Dead Languages (15 page)

“F-f-five seconds. F-f-five, f-f-four….”

“I got a solution, though, for you, kid. Read about it in
Reader’s Digest.
Last month, I think, maybe the month before. Listen good, now, here’s what you do: stick a coupla wads of cotton in both your ears. That’s right, just stick some cotton in your ears. You won’t be able to hear yourself when you talk and it’ll do wonders for you, kid. Really, you gotta try it.”

Actually, I did try it several years later in the form of an electronic gizmo called the Edinburgh Masker, which was approximately as effective as the cotton cure.

“No, I’m sorry,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
is not the answer we were l–l-looking for. Heh-heh. No, I’m s-s-sorry, that’s wrong, sir. We’ll just have to call another one of our lucky viewers. B-b-but as a consolation prize we’re sending you a forty-five of Nancy S-S-Sinatra s-s-singing, on one s-s-side, ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’’ and, on the other, ‘Love Is a Velvet Horn.’ That’s right, absolutely free. Bye, now. Yes, bye. Goodbye.”

I returned the receiver to its cradle and tried to laugh a little with the guys—took a sip of Coors, a long drag on a Camel—but I was sweating profusely, my hands were shaking, and the boys understood what had happened. They were oddly commiserative, too. They clapped me on the back, told me it was a good prank, and Mark even picked up the phone to try the same stunt on someone else, but the old man was still on the line. That happens sometimes: one person hangs up, the other stays on, and the connection remains unbroken. All night long the old man reclined on his prickly couch, sipped his Scotch, and said, “Let me talk to the kid with marbles in his mouth. Yeah, Pat McCormick; put him back on.” I had to listen until midnight to the details of the cotton cure.

THIS DIALOGUE
was rather discouraging, but human intercourse is often one person’s obstinate attempt to dominate another person, and one of the unfortunate facts about disfluency is that you never get to dominate. It’s all very well and good to assert that communication comes down to a mad dogfight; it’s something else altogether to confess you’re always the poor pup who loses. Another unfortunate fact about disfluency is that it prevents you from ever entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property and not yours—not really yours except by way of disingenuous circumlocution. It was precisely this failing, what might quite properly be termed the inability to love anything other than language, that preordained the irretrievable divorce between me and the first girl ever—at the bottom of a heated, heart-shaped swimming pool—to kiss me flush on the lips with feeling.

Audrey Robbins lived alone in Haight-Ashbury at a time,
1969
, when it was still very stylish for eighth-graders to be living alone in the Haight. She was thirteen, a waif, immensely sophisticated, beautiful beyond belief; had tortured ballet toes, Russian ancestors, and a leather purse; but the telling detail about her was that she liked nothing better than blowing Double Bubble at the same time she was inhaling Tareyton
100
’s. She was an amazing mixture of pink innocence and smoky extinction: one day, she was all light and dance and Communist bloc folklore; the next, she was all gloom and doom and standing with me on the Golden Gate Bridge, looking down.

It was she, of course, who made the first overture. I’ve never had the courage to want the world. I’ve always let it come to me, which is a rather negative approach to existence, but the funny thing is: inevitably, it comes. Sooner or later, whether you want it or not, the world comes to you, it comes at you, and in this case it came in the form of someone with a taste for the simultaneity of Tareytons and Double Bubble. She was head cheerleader of the Bayshore Kittens and, although she didn’t know a jump shot from a running pick, she accepted the post—she told me later—not for the enormous prestige it heaped upon her person but because she was obsessed with the color and shape of my legs in the artificial light of the gymnasium in the afternoon.

