“This is good shit,” I said.
“Panamanian pot, baby,” Big Daddy added.
“I don’t want any of that shit,” the pale junkie said scornfully. He got up and Barry ushered him upstairs.
Another guy, who hadn’t said a word since I had arrived about an hour ago, followed them quickly.
A girl, a typical Village type with long stringy hair, man’s shirt, and paint-splattered blue jeans, bolted up and yelled, “Wait for me, you greedy bastards. You think you’re going to get all the goodies.”
Then Jelly Roll struts in like a proud rooster. He was a Korean War buddy of mine and Big Daddy’s. Round chocolate bear, nuts for ballet. He makes his living now playing drums in a rock-and-roll band.
Jelly stands in the middle of the living room grinning, jerking his shoulders, rubbing his fat hands together as if for warmth.
“Charlie, my man, Big D,” he said, “what’s the haps?”
“Everything, baby,” Big Daddy mumbled. “I’ve got to ration myself on this stuff.”
“Ah, come on,” Jelly laughed. “Man, I want some H. Some horse.”
“Talk that trash,” a girl named Louise said. She put her bourbon down and gave Jelly the eye.
“Yeah,” Jelly amended. “Take me to thy keeper.”
“Come on, Charlie,” Big Daddy says, getting up. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Jelly turned to me. “Baby, I knew you’d finally get hooked.”
“Hell,” I grinned, “I just wanna see the orgy.”
“Tell me more,” Louise said. She came over and took my hand and we followed Jelly and Big Daddy up the carpeted stairs. A group of landscape prints decorated the stair wall and there was a chandelier of frosted glass. And because of the quiet, it reminded me of a funeral home.
Barry and the pale junkie were in the bedroom sitting on the floor. They reminded me of guys down at Wall Street with Big Deals brewing. Stoned junkies have that same cocky air. They are the top dog because they feel that they are the world.
There was a girl sitting on the bed who hadn’t been downstairs. She stared at nothing or perhaps she was seeing her thoughts like photographs on the jungly wallpaper. Her eyes were glazed like a cat’s. The bedside radio was playing early morning jazz and she kept time with the music, snapping her fingers.
Louise went over and joined Barry and the pale guy who had his eyes closed, nodding his head.
“Who’s gonna turn me on?” Big Daddy asked. He had a foolish expression on his face now.
“Yeah,” Jelly echoed in a desperate voice.
Barry looked up. “Ellie. Turn the boys on.”
Ellie was the girl sitting on the bed. “What?” she asked, frowning.
“Turn the boys on.”
“Oh sure,” Ellie mumbled, leaving her dream world.
Ellie got up from the bed in a very businesslike manner, went over to the mirror-topped dresser.
Jelly gave her a hard, cold stare, but Big Daddy was already rolling up his sleeves.
“Easy doll, easy does it,” Big Daddy grinned. “Watch out for my veins. I got it bad once in the arm and they had to shoot me in the feet.”
Ellie did not look up or crack a smile. She picked up the heroin spoon, and struck a match, and prepared the injection. She had the same bored manner of army doctors giving shots.
Ellie plunged the needle in Big Daddy’s arm and quickly, expertly, swabbed his arm with cotton.
Big Daddy exhaled as if he had suddenly been relieved of a great weight.
Ellie glared expectantly at Jelly.
He eased up to her with a frozen grin. His mouth trembling as if he were on the verge of a scream.
Ellie shot him. He moaned, “Oh, bitch, suck my blood.”
I left the white brick town house at about four p.m. the following afternoon and walked down the quiet, expensive, residential street. I doddered like an old man. My energy had been sucked up. But I didn’t care and took the crosstown bus home.
MRS. LEE CALLS: “Charles, pet. Are you alive? Fine, fine. Listen, Charles, I have a most delightful idea. We’ll round up a party and go to Jones Beach in a rented limousine. What mad fun we’ll have. I bought a portable beach tent—yellow, green, and red. Oh, it’s too much, pet. Cleo going down the Nile. Now, there will be Diego—you haven’t met him, have you? What charm! Like taffy melting in the sun. He wants to be a cabinetmaker. Laura thinks he’s adorable. She’s coming. She has the most marvelous French bathing suit. A bikini. All red knit. A scream, Charles! I thought we’d ask Sade, too. Oh, sorry, pet. I forgot you were not on friendly terms. But I could ask that sweet little Jewish boy . . . what’s his name. Oh, you know who I mean. And Lena. She’s such fun. I hear she’s out again—have you seen her? And what do you think of this pet? I’ve got champagne for you. Just for you, darling.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I moaned, on the verge of tears, and hung up.
