The Paper Dragon (27 page)

"Why, yes, of course!" Driscoll said, grinning. "I
did
have a long discussion with some veterans of the June-July fighting, and they told me all about the 105th Armored Brigade and their Russian-built T-34 tanks."

"Chicane," Jonah said, "for which I could be disbarred." He shook his head. "You'll just have to remember where the 105th
really
came from."

"How can I? I don't
know
where it came from."

"Did you steal that play?" Jonah asked suddenly.

"I never stole anything in my life," Driscoll answered.

"Good," Jonah said.

"Do you believe me?"

"Yes."

"That's nice, because I don't give a damn whether you do or not," Driscoll said, and burst out laughing. "Here're our drinks. Let's forget the trial for a minute, can't we?"

"Brackman has already brought up this matter of the thief leaving his fingerprints," Norman said, "and I can assure you…"

"I'm not a thief," Driscoll said.

"Nobody said you were."

"Brackman said I was. And Constantine said I was. I didn't steal his play."

"Well, we know you didn't steal it," Norman said.

"How does it feel to be colored?" Driscoll asked.

"Fine," Norman said. "How does it feel to be white?"

"I only asked because Sergeant Morley in my book is colored, and I often wondered while I was writing it how it feels to be colored, how it
really
feels to be colored."

"Listen, Jimmy," Jonah said suddenly, "you'd better start thinking about this because I'll tell you the truth I'm very concerned about it, very very concerned."

"So am I," Norman said.

"So am I," Driscoll said.

"So start thinking about it," Jonah said.

"About what?"

"The 105th."

"Oh."

"Yes."

"I
have
been thinking about it."

"What was your serial number?"

"What?"

"Your Army serial number."

"714-5632."

"Where did you live before you went into the Army?"

"On Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn."

"The address?"

"61 Myrtle."

"What was your telephone number?"

"Main 2-9970."

"Were you married at the time?"

"I got married two months before I was drafted."

"What was your wife's address?"

"Well, the apartment on Myrtle was hers, you see. I moved in with her after we got married."

"Where were you living before then?"

"With my parents."

"Where?"

"West End Avenue. 2426 West End."

"What floor, what apartment?"

"Apartment 12C."

"And on Myrtle Avenue?"

"Apartment 37."

"Your life seems singularly devoid of the number 105," Jonah said sourly, and lifted his drink.

"Did you have a car?" Norman asked.

"Yes."

"What was your license plate number?"

"Who the hell remembers?"

"Have you ever been to 105th Street?" Jonah asked.

"No."

"What high school did you go to?" Norman asked.

"Music and Art."

"Did you have a locker?"

"What?"

"A locker. For the gym."

"Oh. Yes, I had a locker."

"With a combination lock?"

"Yes."

"What was the combination?"

"24 right, 17 left, 14 right."

"How can you possibly remember that, but not your license plate number?"

"I didn't have to open my license plate every day of the week," Driscoll said.

"You will have to think harder," Jonah said.

"I don't have to think harder if I don't want to," Driscoll answered. "I don't have to think at
all
, if I don't want to." He picked up his glass and drank from it, and then put the glass down and stared into it, aware of the sudden silence at the table. Well, the hell with you, he thought. You sit here and throw questions at me, don't you think any of this
means
anything to me, Ebie's apartment on Myrtle Avenue, and the telephone number I called maybe ten thousand times, or the old Buick I used to drive when I first started at Pratt, and my locker at Music and Art, or the apartment on West End Avenue?

I can remember every inch of that apartment the way it used to look when Pop was still alive and before my mother sold all the furniture and brought in that Danish modern crap which my father would have thrown out of the house in a minute. But her new husband Mr. Gerald Furst is in the furniture business, so what else do you do but throw out all the old mahogany stuff and bring in a sleek new line to go with your sleek new husband? The piano, too, getting rid of that. Well, nobody played it but Pop, and he's been dead for five years, so I suppose she was right in giving it away. Christ, the way he used to sit at the piano with a tumbler of whiskey resting on the arm, banging out those Irish songs while Uncle Benny stood there singing at the top of his lungs. Pink shirts. Uncle Benny always used to wear pink shirts. And Pop would offer me a sip of booze, and I'd turn my head away, pulling a face, things sure change. Here I am getting squiffed in a bar, thirty-seven years old, things sure change. Everything changes. Even Uncle Benny finally got married and moved off to Fort Lauderdale.

