The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [57]
Jack’s bed symbolized not only sickness but also sex. He told Lem that he had managed to masturbate only twice, and his “penis looked as if it had been run through a wringer.” His pajamas were dirty and “stiff from sweat.” He “feels kind of horny,” especially after reading a dirty book. All day long nurses entered his room. They were “very tantalizing and I’m really the pet of the hospital … and let me tell you nurses are almost as dirty as you, you filthy minded shit.” He boasted to Lem that one of the nurses “wanted to know if I would give her a workout,” but the nurse did not return later to his room.
The boastful boyish bravado and self-conscious obscenity are so overwhelming that it is easy to forget, as surely Jack wanted to forget, that he was a seventeen-year-old youth half a continent away from his family, lying in a hospital bed with doctors and nurses poking away at his body, seeking to understand the mysterious affliction that tortured him and held him back from the life he wanted so much to live. He was sick and he was hurting and he was full of pain that he could not even fully admit to himself, and never to Lem and the rest of the world.
Jack was at the Mayo Clinic while his closest friend sat in his house, sailing and swimming, enjoying the marvelous days of summer. He wrote Lem about “dirty minded nurses” and confrontations in a movie theater as if, even in this worst of times, he was having daring experiences that Lem would never have. Jack had a wondrously inventive mind and, like most adolescents, was full of braggadocio about his supposed sexual encounters.
Jack was probably inventing these stories, and doing so with detail, imagination, and nuance. He was affirming his own vitality, even if it was in the guise of a fictional creation. There was a heroic quality in the magnitude of Jack’s denial and the daring invention of this picaresque life. He could have given in to his illness and accepted an invalid’s pale life. Instead, Jack had learned a denial technique when dealing with the implacable realities of life, and it proved to be irresistible. He had made a mask that he could put on whenever he needed it, or if he chose to, he could put it on and never take it off again.
As the perpetual observer of his own life, Jack lived in two worlds. It was this extraordinary duality that set him apart not simply from Joe Jr. and his other siblings but from everyone else as well. Young Jack was in a situation that would have filled most adults with fear, but there was none of that in him. Here in this hospital room his sense of irony grew hard and became the preeminent means by which he looked at the world.
Jack left the hospital that summer with no firm diagnosis of his condition, and that fall he returned to Choate. In chapel the headmaster stood before the students and in his Olympian manner talked about the small minority of mindless troublemakers who were destroying the peace of his beloved Choate. St. John said that these miscreants represented no more than 5 percent of the student body, but that they were a slow poison. If he ever could determine their names, he would root them out quickly and send them home disgraced. They were muckers, nothing but muckers, mucking up Choate.
As Jack and his friends listened, they were delighted at St. John’s coinage. Muckers! That was exactly what they were. Muckers! The boys decided to turn their casual fraternity into a small secret society. To formalize matters, they trooped into Wallingford and had special golden shovel emblems made for themselves at a jewelry shop.
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