About Harry Towns

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  “But I am,” she said. Then he saw that she was really petrified and he was very tender with her. She said the cold, antiseptic atmosphere, the glass and steel he was so proud of, reminded her of a hospital ward. “That's because I haven't filled it in yet,” he said. He bought some colorful rugs and pictures and each time she showed up he would ask her if it was beginning to warm up. “A little bit,” she said. He was very fond of this girl and admired the fact that she stood on her own two feet and ran a laugh-sweetening machine. If it was a question of moving someone in, he would have chosen her. And she would have liked being chosen. But at the moment, all he really wanted was sole occupancy of that apartment he loved. He wanted to bring people in and then have them leave.

  One day Harry Towns picked up his boy in the suburbs and brought him back to stay overnight in the apartment. The boy had trick knees and favored his mother around the cheekbones. “I didn't know it was going to be like this,” said the boy, running in and making himself at home. “I thought my father would be in an old ratty place in the Bowery.”

  “I haven't really fixed it up yet,” said Towns.

  “What about this chair?” asked the boy, hopping on a white one and testing it out. “Do you own it?”

  “Yes,” said Towns.

  “Holy cow,” said the boy, socking his head and testing out another. “How about this one?”

  “I own that one, too.”

  The boy tried out each piece of furniture, stopping to ask Towns if he owned it. Towns said he owned them all.

  “Are you ever going to bring them home?” asked the boy.

  “No,” said Towns. “They go with the apartment.” The boy was not really clear on the separation arrangement and Towns had never gotten around to filling him in on it. In truth, he wasn't too clear on it himself. Neither was his wife, evidently. At some point, Towns would have to take the lead and get it nailed down, but for the moment, all that could be said for sure was that he lived in one place and his wife and son lived in another.

  “What happens when you're finished up here? Do you have to give all the chairs back?”

  “No, I keep them. I really do own them.”

  There actually weren't any things for boys in the place and Towns wound up showing his son a bunch of tools, an expensive set he had received as a gift. He didn't use them, but they looked fine and he liked having them around. “What are you showing me them for?” asked the boy.

  “I thought you'd like to have a look at them,” said Towns. “They were made in West Germany.”

  “Well, you don't have to show me things.”

  The boy checked the refrigerator and seemed puzzled by the tins of pâté and caviar and the triangles of Camembert. But then he found a bag of potato chips in the pantry and said, “What a setup. You've got everything here, Dad.” Scooping up the bag, he turned on the TV set and settled in as though he had been living there for years.

  Later, Towns went out for a while. Before he left, he tucked the boy into his bed, feeling a little funny about sticking him in there where all those stewardesses had been. But the sheets were fresh and clean so it was probably all right. The boy had brought along a pair of pajamas but for some reason he wanted to sleep in his clothes. “I think I'll just keep 'em on,” he said and would not explain why. When Towns came back a few hours later, the boy popped open an eye and said a couple of young girls had called but wouldn't leave their names. “What do you mean ‘young'?” asked Towns,

  “They sounded young,” said the boy.

  “Well, they're just a couple of friends,” said Towns.

  He went to sleep on a couch in the living room, glad that he was getting some use out of the sleeping feature of the couch, since it had cost more than any of his other pieces. The next morning he took the boy out to an elegant restaurant for breakfast. It had a garden attached to it and seemed to cater to divorced fathers who had their sons in for the weekend. There were rows of these fathers, all sitting very erectly and talking in a dignified way to their sons who were exceptionally well-behaved. If you closed your eyes, you would not have thought there was a child in the place since the fathers talked to their boys as if they were fellow executives. They seemed to be hurrying their sons along to adulthood so they could fend for themselves and be free of the divorce atmosphere. The fathers all seemed to be terrifically sober, even-tempered fellows; Towns could not imagine why a wife would want to unload the worst of them. Most of them had thinning hair which may have been a factor.

  Even though he tried not to be, Towns, in talking to the boy, was a little more dignified than preferred. The waiter, completely at ease in handling divorced kids, got a big breakfast out on the table, hot and in a hurry. That went over very well with Towns's kid, who graded restaurants on the basis of how fast they got the food out of the kitchen.

