The Hair of Harold Roux Page 15

  Maloumian was often in the company of others who resembled him, who had the same sort of nickname: Mung Harorba, Flash McLeod, Engine Whalen (who had worked on the Mt. Washington Cog Railway), Snake Morrow, Prop Gil-man (also called Flieger because he had been a pilot). Their noises when together were always raucous and challenging, but Maloumian was the loudest of all.

  When he wanted to, or when his inner balances were in equilibrium, Boom Maloumian could be generous with his booze and food, and he could be funny, if in sometimes horrifying ways. In this mood his stories changed, and the central intelligence responsible professed a somewhat rational wonder at the craziness of the world. But he could change back the next moment, the pale cast of civilization fading from the big face, the red mouth, the teeth like pearls, too clean and bluish, as though polished by the hot flush of his breath. When a certain depth of meanness appeared, he seemed to be viciously biting his own cheek and blaming someone else for the pain, his face screwed to port, his small black eyes lost in the thick flesh that was muscled even at the temples.

  Allard quickly read these changes, and he resented in himself the tinge of fear that made him so sensitive. He was also ashamed to be amused at Short Round’s willing degradation. He would find Short Round sitting on the floor outside the closed door, reading. “Boom’s jerking off and he wants privacy,” Short Round would say.

  It was strange that of the ten or twelve Armenians Allard had known, Maloumian was the only one he hadn’t felt to be somehow more gentle than other men. Armenians: an orphan race with a history of persecution by their neighbors. Arabs, Romans, Turks, Georgians, Mongols, Byzantines, Persians and again the Turks. Starvation and massacre. Once a Turk had taught Allard some Turkish curses, saying, “If you say this to an Armenian, run!” Eschëk! Pezze venk sen e mesbu! Sen gurt durnful lama sinis! The last meant “You were born out of your mother’s asshole.” Occasionally Allard wondered if Maloumian did know these words, and felt them at the back of his tongue like dangerous little bombs.

  Maloumian’s other roommate, Gordon Robert Westing-house, spent most of his time in a small enclosure deep in the stacks of the library. But even so, he had to come back to the room, and here he had a strange immunity, probably because Boom Maloumian was, at least for the time being, awed by real dottiness. Gordon Robert Westinghouse was one of the few nonveterans in the dormitory and it was easy to see why he’d been 4-F in the war. Quite often he wasn’t really there—or perhaps he was there but you weren’t. He had days when he didn’t look at other people at all. Another of his peculiarities, widely discussed as indicative of a strange upbringing, was that in front of a urinal he didn’t use his fly but slowly and carefully undid everything and urinated with his pants and underwear down at his feet. Sometimes, after days of ambulation inside himself, he would appear in Allard’s room, his grayish ankles showing below pants that were six inches too short for him, his socks having mostly worked down into his sneakers, and talk, usually about his poetry. He gave the impression of feverish dankness; his joints all seemed to articulate at about forty-five degrees off-center. Because he looked so mournful and sick, at first Allard felt sorry for him. This was before Allard discovered the true depths of the man’s unctuous egomania. He listened to no one, ever, and could not be kept from explaining, in utter detail, things generally known.

  “Your standard-sized birds,” Gordon would begin in his hard, inflectionless voice. He gave you the cold, helpless feeling you get from a recorded message. “Your standard-sized birds are your robin and your chicken. Smaller birds are compared with your robin …”

  “Hey, poet,” Knuck Gillis said, “you leave my goddam robin out of it.”

  “… larger-sized birds are compared with your chicken.”

  While Nathan Weinstein’s oogah laugh reverberated around the room. “Oogah! Oogah! Oogah hyuka-hyuk!”

  Gordon Robert Westinghouse heard none of this. He was going to be a famous, immortal poet. He would reverently place a piece of wilted paper on Allard’s desk.

  Lady of the night

  Slide gently down the orbiting moon

  “I worked twelve hours on those two lines. Twelve hours and fifteen minutes before I got them exactly right. I didn’t eat, I didn’t take a drink of water, I didn’t go to the bathroom.” That was why he was going to be a famous poet. If he could work more hours on each line than anyone else, he couldn’t fail. It was a matter of work, of concentration. “Remember well,” he said over and over again, “You knew me here, before I was famous. You must keep careful notes.” Did you see Shelley plain? “Your observations and memoires will be extremely valuable someday.”

