Going Down Fast: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Saturday Leon got up as early as she did. While she ate he sat at the table making little notes and mumbling to himself.

  “What happened last night with your folks?”

  He fell into coughing and shook his head helplessly. “Eh. Today’s the day Caroline gives herself away. Yeah. I’m going to celebrate it. Who was that girl who called?”

  He insisted. He had the ability to sense the undertones of her silences. She told him.

  “He sent her over, uh? Why did you talk to her?”

  When she came back from the office, late because they had been putting out a mailing, the apartment was still empty. Leon did not come home until Sunday morning. Then he arrived too weak to make it to bed alone and she had to undress him.

  “Now she’s married to him,” he muttered. He lay in bed wrapped in all the blankets. He complained of cold but his forehead was burning. “She’s done it. Finished it off once and for all. All gone.”

  She made tea and he drank it. Then he complained of being hot and threw off the blankets. He got up and she could not make him lie down until he began to shiver. “Nobody gets anything,” he muttered. “Nobody gets anything. Everybody gets nothing.”

  Monday afternoon his fever rose to 104.4 and she was afraid. She gave him aspirin and tried Rowley’s cold remedy: equal parts strong tea, rum and lemon juice, with enough sugar to get it down. He cursed as he drank it and threw it up.

  Leon tossed in bed, his face shining under sweat. He was simmering with fever. Restlessly he turned in the nest of rumpled covers. His breath came harshly, his chest rattled.

  “Leon, I think I better call a doctor.”

  He made a gesture of disgust. But when she started turning the yellow pages, he said, “Call my cousin Murray. He’s a fat jerk but he knows what he’s doing. Murray Lederman. Burt’s oldest kid. Call him, say I got a bad cold and arrange with him so you go to a drugstore and he calls in the prescription.” Then he grinned, facing half into the pillow. “And pick up the newspapers, okay? I want to see the newspapers.”

  Cousin Murray was busy. After she explained, the nurse said Dr. Lederman would phone her back. In the meantime she called the office to explain she would not be in for the staff meeting. Then she tried plain tea to sweat his fever down. She fiddled with the stove and succeeded by constant effort in keeping the bedroom moderately warm.

  Leon turned his swollen head back and forth heavily. His orange hair was plastered to his scalp. She was ashamed to realize she did not like to touch him.

  “So she’s married,” he muttered. “I’m going to get my lawyer to fix it so I can see Jimmy. She’s running around with some dentist. Ought to be able to pin something on. He’s my kid, right?”

  When she touched the pillows they were wet. She changed the cases. It was dark before his cousin returned the call. At first he was suspicious of what kind of prescription she was trying to get. When she mentioned Leon’s temperature, he said he would come. He let her know how much out of the way it was. When he called her Joye, she did not bother to correct him.

  She fed Leon hot bouillon and changed his pajamas. Quickly she tidied, hiding her traces. When the doctor finally arrived, she realized she need not have troubled: he was wading into the unseemly and could not be relied upon to discriminate between scrubbed and unscrubbed bare boards. He would not at first take off his coat: a short stout pigeony man whose scarce brown hair had only orange lights, although he retained the sad family nose and brow ridges. A weak chin: his head gave up. He knew by now she was not Joye and called her “Miss” though Leon introduced them gruffly. He bustled around Leon, clucking. Before he examined Leon he ordered her out of the bedroom, while Leon kidded him hoarsely and without energy.

  “Ashamed to have anyone see how you treat me, you quack? How’s your mother?”

  When the door opened, Cousin Murray was obviously angry. Ignoring her he went to the phone and dialed, misdialing, quit and dialed again. “Hello, Fern? Yes, well he has pneumonia. No, of course not. How am I supposed to know? Gross neglect. No use upsetting yourself. What are you talking about? No, I didn’t see it. I don’t have time to read newspapers. Into the hospital, I’ll arrange it. Always glad to. Yes, why don’t you, I think that would be the best thing.”

  She went in. Leon was lying with the pillows pushed up and his eyes closed. “He says you have pneumonia.”

  “Fancy name for a bad cold. I’m not going to the hospital.”

