An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  I went in a rush from the table to the men’s room, and in the stall, locked the door, knelt, and retched again for the second time that night, feeling as humble as a saint, I knew now that a saint would set his head near such a throne expecting the cleanest air to lay like a halo on the edge of the fumes. Perhaps I caught a hint of that air, for my burned-up lungs went clear—once again this night I was taking one of those fine new breaths I had not known in twenty years, so it seemed, and then I vomited with all the gusto of a horse on a gallop, cruds, violations, the rot and gas of compromise, the stink of old fears, mildew of discipline, all the biles of habit and the horrors of pretense—ah, here was the heart of the puke!—came thundering out with the fluid intent downrushing sounds of a stream tearing through the wood to recover its river, I felt like some gathering wind which drew sickness from the lungs and livers of others and passed them through me and up and out into the water. I was draining the poison from the wound I had inflicted in Cherry’s belly, and yes in confirmation her voice came rowdy-dah, rooty-toot, ringing through the men’s-room walls, loud and laughing and triumphant, When the saints come marching in, soaring like a golden bird free at last from the cage of her throat, laughing happily at the antique of the song, and I held to the bowl and shook with sickness, and thought that if the murderer were now loose in me, well, so too was a saint of sorts, a minor saint no doubt, but free at last to absorb the ills of others and regurgitate them forth, ah yes, this was communion and shuddering rings of nausea and Leznicki, oh here came Leznicki, up from the belly, up, up, and the presence of Roberts up and splat! Pea beans and shreddings of puke came up from the basement of my belly, the police were saying good-by to my body.

  Peace. And peace. Nausea faded like the echo of a locomotive in the gloom of that toilet stall, and I was lighting matches to search for specks and the hint of spatterings on my jacket, as if a more simple search in the light by the sink outside would be less devoted and so less effective. I washed my face in cold water, but carefully, once again carefully, as if I were washing a new face. And in the mirror my eyes were bright, bright and merry as the eyes of a yachtsman catching the sun off the water—was the mirror my sanity or helping to drive me mad? Still I used it to comb my hair and reset my tie. The collar of my shirt was surprisingly fresh—I remembered the devotion with which I had put it on just after washing (the corpse of Deborah lying of course flat on the floor in the other room) and I wondered if the freshness it still maintained could be a small gift of life from the devotion I had given to the material then. Hierarchies of soul and spirit turned in my brain—drink, or a visitation from Deborah, had me insane as the Celts: I was trying to calculate how a shirt might have a spirit which laundries smashed and tender fingers restored. Still, there was the evidence of the shirt. Ripped off to make love to Ruta, whipped on again, subjected to a grilling from the drilled eye of the police, and a walk in the rain, a psychic artillery battle in the bar, a round of heaves here, and still keeping its front!—my shirt must be as fortified as a superior ego. I had one wistful passing sadness that my mind would have the liberty to adventure no longer for would I be dead in three days?—I seemed somehow to think this quite likely—or incarcerated? or just deadened with the anxiety that questions and more intolerable questions were to be answered. And at this moment far from mourning Deborah, I hated her guts. “Yes,” I thought, “you’re bitching me still.”

  But Cherry was finishing her set. Or that was the way the music felt as it came through the walls. Looking in the mirror I tipped my left hand to my left eye in a mock salute and the lights dimmed for an instant again as they had in the other bathroom, dimming now either in fact or in the center of my imagination, and I said to myself, “Yes, you certainly will be dead in three days.” Then I walked out and sat down at my table, just as she was finishing the last few bars of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

  Which was just a little too late, for as she walked past me to the bar, a professional half smile on her face, her eye chose almost not to see me.

  “Let’s have a drink,” I said to her.

  “I’m having a drink with some friends,” she said, “but come over and join us.” And she gave a smile which was somewhat better, and walked over to the three men and two women I had decided earlier were Tony’s friends. She did not know the women, she went through some measured greeting with them, radar to radar, shaking hands finally with each of those two girls, and then she kissed two of the three men in a big wet friendly fashion like a smacking handshake and being introduced to the third man, the former prizefighter, Ike Romalozzo, Ike “Romeo” Romalozzo was his name I remembered now, she hesitated, then said, “What the hell,” in a very loud very broad Southern accent and kissed Romeo for greeting to him as well.

  “You could charge five bucks for those kisses,” Romeo said.

  “Honey, it feels better to give them away.”

  “This girl’s a swinger, Sam,” said Romeo to one of the two other men, a short man, perhaps fifty-five, with gray hair, a leathery gray skin, and a wide thin mouth. This man now touched the head of the stone in the stickpin of his white tie as if to give warning. “She’s the friend of a friend,” said Sam.

  “Give us another kiss, sweetheart,” said Romeo.

  “I’m still,” said Cherry, “recovering from the last one.”

  “Gary, where does her friend hide?” Romeo asked.

  “Don’t ask,” said Gary. He was a tall heavy man about thirty-eight with a long nose, a puffy face, and nostrils which cut the air with such an edge that his intelligence seemed to be concentrated there.

