MEAT FOR THE WINTER
a short story
by Edward Tosques


Chris and George had found girlfriends. One evening they invited them over to George’s for an impromptu dance party. The girls, Janice and Lorraine, were friends, both blowsy and big-boobed, with sumptuous manes pinned back on one side and drooping over their eyes on the other, and thickly applied lipstick drawn in cupid bows over their liplines. The four of them danced with lumbering synchrony in the narrow space between the plastic-covered sofa and twin armchairs where the coffeetable had been removed, leaving four dimples in the carpet, while Jimmy, Philip and I stood by sipping beers. Nicky wasn’t there, likely still screwing his way through a carload of chicks who had driven by one June evening while we were roaming down around Southern Boulevard and, to Jimmy’s chagrin, had picked him out of the group. Philip had gotten in with a black crowd from his school – his spirited Neapolitan face was dark and broad-featured enough to pass for mulatto – and bragged of taking part in sex and drug orgies somewhere south of the race border of Crotona Park. Jimmy was the only one of us not getting any nooky and it was driving him nuts. “I can’t go on like this. My hand’s got fucking jerk-off cramp,” he proclaimed with a tragic pout that gave me the giggles. His plan, now that summer had arrived, was to pick up a girl at the beach – “get meat for the winter,” as he put it.
Meanwhile Marsha’s family had rented their season bungalow at Far Rockaway. I would take day trips there once a week, starting on the long subway ride shortly after sunrise. Marsha would meet me at the station and we would spend the day mainly eating cherry-cheese knishes and making out on the benches up and down the boardwalk. I finger-fucked her a couple of times in the water but it was too rough to keep steady and she was too distracted by the other bathers, so we gave it up. The fact that sex was out made us bored and quarrelsome. So from noon on I would half look forward to going back. The daylong cock-tease and the bumping of the train would bring on such a persistent boner that I’d get off at Tremont bent over and shielding my crotch with The Portable Steinbeck.
The other days I’d go with Jimmy to Orchard Beach. We’d get there in the late morning and take the last bus back at ten at night. It was like inhabiting a mythic dimension – the round of swimming, lying in the sun, eating the baloney sandwiches I brought from home, debating The Big Questions, and walking the surfline through all thirteen sections in search of girls, with the omnipresent smell of suntan lotion, the din of blanket-to-blanket bathers with their portable radios and the cries of ice-cream and soft-drink vendors in their khaki outfits and pith helmets, trudging over the sand like Foreign Legionaries. We got as black as Bedouins, and it must have been the effect of the blazing sun, the sharp contrasts of light and shade on the scalding sand and the alternation of the tides that led us to caress our dream of “the villa.” It was another way back to our “glorious Italian roots” by way of snippets from certain war movies about the Allied drive through Italy and the discovery by sensitive Montgomery Clift type G.I.’s of the “Eternal Beauty of the Mediterranean.” It was also a precursor of the dropout syndrome, two proto-hippies of the late Eisenhower era spinning out the first crude counter-culture fantasies. We were going to get jobs and save up a nest-egg and then go to Italy – Portofino maybe, or Amalfi – and with our super-dollars buy an elegantly rundown villa with a breathtaking view of the sea. We would live simply on a few sardines purchased each day from leathery fishermen, and pecorino cheese and olives from black-shawled peasant women. I saw myself winding on foot up the hill atop which the villa stood, the glittering azure below me, clutching a flask of wine and accompanied by a bevy of urchins. But now and then an irritating grain of realism would creep into Jimmy’s thoughts. “What do we do when our money runs out?”
“That wouldn’t happen for a long time.”
“But eventually it would.”
“Well, we’d just come back here, work awhile, and then go back.”
“How could I enjoy it if I was always thinking I’d have to come back to this fucking rat-race?”
Now that school was out and he had gotten his sop general diploma he was fretting about the draft more than ever. “If I don’t decide something soon they’ll pick my number and I’ll be up shit’s creek.” He went to the Air Force recruitment shack on Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse to speak to the officer in charge, who assured him that the draft board wouldn’t even consider him for at least another six months. So he had all the time he needed to decide whether and how to enlist. This should have tranquillized him. But he was also under pressure from his mother to “stay put,” which meant living under the same roof with Helen, Theresa, Peter and her till the end of eternity. “She’s bugging me to apply to a junior college so I can get a deferment,” he said, wincing, and then frowned. “But I don’t want to go to no fucking college for spics and retards. I want a CAREER.”
