Something Happened

not be first rate).

If I talk to a Negro (spade, if I've been talking to a honky who calls a spade a spade), I will, if I am not on guard, begin using not only his vernacular (militant hip or bucolic Uncle Tom), but his pronunciation. I do the same thing with Puerto Rican cab-drivers; if I talk to cabdrivers at all (I try not to; I can't stand the whining malevolence of New York cabdrivers, except for the Puerto Ricans), it will be on their level rather than mine. (I don't know what my level is, ha, ha.) And the same thing happens when I talk to boys and girls of high school and college age; I bridge the generation gap; I copy them: I employ their argot and display an identification with their tastes and outlooks that I do not always feel. I used to think I was doing it to be charming; now I know I have no choice. (Most of my daughter's friends, particularly her girl friends, like me and look up to me; she doesn't.)

If I'm with Andy Kagle, I will limp. 'You were with Andy Kagle today,' my wife says.

We are in the kitchen.

I have indeed been with Andy Kagle; I stop walking with Andy Kagle's limp; and I consider prudently if I have not been talking to my wife in a Spanish accent as well, for the girls Kagle and I were with this time were both Cuban and unattractive. They were prostitutes. Nobody likes to call a prostitute a prostitute anymore (least of all me. They are hookers, hustlers, and call girls), but that's what they were. Prostitutes. And I have taken the high-minded vow again (even as I was zipping up my pants and getting back into my undershirt, which smelled already under the sleeves from the morning's output of perspiration) that from this day forward, I am simply not going to make love anymore to girls I don't like.

We have done better with our whores, Kagle and I, than we have done this afternoon, and we have also done worse. Mine was the better looking of the two (Kagle always wants me to take the better looking of the two), with bleached red hair and black roots. She was not well-educated; but her skin was smooth (no pimples, cysts, or sores), and her clothes were neat. Her nature was gentle, her manner tender. She wanted to save up enough money to open a beauty parlor. She was friendly and obliging (they aren't always), and wanted to please me. 'Do you like to be teased?' she asked me softly. When Kagle cannot run away from his home and the office by going on a business trip (like the one to Denver he has just got back from), he likes to run away to New York whores in dark hotels or walk-up efficiency apartments with thin walls. He asks me to accompany him. I always refuse. 'Oh, come on,' he says. And I always go.

I don't enjoy it. (Although I definitely do enjoy my sessions with one of those extraordinary, two-hundred- dollar call girls that are sent my way as a gift every now and then by one of the suppliers I buy from. I tell Kagle about these; all he does is smile. I don't believe he wants a pretty girl in a lovely apartment. I think he wants a whore.) I feel unclean. (I am inevitably repelled by the odor of my undershirt when I put it back on, even though it is my own odor and usually slight. On days when I don't wear an undershirt, the smell is there in my shirt, faint but unmistakable, even if I've used a deodorant. The smell is me — I? — and I guess I can't get away from myself for very long.) I know there is something unholy, something corrupt and definitely passй, about grown men, successful executives like Kagle and me, going cold sober to ordinary whores in our own home town. They aren't pretty or necessary, and they aren't much fun. I don't think Kagle enjoys it, either; we have never gone back to the same girls (although we have gone back to the same sleazy hotels).

Kagle always pays and charges it to the company as a legitimate business expense. (One of the things I do enjoy is the idea of fucking the company at the same time.) I pay for the taxi sometimes and buy the bottle of whiskey he likes to bring along. Once I'm there I'm all right (I fit right in); but once I finish, I want to be gone. Generally, I'm ready to leave before he is and depart alone. Kagle hates to go home (even more than I do). If things are going smoothly for him (they don't always, because of his bad leg), I leave him there with his whiskey and his whore. I never really want to go with him at all. He asks. And I do.