  She kept silent, not wanting him to go either. She was afraid of hospitals. Leon would be taken and fitted into a white frame. Her fear made her guilty. She had to say, “If you’re that sick maybe you better.”

  His eyes opened, the pupils large, the irises only rims of blue skim milk. “Eager to get rid of me?”

  “No,” She touched his hot hand. Gritty feeling.

  “Better off here.” He patted the bed. “You’re not a bad nurse. You get a bang out of it.”

  “Not much. I like you better cool and healthy.”

  “Am I ever healthy?” His head lolled on one shoulder. “Born with a sick eye. See a gray world, color of ash. See you gray too.”

  “I’m not gray! I don’t see you gray.”

  “Wash your eyes out.” He said then in fitful eagerness, “Tell Caroline I’m sick. She’ll get over her mad. She’ll figure I’ve been out of my head with fever. Who’s that?”

  She went out to see Sheldon enter, trailed by Fern and another woman. Sheldon was monolithic and glittering, florid from the cold with a vibrancy of joyful anger coming off him. Quickly he surveyed the room, her with the other furniture, before passing in a wake of cold air into the bedroom. He shut the door but his raised voice came through it. Clucking, Cousin Doctor Murray went after him.

  The other woman sat gingerly on the couch. Fern stood in her fur, twisting her hands. “I must pack his things for the hospital, but how can I go in there with Sheldon so upset? Why does Leon do these things?” Fern paced around the apartment, running a finger along a table, giving the refrigerator a peek, peering without recognition at Joye’s mobile of bicycle parts. “I told him Friday night to watch his step. Sheldon is furious!”

  “He certainly has given you enough concern.” The other woman was plump, corseted, with fat slack cheeks surrounded by blonded hair. She fidgeted with her shuddery hat and tweaked at her gloves. “He’ll worry you into a stroke one of these days, what does he care? Trouble for the family. Everything the way he wants. His parents should give and give and he should take and take, a big boy his age.” The woman’s eyes scraped over her.

  She leaned against the wall by the bedroom door, her arms crossed, incredulous. Amazing grace. The righteous shall forever stick the ungodly with pins and needles and laws and their abominable manner of being in the world. Holy fat wives and mothers, forgive me my body and loves, my hair and clothes, forgive.

  Sheldon swept out. He slapped his gloves smartly into his hand and stood a moment frowning. “Didn’t you pack for him yet?” he asked Fern. “Get a move on.” His gaze fell then on her. “You can go home.”

  “I am home. And you may stay a short while longer.”

  The electric cold eyes of Leon’s father looked and waited for her gaze to drop. A vain handsome irascible man who loathed her on sight. An efficient enemy who wanted to turn the world into himself. The eyes flicked on. He was too busy to challenge her at length. She perceived the source of Leon’s gentleness. Also that puritan streak. He had eaten the father and could not cast him out and must always with part of his mind condemn his own pleasures.

  Leon was forced to dress, bundled into his coat, a small bag was packed for him, and the entourage exited. They did not offer to tell her where they were taking him, and she was too proud to ask. After they had gone silence hummed in the rooms.

  Leon

  Invasion of the Poverty Freaks

  Saturday, January 17

  He had little trouble getting his people together. There wasn’t that much competing in Chicago a
nd they liked him. Old goodwill. Elliott not only agreed to send his current stars but came himself in high drag and full of suggestions. Friday he rented the equipment and bought the film and started collecting the props and garbage they would need. Finally he had taped the words he had written. Saturday when they assembled he played the tape for his actors. He thought it went over pretty well, but he would make decisions on the basis of what happened and the kind of footage he caught. They assembled at his pad, skirted the park, marched under the viaduct and along the embankment; a route where few saw them until they arrived.

  Saturday morning at eleven thirty in the new shopping plaza, zenith of local commerce and socialization. The prosperous burghers nudged each other gently in the wide malls. But before the drum Big Thelma (two hundred fifty pounds of ex-anthropologist-whore) beat they fell back. This was handheld camera with a vengeance, because he was jostled and shoved.

