Thomas McGuane - Panama

Over the top of my salad, I could see faces pressed to the glass amid Japanese lettering.

“What do they want from you?” asked Catherine.

“I don’t know. But my job is to make them think they’re going to get it.”

She looked at me; you know how — long and assessing, ending with a sudden grin. I want to isolate this, the sudden smile, emerging as it does in Catherine as — what? — well, as a sunburst, from deep thought. Similarly, when after puzzling over some confusion, Catherine says no, it is as sudden and fatal as the sunburst smile. It is over. Do you see? Over.

Then we went and hung around the Richmond — San Rafael bridge. I stared ruefully at Alcatraz while Catherine wrote our names on the abutment, in a heart, with a chalky stone, scratching away and talking about the South and the poor complexions of San Francisco while I, as usual, talked about the dead and near-dead. Catherine, strong and living, had thrown herself at my feet. I couldn’t shut up.

I had at that time a bodyguard who had had a distinguished career as a U.S. Marshal in Portland and Northern California. His name was Roy Jay Llewelyn and he had survived many shootouts in Federal Service. He had also sent many people to Alcatraz, and as Catherine and I played, he gazed serenely at its impregnable shape.

Roy knew many other hired guns in the area, some U.S. Marshals, and they were a little society of men who showed each other their bullet holes. Later, when Marcelline spoke of triggermen, I thought of Roy.

Roy took Catherine and me to the dump at south San Francisco. The triggermen were there, car lights trained on a hill of rubbish, shooting rats. On the hoods of their cars were supertuned Pachmayr combat pistols. The hill was ignited like a movie screen, and back in the dark, the cigarettes of gunslingers glowed over the sound of AM car radios. Now and then, a voice: “There’s a damn goblin, Roy.” A rat would creep through the glare of illegal hot car lights — quartz iodide shimmer on wet fur — and Roy Jay Llewelyn would drop into position and let the goblin have it. As night sank in, hungry rats threw caution to the winds while Catherine and I crawled into the back seat of Roy’s triple-tone Oldsmobile. Gently, I undressed Catherine for the first time while the younger gun hands crowded around Roy. We made love for a long while as the automatics popped and rat parts flew among the rubbish. San Francisco then had been an earlier song, a song of Alcatraz, pet stores, Japanese-Croatian restaurants, gunmen, and rat gore. Love affairs have begun more prettily; but that was the only one we got. I was a star and couldn’t just walk around.

Catherine had been living for a year and a half on three Maxwell House coffee cans of inherited jewelry. She was so frugal then that there were, when I met her, still two cans left, including the one that contained her great-aunt Catherine’s emerald bracelet, bought for her by her husband when he commanded a ship for the Navy in China.

I swept Catherine off her feet to the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, years before rich rock-and-roll fascists took it over. At that time, it was a hotel where the staff specialized in memorizing faces just to tell you how good it was to see you again.

I was making a tremendous living demonstrating, with the aplomb of a Fuller Brush salesman, all the nightmares, all the loathsome, toppling states of mind, all the evil things that go on behind closed eyes. When I crawled out of the elephant’s ass, it was widely felt I’d gone too far; and when I puked on the mayor, that was it, I was through. I went home to Key West and voted for Carter.

We set a room service record.

I would send out for little things. A single pack of Salem Longs. Trifles. We had much sex, even while on the phone; or during Ed McMahon dog-food commercials, where a spaniel would choose between two bowls. When Catherine took her chair into the bathroom to play with the taps, I knew we’d been in the hotel too long. The message light was flashing on the phone. There were huge blue grapes soaking the morning New York Times. I called to check out. News of what I’d done to — or, I should say, on —the mayor had hit the hotel. The staff stared at me. I said the mayor would soon be writing spy novels in prison like other government felons; but I had little conviction. They didn’t like me and they didn’t think I was funny.

At La Guardia, I wore dark glasses and ate about a pound of Oreo cookies, after which I could have really nailed the mayor, but I thought, “Why cry over spilt milk?”

Nighttime 707 Commuter to Miami: little reading lights ignited the disembodied arms in rows in front of me, arms which listlessly flipped airline magazines, or held cigarettes to stream smoke into the cones of light now and then swept aside by the air current behind a hurrying stewardess. All of us passengers were torn from our origins. Red and green lights shimmered on riveted aluminum wings and beneath us my little America, my baby madhouse, deployed towns and farms and cities against the icy ruinous transept of time and the awful thing which awaits it.

Catherine and I swallowed cocktails from the cart, though we seldom had the correct change and drew ugly glances from the stewardesses. I felt that my hands and feet were swelling up and that the pilot had falsified the cabin pressure. I felt too that having to go up and down the aisle at night, to put up with incorrect change and the flight crew’s demand for snacks, was infuriating the stewardesses and that any minute an atrocity directed at the sheeplike passengers with their magazines could break out. Catherine and I were in tough shape mentally; and we had started to fear the stewardesses. As though to throw fat on the fire, they began to gather in the tail of the plane, to ignore the call buttons and to block the toilet. My stomach was full of butterflies and when I saw an old man gesture helplessly to a stewardess as she shot to the tail, I felt I had to do something for us all. I unfastened my seat belt, catching Catherine’s alarmed glance, and started aft. I thought as I glided above the passengers that I saw their hopes of something better winging to me.

The stewardesses glowered toward my approach. They were in a little group. There were sandwich wrappers and styrofoam. An aluminum door was ajar behind them and toilet light flooded forth. They had more food than we did. They seemed to glance at one blonde, a Grace Kelly type with a Bic crossways in her tunic. I was afraid.

When I reached them, I said, “There’s an old man who needs a glass of water. Can you help?”

The blonde stared through me. Then she reached up and touched a switch. Over three hundred passengers, RETURN TO SEAT appeared in lights.

“Hit it,” said the blonde.

“I wonder if I—”

“Can’t you read?”

“The old man needs—”

“I don’t care what he needs. We are entering turbulence. Return to your seat and extinguish all smoking materials.” Then she added something which signaled the beginning of my understanding that the end of my glory was at hand. “You rotten pervert,” she said. “Blowing your cookies all over the mayor of New York.”

* * *

Zut alors! I am in arrears with everyone; else why are they all explaining the sky is blue or yesterday I ate breakfast twice? Why? Someone said, “Two plus two equals four is a piece of insolence.” And these simpletons think I shall accept their reports at face value! Not possible; a thousand times no.

I’m not complaining. If people accept me as I am, that is, fallen from a high place, and don’t assume that I am in despair and require that actuality be described to me, why then a happy liaison of spirits is always a possibility. But not if we are doing ABCs on the state of reality.