JD (30 page)

Maybe I cannot do his voice because we have not talked, not really, since the year I touched him. I don't know what he understands about me, I don't know what he remembers about those weeks when I yearned to be inside him. I just know that we have been, these years, like two opposing magnets.

I can't fix it, he will never be mine again. All I can do is write his paper for him. I might as well still be wiping his butt.

January 20, 1972

I brought Mickey the paper to read. I figured, if there were parts he just plain couldn't understand at all, then we'd delete those--because they must be things he couldn't have thought. And, conversely, if he actually had any ideas of his own, we could stick those right in.

I was explaining this--the way I talk to Mickey now, slowly and in a near monotone, so he won't think I'm being mean and he won't think I'm being creepily invasive. What a tightrope he has me walking! No, one I stepped out onto by myself.

I was sitting at his desk, he perched on the edge of his bed. I was explaining and he said, “No, I can't do this.”

“What?”

“I can't hand in this paper.”

I wanted to say: What, you fuck off for a whole semester, after fucking off at Warwick for a year before that, and you're suddenly worried about the goddamn honor code? Instead, I said, “Look, I didn't mean you'd actually hand this in. It's just a starting point, a few ideas for you to play around with and then write your own paper. I mean, we both know you're smart enough to write your own paper.”

“Maybe not. Maybe I'm not as smart as everybody wants me to be.”

“Of course you're smart, look at your damn SATs!” I was aware, as I said this, that I was relying on some school-marms in Princeton, with their analogies and multiple choices, to take the measure of my son. “Mickey, look, this is it. This is your last chance.”

“I don't want any more chances. I'm just going to flunk out. People flunk out all the time, it isn't the end of the world.”

I thought: of course it is! How can anybody named Ascher flunk out of school? And what are you going to do then, be a garbage man? But then I thought, he's going to flunk out. What am I going to do, write all his papers for four years?

“I guess it isn't the end of the world,” I said.

“This just isn't what I was meant to do, all this shit. Why am I supposed to care about this Durkheim guy? I should have just dropped out, or I should never even have gone to school, or …” He trailed off.

I closed my eyes. Because if I looked at him I was just going to shout at him. I summoned up all of my--Martha assures me--limited stock of patience. “So what are you going to do now?”

“I don't know. I never really got a chance to figure out what I wanted to do, did I?”

“Mickey, it doesn't matter what you want to do, these days if you want to do anything you at least have to get through college.”

“Oh, yeah? I thought you said--what was it?--you said colleges were just farms where they grew personnel for the corporations to harvest. Isn't that what you wrote?”

“Pretty close.” I had to laugh. “I thought you weren't so smart.” I raised a hand to tousle his hair but pulled it back.

He looked at the hand as if it were some kind of animal and he wondered what it would do next. What it did next was gather up the pages of the paper he wasn't going to be handing in and take them back to my office.

It was certainly very, very smart of him to point out the contradictions in my position. Who even knew he had read my goddamn book? I used to prattle about remaking the world for my son, and then all we could imagine for him was the same world given to everyone else's son. I can say that this is Martha's fault, that she and her father--who I hope is spending his infernal eternity listening to City College Trotskyites explaining the dialectic--steered him to
Warwick and Beta Theta Pi. (Oh, you have a Jewish name? Their fraternity's right down the street.) But I didn't have any other course to offer him.

This guy Marcuse--who I guess is pushing me out as the
savant du jour
, judging from the drop-off in my speaking gigs--has this idea of the Great Refusal. We all have to say NO, to the phony things we are taught to want and to the repression that is the price we pay for all this dreck we buy.

But it is Mickey who is performing the Great Refusal-starting with refusing my touch, moving on to rejecting everything I valued in the world. And this is how the technological empire will end. Not--as Marcuse and I thought, coming from different angles--in young men recovering the solid work of their hands and spirits. But like Mickey … sleeping late.

I don't know anymore what the New World might look like. Mickey will have to find his way to it all by himself. And I won't even dare to kiss him good-bye.

