That Sweet Sinner and Traveling I

Here we go again. I, Dale Dubble, was quarreling with a friend named Evie about whether or not she was going to let me. Her eyes said zero-naught at me. My eyes said mute-boyish-appeal at her. Her eyes said back-of-my-hand-to-you and her mouth said, "Hang it up, Dale."

Because I had gone away and left her, don't you know? Surely you all out there in Readershipland have encountered the like. That old lorn female logic leads to that nagging old female blues which I expressed so well in:

You done gone away and left me,You done gone away and left me,So I ain't a-gonna let you.

© Dale Dubble

as played by the State Jazz Symphony of Moscow, with hot electric violins and all the other primitive instruments of the true primitive ragtime brought up the river from Azerbaijan. They invented it straight from me. I had composed it in honor of Evie, but under the cultural exchange program it was stolen by Honored Artist of the Republic Bash Shmulkov, the foremost Sovietski rock-'n'-roll composer. (Later he was eliminated as part of the Summit failure.)

Anyway, not many rock-'n'-roll composers can say that. Say what? you ask. You didn't understand me? Well, part of my life's work was stolen by the Russkies, who actually invented rock-'n'-roll, of course, only they called it Bloose. And the first song they stole was the one I wrote for Sweet Evie, with the dimples on her knees and the stern calculation on her cerebral cortex, who was not always a nag. Got me now? I always went away on these trips, in order to get away from her, and then I'd come back from these trips, in order to get close to her, and then she wouldn't let me. Would, not, let, me. I would snuggle and she would desnuggle me. I would entangle and she would disentangle. And in my absence, she studied judo.

All clear? I sort of loved her, but I liked even better to flee – get clear – untie myself up after being tied down. Poor Dale. Poor Evie. Lucky Dale and Evie. We are now leaving political commentary and the Russians far behind. We are getting down to brass Evie, a trim little band chick who had gone straight and taken up junior miss modeling. She had given up singing into a mike for pouting into a camera. Being a sweet songstress had worn her down. "Cause if you go with a band," she explained, "you have to let the whole goddamn outfit make out. Not just the agent and the leader, but the sidemen, too. And the advance man. And the club owners. Bunch of hoods – no delicacy."

"So how big a band you with?" I asked her when we first met, already jealous. (Already I know she was my aimless heart's hot desiring, O Evie baby, sweet sinner o' mine.) "Tell me, how big a band?"

She cast down her eyes shyly and slyly and reassured me. "Modern jazz," she said. "It was only a small combo."

"That's refreshing," I said.

Her mouth went into its full repertory of snarls, lips curling to beat the band, and she looked old, maybe eighteen. (She was actually twenty-two.) "But it's I mean a drag, pal. So now I'm modeling."

"How big an agency you with?" I asked snidely.

"Well, this week my picture is in Life, and what they got? Eight million subscribers?"

Ouch, went my heart.

"But all they get is my picture and their fantasy life, Buster. And as for you – I keep pure now, you got to if you want to stay a junior miss."

I loved her at this moment with no perceptible desire to flee her entanglements. She smelled like Blue Grass. She tinkled when she walked – charm bracelets. And then there was her delicate Millie Perkins mug with its shell ears and rosy-pink tongue. "How do you happen to look so young with all you went through?"

"Well," she answered, clear-eyed, fresh, hoping to be discovered for a TV commercial, "what I did with the band, it was very nourishing, no matter what you say."

Let's leave my mother and the Russians. Gladly.

We'll get to Evie's almost immoral combination of slimness and fullness later, but in the meantime, who could resist her? Not you, not me. When it comes to winsome, tricksome, squirmsome and toothsome, little girls, we are all sentimental fools with low ability to resist. And I had a start on her, so I didn't.

But I'm an odd type too. I did disc-jockey endeavor-type profession for years, and made out fine as a jockarooney, and wrote minor hits on the side, stealing a bar or two here and there and writing my own story into the song:

Oh baby I miss you,

Oh baby I miss you,

Then baby why'd I ever go away?

©Dale Dubble

Because every great hit has got to tell a story, you know? That's a rule to great songwriting:

But now I'm back baby,

But now I'm back baby,

And I sure am golly-wise glad.

