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

The morning fading away. Noontime coming. The afternoon descending. Premonitions looming of never seeing Dru again. Such different worlds we live in. Yet I was in hers as close as you can get. Her words wonderfully astonishing being conferred upon me as I sank my cock into her for the third time. And she screamed like a wounded animal and the rattler rattled. And my world seemed all in radiant glory as a great cascade of chorus came from Gounod’s St. Cecilia Mass as I cried out with my own scream of joy. We lay there enraptured, legs and arms enveloped, the moisture of our bodies she said had become one.

Stephen O’Kelly’O turning to look out at the sound of a beeping horn down in the street. And there suddenly below as I open the window for a breath of differently polluted air is Maximilian Avery Gifford Strutherstone III, waving his bright cap held in a hand wearing a lemon yellow driving glove. And dressed in a hacking jacket, cavalry twill riding britches, and grinning up from his open Bentley, beckoning me down. And of course leaning out I knocked a carton of milk off the windowsill and it went plop in front of the landlord, the splash turning his shoes white just as Max shouted.

“Hey pal, old buddy boy. I’m on my way to take a little canter in the park. Why don’t you come along and join me for a bit of a spin. And later take you to a meal and swim at my club.”

There was considerable gladness to see and hear this friend. The spiritually corrosive element of the city had made itself felt upon me as I attempted to go to sleep last night, when I had a ringside view of a fight erupting down in the street. A drunken man distributing ten-dollar bills and the guy slapping his hand on the back of a passing taxi to distribute his largesse. Taxi stops. Guy gets out. And to the proffered ten-dollar note, instead of taking it and saying, Thanks pal, the taxi driver punches him on the jaw, knocks him down and his head hits the curb. So much for outright giving people money. Like a good and true New Yorker, the taxi driver jumps back in his cab and drives away in a smoking blaze of tires. I was about to venture out to assist the vanquished citizen but a police patrol car happening down the street intervened and soon had an ambulance coming along. Then the junk searchers came patrolling down the street to see what they would take as they examined the best garbage in the world. Which more than half-furnished everything in this room and which was collected off the sidewalks of the surrounding streets. Now I hear Max beeping his horn again as I put on a tie and feel horny for Dru. Where is she in her daily itinerary. At the chiropodist, hairdresser, psychic, or swimming at her club. Her lithe body undulating through the water. The shiver I feel whenever I remember the rattling rattlesnake. Maybe like one used to try and kill ole Max in Texas. And even in its stuffed variety scaring the shit out of me. Dru asked if I were ever scared in the war. I said plenty and especially once or twice manning twenty-millimeter guns, firing at kamakazi that flew straight at you and kept coming through the tracer bullets while you tried, with all the aircraft crisscrossing the sky, to make sure you hit the bandits instead of the angels. My gunner’s mate third class nearby, got hit and blown to pieces and his blood and parts of him were splattered and stuck all over me. Now go down these stairs. The dust on the carpeted steps comes up as a fume to asphyxiate you. Like you’d feel loading sixteen-inch guns behind massive armor plate and being driven crazy with claustrophobia. Go out the vestibule. Past bills stuffed in the mailbox. Better there than a worry on my brain. Climb up into the old Bentley.

“Boy pal, it sure is good to see you. How are you.”

“I’m okay Max. How are you doing.”

“Well ole buddy boy pal, let’s answer that by saying we’re on our way to take in some riding. Can’t really hold your head up socially unless, when the season comes, you aren’t already socked in with a good hunt in New Jersey. Isn’t that where ole Sylvia hunted before you married. And you objected to the chasing of the fox as a cruel sport. Rumor has it that ole Sylvia has a trace of Iroquois Indian blood.”

“Well Max, there are rumors now of so many sorts that all I believe is what I see with my own eyes. The truth is she found her natural mother, and she spat in Sylvia’s face.”

“Hey, pal, old buddy boy. That’s awful. Worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

As we roared off down the street, chill air blowing upon our faces. It was astonishing how Max’s appearance could in a second or two transform one’s life from verging on an unheralded session of manic depression into at least a milder form verging on a feeble spark of hope in the distance. Even the landlord seemed impressed by Max’s car and remained noncomplaining about the milk on his shoes or two months owed rent but I suspected he preferred my not lowering the tone of the building any further if I kept my milk off the windowsill. It was as if moving in such stylish company gave the landlord the notion that affluence the like of Sylvia’s clothing and behavior and Max’s elegantly flamboyant appearance, largesse was not far away and coming up with the rent was only a matter of a short delay, with family lawyers and trustees ladling out funds from an office near Wall Street which, with Sylvia was in fact the case in receiving her monthly emolument, alas no longer being injected into her bank. And I told Max to say nothing about Sylvia’s mother.

“Well old buddy, I won’t and at least we’re taking you up to a better part of town up there around the park.”

It was in itself cheerful to find how in Max’s company one’s mood could change so fast and a sense of purpose prevail. Even though it be for a superficial pursuit. With every part of this city that you passed still reminding you of something which instantly could become inspiring for one’s aspirations. In a metropolis you didn’t always realize you lived in as if it were a dream. For unless you did, its lonely sadness could tear you apart.

“Max, my mother used to say, who before she got married worked as a ladies maid for a rich household on Fifth Avenue, that nobody who was anybody lived north of Fifty-seventh Street.”

“You don’t say. Well pal, things have sure changed. But sorry to hear that about your mother having to do something servile like that. But go back far enough I guess in social lineage in this country we all had to come from the wrong side of the tracks. And rely on the good example of others who made it over to the right side of the tracks. Where one refers to oneself as one.”

“Well my mother, as a matter of fact, didn’t come from the wrong side. She came from a green field in Ireland and didn’t refer to herself as one. But even when she had her own maid and cook in America, she nearly spent all her time in her kitchen anyway, brushing her hands on her apron.”

“Hey, that was a pretty kind of menial existence she chose, wasn’t it.”

“She was domestically dedicated, I suppose. Setting an example for my sisters, who were sometimes helping.”

“That must have been nice for your father.”

“Well my father stayed downtown a lot minding his bars but I saw him more than once in the dining room, his head in his hands, wracked with worry with his large family to feed, clothe, and educate.”

“Hey, tough. Gee, really tough. But I mean, things like bootlegging must have been profitable in the past for him to have built up a nice little equity. But I guess you had to fight against the moral indignity of it.”

There were times when I thought I should give ole Max a severe kick in the ass. There were plenty of families with far more exalted names and reputations than mine who were bootleggers. But there was no question that without ever wanting them to appear any grander than their circumstances, one always attempted to uphold the reputation of one’s family. And do as Max suggested refer to oneself as one. But now I also hoped the conversation would slow Max’s speed as we roared up Broadway toward Fifty-ninth Street. Max waving back to approving pedestrians who were shouting encouragement at the passing leviathan which was only just miraculously avoiding accidents with screeches of brakes, swerves, and quick acceleration which deaccelerated pronto as a policeman’s whistle blew and pulled us over. And Max, with his usual charm, apologized to Patrolman Richard J. Gallagher, ex-Marine Corps, who after a lecture on the exercise of good manners and civil behavior in a big city let us ex-navy types go.