  THE EXILES’S RETURN

  WE ARE ALIVE TOO: WE ARE AS REAL AS YOU

  WE ARE YOUR GARBAGE

  YOU DISPOSED OF US

  WE ARE BRINGING OUR GARBAGE

  BACK TO YOU

  He was glad that he had shot the footage of demolition over the past months, especially that summer stuff. The commentary spoke in his mind. Our tenements crack like rotten eggs before the swinging ball of the wrecking crew. A sidewalk smeared with hopscotch leads to a pit. Gray with dust, a workman sorts bricks where the deaf shoemaker coughed at his oily bench. Feldman’s candystore is a nondenominational parking-lot. There … are … no … smells … left.

  A hag in Army surplus overcoat shuffled raggedly, riffling every wastebasket they passed and strewing the contents. Doreen in town for the weekend from Ski U was made up as a tubercular beggar. His old girl Fran toted a sign NEGRO HUSTLER WITH AGED DEPENDENT DESIRES ROOM, with her brother and his friends as hoods marching together like a war party. They had magic markers and chalk and cans of spray paint.

  FAT CITY

  YOU SUCK MONEY

  GARBAGE OF THE WORLD, REVOLT:

  YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE

  BUT A TRIP TO THE INCINERATOR

  BLACK SUN RISING

  MOON GOING DOWN IN BLOOD

  YOU STOLE MY BONE

  The neighborhood is being facelifted for professional couples who wish nice companions. Gingerly the great crane nibbles the bar where many began and many more never could: the teeth close. (Zoom shot.)

  Ghosts of dislocated alleycats slink at midnight under the fluourescent moons of shopping plaza. Halloween visitants haunt their bulldozed beds.

  Pink and purple and green and gold and black. Tinsel and rags, sequins and burlap. The big cart filled with burned mattresses and twisted springs and broken mirrors and plaster and bricks and doors and cracked toilet bowls was drawn by Elliott’s boys with Elliott himself in full thirties drag on the driver’s seat. Big Thelma beat a rock rhythm on the drum and his parade came dancing after, clanking strings of tin-cans at their feet, wheeling dollies heaped up with suitcases and boxes, moaning and lurching and weeping and shouting out the slogans on their signs and banners. They came under big emblems of roaches and rats borne above them, some of the kids burning incense. But instead of flowers they tossed garbage. The pillars of the mall dripped red and black. Elliott would hand down a smashed chandelier or a bottomless chair and another actor would place it carefully in front of one of the onlookers or against the window of a store. A boy peddled bright balloons labeled GRASS, ACID, BENNY, PEYOTE, KIF, OPIUM, HASH, SPEED, HORSE. A girl dragged a kid’s red wagon with a plaster statue of St. Francis wearing beads.

  POVERTY = LEPROSY

  YOU HAVE TAKEN OUR HOMES: TAKE US INTO YOURS

  Into the shopping plaza jiggled the army of unwanted.

  His heart rocked in his chest as if he was on a bad trip. He was hot and cold in long woozy spurts. Even through his shades the sun clawed out of the sky and fractured off the expanses of new cement, and he had to take off his shades as soon as he started squinting through the lens. He had not eaten since yesterday, had had nothing but a cup of coffee and a candybar and the glass of water with which he took two antihistamines, yet he was high. On top of his fever, on top of his sickness, he balanced on a bouncing wire. Colors struck on his eyes, cries entered his ears and blood and burned there with a cool rippling ecstasy. He had to fight to see black and white. Normally he hated color: it was anti-image. It was cheap pseudorealism. It encouraged postcard reportage instead of seeing it new. What is seen, is. The phonemes of cinema are images. He found himself floating into abstraction. Hold on, hold on. The camera felt heavy. His arm ached already.

  WE BREATHE: DON’T BURY US

  IN GARBAGE

  IN GHETTOS

  LOVE US, WE ARE YOUR SHADOWS

  WE ARE YOUR GARBAGE

  Images would intervene. A fence of doors: exits, invitations, openings, and places where locks are hung. Flash of a doorman barring an entrance. Around them shoppers surged, stopped cold. A hush of horror settled on some. Others yelled. Some tried to interfere and he filmed a couple of fistfights. Some giggled, some frowned, some stared, some turned and hurried away.

