That’s the way it got started, I said, but then later on, when they had to realize that for all of his straight A records, his conduct in class sessions was not at all that of an irrepressible academic eager beaver, but that of somebody who always sat in the back row and never volunteered to answer any question or join in any discussion and only answered only nonchalantly when called upon, the Snake nickname no longer referred to snake oil trickster but snake in the grass.
Which gave him a reputation that did him no harm whatsoever when he went cruising among the upperclass coeds during social events, I said, and when the elevator door opened, Taft Edison had said what he said about hearing talk in the band cottage about a freshman known as the Snake because he had a very special recipe for chem lab cocktails that some of the musicians in both student dance bands liked to sneak into the parties they played for on campus back in those Prohibition era days.
And before the door closed I said, Hey, but as for old high butt Thomas Wolfe, man, I don’t remember all that time I spent and still spend in the library as any goddamn hunger to devour the whole goddamn earth at all. I can go along with the part about being somebody who reads whole libraries or at any rate whole collections as other people read books. Because, man, I don’t think I ever thought of reading as acquisition as such, but rather as preparation. Preparation for unknown, I thought, as the bus headed down Fifth Avenue toward Forty-second Street. Preparation by reducing the unknown. Be prepared. The Boy Scouts of America had already said that.
VI
As the fall term moved on into November of that first school year in New York, I began to feel that I had the preparation of all of my seminar discussion assignments and research reports well enough ahead of schedule so I could spend more and more time doing nonacademic things that made you feel that you were at last beginning to become another inhabitant of Manhattan at large as well as a student at the Washington Square campus.
Not that Manhattan or anywhere else could ever become another benchmark in the same sense as Gasoline Point on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, on the bay of the Gulf Coast had always been and indeed in the very nature of things, would also always be. As not even the campus in central Alabama for all its archival treasures could also be, being, after all, only a four-year stopover en route to other perhaps temporary destinations as yet as undecided upon as Hollywood had turned out to be (although California, which was that many miles and travel days and nights west from Mobile by way of the L N to the Southern Pacific from New Orleans and left on the wall map in Miss Lexine Metcalf’s third-grade classroom, had once been a boy blue future point of arrival and at least somewhat like Philamayork itself).
Because as benchmark, Gasoline Point, Alabama, would always be that original of all fixed geographical spots (and temporal locations as well) from which (properly instructed as to its functional and thus tentative absoluteness) you measure distances, determine directions, and define destinations, all of which are never any less metaphorical than actual. And, of course, there is also the irradicable matter of the benchmarks of your original perception and conception of horizons and hence aspirations in terms of which everything else makes whatever sense it makes.
The also and also of all of which is, incidentally, why it is also in the very nature of things that even as you finally began to realize that you are beginning to feel about Manhattan as you had imagined you would as you began looking forward to your next return there back during your first year on the road with the band, you also realize that it would nevertheless remain the metaphorical Philamayork of the blue steel, rawhide, and patent-leather preschoolboy fireside aspirations you would always remember whenever you remembered the thin blue horizon skies fading away north by east beyond Chickasabogue Creek Bridge as you saw them from the chinaberry tree, south of which beyond the river and the bay and the old Spanish Main of buccaneer bayou times were the seven seas.
(Along with all of that, to be sure, there was also always that ever so indelible twelve-bar matter of old sporty limp-walking Luzana Cholly picking and plucking and knuckle knocking and strumming and drumming on his ultradeluxe twelve-string guitar singsongsaying, Anywhere I hang my hat, anywhere I prop my feet.)
Which is also why what it all really came down to was a matter of settling in for the time being whether for the duration of the courses at the university or for the duration plus whenever, whatever, wherever. In either case, beyond the immediately functional details of basic household and neighborhood routines that incidentally were no less directly geared to the academic schedule than was campus dormitory life, there was also the also and also of all of the daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal metropolitan attractions of greater Manhattan and vicinity, which, after all, were why New York University had been the graduate school of choice at the