I began biting my fingernails pretty much that same way, because someone asked me to. (Lord knows, it wasn't my idea. I didn't even know people did such things. And I don't think I was inventive enough to come upon the habit on my own.) I was in the second half of my first year in elementary school, seven years old and already fatherless. (I don't remember much about my father. I did not grieve for him when he died; I acted as though he had not gone, which meant I had to act as though he had not been. I didn't miss him, since I didn't remember him, and I've never thought about him much. Till times like now.) All of my friends in the first grade (I had many friends in the first grade; I have always worked hard to be popular and I have always succeeded) began to bite their fingernails the same week, for no better purpose than to exasperate the teacher (Miss Lamb; in the second grade, it was Mrs. Wolf. I have an uncanny memory for names and similar petty details) and their parents and older sisters. (It originated as a childhood conspiracy.)

'C'mon, bite your nails,' they told me.

So I did. I began biting my nails. In a little while, they all stopped. But I didn't. (They grew up and went away, leaving their bad habit with me.) I didn't even try (I know now that I didn't try to stop because I didn't want to and because I understood even then that I would not be able to). And for all these years since, I have been nibbling and gnawing away aggressively, swinishly, and vengefully at my own fingertips, obtaining an enormous satisfaction from these small assaults. (It's not so much a habit, of course, as a compulsion, vicious, uncouth, and frequently painful, but I like it. And I don't think, at this stage, that I would want to live without it, and nobody has been able to tell me why.) And I know now that I will continue chewing away at my fingernails and my surrounding flesh until I die (or until I have all my teeth pulled and am no longer able to. Ha, ha).

Even my handwriting is not my own!

I borrowed it (and never gave it back). I actually copied the handwriting I have now from an older boy who used to work with me in the file room of the automobile casualty insurance company and liked to while away the time between busy periods inventing, practicing, and perfecting a brand-new handwriting. (His own was not good enough.) His name was Tom, or Tommy, depending on who was talking to him or calling for him. He was twenty- one, tall, and very complacent and mature. (He had a good deal to be complacent and mature about, for in addition to creating a new handwriting, he was laying Marie Jencks, the biggest blonde that our casualty company had to offer.) He studied art lackadaisically in the evening and tended to take things easy during the day while he waited for the army to draft him into World War II. Between chores and errands and smokes in the men's room, Tom would sit at the desk in the rear of the file room (out of sight of everyone who went by, for the file room was a cage of cyclone fence that rose from floor to ceiling and jutted right out into the center of the office, where everybody who did pass could look inside at us) and devote himself industriously to his handwriting. And I would sit beside him at that desk in back, tucked out of sight behind a bank of green metal file cabinets containing indexes by name to the accident folders filed by number in the taller banks of larger, greener cabinets standing near the front, to learn and copy and practice his handwriting with him.

It wasn't always easy work. Tom would experiment tirelessly with the arcs and slants and curlicues of a capital R or Y or H or I, speaking little, until he had achieved precisely the effect he thought he wanted, and then he would say: 'I think that's it now.' And if he didn't change his mind in a minute or two with a sober shake of his head, I would slide his sheet of paper with the finished product closer to me and set to work learning and practicing that letter, while he moved ahead with the foundations of design for another member of the alphabet. (Sometimes, with a downcast, disappointed air, he would reverse his judgment about a certain letter after a week or two had elapsed, reject it, and start all over again from scratch.) Some of the letters were simple, but others proved incalculably hard and took an immeasurably long time. We were a pair of dedicated young calligraphers, he and I (I, of course, the apprentice), when we weren't scheming secretly and separately to satisfy the stewing miseries of our respectively emerging lusts; for he, like me (I was to discover one day entirely by coincidence), also had a very hot thing going with one of the women (girls?) in the office (and here, too, he was way ahead of me. He had big, bossy Mrs. Marie Jencks, of all people, who was twenty-eight and married, and he was already getting in regularly down, of all places, in the storeroom. Wow! What a mixed-up maelstrom of people, I felt, when I finally found out about all of us, not realizing then, as I do realize now, that the only thing unusual about any of it was me). By the time old Mrs. Yerger was transferred all the way across the company offices into the file room to get us to do more work or clear us out (even though there was not that much more work to be done. It was Tom, in fact, who taught me that if I just walked around with a blank piece of paper in my hand, I could spend all the time I wanted to doing nothing. I spent a great deal of time doing plenty, or trying to, at a corner of that desk underneath the big Western Union clock, very close to Virginia, that pert and witty older girl of twenty-one,