s screened-in veranda for the Kona coffee he has already prepared, and we read the morning
Honolulu Advertiser,
Hannibal the funnies and I anything that strikes my interest. Hannibal laughs a lot and exclaims, “Eeese goot,
eeese gootl”
then asks me to read what he’s just laughed at and explain it to him. Tell me about that, will you, Al? At six, after four or five mugs of coffee and a half dozen True blues, Hannibal returns me to my room, locks me in, I have my morning evacuation, sit at my desk, half listen to Crazy Fishhead, and survey my writing paraphernalia, books, paper, ballpoint pens, pencils, erasers, typewriters, even a used Xerox machine.

When O’Twoomey asked me how I wrote—I knew of course that he wanted to know what material I used—I told him I wrote in longhand on legal-size tablets, typed the material on cheap paper, rewrote, then put it all onto a high-quality rag-content bond. Two days later this room was stacked with enough boxes of paper to produce Trollope’s shelf, with enough left over to copy
War and Peace
and four or five of Dostoyevski’s in triple space. As one example, to the right of my desk in easy reach is a stack of virginal legal-size tablets three feet high. The four- and five-foot stacks of books, scattered aimlessly about the room like an intellectual recluse’s formidable maze, are—or were until O’Twoomey got my number—a ploy of mine.

While reading the morning
Advertiser
and the Sunday
Advertiser and Star-Bulletin,
I made mental notes of every reviewed book. On my return to my room I’d write the titles down, then every two weeks or so I’d present a long list to O’Twoomey, telling him there were things in these volumes I felt might be of use to me. O’Twoomey would hand me three or four hundred-dollar bills and have Toby fly Hannibal and me over to Honolulu in the Cessna. As O’Twoomey won’t allow any of us to have a drink until 6:30, when he switches from his imported Guinness stout (by then he’s drunk at least a case) to his deep-dish Boodles martinis (four ounces of gin on ice, no vermouth), I use these semimonthly outings to get drunk and to look at the shoppers.

In the rented Jeep O’Twoomey keeps in Honolulu airport’s long-term parking lot Toby would drop Hannibal and me at the Walden bookstore in the Ala Moana Shopping Plaza and we’d make arrangements to meet in the Hano Hano room in the Sheraton Waikiki. Because Toby had six or eight girls in Honolulu, Hannibal and I were never pressed for time. Toby was always late (he was into his “Chink period doing strange things” he never got around to detailing for me, taking Oriental herbs that allowed him to sustain two-hour erections or some such thing) and I, with Hannibal never more than a step away, would select eight to ten books that had nothing to do with any tides on my list, after which we’d stroll about the plaza staring achingly at the Eurasian girls in their muumuus or—grant me peace—high-slit cheongsams. We’d pick up some underwear, leather thongs and sandals, aloha shirts, golf balls and tees, occasionally a small gift for O’Twoomey. O’Twoomey never asks for change, Alissa, and I have over four thousand dollars lying loosely in one of my cabinet drawers.

Then we’d take a taxi to the Sheraton, the outdoor glass elevator to the top of the building, and, while waiting for Toby, we’d sit at the bar of the Hano Hano Room overlooking Waikiki. I’d have a double vodka and grapefruit juice, Hannibal a Coke, and he’d go one for one with me even if Toby was two hours late and I had time for fifteen. Hannibal always said, “You no tell Mr. O.” and I’d say, “No, I won’t tell him, Hannibal,” meaning I wouldn’t tell O’Twoomey Hannibal had sullied the sacred rules of our alluring palm-shrouded Yaddo by allowing me to drink before six.

Some time ago—I’ve lost all track of time, Alissa—when I presented my book list to O’Twoomey, he asked obliquely why I didn’t finish the books I already had. When I protested I had finished them, having read some of them twice, he reached fiercely under his chair, pulled out a fat R. F. Delderfield paperback, snatched up his letter opener, and with a grand flourish, as though he were a swashbuckler brandishing a cutlass, began lustily separating the pages which, alas, the binder’s machines had obviously neglected cutting. It was the first indication I had that O’Twoomey was spying on me when I was out of the room. The next day, having exposed himself for the Jerry Sneak he is, he had a peephole installed in my door, one he can see in but I can’t see out.

It does little good, Alissa. O’Twoomey’s leg has never healed properly; every time the surgeons took the pins out the leg collapsed from his monstrous weight. Now he refuses to have the pins removed altogether, despite admonitions of possible severe infection (I pray for gangrene compounded by irreversible blood poisoning). In any event, were I forced to, I could hear his clamorous gimpy walk from here across the Maui Channel to Lahaina. Hence, I’m always at my desk, either reading or composing this letter, by the time the fat old sybarite hobbles down the hallway and puts his booze-rheumy eye to the peephole.