Tours of the Black Clock

by Erickson, Steve;

  37

  HANKS’ CLUB, THE TOP Dog, takes up the second-to-the-top floor of a brownstone on the West Sixties, between Columbus and the park; the only floor above it comprises Hanks’ various offices. The club has heavy crushed velvet curtains and an oak bar, European paintings and glass separating the booths, chiseled in each corner with the design of a rose. The women smoke from small ivory-and-silver cigarette holders and a guy in a dinner jacket begins playing the piano in the corner around nine. The veranda stammers with light. Sometimes standing before the windows I’ll remember when I could see the span of my life’s time from such windows. In these windows I don’t see any such thing. I see New York City.

  38

  LEONA CHECKS THE COATS at the Top Dog. She’s dark and dimpled, not one of the really beautiful women of the club but not plain either. The first time I see her, which is about five minutes after the first time I walk through the door, I know I’ll have her, I know she’ll be my first woman. I may have to work at it, but not that hard. She stares at me the whole night.

  This begins my career as the doorman for Doggie Hanks. I wouldn’t make too much of it, it’ll only last about fourteen months and not once in that time do I see anything particularly interesting. “Just how shady is this?” I ask him one night, and he says, “Prohibition’s legal now, kid,” a non sequitur but I know what he means. The clientele is a mix of the completely respectable and the faintly dubious, none necessarily any more suspicious than the clearly underage doorman. I’m never called upon to escort anyone out, though a couple of times Doggie does suggest I sort of shift my attention in the direction of someone who risks getting out of hand. I guess the mere sight of me is always enough, which is the way Doggie likes it. “And he’s smart too,” he’ll say to this person or that. “So let’s see him do something smart,” the other person will say, and Doggie retorts, “He doesn’t have to do anything smart. You can just take my word for it.”

  I have Leona my second week, one night after the club has closed. We’re back among the coats that got left behind by people too inebriated to remember them. Because it’s my first time I’m a little nervous, it’s probably not the most impressive performance. Still, Leona screams like she’s being impaled; when I begin to stop she croaks in my ear, “Don’t you dare, don’t you dare.” She wants the light off but I have to leave it on because in the dark I see these things I don’t want to see, the faces of Indian women, and I hear these things I don’t want to hear, voices from the dark of a doorway; so the light stays on.

  Leona wants me to go home with her afterhours but that isn’t what I have in mind. For a month or two I sleep at the club on a couch in one of the offices upstairs until I get some money together for a room. I begin to do what I’ve been waiting to do. For a while I do it on a table in the cloakroom and later when I get my own room about seven blocks from the club, a room all of ten feet by twelve, with a bed and small dresser for my clothes and a table by the window, I do it there. Then I work up the courage to borrow the typewriter in Hanks’ own office and in the early mornings around six or seven o’clock I teach myself how to use it, one slow finger at a time, until I’ve finished with what I’ve already written out by hand. When Doggie catches me in his office he’s not very pleased about it; for the first time he scares me. Billy the driver happens to be there and is extremely amused. “Sorry,” I can only say, “didn’t mean anything.” Hanks is smoking mad. “Didn’t mean anything,” I keep muttering, “sorry,” over and over. Hanks nods to Billy. “Solicitous as hell,” he says. Billy guffaws.

  “What’s this?” Hanks picks up my old beatup issue of Savage Nights next to the typewriter. He shakes his head. “Our fucking doorman’s making with the words,” he says to Billy, then he throws the magazine down and sighs deeply. “You want to use the machine it’s OK, kid,” he says, “but not in my office. You can take it down to the cloakroom where you’ve been boinking my check-in girl.” I look at him surprised and he says, “Yeah I know about that, too. Look, don’t get it into your head there are things it’s better for me not to know about. There’s nothing that it’s better for me not to know about.” He looks over his shoulder at Billy and turns back to me smiling. “When you’re done with the machine, Billy will bring it back up for you.” All the amusement goes right out of Billy’s face. I want to laugh out loud.

  Sometimes when I’m typing in the cloakroom Hanks sits out in the empty club in a booth with a girlfriend, or a business associate; then he comes by and sticks his head in. Or I’ll finish up and while Billy’s carrying the typewriter into the office, pale and fuming, I catch a glimpse through the door into Doggie’s private washroom, and he’s standing there with a razor in his hand and his face white with cream. As he shaves it smooth and rinses the razor he calls out to me and asks how the words are coming. Over the months I make up stories about some of the people who come into the club, once or twice I’m stupid enough to ask Hanks the wrong question as a bit of research. Like if he’s killed many men. I never figured him for a somber man, but he answers somberly, “You’re talking like a little kid now. Who I’ve killed and whether I’ve killed isn’t a joke.” I’m appalled by myself at this moment, but eight years from now it will seem small potatoes, compared to the mortifications to come.

  39

  BUT THEN IN 1942 I’ll come to find myself oblivious to self-mortification. I’ll come to acknowledge it in principle even as I never quite feel it. I don’t guess in 1942 I’m aware of anything except the room in Vienna where I ravish you over and over while the most evil man who ever lived watches us. I don’t suppose anything ever really shakes me until the night I watch my wife and child hurl themselves to oblivion as some kind of price for saving you and me, a woman they never knew and a man the depths of whose soul they never felt the way they deserved. Both of us from a pact which perhaps I chose, perhaps I didn’t.

