that Sandra did not fuck like a bunny. She fucked like the White Rabbit in the Jefferson Airplane song. In the process she did such things to David’s head that by the end of a week of nights he’d asked her to move in with him.
But as his love life improved, David’s problem with his local draft board worsened. Finally he had to borrow five hundred dollars from his father in order to give a lawyer a retainer. The lawyer then sent David’s draft board a letter as full of endless corridors as the Pentagon. It would buy time at least.
To support himself David was working twenty hours a week in his father’s Seventh Avenue dress business. At least he wasn’t driving a cab or waiting on tables, but he dreaded being bound up in the family firm if something didn’t happen soon.
Not long after moving in with David, Sandra was hired as a waitress at the Elephant and Castle restaurant, where she felt she fit in spiritually.
Much of their free time Sandra and David spent scouring the trades or going to auditions. They were together only in acting class and in bed at night. Sometimes in bed they would watch Johnny Carson. The guests on the “Tonight Show” usually had the effect on David of deepening the mystery of fame. One night Sandra sketched him after he’d yelled at Ed McMahon, “Just what exactly is it that you do ?” In the drawing, David looked like Donald Duck in a rage.
A week later David experienced an episode of light-headedness. The next morning when he went to the bathroom he saw that his stool was as black as the telephone. And the smell was overpowering, worse even than what had hung in the air those times when his mother would say to his father, “What crawled up inside you and died?”
Badly frightened and wobbly, David lit a match and sprayed Lysol all around.
Then he went into the kitchen and said to Sandra, “Something’s really wrong with me.”
She made him sit down. Heating water for tea, she looked up in the telephone book the number of his family’s doctor. After he’d had the tea, they went over to the day bed and she nestled against him, rubbing his back. Then they made love, slowly.
When he was in college David would have called it a “sympathy fuck.” He didn’t think of it that way now, though.
Two days later he learned that he had an ulcer.
And that night it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to have to worry about the draft anymore. The acid in his belly had chewed him out of the trap.
But now what? How much more could he take of the acting classes that went nowhere and the navy-blue fabric from Taiwan with the daisies the size of flies? He was even tiring of Sandra, though she rode him giddy as a child on her father’s shoulders. She was too content carrying her trays and doing her drawings that reduced people to their own big toes.
David knew he couldn’t survive this way, with his insides pouring out of him, the smell of his shit like steaming fresh tar.
He had to find a way out.
One afternoon, as he stood by a window in his father’s office, he saw a speck of a plane making a thin chalk line across the western sky.
Within a week, he was on his way to California.
22
They were taken on a bus to an army base surrounded by a chain link fence. By the base’s guardhouse a ragtag group of protesters was being harangued by two housewives who apparently were so outraged by the sight of the little demonstration that they had stopped their station wagon to do battle. Through the open window of the bus, Mike could hear one of the women shouting at the protesters.
“My brother got called up during the Korean War,” she yelled, “and he went. He went!”
So why shouldn ’t you go now? Mike thought, finishing the woman’s speech for her. All wars were the same war as far as people like her were concerned. They were as orthodox in their patriotism as they were in their religion. Mike could see in the women’s distorted faces their fury at the protesters’ serene
But as his love life improved, David’s problem with his local draft board worsened. Finally he had to borrow five hundred dollars from his father in order to give a lawyer a retainer. The lawyer then sent David’s draft board a letter as full of endless corridors as the Pentagon. It would buy time at least.
To support himself David was working twenty hours a week in his father’s Seventh Avenue dress business. At least he wasn’t driving a cab or waiting on tables, but he dreaded being bound up in the family firm if something didn’t happen soon.
Not long after moving in with David, Sandra was hired as a waitress at the Elephant and Castle restaurant, where she felt she fit in spiritually.
Much of their free time Sandra and David spent scouring the trades or going to auditions. They were together only in acting class and in bed at night. Sometimes in bed they would watch Johnny Carson. The guests on the “Tonight Show” usually had the effect on David of deepening the mystery of fame. One night Sandra sketched him after he’d yelled at Ed McMahon, “Just what exactly is it that you do ?” In the drawing, David looked like Donald Duck in a rage.
A week later David experienced an episode of light-headedness. The next morning when he went to the bathroom he saw that his stool was as black as the telephone. And the smell was overpowering, worse even than what had hung in the air those times when his mother would say to his father, “What crawled up inside you and died?”
Badly frightened and wobbly, David lit a match and sprayed Lysol all around.
Then he went into the kitchen and said to Sandra, “Something’s really wrong with me.”
She made him sit down. Heating water for tea, she looked up in the telephone book the number of his family’s doctor. After he’d had the tea, they went over to the day bed and she nestled against him, rubbing his back. Then they made love, slowly.
When he was in college David would have called it a “sympathy fuck.” He didn’t think of it that way now, though.
Two days later he learned that he had an ulcer.
And that night it dawned on him that he wasn’t going to have to worry about the draft anymore. The acid in his belly had chewed him out of the trap.
But now what? How much more could he take of the acting classes that went nowhere and the navy-blue fabric from Taiwan with the daisies the size of flies? He was even tiring of Sandra, though she rode him giddy as a child on her father’s shoulders. She was too content carrying her trays and doing her drawings that reduced people to their own big toes.
David knew he couldn’t survive this way, with his insides pouring out of him, the smell of his shit like steaming fresh tar.
He had to find a way out.
One afternoon, as he stood by a window in his father’s office, he saw a speck of a plane making a thin chalk line across the western sky.
Within a week, he was on his way to California.
22
They were taken on a bus to an army base surrounded by a chain link fence. By the base’s guardhouse a ragtag group of protesters was being harangued by two housewives who apparently were so outraged by the sight of the little demonstration that they had stopped their station wagon to do battle. Through the open window of the bus, Mike could hear one of the women shouting at the protesters.
“My brother got called up during the Korean War,” she yelled, “and he went. He went!”
So why shouldn ’t you go now? Mike thought, finishing the woman’s speech for her. All wars were the same war as far as people like her were concerned. They were as orthodox in their patriotism as they were in their religion. Mike could see in the women’s distorted faces their fury at the protesters’ serene
Similar Books
