26. I stood in line at the grill. . .
I stood in line at the grill, watching a man I knew from Casey’s fry up my cheeseburger. A grad student like me, he sweated alongside the eighteen-year-olds for a dollar twenty an hour. This was called “work-study,” the University’s idea of doing him a favor. “There you go, Ace,” he said, dumping fries from a mesh basket and handing me the plate. “Happy heartburn.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Anybody in back?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “Haven’t had time to look.”
The grill at the Union had two separate seating areas. One, “out front” if you approached from the campus side, resembled a burger joint of that period, with cheap plastic furniture, bright fluorescent lighting, and a juke box; a contingent of black students made themselves at home near the music, and I sometimes preferred to eat out there in the company of James Brown, Otis Redding, and Gladys Knight and the Pips. More often I chose the quieter and darker room “in back,” or on the downtown side. This room, with its rich walnut paneling, dormant fireplace, and chandeliers, had been the lobby before the old building got swallowed by its additions; hung with student paintings done in an assaultive style, filled with clunky wooden chairs and tables, it was favored by the studious and by the antisocial. Grad students from various departments—English, Philosophy, Psychology, sometimes Math and Physics—could be found playing bridge there on winter afternoons, waiting out the hours between classes. Though I did not play bridge, I liked the atmosphere, fragrant with patchouli and sometimes a hint of cannabis wafted from who knows where.
L. D. Langdon sat with four other people, handling an enormous deck, a cigarette hanging off her lip at a forty-five degree angle. I greeted the table—I knew them all by sight if not by name—and moved a second table cornerwise so I could sit there eating and watch them play. “It’s the party boy,” L. D. said, glancing at my tray. “Ugh! Look at all that grease. You gonna get a heart attack by the time you’re fifty.”
“Say again,” I said. “I can’t hear you because of that cancer weed you’ve got stuck in your face.”
“I said you’re gonna die.” She began dealing to the other players. “If cholesterol doesn’t get you, some unreformed smoker will. How was Tooksie’s?” L. D. was enrolled in the class from which I’d just come, Rolland Tooks’s Romantics.
“Everyone asked for you,” I said. “Poor Rolland was heartbroken. It’s a good thing nobody told him you were cutting his class because you’d rather cut the cards.”
“I tood my kid to the doctor, wise ass,” she said, dealing rapidly. “She’s been having earaches again.”
Sitting to L. D.’s left was Dexter Coffey, a dark-haired fellow with a riverboat gambler’s beard who’d been working on his English dissertation since John F. Kennedy was shot. Across the table, L. D. was partnered by a couple from the Art Department known as the Leather Babies; a thin, androgynous, sharp-faced pair who were never seen apart, they dressed like twins from the coming ominous century. Dexter Coffey’s partner was a roundish woman with a heartshaped face and inward-slanting teeth, then married to a young up-and-coming English professor. She wore her long honey-blond hair in a thick swinging braid, and scowled at her cards as if they might misbehave.
“Speaking of doctors,” I said, “Julia speculates that you had to miss the party last week due to health reasons.”
This sally prompted a sharp look from L. D. “I wasn’t there,” she said, “because I was having Thanksgiving dinner with my daughter. You see any children at that party?”
“What party was this,” Dexter Coffey asked, “and why was I not invited?”
“Last Thursday,” L. D. said. “Adrian and his chickie fed a lot of fine folks spaghetti and meatballs. What’s the matter, Dex, did you miss a free meal?”
“It was better than she makes it sound,” I told him. “Those meatballs were terrific. Some traditional Italian recipe.”
“Of course they were Italian, dear,” L. D. said to me. “It says so right on the can.”
“Did Teddy go?” Dexter asked L. D. When she didn’t reply, he turned to me. “This woman you see here,” he explained, “is a notorious man-stealin’ tramp, and a certain preacher lady has volunteered to rip her head off and put it up her butt for the good of the community.”
“Teddy?” I glanced at L. D., who had finished dealing and was arranging her kings and aces. “Would he be referring to the new Chair of the Philosophy Department?”
“With whom you had a little discussion,” L. D. said. “You also met Mattie Halliday, I believe.”
“Ah ha. Things are becoming clearer,” I said.
“Small world,” she said, “ain’t it.”
I dipped my French fries and watched them play out the game. Though I didn’t understand the rules of bridge, I enjoyed the players’ bluster and banter. L. D. and Dexter looked like a couple of sharks; I thought the others were probably not as good.
“I was teasing Robert Shemansky,” I said to L. D. “I told him that Julia has a crush on him.”
“You ought not to do that, Jonas,” she said, taking a trick and leading back, “because it’s you she likes.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Julia?” Dexter Coffey worriedly examined his cards. “Anyway, you should’ve seen him. He dived into his book like a spooked cockroach.”
