Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  He held the bottle to the light. “If nothing turns up,” he said, “I’ll drink this. And to hell with the kitchen window.”

  The cab driver brought the pizza and Bertie gave him the twenty dollars.

  “I can’t change that,” the driver said.

  “Did I ask you to change it?” Bertie said.

  “That’s twenty bucks there.”

  “Bird lives. Easy come, easy go go go,” Bertie said.

  The driver started to thank him.

  “Go.” He closed the door.

  He spread Norma Preminger’s largest tablecloth over the dining-room table and then, taking china and silver from the big breakfront, laid several place settings. He found champagne glasses.

  Unwrapping the pizza, he carefully plucked all the mushrooms from it (“American mushrooms,” he said. “Very square. No visions.”) and laid them in a neat pile on the white linen. (“Many mushloom,” he said. “Mushloom crowd.”) He poured some beer into a champagne glass and rose slowly from his chair.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “to the absent Klaff. May the police in Los Angeles, California, beat his lousy ass off.” He drank off all the beer in one gulp and tossed the glass behind him over his shoulder. He heard it shatter and then a soft sizzling sound. Turning around, he saw that he had hit one of Norma’s paintings right in a picturesque side street. Beer dripped ignobly down a donkey’s leg. “Goddamn,” Bertie said appreciatively, “action painting.”

  He ate perhaps a quarter of the pizza before rising from the table, wiping the corner of his lips with a big linen napkin. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I propose that the ladies retire to the bedroom while we men enjoy our cigars and port and some good talk.”

  “I propose that we men retire to the bedroom and enjoy the ladies,” he said in Gimpel’s voice.

  “Here, here,” he said in Klaff’s voice. “Here, here. Good talk. Good talk.”

  “If you will follow me, gentlemen,” Bertie said in his own voice. He began to walk around the apartment. “I have often been asked the story of my life. These requests usually follow a personal favor someone has done me, a supper shared, a bed made available, a ride in one of the several directions. Indeed, I have become a sort of troubadour who does not sing so much as whine for his supper. Most of you—”

  “Whine is very good with supper,” Gimpel said.

  “Gimpel, my dear, why don’t you run into the kitchen and play?” Bertie said coolly. “Many of you may know the humble beginnings, the sordid details, the dark Freudian patterns, and those of you who are my friends—”

  Klaff belched.

  “Those of you who are my friends, who do not run off to mix it up with the criminal element in the far West, have often wondered what will ultimately happen to me, to ‘Poor Bertie’ as I am known in the trade.”

  He unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall to the floor. In his undershirt he looked defenseless, his skin pale as something seen in moonlight. “Why, you wonder, doesn’t he do something about himself, pull himself up by his bootstraps? Why, for example, doesn’t he get his eyes fixed? Well, I’ve tried.”

  He kicked off his shoes. “You have all admired my bushy mustache. Do you remember that time two years ago I dropped out of sight for four months? Well, let me tell you what happened that time.”

  He took off his black pants. “I had been staying with Royal Randle, the distinguished philologist and drunk. You will recall what Royal, Klaff, Myers, Gimpel and myself once were to each other. Regular Whiffenpoofs we were. Damned from here to eternity. Sure, sure.” He sighed. “You remember Randle’s promises: ‘It won’t make any difference, Bertie. It won’t make any difference, Klaff. It won’t make any difference, fellas.’ He married the girl in the muu-muu.”

  He was naked now except for his socks. He shivered once and folded his arms across his chest. “Do you know why the girl in the muu-muu married Randle?” He paused dramatically. “To get at me, that’s why! The others she didn’t care about. She knew even before I did what they were like. Even what Klaff was like. She knew they were corrupt, that they had it in them to sell me out, to settle down—that all anyone had to do was wave their deaths in front of them and they’d come running, that reason and fucking money and getting it steady would win again. But in me she recognized the real enemy, the last of the go-to-hell-goddamn-its. Maybe the first.

