Hob Broun - Inner Tube

My position: “It’s not about politics.” I pointed to the set, where Stans, a member of the CPA Hall of Fame, read his prepared statement in a grain belt monotone. “This is a passion play. A rite.”

“High mass?” Nito made the sign of the cross. “I would rather watch the Ursula Andress movie.”

“Stay tuned. Study our national culture.”

“But where are the breasts?”

I took pride in those days in my total lack of purpose. It seemed to me a mark of real clarity, of harmony with the future. But in this role of disaffection, I’m afraid, there was too much ham. Even Carla, summering with friends on a farm in Pennsylvania, was sending me checks.

Bad Boy—

Am having dire word of you and your life in the slums. Mom and her inflations, you know. But here anyway a small contribution toward socket wrenches, or whatever you might need. Very muggy here, sleep difficult. The cukes, tomatoes, etc., seem to thrive on it, though. Raccoons come out of the woods at night and beg at the porch for scraps. Did you know they’re related to the panda? Neither did I.

Love and birdwatching,

C

For sure, the heat was on. Gordo suggested I enroll in electronics school. Casually, Alexander Butterfield betrayed the existence of a White House taping system. I slept with all the windows open and listened to sirens. I cracked ice trays into the bathtub and sat there reading about intrigue in the Ottoman Empire.

The Constitution in jeopardy. Our republic foundering. But I found no alarm in my surrounding streets. Nothing new at Katz Laundry, or at Three Bros. Coffee Shop, radio tuned to the Mets game. Elders outside the grocery sipped beer and slapped their dominoes, and of Nixon only amusement—“The fuckin’ guy.” Still, the indignant shock was out there, in some other part of town, or in green counties to the north, beside ponds and croquet courts, where values hard arrived at seemed to warp. Such blather. Such density of ego.

By the time John Dean began the careful relinquishing of his confidences, I had reached Chapter 7 in my bartender’s guide: Punches & Coolers. My cache of lemons attracted canny urban flies and scented the days with a pleasant bitterness. “A cancer in the White House.” The analogy anyone could understand. Clever Dean, nothing left to chance. Writers of enterprise flew off to interview his teachers and tennis buddies.

I filled a two-gallon pot with something called Rum Cockade and invited the Roysters. Chip and Dale had the apartment above mine. They were emigrants from northern Ohio, exponents of social change. Their walls were hung with serapes, the floor littered with cat toys. Their flattened vowels and cumbersome honesty charmed me, though I knew they were in for it. The city, having lured them, would no doubt show no mercy.

Dale assessed the President. “It’s like he wanted to get caught,” she said, swinging her braids. “Like when you’re a kid and do things just to test your mother. To see if she’s paying attention.”

Chip snorted and touched his bald spot. “Special attention for Dickie. He’s so misunderstood.”

Dale worked in a daycare center.

“Mr. Above-it-all,” she said, and drained her third cup. “You should be in a seminary.”

It struck me that this was one of those relationships based on the fact of its never working. Yet how tenderly Chip would comfort his wife a few hours later, cradling her as she retched over the sink.

I ladled out more punch. “Think we’ll ever get to hear those tapes?” What a host.

“Which tapes?” Chip said. “I mean, how do you ever know or not if what you’re listening to is fake?”

“He wants punishment,” Dale insisted. Hugging her knees, mouth hidden behind the tin cup, she was beginning to suggest an ad layout for CARE. “He wants to be stripped naked and flogged.”

“Yes, a ceremony.” I toasted her. “You’ve got a grip on it now.”

“What this country needs,” Chip said grandly, “is less humiliation and more humility.”

Chip had been with the Peace Corps in Guyana.

I slept heavily that night and dreamed I was a bagman for the Mormon Church. Gordon Liddy took me to lunch. The prime rib was rare. We talked about theocracy and gauchos and how to kill someone with a sharpened pencil. Waking in late afternoon, I told myself: Stop fighting the odds and you’ll make a fine apologist.

A few days later I met Dale in front of Katz Laundry. Her little face was pinched and she kept looking over her shoulder. Chip, she confided, was unwell. His vision blurred; he had ringing in his ears. Just that morning, short of breath and twitching uncontrollably, he had been admitted to Roosevelt Hospital for evaluation.

“We wanted to come here so bad. We said, ‘It’s the nerve center.’”

Now Dale pined for the simplicities of Dayton, molded-salad luncheons and covered-dish suppers. Chip was afraid of having to work the line like his father, but could it be worse than this?

Shortly after Judge Sirica ordered release of the tapes, Nito was stabbed in the arm by a junior high kid who wanted his radio. By the time impeachment proceedings were under way, I had moved back to Lake Success, regained my job with the network, and become a commuter. The democratic system, it was widely announced, was proving its special merit. I was relatively sober, flirting with accommodation. And, unbeknownst to anyone, my mother was preparing to leave the world behind.

HAVE I MENTIONED TO you the stretch I pulled in San Francisco? Of course, yes, the story of the shoes with the holes cut in them. So. There I was in the city that has always wanted to be somewhere else. The place and the people in it were arch and overindulged and wanted their sophistication to be appreciated. The locale, in short, was all too fitting.

I had a cheap apartment with a view of the Oakland shipyards. Above an Italian restaurant, it was furnished like something out of a thirties detective novel and redolent of singed garlic. My landlady left small packets of anisette cookies in front of my door.

I had a job that brought me into contact with the sort of underworld I needed as an antidote to Lake Success. If I was going to shake loose of that depleting heritage, Le Sex Shoppe was ideal territory. It was undemanding work besides and afforded me nearly limitless reading time — B. Traven and Vargas Llosa were my fascinations at the time. I had barely to glance up from The Green House in order to make change for the peep booths.

I had an Olds 88 that enabled me to learn the city like an anatomy chart. I knew a spot in the Mission where tamarind or hibiscus popsicles could be had, and out the avenues toward the sea, a Korean grocery with the cheapest carton of cigarettes that side of the Bay and homemade kimchi that made your eyes water. In a light industrial zone south of Market, I found a record store called Tommy’s Soul Shack where I could get a bet down on anything from the sixth race exacta at Longacres to the bottom of a fight card in Stockton. In the apartment directly overhead lived a conceptual artist named Irv who made masks out of hair scrounged from beauty salon Dumpsters. Irv was a lapsed Jew from Baltimore, a fellow fugitive. He supplied me with high-grade black hashish at very reasonable rates.

The fabled city at my fingertips? The life of Riley? Well, not altogether. Ambivalence comes with every territory.

I was having an affair with an Armenian art student who wept while she fucked. “What is it? What is it?” I’d say, but Andrea would only pull her dark hair over her dark face and shudder. The tendons in her neck would stand out wire-tight. I’d stroke them, matching her silence for silence. Her mysteries filled me with loathing as often as with tenderness, but I couldn’t say goodbye. Andrea was short, round, not particularly beautiful. Still, I was enormously aroused by her almost complete lack of humor, by the warm morning smell that stayed all day with her and which no perfume could fully mask. Also, I suppose, I was unduly fascinated by my own reactions to the first woman I had known for whom there seemed to be so much at stake.