We had no lack of company. Sometimes Chris, George, Philip or Nicky would join us on the beach, but having summer jobs they couldn’t make it that often. One day Jimmy ran into an old junior high school pal of his, Danny Lowe, who had just gotten back from a long hitch-hiking trip down to the Appalachians and back. He was a bright good-looking kid with a face full of acne. I had recently read On the Road so I listened with awe and no little envy to his boastful adventures, convinced I would never have the guts to take such a trip myself.
“You have any trouble with queers?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah, a couple of times. But I was armed for it.”
“You carried a blade?”
“Nah. If the cops find a blade on you they’ll bust you. I carried a normal can opener. This one hick truck driver picks me up outside Charlottesville. A few miles down the road he starts laying his hands on me. I take out my can opener and he just laughs. ‘Laugh all you want, you dumb fuck,’ I say. ‘Maybe in the end you’ll pin me down but I’ll fucking slash you to ribbons first.’ He backed off all right – even thanked me for ‘leading him from the path of temptation’.”
Nothing had panned out as yet in the chick department, and it was no doubt Jimmy’s extenuated horniness that led him next to hatch a cockeyed scheme with another friend of his, Mike Landolfi, who one day happened by our patch of sand. I hadn’t met Mike before and at once formed an instinctive dislike of him. He was an immigrant kid whose family had come from somewhere around Naples. He had the smaller nervous stature of a foreigner whose early diet was poor in proteins. His English was fluent with a trace of accent, and his face was always slipping into a guappo smirk, a combination girls seemed to find irresistible. He lived off Pelham Parkway with his parents, who at the moment were away, so he had the house to himself. With swaggering generosity he offered one of his girls to Jimmy – and not only to Jimmy but to our whole gang. “She’s this Jew troia I picked up a couple of weeks ago at Poe Park. Puts out in more ways than Wonder Bread.” The plan was to bring her to his house that Friday night, get her drunk, and start fucking her while the rest of us waited quietly in the wings. Then each of us would step in and have her in turn. “She’ll be so blotto that in the dark she won’t even know the difference.”
As soon as the plan became operational I started getting stomach cramps but didn’t have the balls to defy the group, which – Jimmy especially – were utterly gassed at the idea. The six of us met at ten p.m. at the appointed bus stop along the tree-lined Parkway, Jimmy and I coming from the beach and Chris, George, Nicky and Philip coming from home. They’d been drinking, and the mix of booze and anticipation made them skittish. It took us awhile to locate the house, mainly because they kept horsing around, and Jimmy had to constantly herd them in. When we found it the front door, as per agreement, was unlocked. We slipped into a stodgy, dimly lit living-room with thick embossed carpeting, plastic-covered sofa and armchairs, and glossy, massively carved furniture. Jimmy hushed us with a finger to his lips and motioned that he was going to reconnoiter. As he tiptoed up the carpeted steps I felt a thread of nausea slither up my esophagus. What if something went wrong? What if she had some venereal disease? Worst of all, what if I couldn’t get it up and the rest of them saw? This was not the initiation into real sex I’d had in mind. Then Providence stepped in, for me and (in retrospect) the girl. Philip started snickering. He cupped his hand over his mouth but it did no good. He doubled over and the snickers puffed through his fingers. This set off the others, whose snickers soon rose to guffaws. Jimmy appeared at the head of the stairs like a ship’s captain on the bridge, gesticulating at us wildly to shut up. Then voices stirred from the bedroom. A door opened.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Mike said.
“Hey, Mikey, who’s out there?” asked a slurred but feisty female voice.
At this we all panicked and fled helter-skelter out the door. We didn’t stop running until we reached the bus stop. I felt my legs rubbery under me and a strong urge to pee but otherwise indescribable relief. After a minute Jimmy caught up with us. He was furious. “Man, what the fuck is wrong with you? We had it made. You guys are such assholes. I shoulda never let you in on it in the first place.”