  Sam whispered in Romeo’s ear. Romeo was silent. Now they all were silent. Sitting where I was, not fifteen feet from the bar, I had come to the conclusion that if I were to be dead in three days, Romeo was the man who was likely to do the job. I had no idea if this thought came from what was most true in my instinct, or if my mind was simply sodden with idiocies. Nonetheless, something now decided I must go up to Romeo in the next few minutes. “You’ll never get past the police,” said my mind to me, “unless you take the girl home from this bar.” And on the echo of this thought, I noticed the detectives were gone. I felt the anxiety of a man hearing he must undergo a dangerous operation.

  “They’re going to make a movie of my life,” Romeo said to Cherry.

  “What are they going to call it?” asked Gary, “Punchdrunk and Paunchy?”

  “They’re going to call it the story of an American boy,” said Romeo.

  “Lover!” said Sam.

  “The people I’m with got a ghost writer working now. Story of a kid who goes bad, turns straight, goes bad again.” Romeo blinked his eyes. “It’s the fault of the company he keeps. Bad influences. Cheap whiskey. Broads. He don’t make champion. That’s the price he pays.”

  Romeo was not bad-looking. He had curly black hair which he wore long and thick on the sides and he had had his nose bobbed once he retired from the ring. His eyes were dark and flat in expression, flat as Chinese eyes. He had put on weight. He would have looked like a young prosperous executive in Miami real estate if it had not been for the thick pads of cartilage on the sides of his temples which gave him a look of still wearing his headgear.

  “Who puts up the money for this movie?” Cherry asked.

  “Couple of guys,” said Romeo.

  “Mutt and Jeff,” said Sam.

  “You don’t believe me?” Romeo asked.

  “They ain’t going to make a movie of you,” Gary said.

  “If they get a good enough actor to play my part they going to make a very good movie,” said Romeo.

  “Say, Romeo,” I called out, “I got an idea.” I said this from my seat fifteen feet away, but the words were out. I stood up and walked toward them. My idea was unfortunate, but it was the best I could muster. I kept hoping something better might reach my mind.

  “You,” said Romeo, “got an idea.”

  “Yes,” I said, “when they make your movie, I’ll pla
y your part.”

  “You can’t,” Romeo lisped, “you’re not sufficiently queer.”

  Romalozzo had been famous for his tricky left hook. I had just walked into it. A snicker began with Gary, passed on to Sam, reached Cherry and the two girls. They stood at the bar laughing at me.

  “I owe everybody a drink,” I said.

  “Bartender,” shouted Romeo, “five Bromo-Seltzers.”

  Gary slapped Sam on the back. “Our boy gets better and better.”

  “Talent is in its infancy,” said Romeo. “When they get done with this movie, the class, the fanciest broads in town will say, ‘We had Romalozzo for dinner last night.’ ”

  “Yeah,” said Sam, “and that Guinea ate all the pizza.”

  “Caviar foie. Hey, Frankie,” Romeo yelled to the bartender, “bring some caviar foie with the Bromo-Seltzer.”

  Cherry laughed again. She had an unusually large laugh. It would have been perfect and merry and a gain to anticipate if it had not been for a suspicion of something mulish and bragging, a bit of small-town Southern jackass in the sound. I realized what a tension had begun in me that she be perfect.

  “Romeo,” Cherry said, “you’re the funniest man I’ve met today.”

  “It ain’t me,” said Romeo, “it’s my friend. My new friend.” He looked at me with his flat eyes. “Sam, isn’t this my new friend?” he asked.

  Sam looked at me with even eyes. “Well, Romeo, he’s not my friend,” Sam said after a little pause.

  “Maybe he’s your friend, Gary?”

  “Never saw the gentleman before,” Gary said.

  “Sweetie,” said Romeo to one of the girls, “is he yours?”

  “No, but he’s cute,” said Sweetie.

  “Then, Honey, he must belong to you,” Romeo said to the other girl.

  “Not unless we met in Las Vegas five years ago. I think,” said Honey, trying to be helpful, “that we may have met at the Tropicana sometime like five or six years ago, do I care to count, ha ha.”

  “Shut up,” said Gary.

  The mulatto with the plump mandarin face and the goatee was staring at me from his table. He looked like one of those jungle crows who sit high on a tree and watch the lions and the lion cubs take blood, foam and flesh from the entrails of a wounded zebra.

  “I guess,” said Romeo, “he’s nobody’s friend.”

  “He’s yours,” said Sam.

  “Yes,” said Romeo. “He’s mine.” He looked at me. “What do you say, pal?”

  “You didn’t ask the lady,” I said.

  “You mean the lady who was entertaining us? The lady who was singing?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Since you’re my friend,” said Romeo, “I’ll fill you in. This lady is my escort for the evening.”

  “I’m surprised,” I said.

  “It’s a fact.”

  “I’m really surprised,” I said.

  “Buddy, you played out your string,” said Romeo. “Now beat it.”

  “You couldn’t think of a more agreeable way to ask me to leave?”

  “Move on.”

  I was ready to go. There was very little keeping me. But there was something. It was the glitter of light in Cherry’s eyes, bright and prideful. That fed the anger to stare back into Romeo’s eyes. For she had been using me—so I understood it now. And felt an icy rage against all women who would use me. It was still another relative of insanity—I who had visited so many members of the clan tonight—but now I said, “I’ll move on when the lady asks me to move, and not before.”

