The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  Social workers, VISTA (vision) workers, the Church offer services. Nothing changes. The old woman who laughs like an exhausted mare is still inspecting garbage cans, a Horn & Hardart shopping bag wreathed over her arm. A stringbean junkie, age twenty, has been stealing something almost daily for two years.

  You see I am no stranger here. “You know all of those people over there,” Shirley had said. “Please see if you can find

  Denise.” Denise had split from the pad on Ninth Street. The R.O.T.C. student had split. The last member of the party, a blonde, a chocolate-chip cookie of a girl, was alone and depressed; the rent was due. As I waited for the elevator, two junkies tried to sell me a pair of ice skates. Toto Thomas has worked many scenes: reform school, Golden Gloves, con artist, armed robbery, file clerk, messenger, truck driver. Then he blossomed into a blue-eyed flower and sat in Tompkins Square like a human rocket waiting for the countdown. Where was Denise? Well—

  “Man. It’s good to see you. And you know something? I’m gonna make it this time. I’ve got a good scene uptown. But I’m gonna make it down here once in a while.”

  We went over to the pad Toto Thomas had crashed and shared with four pleasant, apple-cheeked young men from suburbia. The pad was neat like a college dormitory. The young men were leaving. They were very careful with their garbage. I watched them force bulging paper bags into a garbage can and then replace the lid. Four well-mannered young men who for the moment controlled heroin like conservative stockbrokers.

  “I don’t shoot any more,” Toto Thomas said. “Just baby shots. Water shots.” Toto picked up wads of cotton which contained heroin dregs. Just before shooting up, he turned to me and grinned. “Now I’m ready to rap and go out and get a piece. Ball, baby. That’s what I always say.”

  The same afternoon, I met Peter on Avenue B. “Where you been?” he asked. “You look bad. Are you still looking for that pet? Wanna couple of pills? I got pills, baby. Pills to go to bed with. I’m back with my old lady and her girlfriend.”

  A boy who appeared to be about sixteen years old walked up. Peter made a sale. Then the boy turned to me. Without blinking an eye, he asked, “You wanna get rimmed?”

  “No,” I said. “That bores me.”

  The three of us laughed. The boy started off, walking like an ambitious executive. At least the last of the flower children were interested in the pollen count. Anything goes! The New World’s sexuality! Lord, sometimes I ask myself, Are they for real, are they free? Rimming, once a whispered desire of sexual swingers, is slowly surfacing from down under. And it seems somehow appropriate to mention human excrement and cannibalism as mankind prepares not to scale the summits but to take the downward path into the great valley of the void.

  Thoughts pinballed through my mind; the questionnaire was almost blank, and I stopped off at Sam’s; he lives in one of those medieval wrecks. The last of the communal flowers were limp in front of the building. They sat on the stoop, played guitars, sang on fire escapes, and got high on stairwells, seemingly placed there by a landscape architect, schooled in James Joyce’s Night-town.

  Miss Ohio manned the second floor. Glowing with warmth, she had just returned from visiting her parents and giggled about her new silver-buckled shoes. Miss Ohio had been on the scene for almost a year. Nothing bad had happened to her—yet. Occasionally she gets high, talks about being “hung-up” on some “cat,” spends most of her time with the neighborhood children. She seems so out of place in the East Village. She belongs to the world of babies, chintz-flowered bedrooms, country kitchens.

  On the third floor, I had to step over a group of stoned children. Sam was talking with—let’s call him Jerry. Sam works in Jerry’s uncle’s midtown office. We sat around listening to records, getting high. Then the white chick from upstairs arrived. She’s got a Jones, a thing for black dudes. A hefty girl with a ban-the-bomb air. Her old man had split, and she wanted Sam to help her find him. “The bastard is probably in Washington Square because he knows I don’t hang out there.”

  Meanwhile, long-haired Jerry had placed his booted feet on the lower shelf of the coffee table, his elbows rigid on his knees.

