Posted by Anonymous on 2020/02/10 under Life January 15, 1953 Dear Allen, Love, Bill P.S. Billy Bradshinkel got to be such a nuisance I finally had to kill him: The first time was in my model A after the Spring prom. Billy with his pants down to his ankles and his tuxedo shirt still on, and jissom all over the car seat. Later I was holding his arm while he vomited in the car headlights, looking young and petulant with his blond hair mussed standing there in the warm Spring wind. Then we got back in the car and turned the lights off and I said, ‘Let’s again.’
Hotel Colon, Panama
I stopped off here to have my piles out. Wouldn’t do to go back among the Indians with piles I figured.
Bill Gains was in town and he has burned down the Republic of Panama from Las Palmas to David on paregoric. Before Gains, Panama was a pig town. You could buy four ounces in any drug store. Now the druggists are balky and the Chamber of Deputies was about to pass a special Gains Law when he threw in the towel and went back to Mexico. I was getting off junk and he kept nagging me why was I kidding myself once a junkie always a junkie. If I quit junk I would become a sloppy lush or go crazy taking cocaine.
One night I got lushed and bought some paregoric and he kept saying over and over, ‘I knew you’d come home with paregoric. I knew it. You’ll be a junkie all the rest of your life’ and looking at me with his little cat smile. Junk is a cause with him.
I checked into the hospital junk sick and spent four days there. They would only give me three shots of morphine and I couldn’t sleep from pain and heat and deprivation besides which there was a Panamanian hernia case in the same room with me and his friends came and stayed all day and half the night – one of them did in fact stay until midnight.
After checking out of the hospital, I stopped off at the U.S. Embassy. In front of the Embassy is a vacant lot with weeds and trees where boys undress to swim in the polluted waters of the bay-home of a small venomous sea snake. Smell of excrement and sea water and young male lust. No letters. I stopped again to buy two ounces of paregoric. Same old Panama. Whores and pimps and hustlers.
‘Want nice girl?’
‘Naked lady dance?’
‘See me f*** my sister?’
No wonder food prices are high. They can’t keep them down on the farm. They all want to come in the big city and be pimps.
I had a magazine article with me describing a joint outside Panama City called the Blue Goose. ‘This is anything goes joint. Dope peddlers lurk in the men’s room with a hypo loaded and ready to go. Sometimes they dart out of a toilet and stick it in your arm without waiting for consent. Homosexuals run riot.’ The Blue Goose looks like a Prohibition era road house. A long one story building run down and covered with vines. I could hear frogs croaking from the woods and swamps around it. Outside a few parked cars, inside a dim bluish light.
I remembered a prohibition era road house of my adolescence and the taste of gin rickeys in a mid west summer. (Oh my God! And the August moon in a violet sky and Billy Bradshinkel’s c***. How sloppy can you get?)
Immediately two old whores sat down at my table without being asked and ordered drinks. The bill for one round was $6.90. The. only thing lurking in the men’s room was an insolent demanding lavatory attendant. I may add that far from running riot in Panama I never scored for one boy there. I wonder what a Panamanian boy would be like. Probably cut. When they say anything goes they are referring to the joint not the customers.
I ran into my old friend Jones the cab driver, and bought some C off him that was cut to hell and back. I nearly suffocated myself trying to sniff, enough of this crap to get a lift. That’s Panama. Wouldn’t surprise me if they cut the whores with sponge rubber.
The Panamanians are about the crummiest people in the Hemisphere – I understand the Venezuelans offer competition – but I have never encountered any group of citizens that brings me down like the Canal Zone Civil Service. You can not contact a civil servant on the level of intuition and empathy. He just does not have a receiving set, and he gives out like a dead battery. There must be a special low frequency civil service brain wave.
The Service men don’t seem young. They have no enthusiasm and no conversation. In fact they shun the company of civilians. The only element in Panama I contact are the hip spades and they are all on the hustle.
And he said, ‘No we shouldn’t.’
And I said, ‘Why not?’ and by then he was excited too so we did it again, and I ran my hands over his back under his tuxedo shirt and held him against me and felt the long baby hairs of his smooth cheek against mine and he went to sleep there and it was getting light when we drove home.
After that in the car several times and one time his family was away and we took off all our clothes and afterwards I watched him sleeping like a baby with his mouth a little open.
That Summer Billy caught typhoid and I went to see him every day and his mother gave me lemonade and once his father gave me a bottle of beer and a cigarette. When Billy was better we used to drive out to Creve Coeur Lake and rent a boat and go fishing and lie on the bottom of the boat with our arms around each other’s shoulders not doing anything. One Saturday we explored an old quarry and found a cave and took our pants off in the musty darkness.
I remember the last time I saw Billy was in October of that year. One of those sparkling blue days you get in the Ozarks in Autumn. We had driven out into the country to hunt squirrels with my .22 single shot, and walked through the autumn woods without seeing anything to shoot at and Billy was silent and sullen and we sat on a log and Billy looked at his shoes and finally told me he couldn’t see me again (notice I am sparing you the falling leaves).
‘But why Billy? Why?’
‘Well if you don’t know I can’t explain it to you. Let’s go back to the car.’
We drove back in silence and when we came to his house he opened the door and got out. He looked at me for a second as if he was going to say something then turned abruptly and walked up the flagstone path to his house. I sat there for a minute looking at the dosed door. Then I drove home feeling numb. When the car was stopped in the garage I put my head down on the wheel sobbing and rubbing my cheek against the steel spokes. Finally Mother called to me from an upstairs window was anything wrong and why didn’t I come in the house. So I wiped the tears off my face and went in and said I was sick and went upstairs to bed. Mother brought me a bowl of milk toast on a tray but I couldn’t eat any and cried all night.
After that I called Billy several times on the phone but he always hung up when he heard my voice. And I wrote him a long letter which he never answered. Three months later when I read in the paper he had been killed in a car wreck and Mother said, ‘Oh that’s the Bradshinkel boy. You used to be such good friends didn’t you?’
I said, ‘Yes Mother’ not feeling anything at all. And I got a silo full of queer corn where that come from. Another routine: A man who manufactures memories to order. Any kind you want and he guarantees you’ll believe they happened just that way – (As a matter of fact I have just about sold myself Billy Bradshinkel). A line from the Japanese Sandman provides theme song of story, ‘Just an old second hand man trading new dreams for old.’ Ah what the Hell! Give it to Truman Capote.
Another bit of reminiscence but genuine. Every Sunday at lunch my grandmother would disinter her dead brother killed 50 years ago when he dragged his shotgun through a fence and blew his lungs out.
‘I always remember my brother such a lovely boy. I hate to see boys with guns.’
So every Sunday at lunch there was the boy lying by the wood fence and blood on the frozen red Georgia clay seeping into the winter stubble. And poor old Mrs. Collins waiting for the cataracts to ripen so they can operate on her eye. Oh God! Sunday lunch in Cincinnati!