February 25, 1972

Sixty. Last night Martha and I--sans Mickey, who Refused to put a tie on--had my birthday dinner at the old Café Lucien, down in the Village. Where we got engaged, or ensnared. Last time I'd walked by, the place looked like it was on its last legs, but it's still going. Much like our marriage.

Like any last-legged married couple, we ate pretty much in silence. While we waited for dessert--no cake for me, just Martha's flaming crêpes suzette--Martha suddenly wanted to talk about what we would do with Mickey now. I whined, “It's my birthday,” like a child. No unpleasantness on my birthday.

She persisted. “He isn't doing anything. He sleeps all day and he runs around with God knows who all night. He's got to start doing something.”

“It's just been a couple of weeks.”

“It's just been a couple of weeks since SLS gave him the boot. It's been a couple of years since he actually did anything.”

“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow I'll tell him he should do something.”

I could swear that, even as she took another bite of her crêpe, she was humming. She swallowed before saying, “I don't know why you've always thought raising a child was some kind of joke.”

I didn't give the obvious answer: that raising Mickey is the only thing that wasn't a joke. Just watched her eat and waited for whatever further chastisement might be forthcoming. There was none, I suspect because she thought it over and realized that she didn't know what to tell him, either. We had kind of run out of things to tell him.

We walked home. Martha went up the stairs to the front door, then realized I wasn't with her, turned. I just waved and went back down to the Village for a little wan birthday merriment.

I stopped in at the Poplar. I hadn't been there in years, but I thought maybe I'd run into Willis or Dennis O'Grady or somebody. I didn't recognize a soul. But, beyond that, everybody seemed different somehow. The scruffy old Poplar crowd, poets and artists and various other manqués, had given way to …

Gay people. The place was full of gay people, you could smell their cologne even over the cigarette smoke. Most of them had mustaches, or little beards, careful as topiary, ringing their pouting lips. A few had their arms around each other, now that Mayor Lindsay has pretty much put a stop to the raids. Others stood at the edges of the room, posed motionless with their beer bottles held just so, eyes darting, darting. Nobody's eyes came to rest on me, of course. I am sixty, sixty.

If you had asked me, two years ago when they had that parade, if gay people could change the world, I might have said, yeah, maybe. There's still some chance of an ecstatic
blend of political and sexual liberation for everybody, gay and straight. We can still make a new world where Mickey would be doing something he cared about and would sometimes let his Pop tousle his hair. That's what I might have said. But I know we won't make that world now. We have lost, we have already lost it all.

I suppose I scowled while I thought all this, adding to my sexagenarian allure. Anyway, it was clear enough I wasn't getting any birthday treat in the Poplar, so on impulse I headed over to Virgil's, on 11th Street. Where the hookers are.

My experience with that kid in Baltimore--George, I think?--that was the only time I ever paid except by accident. Accident meaning you bring somebody home and realize only then that all evening he had been--too subtly for his own good--dropping hints about his professional status. So once or twice I paid a few bucks just to avoid a row. I didn't, until last night, think about going to Virgil's.

For a lot of reasons. Ego, surely, not wanting to admit I have to pay for it. And of course the merchandise in Virgil's is a bit more shopworn than George, and more dangerous. Not dangerous in the JD way, that used to make my stomach tighten and my head swim with that thrilling mix of fear and arousal. Dangerous in the sense of, why is that guy who's been walking behind me suddenly speeding up?

Virgil's. Long before the hookers showed up it was a dark, smelly old dive. I wandered in on Repeal Day in ‘33: my first legal drink in a bar, and I had no idea what to get. I looked at the cocktail menu on the wall and ordered a Pink Lady. I'll always be grateful to the bartender who didn't crack a smile as he said, “I'd bet you've never tried real bourbon, sir.”

