2
I had never worked in a place where I couldn’t read. Only reading made work bearable. I brought Baudelaire to the Maldwyn Country Club and sneaked looks at it, but when Mattanza saw me he told me to put it away.
“What is it with these books?” he said. “Hey, know what I think? All this reading makes you crazy. Not only ruins your eyes. I mean, it’s no good for you.” He wagged his scaley fingers at his head, an Italian gesture meaning cracked.
“So when your kids go to school you won’t let them read books, is that right?”
“School books. That’s different.”
“How do you know this isn’t a school book?”
“The way you got your nose in it. You like it.” He winced at me. “You’re going to make yourself pazzo.”
“I see. So school books don’t drive you crazy, because they’re no fun to read. It’s only enjoyable books that turn you into a mental case. Is that right?”
We were doing the filters — Mattanza pouring the chlorine in while I screwed them into their holes. Mattanza put the bag of chemicals down. His tiny eyes were black with anger.
“You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I became very vague, as if it was impossible for me to determine whether or not he was stupid. I faced him and tried to look baffled.
“Hey, if you don’t like this job I could find lots of guys to take your place.”
I decided not to reply. I didn’t want to tell him what I thought of the job.
“I’ve got them pleading with me,” Mattanza said. “I could show you the applications. Know why there’s so many?”
I smiled at him.
He gathered his fingers and shook them at me in another Italian gesture.
“Because this place has class.”
I said, “You mean money. That’s all you mean. Money.”
“Fucken right that’s all I mean.”
I didn’t mention taste or intelligence or generosity, I didn’t say anything more. I was fairly sure he was crazy. He was certainly unpredictable. We went on doing the filters — Mattanza shaking the chlorine while I did the fitting — and then he spoke again.
“I used to go in disguise,” he said. “I was Joe Falco. I had this special suit that I just wore in the North End, nowhere else. I used to comb my hair different. Know something? A lot of broads like to be slapped around. You wouldn’t know that because you don’t know shit. But I can tell when they want me to hit them. I just fucken slam them and they love it. They get this”—he weighed his little fist—“right on the mouth. Only it wasn’t me. It was Joe Falco.” Mattanza looked at me and made his mouth into a smile. “Falco was a crazy bastard.”
* * *
No reading, no talking, and Mattanza didn’t like me looking away from the pool. A job that seemed to me to have pleasant possibilities quickly turned into a grind. How could a lifeguard job be hard? But at the Maldwyn Country Club it was hard. And if I was only a few minutes late, Mattanza ranted.
“I’m docking your pay! You’re losing an hour! You’re late!” he said. “I should give you your walking papers. Know my problem?”
“I can’t guess.”
“I’m too nice. Suit up and get your ass out here.”
“The bus was late.”
“Don’t blame the bus. Don’t give me no excuses.”
I hated the bus — hated the hard seats, and the way they smelled; hated the condescending bus advertisements that were designed for the down-at-heel bus passenger. Ever thought of completing your education? or There is a future for you in TV and Radio Repair! I wanted a motorcyle, but how could I buy one on forty-four dollars a week — they withheld seven-fifty in tax. I gave my mother fifteen, kept fifteen and banked the rest. I needed nine hundred by September: I would never make it. Working to make money made me distrust work and despise money.
What demoralized me was that all the members had money: they drove Cadillacs, they played golf, they had huge lunches, and if they wanted a drink they ordered it. They lay spread-eagled by the pool, tanning themselves; they drank. And I stood watching them, which was my job, and I resisted the urge to read.
They had sporty clothes and I had army-surplus. The only advantage I had was that all I was required to wear was a bathing suit. I was healthy and a good swimmer, but so what? I deeply resented the fact that I was a servant and regarded as inferior. And it was a trap: because they were stupid I would never be able to prove to them that I was intelligent.
One hot day in the second week at the club I stood in the sunshine feeling dizzy, and, fearing that I was going lightheaded, I decided to plunge in and cool off. Mattanza was waiting for me at the top of the ladder when I came out.
“No swimming,” he said. “Hey, don’t you like this job? Because if you keep goofing off like this I’m going to have to let you go.”
But less than an hour later he had put on his tiny bathing suit and begun diving into the pool. He swam poorly but he was a good diver. I was glad to see that he was the sort of show-off who sometimes goes too far. I hoped that he would overdo it and bash his brains out on the edge of the pool.
There were girls my age who spent the whole day there. I watched them but I did not speak to them. They had wide Armenian faces and were heavy, and had big brown thighs and broad feet and square shoulders. In spite of all their money they would always look the way they looked, which was a kind of warning. They lay sleepily in the sun and got even browner.
The boys my age made me feel like an outsider. They were not intentionally rude, but they were too selfish to know how to be friendly and too stupid to hold a conversation. The girls were all daughters and the boys were all sons — special for that and protected. Their whole lives were taken care of. They were fat and slow and they would become fatter and slower; they had money. Even the younger ones were hairy, and a few fourteen-year-olds had mustaches. I could tell from the way they jumped into the pool and splashed everyone that they would be hell when they grew up.
“That’s my kid, Kenny,” a man said to me one day. The boy had done a cannonball from the end of the pool, nearly landing on a woman’s head. But the man was laughing. He loved seeing aggression in his son. He pointed to himself. He said, “Deek Palanjian.”
I smiled at him. I saw Mattanza watching. He was thinking: No talking. But Palanjian was talking to me.
“Elia Kazan — know who I mean? Big movie director? He’s an Armenian.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Michael Arlen? Wrote a lot of best-sellers? Know what his real name is?”
I shook my head because Mattanza was watching.
“Dikran Kouyoumjian.”
“No kidding.”
“That guy in Russia — he’s Armenian.”
“Which guy in Russia?”
“Anastas Mikoyan,” he said, and waved to his son, who had climbed onto the diving board. He was a short heavy brown boy with a shaven head, and he moved nimbly with his arms down, like an ape. “Hey, Kenny, show me a dive!”
“How do you stand this job?” the woman said. It was the same woman who had been reading Norman Mailer. Today she was reading The Henry Miller Reader—the man’s sly devilish face on the book jacket looking up at me from between the woman’s breasts.
“The job’s all right.”
“You don’t have to be polite to me. I’ve been watching you,” she said. “I think you hate it here.”
It astounded me that she was able to read my mind, and I was embarrassed because I guessed she might have an inkling of all the ingenious ways I had devised to destroy the Maldwyn Country Club: making a minefield of the golf course, poisoning the water cooler, bombing the clubhouse. And lately I had been thinking that, just for the cruel fun of it, I would jam a potato in everyone’s exhaust pipe — all those limousines in the parking lot — so that they wouldn’t be able to start the engine. Then they would have to walk, like me.