Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

Is that the wind? I asked my friend,

That shakes the trees and makes them bend?

In a group of six or seven grim-looking undergraduates I was the big bearded one in army fatigues, older than the others and trying to look inconspicuous; and more than likely there would be a small pale girl next to me, who couldn’t stand her parents. “When you were my age,” she would say, and go on cracking my heart, bending my ear.

It did not last long. My reading only trained me to read better. What I wrote sounded like what I read: “A cold dark November in my soul,” I’d write, and then furiously cross it out, or again and again, “I was born in the year 1918, in the North End of the city of Boston, the second child of two transplanted Italians—” Then half a chapter about childhood fears — not the informed apprehension of the adult, but the impatient uncertainty of the little boy who was always made to wait, who thought he might die in his bed if the lamp was switched off and whose pleasures were his thumb, and the minutes after confession and the time spent in a slate urinal, pissing with one hand and eating an icecream sandwich with the other. To sit down and write Chapter One — Childhood was to begin a book rather than a story, a bold guarantee against ever finishing it. My character’s name was Jack Flowers, not John Fiori. A first-love chapter and an army chapter loomed, and Jack was going to discover the simplicity of love and the surprise of wealth. If the book succeeded I would write another about success; if it failed, about failure. The fellers in the coffee shop asked me what my book was about. I said, “It’s about this guy who’s trying to write a book—”

Writing bored me, and it sickened me in my attic to.be staring at a white sheet of paper (“Chapter One”) while the sun was shining outside and everyone else was at play, for every word I wrote seemed a denial of the complex uniqueness I could see just outside the window. My descriptions reduced what lacy trees and grass I could see to sorry props on the page, and my characters were either brutes or angels, too extreme and simple to be human. Still, fiction seemed to give me the second chances life denied me.

But there were other difficulties. In my short time as a student the artistic fringe people switched from getting drunk to getting high. I could cope with alcohol, but drugs baffled me, and I didn’t even know that the pills I was taking to get my weight down, little heart-shaped orange tablets, were a kind of pep pill.

“John,” a girl said, seeing me swallow one, “what’s that?”

I was too embarrassed to explain that they had been prescribed to reduce my waistline. They killed my appetite: skinny fellers had more girl friends. I said, “It’s just a tablet. I don’t even know the name—”

“Dexedrine,” she said. “Fantastic.”

“You want one? Here, take a dozen.”

“Cool.” She swallowed three.

“You won’t want any lunch,” I said.

“Crazy.” She shuddered.

That amused me. Handing out these reducing tablets won me the girl friends I had hoped to get by being thin. Briefly, I was happy. But happiness is a blurred memory of sensational lightness; fear and boredom leave me with a remembrance of particular details. I recall the discomfort: squatting or sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening to long poems by nineteen-year-olds beginning, I have seen … — getting cramps behind my knees, my back aching— And I have seen … I made myself sick on that sweet wine (“Look out, John’s barfing!”) and they talked about Zen, rejection slips from quarterlies with names like The Goatsfoot , ban-the-bomb, Ezra P. I would be dying for a hot bath. I admired their resilience; they could stay up all night gabbing, eating nothing but Dexedrines and cough syrup; I’d say, “Hell, I hate to be a party-pooper, but—” and crawl off to bed, hearing And I have seen —all the way to my room. The next morning I’d see them stretched out on the floor, paired up but still chastely in their clothes, and all of them sleeping in their shoes.

They invented a past for me. I deserved it; I had not told them a thing about myself. They intended flattery, but the stories were truly monstrous: “You’ve got a wife and kids somewhere, haven’t you?” a girl whispered to me in my attic, candid in the dark after love. Another, rolling over, said, “Do anything you want to me — I know you’re a switch hitter.” I was a genius; I was a deserter; I was shell-shocked; I was a refugee; I sometimes took a knife to bed; the Germans tortured me. The stories were too ridiculous to deny, the truth too boring to repeat. I had grown to like the kids; I did not want to disappoint them. I used to make the eyes of those lovely girls bright by saying, “If I laid you once I’d turn you into a whore.”

It ended badly. The coffee shop was in a residential area, and the late nights the kids spent discussing music and poetry were interpreted by the neighbors as sex orgies. We got strange phone calls, and visits at odd hours from well-dressed men. The police raided us. I say “raided.” Two cops opened the door and said, “We’ve had a complaint about you.”

“Let’s see your search warrant,” I said. It seemed a good gambit, but they weren’t buying it.

“Out of the way, fatso,” they said, pushing past me. They went upstairs, rousing people and saying, “Nothing here,” and “Okay in here.” Soon they were back in the hall, surrounded by angry poets and pretty girls.

One cop showed me his white glove. The palm was filled with Dexedrines. “Whose are these?”

They weren’t mine. I had stopped taking them, though I still passed them around. I said, “Mine.”

“No, they’re not,” said a girl named Rita. “Those are mine.”

“They’re his,” said the cop, “so shut up.”

“Anyway, what’s the problem?” I said. “I take these things to kill my appetite. I got a weight problem.”

“You got a problem, fella,” the cop said, “but it ain’t no weight problem. Better come along with us.”

Rita screamed at him.

In the squad car the cop driving said, “We know all about you and those kids. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I was charged with possessing drugs without a prescription, procuring drugs for a minor, and on hearsay, on charges of fornication, bigamy, homosexuality, and petty theft. My trial would be in three weeks. Bail was steep, but the coffee shop fellers and some sympathetic faculty members started a fund and bailed me out; they told me I was being victimized.

Jumping bail was easy; the only loss was the money. I took a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles, and leaving everything including my name, flew to Hong Kong and signed on the Allegro. It was not despair; it was the convenience of flight, an expensive exit that was possible because it was final. I had no intention of going back. It would have been bad for my heart, and I’m using that word in its older sense.

And: “Flowers,” said the skipper of the Allegro , reading my name from the crew list. He made a mark on the paper. “Age — thirty-eight. Single. No identifying marks or scars.” He looked up. “Your first contract, I see. Know anything about oiling?”

“No,” I said, “but I don’t think it would take me long to learn.”

“What can you do?”

“Anything,” I said. “I suppose you’ve heard this one before, but what I really wanted to do was write.”

“Take that pencil,” the skipper said.

“This one?” I selected one from a pewter mug on his desk.

“And that pad of paper.”

The letterhead said, Four Star Shipping Lines.

“Write,” he said.

“Shoot,” I said.