The Paper Dragon (5 page)

He met Virginia Kelly in the hall one day, he was coming back from the boys' room and he had the wooden pass in his hand, and Virginia stopped him. He was nine years old, and she was ten and big for her age, and she stopped him and said, "Don't look at me anymore, Stupid."

"Who's looking at you?" he said, but his heart was pounding, and he wanted to kiss her, wanted to kiss this quintessence of everything alien to him, the sparkling green eyes and the wild Irish way of tossing her head, all, everything. Years later, when he read
Ulysses
, he knew every barmaid in the book because they were all Virginia Kelly who told him once to stop looking at her, Stupid, and whom he never looked at again from that day forward though it broke his heart.

When he moved to the Bronx, the only person he thought he missed was Virginia Kelly. He would lie awake in bed at night and think of Virginia, and when he learned how to masturbate, he would conjure visions of this laughing Irish girl and ravage her repeatedly until one morning Julie said to him, "Hey, 
I
have to make the beds around here, you know," and he pretended he didn't know what she meant, but after that he masturbated secretly in the bathroom and carefully wiped up after him with toilet paper. Somewhere along the line, he switched from raping Virginia Kelly to raping Hedy Lamarr, and he never thought of her again except once or twice when he remembered that there were people in this world who drove in red convertibles with their long black hair blowing in the wind, laughing, wearing silk stockings and loafers, the idealization of everything that seemed to him American, everything that seemed to him non-Harlem and non-Italian. Once, in high school, Rubin said to him in the boys' room, jokingly, "Where else but in America could an Italian and a Jew piss side by side in the same bowl?" and he had laughed because he laughed at everything Rubin said, Rubin was so much smarter and better informed than he, but he didn't really get the joke. He did not by that time see anything funny about being Italian, nor could he understand what Rubin thought was so funny about being Jewish. It never once occurred to him, not then, and not later when he was hobnobbing it around Hollywood with stars and starlets and all that crap, nor even when he laid a famous movie queen who kept calling him Artie, for which he almost busted her in the mouth, except she really was as passionate as she came over on the screen, not in all those years, not ever in his life until perhaps this moment when he felt so terribly alone enmeshed in a law system created by Englishmen, not once did he ever realize how dearly he had loved Harlem, or how much it had meant to him to be Italian.

There was in his world a cluttered brimming external existence, and an interior solitude that balanced each other perfectly and resulted in, he realized, a serene childhood,
even
in the midst of a depression, even though his father was a mysterious government employee known as "a substitute" instead of "a regular," which he gathered was highly more desirable. There was an immutable pattern in his household, the same foods were eaten on the identical night each week, Monday was soup which his mother made herself, he hated soup meat, it was stringy and tasteless. Tuesday night was spaghetti with either meatballs or
braciòla
, Wednesday night was breaded veal cutlets with spinach and mashed potatoes, his mother once dumped a whole bowl of mashed potatoes on his head because he was trying to catch a fly as a specimen for the microscope he had got for Christmas. He threw a dissecting needle at the fly on the wall and, uncanny luck, pierced the fly, even Errol Flynn couldn't have done better. ("You
got
'im, Sonny!" Julie shrieked in delight.) But a lot of gooey white glop came out of the fly and he refused to eat his mashed potatoes after that. So his mother, naturally, having inherited a few Neapolitan traits from Grandpa, even though she herself had been born and raised in the garden spot called Harlem, picked up the bowl of potatoes and dumped the whole thing on his head. His father laughed. He hated his father for two months after that. Couldn't he have at least said it wasn't nice to dump a bowl of mashed potatoes all over a kid who was maybe a budding scientist and certainly the best dissecting needle thrower in the United States?

Thursday night was some kind of macaroni, either
rigatoni
or
mostaccioli
or
fusilli
, again with meatballs, or maybe sausage, and Friday night was fish, of course. Oh, how he hated fish. There were three kinds of fish his mother made, and he hated each and every one of them. The first was breaded filet of flounder, dry and white and tasteless. The second was breaded shrimp, she sure had a mania for breading stuff, equally as tasteless, except they seemed to come in bite size. The third was a white halibut which she made with a tomato sauce, fresh tomatoes he remembered because the sauce was always pulpy and sometimes had seeds. This was the best of the lot because it was a little juicier than the two breaded concoctions, but he hated each with a passion and deplored the approach of Friday each week. He did not learn how to eat lobster until he went to Maine with a girl from Barnard one weekend, and had not discovered until just recently that his mother hated fish as much as he did and had only made it every Friday because she was a sort of half-ass Catholic who never went to church or confession, but who nonetheless made fish every Friday night. Breaded.