He could draw like an angel, that man. I would have given my
soul
to be able to draw like him when I was a kid, or even, for that matter, after I'd had more training than he'd ever had in his life. You stuck a pencil in Uncle Benny's hand, and he would conjure a world for you, name it and Uncle Benny would draw it. It was he who first got me hooked, the sweet old pusher whispering to the innocent kid, Hey, Jimbo, want to try this? Guiding my hand along the page at first, showing me how to copy things from the newspaper comic strips, easy stuff at first like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, all clear sharp heavy lines, and then into the more complicated stuff from
Abby an' Slats
, or
Prince Valiant
. I did a marvelous copy of the Viking with the red beard who used to be in
Prince Valiant
, what was his name? I colored his beard the same color it was in the paper, and I also did one of Val himself swinging that mighty singing sword of his against a man with a helmet that looked something like an upended garbage pail. Uncle Benny said the perspective was off, but he praised the drawing anyway. I used to have a terrible handwriting in those days, so I would ask Uncle Benny to sign all my work for me, J. R. Driscoll, which was James Randolph Driscoll, the Randolph being in honor of my grandfather, who died when I was only four months old. Uncle Benny would sign each of my drawings in the lower right-hand corner, J. R. Driscoll, and then outline the signature with a narrow box that had a very heavy line on the bottom and on the right-hand side, so that it looked as if it were throwing a shadow on the page. I colored that guy's beard with crayon, what the hell was his name?

Pop wasn't much help in the art department, except in terms of criticism,
You made his nose too long
, or
Whoever saw a dog with a tail like that
? But he was very proud of the work I did, and always asked me to bring it out whenever any of his cronies from Gimbel's stopped by. He was an upholsterer, my father, and he used to work for Gimbel's, an uneducated man who nonetheless taught himself to play the piano and who studied the dictionary night after night, taking it a page at a time and learning new words which he would spring on all of us while we sat at dinner in the big dining room overlooking the Hudson. "Do you know what a dimissory letter is?" or "What is the meaning of equitation?" or "What is the difference between geminate and germinate?" I remember one night especially because he gave us a word which became the basis for a game we later played. He said, "Use the word caruncle in a sentence," and I said, "Caruncle Benny have some more mashed potatoes?" and Pop almost died laughing, though my mother didn't think it was funny at all. In fact, I doubt if she even got it. But Pop invented the game called Caruncle, and we used to play it two or three nights a week, the three of us sitting on the brown sofa near the old Chickering, while my mother sat in the wing chair tatting; she used to make these antimacassars which she gave to everyone at Christmas, and which always looked faded and dirty when you put them on the furniture. The game Caruncle had no real rules and we played it by ear each time, the way my father played the piano. The idea was to give a word which the next person would then define incorrectly. For example, if my father used the word "disseminate," my uncle might have defined it by saying, "When you disseminate, it means you make a distinction," and then I would say, "No, that's discriminate," and my father would say, "No, discriminate is when you burn your garbage," and Uncle Benny would say, "No, that's incinerate," and I would say, "No, incinerate is when you hint at something," and Pop would say, "No, that's insinuate," and Uncle Benny would say, "No, insinuate is meat on Friday," and we would always end up laughing. Another word game we — played was called Progression and was a variation of Ghost, except that the idea here was to make a new word on each turn by adding a letter to the word we already had. Pop might start with the word "man," and Uncle Benny would add a letter and change it to "mane," and then I would make it "mange," and Pop would make it "manger" and Uncle Benny would make it "manager," and so on. Or I might start with "rid" and Pop would make it "dire," and Uncle Benny would make it "rived" and I would make it "divers" and Pop would make it "diverse," the idea being to reach ten letters which was the highest score and which hardly anyone ever got. My mother never played any of these word games with us. She had an Irish brogue and was ashamed of it.

