The lobsters and cat and scaling of the soldier were precious to the writer and Bandini was in solid at the writer’s campus bungalow. He read up on Bruce Catton and could account for the Northern agony, better and better, when the topic moved over to Those Who Fell once Elvis sang his medley of “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with the highly sincere Las Vegas band behind him.
Bandini insisted Cruthers move in with him and share his lot and the few hundred a month he got from his parents to stay out of New York. In fact he rather kidnapped Cruthers from the writer. But this was all right, since the writer was growing tired of Cruthers a little. Lately he had begun running the car out of gas and leaving it in mean places where crack fiends prowled and respected nothing. Also there was the problem of Cruthers always being in jail to be bailed out. Some money had disappeared too.
Bandini filled up the old shabby yellow house with history books. He was studying to be a student in the future, but this could wait. Through the writer he was let in to practice sessions of the football team, and he watched from the sidelines for hours, memorizing the players, especially the swift monstrous crushers. The coaches did not know what to make of the screaming little man with the New York accent who seemed to know and hate the weaknesses of individual players even more than they did. He used the word pussy a great deal. Soon he was asked to quiet down or leave. But he seemed to think of himself as a man with true work and vicious responsibility. Bandini knew that college players were semipro recruits only tenuously connected to the university. Half of them were not on familiar terms with the phrase alma mater. Bandini loved this. He wanted to think of the boys as pure cruising crushing meat, a kind of express ham. He was partial as always to the blacks, who he thought of as bursting out of their little nasty nowheres into the howling arenas of the world in the manner of Spartacus. This was their only shot and Bandini worshiped this wild simplicity.
The first time I saw Bandini in public trouble was after a game our team had lost in November when it was first turning chilly. Twilight was coming on and we filed out under the end zone stands. In the end zone we had a sort of rowdy club made up of professors and artists. It was fun seeing the touchdowns and murderous defensive plays from just a few feet away. Bandini sat with us and always brought Cruthers to the games with him. Without cease he would yell insults at the players, naming them, when he saw an error. He became hoarse doing this but never relented even when the game was far gone and the loyal were trickling out.
Under the stands a large professor who was also drunk had not cared for Bandini’s style and was beating Bandini on his head, really pounding him, as the man’s wife and Cruthers looked on. But Bandini would rise and rise again, crying out hoarsely. The wife seemed angrier than the man beating Bandini, actually. She had been personally insulted but the large professor was going about clobbering Bandini in a dutiful way, just socking him as if stamping the price on groceries. Cruthers was holding the man’s coat and smiling. Bandini would not fall and stay, and when he rose once, I heard his hoarse voice still going, hoarse in a whisper through his big bloody lips. He was still yelling about the game, the errors. He was barely acknowledging the professor, and I believe there was even a little smile on Bandini’s lips, a tolerant thing, as if this were a small social misunderstanding.
Months later, toward the end of my own serious drinking life, I was in a bar in an alley off the center of town. This bar prided itself on its roughneck and biker atmosphere in a town devoted to campus fashion in nearly everything. A crowd made way on the dance floor in front of the rock-abilly band. I thought at first it was Bandini dancing by himself. But he was doing his moves and staggering from having been hit. A man in a leatheroid long cowboy coat had struck him for defending Cruthers, who had been dancing with a white girl. Cruthers was still standing beside the girl with his arm around her shoulders sweated up from the dance. I noticed he was beholding it all with an expression of implacable scorn.
I really felt for Bandini, who went over to a booth by himself and sat there a long time, with an awful bruise rising on the side of his face. He was saying something over and over to the table but you couldn’t hear it for the band. I asked him if he was all right.
He lifted up his head and said: “I’m always all right.”
I heard that later in the night, however, Bandini had come out of the booth having shed his clothes. He had begun dancing and whirling. The boy who told me this commented that Bandini had an enormous penis, a thing almost not a part of him, it seemed. Nobody could believe it, and the band quit. Bandini lifted his penis and shook it all around at everybody, baiting each and every one, as it was quiet now.
“You can’t hurt me. Nothing you can do. You can’t hurt me.”
They were astounded but nobody seemed to mind that much. Bandini was in bad luck, however. There were two cops at the door and they broke through and hauled off Tiger Bandini, who still proclaimed himself hurt-proof. One drunk woman dancer began crying and saying what an awful thing that was, that it was too much like Jesus and it was a terrible, terrible thing to witness. She was hysterical.
I visited Bandini and Cruthers several times that year. I was running out of friends to drink with and it seemed that my worst anguish over a drink came on Sunday evenings when all the liquor was gone and the stores were shut. I think Bandini and Cruthers were moderating their drinking somewhat now after the incident at the bar. Cruthers I’d guess was simply a vast consumer and not strictly alcoholic. He simply drank whenever it was provided and you never saw him begging for a beer. He was a seasoned blithe leech and the campus provided him with a perennial supply of white liberal donors. He had a certain style and I never saw him thank anybody for a drink they had bought him. Bandini always seemed to have a few cold beers or the good part of a bottle left on Sunday nights.
The last night I visited he had two whole bottles and half a case of Heineken. It was his birthday and they had had a party yesterday, he said.
After three drinks I could not get a lift, only the poisoned flat feeling. I told Bandini I thought I was alcoholic. This made him very angry, not at me but at the idea.
“You are not!” he insisted. “Don’t take the cheap way out. Nobody is really … anything. Everybody is just a collision.”
I wondered where he had got that. Around the room, all over the sofa and the bed, were books of history. I noticed markers were in all of them just a few pages deep. He seemed to be reading many at once instead of one at a time.
I was over there hours talking history, football, and great art. I started talking about women but that stopped everything for a while. There was a long pause during which I drank very rapidly and finally felt a little. Bandini had nothing to say about women. He looked at me vacantly. Cruthers said he liked sleeping with a fat woman when it came winter. He said he had children about who were pretty. Bandini was flat to this too.
I recalled then I had never seen Bandini with a woman. He was not gay, but I had never even seen him in conversation with a woman.
But he was getting emotional now, well into the good whiskey along with Cruthers, who seemed to be getting sadder.
Bandini put a tape of the soundtrack to the movie Platoon in a small player and a trumpet began crying out.
The two of them were moving into something and I’ll never forget it. Cruthers leaned against the window, and outside, the cat that Bandini had saved sat poised like a monitor on the other side of the screen with an orange moon behind it. They listened intently to the soundtrack and I felt to say anything would be like speaking aloud in church. Cruthers got to shuffling and became moodier and distant. Bandini raised his head and said to Cruthers softly, “Tell it all.”