  “I don’t wanna cry,” he whimpered. But he made no effort to check the tears. “I can’t stand it. Last summer I was flipping out. Speed and every goddamn thing. Paranoid as a son of a bitch, and one night these punk kids tried to jump me. They were high, too. On pot and wine. I wasn’t trying to cop a plea. I just didn’t wanna fight. I started to run, and one of them comes after me. I gave him a belt in the stomach, and he fell back and hit his head against one of those old-fashioned stoops.”

  Jerry bolted up from the sofa. “I just can’t stand it. I’m dreaming about it all the time. His mother—she was holding his head. ‘You killed my son.’ Now I don’t take anything. Drink booze, smoke a little pot. I’m on probation, and the family and everyone treats me with kid gloves. But I don’t feel free.”

  Later, suffering Death Valley Days of the mind, Jerry was crawling on the floor, crying, beating his fists against the floorboards.

  I looked out the window. On the roof across the street, a sailor on leave drank a quart of Miller High Life and looked down at the street scene. A civilian last summer, he was always on the roof at dawn. Alone in the early summer quiet, then he drank cans of Rheingold, ranted and raved at the young people who balled and slept on the roof opposite him. His roof was one story higher than the Drugsville roof. I remember that he was like an angry Baptist preacher. A frustrated, beer-drinking, Saturday-night hard hat. Perhaps the navy had been very good for him. Perhaps he had matured and from the experience had become a man, had gained confidence and had had women. Perhaps his I-am-at-peace-with-the-world had crystallized because flowers no longer blossomed and balled on rooftops. I’ll never know. I sensed he wanted to talk to me. But I turned from the window. It had been a long trip. Darkness was a long way off. The hip and beautiful flowers were dead, out of season, waiting to be reincarnated and given a new name, a new scene.

  You know how it is. Memory quivers like a vibrating machine, and you smile. “Golly, Miss Molly.”

  I had been drinking in the White Horse with two of my more stable earthlings. A nine-to-five Literary Chap in a Chipp suit. His companion was a down-in East Village boutique girl. They wanted me to go with them to a Hotel Albert party. But I remembered too many roller-coaster days, nights, schlepping early-morning ghosts, hallucinating rock revivals at the priceless Albert. So I made it across town and went to the Old Dover in the Bowery. In this frantic bag of hell, I could be absolutely alone. The regulars, stoned on cheap wine, respected my privacy. I had trained myself against the babbling voices around me. I would play “Hey Jude” and “Revolution,” knock down vodka, and make it. Sitting at my customary station at the bar, turned toward the street, I watched a chic Harper’s Bazaar type of girl saunter in. She was Lady Brett Ashley, stoned on salvation.

  “You weak bastards,” she shouted. “Get back into the mainstream of life!”

  The jukebox swung with “Can I Change My Mind and Start All Over Again?” The Bennington girl, masquerading as Lady Brett, wanted to dance. A real nigger type, carried away by the promise of the moment, asked me for a cigarette. “If you can’t make it without a smoke, you’re nowhere,” I told him.

  Meanwhile, the sotted sister threw her handbag on the bar and winked at me. A game, a happening, no matter, no matter. I knew her kind and gave her my Rover Boy smile. Lady Brett began dancing alone. A parody of a sensual grind. Surrounded by stoned but reserved men, she had for the moment forgotten her mission of soul saving. But the bartender, followed by his henchmen, threw Our Lady of the Bowery, kin of Hemingway and Harper’s Bazaar, out the door. No one followed the lady’s exit.

  A dark, port-wine-drinking young man came up to the bar. Despite the warm night, he carried a leather jacket and had on black bell-bottoms, black T-shirt, and Swiss-hi shoes (in other words construction-worker high tops. Laces of tan leather, Dupont neoprene crepe sol
es. These shoes are extremely popular for comfort and durability, and offer the weight of a coffee cup’s illusion of masculinity. In fact, knowledgeable people call them “fruit boots”).

  “Wanna smoke from a dead man?” Leather Jacket asked, offering a hand-rolled cigarette.

  I accepted and discovered a man had died in the bar earlier. Men are always passing out, sleeping on the tables and floor, and the dead man was, well—on the floor. All Leather Jacket knew was that the cops went through the man’s pockets, searching for identification. They laughed and joked with the regulars. A cop had given Leather Jacket the dead man’s tobacco and cigarette papers.