Soon after, Jimmy did find his meat for the winter. Her name was Tasia and she was a cute coy plumpish Greek girl with short wavy auburn hair, four years his senior. In the russet light of one early evening, when the beach had thinned out, the lifeguards had left their tall chairs and the seagulls were crying and gliding down onto the ebb-tide sand, they were the only bathers left near us – Tasia, her thirtyish sister Katherine and another middle-aged woman, Pauline, the super of their building. Jimmy and I were talking about nothing less than Church corruption and the origins of Christianity. Jimmy was lecturing on the Essenes and the Cathars, of whom I knew little and he seemed to know everything.
“See, Jesus and his disciples were really Essenes. It was a sect of Jews that lived like monks. They didn’t eat meat or marry, and they practiced communistic ownership of property. They were non-violent and didn’t keep slaves or sacrifice animals or do business or nothing. They was a little like the Cathars in the Middle Ages. These Cathars believed that the world was created by the Devil but that God put a divine spark in everybody and we had to free it from the evil matter we were made of. They didn’t believe in marriage neither but that you could have sex as long as you didn’t procreate. They were vegetarians too and against war and capital punishment. They even believed in reincarnation and were sort of like Buddhists. So the Church exterminated them. They organized this Crusade where they tortured and massacred the whole fucking lot of them. I don’t say that the Church ain’t done a lot of bad things. But I cling to this spiritual side of religion.” He added, almost in a whisper, looking hard at me, “Believe me, I’d give up sex any day of the goddamn week for spiritual peace.”
But not that day. His natty hairy body, tanned to burnt sienna, sprawled on his towel like Michelangelo’s Adam. He always spoke louder than he needed to, with a voice that could drill right through you, but now it was even louder than usual. Then I understood why.
“Hey, teach, I didn’t know Orchard Beach had a summer school.”
The voice came from the cluster of women nearby and was Tasia’s. The three of them laughed.
Jimmy tossed his head back, wrinkled his globby nose and laughed in return. “Hey, you pay your tuition?”
“Oh no, we didn’t. You gonna send us to the Principal?”
“I am the Principal.”
He sprang to his feet, strutted over and sat on the sand in front of Tasia, locking his fingers around his drawn up knees and twitching the big toes of his crossed feet. I was uncertain whether to follow and sifted the sand to mark a dignified pause before joining them. Tasia and Jimmy were steeped in their flirt while I engaged in small-talk with the other two. Katherine was on vacation from her secretarial job at an import-export firm. She was your typical Big Sister, starched and matronly, with tortoiseshell glasses and a good-naturedly dull personality. Pauline was something else. She had a remarkably lithe body for a middle-aged lady and a face with a tracery of fine lines that was still roguishly attractive even to my sixteen-year-old eyes. She had a thing for the garbage men who served her building. “People don’t appreciate what skill they got. It takes a lot of strength to lift those iron cans and dump them out. Then they got this way of tossing them back so they skid in place without falling over. Not all of them got the knack for it. There’s this one young guy. He leaps on and off the truck like a ballet dancer and moves the barrels like they were made of tin. One morning he catches me giving him the eye and follows me down to the cellar. He presses me against the wall and kisses me like I’ll never forget.”
On the way back Jimmy swung between euphoria and his standard fretting. He’d gotten Tasia’s phone number and was supposed to call her the next day. “Eat at Jimmy’s!" he said several times by way of a refrain, thrusting out his groin and clutching it with his right hand. “She is one hot chick. I could tell by how she was looking at me that she really wants it.”
Now that he had a girl he thought maybe he should get a job, and his mother’s needling him to apply to a junior college maybe wasn’t so off the wall as had seemed if it bought him time to figure out what to do with his life. The previous year he had flunked out of Aviation High School and it still galled him to think of his old classmates starting brilliant military and civilian careers while he could only look forward to some shit-job in the rat-race. I reminded him of the villa but his only thought was the best way to keep from knocking Tasia up. He calculated how much scumbags would set him back each month and weighed the pros and cons of buggery, which he considered shrewdly must not be unfamiliar to her as it had been practiced by the ancient Greeks. “Eat at Jimmy’s!” he shouted again, thrusting out his groin and clutching it, and wrinkling up his globby nose in a loud guffaw.