I could swear that half the customers in Virgil's last night might have witnessed that event. And were not young men at the time. As for the hookers: the hookers looked okay. That is, obviously better than anything I've gotten
for free lately, but not quite good enough to pay for. How silly, I thought: could I have imagined that I might come into this dump and find a George? Of course none of these boys was as innocent or straightforward as George, and I'm not so innocent myself anymore. The age of idylls has passed.

I picked the boy who looked as though he had showered this week. We went to the alley behind the bar, found a dark spot next to the garbage cans. I could hear a rat scuttle away--no, not scuttle, sidle away, a little bored. It must have seen plenty of human couplings in that alley. The kid got on his knees, reached for my fly. “No, I want to do you,” I said.

He looked up at me and snorted. “I do smack, man.”

“Smack?”

“I got nothing downstairs for you to play with. Come on, I'll get you off good.”

He got me off good. I felt filthy and cruel and … rich. Using a--probably straight, but who cared?--boy whom the world had thrown away. Getting off, zipping up, handing him his ten and leaving him in the alley with the garbage. The road I've been on, the years from George to last night: this is the road the country's been on. I don't think we'll come back.

Mickey, my native informant, tells me that “smack” means heroin. And wonders why I'm asking.

Leave it to Jonathan to declare that his descent to steadily more degraded hustlers was the trajectory of the nation. Not that he was wrong, necessarily.

And he was certainly right that I had no more ideas than he did for Mickey. I had vague thoughts of some kind of ultimatum—threats I mumbled at the dishes as I washed them. Find some kind of job or go beg in the streets! Yes, indeed, throw him into the lake and he'll learn to swim. But this particular pedagogical technique entails a willingness to jump in after him if he starts to drown, or to stand mutely by.

I had done my part, did my best to steer him the right way all those years while Jonathan went about his anarchic business. I was tired, I didn't want to be anybody's parent anymore.

March 7, 1972

Dennis O'Grady, Leading Poet of Chelsea Group, 39
.

A heart attack, the
Times
goes on to say. Maybe so, even at 39, but I've heard from Willis that Dennis's poetry and his dancing both sometimes benefited from a little chemical boost. So it wouldn't be astounding to learn that he had boosted himself right off the planet. He is survived by his parents, a sister, and nephews and nieces, all in North Carolina. “He is survived,” that's how the
Times
puts it. All the other verbs in the article are, of course, in the past tense. The only thing Dennis can do in the present tense is be survived. Presumably he is also survived by Geoffrey-with-a-G: last I heard they were still together. But naturally the
Times
will never find the names of dead fairies' real families fit to print.

If I had died at 39 I would never have married Martha, never have seen Mickey, never have written JD and become famous. And maybe, too, never have watched each leg of my life's tripod--marriage, child, career--wither. I used to make fun of Dennis for caring more about Scriabin than about the fate of the earth. But--for all the good that has come of my worrying about the world-- I might as well have listened to music, too. Listened, took whatever drug killed him, until then held somebody at night the way Dennis held Geoffrey in his wiry arms.

Past this, two other thoughts, each perhaps discreditable. First--like, I bet, every writer in town this morning-- I wonder if I will get as many column inches as Dennis O'Grady. Second: I wonder into whose arms Geoffrey will fall next. I don't suppose I'm a plausible candidate.

March 15, 1972

Mickey asked me for twenty bucks. Usually I just say no, knowing he'll probably wheedle it out of Martha. But
yesterday I said, “What for?” Figuring that whatever lie he told me would be information of a kind--greater than zero.

He stuck out his lower lip and said, “To get some grass.”

“Oh. Okay, then.” I peeled off a bill, enjoying having startled him, then had a thought. “As long as you share a little with me.”

“You smoke dope?”

“I thought I might try it.” Actually, I did try it once, back in the fifties, with a couple of students who were playing beatnik. I'm not sure if I got high or not; at the time I was much more interested in making a little headway with one of the students, who was a knockout even with his little hip goatee and his ironic black eyeglass frames. I did not make any headway, left cranky. “You'll have to show me how.”