Little Casino (22 page)

B
UT WHAT ARE THE STEPS OF THE PROOF
that inevitably concludes that there are no winter wonderlands here, no deep purple, falling or otherwise, no stardust or star eyes or sleigh bells or open fires or garden walls or angels singing? Shall we accept the conclusions of such a proof without insisting on a clarification of its steps; or, at the very least, a dry martini? And although it
may
be proved that the light of bowling alleys is romantic, it must be made clear that those bowling alleys are nowhere in this vicinity, brother! And if Cheech and Nickie marry Annette and Inez, that will in no way enable those bowling alleys, to, well, appear. Nor will it preclude the vomiting of black blood by old men, dying in little pieces from bad food, bad whiskey, bad luck, and humiliation, their hearts more or less broken; nor will such ecstatic couplings improve the ratio of tapioca to semen in reprehensible masculine dreams, dreams in which young women are treated with the utmost disrespect, ruthlessly undressed, and spoken to in language not fit for a barracks, and there isn’t much that is not fit for a barracks, and all this carried out within the very dreamwork itself! A person could die from embarrassment. So Freud is wrong, yet again, thanks be to God. And after the light of bowling alleys has been used to “help one get through life’s daily stresses,” what apologist for the shameless fraud of a shambling Viennese Jew, whom dimmest sophomores can smugly mock, will dare to attempt to prove that he was less a fraud than Georgia O’Keefe, whose least accomplished paintings are moreso, oh moreso than they ever were, scintillant in their location, insistent in the depth of a statement that controls the picture plane with the saturated colors that are certain in their regard for the iconoclasm of erotic love, and twice on Sunday. Like chicken and mashed potatoes and fresh peas, with a full gravy boat down at the end of the table. Hey, pass that down, ok, Georgia? And who first noted that Ms. O’Keefe once said that she painted well on Saturdays but badly on Sundays, chock full as she inevitably was with “chicken and taters,” as she affectedly called the dish? It was, never doubt it for a moment, somebody. That’s exactly the way things used to be in old Santa Fe, a town that can never be imitated, nor even vaguely suggested as to its color, shade, and charm around these parts, dear pal. And it’s a cinch that not one resident would tolerate for a moment an imitation—assuming such an unlikely horror—of the town that is often called “prettier than Frisco.” These residents, or representative samplings of same, would, instead, make their way to the Loew’s Alpine to see a double feature with such actors as George Brent, Veronica Lake, Rondo Hatton, Edward Arnold, and Jack Carson, plus coming attractions, cartoons, a Pete Smith Specialty, a Robert Benchley short, and the news. The Alpine took to sporting blue sateen banners, which, draped casually from its marquee, announced, in silver letters, that the theater was AIR COOLED BY FRIGIDAIRE. Many have tried, oh many, many have tried in vain to prove that the blue of the banner was the blue of Lake Como or Lake Tahoe or Lake Sapphire, or even, for that matter, Lake Hopatcong, but there’s no chance of such a serene and glamorous lacustrine blue existing around here, sport. You have, by the way, an honest face, something like Jack Carson’s.

Alfred Stieglitz, or so they say, wrote letters to Georgia O’Keefe in which he said more amorous, even erotic things, in barracks language, than you can shake a stick at. Nothing, by the way, is “prettier than Frisco,” often called “the Santa Fe of California,” whatever that means. Nothing.

Jack Carson, who regularly played loud fools whose bonhomie could not conceal—nor was it meant to—the larceny in their hearts, had an uncanny ability to let the audience see his tender vulnerability beneath the intentionally revealed cupidity and the hearty bluster, so that when he was on screen, one watched three people at once. He can be seen at work in many films, two of his best being
Strawberry Blonde
and
Mildred Pierce.

“They don’t make ‘em like Jack Carson anymore,” Fat George the Armenian says. “Now any dimwitted dumb fuck of an actor is a STAR! You could die laughing.” His father, filling a huge jar on the counter of his Italian-Greek Food Products store, adds, “Bill Harris’s dozen or so choruses on his ‘In a Mellotone’ are worth any five movie stars you can think of, male or female. Hell, they’re worth any five Nobel laureates you can think of!”

Had Freud somehow known that Gloria Steinem once “worked” as a Playboy Bunny in order to get “material” for a “story,” would he have remarked: “Uh-huh” or “Worked?” or “An anal repressive, surely” or “Not a bad built, Klaus”?

George’s father filled the huge jar with, let’s say, Greek olives.

Barracks language is always everywhere vile, and yet, after a time, it takes on the homely qualities of security, familiarity, and, generally speaking, regulated domesticity.

“That is no fucking lie, you sorry sonofabitch motherfucker,” Corporal Wing avers, looking up from his fucking field-fucking-stripped M-1 carbine. Home sweet fucking home.