All during basketball season, she’d cheer loudly when my name was announced, bring me sticks of grape licorice at halftime, and jump up and down whenever I was shooting a free throw, which caused my free throw percentage to drop a few points, but I didn’t care: she looked so happy, jumping up and down and screaming like that. Week after week of buying gum and cigarettes for her at Safeway, walking her to the bus station, talking on the telephone until midnight, but nothing was ever said, nothing was ever done. Then, two weeks after the eighth grade basketball season was over, in the extraordinary manner in which junior high school romance is carried out, I was handed a letter by Elaine, the assistant head cheerleader of the Bayshore Kittens and Audrey’s nearest and dearest friend, which said:

XXXXX OOOOO

XXXXX OOOOO

Audrey

March twenty-seventh wasn’t her fourteenth birthday, and she probably hadn’t received a big! big! check from welfare so much as gotten hold of some very high-grade acid and sold it at triple profit. I honestly didn’t know why she wanted me to bring an identification bracelet to the party, but I purchased a silver chain bracelet with my initials etched on the underside, a couple cartons of cigarettes, an entire bag of chewing gum, and a pair of red swimming trunks with a blue anchor at the crotch. I arrived bright and early the next morning at Elaine’s house.

Other than Charles, whom I hadn’t seen for a while, I didn’t really have any friends, so I couldn’t say Audrey ran with a different crowd than I did. They were certainly a switch, though, from the kind of people who showed up at Mother’s coffee klatsches. Audrey’s friends all seemed to have parents who were dead, diseased, or sadistic. They all seemed to have spent a night in jail or a month with Synanon. They all loved, absolutely loved, The Dead. There was a story called “The Dead,” which at the time was completely incomprehensible to me but about which in my later, more discursive years I concluded: “When all of Gabriel’s attempts to communicate at a nonverbal level—holiday ritual, music, sex—fail, he returns to overblown rhetoric: sheer language overwhelms, sound drowns out sense, and pathos lapses into bathos.” Have I always had only words to play with? I thought The Dead were maybe an occult group that scavenged shallow graves, looking for dybbuks, since Audrey’s friends liked to say that, at thirteen, they had lived and loved and now were ready to die. They’d gone out in the world and found it a waste, whereas I was still trying to build up the nerve to walk alone through North Beach.

This discrepancy between my innocence and their decadence made me a little uneasy, but they’d say, “That’s what Audrey digs about you, man. You’re one of the few uncorrupted cats left.” I disliked being called a cat—I saw myself, instead, as an infinitely poignant cocker spaniel—and thought Audrey had selected me because she was obsessed with the color of my legs in the artificial light of the gymnasium in the afternoon. Lately I’ve been attempting to project an image of brooding, masculine depravity, but Gretchen always ends up saying, “Who are you trying to kid? You’re so innocent. You’re such a baby.” I suppose Audrey was unusual only in being the first to perceive this fact.

None of these hesitations seemed to matter anymore when I was sitting with twelve other people in the back of Elaine’s brother’s red pickup truck, smelling spilled beer, feeling Audrey’s fingers crawl across the floor toward mine.

“I hope you brought the bracelet,” Audrey said, rubbing her wrist.

I patted my shirt pocket and nodded.

The motel was something of a disappointment. It wasn’t on the edge of a cliff overlooking the bay, as its brochure said it was, but on a dirt road with an unobstructed view of an abandoned filling station. Although the swimming pool was indeed heart-shaped, it was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence—no obscurity to this motel’s symbolism—the gate to which had to be opened for you. The room Audrey had rented was a dusty, dark affair, with gold bedspreads, sliding doors that wouldn’t slide, and Venetian blinds that blinded. A color TV hung from the ceiling like a dead turtle. Quite a few of Audrey’s pals wanted to watch late morning cartoons as desperately as my Mission district playmates had, but, as the station announcer insisted on informing us every thirty seconds, we were experiencing difficulty with the audio portion of our program. “Cartoons without sound ain’t shit,” one of the partygoers observed and everyone agreed, so the television set was turned off.