  Evidently Boom Maloumian found him more valuable to observe than to exploit, or maybe, as in the case of Harold’s toupee, he would settle for nothing but perfection. Maloumian would wait for inspiration; he was an artist at torment, a genius at giving pains.

  Allard and his two roommates would occasionally wonder at their own heterogeneity, but they were not quite as mismatched as those in the Maloumian enclave down the hall. Nathan Weinstein was short, skinny and dapper, and considered himself a man of the world with a brilliant future ahead of him in business and/or law and diplomacy. Knuck Gillis was a large, abnormally pale ex-Marine who was captain of the defensive unit of the football team—this unit called the Kamikaze squad. His ambition was to have a professional football career and to be, eventually, a head coach. The friendship between the three of them fascinated Maloumian, and in one of his more rational moods, one day, he invited them to his room for a few beers.

  Paul Hickett, representing the tradition of cowards, traitors, liars and fawners who are cruel in power and abject before power, was also there. He wore an Ike jacket obviously not his because where the chevrons of a staff sergeant had once been sewn on the sleeves, the cut stitches still carefully revealed this shadow rank. He had actually been a Pfc. Harold Roux wouldn’t have been there anyway, but as it was he was busy in his room trying to remove bubble gum from his best pants and jacket; earlier Short Round had chewed up gobs of it and strung fine webs back and forth across Harold’s doorframe for him to walk through.

  “I was a cook, just assigned to this outfit outside of Yokohama,” Boom Maloumian said. “Don’t ask me what the outfit did. They ate, is all I know. Supposed to have something to do with Military Government, but far as I could see they spent all their time trying to keep from getting the clap. Commanding officer was Colonel Koons, bird colonel, craziest son of a bitch I ever saw in my life. Spent all his time with his Leica and floods and flash bulbs and what-all taking pictures of whores’ crotches. I wouldn’t bullshit you, word of God! Bein’ a new man in the outfit I had to take his personal tour of his artwork, with a lecture how not to get the clap, and of course the Old Joe, which was worse ‘cause penicillin didn’t work as good on the Old Joe as it did in the beginning. Anyway, Koons was a spit-and-polish man—even wore his marksmanship medals. Looked pretty professional till you found what it was the only thing he was interested in. Anyway, here we go to the latrine, first off, and by God above every pisser, where you fuckin’ had to look at it, was this life-size blowup of a whole whore’s crotch with pus and lesions drippin’ all over it, some of ‘em all the way asshole to bellybutton. You had to stand there shakin’ it with this globbed up snatch starin’ at you like some great motherin’ Cyclops!”

  His big face twisted into startled curiosity and disgust before he laughed. “All over the goddamn billet you run up against these murals. Needless to say nobody in that outfit thought much about anything but pussy. Short-arm every morning, man, and it better be clean. Colonel Koons’ outfit maybe didn’t have much else to do, but he was gonna have the ichi ban record in Japan for low incidence of V.D. Any man come down with the drip, he was busted right now, right down to buck-ass private, it didn’t matter how many stripes you had, time in service, Regular Army, medals, campaigns, top-three-grader, nothing! And you should of seen those short-arms! Fifty men lined up bare-assed in the ha
lls, covered all over with goose pimples, it didn’t matter how fuckin’ cold it was, and here he comes, Old Eagle-eye. He’d get right down there and examine each and every pork like he was going to have it for breakfast. I mean you really had to milk it down for Old Bright-eyes. You had to pull it back four or five times, anyways—I mean, once more and it would of been technical masturbation—and milk it down slow and e-e-easy. Following behind was the First Sergeant—fifteen years in the moth-erin’ army, you should of seen the expression on his face—and a sweet young thing of a medic, a Pfc, queer as a three-dollar bill, pushin’ along this friggin’ tray with slides and needles and all. Man, he was in paradise. But if one half a friggin’ drop come onto the end of your wang that medic had a smear before you could blink an eye. He loved his work, man. He was not only quick, he was rapid!

