“Look. What the hell’s the idea of coming in here and talking to me like that? I won’t kiss your ass, but I may kick it if you don’t look out.”
“Sure. You’re just the big corn-fed stupe who could do it, too, aren’t you? Well, go ahead. I had an idea you had some brains, just from the look of you, but I guess you’ve got them all in your hands and feet, if you’ve got any at all, just like all the other stupes around here. Go on. Kick my ass. Kick the shit out of me.”
“Oh, go to hell. I think I’ll have a drink out of that bottle after all.”
He took a swallow from the bottle and gagged. Howie Brewster watched him with open curiosity and an immediately resumed amiability.
“You ever had a drink of whiskey before?”
“No.”
“Honest to God?”
“What do you want me to do, apologize for never having a drink before? I’ve had beer, out with friends now and then, but I never drank any whiskey.”
“Never mind. You’ll learn. How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“You’ve got plenty of time. I’m twenty myself. If I was a year older, I’d be contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
“Balls. You’re a big talker, aren’t you? Your old man’s rich, and you’re a regular rounder.”
“It’s a defense mechanism. The truth is, I’m neurotic as hell. It’s a fact, though, that my old man’s well heeled. You can believe it or not.”
“How come you can’t afford anything better than Mrs. Murphy’s, then?”
“Because my old man’s a bastard. He’s a bastard, and so am I. We deserve each other. When I refused to join his goddamn frat, he put me on a subsistence allowance. He thinks it’s good for my soul.”
He tipped his bottle and took a long pull and did not gag. Standing, he walked to the door.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got to read my goddamn economics assignment. Not that it’ll do any good. I won’t remember the crap. This’ll probably be my last year here. Second and last. I’ll flunk out sure as hell.”
He left, swinging his little bottle openly by the neck with an air of bravado in defiance of Mrs. Murphy’s posted prohibition of liquor on the premises, but he was back a couple of nights later, and in the weeks that followed, accumulating to a couple of months, he and Henry became comfortable cronies with a developing taste for beer. By tacit understanding, after the first night, whiskey was dropped as an issue, and the beer was in the beginning a kind of compromise that became quickly a social lubricant, and at the same time the substance of a bond. They discovered a small place downtown near the river where the question of age was not raised against them, and it was here that they habitually spent the nights that they could afford to give to it. The compatibility was supported by a mutual interest in writing and a shared conviction that the novelists of the twenties and thirties, the giants of the middle age between two wars, had never been properly read or appreciated until the two of them came along to do it.
Beneath Howie’s pretentious rebellion, his excessive profanity and assumption of decadence, there was in truth, Henry learned, a genuine loneliness and uncertainty. And below these, now and then discernible, a depth of black despair. At first, as their sensitivity to each other increased, the real Howie was no more than a collection of suggestions, a personality merely inferred by some of the things he said and did, but then, one night in Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House, there occurred an incident that made him, in one rather terrible minute, perfectly clear.
Henry had been to the bathroom at the end of the hall. On his way back to his room, passing Howie’s closed door, he heard from behind the door a dry, rasping sound. Without pausing to think or trying to identify the sound, he stopped and turned the knob and stepped into the room. Just beyond the threshold he stopped abruptly, feeling within himself a rising tide of horror that was excessive in relation to its cause. Howie was lying face down across his bed, and he was crying. The sound of his crying was the arid sound of grief without tears.
“What’s wrong?” Henry said.
He knew immediately that he had made a mistake. He should not have opened the door to begin with, but having opened it, he should have backed silently out of the room and left without a word. Howie rolled over and sat up on the bed, and his voice, although quiet, had the brittle intensity of a scream.
“Get out of here, you son of a bitch! Who the hell do you think you are to come walking in here any goddamn time you please without knocking?”
Henry’s first reaction was one of simple shock at the violence of the attack. He backed out and closed the door, but when he was in his room again, he began to feel angry and was tempted to go back and give Howie a damn good beating. But this reaction was also short-lived, and shock and anger gave way together to genuine concern and an uneasy sense of shame for Howie’s brief emotional nakedness. He wondered what on earth could have happened to disturb Howie so deeply, but he was really aware, even then, that it was nothing specific, no one thing in particular, and that Howie had merely reached, as he had before and would again, a time of intolerable despair.
Thirty minutes later Howie was standing in the doorway.
“May I come in?” he said.
“Sure. Why not?”
“Well, you know. I thought I might not be welcome.”
“Oh, to hell with it. Come on in.”
Howie came in and sat down, and that was the only reference ever made to the incident by either of them. “I’ve written a long poem,” Howie said.
“Oh?”
“Yes. Two hundred twenty lines.”
“That’s pretty long, all right. What’s it about?”
“Well, it’s pretty hard just to say in so many words what a poem is about. Would you like me to read it to you?”
“Go ahead.”
“I call it The Dance of the Gonococci.”
“What?”
“The Dance of the Gonococci. You know. Gap bugs”
“Oh, come off. You’re joking.”
“Certainly not. Why should you simply say that I’m joking?”
“You’ll have to admit that gonococci are pretty unusual subjects for a poem.”
“Nothing of the sort. If Burns could write a lousy poem to a louse, why can’t I write one about gonococci? In my opinion, gonococci are much more poetic than louse. At least, one can have a lot more fun acquiring them.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Look, sonny. Just because you’re a green and sappy virgin, don’t think everyone else is too. You’re just retarded, that’s all.”
“Talk, talk, talk. Talk big, talk loud.”
“Oh, God, you’re impossible. You don’t know anything about anything. A dose of clap would do you good.”
“It might do you good too. Then you might not think gonococci are so damn poetic.”
“I had a dose once. Didn’t I tell you about it?”
“No.”
“I was seventeen at the time. I caught it from a girl from one of the best families. Nothing but the best for Howie, you know.”
“One of the best families in shantytown?”
“Don’t be facetious, sonny. Catching the clap is not a minor matter. Not that it amounted to much, really. It’s no worse than a bad cold.”
“I’ve heard that before, too.”
“It’s the truth. You ought to try it.”
“Oh, balls. Go on and read the damn poem.”
“No. I’ve changed my mind.”
“Why? Don’t think I’m going to beg you.”
“Please don’t. It’s just that I don’t think you’d appreciate it. You’re obviously not sufficiently cultivated. Besides, I’ve got another idea.”