The Nix(157)
Outside, across Michigan Avenue, cops on horseback patrolled the park. Ostensibly, they were there to find troublemakers and saboteurs. What they found were couples in the bushes, under trees, on the beach, youths in various states of undress slithering over each other so ensconced they didn’t even hear the horses’ hooves approaching. They were necking (or more), doing unspeakable things right there in the dirt of Grant Park, in the sand off Lake Michigan. The cops told them to run along, and they did, the boys waddling uncomfortably away. And the cops might have found this funny if they didn’t also suspect these very boys would be back tomorrow, yelling, fighting, throwing things, getting beaten by the cops’ own hands. Tonight, it was carnal. Tomorrow, carnage.
Even Allen Ginsberg found a few moments’ relief from the melancholy. He sat naked in the bed of the skinny twentysomething Greek busboy he’d discovered that afternoon, at the restaurant, where he met with the youth leaders as they conspired and planned. They wondered how many people would be showing up for the protest. Five thousand? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? He told them a story.
“Two men went into a garden,” he said. “The first man began to count the mango trees, and how many mangoes each tree bore, and what the approximate value of the whole orchard might be. The second man plucked some fruit and ate it. Now which, do you think, was the wiser of these two?”
The kids all looked at him, eyes as blank as lambs.
“Eat mangoes!” he said.
They didn’t understand. The conversation moved along to the great crisis of the day, which is that the city had finally denied their applications to demonstrate downtown, to parade through the streets, to sleep in the park. Hordes of people were showing up tomorrow and they had nowhere to sleep but the park. Of course they were going to sleep there, of course they were going to demonstrate, and so they debated the likelihood of police intervention now that they lacked the proper permits and credentials. The likelihood, they decided, was a hundred percent. And Ginsberg tried to pay attention, but mostly what he noticed was how the busboy reminded him of a sailor he saw in Athens one night walking the old streets under the skeleton-white Acropolis and seeing this sailor plant his lips earnestly and tenderly on the lips of some young boy-whore, right there in the open, in the land of Socrates and Hercules and statuary everywhere all muscle-smooth and polished to solid cream. The busboy had that sailor’s face, that same hint of debauch. He got the busboy’s attention, got his name, got him up to his room, got him undressed: skinny boy with a huge cock. Isn’t that always the way? Now curled afterward under the covers and reading to the boy from Keats. Tomorrow there would be war, but tonight there was Keats, there was the window open for the pleasant breeze, there was this boy, there was the way this boy gripped his hand, lightly squeezing like he was inspecting fruit. It was all too beautiful.
Faye, meanwhile, was scrubbing. She had purchased several teen magazines and something all of them recommended brides do before going all the way was to scrub vigorously and thoroughly and relentlessly with many different scrubbing media: soft cloths, porous sponges, emery boards, rough pumice. She spent most of her week’s food budget on things to make her allover smooth and invitingly fragrant. She’d been thinking about the posters in her high-school home economics classroom, the first time in months. They were no less horrifying even at this distance, now that she was the one going all the way. Sebastian would be here soon, and Faye was still scrubbing, had yet to apply certain strong-smelling unguents she worried would sting, jellies that smelled so powerfully of roses and lilacs that they actually reminded her of a funeral home, the way funeral homes set out flower bouquets to overwhelm that chemical death smell that was always there, underneath. Faye purchased perfumes, deodorants, douches, salts she was supposed to bathe in, soaps she was supposed to scrub with, alcohols minty and prickly she was supposed to gargle with and spit. She was beginning to grasp that she’d underestimated the time it would take to pumice, scrub, clean, shampoo, never mind squirting and applying her new solvents and salves. Her bedroom floor was littered with dainty pink cardboard boxes. She would not have time to do everything before Sebastian arrived. She had yet to polish her nails, spray her hair into place, choose the right bra-and-sweater combo. These things were not negotiable, not at all skippable. She finished work on her left-foot calluses. She decided to triage pumicing the right foot. If Sebastian noticed calluses on one foot and not the other, hopefully he would keep it to himself. She vowed to keep her shoes on until the last possible moment. She hoped he wouldn’t be paying attention to her feet by that time. Her stomach flopped when she thought about this, about actually doing this. She concentrated again on her brand-new beauty products, which helped to keep sex vaguely and safely abstract, a kind of marketing idea and not something her body would really do. On her date. Tonight.
She had three different colors of nail polish, each of them some variation on purple: there was “plum” and “eggplant” and the more conceptual purple called “cosmos,” which was the one she eventually chose. She painted her toenails and did that thing with the cotton balls between each toe and walked around her dorm room on her heels. Hair curler was warming up. Little glass jars of cream-colored powders she dabbed on her face with a sponge. Cleaned out her ears with a Q-tip. Plucked a few eyebrow hairs. Replaced her white underwear with black underwear. Then changed back to white, and then back again. She opened the windows and smelled the city’s cool air and, like everyone else, felt hopeful, optimistic, sensually physical.