  “Now all the boys in that outfit was a little crazy, who could blame them? Nervous? There was a run on flashlights at the Eighth Army PX, everybody had one. At night it looked like fireflies all the way into town—in the fields, in the alleys, beside the goddamn road, it was these nervous bastards with their flashlights, examining cunts. It got so you couldn’t say kom ban wa? to a hooker within ten miles of that place she wouldn’t flop on her back, pull up her kimono and spread, waiting for a clinical exam! Must of been startling to strangers.

  “But to get back to when the shit hit the fan was when the First Sergeant himself come down with the syph. As if he wasn’t tear-assed enough—it’s no joke to latch onto the Old Joe—this little flit medic ratted on him to the Chicken! Fifteen years in the army, RA, Bronze Star. Purple Hearts up the gink, master sergeant, he shouldn’t of even been in the outfit, he was just waiting for orders to the repple-depple at Zama and transportation back to the States. And this chickenshit colonel busts him! You know what that means? He’s gonna have to go home by slow boat and do K.P.! He’s thirty-eight years old, been in rank four years! Jesus H. Christ!

  “Anyway, next morning after short-arm I’m in the kitchen about ready to dish up Colonel Koons’ breakfast when in comes Toppy with no stripes, he’s a yardbird private. ‘This his plate?’ he says. ‘Yup,’ I says, and he whips out his prong, calomel ointment, pus and what-all smeared all over it, and rubs it up and down and all over the Colonel’s plate. I dish up a pile of scrambled eggs on it, and he says, ‘Okay, take that in to the muff-divin’ son of a bitch!’ Which I do. Man, I made it to the officers’ mess and back, I don’t know how, but when I got back I never laughed so hard in my life! I nearly split a gut!”

  While Allard was willing to concede that this tale might have a moral, he was not so certain that its author was responsible for its moral value. Other tales, told with equal relish, also had to do with the humiliation of women, and finally one reduced Allard to a state similar to the aftermath of rage—weakness and shame. It concerned a First Cavalry unit’s revenge on a Japanese neighborhood that was hospitable to a nearby Negro quartermaster battalion, especially what was done to women who were found with niggers jigs shines spades dinges coons, etc. When the story came to this part, Allard’s memory presented him with a Japanese girl he had once known, with her delicate grace, and it was her hair cut off roughly with a K-bar knife. He got up to go.

  “Where you going, Benson?” Boom Maloumian smiled, but the thick neck cords moved, slowly swiveling the turret of his head toward diminishing Allard. The black holes of the periscope slits slid half shut.

  “Out,” Allard said.

  “What you say, boy?” The voice came from somewhere down inside, a muted loudspeaker from the center of control.

  But Allard left, the rare mouse who managed to beat the claws to the crack beneath the door. Escape was not his way and he was humiliated, so when he found a hockey stick tied across Harold’s door, roped to the knob so that Harold was imprisoned inside, he broke it in several places and threw it and the clothesline down the hall. He remembered then that Short Round had been out of the room for a few minutes.

  “It’s me. Allard,” he called to the door. By this time Harold wouldn’t open his door without positive identification. “You in there, Harold?”

  The door opened. Harold stood there all dressed up in the clothes from which he had painstakingly removed the bubble gum. His eyes were shiny, a little evasive, and his face was gray, even grayer than its usual sunless clerk’s pallor. He moved his lips but at first he couldn’t speak. “I was supposed to meet Mary at the Youth Center. The church. It’s all over now.”

  “Why didn’t you pound on the door? Or maybe you could’ve broken it open. It was only a hockey stick. Somebody would’ve let you out, Harold, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I pretended I wasn’t in here.”

  “You what?”

  “I didn’t want them to know I was in here.” Harold went back into the room and sat down at his desk. His hands trembled as he carefully put them flat against his cheeks. “I don’t know, Allard. I thought I could just study, and live and let live. I don’t know why they hate me so much. What have I done to make them do these things to me?”

  “That fucking Maloumian can’t leave anybody alone.”

  Harold winced a little at the bad word. He drew a Kleenex from a drawer and blew his nose lightly—probably not hard enough, Allard thought. Harold would consider that noise in bad taste. He had been crying, or nearly crying. Allard considered telling him that Boom Maloumian didn’t hate him at all, any more that a cat hates a ball of yarn or a mouse, but decided not to.

