by Ward, Robert
But now … now … our house was truly a House of Pain, and only this new house, the house on Chateau, felt alive to me. I had found friends, other outlaws who were heading out for some strange new world, but who were also, in their own wiggy way, taking the best of the old world, too, or at least I hoped they were. Yes, Raines reminded me in his own way of Bobby Murphy. He was smarter than Bobby, and he hadn’t fallen prey to the Baltimore curse of hating anyone who didn’t come from your neighborhood, but unlike the academics, he hadn’t cut himself off from the real world, like (and even thinking this, I felt like a criminal, a betrayer, an ingrate) Dr. Spaulding.
As soon as I had those thoughts, I was tortured. I had to be careful and I dimly knew it. I did love books, I did love reading, discussing them, and I couldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I had to know my own world, the world of down and dirty Baltimore. It occurred to me that night as I finally circled back toward Chateau Avenue that I couldn’t “transcend Baltimore” (as Dr. Spaulding always preached we must), but rather I would have to love it, as Raines truly loved it, love it for all its brashness, its stupidity, its down-home friendliness, its crab cakes, its marble stoops, its fat women in muumuus saying, “Hiya, hon … How bout Johnny U., in’t he the greatest?” Yes, I had to embrace it all if I were ever going to write about it well, and more importantly than that, I would have to love it if I was ever going to really be a man.
I roamed around for three or four hours and didn’t get back to Chateau Avenue until after ten o’clock. The place was quiet, and when I walked up the dusty Victorian steps to the second floor, I saw that Jeremy’s door was closed. From inside, I could hear the sound of John Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things.” Raines played that song night and day now. I started to rap on the door, but then I heard a low giggling coming from inside, the sound of Sister Lulu Hardwell’s voice saying, “Jeremy … Jeremy … baby …” and I just smiled and moved on down the hall. It was good to be home. I had grown to love everything about the old house, the scarred furniture, the ridiculous barber chair, the musty smell of dustballs. It was all funky and Bohemian, and I told myself as I crept down the hall that I would never live any other way. Still, I worried a little about Lulu and Jeremy’s relationship. What if she really fell for Jeremy? He surely didn’t take her seriously, but it was possible on her side, all too possible it seemed to me. And on the more practical level, what if Dan the Trucker showed up again after finding out Jeremy had lied to him? That seemed more than a little likely. Good God, half the time we didn’t even bother locking the front door. What if the lunatic decided to storm the house with his nice little crowbar? I decided I would have to mention something about this to Jeremy first thing in the morning.
But meanwhile, I badly needed sleep. I was deeply exhausted. Nothing takes it out of you more than reinventing yourself on a daily basis, and I half staggered to my door and pushed it open, longing for my bed.
But my room wasn’t empty. It was pitch dark except for one candle and the exotic smell of incense. And there in my bed was Val sitting stark naked, holding a book of poems by William Carlos Williams.
I felt my heart pump wildly. God, she was as beautiful as some romantic cliche. Her skin was literally like alabaster, her breasts were so perfectly shaped, her mouth was a bow of desire and playfulness. The red hair that framed her face looked like an arc of fire and her red pubic hair made an enticing V to her perfect, muscular thighs.
“I thought you’d never get here,” she said in a purr.
“Val?” I said. I wanted to add something else, something suave and hip and memorable, but my lips couldn’t form any words. I moved to the bed quickly, shedding clothes on the floor, and then I was there with her, holding her, kissing her face, rubbing my hands across her perfect back, and I wanted to cry out I was so happy. I kissed her nipples and put my finger into her satiny cunt. Lord, let it stay like this forever and ever, and then I started to penetrate her, but she pulled away: “I have this little problem,” she said. “I should have told you the other night.”
“What is it?” I said. Though I hated myself for feeling this way, images of Greek sailors swarmed through my mind.
“Well,” she said, nuzzling next to me. “The problem is I like you a lot. I really like you. I don’t usually like to fuck guys I like this much. It leads to tragedy and pain and heartbreak and crying jags and broken records.”
I rubbed my fingers through her hair and laughed. I had no idea what to say, how to handle this, or at least, the old Tommy (of, say, a week ago) wouldn’t have, but having won the Miss Kissable Lips contest for my mother, it seemed easier to deal with the whole problem by becoming someone else again. I smiled and stroked an imaginary black moustache.
“You wish I was Greek sailor named Nikos?” I asked in some kind of terrible Zorba the Greek accent. “Okay, I be Nikos. I so glad you here to velcome me to your country. Thank you so much. Now how bout sex, American wild thing?”
“You’re terrible. You act like a scholar, but underneath you’re like all the rest. You only want pussy.”
“Nikos cannot help self,” I said. “Nikos is peasant. Peasant love only to dance and drink Retsina and eat pussy.”
“You’re a horrible man,” she said. But she was laughing.
“You laugh, Nikos laugh. You dance, Nikos dance, too.”
I leaped up on the bed and started to dance. My cock and balls sprang around doing their own folk dance.