  I AM BLACK BUT COMELY AND

  I WILL NOT MARRY YOUR SON

  (NOT EVEN FOR MONEY)

  REVOLT OF THE GARBAGE

  RETURN OF THE REFUSE

  THE WASTE COMES BACKIn the center of the plaza where a small parklike area surrounded a fountain with an original piece of sculpture all brassy and nonevocative (unless it was programmed subliminally to whisper, buy, buy, buy) they began to deposit their gifts. They opened the tattered bags and dirty suitcases and stacked up the bags of garbage around the fountain.

  Dream of freaks and razors. Barb your hedges, doublelock your doors, hire men to stand guard outside, put up wire fences, arm your cops with mace and flamethrowers and tanks.

  NOTHING HUMAN

  ALIENATES

  LIKE COMFORT

  The press arrived five minutes before the fuzz. So ended his parallel ceremony.

  Rowley

  Sunday–Saturday January 18–24

  Sam sat on the windowledge, one leg swinging and the other propped up. Her hair hung in a fat glossy braid and she clasped her hands behind her neck looking wise. “I could have told you six months ago you wanted her …”

  She did not know what six months could hold. Vera haunted the corner of his eye by flashes: barefoot in pants and loose olive sweater. He felt removed from Sam and patient.

  A goldbrown shirt brought out the blood in her cheeks. “Now you’ve let her move in with some guy and then you complain you can’t reach her. All this static. I can’t figure you both out. Are you looking for an excuse to give up?”

  “Not hardly. But you don’t patch up with someone by twisting her arm.”

  “I don’t see why not.” Sam looked with private meaning at Gino slumped against the wall. “If you do it nicely.”

  “You want her to come to you.” Gino squinted up through the bottom of a popbottle. “Why should she? She has a scene going.”

  “But she always does have.” In which she was just like him.

  “Because she’s open.” Gino scratched his crotch. “If you want to get to her you’ll have to risk being open yourself.”

  “All this good advice. Like the phony whipcream that squirts from a can.” Ten minutes with Anna and the kid was lecturing. Anna always turned gangly kids on. Sweet the kid would say if that word wasn’t excised from his jargon: sweet, uh? also salty, spicy and bitter in layers the kid would never taste.

  But what he minded the most was what he had come to think during the weekend, watching Sam and Gino and the friend who had come with them and slept too on his floor at ease, grubby from traveling and unsurprised and cheerful together. A few days before they had been busted at a demonstration at an induction center and they were full of comparative anecdotes about demonstrations and beatings and jails. That morning their friend had left on his way to the Coast. Sam and Gino would be cat
ching a ride back in a few hours, hoping to arrive for their morning class.

  He could no longer dismiss Gino as the son of a chemical engineer, though he found Gino still glib and fuzzy and product of Midland, still infuriatingly righteous and callow. He had watched them and saw that Sam was more theirs than his. They shared phrases and buttons and jokes, they sang scraps of rock and owned the same few books—which he had sometimes read but not in the same way. They shared more than a bed, more than a language and friends and style, though the style was important to them in ways he thought silly. They were at once open and closed, mistrustful of anyone who could not share their cool, easy style. They had political instincts different from his own, and perhaps more natural to them than his had ever been.

  The kids were more and less isolated than he was. They had a total mistrust of the whole shebang that startled him. Where his generation had taken honors and bitched at the system, they dropped out. How will you make it? Oh, they said, by hustling. They turned seacold eyes on the establishments right, left, liberal, philanthropic, academic. There was scarcely a man with power or place they did not consider an enemy, yet they spent little time in the ritual cursing he remembered as the main social form of politics at their age. They struck him as naive because they thought meeting in their dingy storefronts and cranking out their mimeograph machines they could change the world: but already they had changed each other. They had a sense of identity and community he had had only in his music. They felt part of something, not in the disciplined but rigidly insistent way he had known with American Communists. Thrown down in random flat cities they found each other, in Fort Wayne and Davenport, in Tangiers and Guatemala City. They invested much hope in small countries whose geography was blank to him. They made him turn and examine his youth as a piece of history. They could say “the revolution” without giggling, without quotes, without a sense of absurdity. Harlan and he had called themselves radicals, but if they had referred to “the revolution” the quotes hung in the air and their tone was heavy heavy irony, self-deprecation and shame.