Now I had a car, a big car with nothing but room in it, and there were all these people on the road, I never went a day without seeing a dozen of them, and I never once stopped. There were soldiers in uniform and hippies and straight-looking kids and older people, everything, and I passed them all up. Not because it was dangerous to stop, although I guess it is, but because I just didn’t want to talk to anybody.
It was a funny stretch of time. I guess I wouldn’t want to go through it again.
Fourteen
i had to write the last chapter twice. The first time I did it, I put in a six-page scene that never happened. It was the first night after I left Bordentown, when I stayed in the motel with cardboard walls. The way I wrote it the first time, there was this long scene where I listened to a couple through the wall, and the guy finished before the girl was satisfied, and he just left her there, and she was storming around the room throwing things and crying. So then I went next door and brought her back to my own room and took her to bed, and afterward she was sleeping and I heard the same thing happen again in the room next door, except this time the guy was drunk and passed out before he could do anything. Whereupon the heroic Chip Harrison went next door and found the second girl, and she was also ready to walk up the wall and across the ceiling, and good old Chipperoo brought her back, too, and balled her in the bed while the first girl was still sleeping, and then the first girl woke up, and the three of us had this wild orgy with everybody doing everything to everybody else all at once.
I filled up six pages with that crap. It was a pretty good scene, actually, and I think it would have been pretty erotic.
But I thought about it and tore it all up and did it over the way it really happened.
So I wrote that scene, and it didn’t bother me while I was writing it. In fact while I was typing it all out I could actually believe it really happened. Sometimes it’s a little frightening the way your imagination will take a lie and make it almost true.
Then why did I tear it up? I could say it was because I didn’t want to put any lies in this book, but that’s not it because there are already a couple of lies in it that I’m leaving in. Just small lies, but that doesn’t make them true. The real reason, I think, is that putting in a scene like that would just make a lie out of everything that happened in Bordentown and lot of what went on afterward. Because that scene I wrote could never have happened. If the beginning of it happened, and if a guy did leave a girl there all unsatisfied, I never would have gone next door. Not the way I felt. If anything I would have just left the motel and gotten back in the car and kept on driving. And if I tried to do anything with a girl just then, if somehow I really did make an effort, I’m sure I couldn’t have managed to accomplish it.
I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco, but for a while there I guess I left my balls in Bordentown.
Fifteen
I guess I knew all along I was on my way to Wisconsin. In fact the first night out I tried to figure out just how long it would take me to drive there if I drove sixteen hours a day and slept eight. (If I had tried it, I think I would have killed that Cadillac in a matter of days. It was good for another fifteen years if you didn’t push it more than fifty or a hundred miles at a stretch, but it tended to burn oil when it overheated and I would have thrown a rod or burned out a bearing sooner or later.)
But the thing is that I wanted to be going to Wisconsin but I didn’t want to get there. I wanted to see Hallie. I always wanted to see Hallie, ever since that one night in September when she came to my room over the barber shop. The next morning she went to Madison to start college, and ever since then I had been not quite going there to see her.
Because if I went there, and if it turned out that there was nothing there for me, then what would I do? I wouldn’t have Hallie to send postcards to, or to write letters to and not mail. Or to think about the way knights used to think about the Holy Grail.
Once I was out of Bordentown I really didn’t want to see anybody right away, Hallie included. I knew that there had to be some time in between Bordentown and whatever was going to come after it. I don’t mean that I spelled all of this out in my mind, but when I think back on it I can see it was something I must have known.
So I took my time, and took down a lot of storm windows and put up a lot of screens, and touched up woodwork and repaired furniture. And before long it was June and the colleges were out for the summer, so there was no point in rushing up there because she would be away on summer vacation.
Of course I knew where she lived, in the same town where I originally met her, a little town on the Hudson between New York and Albany. It stood to reason that she would go home for the summer, and I suppose I could have gone to see her there, but the way I looked at it was that I was already out in the Midwest and it would make more sense to stay there and see her in Wisconsin when the fall term started.
Which meant that all I had to do was kill a couple of months. I didn’t even have to pretend I was on the way to Wisconsin. All I had to do was kill time, and I was getting pretty good at that.
I think some of the pressure came off about the time that the school year ended in Wisconsin. I don’t know that one thing had much to do with the other. Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, but within a week after the end of the semester, I did something I hadn’t done since I left Bordentown.
By this time I was starting to worry about it. Not that I wasn’t doing it — because let’s face it, I had gone almost eighteen years without doing it, so a couple of months off wasn’t anything remarkable. But I didn’t even want to do it. I didn’t even particularly think about it, for Pete’s sake, and it’s usually all I do think about.
In fact, I wasn’t even doing what I had told Lucille it was perfectly normal to do.
I would see a pretty girl on the street, say, and I would tell myself, There’s a pretty girl. I still had the brains to realize this. But what I wouldn’t tell myself was, Man, would I ever like to ball that chick until her eyes fall out of her head. And that sort of thing had always been my normal response to a pretty girl, and now it didn’t happen, and I was beginning to worry.
For months I had been with Lucille five days a week. The same girl, lunch hour after lunch hour, and I never once got tired of it. I was always ready and willing and able, and it was always good, and I always enjoyed it. And now it began to seem possible to me that (a) I was never going to want it again with anybody or (b) I was only going to want it with Lucille. And both of these things amounted to the same thing, because I was never going to be able to see Lucille again.
And if (b) was true (and it might have been, I couldn’t tell, because I wasn’t sure I still wanted to make love to Lucille but I couldn’t prove that I didn’t, either) then it stood to reason that leaving Bordentown had been a mistake. But not one of those mistakes you can do anything about, except maybe cut your throat, which still seemed a little too extreme.
So it reassured me when it finally happened. And it’s reassuring me right now, because I can write about it, and if I didn’t have some sex in this book pretty soon I suppose Mr. Fultz would give it back to me and tell me to use it to line a birdcage or something. He may anyway.
I hope not.
It was in Iowa. I don’t remember the name of the town. (There’s another lie for you. I remember it perfectly well, but I’m not putting it in.) The house I was staying at this time was like most of the others, a sprawling old place in the middle of town with bay windows and gables and extra rooms that were nicely furnished and everything, but nothing happened in them and nobody ever went in there. This house had two widows instead of one. One of them was about sixty, a plump little old lady with cataracts and hardly any chin, so that her face just curved back from her mouth to her neck. This took a little getting used to.