The bus from Fordham Road left us off under the el at 180th Street. As was our custom, first I walked him home and then he walked me home, and back and forth two more times, lost in conversation. The third time we reached my streetcorner I started to hear a persistent tapping. From the corner of my eye I spied my mother at the bedroom window, rapping on the glass with a coin. I glanced down on the sly at my watch. It was twenty past one. I made it a point to pay no heed. It was part of our ongoing battle of wills, which now took the form of a skirmish over my staying out till late (“What have you become here, a boarder?”), but behind which she waged a war to get me back into the lap of Mother Church. Jimmy was oblivious to the tapping. He kept on talking with his buzz-saw voice, which must have been ripping through the sleep of all our neighbors. I lowered mine to a whisper but he didn’t get the hint. Meanwhile my mother kept tapping.
Jimmy saw Tasia on and off over the next few months, though I myself never saw her again. He would give me sketchy reports of their encounters, which had their ups and more often their downs. “She’s real wise. We’ve reached a real deep understanding,” he would say one day. “She’s a tight-assed wily bitch,” he would say another. The crux of the matter seemed to be that while she enjoyed fooling around she insisted on keeping her hymen intact, which for a twenty-two year-old girl from an Orthodox Greek-American family in 1959 was apparently still a prime condition of marriageability. “She won’t let me get in her box,” he’d complain again and again, on the verge of tears. This denial of the Supreme Prize not only upset his calculations but got to him emotionally to an extent that baffled me. I understood between the lines that basically they made out and that she gave him occasional hand jobs. In a fit of generosity she may also have thrown in a blowjob or two. Their culminating fight was over her obstinate refusal, after he’d pestered her for weeks and despite the precedent of her ancient Greek ancestors, to let him bugger her. Not on moral or theological grounds, just the practical one that if she bled and needed medical attention her parents would surely get wind of it and all hell would break loose, ultimately affecting her marriage prospects, confined as they were to the small circle of the Greek community where word got around. Jimmy couldn’t seem to fathom what it meant to go with an older woman, especially one as astutely circumspect as Tasia. She would plot with Katherine to cover for her during their trysts. It was of course out of the question for her to show him around, still less to be shown.
In September he got a job as a technician in a medical lab on Madison Avenue, grappling all day with blood and urine samples and charts with cryptic names to which he added cryptic figures. He also filed an application for the Hunter College Teacher Training Program to start in January. This may have brought a momentary beatitude to his mother’s long-suffering face but to Tasia it meant absolutely nothing. Jimmy was her thing-on-the-side, and she, or her family for her, had predictably set her sights on some gray-templed Panaiotis well-established in the furrier or restaurant trade. I don’t know where she and Jimmy met to do whatever they did. Nothing more probable than that Pauline had a hand in it, like a maidservant in a Decameron tale, providing a cot, candles, a bottle of Lancers, a tin of smoked baby oysters, some André Kostelanetz music and sundry other amenities in her cellar apartment. The fact was that Jimmy’s meat for the winter was a little like the cake you couldn’t have and also eat.
To top it off, in December, just around the time he broke up with Tasia, Jimmy noticed he was going bald. “Damn, it’s coming out in fucking clumps,” he would say in desperation. To me he still appeared to have a full head of hair but to the sharper eye of his vanity it was already alarmingly decimated. Whenever I went to his house, or any place we happened to be, he would stand before some real or makeshift mirror, comb it and then stare dumbly at what in effect would be a worrisome frizzle caught in the teeth. He would turn his head this way and that, eyeing his profile and fluffing it up. The duck’s ass and the elephant’s trunk curl still ruled supreme, unless you were Yul Brynner as Dimitri Karamazov. He began to suspect that this onset of baldness was linked to his job. “All that piss and blood I gotta touch. God knows what’s crawling around inside of it. Maybe I got some fungus in my hair that’s eating away the follicles. I mean, my father ain’t bald. No one in my family is. Damn, I ain’t even twenty.” Five years later I too started losing my hair and only then understood the anguish. But in my blissful ignorance his dilemma just gave me the jollies, also because he himself would suddenly see the funny side. “If worst comes to worst I’ll get a Liberace wig in one of those pervert stores on Forty-second Street.” One day on the subway we saw this old fag with a pink sucked-in face framed by a cheap opulently blond toupée. “That’s me in another two years,” Jimmy commented and we both cracked up.
