Apparently, Audrey had told everyone not to bring presents but, if they really wanted to bring something, a carton of Tareytons and a six-pack of Double Bubble would be great! because everyone handed her exactly the same thing. Some people had brought bottles of liquor or water pipes for themselves. While they drank and sucked, Audrey blew smoke rings and popped gum bubbles. I sat at her side on the gold bedspread, reading Double Bubble comics. Someone asked the manager of the motel to unlock the gate to the heart-shaped pool. None of them wanted to swim. They just sat along the edge and watched me tread water. They were extremely impressed with how long I could keep bobbing up and down, but it’s nothing, really. I’ve always been able to stay barely afloat forever. After a while, Audrey grew bored sitting in the sun and watching me swim. It was her party, so when she asked me to bring her the bracelet I jumped out of the pool and ran across the rocky parking lot to the room. When I returned, Audrey was leaning back in the lounge chair, and they were all gathered festively around her.

“Here it is,” I said, handing it to her.

“Well?” she said.

“‘Well?’” I said.

“Well?” she said.

“Well, here,” I said, taking the bracelet out of her hands and giving it to her again. “Happy Birthday.”

“Won’t you be so kind as to wrap it around my wrist, sweet Jeremy? For as of this moment you and me are goin’ steady.”

Most laughed. I thought maybe I’d been brought here as a comic example of pubescent sincerity or that Audrey was sexually slumming—going through initiation rites she’d outgrown when she was nine. But she, if not the rest of them, also seemed deadly serious. Her perfect blue eyes were aching with emotion, with a thirteen-year-old’s thirst for romance. Maybe her mock-epic tone was for the amusement of her friends. I knelt down and clasped the chain around her wrist. I didn’t know what it meant to be going steady, but I supposed it meant I couldn’t see other girls, and I wasn’t, so going steady seemed fine.

“It’s beautiful. It’s so silvery. I’ve never owned silver before. Never owned J.J.Z. before, either,” Audrey said, digging her fingers into the carved initials, tugging on my trunks. “To celebrate, I’m gonna go slippin’ down the slide, but I don’t know how to swim real well, so you catch me when I hit water, okay?”

Everyone else stood off at a distance. I dove in; Audrey climbed the ladder. At the top, she stopped and spat the chewing gum out of her mouth, as if she were doing away with whatever was silly juvenilia. Her legs were spread, her arms were flapping, the straps to her suit were slipping off. She was lying when she said she couldn’t swim. She could swim as well as or better than I could. She grabbed my hair, wrapped her legs around me, and pulled me under. The deep end was only six feet, so we went all the way to the bottom. Through air bubbles and chlorinated water, she kissed me. One always wonders what the first kiss will be like; suddenly one is in the midst of it and it doesn’t seem to matter any more what it should or would or might be like. It is. What it is is something entirely different from familial good night and good morning kisses. It’s a different thing altogether. The shaking of heads, the rubbing of bodies, the touching of tongues—all this seemed excellent enough. But what I really thought was too wonderful for words was that someone finally liked my mouth, someone finally liked me and was concentrating all her admiration on my mouth: on my trepidant lips. I came up for air first. Then, a second later, Audrey rose, looking for all the world like a mermaid in love.

IN THE WAY
that all people in any deep passion attempt to separate themselves from their society, Audrey said goodbye to her group and, while I didn’t bid farewell to my family, I temporarily stopped seeing them as the center of my universe. Audrey sent me ungrammatical love letters in geography class. I wrote poems (very free verse) to her during math. It was eighth-grade romance, spring passion, a flush feeling in the face.

Although Audrey was still smoking too much to be in very good athletic shape, she joined the girls’ track team, principally, I think, to look at the color of my legs in the natural light of the playground in the afternoon. Soon enough she’d turned herself into a tough little sprinter and was running anchor leg for the girls’ quarter-mile relay team. I ran the last hundred and ten yards for the boys’ team. Sometimes the boys would race against the girls. I’d receive the baton a second or two before Audrey did, wait for her, run shoulder-to-shoulder for ninety yards, then let out a little kick at the end. It’s always seemed to me that, if you’re really fast and know in your own mind how fast you are, from time to time you’ll let the other person win. I’ve never been that fast in anything. I’ve always had to prove how superior I was.