  “They even took me with them on their honeymoon. At the time I thought it was a triumph for dependency, but it was just a trick, that’s all. The minute they were married, this girl in the muu-muu was after Randle to do something about Bertie. And it wasn’t ‘Poor’ Bertie this time. It was she who got me the appointment with the mayor. Do you know what His Honor said to me? ‘Shave your mustache and I’ll give you a job clerking in one of my supermarkets.’ Christ, friends, do you know I did it? Well, I’m not made of stone. They had taken me on their honeymoon, for God’s sake.”

  He paused.

  “I worked in that supermarket for three hours. Clean-shaved. My mustache sacrificed as an earnest to the mayor. Well, I’m telling you, you don’t know what square is till you’ve worked in a supermarket for three hours. They pipe in Mantovani. Mantovani! I cleared out for four months to raise my mustache again and to forget. What you see now isn’t the original, you understand. It’s all second growth, and believe me it’s not the same.”

  He drew aside the shower curtain and stepped into the tub. He paused with his hand on the tap. “But I tell you this, friends. I would rather be a mustached bum than a clean-shaved clerk. I’ll work. Sure I will. When they pay anarchists! When they subsidize the hip! When they give grants to throw bombs! When they shell out for gainsaying!”

  Bertie pulled the curtain and turned on the faucet. The rush of water was like applause.

  After his shower Bertie went into the second bedroom and carefully removed the spread from the cot. Then he punched the pillow and mussed the bed. “Very clever,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to let them think I never slept here.” He had once realized with sudden clarity that he would never, so long as he lived, make a bed.

  Then he went into the other bedroom and ripped the spread from the big double bed. For some time, in fact since he had first seen it, Bertie had been thinking about this bed. It was the biggest bed he would ever sleep in. He thought invariably in such terms. One cigarette in a pack would suddenly become distinguished in his mind as the best, or the worst, he would smoke that day. A homely act, such as tying his shoelaces, if it had occurred with unusual ease, would be remembered forever. This lent to his vision an oblique sadness, conscious as he was that he was forever encountering experiences which would never come his way again.

  He slipped his naked body between the sheets, but no sooner had he made himself comfortable than he became conscious of the phonograph, still playing in the little hall. He couldn’t hear it very well. He thought about turning up the volume, but he had read somewhere about neighbors. Getting out of bed, he moved the heavy machine through the living room, pushing it with difficulty over the seamed, bare wooden floor, trailing deep scratches. Remember not to walk barefoot there, he thought. At one point one of the legs caught in a loop of the Premingers’ shag rug and Bertie strained to free it, finally breaking the thick thread and producing an interesting pucker along one end of the rug, not unlike the pucker in raised theatrical curtains. At last he had maneuvered the machine into the hall just outside the bedroom and plugged it in. He went back for the Billie Holiday recording he had heard earlier and put it on the phonograph. By fiddling with the machine, he fixed it so that the record would play all night.

  Bertie got back into the bed. “Ah,” he said, “the sanctum sanctorum.” He rolled over and over from one side of the bed to the other. He tucked his knees into his chest and went under the covers. “It makes you feel kind of small and insignificant,” he said.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Graham Macnamee speaking to you from the Cave of the Winds. I have made my way into the heart of this
darkness to find my friend, Poor Bertie, who, as you know, entered the bed eight weeks ago. Bertie is with me now, and while there isn’t enough light for me to be able to see his condition, his voice may tell us something about his physical state. Bertie, just what is the official record?”

  “Well, Graham, some couples have been known to stick it out for seventy-five years. Of course, your average is much less than that, but still—”

  “Seventy-five years.”

  “Seventy-five, yes sir. It’s amazing, isn’t it, Graham, when you come to think? All that time in one bed.”

  “It certainly is,” Graham Macnamee said. “Do you think you’ll be able to go the distance, Bert?”

  “Who, me? No, no. A lot of folks have misunderstood my purpose in coming here. I’m rather glad you’ve given me the opportunity to clear that up. Actually my work here is scientific. This isn’t a stunt or anything like that. I’m here to learn.”