MEAT FOR THE WINTER

a short story
by Edward Tosques


Chris and George had found girlfriends, and one evening they invited them over to George’s for an impromptu dance party. The girls, Janice and Lorraine, were friends, both blowsy and big-boobed, with sumptuous manes pinned back on one side and drooping over their eyes on the other, and thickly applied lipstick drawn in cupid bows over their liplines. The four of them danced with lumbering synchrony in the narrow space between the plastic-covered sofa and twin armchairs where the coffeetable had been removed, leaving four dimples in the carpet, while Jimmy, Philip and I stood by sipping beers. Nicky wasn’t there, likely still screwing his way through a carload of chicks who had driven by one June evening while we were roaming down around Southern Boulevard and, to Jimmy’s chagrin, had picked him out of the group. Philip had gotten in with a black crowd from his school – his spirited Neapolitan face was dark and broad-featured enough to pass for mulatto – and bragged of taking part in sex and drug orgies somewhere south of the race border of Crotona Park. Jimmy was the only one of us not getting any nooky and it was driving him nuts. “I can’t go on like this. My hand’s got fucking jerk-off cramp,” he proclaimed with a tragic pout that gave me the giggles. His plan, now that summer had arrived, was to pick up a girl at the beach – “get meat for the winter,” as he put it.
Meanwhile Marsha’s family had rented their season bungalow at Far Rockaway. I would take day trips there once a week, starting on the long subway ride shortly after sunrise. Marsha would meet me at the station and we would spend the day mainly eating cherry-cheese knishes and making out on the benches up and down the boardwalk. I finger-fucked her a couple of times in the water but it was too rough to keep steady and she was too distracted by the other bathers, so we gave it up. The fact that sex was out made us bored and quarrelsome. So from noon on I would half look forward to going back. The daylong cock-tease and the bumping of the train would bring on such a persistent boner that I’d get off at Tremont bent over and shielding my crotch with The Portable Steinbeck.
The other days I’d go with Jimmy to Orchard Beach. We’d get there in the late morning and take the last bus back at ten at night. It was like inhabiting a mythic dimension – the round of swimming, lying in the sun, eating the baloney sandwiches I brought from home, debating The Big Questions, and walking the surfline through all thirteen sections in search of girls, with the omnipresent smell of suntan lotion, the din of blanket-to-blanket bathers with their portable radios and the cries of ice-cream and soft-drink vendors in their khaki outfits and pith helmets, trudging over the sand like Foreign Legionaries. We got as black as Bedouins, and it must have been the effect of the blazing sun, the sharp contrasts of light and shade on the scalding sand and the alternation of the tides that led us to caress our dream of “the villa.” It was another way back to our “glorious Italian roots” by way of snippets from certain war movies about the Allied drive through Italy and the discovery by sensitive Montgomery Clift type G.I.’s of the “Eternal Beauty of the Mediterranean.” It was also a precursor of the dropout syndrome, two proto-hippies of the late Eisenhower era spinning out the first crude counter-culture fantasies. We were going to get jobs and save up a nest-egg and then go to Italy – Portofino maybe, or Amalfi – and with our super-dollars buy an elegantly rundown villa with a breathtaking view of the sea. We would live simply on a few sardines purchased each day from leathery fishermen, and pecorino cheese and olives from black-shawled peasant women. I saw myself winding on foot up the hill atop which the villa stood, the glittering azure below me, clutching a flask of wine and accompanied by a bevy of urchins. But now and then an irritating grain of realism would creep into Jimmy’s thoughts. “What do we do when our money runs out?”
“That wouldn’t happen for a long time.”
“But eventually it would.”
“Well, we’d just come back here, work awhile, and then go back.”
“How could I enjoy it if I was always thinking I’d have to come back to this fucking rat-race?”
Now that school was out and he had gotten his sop general diploma he was fretting about the draft more than ever. “If I don’t decide something soon they’ll pick my number and I’ll be up shit’s creek.” He went to the Air Force recruitment shack on Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse to speak to the officer in charge, who assured him that the draft board wouldn’t even consider him for at least another six months. So he had all the time he needed to decide whether and how to enlist. This should have tranquillized him. But he was also under pressure from his mother to “stay put,” which meant living under the same roof with Helen, Theresa, Peter and her till the end of eternity. “She’s bugging me to apply to a junior college so I can get a deferment,” he said, wincing, and then frowned. “But I don’t want to go to no fucking college for spics and retards. I want a CAREER.”