Val laughed wildly and leaped on the bed with me. We held hands and jumped up and down and yelled, “Hayo, hayo, hayo,” like cornball Hollywood Greeks.
“Nikos love you.”
“Val love Nikos,” she said.
Then we screamed and threw each other down on the bed and started fucking like Greek gods.
“I do love you,” she said as I went inside her. “That is the problem.”
“No problem for Nikos,” I said.
She shut her legs and pulled her ass and perfect moist pussy away from me.
“Don’t be Nikos,” she said like a little girl. “Be Tommy.”
“But you don’t like Tommy,” I said. “He pipe-smoking liberal. He like T. S. Eliot. He a drag. I be Nikos. We dive for clams.”
“No,” she said, putting her hand under my chin and pushing my head up. “Nikos is an idiot. I want Tommy back. I demand Tommy, and I’ll only give my throbbing wet cunt to Tommy.”
“Tommy here, Miss Lane,” I said, smiling at her like innocent sweet Jimmie Olson.
“Be Superman, and fuck me until I cry,” she said.
“Golly, yes, ma’am,” I said. Then I put on my cape and bit her lip until blood came, and we fucked in lust in love, and I was dead gone, gone, gone … Oh, Lord, sweet Miss Val Jackson.
In the morning I propped my head up on one elbow and stared at her sleeping. Long-lashed, pug-nosed, she looked like a veritable angel. I kissed her gently on the eyes, and she smiled and curled closer to me.
“My own poetic angel,” I said. Then I thought of her screwing Nikos down by the docks. I pushed that thought from my mind. I was a bona fide Bohemian now. I had left the safe straight world forever, and in this new life people were braver, which is what I wanted, and yet the very thought that this perfect being, this saint, could be down on the docks with some Greek sailor….
No, I would not let myself think it. I was going to be a new, improved Tommy, yes, yes, I was going to love sex and love the fact that she had had sex. I was going to purge myself of all Father Knows Best, Doris Day, Good Housekeeping, “Leave It to Beaver,” Methodist Girl Next Door fantasies.
I patted her sweet head. I kissed her eyes again.
Only a fool questions good luck on this order. Only an idiot ruins a good thing.
I put one innocent arm around her shoulders and with my other hand reached in between her legs. Oh, Lord, the softness, the wetness. I felt my cock harden, and I rolled over on top of her. She put her arms around me and began to lift her perfect flat stomach u
p toward me.
Then I heard a crash and a scream and what sounded like a gunshot.
I leapt from the bed. Val’s eyes opened in blue panic.
“What the hell?”
“It came from Jeremy’s room!”
We both leapt from the bed and found our tangled clothes lying in great heaps on the floor. Then, still half-dressed, we raced from the room and down the dark hallway toward Jeremy’s. My mind was filled with a bloody tableau. Dan standing with a smoking gun over the bloody fallen body of my friend. Seconds later as we got into the hall, we heard another shot, and I pulled Val back and leaned on the door, my heart beating wildly. It slowly opened and I looked inside. Jeremy was sitting in his bed, naked to the waist, but at the foot of the bed stood a man whose back was to me.
“You are gonna die, Raines,” the man said. “You are gonna fucking die for this!!!”
He held up his right arm, and I gasped audibly as I looked at a stump where the desperate man’s hand should have been. The man heard my shocked gasp and turned quickly before I could make a move. When I saw his face, I gasped again.
The crazed, stump-armed man was not Trucker Dan after all, but none other than our friend Eddie Eckel.
“Come in here you two. You are going to be witness to a murder!”
I did what I was told, my heart quaking. Val moved slowly in behind me. No one had ever held a gun on me before, and I was no Philip Marlowe. I remember my back muscles tightening in a spasm and a cold sweat breaking out on my chest.
“Now, Eddie,” I said in a surprisingly calm voice, “it seems there’s been some misunderstanding. We’re all good friends here.”
“No!” Eddie screamed. “That’s history! Do you see this stump? Do you?”
I could have scarcely missed it. He had put the terrifying thing right in my face and was running it back and forth under my nose.
“Do you know how I got this? Do you?”
He was screaming very loudly now.
“No,” I said. “No, I do not know.”
Jeremy moved a little on the bed, and Eddie turned and waved the gun menacingly at him. Then he pulled the trigger and the gun roared.
“No!” Val screamed.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
Jeremy fell backward and didn’t move.
“Oh, Christ, you’ve shot him!” Val screamed. “Oh, Jesus …”
“No, I haven’t. Get up you son of a bitch.”
Slowly, Jeremy sat up. Then I saw that the bullet had lodged in the wall to the right of the bed.
“No, I haven’t shot him yet,” Eddie said, grimacing like a madman. “But I am going to. I am going to shoot him piece by fucking piece for what he did to me, man.”
“What did he do?” I said, my knees knocking together.
Now Jeremy spoke for the first time. And he seemed calm, even bemused by the whole thing. Indeed, I don’t know what shocked me more—Eddie’s gun or Jeremy’s reaction to it.