  Leather Jacket ordered two dark ports, before confession. Once again, I am working on my sainthood: I listen. A Catholic, another cross in the seemingly endless line of raunchy souls I’ve encountered recently: Czechs, Poles, Irish, Italians, and Puerto Ricans. Guilt works overtime for them. I’m not sure if they want help or simply want to recharge their emotional batteries. But Catholic youth is the victim of their passion, frustration, and hatred. Apparently family and Church have failed these weak men. Unable to recognize their latent disturbances, they simply hustle them down the medieval road of morality and guilt. Any intelligent child questions that road, especially if it detours from the reality around him.

  “My old lady put me out,” Leather Jacket was saying. “I lost my job and left Jersey City. I’ve been drinking since Easter.”

  “You seem to be doing all right,” I said.

  “Well, I got cleaned up. You should have seen me last week.”

  A small black queen, sitting ringside, graciously accepts the good nights of the courtly regulars. Makes it with a lean hillbilly escort.

  “My old lady looks something like that.” Leather Jacket laughed.

  “Do you mean she’s black and ugly, or a man?” I asked.

  Leather Jacket looked directly at me and smiled. “I guess you got the scene figured out.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, ordering another vodka. Leather Jacket opened the cage of his past. An American Catholic Classic in some respects. Hard-working, hard-drinking father died when Leather Jacket was an altar boy. Mom (“A beautiful broad, I wanted to make it with her. I think she wanted to make it with me, too”) put her two sons and three daughters in an orphanage and shopped around for a new husband. Mom eventually married a rich old man and moved to Montreal. The children remained in the orphanage. Leather Jacket rebelled against the sadistic fathers and nuns. “It fucked with my psyche, but I’m sort of together.”

  Enlisting in the army, Leather Jacket continued his personal revolt. “Nothing has ever been able to break me.” After a medical discharge, he worked in factories, diners, gas stations. A black schoolteacher stopped for gas one day and propositioned Leather Jacket. “I remember following him up the steps. Man. He was big and ugly, but I sort of dug him. Weird man.”

  “And there were red lights in the pad, and he called you Daddy.”

  “You’re a smart son of a bitch. You got the whole fucking scene figured out.”

  “I’m not putting you down,” I said. “But I’ve heard the story before.”

  Leather Jacket’s brain was at the bottom of the wine barrel. “I’m all fucked up,” he said, breathing hard. “I get so goddamned tired and lonely, and it’s not all sex, you know. Hell. I could have almost any broad I want, and you know about the queens.”

  I understood, thinking: Jesus. I hope he doesn’t start the waterworks. Leather Jacket was more honest than most twenty-five-year-olds from his prison. I remembered a Spanish queen who lived nearby. Her old man had left for P.R. The queen was alone and lonely. Perhaps Leather Jacket and the Spanish queen could, at least for the night, quench their loneliness. As we departed, I wondered where was my saintly halo, my recluse’s cabin by the sea.

  Coco gave Leather Jacket her Park Avenue welcome. We went into the living room. All the major pieces of furniture were covered in custom plastic, including the fluffy 9-by-12 white cotton rug. The art objects were holy: gilt madonnas with rosebud halos. Jesus Christ was everywhere. Plastic, coppertone, brass plate, plaster of Paris. The room was heady with orange blossom refresher. Large votive candles created a mood appropriate for a wake, séance, or Mass. Coco and Leather Jacket made small talk while I looked over the record collection. Already, I could sense they would work something out and that it would go well for them. I put on an LP, smoked a joint, very happy about the whole scene. Then Pepe, the ex-husband, lumbered in from the bedroom, yawning. He greeted me warmly and shook hands with Leather Jacket, and I knew that they would be enemies.

  But Coco was in his glory. An amused queen enthroned in a red Easy Boy lounge chair. Pepe showed me the long knife he had bought on Forty-second Street. Leather Jacket was an excellent knife thrower. Coco cooed and teased. Pepe and Leather Jacket fought for his favors. Then Coco invited me into his neat little kitchen. He thanked me, and I inhaled Avon’s Fandango perfume.

