About Harry Towns

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  He had been carrying around that notion of Another Try long before he had heard of Tom Eagleton. He didn't like the quality of his life, and he saw his wife and his old family as a means of protecting him from it. For example, he knew how to get a silencer. Now where did he come off knowing how to get one of those? It was easy to get a gun in the city, but a silencer was another story. A bartender showed him one and said that any time he needed one like it, he could have it for him in twenty-four hours. They came from Jersey. Why did Harry Towns have to know how to get something like that? From sunup to sundown, he had once played baseball in the shadow of a great stadium and dreamed of becoming a serious man. Coriolanus was his favorite play, and now he knew how to get a silencer. One friend was a homicide detective who would drop around to Towns's place without calling and tell him how depressing it was to work with dead bodies all the time. The detective said his best friend was the Te Amo cigar, which neutralized the smell of corpses; he was never without a pocketful. So Towns knew this about Te Amo cigars. Because this was the type of friend he had, the kind of fellow who just dropped by. Towns was fairly relaxed in his apartment, but never one hundred percent, because at any moment, some dangerous person might walk in on him. He knew a fellow with the face of a French mime who stopped pimp cars, flashing a fake badge and a real pistol, then shook down the drivers for entire kilos of cocaine. He would show up in a bar Towns went to, his hands shaking, his heart virtually jumping out of his chest, saying, “I just did it. Come into the john and I'll show you what I got.” He wouldn't give Towns any of the cocaine, just show him giant balls of it in glassine wrappers and then stick out his hands and say, “Look how shaky they are.” The fellow said he wanted to get in a lot of this type of activity, because in six months he was “going up.” It seemed a peculiar way to while away the days before you went to prison. It would have seemed more intelligent to maintain a low profile or to spend some time in self-improvement. For example, by taking a language course. Towns wondered about the prison fags and the possibility of being turned into one, to which the wild fellow with the French mime's face said, “I do take a lot of head.”

  In the shadow of that great stadium, most of Towns's friends were slated for careers in heart medicine, or at least orthodontia. Some had gotten Bausch & Lomb scholarships, and Towns himself had finished high school with a ninety-three average. Now he knew people who were “going up”; bodyguards and fellows who owned hidden pieces of hotels, one of them holding secret title to the twenty-eighth floor of a famed Miami one. He could understand the charm of knowing a few people like this, but not having them become your entire crowd. A girl he knew had been taken to Pennsylvania, sprinkled with cleaning fluid, and lit up. And Harry Towns had slept with her. Found her in a bar, took her home, screwed her matter-of-factly for about an hour and a half, took her back to the bar, where they both went about their business. The decision to keep it casual and matter-of-fact was hers, as well as his. And then she had been set on fire. He had once had his cock in this girl who got burned to a crisp. It had something to do with a kickback on an engineering contract. This gives you an idea of Harry Towns's circle. Another friend was a pimp who showed him two hundred twenty thousand dollars in a pair of shoes. But he didn't offer Towns any. He would turn up in a rented car, carrying a fortune in recording equipment, and play Harry Towns pimping tunes he had written. He wanted to make a switch from pimping into songwriting, and had the idea Towns could smooth this transition. He was a nice enough fellow, but he was also one more of a certain type of friend Towns had. Towns wound up getting him some coke, fixing him up with a waitress, and saying to himself, “Hey, wait a minute, who's the pimp around here?” It's possible that's what made the fellow such a topflight pimp. Because he could get people like Towns to do such things for him.

  An attorney he respected scared the hell out of Harry Towns by saying, rather onimously, “You're getting a little close to the fire.” On the positive side of the ledger, he was friendly with an all-pro defensive linebacker for the National Football League. But examine the circumstances in which they had met. The fellow had walked into one of Harry Towns's bars with a big grin on his face, put an arm around him, and said he wanted to buy them both a drink because he had just received his initiation into back-door sex. In the course of being blown by an Australian hooker, he had let drop the fact that he was an all-pro defensive linebacker for the NFL. “All-pro!” the girl had exclaimed, pausing for a moment. “Turn around.” So Towns knew a celebrated ballplayer, but he would vastly have preferred meeting him in another way. Why couldn't he have run into him, say, in some sporting capacity? The person he knew who boasted the most distinguished credentials was a lady poet who had once bummed around with Ernest Hemingway. Towns felt that this lady was his link to the literary greats of yesteryear. He gave himself high marks for taking her to Chinese restaurants, despite her advanced age. It was a sign of his maturity that he allowed himself to be seen around with a woman who was not exactly a cupcake. But she was hard on him, and made him feel that his behavior was not first-rate and true like that of the literary greats of yesteryear she had once bummed around with. For example, when she ordered fried carp with noodles, her voice was firm, her gaze at the waiter steady, and there was a sense of her having come up with a dish that was first-rate and full of integrity. Whereas, if Harry Towns went for the sea bass with black-bean-and-garlic sauce, she gave him a look of cold steel that said he had done something second-rate and not really true. As he spoke to the waiter, she would crane her head around as if searching the restaurant for some small trace of the honesty and lack of pretense she had experienced in Paris during the Thirties. Hemingway would have picked Towns off as a phony the second he placed such an order, and she was more or less acting in his behalf. So he didn't see her too often. There was a strong chance he fell a little short in the integrity department; he didn't need to have it rubbed in. He sensed that his notion of moving away from waitresses and hookers in the direction of mature women was a sound one, but he did not have much luck with his first tries.