We had no lack of company. Sometimes Chris, George, Philip or Nicky would join us on the beach, but having summer jobs they couldn’t make it that often. One day Jimmy ran into an old junior high school pal of his, Danny Lowe, who had just gotten back from a long hitch-hiking trip down to the Appalachians and back. He was a bright good-looking kid with a face full of acne. I had recently read On the Road so I listened with awe and no little envy to his boastful adventures, convinced I would never have the guts to take such a trip myself.
“You have any trouble with queers?” Jimmy asked.
“Yeah, a couple of times. But I was armed for it.”
“You carried a blade?”
“Nah. If the cops find a blade on you they’ll bust you. I carried a normal can opener. This one hick truck driver picks me up outside Charlottesville. A few miles down the road he starts laying his hands on me. I take out my can opener and he just laughs. ‘Laugh all you want, you dumb fuck,’ I say. ‘Maybe in the end you’ll pin me down but I’ll fucking slash you to ribbons first.’ He backed off all right – even thanked me for ‘leading him from the path of temptation’.”
Nothing had panned out as yet in the chick department, and it was no doubt Jimmy’s extenuated horniness that led him next to hatch a cockeyed scheme with another friend of his, Mike Landolfi, who one day happened by our patch of sand. I hadn’t met Mike before and at once formed an instinctive dislike of him. He was an immigrant kid whose family had come from somewhere around Naples. He had the smaller nervous stature of a foreigner whose early diet was poor in proteins. His English was fluent with a trace of accent, and his face was always slipping into a guappo smirk, a combination girls seemed to find irresistible. He lived off Pelham Parkway with his parents, who at the moment were away, so he had the house to himself. With swaggering generosity he offered one of his girls to Jimmy – and not only to Jimmy but to our whole gang. “She’s this Jew troia I picked up a couple of weeks ago at Poe Park. Puts out in more ways than Wonder Bread.” The plan was to bring her to his house that Friday night, get her drunk, and start fucking her while the rest of us waited quietly in the wings. Then each of us would step in and have her in turn. “She’ll be so blotto that in the dark she won’t even know the difference.”
As soon as the plan became operational I started getting stomach cramps but didn’t have the balls to defy the group, which – Jimmy especially – were utterly gassed at the idea. The six of us met at ten p.m. at the appointed bus stop along the tree-lined Parkway, Jimmy and I coming from the beach and Chris, George, Nicky and Philip coming from home. They’d been drinking, and the mix of booze and anticipation made them skittish. It took us awhile to locate the house, mainly because they kept horsing around, and Jimmy had to constantly herd them in. When we found it the front door, as per agreement, was unlocked. We slipped into a stodgy, dimly lit living-room with thick embossed carpeting, plastic-covered sofa and armchairs, and glossy, massively carved furniture. Jimmy hushed us with a finger to his lips and motioned that he was going to reconnoiter. As he tiptoed up the carpeted steps I felt a thread of nausea slither up my esophagus. What if something went wrong? What if she had some venereal disease? Worst of all, what if I couldn’t get it up and the rest of them saw? This was not the initiation into real sex I’d had in mind. Then Providence stepped in, for me and (in retrospect) the girl. Philip started snickering. He cupped his hand over his mouth but it did no good. He doubled over and the snickers puffed through his fingers. This set off the others, whose snickers soon rose to guffaws. Jimmy appeared at the head of the stairs like a ship’s captain on the bridge, gesticulating at us wildly to shut up. Then voices stirred from the bedroom. A door opened.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Mike said.
“Hey, Mikey, who’s out there?” asked a slurred but feisty female voice.
At this we all panicked and fled helter-skelter out the door. We didn’t stop running until we reached the bus stop. I felt my legs rubbery under me and a strong urge to pee but otherwise indescribable relief. After a minute Jimmy caught up with us. He was furious. “Man, what the fuck is wrong with you? We had it made. You guys are such assholes. I shoulda never let you in on it in the first place.”