  “Can you tell us about it, Bert?”

  “Graham, it’s been a fascinating experience, if you know what I mean, but frankly there are many things we still don’t understand. I don’t know why they do it. All that licit love, that regularity. Take the case of Richard and Norma, for example—and incidentally, you don’t want to overlook the significance of that name ‘Norma.’ Norma/Normal, you see?”

  “Say, I never thought of that.”

  “Well, I’m trained to think like that, Graham. In my work you have to.”

  “Say,” Graham Macnamee said.

  “Sure. Well, the thing is this, buddy, when I first came into this bed I felt the aura, know what I mean, the power. I think it’s built into the mattress or something.”

  “Say.”

  “Shut your face, Graham, and let me speak, will you please? Well, anyway, you feel surrounded. Respectable. Love is made here, of course, but it’s not love as we know it. There are things that must remain mysteries until we have more facts. I mean, Graham, checks could be cashed in this bed, for Christ’s sake, credit cards honored. It’s ideal for family reunions, high teas. Graham, it’s the kind of place you wouldn’t be ashamed to take your mother.”

  “Go to sleep, Bert,” Graham Macnamee said.

  “Say,” Bertie said.

  Between the third and fourth day of his stay in the Premingers’ apartment Bertie became restless. He had not been outside the house since the Sunday he arrived, even to bring in the papers Preminger had told him about. (Indeed, it was by counting the papers that he knew how long he had been there, though he couldn’t be sure, since he didn’t know whether the Premingers had taken the Sunday paper along with them.) He could see them on the back porch through the window of Norma’s sun parlor. With the bottles of milk they made a strange little pile. After all, he was not a caretaker; he was a guest. Preminger could bring in his own papers, drink his own damn milk. For the same reasons he had determined not even to answer the phone when it rang.

  One evening he tried to call Klaff at the Los Angeles County Jail, but the desk sergeant wouldn’t get him. He wouldn’t even take a message.

  Although he had not been outside since Sunday, Bertie had only a vague desire to leave the apartment. He weighed this against his real need to rest and his genuine pleasure in being alone in so big a place. Like the man in the joke who does not leave his Miami hotel room because it is costing him thirty-five dollars a day, Bertie decided he had better remain inside.

  With no money left he was reduced to eating the dry, cold remainder of the pizza, dividing it mathematically into a week’s provisions, like someone on a raft. (He actually fancied himself, not on a raft perhaps, but set alone and drifting on, say, the Queen Mary.) To supplement the pizza he opened some cans of soup he found in the pantry and drank the contents straight, without heating it or even adding water. Steadily he drank away at the Premingers’ modest stock of liquor. The twelve cans of beer had been devoured by the second morning, of course.

  After the second full day in the apartment his voices began to desert him. It was only with difficulty that he could manage his imitations, and only for short lengths of time. The glorious discussions that had gone on long into the night were now out of the question. He found he could not do Gimpel’s voice any more, and even Klaff’s was increasingly difficult and largely confined to his low, caressing obscenities. Mostly he talked with himself, although it was a real strain to keep up his end of the conversation, and it always made him cry when he said how pathetic he was and asked himself where do you go from here. Oh, to be like Bird, he thought. Not to have to be a bum. To ask, as it were, no quarter.

  At various times during the day he would call out “Bird lives” in seeming stunning triumph. But he didn’t believe it.

  He watched a lot of television. “I’m getting ammunition,” he said. “It’s scientific.”

  Twice a day he masturbated in the Premingers’ bed.