  “The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” said Gary.

  I did not take my eyes from Romeo’s eyes. We locked one stare into the other.

  “You’re going to get hurt,” said his eyes. “I have something going for me,” said my eyes back. His expression turned dubious. The odds were not established for him. He had no ideas in his eyes, only pressure. Maybe he thought I had a gun.

  “You invite this guy over?” asked Romeo.

  “Of course I did,” said Cherry, “and you gave him one bitch of a greeting.”

  Romeo laughed. He laughed with a big flat dead sound at the center of his amusement, a professional laugh, the professional laugh of a fighter who has won a hundred fights and lost forty, and of those forty, twelve were on bad decisions, and six were fixed, and for four he went in the tank. So it was the laugh of a man who has learned how to laugh through all sorts of losses.

  “Say,” said Cherry, “this gentleman’s a celebrity. He’s Mr. Stephen Richards Rojack whose television program you are all familiar with, click?”

  “Yeah,” said Sam. “Click,” said Gary. “Sure I know it,” said one of the girls, Sweetie, with the happiness of a dull pupil answering a quick question in class. “I’m impressed to meet you, Mr. Rojack,” said Sweetie. She was sweet. Sam looked sick at being there with her.

  “And now since Mr. Rojack is very special to me,” said Cherry, putting one perfumed run of four fingertips on the back of my neck, “we’re going to go in the corner and have a few drinks.”

  “You’re on again in fifteen minutes,” said the bartender.

  “I didn’t hear you,” said Cherry. She gave a silvery smile as if the terrors of men were about as admirable as the droppings of hippopotami.

  We took a little table with a lamp shaped like a candle about ten feet from the isolated stand with its deserted piano and empty microphone. Sitting next to her, I seemed to feel not one presence in her, but two, an ash-blonde young lady of lavender shadows and curious ghosts, some private music, a woman with a body one might never be allowed to see in the sun; and then the other girl, healthy as a farmer, born to be photographed in a bathing suit, brisk, practical, clean, the kind who looked to sex for exercise.

  “You’re still angry,” she said to me.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t have to get mad,” she said. “They were just putting you on.”

  “So were you. If I had walked away, you’d be here with Romeo.”

  “I might be.”

  “And feeling no different.”

  “That’s evil to say,” she said in a little Southern girl voice.

  “Evil says what evil sees.” I didn’t know exactly what I was saying, but it pleased her immensely. We could have been adolescents. She flickered the backs of her fingers under my chin, her green eyes looking full of pepper in the glow of the candle, glints of brown and gold and yellow. In this light she was a pure cat, cat’s eyes, cat’s nostrils, cat’s knowing mouth. “Mr. Rojack, can you tell funny jokes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me one now.”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “When?”

  “When we’re about to leave.”

  “You’re rude. In fact …”

  “Yes?”

  “Ass,” she said with a Southern bray, and we beamed at each other like two jewelers finding a gem for a partner. Then we leaned forward and gave a kiss. With all that booze I came near to passing out. For a draft of something sweet and strong came off her mouth and spoke of what she knew, of small Southern towns and the back seats of cars, of expensive hotel suites and years of listening to good jazz, of simple honest muscle in her heart and the taste of good wines, jukeboxes and crap tables, stubborn will, something compromised, inert, and full of gas, something powerful and dull as her friends, the smell of bourbon, too, the raw red promise, so much I closed my eyes and fell back into a swoon for an instant or two, she was too much for me—it is the truth—it was exactly as if I’d been sparring with a bigger man and got hit with a full right hand, not a bare fist but a hand in a boxing glove, and went out of consciousness for a second and took another slow second to come back because punishment was ahead. It was not the nicest kiss I ever had, but it was certainly the most powerful, there was something in it of the iron motor in the hearts of a good many men she must have kissed.

  “You’re such a sweet kisser,” she said.

>   Yes, we could have been adolescents. I had not felt this peculiar mixture of promise and respect, a little awe (as if I were walking blindfolded and might at any moment fall down a flight of stairs: but there were cushions at the bottom—part of the game), the expectation that life had something to offer which few people knew anything about, the happiness that there was a body next to me which was feeling just about the sweet way I felt, sweetness itself. I was afraid to make a move.

  “Ass,” she said now, “you came over like you had a cricket in each pocket.”

  “I was scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Voodoo.”

  “You voodoo. You bongo nutty. I didn’t introduce you because you weren’t my friend no more. You were King Creep.”

  “I guess I was.”

  “Awful!”

  The bartender came over. “It’s time for you to go on.”

  “Not singing any more tonight.”

  “I’ll have to call Tony,” he said.

  She had the expression on her face of a soldier who has found a fresh peach on an autumn tree and has stopped to eat it. In a minute he will begin to march again. “Call Tony,” she said, “and bring us two doubles.”

  “I don’t want to make a call to him.”

  “Frank, I wish you would call Tony. I don’t care about that. I really don’t. But don’t make me feel bad that I’m making you feel bad.”