©Dale Dubble

In all modesty, I think I had something to contribute. My own little touch. Namely, no blushes before the banality, no cringing before the cliche. Nope. I was brave. Of course, I didn't have to apologize to anybody but my tax lawyer, and what did he care about echo chambers? Zero-naught, friends.

Then payola put me out of the discjockey business and I had to depend entirely on my composing. It's not that I was a dishonest disc jockey; it's only that I was greedy. I used to hate myself sometimes in the morning, because I heard of guys who got more from the record companies than me.

But finally the station fired me, and that was the end of one of my finest careers. I invited Bert Alcatraz, owner of the station, to meet Evie baby, hoping that he would have mercy on me, but he only looked at her with his cold thirty-second stare, took the cigar out of his mouth, killed it in the soil around the cactus on my coffee table, and said, "You'll never starve, Dale." So I was thrown on my musical and lyrical resources. I was certainly not going to peddle Evie –though I appreciated Bert's fatherly concern for my future. It didn't seem right somehow. She meant too much to me. She was, I mean, important. Even when I was running for my freedom.

As you can see, I too have a story to tell, a sad city story about that man who wants a girl and gets her and doesn't want her and leaves her and wants the girl again and maybe gets her and goes away again and tries and she says no because she knows if she says yes he'll leave her and so he says please and she says... There is also the tense economic drama of being a rich songwriter. And the family complication; my name isn't really Dale Dubble. I've changed my name, as the saying goes, in order to protect the guilty.

Namely, me and Evie baby.

I wanted to make out again. Oh man. When you don't want to, you really don't; but when you do, it even hurts to look at the lady cab driver. And my sweet sinner girl Evie was no lady cab driver. She had that skinny lankness that junior miss models develop from so many vitamin pills and not enough mashed potatoes, but she must have swallowed a hormone pill which put jiggle and jump where there is customarily only matched foam rubber. (Am I giving away trade secrets? Truth! I'm crazy for truth! That's the only reason for writing my life's story! Most models are flatchested!) Once I even knew a girl who wore falsies on her hips. She was just like straight up and down and around. And rump falsies, you ever find that? You just stick around the dreamy-eyed Audrey Hepburn, Millie Perkins types long enough, you'll see everything, by which I mean: nothing, nada, niente, rien, scrawnysville. But Evie, on the other hand. Oh Evie. She had rampant flesh and hobs and jobs and jiggles and juts and pinnacles of it, rampantsville. And that lank badminton-playing litheness I like. Mies van der Rohe engineering with Romanesque abutments.

So you see the predick I was in. She could fix me by not fixing me.

Which she proceeded to do. "Nyet!" she said (but don't think I'm going to start discussing politics again). She had taken a post-grad, junior miss course in Russian with a translator from the U.N. "At this summit, Buster, No!"

"Aw honey, you remember me," I said.

She did, alas. Her nose quivered with remembrance of thingamajigs past. That was the trouble. All too well. I had made her quiver, she had made me quiver; I had departed on my voyage to Cuba, where I saw Castro on the telly and (continued on page 114) (continued from page 54) wrote my income tax song:

It is I mean blue in the sky,

It is I mean blue in the sky,

Oh what's to become of you and I?

Dale Dubble

It scored enough out of the Nat Cole recording to pay my tax for last year, but I got a bunch of letters from English teachers saying, "You and me! You and me, crud!" But I couldn't oblige because I had my heart set on a rhyme, dig? Only later did Evie baby, smart girl, inform I that me could have said: It is I mean blue in the sea/Repeat/What's to become of you and me?

"I didn't think of it that way," I protested. "I was lying on my back and looking at the sky, and that's artistic integrity, honey baby."

"I should have been with you," she commented. "You'd have been more grammatical. And not so much on your back."

But she knew how I like to travel alone. Adventure, adventure, is what I search. Sometimes I find it. It's no worse than a bad cold.

She added: "You can say that again."

"What? What? I wasn't talking. I was thinking."

"I noticed," she said. "Usually you talk too much."

She was one for suggesting a silent record on the juke box – that type. She was meditative frequently. When she orgied, she orgied; and when she was an intellectual junior miss with heavy horn rims and her copy of Zen Archery, well, she was horrid. In such moods she made me feel like a baboon, when the fact is, I'm one of the most sensitive and intelligent rock-'n'-roll composers on upper Broadway. (I also do a little Country and Western to keep my Roots. I was born in the Bronx.)