  At this moment, making raucous but not really dangerous noises, Boom Maloumian, Knuck, Nathan and Short Round came laughing into the room. Maloumian had what was left of a case of beer under his arm, the cans clunking together in their cardboard box. “Hey, hey!” he said. “Drink up!” He dropped the box on Harold’s neatly arranged desk and with much spray opened the remaining cans with his church key. “Here, Mr. Proctor man, chugalug this mother! This crazy little Hebrew here has volunteered to drive us all to Litchwood so we can get ourselves fried to the ass!”

  In Litchwood was Sarge’s Cafe, an incredibly squalid bar that was so dark, so filthy, so loud and odorous, so far beyond the pale it had become popular with the students.

  Boom Maloumian took one of Harold’s thin hands and wrapped it around a beer can. “You’re a good sport, anyway,” he said. He put his big arm around Harold’s delicate shoulders and squeezed him; then, with a sneaky, evil little smirk that didn’t seem to belong to the width and breadth of his face, patted Harold once, delicately, with one effeminately arched finger, on the very top of his head.

  Harold gave out a little squeak, dropped the beer on the floor and ran out of the room with both hands on his head. Boom Maloumian roared. “I guess I must of pushed his button!” On the floor the beer frothed over Harold’s braided rug.

  “Why don’t you lay off?” Allard heard his own voice enunciate these unbelievably clear words. Yes, that was what he had just said.

  Boom Maloumian was suddenly calm, interested in Allard. “What you say, boy?”

  “You heard me.” Again his voice betrayed his frail body. “Why don’t you play your little games with somebody your own size?” Now, this was a foolish and inaccurate thing to say, because Allard wasn’t Boom Maloumian’s size at all.

  “You want to play some little games, Benson?”

  “You’re a bully, Maloumian.” The inadequate word came from childhood, where at least one part of Allard felt itself to be at that moment. Or would have preferred to be.

  At this point Nathan Weinstein entered into the situation. Allard was extremely grateful, though he hadn’t much hope. “Hey!” Nathan said. “If I’m going to drive you assholes to Litchwood let’s go!”

  “Yeah, let’s go,” Knuck Gillis said. Nathan, like the little banty rooster Knuck called him, pushed between Allard and Boom Maloumian, ostensibly to get a fresh beer, and the ceremonial strutting was disrupted just enough. After a little more urging, Boom Maloumian went with Knuck, Nathan and Short Round.


  Weak and shaking, Allard went to the latrine, where he found Harold, identified by his shoes, sitting in a locked booth. “Come on out, Harold. They’ve left. Come on and I’ll help you mop up the beer.”

  “I don’t see why I have to live this way,” Harold said without moving. “I’m leaving, Allard. I can’t stand it here any more.”

  “Well, come on out. I’m telling you it’s safe now.”

  “I can’t stand it any more.”

  “Come on out and we’ll clean up your room and go see Mary.”

  “I was supposed to meet her and Father Desmond at two, and now it’s four.”

  “Shit, Harold, that’s all right. We’ll explain what happened.”

  “Can’t anybody ever say anything but sh’t?” Harold said. Somehow he couldn’t quite pronounce the word. “Is that everything anybody ever says? Is it?”

  “It does get kind of monotonous, I suppose,” Allard said.

  “For three years in the army all I thought about was getting away from those animals and coming to college.”

  “Yeah, I know. And now you’ve got the same animals only with slightly higher IQ’s.”

  “I’m twenty-four years old and I was in the service for three years and two months. I didn’t see combat but that wasn’t my fault. I admit I wouldn’t have liked it, but I never raised even a finger to keep out of it. I have an honorable discharge and I don’t think I deserve this.”

  “Well, come on out anyway, Harold.”

  “I thought college would be dignified and intellectual. I never thought I’d be hiding in a toilet.”

  “Well, stop hiding in a toilet. They’ve all gone now.”

  “I could go live at a place out of town but I don’t want to. I want to live here at college. That’s what college is for, really. That ambience. Like a community of scholars.” He explained in a still-tearful voice that some friends of his aunt and uncle owned a group of cabins called the Lilliputown Motor Inn about five miles north of town and he could stay there, clerking for room and board. “But it would be lonesome, I know it.”