And so they gave up and left Whaddayamean Dean to finish his vodka and within three minutes he forgot that everyone had been picking on him and that Harold Bloomguard was almost naked and alone with the ducks on Duck Island. As a matter of fact, everyone forgot Harold Bloomguard but Sam Niles, and he would like to have forgotten.
At 5:00 A.M., when only the two girls and three of the choirboys were left sprawled on their blankets, Sam Niles stripped down and waded through the sludge to Duck Island, knocked the sleeping ducklings off Harold Bloomguard’s shivering body shook him awake and dragged him through the cold dirty water to his blanket and clothes. But Sam decided that Harold was too covered with filth to put him in Sam’s Ferrari so he broke the lock on the park gardening shed with a rock and found a hose with a strong nozzle. Then he forced the protesting Harold Bloomguard to stand shivering on the grass and be sprayed down from head to foot before drying in the blankets and dressing.
“I’d never do this to you, Sam!” Harold screamed as the merciless jet of water stung and pounded him and shriveled his balls to acorns.
“You’re not getting in my Ferrari covered with that green slimy duck shit,” said Sam Niles who had a thundering headache.
“I loaned you part of the down payment!” reminded Harold and shrieked as the spray hit him in the acorns, waking up Roscoe Rules who saw two nearly nude men by the gardening shack and figured it was a pair of park fairies.
Roscoe belched and shouted, “All you faggy bastards in this park better keep the noise down or I’ll make you do the chicken!” And then he went back to sleep.
When Harold was relatively clean Sam Niles vowed that somehow, someday he would rid himself of Harold Bloomguard who was by his own admission a borderline mental case.
Sometimes Sam Niles felt that he had always been burdened with Harold Bloomguard, that there had never been a time in his life when there was not a little figure beside him, blinking his large hazel eyes, cracking his knuckles, scratching an ever-present pimply rash on the back of his neck with a penknife and worst of all unconsciously rolling his tongue in a tube and blowing spit bubbles through the channel into the air.
“It’s sickening!” Sam Niles had informed Harold Bloomguard a thousand times in the seven years he had known him. “Sickening!”
And Harold would agree and swear never to do it again, and whenever he would get nervous or bewildered or frightened by one of the several hundred neurotic fears he lived with, he would sit and worry and his tongue would fold in two and little shiny spit bubbles would drop from his little pink mouth.
Sam Niles realized that at twenty-six, just four months older than Harold Bloomguard, he was a father figure. It had been that way since Vietnam where Harold Bloomguard more or less attempted to attach himself to Sam Niles for life, taking his discharge two months later than Sam and following him into the Los Angeles Police Department after returning to his family home in Pomona, California, where Harold’s father practiced law and his mother was confined in a mental hospital.
It was always the same, with Harold begging Sam to sit quietly and help him interpret his latest dream full of intricate symbols, Sam always protesting that if Harold were really worried about joining his mother in the funny place, he should see a psychiatrist. The problem was that Harold Bloomguard always believed that it was her weekly session with a shrink that put his mother in the hospital in the first place, and until she went into psychotherapy when Harold was overseas, she was more or less an ordinary neurotic. So Sam Niles became the only psychiatrist Harold Bloomguard ever had and it had been this way since Sam took pity on the skinny weak little marine.
“Sam, I gotta tell you about the dream I had last night,” Harold said as they left Wilshire Station at change of watch and drove into the gritty personal night world of police partners, most intimate perhaps because they might have to depend upon each other for their very lives.
“Yes, Harold, yes,” Sam sighed and pushed his fashionable, heavy, steel rimmed goggles up on his nose and promised himself to get his eyes examined because he was becoming more nearsighted than ever.
He cruised steadily through the traffic as Harold said, “There was this black cat that crossed my path and I was very afraid and couldn’t understand it and I reached in my pocket and pulled out an eight inch switchblade to defend myself from I don’t know what as I walked down this dark street with apartments on both sides. God, it was awful!”
“So what happened then?”
“I can’t remember. I think I woke up.”
“That’s it?”
“Sure. It’s horrible! Makes my hands sweat to think about it.”
“What’s so horrible?”
“Don’t you see? The knife is phallic. The cat is a pussy It’s black. Black pussy I’m unconsciously wanting to rape a black woman! Just before I crack up like my mother that’s what I’ll probably do, rape a black woman. Watch me very carefully around black women, Sam. As a friend I want you to watch me.”
“Harold, I’ve watched you around black women and white women. You’re perfectly normal with women. For God’s sake, Harold…”
“I know, I know, Sam. You think it’s my imagination, these deep stirrings in my twisted psyche. I know. But remember my mother. My mother is mad, Sam. The poor woman is mad!”
And Sam Niles would push up his slipping glasses, finger his brown moustache, light a cigarette and search for something else for Harold to worry about, which was generally the way to shut him up when any particular obsession was getting too obsessive.
“Harold, you know you’re losing some hair lately? You noticed that?”
“Of course I’ve noticed,” Harold sighed, touching his ginger colored sideburns. He admired Sam Niles’ deep brown hair and his several premature gray ones in the front. Harold admired everything about Sam Niles, always had from the days when Sam was his fire team leader at the spider holes, and though they were in the same police academy recruit class, Harold always treated him with the deference due a senior partner and let him be the boss of the radio car. Harold even admired Sam’s steel rimmed goggles and wished he was nearsighted so he could wear them.
Sam Niles admired almost nothing about Harold Bloomguard and especially did not admire his annoying habit of amusing himself with doubletalk.
Harold would tell about a traffic accident that befell 7-A-77 the night before which resulted in a “collusion at the interjection” of Venice and La Brea. Or when Sam asked where he would like to take their code seven lunch break Harold might say “It’s invenereal to me.”
Or in court Harold would ask the DA if he had any “exterminating evidence.” And then ask if the DA wanted him to “draw a diaphragm.” On and on it went and became almost as unbearable as the plinking spit bubbles.
But none of that was as bad as Harold Bloomguard’s relentlessly sore teeth. He claimed he was a sufferer of bruxism and that he ground his teeth mercilessly in his sleep. If the nightmares were memorable the night before Harold would eat soup and soppy crackers during code seven.
But as with Harold’s other maladies, Sam Niles suspected it was imaginary. He had once demanded to see Harold Bloomguard’s teeth at choir practice and Ora Lee held Harold’s head in her comfy lap while Father Willie struck matches for all the choirboys to examine Harold’s molars which were not flat and worn down but were as sharp and serviceable as anyone’s.
“They are worn down, I tell you,” Harold said that night in the park. And he opened his mouth wider as Sam struck matches and everyone looked at his teeth.
“Let’s see yours to compare, Roscoe,” said Father Willie who was already very drunk.
Roscoe Rules only agreed because he wanted to take Harold’s place on Ora Lee’s lap and cop a feel. But while they were comparing, Father Willie accidentally dropped a match down Roscoe’s throat.