Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer Page A

My father (as you may have gathered from our conversation on the phone) was not often a man to do any more talking than the exigencies of communication would require, but he could soothe you by his silence. He was six-foot-three and at that time, in his fiftieth year, he weighed two-eighty. Forty of it he could have done without. It stood in front of him like the round rubber fender on an amusement-park car that bumps other cars,and he breathed heavily. With his prematurely white hair, boiled red face and blue eyes, he looked like the biggest, shrewdest and most corrupt old detective in town, but in fact he hated cops. His older brother, whom he never liked, lived and died on the police force.
    This afternoon, as we stood side by side at an Irish bar (which stretched out so far into the interior darkness that it was long enough, my father commented, for the dogs to have a track) he put down his fourth drink—taken, like the first three, in shot glasses—and said, “Marijuana, huh?”
    I nodded.
    â€œHow could you get caught?”
    He meant: How could you be so dumb as to get nabbed by a bunch of Wasps? I knew his opinion of their wits. “What’s wrong with certain people,” he stated once in an argument with my mother, “is that they expect God to buy His clothes in the same store they do.” So I always reacted to Wasps through his eyes. Big Mac saw them as well-knit, silver-haired, gray-suited and forever speaking in such swell accents that they had to believe God was using
them
to display His decency.
    â€œWell,” I told him, “I got careless. Maybe I was laughing too hard.” And I described the morning of the night I was caught. I had been in a sailing race on a lake near Exeter whose name I no longer remember (the wages of pot!) and the boats were still. They almost called the race off.I knew nothing about sailing, but my roommate did, and had me crewing for an old history teacher who certainly managed to fit my father’s idea of a Wasp. He was a good skipper, probably the best in school, and so contemptuous of his competition that he even took on an ignoramus like myself. In the race, however, we had light winds and bad luck. The wind would die, breathe us forward on a zephyr, then die again. At last we stood by the mast, our empty spinnaker hanging in the bow, and watched a boat creep ahead of us. At its helm was an old lady. She was much closer to land than we were, and had gambled that while there would not be wind anywhere this morning, she could count on a touch of current licking the lakeshore as it moved toward a stream. She counted well. She crept from three boat lengths back to eight ahead, while we, now down to second place, five hundred yards farther out from land, never moved at all. She had outfoxed our old fox.
    After a while it grew boring and I began to banter with my roommate. The skipper stood it as long as he could, but the inert spinnaker finally did him in. He wheeled on me, and in his best master’s voice said, “I wouldn’t talk so much if I were you. It spills the wind out of the sails.”
    After I told this story my father and I laughed so hard we had to clutch each other and whirl around for balance.
    â€œYeah,” Big Mac said, “with people like that, it’s a favor to get caught.”
    That took away my need to tell him how I had come back to my room in a riot of laughter and fury. What retorts I had swallowed. One year at Exeter had obviously not been enough for me to learn the customs of the people who ran the works. (Oh, the English have airs in their nose and the Irish sprout hairs in their toes!)
    â€œI’ll try to explain it to your mother,” Big Mac said.
    â€œI appreciate that.” I knew he and she had probably not spoken in a year, but I could not face her. She would never understand. From the time I was eleven until I turned thirteen (and was outdoors every evening) she managed to sit