The Centaurus

My father and I parted by the railroad station. He walked left, toward the hospital. I walked on, to Weiser Street, where five movie theatres advertised their shows. The downtown crowds were streaming home. The matinees were dismissed; the stores, their windows proclaiming January White Sales and drifted deep with cotton sheets, were stringing pad locked chains across their doors; the restaurants were in the lull of setting up the tables for di

The five movie palaces of Weiser Street in Alton were Loew’s, the Embassy, the Warner, the Astor, and the Ritz. I went to the Warner and saw “Young Man with a Horn,” starring Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, and Lauren Bacall. As my father had promised, it was warm inside. My best piece of luck for the day, I came in on the cartoon. The day was the thirteenth of the month so I did not expect it to be lucky. The cartoon was, of course, a Bugs Bu

The sidelights turned bright. I fled from my seat. In the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that lined the sloping glaring lobby I saw myself full-length, flushed, pink-eyed, the shoulders of my flaming shirt drenched with the white flakes I had scratched from my scalp in the dark. It was a habit of mine to scratch when unseen. I brushed my shoulders wildly and on the cold street was startled by the real faces, which seemed meager and phantasmal after the great glowing planetary visions I had been watching slowly collide, merge, part, and recombine. I ran toward the Y.M.C.A. It was two blocks up from Weiser Street, at Perkiomen and Beech. I ran along the railroad tracks. The narrow pavement was lined with small bars and shut barber parlors. The sky was an un steady yellow above the tenements and even at the zenith paleness drained stars from the night. The smell of cough-drops coming from a distance mocked my panic. The perfect city, the city of the future, seemed remote and irrelevant and conceived in cruelty.

The Y.M.C.A. smelled of sneakers and the floor was scuffed gray. At the center desk a Negro boy sat reading a comic book underneath a bulletin board shingled with obsolete posters and bygone tournament results. Far away down a strangely green hall, green as if lit by bulbs shining through grape arbor leaves, a game of billiards studiously muttered. From the other direction drifted the patient ga-glokka, gaglokka of a ping-pong game. The boy behind the desk looked up from his comic book and frightened me; there were no Negroes in Olinger and I was superstitiously timid of them. They seemed to me wizards, possessing the black secrets of love and song. But his face was all i

In the great tiled chamber where the pool lived, a barking resonance broke everything into fragments. On the little wooden bleachers at the poolside my father sat with a wet and naked boy, Deifendorf. Deifendorf wore only the skimpy black official trunks; the droop of his genitals was limply defined between his spread thighs. Hair flowed down his chest and forearms and legs and a stream of water was ru

“I won more than you did,” he answered.

“He won the breast stroke,” my father said. “I’m proud of you, Deify. You kept your promise to the best of your ability. That makes you a man.”

“Shit if I’d seen that guy in the far lane I’d’ve taken the two-twenty too. Bastard he sneaked in on me, I thought I’d won it, I was just gliding in.”

“That kid swam a good race,” my father said. “He won it honestly. He paced himself. Foley’s a good coach. If I was any kind of a coach, Deify, you’d be king of the county; you’re a natural. If I was any kind of a coach and you’d give up cigarettes.”

“Fuck I can hold my breath eighty seconds as it is,” Deifendorf said.

There was in their talk a mutual flattery that a

“What does it feel like to win?” he had asked aloud, speaking straight ahead and thus equally to Deifendorf and me. “Jesus, I’ll never know.”

Flecks and blobs skidded back and forth across the volatile aqua skin. The lines of lane demarcation on the pool bottom looped and wavered, refracted, toward the surface; the bearded face seemed about to constitute itself when, each time, another boy dived. Everything was over but the diving. One of our divers, Da