When I was about twelve years old, I made up the comic strip called
The Cat
. It was a direct steal from
Batman
. My character was a very wealthy socialite named Jim Dirkson, which name I arrived at by transposing the letters of my own name and substituting a letter here and there. The Cat was dedicated to fighting crime and evil. He wore a black costume just like Batman's, except that his face mask had whiskers on it. Uncle Benny helped me lay out the panels, and he also did all the lettering in the balloons. It was in full color, though I used Mongol pencils instead of ink. I did forty-eight panels, which I figured was enough for about twelve days, and I asked Pop if he thought I should try sending it around to the newspapers. He said, "Sure, why not? It's an excellent comic," but I never did submit it because I didn't think it was good enough. Besides, I felt funny about Uncle Benny having done all the lettering. I didn't know at the time that a lot of comic strip artists hire people just to do their lettering for them. After I saw
Pinocchio
, I decided I would make an animated movie, even though I didn't have either a camera or the faintest understanding of single-frame photography. I created all these characters freely stolen from the film, including one called Swat Fly, who was based on Jiminy Cricket and who even carried an umbrella the way he did. But I also had a two-headed giant named Galoppo, whom Walt Disney had never even dreamt of. The two heads were constantly arguing with each other. I borrowed Pop's old Remington and began typing up the outline of the movie, starting in this tiny star-washed village (like the village in
Pinocchio
) and showing Swat Fly walking down the cobblestoned street and searching for the shop of a poor-but-honest butcher named Ham. Well. I got through six pages of it, single-spaced, but nothing seemed to be happening, so I gave it up. Uncle Benny liked the sketches I'd made of the characters, however, and only casually hinted that they were somewhat derivative. "That's when you make fun of something," I said, and Pop immediately said, "No, that's derisive," and Uncle Benny said, "No, derisive are on either side of Manhattan Island."

Uncle Benny drank a lot. My mother used to call him "a disgosting drunk." He was Pop's brother, and he slept in the end bedroom, next to my room. He worked in a pool parlor, and once, he took me there and ran off a whole rack for me, and then taught me how to hold the cue and how to put English on a ball, and he taught me a trick shot with which I later won a lot of money, making bets in the Army; I never forgot that shot he taught me. He also taught me geometry when I was flunking it at Music and Art. Numbers always threw me, I never was good at arithmetic. When I started geometry, there was suddenly more than numbers to cope with; there were angles and curves and Given this, Prove that, and I got hopelessly lost in the first three weeks. Uncle Benny stepped in, telling me he had once won a medal in math, and then proceeding to drill me every night, going over each formula again and again, "There, now wasn't that easy, Jimbo?" painstakingly working through every problem until he was certain I understood completely. I used to wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and see triangles and circles floating in the air, equilateral has three sixty-degree angles and three equal sides, isosceles has two equal sides, circumference equals πr
²
. I ended up with a 90 on the Regents exam, thanks to Uncle Benny's persistence. He gave me a Bulova watch when I graduated from Music and Art. Engraved on the case was the inscription "To a geometrid genus," which was an inside joke based on Caruncle, "from your loving Uncle Benny."

My best friend at Music and Art was a colored fellow named Andrew Christopher, who was an art major like myself but who also played trombone in the school band. Andy lived on Lenox Avenue and 123rd Street, and I would meet him each morning on the 125th Street platform of the Broadway-7th Avenue Line, which I took up from 96th Street, and which we rode together to 137th Street. We would walk up past City College and then to the school, talking about everything under the sun, but mostly about his girl friend whose name was Eunice and who went to Washington Irving High School where she was studying fashion design. Eunice was a light-skinned girl and her parents objected to Andy simply because he was darker than she. He told me this very openly, and neither of us felt any embarrassment talking about it. It was just one of the facts of life. I never went to Andy's house, though, and he never came to mine. My mother used to call Negroes "boogies."