  Damn the consequences of my acts, it’s the consequences of my words I love and loathe. I wrap them like a rope around a man’s neck, or thread them like a string of pearls up through the middle of a woman’s womb.

  I don’t know whether I’m supposed to feel bad for Pennsylvania, I only know I don’t. I cleared the decks of that almost instantly, making room for the evil to come. I admit it’s a little appalling that it doesn’t cross my mind hardly ever. Maybe Henry deserved dying, maybe my father and Alice and Oral deserved what they got too, but there’s an odd silence where my conscience should be wrestling with it. It’s like a man atomizing into nothingness hundreds of thousands of men and women and children, maybe in a little city somewhere, maybe Japan, maybe two little cities in Japan, maybe in the name of something righteous, maybe in the name of ending some larger barbarism, but then claiming that he never has a moment’s doubt about it, he never loses a moment’s sleep. Never in the dark does he see a face or hear a voice calling him. But then, that happens in your Twentieth Century. Not mine.

  I’ve come now to see and hear things only when I fuck a woman in the dark or write words on a white page. It doesn’t mean I stop feeling the havoc of my fingers. I write to the music of Henry’s head sloshing when I broke it. My first story, there in the cloakroom at Doggie Hanks’ Top Dog, is about a man who kills his woman on a New York City backway. He kills her at the story’s beginning, but the story isn’t about him, it’s about her. She’s telling the story and goes right on telling it after he’s killed her, and goes on telling us how she longs for him still. When he sleeps at night she strips him on the bed, ties him to the bedrail with his shirt and makes love to him with her mouth. He wakes up and all he can see is that he’s tied naked to his bed and bleeding. His thighs and belly are covered with blood and he cries out in terror at his dying. In fact he isn’t dying at all. In fact the blood isn’t his but hers, she’s still bleeding from the top of her head where he bashed it in. But he can’t see her at all, he only sees the blood that he assumes is his own; and the sight of it, the image of what he believes is his own death, as well as the myster
ious inexplicable climax he comes to from a sucking he cannot fathom, literally stops his heart. I also manage to work in some social observations of life in the streets of Manhattan.

  I work in dread of every word I write. It leaves me abysmal and burdened rather than released. When I lie down to sleep I have to put the papers away, where I can’t reach or see them. When I finish I don’t wait a minute with it, but take it right down to the offices of the magazine, so as to have it out of my life.

  40

  THE MAGAZINE BUYS THE story for forty dollars. That’s the long and short of it, actually there’s a great deal of fussing and hesitating and general screwing around that goes on several weeks. First they don’t believe I’m really writing stories, because I don’t look like someone who writes stories, then they don’t believe I wrote this particular story, then they’re trying to figure out what to do with a story like this. This then is the second career which comes of standing around Jerry’s newsstand on the afternoon Jerry’s wife had a stroke; and the first career, as Doggie Hanks’ doorman, provides me the resources with which to pursue the second. The second will lead to the third, which will take me away from my country for more than thirty years. But that’s almost two years away: it’s now early 1935. I’m writing for the pulps. The stories are a cut above average and my rate goes up from forty dollars to fifty, but the secret of success is writing lots of stories; I don’t have the energy. Also, I don’t know anything. What do I know? I know how to destroy the manifestations of my youth in a single night. Out of it I write stories I can barely stand to hold in my hands, after which I travel for days inside my own black hour.

  T.O.T.B.C.—5

  41

  I MAKE A FATEFUL and entirely conscious decision right at the beginning. This decision is to put across the top of my stories the name Banning Jainlight. I know that this has got to catch up with me, I can read the papers. The Philly papers have run a couple things, and Philadelphia just isn’t that far away. They’ve heard of Banning Jainlight there. Maybe I’m just not willing to be a tourist anymore. Maybe I’m not visiting anymore. The name goes where I go, bad or good. Maybe I keep it in defiance of Oral and Henry in that hut, Alice and my father thrashing on the ground beyond the licks of the flaming house, maybe I keep it to defy my mother who disappeared into the night, when she should have disappeared sixteen years before and taken me with her. Then I wouldn’t have been Banning Jainlight at all.

  Sooner or later someone’s going to come. Little man, big man, whoever. I remember them already, actually. They’re still about twenty months into the future but I already remember them coming out of the night, down the street: “You know someone named Jainlight?” they say to me out of the dark. Little man. Big man. I turn and run. I hear their footsteps running after me, rounding the last corner of 1936.

  But now in the spring of 1935 after I’ve been working for Doggie almost a year, I’m at the club one night early before the crowd has come in. Not much is going on, Doggie’s just strolling up the aisles and Billy’s with him, and Billy’s thinking very hard, hard enough to practically launch his head from his shoulders. When they’re close to me Billy says out of the blue, but so that Hanks will hear it, “So: Jainlight.” Just like that. First time he’s ever used my name, and I know it’s come to mean something to him.