Saturday was either lambchops or steak. Sunday was Grandpa's house, the biggest feast of the week, the family represented in smaller groups except on the holidays, antipasto, spaghetti, meatballs, roast beef or chicken or turkey, fruit, nuts, pastry — his grandfather always went out to buy
cannoli
and
cassatini, sfogliatelli
and
baba
on his name day, a sort of pilgrimage every year. He would come back flushed with the cold (his name day was in November) carrying two white cartons of Italian pastry, tied with white string, "Did you get them, Papa?" his mother would ask. And Grandpa would nod and smile and then grab Arthur playfully and say, "Sonny, help me cut the string, the string is too strong for me."

Structured, everything structured and ordered, the activity in the streets as patterned as the regularity of meals and holidays, each season bringing its own pursuit, its own hysterical joy to the slum. (Slum? What's that? What's a slum?) Roller skates, and stickball, and pea shooters, and pushos, and hi-li paddles, and baseball cards, and roasting mickeys, and black leather aviator hats with goggles, and rubberband guns, one kid had six of them mounted in tandem like a machine gun, and pigeons on the roof, and stoopball, and boxball, and Skullies (I love you, Virginia Kelly) and Statues, and Johnny-on-a-Pony and Ring-a-Leavio, and little girls skipping rope, or playing that game where they lift their leg over a bouncing ball, skirts flying, "One-two-three-a-nation, I received my confirmation," Virginia Kelly had a plaid skirt, blue plaid, she wore white socks, she once beat up Concetta Esposito for calling her a lousy Irish mick, which after all she was. Patterned, structured, safe, secure, there were no rats in Harlem, there was only a street that was a city, a dozen playmates who populated the world, a million relatives who hugged and kissed and teased and loved him and called him Sonny, a busy universe for a small boy.

And juxtaposed to this, the inner reality of Arthur Constantine, the quiet, thoughtful, solitary child who played with his soldiers on the dining room floor, the big oaken table serving as suicide cliff or soaring skyscraper, the intricacy of its hidden structure becoming a bridge to be blown or a gangplank to be walked, each separate lead soldier — the heads were always breaking off, when that happened, you fixed them with a matchstick, but they never lasted long — each separate soldier or cowboy or Indian assuming an identity of its own. Shorty was the one with the bow legs, he had a lariat in his hand when Arthur bought him for a nickel at the Woolworth's on Third Avenue, but later the lariat got lost. Magua was the Indian, he was made of cast iron rather than lead, and he never broke, he outlasted all the others. Naked to the waist, wearing a breechclout, he was Arthur's favorite, and Arthur always put words of wisdom into his mouth, carefully thought-out Indian sayings that helped the white man in his plight. Magua never turned on anybody, Magua was a good Indian. Red Dance was the bad Indian, he had a bonnet full of feathers. When his head finally broke off because Arthur caused Magua to give him a good punch one day, Arthur never bothered to repair him. Instead, he bought an identical piece and named him Blue Dance, who he supposed was Son of Red Dance, and when Magua knocked
his
head off, too, Arthur switched to a villain named El Mustachio who was a soldier carrying a pack, and who didn't have a mustache at all. He would talk aloud to himself while he played with the tiny metal men, he would construct elaborate conflicts and then put everything to rights with either a wise word from Magua or a sweep of his hand, scattering the pieces all over the floor. If his sister ever tried to enter one of these games, he shrieked at her in fury, and once he shoved her against the wall and made her cry and then went to her afterwards and hugged her and kissed her and said he was very sorry, but he still would not let her into any of the solitary games he played with the metal men. He wondered once, alone in his bed and listening to the sounds of sleep in the room next door, whether he would even have allowed Virginia Kelly to play soldiers with him — and he decided not.