  “Forget it, doll.”

  “He came back and I took him back, but I’ll show him tonight.”

  The night danced on and on. We got higher. Pepe and Leather Jacket remained on guard. Coco remained on the throne. The three non-jazz lovers seemed to enjoy the records I played. Then something funny happened. Leather Jacket and Pepe became open enemies again.

  Pepe, who had never worked for one day in the nineteen years he had been on this planet, called Leather Jacket a phony.

  Leather Jacket, still breathing hard, said, “You little uncool Forty-second Street punk.”

  “Cut it out,” I said. But I didn’t get up and stop them.

  Leather Jacket was ready to attack and ran his trembling hands through his long blond hair.

  “You’re a real little bitch,” he told Pepe. “Did you know that?”

  “I’m young, faggot,” Pepe cried.

  “Oh dear,” Coco moaned. “Why do my husbands always turn out to be members of the sisterhood?”

  FLASH! A CHICAGO POLL reports that segregation is flowering magnificently in America. Oh my God . . . interesting. Is John Wayne aware of the result of the Chicago poll? Once upon a time, John Wayne let Sammy Davis, Jr., wear that legendary hat in a Rat Pack western. John Wayne has given blacks two roles in films he has directed. One black was perfect for his role: he portrayed a slave. But American blacks are not responsible, according to Wayne. It was not surprising for him to announce in a May Playboy interview: “I believe in white supremacy.”

  Once upon a time, playing cowboy in an old wrecked house, imitating John Wayne, a nail zipped into my lower lip. I still have the memento today. But I want to tell you about Newport Beach, two years ago. Albert Pearl, my friend and tourist guide, pointed his finger in the direction of a palm-shrouded hill and said, “John Wayne lives over there.” June Allyson also lives in Newport, I was told time and time again. I remembered her smile, husky intoxicating voice, the childhood MGM movies. But now I am a man; I know what kind of woman June Allyson is. Breathing the dry, clear air of Orange County, I always detected the scent of the far right. The only way I can describe the scent is to say: Inhale ether, or imagine facing a double-barreled shotgun ten feet from where you are presently standing or sitting.

  Uncomfortable looking at the sterile, pretty pastel houses, the Sears Roebuck landscaping. All I can think of is golf, insurance, and car agencies. Reader’s Digest, the Republican Party, and watching Lawrence Welk on a Saturday or Sunday night. In my youth I visited California. I remember San Bernardino, Whittier (Nixon, the future President of the United States, was living there at the time. However, only family and friends were aware of it), Riverside, Pomona. All the streets linking towns. Even then, the place made me slightly uncomfortable. I certainly had never heard of the far right. Joan Didion was a little girl then. Today, the towns remain the same, the people remain the same—the custodians of San Gorgonio Mountain and Death Valley.

  No, I do not want to tell you about Newport Beach today. I am in the East, waiting to
fly or crack up. And before either happening takes place, let me say: Afroed, slender, Levi bell-bottoms, striped mock turtleneck shirt, and perhaps a book under my arm, I usually receive polite, guarded smiles in, say, Merrick, Long Island, if I ask directions. A visitor, or has one of them moved here?

  Afroed, slender, Levi bell-bottoms, striped mock turtleneck shirt, and perhaps a couple of books under my arm, I am always the intruder, the rapist, the mugger on—say—Avenue J and Twenty-ninth Street in Brooklyn. Basically an Orthodox Jewish zone. I respect, am fascinated by their way of life. But men have landed on the moon, pollution is the common cold of science. We’re running out of space, and I’ve been here for four hundred years, am no longer a stranger. I am only in their zones to wash dishes. I am underpaid. Almost all of them would cheat me if they could, and although I admire their women, it is at a distance. Their women would have to literally come crawling on their hands and knees before I would make love to them. But knowing my mood these days, I’d probably laugh, shout an obscenity, and walk away.

  “Forest Hills, Forest Lawn,” I joked in the smoker of a Long Island train. My two white co-workers were feigning sleep. Already, they had assured me that things were getting better. I hadn’t asked them. The tone of their voices would make an agnostic quiver with belief.