Then Claudia, the Grand Duchess, dashes in like a mad potentate. His eyebrows are plucked. The makeup is wearing off and he resembles a spotted wild animal. He’s giddy from the aftereffects of an all-night sexual drinking bout.
“Gimme a cigarette,” Claudia said, swooping down in the chair like an exhausted bird. “Oh, child, I really had a ball last night. I really enjoyed myself. Those children carried on. Let me tell you: they carried on like there was no tomorrow.”
And then Lady P comes in, wagging her tiny Egyptian tail like a shy debutante.
“Mama’s love,” Claudia croons. “Let’s go for a walky-walky. And if you help me cruise a lovely man, we’ll have chopped steak for dinner. That’s what baby will have.”
Claudia picks up the petite, silent Lady P and they exit, grandopera style.
WORKED LATE AGAIN TODAY: seven p.m. There was nothing waiting for me at home and I walked over to Amsterdam Avenue for a drink. This was poor Alice’s turf, and I thought of her and felt like saying a prayer. She got such a bang out of just living; the prostitution and drugs had nothing to do with it.
I remember Alice once leaning out the window and tossing a handful of coins down to the kids who lived in my block. “That’s right, ya little bastards! Get’m! That’s what you’ll be after the rest of your life. Bastards!” This was followed by a great peal of laughter which could scald a sensitive heart. Bruce tried to convert Alice. “If St. Peter opens them pearly gates for you,” Alice would tell him, “I think he’ll open them for me. Yeah. That’s right, baby.”
About a year ago she got syphilis. A month later Alice was nearly nuts. Then, one windless, pale, March afternoon, she made crazy designs on a man’s face with a beer bottle in her West Eighty-fifth Street room. She called me, her voice giddy. I thought she was back on heroin. “Charlie, come up quick. I think I killed somebody,” Alice giggled.
“Who?” I asked. “Alice, are you high or something?”
“Yes, baby,” Alice said. “I got a jolt this time. Some bastard is conked out on the bed, bleeding. Come on up, baby.”
I arrived an hour later, and there were only blood stains on Alice’s filthy bed. There was one sole window in the room, the frame painted PR blue. The window was open and the pink, plastic curtains crackled. I looked out the window. But there was no trace of Alice in the garbage-littered backyard.
“I nuw it, I jest nuw it,” the super told me gleefully, displaying a fine set of rotten teeth.
“What makes you say that?” I asked sharply.
“Nuttin’,” he frowned. “You hur pimp or sompin’?”
“No,” I said slowly, trying to hold back my anger. “I’m her brother.”
Pity seeped into the super’s lined face. “Her rent is paid til Satta.”
This was a year ago, and in this mood of dark remembrance, I entered the Step Down bar on Amsterdam Avenue. There were four men and one woman in the place with the intimate, neighborly air of regulars. The bar was very clean and quiet. The television was sitting on its throne above the mirrored wall and the cowboys were shoot’n ’em u
p, but there was no sound.
I ordered a bourbon with beer chaser and took my usual spot near the door. If the street scene became dull I could watch the customers, provided that they weren’t too inquisitive about me.
At the opposite end of the bar was a boy with a crew cut. He had a clean-cut, healthy appearance, with cold, deep blue eyes. He looked out of place with his madras sports coat, khaki trousers, white button-down shirt, and slim tie. I figured he must have come over from Central Park West.
From time to time he would stare up from his bottle beer at me. The stare was direct and cold like a shrewd housewife inspecting a leg of lamb at the butcher’s. But I wouldn’t let him shake my nerve. I wondered why he wasn’t watching TV. The cowboy movie had changed to a cartoon of monkeys decked out like chorus girls. The single woman, a redhead, was drinking a Tom Collins. She looked like a clothed Rubens nude in her polka dot dress, cut low. Her voluptuous, creamy tits almost spilled out on the bar. The bartender was very busy with his wet cloth, adjusting the redhead’s coaster. His eyes stayed down and his face was flushed. The redhead joked with a few healthy, four-letter words.