Now after my trip, we sprawled out on the rug, meditative, getting reacquainted with each other through the medium of resentful silence. I sulked. She brooded. "It's wonderful to see an old friend again," I said.

"Great idea for a song," she grunted.

I gloomed. She pouted. I pulled a string off my sock. (It's better to singe it; otherwise you can unravel right up to your belt.) She combed her long glossy hair and brushed her bangÈ with her hand. We waited to cut each other down.

Ain't young love grand?

"Your neck is brown," she said.

"Nature's Man Tan," I said.

She looked at her watch. "Nine o'clock," she murmured thoughtfully. "I thought you were going to take me to dinner."

"Nice place you got here," I said, examining her apartment with sudden interest. She lived on Charles Street in the Village, with a fireplace, a carpet (her great extravagance: a beautiful golden French antique it was), and her calculating ways.

"You know the place by heart," she snapped.

A small victory. I wanted her to remind me, and incidentally herself, of those Sunday afternoons we had spent together. She had served me breakfast, and then we had gone to the movies. Breakfast at five o'clock, and then just a few minutes of daylight before evening and the soothing dark of a double-feature horror show, with more reassuring sex at home afterward. I would goose her down Charles Street. Oooh, nasty! she would cry, and we would have a late supper, with me pleasantly jittery after too much coffee and love. And the smoky Manhattan evening cradling us. And the dim dreaminess of the Village all about us. And that Italian violinist beating his wife again next door. Yes, I wanted her to remember that I knew her apartment very well. "There might be a movie on the telly," I said. "You could just scramble us up some eggs, honey."

"Take me to dinner," she said. "It's ten after nine."

"I'll run down to the liquor store and we could have eggs scrambled with wine."

"In five more minutes I go alone to Whelan's for a club sandwich."

"Aw, honey."

"Four minutes and ten seconds."

"Come on now." I reached for her.

"Ten seconds."

"You are cruel, you know?"

Pause. Sniffing the cruel air. Squiggle of cruel nose. Cock of cruel head. Retard of cruel ankle.

"Bong. Three minutes," she said.

I took her out to Sammy's off Eighth Avenue, a favorite Nashville-style rock-'n'-roll hangout. We had chopped liver, knoedlock soup, Rumanian roast with an order of chitterlings on the side, and sent out for a pair of fortune cookies for dessert. My fortune said: Keep trying, for what else is there? Her fortune said: A nervous man with contact lenses has come back into your life.

Actually, as you may have suspected, this was a put-up job by my secret agents, namely, me. Sometimes my left hand, which plays pretty good barrel-house piano, hardly knows what my right hand, which puts in the contacts, is doing. (I had to look good for television. Dick Clark looks good; why shouldn't I?) Anyway, when Evie went to the Ladies' to cock her grenade or whatever she was planning to use for protection against me – I had forced her agreement to return to her apartment to watch a really important television spectacular – really important to me, that is, since I wanted to get in ... Anyway, while Evie was there, oiling up her brass knuckles, I performed a quick illicit operation on the fortune cookies. They had originally borne rather discreet messages: Fortune Cookie Bakers Local 31, A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Mao Tse-tung is a lousy poet. Since the strips of paper were narrow and strong, I filed them in my jacket pocket to be used as emergency dental floss.

Then, for additional priming, I decided to spend another couple bucks on a quick visit to a Bazouki joint down on Eighth Avenue in the Thirties. Hell, I wasn't in a hurry. I was just desperate. You know those Bazouki places? I mean those Greek bar-restaurants where you eat stuffed grape leaves and tormented lamb and they play those hopped-up strings and wires, that wild Near Eastern music, followed by a bit of educational belly dancing. Actually, it's pretty darn cute, since the girl sits on the bandstand, dressed like an office chick, nodding in time to the music, wearing a tan gabardine suit. Then she excuses herself into a closet for a moment, and when she emerges she is wearÈng the classical flowing diaphanous robes of which Sappho sang, also brassiere and panties, which Sappho never mentioned; but she removes all these items in due course, while dancing the genuine, frenzied, ripple-nipple, happy-pappy belly dance. A few stray striptease bumps and grinds help her to popularize this primitive folk art. While she works, weaving in and out among the tables, educating us in anthropology and the glory that was Greece, the plump and happy male Greeks shower her with dollar bills, thrust them between her bosom, and in general make spendthrift pests of themselves. This evening the wild goatherd Peloponnesian folk melody happened to be adapted from the Limelight theme, by Charlie Chaplin.

