Call Driggers. “Driggers, do not get downwind of the burning bear. You can sit on the goddamn burning sofa, though.”
“Shit, I know that.”
“You do?”
“Learned ’at first thing in the Nam.”
“You fucker.”
“You take it easy.”
“Roger.”
“Wilco.”
A Piece of Candy
TATTIE ELAINE MCGRIM BOLIO Pearsall reports, indiscreetly, seeing Robert on New Year’s Eve in Ybor City, drunk. She mimics the way he was walking, stiff-chested and aslant and veering and thin-legged, like the Planter’s Peanut on a toot, if it is not too hard to imagine the Planters Peanut getting soused and walking crookedly on those spindly legs, which bend ever lower with each step, while his body takes on the solid-looking heft and bulk of a keg of something which keeps getting closer to the ground. Keeping him upright are his friends Mr. and Mrs. M&M and their new blue baby boy. Mr. and Mrs. M&M are drunk, too, but their new blue baby boy is as sober as a brand-new piece of candy, which is just what he is. Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall, which is not her real name, because I cannot recall her real name, is a bitch, a sweet one, whose reporting of Bobby on the occasion of his perambulating Ybor City like a legally drunk Planter’s Peanut is not, I don’t think, judgmental. She means no harm by it. She saw it, saw him, she says so, that is all. She is not mean. She is not a bitch. She is a sweet girl of the sort I never knew. I am a hero. She is a sweet girl of the sort I will never know. I will the a hero and she will be a sweet girl of the sort I never knew. As I lie dying a hero I will be able to say she is a sweet girl of the sort I have never known.
I’d like to slap the smile off the face of new blue baby boy M&M, is what I, hero, would like to do. Where precisely does a piece of candy, let alone a new controversial—unproven—one, GET OFF smirking at an honest drunk, even if a young one? Does a piece of candy think it is better than a drunk man? Has it come to this? When in a few years Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall has had the shine knocked off her by Life, when her lipstick’s on a little crooked and is a little more orange than it should be, or when she has quit lipstick altogether and has shortened her name to McGrim, ha, or maybe to Tattie McGrim, in which case she would be a stripper, or to Paula Bolio, in which case she will be a damned good piece of prohibito hablar in these days of Niceness, or to Elaine Pearsall, in which case she will be rich, I would like to have her. That I would like, a hero like me.
I would say, “Pearsall, what say you and I have a bolio in the bushes? Could you accommodate a hero with some age on him? What do you suppose has become of Robert Higginbotham?” “Oh, I am so terrible, love,” she will say. “If you cannot kiss me, at least pull my hair.” I will pull her hair and I will kiss her: I am a hero. Even then will I be a hero. And the new blue baby boy will have been proven, or not, a legitimate piece of candy or an illegitimate piece of shit.
Robert Higginbotham was, probably, a gangster. He was not Italian, had no connections, no money, no guns, and no interest in them. He had no silk ties and no tough ways of talking. He had no part in any gang or indeed in any organization. Still, if you looked at him with a relaxed and unassuming mind, even at him bent-legged-drunk veering into the cigar-colored brick walls of the ruined cigar factories of Ybor City, no more than a child, really, and not an unhappy one, what you saw surrounding him was a blue aura of gangsterism, and inside that blue gas of possibility, walking on an invisible circle of quintessentially dangerous potential, was a gangster. Already, smiling, he would instruct you not to call him Bobby. “I will fight you,” he would say, smiling. “You may kick my ass, but I will fight you.” Smiling.
This is what the woman variously called Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall, Tattie McGrim, McGrim, Paula Bolio, Elaine Pearsall, and Pearsall saw about Robert Higginbotham when she saw him celebrating the New Year in a cigar district gone to boutique and gentrification seed. She saw a gangster and it thrilled her. She was still capable of being thrilled by the not innocent.
As for the man who would call Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall, Tattie McGrim, McGrim, Paula Bolio, Elaine Pearsall, and Pearsall variously a bitch, a sweet bitch, not a bitch, and a sweet girl of the sort he would never know, and never, in the end, have known — well, of him I can say with certainty only that he is troubled. When he says he is a hero, he is not altogether inaccurate, though he is certainly aware of certain contradictions obtaining between a claim of heroism and the unheroic sentiments coming from the putative hero’s mouth, and he is pleased to make no attempt to explain himself, leaving the matter in a small puddle of, he hopes, muddy irony. (And who might I be? you ask. Whoever I am, I do not count. Forget me. Forgive me.)
After the girl Tattie, who will become the woman Pearsall, sees Robert Higginbotham careering into the Ybor City party-down night, she does not see him enter a strip club. There he seats himself, smiling so hugely and whitely that waitresses scramble to get to him first, in the front row of tables before the stage upon which the unsavory revelations will occur. He is thinking specifically of a time in high school when he went to a strip show at the state fair with a group of friends and of one of them yelling “Pork!” and “No more!” at a heavy, aged, admittedly rather unattractive woman who was the first of six strippers in the show. That had embarrassed him. The woman was in fact a sight past unattractive, and his ardent adolescent desire was bent for six weeks into a queer dormancy as a result of seeing her take her clothes off, but she did not deserve to have a boy with acne who would prove homosexual, or anyone else, yell “Pork!” at her. Robert Higginbotham, his desire restored, was smiling tonight partly to make certain he was recognized as the good guy that he was; he was smiling to atone.
From the first scantily clad waitress to get to him he ordered, without deigning look at her, which he deemed unclassy, a drink, and when it came it was turquoise and terrible and cost ten dollars and he didn’t know what it was. He drank it and waited for the revelations upon the stage. He had not seen Tattie earlier. He was drunk enough to have strong-armed her in here with him, and Tattie was not yet near being Tattie McGrim, stripper, so it was just as well. Because he’d not seen her and knew nothing of her eminent if brief career to come, doing what he was paying to watch other women momentarily do, he was not sitting there in the Comic Book Club thinking Tattie’s absence, or anything else, was just as well. Nothing was just as well to him at that moment. Nothing was just, all was well.
He recalled again the painful adventure at the state fair. The horrific woman, who’d had rolled flesh that swung like wet mop heads, had been the first of six strippers, each of whom improved, sequentially, getting better and better, younger and firmer and prouder, until finally a creature who looked like a hybrid of Marlene Dietrich and an Olympic swimmer took the stage and took the breath out of the boy who’d yelled “Pork!” and “No more!” and took everyone else’s breath as well. Robert Higginbotham had been glad to see the boy silenced, and he had been glad to see the beauty of the woman. Her unavailability to him had seemed, for once, correct, and not part of the infinite scheme of torture that was testosterone.
Tonight in Ybor City he got another turquoise drink and still refused to look at the naked woman who brought it to him, and he got ready for the women he was supposed to look at. When they came on it was gratifying that no one was yelling “Pork!” and “Stop!” that no one considered it, that the women were very attractive, that he wasn’t surrounded by rubes on sawdust, that he’d bought earlier in the evening some navel oranges, which he now on a whim took two of from the paper sack on the chair beside him and put under his shirt and pushed up into the position of exceptionally high, firm breasts, and he watched the show, every savory and unsavory detail, smiling, and the women were smiling back. They had relaxed and unassuming minds and they saw in the front row, with oranges up his shirt and smiling, a little gangster.