  She may not have known he took any, but he saw his wife as someone who would keep the cocaine out of his nose. She would cross her arms and take up a position that would block the hookers and girl-burners, the people who knew about silencers, and the fellows waiting to “go up” from getting at him. And while she was holding them off, he could get back to being a serious man. This included getting involved in television, which he kept describing as a medium that was ready to “step on the gas.” He had once said this to the lady poet who had bummed around with Hemingway, and she took it as confirmation of what she had always felt about him, that despite his lip service to Camus and Doctor Johnson, he was really second-rate. Ninth-rate, if you wanted to press her on it. Imagine Hem taking the tube seriously. Or Malcolm Lowry, someone else she had bummed around with, only in Mexico. But he would not have to care about her. If he got his wife back, she would be out of the picture. She would be in there with the coke dealers, part of his past life. There was no way, for example, to team up the lady poet and his wife. Each would think the other second-rate, and you would have a stand-off.

  His wife had always said that when and if she ever wanted him back, she would tell him, straight out. So there was a certain amount of risk involved in letting her know he was ready to make the move. She could slap him down. They had an arrangement in which they still went to a few family functions together, her family's and what was left of his. In particular, they went to weddings. These would bring out a certain amount of bitterness in her. During one ceremony, she said, “Big deal. In a couple of years, they'll be fucking other people.” Towns couldn't get over the look on her face when she came out with that one. On the other hand, when they danced, after the ceremony, she would hold him in such a way that he could feel a little thrill to her flesh. He had never felt that when they were together. He took that tremulous little shiver to be her way of saying she wanted him back. So, on one occasion, having test
ed the water, so to speak, he plunged in and said, “Listen …” And she said, “I know … and I want you to.” In what one of his friends had described as “a lightning move with her bishop,” she had sold their old house in the country and taken what he saw as a kind of sliced-off apartment in a thickly ethnic, low-rent quarter of the city. It was a slice of an apartment to him in the sense that half of it was outdoors and terraced and the other half was indoors, long and skinny. He imagined himself having to stand sideways all the time to fit into it. But he had visited it, and it had terrific cooking smells in it and a sense of order. Heavy nourishing stews were always bubbling away on the stove; and there were bulletin-board markings, telling when floor shellackers were due. He looked forward to getting involved in those stews. And it would be nice to have some of those bulletin-board notations relate to him. Maybe he could even ink in a few himself. That would mean farewell to coke and egg rolls, except maybe once in a while on the latter. He sublet his own apartment and decided to store his steel and leather furniture rather than sell it. It may be that he was hedging his bets a little on that one. On the other hand, he loved his furniture, and wondered if you were allowed to visit it in storage. He imagined a warehouse fellow taking him in to see it, leaving him alone with it for a while, then coming back to say, “Your time's up, sir.” Moving some of it to the sliced-off apartment was out of the question. It would be like bringing a few hookers into his wife's apartment, and he didn't want to do that to her. Even an end table or a plant would be hookers. He waited for a rush of emotion as the movers crated up his furniture, and he said good-bye to his old life, but none came. He thought it would turn up when the apartment was bare and he took his last romantic look at the skyline, the view of the three bridges that had cost him at least an extra hundred a month, but it didn't come then either. When a storage man cut the wires of his telephones and told him to take the actual phones along, because they were worth ten bucks apiece, he got a rush, but just a small one. It was a funny time to have that happen, standing in the bare apartment, holding two strangled phones. But that was the thing about him. He never knew when he was going to be touched. While the storage fellows were wrapping up his glassed-in musical-comedy posters, he went into the bathroom and snorted up the last of his coke. If only the storage fellows knew what he was doing in there. Then he headed for his wife's stews.

