Tough Guys Don't Dance Read Free Page A

some felicity of syntax or my bored grunts before a phrase that now seemed as dead as an old drinking friend’s repetitions must have sounded strange and animal, as unsettling(given the paneled gentility of this Lounge) as cries made by a hound absolutely indifferent to any nearby human presence.
    Can I claim I was not playing to the house when I would frown over a drunken note I could hardly read, and then chuckle in pleasure as soon as these alcoholic squiggles metamorphosed into a legible text? “There,” I would mutter to myself, “studies!”
    I had just made out part of a title, a bona-fide title, sufficiently resonant for a book:
In Our Wild—Studies among the Sane
by Timothy Madden.
    Now, an exegesis commenced on my name.
In Our Wild—Studies among the Sane
by Mac Madden? By Tim Mac Madden? By Two-Mac Madden? I began to giggle. My waitress, poor overalerted mouse, was able to flick a look at me only by setting herself resolutely in profile.
    Yet I was giggling truly. Old jokes about my name were returning. I felt one rush of love for my father. Ah, the sweet sorrow of loving a parent. It is as pure as the taste of a sourball when you are five. Douglas “Dougy” Madden—Big Mac to his friends and to his only child, myself, once called Little Mac, or Mac-Mac, then Two-Mac and Toomey and back to Tim. Following the morphology of my name through the coils of booze, I giggled. Each change of name had been an event in my life—if I could only recover the events.
    In my heart I was now trying to launch a firstset of phrases for the initial essay. (What a title!
In Our Wild—Studies among the Sane
by Tim Madden.) I might speak of the Irish and the reason they drink so much. Could it be the testosterone? The Irish presumably had more than other men, my father did for certain, and it made them unmanageable. Maybe the hormone asked to be dissolved in some liquor.
    I sat with pencil poised, my sip of bourbon near to scorching my tongue. I was not ready to swallow. This title was about all that had come to me since Day One. I could merely ponder the waves. The waves outside the lounge-room window on this chill November night had become equal in some manner to the waves in my mind. My thoughts came to a halt and I felt the disappointment of profound drunken vision. Just as you waddle up to the true relations of the cosmos, your vocabulary blurs.
    It was then I grew aware that I was no longer alone in my realm of The Widow’s Walk. A blonde remarkably like Patty Lareine was sitting with her escort not ten feet away. If I had no other clue to the profound submersions of my conscious state, it was enough that she had entered with her bucko, a nicely tailored country-tweed-and-flannels, silver-winged-pompadour, suntanned-lawyer—type fellow, yes, the lady had sat down with her sheik, and since they now had drinks in front of them, must have been talking (and in unabashed voices, hers at least) for a considerable period. Five minutes? Ten minutes? I realizedthat they had sized me up, and for whatever reason, had the confidence, call it the gall, to ignore me. Whether this insularity derived from some not easily visible proficiency the man might call upon in the martial arts—Tweed-and-Flannels looked more like a tennis player than a Black Belt—or whether they were so wealthy a couple that nothing unpleasant ever walked up to them in the way of strangers (unless it was burglary of the mansion) or whether they were exhibiting simple insensitivity to the charged torso, head and limbs sitting so near them, I do not know, but the woman, at least, was talking loudly, and as if I did not exist. What an insult at this beleaguered hour!
    Then I understood. From their conversation I could soon divine that they were Californians, just as loose and unselfconscious in deportment as tourists from New Jersey visiting a bar in Munich. What could they know of how they were degrading me?
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