J. Donleavy - Wrong Information is Being Given Out at Princeton

“Gee, Max, isn’t trying to get you for alimony and embezzlement a little bit anticlimatic, but understandable. I’m beginning to think that my life with Sylvia has really been blissful. Do you think there is anything positive peeking up out of the grim horizon.”

“Well pal, I guess instead of life being lifelong all lovely, it can be all hatred. But just to be humanely treated is all one wants from a woman. Who after they dig what they want out of you, leaving you a husk, then desert to go back to being masters of their own fate to maybe go dig something of further benefit to them out of some other poor guy’s life. Like in the spider kingdom. But pal, let’s let Krug get rid of the present concentration on my insoluble old problems. Here’s looking at you, old bean.”

Glasses tinkling in yet another toast. And the waiter delivering the remainder of the champagne to the wood-paneled vastness of the Oak Room. The evening clientele collected at the array of white tables gleaming with porcelain and glassware and polished knives, forks and spoons. And where a cheered-up Max and I dined within the somber splendor of its walls. Oysters with the remainder of the Krug and filet mignon, creamed spinach and salad with a booming Burgundy, as Max termed it. To then, as the hour before midnight approached, sacredly address, as Max also termed it, wild strawberries flown in from France and with a fine native whipped American cream to further glorify the tarnished gold glory of Château d’Yquem. My ass even felt a shiver of sympathetic pain that must have been felt by Max’s wife’s boyfriend as the baseball bat landed. And now on all sides the reassuring voices and faces and the swiveling eyes of those saved from poverty. Even a famed movie actor and actress basking in the furtive attention of all the other diners. And across this vast high-ceilinged room, all were neither sad nor glad knowing they could pay their check for dinner. And like Max, be able to retire to clean sheets to wake up on yet another day to do the same again. But the emotion of the evening taking all the turns and twists of a Tchaikovsky overture. And all I wanted to know was why it was that movie actors and actresses achieved such public idolatry when such should be reserved for the great composers.

“Well pal, I guess none of them get anywhere till they’re dead.”

“Well Max, guess you’re right. Anyway, this is a real fine evening I won’t soon or ever forget.”

“Pal, that makes me glad. Plus, in this smashingly splendid room is where you belong. Anyway it’s an appropriate place from which to contemplate my ending up in alimony jail.”

Max raising the golden liquid, a blissful smile across his lips, closing his eyes and placing his nose over the rim of his glass and inhaling.

“Pal, just put your ole proboscis to this pure nectar.”

“It sure is, Max. And I’m sure costing a fortune.”

“That’s what money’s for, pal, to aggrandize the spirit by elevating the perception of the senses to pleasure. But not to ignore all the other most important things in life of sentimental value.”

“Well Max, while I’m contemplating buying a baseball bat I’m also enjoying this wine and turning over the wisdom of your remarks in my mind.”

The first real meal since the evening out with Dru, and famished as I was, I could feel the champagne and wines and now the food bringing back energy flowing through my veins, my body suddenly reviving in a most miraculous way from what seemed a long term of tiredness. And one realized these wisdoms which were of a culinary nature, were profound. And tonight there could be no more triumphant host. But poor Max, even as a high school home-run king, could go down as an embezzler. And through my mind went a flash of dread and then I could hear choral voices singing and a bugle blowing taps at dusk and the Stars and Stripes flowing in the wind as it was being lowered in the breeze and the sad words of “Now the Day Is Over” being rendered. And I felt that Max needed some encouragement and maybe even a suggestion as to where he could run to ground, to use one of his own expressions.

“Max, maybe you need somewhere to be for awhile out of the limelight, so to speak. Maybe back to Chicago where Benny Goodman, the great clarinetist was born.”

“Yeah, pal. The feel of being somewhere home would kind of keep the ghost of disquiet at bay. I always remember that while we were still in the navy my greatest fear was not sharks or torpedoes or bombs or Jap kamikaze pilots, but going ashore on liberty with all the pent-up frustration accumulated incarcerated for interminable days belowdecks, behind steel bulkheads at sea and then, for what you think is going to be relief, ending up in some same godforsaken sailor-saturated port where the streets were black in winter with swabbies and suddenly overnight going white when summer uniform was the order of the day. It sure demonstrated a spectacle of regimentation that could end you up getting drunk. And then — and this was my real nightmare — ending up going to a tattoo artist to have a girlfriend’s name tattooed with a heart conspicuously on your shoulder or arm, with an arrow stuck through it. Or worse, to be overcome by the drunken temptation to do what old Chief Bosun Mate Lomax did, long before he ever became a chief, who had a tattoo of a fox chased by hounds running to ground right up his anus. I suppose my sense of dignity kept the more undignified seafaring temptations at bay. And you know, old buddy, in a like-minded way, after tonight I don’t ever want to see you having to frequent Horn and Hardart or in straitened circumstances having to go sit at the counter of that Nedick’s food stand place down in the subway on the middle level at Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue where I used to incognito go. And where on the bottom level just below, if you wanted to be even more incognito, you could take the BMT to Queens.”

“Gee Max, I in fact did occasionally go there and sit.”

“Well pal, at least they had the best baked hot dogs, if sometimes a little overcooked for one’s liking, but then you could apply plenty of relish and mustard if you wanted to overcome the taste. Boy, in the first few days I got back to New York before I got my job and I was so damn homesick to get back west to Chicago and the Loop, I used to wind up there on the station platform with the feeling I was hiding away from the whole city, hunched at the counter over a coffee bought with next to my last dime. Here, old buddy, a little more of this old Château d’Yquem.”

“Max, as much as New York is an unforgiving place, it is heartening to know that this most wonderful wine is here to be found. And I suppose one must presume that even in a harsh urban reality, sometimes humanity and understanding are encountered where you least expect.”

“Well, so far, outside of my good ole city Chicago, pal, I haven’t found much understanding and I don’t expect to find too much humanity. But I’ll fight the good fight against all those who assail me.”

An almighty sadness overcame me as Max’s muted words of defiance to this city were uttered, that perhaps things were even worse than he had described. And it was strange how the comraderie one had in the navy where you would trust your life, and had to, to a buddy, once back out in the civilian world it was erased. Every man for himself. Disheartening despair appearing on old Max’s face, his chin falling forward on his chest. Sudden look of fear flashing across his eyes. My own fears, deeper sown. And always lurking. In the navy, it was the terrible loneliness going ashore on ole liberty and getting drunk in some god-awful place like Norfolk, Virginia, with nothing, as Max said, but sailors everywhere. And with no ship heaving under your feet and feeling homesick and thirsty and just looking for a meaningful way to waste one’s time, you could end up getting so desperate that you’d go to the local library, pretending you were literary, to try and proposition the librarian behind a stack of books.