"You know." I musicologically explained to Evie over a couple glasses of Mavrodaphne wine, "the one that goes--"

"Aren't you going to miss your spectacular?" she asked.

"Not if I have anything to say about it." I winked broadly, catching an eyelash. Evie rushed me to the bar mirror and extracted it while I squeaked with pain, and also missed the climax of the belly dance, where the lady (yeah! she of the tan gabardine suit!) got down on her back and scrubbed the floor with it, with only a small glass brooch and a few dollar bills between her and a summons from the Commissioner of Police.

I returned to my table in time to see her dimpled buttocks removing themselves into the closet where hung her Ohrbach's gabardine. Evie clapped her little hands together and said, "Good show, chaps."

"Well," I said, "now let's catch the news broadcast."

Sure enough, the orchestra had its break, the belly dancing was over, and they turned on the telly. Now I wouldn't get a lash in my eye, no, not me. "Isn't that nice?" commented Evie, watching a senator declare how the administration is doing its best in every way to support world peace, justice and freedom for all.

"Shouldn't we go to your place?" I asked, agreeing with the senator.

"We got the news here," she said.

"But I want to watch the late show."

"Ok for the late show," said Evie baby, "but not for the late late show. I told you how I feel about you now, since you left me that last time."

"How was that, honey?"

"It can be summed up in one word," she commented, checking her lipstick in a cute little mirror contained on a ring. Some girls wear diamonds, some mirrors. Well, I bought it for her once in a novelty shop in Mexico City – once when I was having a little vacation from her – but she used it without appreciating me.

"Well," I asked in suspense, "what's the word?"

"One word which sums it up for you." "What is it?"

She blotted her lipstick and smiled. "This: Bug off!"

Rather primly I retorted, "That's two words."

"Not how I pronounce it," she said.

But I would try and try again, and urged her to pack up. If she let me past her door, I would try still a third time.

She let me past her door. She had promised me a farewell glimpse of Channel 9. She may have been overconfident, but she let me past her door. "Hooray!" I shouted, and then frowned. "I'm sorry, Evie, it just feels good to have a long talk with you."

"Maybe I should have left that hair in your eye," she said.

We sat down by the fire and I asked her to be reasonable. She took that to be a question about why she didn't build a fire. She explained patiently that it was warm enough without a fire, and besides, I always cheated as a fire-builder by splashing oil on the wood instead of building from kindling. I leered and took out my lenses. She understood that this was meant to kindle her. She said that I was too oily. I fluttered my eyes, hurt. She offered to make me some hot chocolate to console me for her unkind words. I demanded cognac instead. She poured for both of us. I waited until she had finished her snifter, talking rapidly to keep her from noticing that she was drinking nervously,Èand then I fell into a hurt silence. I had not put a paw upon her in over fifteen minutes. She wondered if I were sick.

All this is known as "The Battle of the Sexes." Over this or similar battle-fields is strewn the wreckage of a million evenings. "Where will it all end?" I asked.

"Where?"

I pointed to my anatomy. I pointed to her anatomy.

"Not," said Evie, "not if help comes when I scream. And if it doesn't, I'll stick my finger in your eye and my knee in your – – "

"Don't be lewd. Think of the future – the sweet child I'll marry someday."

"Me?"

"Some innocent thing."

"By that time," she said musingly, "I'll be innocent enough for Humbert Humbert.I'm getting more innocent by the hour." Horn-rimmed glasses from her purse. Her sweet fingers hooking them behind her sweet ears. "Do you think they can do the true story in the movie – Lolita, I mean?"

I refused to speak. She was not going to distract me with a discussion of mass culture. All America fights this battle. "Aw," said Evie as I sat mute, "you has hurtie feelings, you sad-eyed hood?"

I said nothing. She might talk herself into a trap. I shifted my posture in order to get ready to be a trap if she talked herself into one.

"You sneaky thug," she commented. "You monster with lobster claws. You five-year-plan of a man."

I sighed. "Yes," I admitted, "I can think of only one thing when I'm with you, Evie."