  “What did you think of my new place?” Towns asked the boy.

  “Great,” said the boy, “except that I can hardly wait for you to finish up with it.”

  “I'm going to be there for a while,” said Towns.

  “Don't be there too long,” said the boy. “I liked it much more when you were home every night and didn't have to spend all that time in the city.”

  You would think that Towns would not so much get tired of the apartment as start to take it for granted. After all, it was just a place to live, with some great furniture in it. But as the months rolled along, he found he loved it more and more. He loved the heating-and-cooling system and the specially sealed windows and would have sworn that not a grain of pollution ever sneaked in through them. City apartments were supposed to have paper-thin walls, but when Towns turned his favorite saxophone music up very high so he could really bathe in the music nobody made a fuss about it. The music seemed to pour out into the city instead of back into the building. Only when he sneezed did a far-off neighbor holler back, “God bless you.” Towns had a powerful sneeze. The only tenant he ever said hello to was a fellow down the hall who wore bright Haitian outfits. One night, Towns and a stewardess went out into the carpeted halls naked just for the thrill of it. The door almost locked behind them and Towns had to dive at it, landing on his stomach, to keep it from closing. He had nightmares about what it would have been like to be caught out there naked in the halls. What would the fellow with the festive blouses have done if they had knocked on his door? He decided that his neighbor would have taken them in with great good humor while the door was being opened and not called in someone from the tabloids.

  Sometimes it bothered him that he got such great enjoyment out of his apartment. What was he, some kind of apartment freak? Of course, he had never had one of his own before. He had leaped from his mother's house into the Army and then into being married, with no time between for being a guy on his own in an apartment; no question that had something to do with it. When the marriage went down the drain, he took what he called a “poor-student's place” that got knocked over regularly by junkies. On at least five occasions, he had come back to it to find the windows open, the curtains fluttering, and things missing. Not that he ever lost much. It was the terrible feeling of helplessness and violation that got right into the center of him. It got so bad he actually wanted to keep the doors and windows open as if to say, “Take anything you want. I don't care anymore.” Amazingly, he got a lot of his screenwriting work done in this poor-student's apartment. He was just getting started with girls and found a few who went into a delighted heat over how tawdry it was. But it was not really his place. It belonged to a friend who had a great deal of material stored in crates and kept coming back at irregular intervals to take some of the crates out and put others back in. Towns wasn't even curious to know what was in them. In the new apartment, everything, right down to the last ashtray, belonged to Harry Towns. He did not complete any scripts in it, but that would come. All he got out of it was fierce pleasure.

  One day Towns's wife called him and said she wanted to meet him for dinner. She seemed very nervous and got a piece of
her salad stuck in her throat. He helped her by slapping her on the back and the salad piece finally went down, but it pretty much blew the dinner for her. He told her she looked very young and pretty; she picked up the young part, telling him she thought so, too, but did he really think so? Actually, she didn't look that young, but that had never been an issue with him. If it had gone well with them, he would have loved her, wrinkles and all. He would have loved being able to love someone with wrinkles. She took a brave swig of her drink and said that whatever she had to get out of her system she had gotten out and now the thing she wanted most in the world was for him to move back to the house and for them to be a family for as long as they lived. They had had a handful of these meetings before, but Towns believed this one though he had never bought the others. He said he thought it was terrific that she could say something like that to him, but that he wasn't at all sure he could go back to the arrangement she was proposing. He walked her to her car, wondering for a second if he ought to take her up to his apartment and then deciding it was the worst idea of the century. He kissed her good-bye and she said, “Remember, I'll be out there, not doing anything, not going anywhere, just waiting.” He wished she hadn't said that to him. It struck him as being below the belt.