Soon after, Jimmy did find his meat for the winter. Her name was Tasia and she was a cute coy plumpish Greek girl with short wavy auburn hair, four years his senior. In the russet light of one early evening, when the beach had thinned out, the lifeguards had left their tall chairs and the seagulls were crying and gliding down onto the ebb-tide sand, they were the only bathers left near us – Tasia, her thirtyish sister Katherine and another middle-aged woman, Pauline, the super of their building. Jimmy and I were talking about nothing less than Church corruption and the origins of Christianity. Jimmy was lecturing on the Essenes and the Cathars, of whom I knew little and he seemed to know everything.
“See, Jesus and his disciples were really Essenes. It was a sect of Jews that lived like monks. They didn’t eat meat or marry, and they practiced communistic ownership of property. They were non-violent and didn’t keep slaves or sacrifice animals or do business or nothing. They was a little like the Cathars in the Middle Ages. These Cathars believed that the world was created by the Devil but that God put a divine spark in everybody and we had to free it from the evil matter we were made of. They didn’t believe in marriage neither but that you could have sex as long as you didn’t procreate. They were vegetarians too and against war and capital punishment. They even believed in reincarnation and were sort of like Buddhists. So the Church exterminated them. They organized this Crusade where they tortured and massacred the whole fucking lot of them. I don’t say that the Church ain’t done a lot of bad things. But I cling to this spiritual side of religion.” He added, almost in a whisper, looking hard at me, “Believe me, I’d give up sex any day of the goddamn week for spiritual peace.”
But not that day. His natty hairy body, tanned to burnt sienna, sprawled on his towel like Michelangelo’s Adam. He always spoke louder than he needed to, with a voice that could drill right through you, but now it was even louder than usual. Then I understood why.
“Hey, teach, I didn’t know Orchard Beach had a summer school.”
The voice came from the cluster of women nearby and was Tasia’s. The three of them laughed.
Jimmy tossed his head back, wrinkled his globby nose and laughed in return. “Hey, you pay your tuition?”
“Oh no, we didn’t. You gonna send us to the Principal?”
“I am the Principal.”
He sprang to his feet, strutted over and sat on the sand in front of Tasia, locking his fingers around his drawn up knees and twitching the big toes of his crossed feet. I was uncertain whether to follow and sifted the sand to mark a dignified pause before joining them. Tasia and Jimmy were steeped in their flirt while I engaged in small-talk with the other two. Katherine was on vacation from her secretarial job at an import-export firm. She was your typical Big Sister, starched and matronly, with tortoiseshell glasses and a good-naturedly dull personality. Pauline was something else. She had a remarkably lithe body for a middle-aged lady and a face with a tracery of fine lines that was still roguishly attractive even to my sixteen-year-old eyes. She had a thing for the garbage men who served her building. “People don’t appreciate what skill they got. It takes a lot of strength to lift those iron cans and dump them out. Then they got this way of tossing them back so they skid in place without falling over. Not all of them got the knack for it. There’s this one young guy. He leaps on and off the truck like a ballet dancer and moves the barrels like they were made of tin. One morning he catches me giving him the eye and follows me down to the cellar. He presses me against the wall and kisses me like I’ll never forget.”
On the way back Jimmy swung between euphoria and his standard fretting. He’d gotten Tasia’s phone number and was supposed to call her the next day. “Eat at Jimmy’s!” he said several times by way of a refrain, thrusting out his groin and clutching it with his right hand. “She is one hot chick. I could tell by how she was looking at me that she really wants it.”
Now that he had a girl he thought maybe he should get a job, and his mother’s needling him to apply to a junior college maybe wasn’t so off the wall as had seemed if it bought him time to figure out what to do with his life. The previous year he had flunked out of Aviation High School and it still galled him to think of his old classmates starting brilliant military and civilian careers while he could only look forward to some shit-job in the rat-race. I reminded him of the villa but his only thought was the best way to keep from knocking Tasia up. He calculated how much scumbags would set him back each month and weighed the pros and cons of buggery, which he considered shrewdly must not be unfamiliar to her as it had been practiced by the ancient Greeks. “Eat at Jimmy’s!” he shouted again, thrusting out his groin and clutching it, and wrinkling up his globby nose in a loud guffaw.