  He settled gradually, then, into restlessness. He knew, of course, that he had it always in his power to bring himself back up to the heights he had known in those wonderful first two days. He was satisfied, however, not to use this power, and thought of himself as a kind of soldier, alone in a foxhole, in enemy territory, at night, at a bad time in the war, with one bullet in his pistol. Oddly, he derived more pride—and comfort, and a queer security—from this single bullet than others might have from whole cases of ammunition. It was his strategic bullet, the one he would use to get the big one, turn the tide, make the difference. The Premingers would be away two weeks. He would not waste his ammunition. Just as he divided the stale pizza, cherishing each piece as much for the satisfaction he took from possessing it during a time of emergency as for any sustenance it offered, so he enjoyed his knowledge that at any time he could recoup his vanishing spirits. He shared with the squares (“Use their own weapons to beat them, Bertie”) a special pride in adversity, in having to do without, in having to expose whatever was left of his character to the narrower straits. It was strange, he thought seriously, it was the paradox of the world and an institutional insight that might have come right out of the mouth of that slut in Dallas, but the most peculiar aspect of the squares wasn’t their lack of imagination or their bland bad taste, but their ability, like the wildest fanatics, like the furthest out of the furthest out, to cling to the illogical, finally untenable notion that they must have and have in order to live, at the same time that they realized that it was better not to have. What seemed so grand to Bertie, who admired all impossible positions, was that they believed both things with equal intensity, never suspecting for a moment any inconsistency. And here was Bertie, Bertie thought, here was Bertie inside their capitol, on the slopes of their mountains, on their smooth shores, who believed neither of these propositions, who believed in not having and in not suffering too, who yet realized the very same pleasure that they would in having and not using. It was the strangest thing that would ever happen to him, he thought.

  “Are you listening, Klaff, you second-story fink?” Bertie yelled. “Do you see how your old pal is developing what is called character?”

  And so, master of himself for once, he resolved—feeling what someone taking a vow feels—not to use the last of his drugs until the strategic moment of strategic truth.

  That was Wednesday evening. By Thursday morning he had decided to break his resolution. He had not yielded to temptation, had not lain fitfully awake all night—indeed, his resolution had given him the serenity to sleep well—in the sweaty throes of withdrawal. There had been no argument or rationalization, nor had he decided that he had reached his limit or that this was the strategic moment he had been waiting for. He yielded as he always yielded: spontaneously, suddenly, unexpectedly, as the result neither of whim nor of calculation. His important decisions were almost always reached without his knowledge, and he was often as surprised as the next one to see what he was going to do—to see, indeed, that he was already doing it. (Once someone had asked him whether he believed in Free Will, and after considering this for a
moment as it applied to himself, Bertie had answered “Free? Hell, it’s positively loose.”)

  Having discovered his new intention, he was eager to realize it. As often as he had taken drugs (he never called it anything but drugs, never used the cute or obscene names, never even said “dope”; to him it was always “drugs,” medicine for his spirit), they were still a major treat for him. “It’s a rich man’s game,” he had once told Klaff, and then he had leaned back philosophically. “You know, Klaff, it’s a good thing I’m poor. When I think of the snobbish ennui of your wealthy junkies, I realize that they don’t know how to appreciate their blessings. God keep me humble, Klaff. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, a truer word was never spoken.”

  Nor did a drug ever lose its potency for him. If he graduated from one to another, it was not in order to recover some fading jolt, but to experience a new and different one. He held in contempt all those who professed disenchantment with the drugs they had been raised on, and frequently went back to rediscover the old pleasures of marijuana, as a sentimental father might chew some of his boy’s bubble gum. “Loyalty, Gimpel,” he exclaimed, “loyalty, do you know what that is?”

  Bertie would and did try anything, though currently his favorite was mescaline for the visions it induced. Despite what he considered his eclectic tastes in these matters, there were one or two things he would not do, however. He never introduced any drug by hypodermic needle. This he found disgusting and, frankly, painful. He often said he could stand anything but pain and was very proud of his clear, unpunctured skin. “Not a mark on me,” he would say, waving his arms like a professional boxer. The other thing he would not do was take his drugs in the presence of other users, for he found the company of addicts offensive. However, he was not above what he called “seductions.” A seduction for him was to find some girl and talk her into letting him share his drugs with her. Usually it ended in their lying naked in a bed together, both of them serene, absent of all desire and what Bertie called “unclean thoughts.”