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By Root 3957 0

the stated requirements imperfectly at best, but in other respects suited Cheever just fine. When Lang first got out of prison, Cheever had driven him to a halfway house in Poughkeepsie, but now he was back in Ossining, living in a tiny bedroom at the Dirkses’ house; a talented carpenter and electrician, he worked for a local theater company and did odd jobs for Cheever and his friends. “Are we going to feed the thief [il ladro], too?” Iole would ask while serving lunch, though soon enough she and everyone else got used to him. For a long time he'd “blow in” almost every day—or disappear for weeks, according to whim—and he and Cheever would do the same things Cheever did with any friend: drink on the porch, walk in the woods, watch baseball, or take pool-hopping treks à la “The Swimmer” (though some of Cheever's wealthier neighbors balked at having the wiry ex-con romp in their pools). Cheever did his best to help Lang acclimate to the outside world. He'd discreetly show him, by example, how to comport himself at cocktail parties and such, though Lang continued to prefer a more raffish element. Usually he hung out at a black bar in Ossining called the Orchid Lounge, and one night he got in a disagreement that resulted in his beating a man with a crowbar. As Cheever wrote a friend, “Lang called me from jail early Tuesday morning and I spent three hours (in my very best suit) talking to the backs of black and white police officers. … At around noon I got to a judge, who set bail. I got the cash and out came Lang, unshaven, unwashed and carrying his shoe-laces. I wondered what your reaction would be, he said. Say thank you, said I. Thank you, said he, and we, for the second time, stepped out of jail into the sun. …”

Lang was far from imperceptive, and soon figured out that Cheever needed him at least as badly as vice versa. Cheever often insisted on greeting Lang with a bone-cracking hug (“It took time to get used to that”)—the sort of physical contact he'd always craved but was too sheepish, now more than ever, to seek among his family. Lang got the rest of the picture, too: though Cheever had a wide circle of acquaintances, he didn't seem to have a really “tight friend” in the world—certainly no one with whom he could relax, as with Lang, and display his profound disdain for so-called decent society. “Once you got to know him,” said Lang, “he had no façade at all. If he felt like diving into a pond, he just did it.” He also accompanied Lang to such places as the Orchid Lounge, where they'd sit for hours chatting with Lang's girlfriend, Peaches, whom Cheever described as “a very nubile, 17 year old black … very ethnic and very funny and refreshing.” Lang's multi-faceted love life, in fact, was a source of endless fascination to Cheever. Before he'd gone to Sing Sing, Lang had dated a prostitute named Kathy who once “took on the Yankee ballteam”: “There ain't a decent fuck in that ball team,” she'd allegedly remarked, “and Mickey Mantle is the dirtiest, most disgusting man I ever knew.” Lang's own sexual appetites were strange and unappeasable: whenever he got sick, he said, he'd go to bed and “beat [his] meat” until he couldn't ejaculate anymore, though he went right on beating it (“feels great, but nothing comes out the end”).

In the course of one such conversation, Lang suddenly asked Cheever if he had any “buddies.” Loath to seem utterly bereft, Cheever replied that Art Spear was his buddy. Lang was incredulous: “You two old guys are buddies?“ It transpired that Lang was thinking of a different kind of buddy—the kind of buddies Lang and Cheever became for a while, or so it seems. At one point Lang fell into a stone quarry, drunk or high, and knocked out most of his teeth; Cheever helped buy him a set of dentures, then felt oddly heartsick when Lang came “bound[ing] up the stairs” to show off his new smile: “I feel bypassed,” Cheever wrote in his journal, “in fact I feel lonely. … I might write a story about an older man who fell in love with a [toothless] youth. … The young man returns with a beautiful smile … and the