“Who’s this Shemansky?” Dexter asked. “Do I know him?”
“A grad student,” L. D. told him. “He hasn’t been here forty years, like you.” She turned to me. “Dex is jealous because he plans to marry Julia for her money.”
“A handsome situation,” he said. “A young fellow could do worse.”
“Have to get yourself circumcised,” L. D. said. “You got anything to lose over there, Dex boy? If you do, I’d like to see it.”
“There’s the rub,” he said, reluctantly contributing a face card. “I can’t afford it.”
“You wouldn’t need a doctor,” I told him. “The rabbi will do it for you. You give him ten bucks and he hands you an ice cube.”
“It’s not a question of money,” Dexter replied.
“Take away his foreskin,” L. D. said, “and there’s nothing left.” She gathered her trick and led back, smirking. “Not even a brain.”
“Bitch,” Dexter said. “How many aces have you got, over there?”
“More than you thought, obviously,” she said. She took another trick and led again, changing suits.
“This is painful,” he said. “I feel as if I were being circumcised right now.”
“L. D. collects them,” the woman across from him said. “Yours will make her a handsome trophy.”
“How do you know?” he asked. “Are there cameras in the rest room?” L. D. raked in four more cards, and led again. “Ouch!” he cried out. “Now there’s a ball on the wall.”
“I’ll soon have the other one, too,” L. D. said.
“This guy Kemp must be quite the stud,” I said. “All these high-powered women in love with him.”
“He’ll do,” L. D. said, “till my old man gets out of jail.” Her husband was doing time on a drug charge in Pennsylvania. A setup, she said, because he was a radical, but the dope they found had been real. She took another trick and led back.
“Cunt!” Dexter threw down his cards. “You might as well take the rest of them; I can’t stop you.”
“Don’t pout,” she said. “Just learn how to play bridge, Dex old buddy. Try to make yourself into a stimulating opponent.”
“I’ll stimulate you next time,” he grumbled, “you pushy little cunt, you.”
L. D. spread her cards triumphantly. “Hair and all,” she crowed; the others groaned. She winked at me as I got up to go. “Careful with Julia,” she warned. “Don’t mess with her head, or what just happened to Dexter could happen to you.”
“Anyway,” Dexter Coffey added, “I saw her first.”
Shemansky had vacated the office when I returned to Andrews, so I took a seat at the typewriter to bat out a proposal for Leonard. Right away I realized I didn’t know the formula; finally, I chose the DATE/SUBJECT/TO format of an Air Force memo.
DATE was easy: 1 December 1969. TO was equally straightforward. But when I went back to fill in the SUBJECT line, a raucous chorus of naughty subjects high-kicked across the stage of my brain: “SUBJECT: Hatred of poetry and of its practitioners, especially including T. S. Eliot. SUBJECT: The refined nostrils of Dr. Leonard Strange, desire to flatten. SUBJECT: The brewing process, its chemistry and alchemy.”
Since it was only my time and a piece of paper I was wasting, I hit the carriage return a couple of times and began typing them out. SUBJECT: Employment prospects for reject pilots; the view from a cattle truck; former graduate student picks nose and ponders prospects. SUBJECT: Eighteen essays to grade by Friday; Freshman Comp as the prototype of Dante’s Malebolgias.
SUBJECT: Probable nude appearance of Selva Andersen. SUBJECT: Adrian Fisher’s dick, length and thickness of. SUBJECT: Ten reasons why I would not fuck Selva Andersen. SUBJECT: Ten nasty acts to perform with Selva Andersen.
SUBJECT: The A-1 Tactical Fighter Aircraft, Combine from Hell. SUBJECT: Napalm and its effects on assholes. SUBJECT: Chances of writing David Jones paper by the end of the semester. SUBJECT: Proposal to dam Salt Creek, causing Lincoln, Nebraska to gradually sink into its own shit.
“All baloney,” said a loud voice in my ear, making me jump a foot. Of course there was no one in the room but me; I took this hallucination to indicate that I needed a nap, and put on my flight jacket to go home. Before I left my office, I yanked the sheet out of the typewriter, balled it up and banked it into the wastebasket. I cranked in another one, and typed the following:
“I, Jonas Franklin Adams Stevens Smith, formerly of Ba Rang, RVN, Bugfuck, Texas, and Palemon, Nebraska, do hereby propose to heal my troubled soul in the following manner. First, I will drink as much alcohol as possible, given time and circumstance. Second, I will screw as often as seems reasonable and prudent, jacking off between times as required. Third, I may read a couple of books if I get the chance. Dear Doctor Darling Perfesser Vergesser Strange: K. M. A.”
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