“He has a case, I’m afraid, Tom,” Jeremy said in an amiable tone, as if he were discussing whether we should eat hard or soft crabs for dinner. “You see, if you recall, we had an arrangement. Eddie went to Tangier to buy hashish and I was to wire him the buy money. Then he was going to purchase as many pounds as he could get and we were going to have a lifetime supply and still be able to sell some of it off and …”
“Only he didn’t send me any money!” Eddie screamed. “He didn’t send me a dime, and I had to live on the rooftop of a horrible hotel in Tangier and I had to drink piss!”
“Drink piss?” I said. My knees had stopped shaking. I was becoming interested.
I held onto Val’s waist and could feel her heart thumping through her black silken blouse. I turned and looked at her and realized she was standing here in black bikini panties, and I thought, “God, if he kills us, someone will write a headline in the News American, ‘Three Slain in Hipster Love-nest,’ but I lost interest in the thought pretty quickly as Eddie turned, waved the gun at me again, and started babbling wildly:
“In fucking Tangier, the rooftop was the only place to sleep if you didn’t have any goddamned money, and it was covered with junkies and dopers from England and Amsterdam. Them and batshit-crazy Africans who played fucking cowbells and chanted all fucking day and night. Not to mention faggots who screwed each other up the ass and screamed out their little love cries in French and 105-pound speed-shooting hookers. Yeah, and there was this fountain up there, this old tile fountain with a big fucking goldfish in the middle of it. I mean this water was foul and horrible, but this great goldfish stayed alive in it somehow, after all the other fish had died. The British junkies called him Superfish, and I had to drink water from this fountain for two days because I didn’t know where else to get any. But it turned out that these junkies and other scum up there, they pissed in the fountain every night, so I was drinking piss. Well, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I called here every goddamned day to find out when the money was coming, but I never got any fucking answer from my great friend Jeremy.”
“Well, that’s because the phones were temporarily out, my boy!” Jeremy said, smiling affably.
“Bullshit!” Eddie said. “Man, I trusted you, I trusted you and got the shit beat out of me, and I lost my fucking hand!”
There was a long silence after he said that.
“How did you lose your hand?” Val said coolly.
“Because I didn’t have any money—because he didn’t send me any money—I decided to steal. It was the only thing to do. How else would I ever get home? There was a guy on the roof. His name was Hadji, and he was a drug dealer. A great fat wasted pig of a man. He used his own opium, and he was always wasted so I thought I could steal his money, which he kept in a little sack tied around his waist. I waited until he was asleep and crept across the roof and I moved inch by inch up to him and then slowly, slowly I opened the sack … and I reached inside …”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
“And the money was in there all right,” Eddie said. “It was fucking in there. But there was also something else in there.”
“What?” I said, sitting down on the end of the bed.
“A snake!” Eddie said. “A poisonous coral snake. It bit me. Because you fucking didn’t send the money.”
Now Eddie remembered the gun. He aimed it at Jeremy Raines and shot again.
This time the bullet was much nearer to the mark. It hit the headboard, just to the right of Jeremy’s ear, violently splitting the wood. Jeremy, however, barely flinched.
“Eddie,” I said. “Put down the gun. Really, man.”
“I lost my fucking hand because of him,” he screamed. “You want me to forget that? The venom hit me so fast, man. I thought I was done. But the fat dealer, Hadji, he woke up, and he looked at me and he shook his head and he said, “I should let you die for stealing, but I feel generous tonight. I feel benevolent, like the gods, so I am going to save your life.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
“Four of them grabbed me, and they took me over to the fountain and put my hand on the tiles, and another guy got an ax and—Christ, I thought at first it was some kind of joke—I mean this could not be happening to me, but then I saw the looks on their faces, they were fucking laughing man, I mean they loved it, man, they chopped off my fucking hand! I passed out and woke up on the street with it all bandaged up. I still don’t know who saved me.”
I began to feel a little faint. Everything had started to look like watercolors.
“How did you get home?” I said.
“I finally got through to my parents, man, and they got me the money. But I lost my hand. And now you gotta die, Jeremy.”
He squinched up his face and aimed the gun again, but then stopped and brought it down to his side.
“There’s one more fucking thing I want to know before I kill your lying ass,” Eddie said. “Why didn’t you send me the money, man?”
Jeremy looked hard at Eddie and then an extraordin
ary thing happened—a tear came down his face. But it wasn’t as if he was begging for his life, not at all. It was as if he had somehow taken Eddie’s pain—the pain of losing his hand—into his own body, into his own soul. His face had taken on an almost saintly pallor.
“I won’t lie to you, Ed,” he said in a low grave voice. “I did not send you the money because I became so involved in my work with the cards at Hopkins and the other accounts and … with our new deal with Kodak.”
That stopped everyone in their tracks.
“Kodak?” Eddie said in spite of himself. “What deal with Kodak?”
“The deal I became obsessed with. I told a Mr. Harvey Spence, a vice president of Kodak, about our I.D. cards and he said the company has become more than a little interested in bankrolling our whole venture.”