In the meantime, this joker with the crew cut was beginning to bug me. Here I was putting away my second bourbon, feeling cool, grateful that tomorrow was a holiday, and trying to collect my thoughts. My hair is cut just as short as his, though the quality is different. I am clean shaven. I don’t look in the least unusual. At least that’s what the reflected, mirrored image says.
I go to the jukebox and play a couple of Lady Day sides. “Yesterdays” and “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.”
Crew cut is drinking his bottle beer like there was no tomorrow. Well, I decide, I’m going to stare the bastard down. These eyes are going to the market; appraise and set a judgment, look right through him.
Okay. Now set your drink down with lowered eyes and then look up. “Aw right,” as Mitch would say, “you’ve shook him.” Now he’s got a mean frown on the ruddy face, and he’s knocking ashes from his cigarette. He won’t look at you.
Now he’s smiling with his eyes as well as his mouth. I half expected to see caps on his fine white teeth. What the hell is so Goddamn funny? He must be nuts, lonely, has a problem, or is queer. It might be interesting to find out his story.
Have another bourbon. He’d got his Goddamn blue eyes on you. I’d like to put a good solid one on that firm, proud mouth. He’s looking up again. A bold smirk on that Ivy League mug. There is nothing to do but stare him down.
The bartender ambles down to me and sets up a bottle of beer. He has a bright, wise look on his owlish face.
“It’s for you,” he says knowingly.
Crew cut raises his bottle beer in mock salute, buddy-buddy fashion.
I nod and give my boy a shit-eating grin.
Then he got up and walked toward me, and I discovered that his left foot was a club foot. He had on a pair of highly polished, cordovan brogues; the bottle of beer in his large hand like a flag. Now his smile was warm, boyish. But I had my doubts.
“Hi,” he said, brightly, by way of introduction. “You have crazy eyes. Did you know that?”
I downed the last of the bourbon and started on Crew cut’s beer. I certainly wasn’t going to make conversation after that opening.
“What was the Mets’ score?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, without looking up.
“The Mets really took a beating from the Pirates.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “The Mets were crucified.”
Crew cut laughed easily and said: “Did you watch the Yankee-Tiger game last Sunday? Man. Twenty-two innings. I must have drunk a case of beer with that one.”
“I never expected the Yankees to go that far,” I said.
“I take it that you’re a Yankee fan.”
“Yeah. But in forty-five, the Tigers and the Athletics played almost five hours,” I said, springing my baseball knowledge.
“No kidding,” Crew cut said in an astonished voice, and then looked out at the stalled, horn-honking traffic. “Would you like to go to my place? It’s around the corner. I’ve got some hard stuff there.”
“Okay,” I replied slowly, without thinking. I was certain Crew cut required no thinking.
Peter, that was the club-footed young man’s name, lived high above Central Park West, in a mellow, woodsy apartment with a high, vaulted ceiling. An old hunting sideboard cleverly concealed a bar and stereo equipment. Peter was a proud host. He laughingly said that he would soon have to get a job; his rent was two-fifty a month. Now his eyes rarely met mine; the deep blue eyes expressed the fear and pain of a shy, young animal. I wasn’t making much effort with him—I had met too many condescending, rich brats before, non-thinking jerks. The best education that money could buy, travel; but all of this did them very little good. I remember Mark who had gone to Harvard, and then to Cambridge, and who never had an opinion of his own. Take Channing—with all that money floating in the family background, he has never been to Europe. Poor little Elizabeth. She has lived abroad for the past seven years, mostly in Paris, yet she knows less about Paris than I do.
“You’re the first colored person I’ve known,” Peter said, groping for a cigarette. “That is, except my maid.”
“I’m not surprised,” I said sweetly.
“Why?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Peter agreed slowly.
I was drinking a gin and tonic; Peter was drinking beer out of a silver-engraved mug.