Where do they go, he wondered, all those black-haired girls with the green eyes and the wonderful laugh, when the hell have I ever loved anyone as deeply or as hopelessly as I loved Virginia Kelly? Where does it all go, and how does it happen that I'm alone on this day, with Christmas coming and no Grandpa to ask me to help him break the string on the white carton of pastries, this day, when God knows I could at least use Aunt Louise to tell me she has a friend who knows a magistrate, "Don't worry, Sonny, I'll speak to them at the Club," the Republican Club would set it all straight, or if not, then certainly a dab of Aunt Louise's Ointment would. Where? he thought. Where? I've been invited to orgies in Hollywood (and refused) — "The ideah is to have a few drinks ontil ever'-one get on-in-hib-ited, you know whut I mean?" — I've seen my name on motion picture screens and television screens and once on a theater program, Arthur Nelson Constantine, the "Nelson" added by yours truly as a bow to our cousins across the big water, an acknowledgment of my veddy British heritage, Arthur
Nelson
Constantine ("What?" Aunt Louise would have said. "Don't worry, I know somebody in the Republican Club.") I have gone to bed with young girls, and some not so young, and once I went to bed with
two
girls, and another time I went to bed with a girl and another guy and I think we sent that poor little girl straight from there to an insane asylum, but that was in Malibu where such things happen often, I am told. I have sat at the same table with John Wayne, who offered to buy me a drink and then told a story about shooting
The Quiet Man
in Ireland, and I have been blasted across the sky at five hundred miles an hour while drinking martinis and watching a movie written and directed by a man I knew. And it seems to me now, it seems to me alone in this cold corridor that the most important thing I've ever done in my life was skewer a fly with a dissecting needle from a distance of five feet, shooting from the hip, did I ever tell you
that
story, Duke? And my mother rewarded me by dumping a bowl of lukewarm mashed potatoes on my head. And my father laughed. And the fly dripped its white glop all over the wall.

Where else but in America could a little Italian boy from the slums of Harlem (Well, you see, there are
three
Harlems) sit at the same table with John Wayne and listen to a very inside story about the shooting of
The Quiet Man
in Ireland? Where else, I ask you, indeed. Oh man, I played the Slum Kid bit to the hilt, everybody likes to hear how you can make it in the face of adversity. The mouse that almost bit my mother became over the years a foraging bloodthirsty sea monster with matted hair dripping seaweed and coming up out of the water with its jaws wide ready to swallow her bottom and everything else besides. The apartment on 118th Street became the Black Hole of Calcutta, it's a wonder the swarms of flies did not eat the eyes out of my head as I lay helpless and squirming in the squalor of my pitiful crib, it's a wonder the rats did not tear the flesh from my bones and leave me whimpering helplessly for an undernourished mother to hobble into the room and flail at them ineffectually. I was born and raised in Harlem, you hear that, Duke? Not only was I born and raised in Harlem, but I managed to get out of Harlem, which is no small feat in itself. Moreover, I was educated at Columbia University, which is a pretty snazzy school you will admit, and I managed to become an officer in the Army, came out as a captain don't forget, and then went on to become a very highly paid screen and television writer who this very minute is negotiating, or at least
hoping
to negotiate, with one Hester Miers, you've
got
it, mister, the very same, for the starring role in my new play which will be coming to Broadway shortly. (I'll stand in that lobby on opening night, Virginia Kelly, and when you walk in and recognize me and come over to wish me luck, I'll tell you to go bounce a ball on the sidewalk, one-two-three-a-nation. I'll tell you I've got an apartment of my own now in a very fancy building on East 54th Street, with a doorman
and
an elevator operator, and I'll tell you I date the prettiest girls in New York almost every night of the week and I've been sucked off by more black-haired Irish girls than there are in your entire family or perhaps in the entire city of Dublin. And then I'll ask the usher or perhaps the porter to please show you out of the goddamn theater as you are disturbing my equilibrium.) I was born and raised in Harlem, so look at me. Something, huh? You don't have to be colored to be underprivileged, you know. Look at me, and have pity on the poor skinny slum kid, man, did I play that into the ground.