Helen and Connie

H
IS MIND NO LONGER SEEMS TO FUNCTION
properly, or, in any event, efficiently, but has become, instead, a welter of discrete images, all of which have equal importance. This eccentricity may not stand him in good stead, as they used to say, given the no-nonsense lust for instant results and useful facts that drives the nation. Well. He cannot, or will not, organize or categorize experiences. So that although he may recall the time that he first kissed a girl, and although his recollection that it occurred at another girl’s fifteenth birthday party is probably correct, he cannot see himself at that party as other than the seventeen-year-old who lost his virginity in the park situated just two blocks from the house in which the party was held. The name of the girl he kissed was Helen Ryan; the name of the girl in the park was Constance Mangini. Kisses, he remembers, somebody’s kisses, that tasted of vanilla. His entire past seems to work, if that’s the word, this way now, so that sometimes he knows that he kissed Constance at the party and pulled up Helen’s thrilling skirt under a tree in Bliss Park. And who is that little boy, or is it that gray-haired old man, who is falling in with his company at Fort Hood? He doesn’t seem to mind this confusion of the temporal, this shifting of imagery, this aphasia of blurred time. It fits, it seems to him, rather well with the blood-drenched, always justified chaos of the collapsing century’s history, its legacy, God help us all. Once in awhile he feels his own flesh, still reasonably sound, firmly fixed in long-gone time, and he turns to smile at people who are dead. The ravishing taste of a Lucky Strike as the war ends in the Pacific, the smell of his first love’s sun-warm skin, a clear picture of a woman, desired and desiring, on a shady patio, in white summer clothes, her gin and tonic lifted in a toast to something wholly forgotten but sweet, surely sweet. And who is that drunken soldier in dirty khakis and a flowered shirt on the street in Waco, of all places, a sandwich in one hand and a pint of J.W. Dant in the other?

I’m afraid the two girls mentioned in this putatively tender yet wholly pointless, if not useless “recollection” have had their names garbled. They were Constance Ryan and Helen Mangini. The former was the recipient of what she now thinks of as the “unwelcome sexual attentions” addressed to her in the park. Constance was wearing a blue-and-white-striped linen skirt, and was concerned lest grass stains suggestto her brother, Paulie, an amorous dalliance. He put his jacket down for her when she said that she didn’t want Paulie to find out about it. Find out about what? he said, his hand under that tight skirt.

“They don’t much go in for Dant in California, as far as I can see, am I right? You never hear it mentioned.”

“Well, whiskey and cigarettes will kill you in about twenty minutes in California, a well-known fact. The only things that won’t hurt you are the merciless sunshine and the thousands of tons of poisonous automobile emissions that daily add a certain spice to the pollen and mold in the air. Anyway, ‘some weather!’ is a useful phrase to keep in readiness amid the friendly hollow smiles.”

(Another useful phrase is “how do you like San Francisco?” The reply should be either “compared to what?” or “it’s the Queens of California.”)

The true name of Bliss Park is Owl’s Head Park, by which appellation it is never called, at least not by neighborhood residents. The tree under which the young lovers performed their inexpert sexual acts was a rare copper beech. The tree may still be in the park.

Maybe Frisco is the Waco of California.

“Paulie was
Helen’s
brother!”

Hi!

We’re in the city that’s often called the Waco of California, but it looks sort of like Queens. Some weather! We’ve been reading about all the snow back home, ha ha. We’ll bring you back a souvenir from Haight-Ashbury where they invented modern beatnik poetry and rock and roll.

Love, Helen and Connie

Lakeside and oceanside

H
E HAS ON NAVY BLUE WOOLEN TRUNKS
, cinched by a white canvas belt with a tarnished nickel-plated buckle, and a white cotton athletic-style shirt, on the chest of which is embroidered a navy-blue anchor to echo the embroidered white anchor on the right leg of his trunks. His mother and grandfather are with him, as are two teenage girls, Helen and Julia Carpenter. They have small breasts, which he looks at surreptitiously as often as he can, the little degenerate. Mr. Jenivere and his weirdly corpselike wife sit on an adjoining blanket. Mr. Jenivere considers himself to be “quite a croquet player,” elegant and ruthless, but his grandfather beats him, daily, without, as they say, half trying, and he compounds this indignity by playing the sweet, quiet game with a careless air, one of studied distraction, as if Mr. Jenivere is not really worth his concentration. The air off the lake is cool, and the leaves on the trees that cluster around the chalk-white casino crackle slightly with early messages of autumn. His mother takes him to the casino and they sit in the taproom, where she orders a Tom Collins for herself and an orangeade for him. She gives him a sip of her Collins from its magical frosted glass, and lights a Herbert Tareyton. The taste of the gin and lemon, the fragrant cigarette smoke, are, oh yes, appurtenances of leisure and summer, of the complex world of adulthood. A man at the bar, dressed in a pale-green polo shirt and white slacks and shoes, turns slightly on his bar stool and looks at his mother’s legs.