Little Casino

Helen and Connie

HIS MIND NO LONGER SEEMS TO FUNCTION properly, or, in any event, efficiently, but has become, instead, a welter of discrete images, all of which have equal importance. This eccentricity may not stand him in good stead, as they used to say, given the no-nonsense lust for instant results and useful facts that drives the nation. Well. He cannot, or will not, organize or categorize experiences. So that although he may recall the time that he first kissed a girl, and although his recollection that it occurred at another girl’s fifteenth birthday party is probably correct, he cannot see himself at that party as other than the seventeen-year-old who lost his virginity in the park situated just two blocks from the house in which the party was held. The name of the girl he kissed was Helen Ryan; the name of the girl in the park was Constance Mangini. Kisses, he remembers, somebody’s kisses, that tasted of vanilla. His entire past seems to work, if that’s the word, this way now, so that sometimes he knows that he kissed Constance at the party and pulled up Helen’s thrilling skirt under a tree in Bliss Park. And who is that little boy, or is it that gray-haired old man, who is falling in with his company at Fort Hood? He doesn’t seem to mind this confusion of the temporal, this shifting of imagery, this aphasia of blurred time. It fits, it seems to him, rather well with the blood-drenched, always justified chaos of the collapsing century’s history, its legacy, God help us all. Once in awhile he feels his own flesh, still reasonably sound, firmly fixed in long-gone time, and he turns to smile at people who are dead. The ravishing taste of a Lucky Strike as the war ends in the Pacific, the smell of his first love’s sun-warm skin, a clear picture of a woman, desired and desiring, on a shady patio, in white summer clothes, her gin and tonic lifted in a toast to something wholly forgotten but sweet, surely sweet. And who is that drunken soldier in dirty khakis and a flowered shirt on the street in Waco, of all places, a sandwich in one hand and a pint of J.W. Dant in the other?

I’m afraid the two girls mentioned in this putatively tender yet wholly pointless, if not useless “recollection” have had their names garbled. They were Constance Ryan and Helen Mangini. The former was the recipient of what she now thinks of as the “unwelcome sexual attentions” addressed to her in the park. Constance was wearing a blue-and-white-striped linen skirt, and was concerned lest grass stains suggestto her brother, Paulie, an amorous dalliance. He put his jacket down for her when she said that she didn’t want Paulie to find out about it. Find out about what? he said, his hand under that tight skirt.

“They don’t much go in for Dant in California, as far as I can see, am I right? You never hear it mentioned.”

“Well, whiskey and cigarettes will kill you in about twenty minutes in California, a well-known fact. The only things that won’t hurt you are the merciless sunshine and the thousands of tons of poisonous automobile emissions that daily add a certain spice to the pollen and mold in the air. Anyway, ‘some weather!’ is a useful phrase to keep in readiness amid the friendly hollow smiles.”

(Another useful phrase is “how do you like San Francisco?” The reply should be either “compared to what?” or “it’s the Queens of California.”)

The true name of Bliss Park is Owl’s Head Park, by which appellation it is never called, at least not by neighborhood residents. The tree under which the young lovers performed their inexpert sexual acts was a rare copper beech. The tree may still be in the park.

Maybe Frisco is the Waco of California.

“Paulie was Helen’s brother!”

Hi!

We’re in the city that’s often called the Waco of California, but it looks sort of like Queens. Some weather! We’ve been reading about all the snow back home, ha ha. We’ll bring you back a souvenir from Haight-Ashbury where they invented modern beatnik poetry and rock and roll.

Love, Helen and Connie