“Do you like tennis?”
“No.”
“Opera?”
“No.”
“Interested in politics?”
“No.”
Peter set down his silver mug carefully and smiled. “I bet you like to screw.”
Oh Jesus, I thought, depression settling in. I wish for once that I’d meet someone who would surprise me. I’ve been studying people closely for twenty-nine years and it is agonizing to be able to put them in slots like coins in a cigarette machine. Was Crew cut queer? You see the queer kids in the eastside bars lapping up beer, only beer. It is only the less affluent homosexuals who buy mixed drinks. I’m rather free sexually, but I’m a little sick of the queer scene. The queers are not really honest and their fear has nothing to do with it. With the straight squares and the police, the whole business is made up of fear, hate, money-making. The greatest problem of the American male is proving his masculinity. I myself find that I do not have to lift weights, wear heels with clicks, to assert my maleness. Claudia, the Grand Duchess, once said, “Oh child, one of these days we’ll have a faggot for President. In high drag. Won’t that be a bitch?”
Crew cut’s voice cut in on my thoughts. “You know, I don’t like niggers.” He was sitting on the sofa, his feet propped up on the slate-topped coffee table.
I sipped my gin and tonic, looked over at Peter, and smiled.
His blue eyes flamed with hatred and his face was very red. “Well, what are you going to do about it, nigger?” he asked, his voice quivering.
I burst out laughing and shook my head sadly. “‘Drown in my own tears,’ Ray Charles sings. What do you want me to do? Beat the living shit out of you?”
“I like to be hurt a little,” Peter said. “I like to have my hands tied behind my head. Then I’ll do anything you want.”
NINE-THIRTY A.M. A lustreless pearl sky, soft summer rain. The click-click, tap-tap, and shuffle of feet pressing jobward. The truck driver’s four-letter morning song, “Get ya fuckin’ ass in ge-aar.” The somnolent, suburban drivers creeping into Tip Top Parking. I look out the window at the bumper-to-bumper traffic blocked to Fifth Avenue. The cars are like a hem in the great cape of Rockefeller Center. The slender trees lining the street look like cheap corsages. Through the veil of rain, the Empire State building looks very lovely this morning. No sign of life at the Elmwood Hotel except the fourth-floor ash blonde making up her face with a hand mirror.
A
fternoon. The staccato tone of rain. Indistinct street voices. The cool air has a touch of autumn. A neighbor comes in to tell me there’s been a police raid. It doesn’t interest me. At five o’clock, the darkening sky is like the early dusk of winter. The blaze of neon cuts the approaching darkness. I long for the end of summer, and going away.
Maxine suddenly pops in from art school decked out with slick yellow raincoat and matching hat. She stands in the doorway, her merry eyes sharp observers of the semi-dark room. Then she runs over and sits down beside me on the sofabed. “Charles, the police were here,” whispering her big secret. “They were here this afternoon. A raid.”
“Yes, cookie,” I said. “I heard them. Must’ve been a false alarm.”
“False alarm,” Maxine reflected. “Then it was a mistake, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right, cookie. How was the art class?”
“All right, I guess. Clay.”
I have an idea of Maxine’s prima-donna, natural-born-leader attitude at the Museum of Modern Art’s children’s classes.
“They’re such babies over there,” Maxine sighs. “We worked in clay this afternoon.”
“I loved working in clay,” I said. “You can make a lot of fantastic things with clay. I had a lot of fun when I was a kid.”
Maxine looks up solemnly. “Did you, Charles?”
“Yes. It’s a lot of fun. But you have to be very careful. It takes time and it’s something new for you.”
Maxine removes her coat and hat and folds them neatly over a chair. “I like clay. But I don’t like to make boys and girls and dogs and houses. I like to make fantastic things. But the teacher says no, make boys and girls and dogs and houses.”
“Well, if you’re a good girl. . . .”
“Good?” Maxine laughs. “You know I’m always good, Charles.”
Then Mitch calls me to the phone and when I return, Maxine asks, “Who was it?”
“Shirley.”
“Oh, her. Is she coming over?”
“No.”
“You like her, don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Miss Fancy Pants.”
The Collected Novels of Charles Wright Page 8