  He went back to his apartment and for the first time he felt awful up there. He had had twinges of loneliness now and then and some uneasiness when he was not able to work, but there had been no way for him to feel seriously low in that place. It wasn't set up that way. Even when he was sick with a virus, he had had a pretty good time of it. She had put him in the position of having to say no to being together with his boy and a terrific wife. The terrific wife part was no joke, either. He had noticed a thin steady line of responsibility in her eyes and he trusted that. But it all had to do with giving up the apartment and each time he thought about that it seemed his stomach would drop like the building elevator. Who would move in and take it over—a sales representative? From Monsanto Chemicals? A couple of fag decorators? Of course he could keep the apartment and they could all use it together, but that idea seemed the worst he had come up with so far. No matter how responsible his wife's eyes looked, he did not want her up there with him and suddenly feeling a little depressed. No one was going to be a little depressed in his place. Unless it was him. Moving his old family in would have been like yanking all of those extraordinary past nights out of his life with a pliers.

  After he saw his wife he felt some pressure to make a decision right that second. He was that way. What he decided was to pour himself a long Scotch on the rocks. Buying an elaborate bar had seemed an extravagance at the time, but now that he had it, it seemed to have been the absolutely right move. He put on some of his friend's saxophone music and sat down on a favorite leather chair with his legs stretched out. This time he really did examine the view and he decided that even if he only checked it once or twice a month it was important that he always have one. Even when he wasn't looking at it, he knew it was out there. He suddenly remembered a spinster aunt who was always falling in love with unattainable men, attractive, but described by the family as being “high, wide, and handsome.” That struck him as being the best description of how he felt when he was in his apartment. He checked his answering service and found out that a girl named Harry had called, a stewardess he had met coming back from Baltimore. He had fed her some quick guru material, saying, “Your name's not Harry, it's Jane,” explaining that if she really wanted to feel released and free of earthly concerns, it wouldn't matter to her whether she thought of herself as Harry or Jane. He didn't have time to work in much more, but she seemed delighted with the little bit he had handed her. Still, he had figured the odds against her calling were six to one against. It was like holding twelve at blackjack and drawing a nine to it. With a hundred bucks on the card. And did he love girls with boys' names! He called her back and made a date for later that evening, picking out a bar that was just a stone's throw from his apartment. Two drinks and he would have her up there with him, checking out the view. The date meant that he was covered for the evening and that now he could sit back and enjoy his favorite time of all, that confident space between now and the time he would pick her up. He would have another drink and then take a delicious nap in the tomblike quiet of his bedroom. No need to set the alarm. He would know when to get up. Then he would take a slow shower beneath one of the world's greatest needlepoint showerheads. If the building asked him for fifty bucks more a month for the privilege of having that showerhead he would have coughed it up without a murmur.

  Now that he felt easier, he thought he saw it all pretty sharply. His wife would never believe it in a million years, but it wasn't the girls so much. It was the apartment and the way he felt up there. He wanted to watch the boy grow and shoot baskets with him and particularly to sit with him at the doctor's office and see that he got the very best care for his knees and that no one gave him the runaround. (The doctor was treating a famed big-league pitcher, only you weren't supposed to let on that you knew this. You were supposed to pretend he was just another doctor.) And Towns wanted a family to sit around with and to take on great vacations to places he had never been. Places like Portugal. He wanted to stand around on a lawn in the country and plant things. Sometimes he wanted all these things so much it was like a physical ache.

  But leave this place? Leave the furniture, the clean smell, the doormen, the special garage with its special key? The view that let you see not one but three bridges if you wanted to? Actually pull out? Leave the girls named Harry? The Kathies and Susies with their long straight fragrant hair and the new style that no longer said I won't kiss you until the second date—the way it was in Towns's day—but had graduated to I won't sleep with you until the second date. And there was a way to get around that, too. Say good-bye to it? The only place in the world where he had ever been totally relaxed, private, confident, king of the city? No past, no hassle, plenty of time, exactly the way those out-of-reach mustached boyfriends of his spinster aunt must have felt—high, wide and handsome? Walk away from it? For what? A kid with bum knees, a house in the sticks, and a wife with a good fifteen years on the oldest cupcake he had ever let through the door?

  No way. But he did have to sit there and laugh for a while at the way he had actually considered the idea. Even for a split second. He must be some patsy.

