Paul Theroux - My Secret History

But the man had startled me and made me uneasy. And that crazy talk had given me a strong desire to see Lucy. She was what I wanted — I needed a girlfriend. And she worked in a bookstore. I thought of sex and I also thought how she might get me a discount on books.

“Aren’t you having a beer?” Larry said at the Harvard Gardens.

We had taken our sandwiches there, to the bar, because it was air conditioned and there was a jukebox. He was drinking a Budweiser.

“This is going to sound batty,” I said, “but I don’t have any money. About five bucks, that’s all. It has to last me until payday.”

“A fin until next Thursday!”

“And I wanted a take a girl out.” I didn’t tell him who it was. I didn’t want him to know that I had met her at the pool. “I could use about thirty bucks.”

“I know where you can make an easy twenty-five.” He was eating a meatball sandwich and just then a meatball fell out of one end as he bit into the other. He was chewing and picking up the loose meatball as he said, “Over at the hospital. We can go after lunch. It’s a tit.”

“And just pick up twenty-five bucks?”

“That’s what they pay for a pint of blood,” he said. He was still eating, chewing the meatballs, so I knew he was serious.

* * *

We were still wearing our bathing suits and our red T-shirts lettered LIFEGUARD, but no one took any notice of us. We walked through the hospital, went up to the third floor in an elevator that held a whimpering woman in a wheelchair, and then down a corridor to a waiting room with posters saying BE A BLOOD DONOR. A nurse at a desk recognized Larry and began talking to him. She was about twenty and had dark eyes. She was pretty but had hairy arms.

“Loretta, this is Andre Parent,” Larry said. “He wants to give blood, and so do I.”

“As long as it doesn’t hurt,” I said.

“Not a bit. Ask Larry. He’s been here lots of times.”

“It’s nothing,” Larry said. “It might even be good for you. Like I noticed this strange thing. The more times you give the easier it is. The first time your blood is sort of thick and ketchuppy. But after a few times it gets thinner.”

“How do you know, if it’s in a bottle?”

“It gushes out faster.”

His saying gushes out made me nervous. I said, “We have to get back to the pool.”

“Muzzaroll’s on the chair,” Larry said. “And you covered for him this morning.” He turned to Loretta and said, “We went to the parade. Saw Kennedy. He was about as far away as I am from you. He is definitely going to win. He has class. I mean, he’s Irish. And his wife’s a piece of ass.”

“Please watch your language,” Loretta said. She was smiling, but she became brisk. She stood up and said, “This won’t take long.”

“It’s a business proposition,” Larry said.

“If you want to be paid we’ll give you twenty-five dollars afterwards. And a cup of coffee.” She smiled. “But some people do it for nothing.”

Larry said, “You charge patients for it, so why shouldn’t we cash in.”

“Step inside,” Loretta said.

It amazed me that we were talking about bottles of blood.

Loretta pricked my finger and tested it on a glass slide. She said, “You’re B-negative. We always need that group.”

I lay down on a high-legged bed and she suspended an empty bottle beside me. I looked away when she poked the needle into my arm, but I saw her connect it to a tube that led to the bottle. I started to perspire, so I concentrated on staring at a machine at the far end of the room. A sign over an opening said DO NOT INSERT ANY PART OF YOUR BODY INTO THIS MACHINE. I could only think of one part, and that gave me a twinge.

Loretta gave me a rubber ball to hold. It was black and a bit smaller than a baseball. “Squeeze it slowly and watch what happens.”

I gave the ball a squeeze and a plop of blackish blood ran down the side of the clear glass bottle. I looked at the machine and kept squeezing.

After she connected Larry, he said, “I’ll race you.”

When my bottle was full I stood up and felt weak and lightheaded. I had a coffee and collected the money and we went back to the pool. I still felt woozy, and so I climbed the lifeguard’s chair and stayed there without reading for the rest of the afternoon. I hoped the feeling would pass. I was also watching for Lucy.

At closing time — still no sign of Lucy — Larry said, “Want to try something great? After you give blood it’s very easy to get drunk, because there’s less of it. Let’s go over to the Gardens.”

I had money in my pocket and nothing else to do. And Larry was right. After one beer I felt drunk, but I had another one just the same. Then I began to miss Lucy, and got sad because I couldn’t tell any of it to Larry. Eventually I was too drunk to go home.

We staggered outside and Larry said, “Let’s get something to eat. What do you feel like?”

I said, “Whale steaks,” and imagined chewing one.

He said, “You’re shitfaced,” and laughed in an unfunny drunken way, and in the Chinese restaurant — I could not remember how we got there — he was still laughing.

I said, with my brain buzzing in my head, “See, it’s not Jonah inside the whale. It’s the whale inside me. That’s what I want my life to be like.”

He said, “God, are you shitfaced.”

This Chinese place was supposed to be cheap, but it cost us seven dollars each, and an ice-cream sundae was another dollar, and afterwards I threw up at the bus stop. Larry said, “Put your head between your legs” and left me there. Thinking it was a police car I waved my arms, and when I realized it was a taxi I took it home — another seven dollars.

“You look sick,” my mother said.

I didn’t say anything about giving blood, or the Chinese food or the taxi — she would have asked me where I got the money.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“Nowhere.”

That was my Fourth of July.

In the morning I felt fine, but I only had ten dollars left and that wasn’t enough for a date with Lucy. But where was she?

“There was someone looking for you, Andre,” Muzzaroll said one morning. “She was kind of disappointed.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That you’re late for work.”

I said the bus was late. But he wasn’t angry. He didn’t care.

He said, “When I see a pretty girl waiting for a bus I always get horny, because I know that all I have to do is stop and she’ll get into my car. I can plank her, because she wants a ride.”

“Maybe she doesn’t,” I said. “Maybe that’s why she’s waiting for the bus.”

It was a lovely day. Norman was writing a letter — probably to Eisenhower, or maybe Khrushchev. I steered myself away from him and reflected on how typical it was that he was sitting against the fence scribbling. Weirdos never went into the water, except to yank down kids’ bathing suits, or fondle them underwater. They lurked, they lingered, they stared and muttered. Public swimming pools attracted the strangest people. Mrs. Mirsky wore a corset under her old-fashioned bathing suit and used to sing; Mr. Schickel ate his lunch in the changing room and said, “I’m still very hungry” to naked boys; the boy who stood outside the fence holding his radio against his head; the man who swam in sunglasses and wearing a baseball hat.

The normal ones screamed and splashed, and went home with wet hair. They were mostly kids. The rest were mental cases, or else very lonely. The pool was for everybody, which was why I found it interesting.

Just as I was leaving that day, Lucy stopped by the office.

“I’ve been tied up at the bookstore,” she said. “I just wanted to say that I’m free at the moment if you wanted to do anything.”