Now let me tell you that women want to be respected and all that, it's true; but most of all they want to be respected for their female charm, which is the peculiar property of women. Sometimes they can get insulted if they think you are merely brutally interested in their virtue (the negation of), but in this case, since I had already paid tribute to Evie's virtue (negated it) in the past, it was clear that there was something permanently flattering in my return-again compulsion. The fire died out (I had finally built one with oil). The lights were turned low (she snapped the switch). "Bash," she said, and I leaped for her.

Pow. I was on my back. Evie's judo lessons. It turned out that she was using the word "Bash" not as an imperative verb but merely as the first name of Bash Shmulkov, the Soviet composer who had swiped my song. "Next time hear me out," she remarked, putting mercurochrome on the back of my head. Slight scalp cuts and abrasions. My hair would cover the scar. "As I was saying, I like what Bash did with that hot electrified violin. The Moussorgsky touch. Couldn't you work in a bit of Moussorgsky for Nat Cole's next record?"

"Ouch," I said. "When I comb my hair I'll break the scab. His A & R man wouldn't allow it. Ain't got that swing, so it don't mean a thing. Aw, come on, Evie, you owe it to me."

Having beaten me to a pulp, morally, spiritually and dermatologically, she was beginning to reconsider. There was still something left of me. I was intact financially. She cocked her head and examined the backs of my hands as I gripped the rug for support. Occasionally she may have sadistic impulses of revenge for my flightiness, but she was not a sparrow out for the dollar. No. Not Evie baby. It was not money at all. It was merely the eternal battle for corporate control. This room was her Executive Suite – the place of sweet execution.

I could sense the struggle within her. On the one hand, tenderness. On the other, revenge. On the one hand, salaciousness. On the other, schemes. On the one hand, the good comfort of her rug near the fire and the lateness of the hour and the convenience of my devoted heart. On the other hand, she wanted to wash her hair.

That decided her.

She said in a wee small piping surrendering pleading voice: "All right . . . but tomorrow, honey."

As you can each readily deduce from your own troubles in love, that meant that I had won – and tonight. I said bravely, "Ok," and leaned forward to give herÈan abstract farewell kiss in order to seal our bargain. Now she could allow herself to return it. There was no danger of seeming forward. We hit it together. Sweet poetry, apples and pears and ripe currants, joy and trembling, murmurs, promises, and that Russian composer's first name again, this time as a verb. I felt the silken thread drawn sweetly through my body, and when it was drawn out, I was unstrung (© Dale Dubble). Dot dot dot. The clock struck two, with its face to the wall, blushing.

"Aw honey," Evie said, "you promised you'd wait till tomorrow."

"It was bigger than both of us," I murmured hoarsely, sprawled by her side near the fireplace. With my fading strength I pulled a slipcover off a chair to cover us. I wanted to sleep, blessed restoring sleep. She wanted to talk. I tried to sleep. She talked. I pretended I was asleep. With her elbow she jabbed me awake to talk to her.

"Listen, honey!" she said. "I remember once my daddy tried to teach me to fish and my mother – now listen, Dale – –"

Now what I want to know is: Can't a man spend a quiet Sunday evening at rest without being bothered all the time by a girl? I began to dream with sentimental nostalgia of a long trip, away from importunating ladies like this here Evie baby honey. How could I break the news to her? Difficult. She had let me, and so there I was again, asking permission to leave.

She let me, like I say, Oh she let me, like I say, When is there a Pan Am flight a-going away? © Dale Dubble

I was moving on. Martinique sounded interesting and far away. But after one of these returns, said that little rabbit quiver on the tip of Evie's nose, you will find me really absent, Buster.

Naturally I sincerely hope it won't be until the time after next.

Now you get the flashback, bashback picture. She had minerals and proteins and hormones galore, and lots of wheat germ for break fast with me. She had this pert little white face with large, heavily lashed eyes and a small but firm mouth with small but firm teeth. Her cheeks were on the round side for a model – an old-fashioned young face. There was long straight hair and curse me for a sentimental fool if she didn't sometimes wear bangs. Yes, bangs. I can't help it; she was beautiful in bangs. After we'd come out of the shower, they'd be all wetted down. I'm a sentimental fool, curse it, and I like to take a shower with an old-fashioned girl with (and who) bangs. My mother taught me always to try to have at least one shower a day. It makes a fellow acceptable in those difficult situations of modern life of today.