  When it was good, it was of a smooth consistency and white as Christmas snow. If Harry Towns had a slim silver-foil packet of it against his thigh—which he did two or three nights a week—he felt rich and fortified, almost as though he were carrying a gun. It was called coke, never cocaine. A dealer, one side of whose face was terrific, the other collapsed, like a bad cake, had told him it was known as “lady.” That tickled Harry Towns and he was dying to call it that, but he was waiting for the right time. The nickname had to do with the fact that ladies, once they took a taste of the drug, instantly became coke lovers and could not get enough of it. Also, they never quite got the hang of how expensive it was and were known to toss it around carelessly, scattering gusts of it in the carpeting. Even though one side of his face was collapsed, the dealer claimed there were half-a-dozen girls who hung around him and slept with him so they could have a shot at his coke. Harry Towns could not claim to have enslaved groups of women with the drug, but it did help him along with one outrageously young girl who stayed over with him an entire night. She didn't sleep with him, but just getting her to stay over was erotic and something of an accomplishment. Wearing blue jeans and nailed to him by the sharp bones of her behind, she sat on his lap while he fed her tastes of it all night long. She lapped it up like a kitten and in the morning he drove her to her high-school math class. He wasn't sure if he was proud of this exploit—she wasn't much older than his son—but he didn't worry about it much either.

  If someone asked Harry Towns to describe the effects of coke, he would say it was subtle and leave it at that. He could remember the precise moment he had first smelled and then tried grass—a
party, a girl in a raincoat whose long hair literally brushed the floor, some bossa nova music that was in vogue at the time, a feeling he wanted to be rid of both his wife and the tweed suit he was wearing—but he could not for the life of him figure out when coke had come into the picture. It had to do with two friends in the beginning, and he was sure now that the running around and hunting it down was just as important as the drug itself. They would spend a long time at a bar waiting for someone to show up with a spoon, one of them leaping up at regular intervals to make a call and see if their man was on his way. It was exciting and it kept them together. While they were waiting, they would tell each other stories about coke they had either heard about or tried personally, coke that was like a blow on the head, coke that came untouched from the drug companies, coke so strong it was used in cataract eye operations. Or they would tell of rich guys who gave parties and kept flowerpots full of it for the guests to dip into at will. It was a little like sitting around and talking about great baseball catches. Sometimes they wondered how long you could keep at it before it began working on your brain. Even though they kidded about winding up years later in the back streets of Marseilles with their noses chewed away, it was a serious worry. Freud had supposedly been an addict and this buoyed them up a bit. Also, Towns had once run into a fellow who lived in Venezuela most of the year and had a gold ring in his ear. Rumor had it that he was a jungle fag. Leaning across to Towns one night, he had tapped his right nostril, saying “This one's thirty-six years old.” The fellow was a bit bleary-eyed, but otherwise seemed in good health; the disclosure was comforting to Towns although he wondered why the fellow said nothing about his left nostril.

  Once their contact arrived, they would each get up some money, not paying too much attention to who paid the most. Then they would go into the bathroom, secure the door, and lovingly help one another to take snorts from the little packet. One of Towns's friends was a tall stylish fellow who was terrific at wearing clothes, somehow getting the most threadbare jackets to look elegant. It was probably his disdainful attitude that brought off the old jackets. The other friend was a film cutter with a large menacing neck and a background in sports that could not quite be pinned down. They were casual about dividing up the drug, with no thought to anyone's being shortchanged, although later on, the stylish fellow would be accused of having a vacuum cleaner for a nose. But it was a sort of good-natured accusation. On each occasion, Towns's debonair friend could be counted on to introduce a new technique for getting at the coke, putting some in a little canal between two fingers, getting a dab of it at the end of a penknife, and on one occasion producing a tiny, carved monkey's paw, perfectly designed to hold a little simian scoopful. Towns's favorite approach was the penknife one. The white crystals, iced and sparkling, piled up on the edge of the blade, struck him as being dangerously beautiful. But Towns felt with some comfort that the varied techniques placed his friend farther along the road to serious addiction than he was; Towns made do with whatever was on hand, usually the edge of a book of matches, folded in half. The film cutter had a large family, and occasionally they would tease him about his children having to eat hot dogs because of his expensive coke habit. One night he gave them both a look and they abandoned that particular needle. He had been ill recently, and they had heard that four hospital attendants had been unable to hold him down and give him an injection.