The bus from Fordham Road left us off under the el at 180th Street. As was our custom, first I walked him home and then he walked me home, and back and forth two more times, lost in conversation. The third time we reached my streetcorner I started to hear a persistent tapping. From the corner of my eye I spied my mother at the bedroom window, rapping on the glass with a coin. I glanced down on the sly at my watch. It was twenty past one. I made it a point to pay no heed. It was part of our ongoing battle of wills, which now took the form of a skirmish over my staying out till late (“What have you become here, a boarder?”), but behind which she waged a war to get me back into the lap of Mother Church. Jimmy was oblivious to the tapping. He kept on talking with his buzz-saw voice, which must have been ripping through the sleep of all our neighbors. I lowered mine to a whisper but he didn’t get the hint. Meanwhile my mother kept tapping.
Jimmy saw Tasia on and off over the next few months, though I myself never saw her again. He would give me sketchy reports of their encounters, which had their ups and more often their downs. “She’s real wise. We’ve reached a real deep understanding,” he would say one day. “She’s a tight-assed wily bitch,” he would say another. The crux of the matter seemed to be that while she enjoyed fooling around she insisted on keeping her hymen intact, which for a twenty-two year-old girl from an Orthodox Greek-American family in 1959 was apparently still a prime condition of marriageability. “She won’t let me get in her box,” he’d complain again and again, on the verge of tears. This denial of the Supreme Prize not only upset his calculations but got to him emotionally to an extent that baffled me. I understood between the lines that basically they made out and that she gave him occasional hand jobs. In a fit of generosity she may also have thrown in a blowjob or two. Their culminating fight was over her obstinate refusal, after he’d pestered her for weeks and despite the precedent of her ancient Greek ancestors, to let him bugger her. Not on moral or theological grounds, just the practical one that if she bled and needed medical attention her parents would surely get wind of it and all hell would break loose, ultimately affecting her marriage prospects, confined as they were to the small circle of the Greek community where word got around. Jimmy couldn’t seem to fathom what it meant to go with an older woman, especially one as astutely circumspect as Tasia. She would plot with Katherine to cover for her during their trysts. It was of course out of the question for her to show him around, still less to be shown.
In September he got a job as a technician in a medical lab on Madison Avenue, grappling all day with blood and urine samples and charts with cryptic names to which he added cryptic figures. He also filed an application for the Hunter College Teacher Training Program to start in January. This may have brought a momentary beatitude to his mother’s long-suffering face but to Tasia it meant absolutely nothing. Jimmy was her thing-on-the-side, and she, or her family for her, had predictably set her sights on some gray-templed Panaiotis well-established in the furrier or restaurant trade. I don’t know where she and Jimmy met to do whatever they did. Nothing more probable than that Pauline had a hand in it, like a maidservant in a Decameron tale, providing a cot, candles, a bottle of Lancers, a tin of smoked baby oysters, some André Kostelanetz music and sundry other amenities in her cellar apartment. The fact was that Jimmy’s meat for the winter was a little like the cake you couldn’t have and also eat.
To top it off, in December, just around the time he broke up with Tasia, Jimmy noticed he was going bald. “Damn, it’s coming out in fucking clumps,” he would say in desperation. To me he still appeared to have a full head of hair but to the sharper eye of his vanity it was already alarmingly decimated. Whenever I went to his house, or any place we happened to be, he would stand before some real or makeshift mirror, comb it and then stare dumbly at what in effect would be a worrisome frizzle caught in the teeth. He would turn his head this way and that, eyeing his profile and fluffing it up. The duck’s ass and the elephant’s trunk curl still ruled supreme, unless you were Yul Brynner as Dimitri Karamazov. He began to suspect that this onset of baldness was linked to his job. “All that piss and blood I gotta touch. God knows what’s crawling around inside of it. Maybe I got some fungus in my hair that’s eating away the follicles. I mean, my father ain’t bald. No one in my family is. Damn, I ain’t even twenty.” Five years later I too started losing my hair and only then understood the anguish. But in my blissful ignorance his dilemma just gave me the jollies, also because he himself would suddenly see the funny side. “If worst comes to worst I’ll get a Liberace wig in one of those pervert stores on Forty-second Street.” One day on the subway we saw this old fag with a pink sucked-in face framed by a cheap opulently blond toupée. “That’s me in another two years,” Jimmy commented and we both cracked up.