  I’m leaning in the door reading a paper. News all over the front about Germans. I don’t even look at Billy.

  Billy’s eating a toothpick and talking around it. “Heard they’re looking for someone named Jainlight in the Pittsburgh area: that’s what I heard. A big redhead kid about six foot somethin’. Went on a rampage one night wiped out his whole friggin’ family.” He gazes off for a moment even though there’s nothing of interest in his line of vision except a bourbon glass on the bar that’s empty anyway. Doggie looks at him in confusion and then at me.

  I look up from my paper now. “The news is fascinating these days,” I say, “take these fucking Germans for instance. I was under the impression we taught them what’s what around the time I was being born. Anyway, I can barely tear my attention away from it.”

  “A big redhead kid named Banning Jainlight,” says Billy.

  “Banning Jainlight is my alias,” I say, “must have been the real Banning Jainlight you heard about.”

  Billy turns his gaze in my direction; now he appears a bit befuddled. “The real Banning Jainlight?”

  Doggie’s looking at me, then at Billy. “You heard him,” he says to Billy, “the real Banning Jainlight. In parts of Pennsylvania there are probably several.”

  “I know sixteen or seventeen myself,” I say.

  Billy can’t believe it. He looks at Hanks and then at me and scowls; his nostrils actually begin to flare.

  “Say, why don’t you take a walk,” Hanks says, putting his hand on Billy’s shoulder. Then he turns and pulls me by the arm toward the cloakroom. All the way I’m looking over my shoulder at Billy and Billy’s looking over his shoulder at me.

  Leona’s been waiting in the cloakroom to ambush me, she has my coat halfway off my body before she sees the boss. She flushes and tries to sputter something ridiculous. “Give us a few minutes, OK, sugar?” Doggie says. When she scampers out he takes a long time looking at me. We’re in the dark and about all we see of each other are our eyes. For a moment I think I’m going to see fear, for a moment I actually think he’s going to be afraid of me. I guess he sees something too. “The whole family?” he finally says.

  I don’t want to sound like I’m justifying anything. “I think,” I’m whispering, “I think we might more accurately say part of the family.”

  “Oh,” says Doggie. In the dark I see him nodding. “Only part.” He nods.

  Over and over in my hands I’m rolling a picture of the chancellor of Germany. “My mother wasn’t even my mother,” I blurt.

  “OK,” he finally says, and now I definitely think he’s a little afraid. He doesn’t entirely comprehend but he’s managing his doubts into shapes he can live with. He turns around and, leaving me there, walks out, and I wait awhile in the dark of the cloakroom thinking about everything. Leona comes in and throws her arms around my neck, I shrug her off. I go out into the club, I want to find Billy and say, I’m your Banning Jainlight and always will be; but he isn’t there.

  42

  I DON’T STAY AT THE Top Dog much longer. I leave for several reasons, not because of Billy, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, but Leona’s becoming a nuisance, she’s always around, and a couple of times when I wind up spending some time with other girls, a waitress in a luncheonette over on Seventh Avenue and another of the girls at the club, it causes problems. Doggie doesn’t like it either. But the main reason I leave is that this third career comes along. The editor at the magazine tells me about it rather confidentially one afternoon. He says it involves writing books and when I say I can’t come up with a whole book, he says he thinks I might actually be pretty good at these kinds of books, given the stuff they have to cut out of my stories. A whole book of that kind of thing, that’s what they want, he tells me. I’m still a little thickheaded about what he’s driving at. “Books,” he says, “they don’t put out on the shelves, books you have to ask for and they pull them out from under the counter.” Now I know what he’s driving at but I still can’t quite see it, and then he tells me the pay starts at a dollar a page and is guaranteed to go up if they like what I’m doing.

  Who “they” are remains a little ambiguous at first. At the outset they’re nameless dealers dealing for other dealers dealing for … who knows. Some of the stuff is sold to anyone who walks in and asks for it and some of it is commissioned by private collectors. I figure I know even less about this particular area than I do gangsters. But I come to learn that the less I know the better. I just sit at the typewriter laughing my head off. That’s when I know I have something going.

  I guess that’s why I do it. To write something I don’t dread. I set myself a schedule, every morning squeezin
g another cup out of the coffee grounds that have been sitting on the bookshelf the last month and then knocking out three pages about whatever or whoever was in my head all night, reducing every nightmare and misunderstood impulse to something I can laugh at. Three pages every morning of someone fucking Molly or Amanda, this morning it’s a gangster who’s having her and tomorrow it’s a Prussian sergeant, the morning after tomorrow a cannibal chieftain. Next week it’s a man from Mars and the week after that it’s somebody dead. After lunch I labor on whatever I happen to be doing for the pulps, and then I have to take my mood out into the city and walk it off, have dinner, stand outside the dancehalls and jazz clubs listening to what’s inside. Sometimes I’ll see Leona on her night off, other times it might be someone else. The sheer heft of me either attracts them or sends them running for cover. It weeds out the squeamish. If nothing happens with someone it doesn’t matter, I go back to my room and write a couple more pages, at this rate it takes a month to finish a book and then I set off to deliver it to a man in a backroom at Charles and Bleecker in the West Village.