  The first major event that happened once he had moved in was that his son swiped a giant pencil sharpener from one of the ethnic stores and got traced back to the apartment by a team of detectives. Harry Towns had been out buying some cigars. When he walked in, he saw his teenage son sitting on a kitchen step ladder in handcuffs. Actually, all he saw were the handcuffs. He didn't wait for the story from his wife or the detectives. All he knew was that the handcuffs had to come off. That was worth his life, then and there. Without raising his voice, he communicated this fact to the detectives. There was a good detective and a bad detective, and the good one unlocked them. The bad one, a dead ringer for the French mime stick-up man who was “going up,” was breathing heavily from the exertion of getting the cuffs on. Harry Towns had not done any sober reasoning. He could not get his eyes off the handcuffs, and he could not think past them. They had nothing to do with him or anyone that came from him. They were for other people. His family, his father, his uncles were not handcuff people. So how could his son be? Once they were off, Harry Towns calmed down a little. His son didn't say a word, but simply looked at the detectives with what appeared to be gratitude for confirming feelings he had always had about police. Later, Harry Towns would say something to the effect that they were doing their job, but the boy would never forgive them for putting cuffs on him over a sharpener, one he had taken because he had had three years of bum knees and occasionally did things that were a little out of sync. And he had no dad around to keep an eye on him. He would never forgive them, but he also loved them for letting him hate them. Meanwhile, Harry Towns swung into action. This took the form of getting a distinguished attorney with enfeebled kidneys down to the apartment in forty-five minutes. On a weekend. There was talk about booking Towns's son, but there was also a quiet hint from the attorney that there had been an illegal entry; it was settled by everyone agreeing to sit by silently while the bad detective delivered an uninterrupted lecture to the boy about how he shouldn't grab sharpeners that weren't his, since this style of behavior led to major crimes. It was difficult for Towns to sit quietly during the lecture, but he held himself in check. After the talk, the two detectives shook hands all around and went home. The attorney stayed for a brandy, Harry Towns wondering all the while if his kidneys hadn't been further imperiled by the excitement. How could they not have been? He came to the conclusion that this attorney should restrict himself to a calmer form of law. But he did not think it was his province to suggest this.

  Harry Towns thought it was certainly lucky he was around for this episode. Otherwise, the boy would have had to remain in the cuffs for a long time. Maybe overnight. He had moved back to his family in the nick of time.

  Back at the wedding, Towns's wife had said it would be terrific to get back into one bed again. He was not licking his lips over the prospect, but he was more than willing to go with it. The first time he walked into the bedroom, he saw that she had bought two identical-sized beds and thrown a quilt over them to make it look like one. So technically speaking, it wasn't one bed. And it was more than technical. It meant that someone had to come over to someone else's side. And there was a crevice in the middle. Sometimes he thought of it as a deep one that you could go plunging into, like a skier missing a jump. Later, they would find you at the bottom, crumpled up.

  She made love to him in a dutiful way, which he supposed was an advance over their old days together, when for the most part it was no dice. In a court of law, he would have to say she made herself “available” to him. She was “responsible” in bed, he had to give her that. Just as she was responsible in making neat floor-shellacker notations on the kitchen bulletin board. But he couldn't stir up the shiver and thrill he had felt in her flesh during the wedding dances before they got back together. There were a thousand early reasons for this—and sometimes they talked about them until they were blue in the face—but he had his own theory, and it was one he found difficult to discuss. It had to do with the instant they met. When he first saw her, he couldn't speak. She was so beautiful that nothing in his mouth worked. On the other hand, when she got a load of him, her smile, which struck him as being on the perfect side, dropped a little to the right, although she tried bravely to keep it even. The girlfriend who had fixed them up had led her to believe that he had another kind of face. Once again, bravely, she tried to go with what she saw as his “truckdriver” features, but she had clearly been hoping for someone finer looking. like the cabaret piano player who had been her previous lover. Or would have been, if girls had had lovers in those days. That's where it began, he believed, and that's where it would end. Exhibit A: her face stopped his heart; Exhibit B: he did not look like a cabaret piano player. He didn't care if a massive land army of psychoanalytical giants converged on him with evidence to the contrary, he was sticking to that. It was ironic, too. She was in her forties now, with a new set to her jaw, and if there was anything that stopped his heart, it was her courage in turning herself inside out. Coming out from behind layers of make-up and forgetting about her ankles, which she had always felt were too thick. They were not exactly a favorite masturbatory fantasy of his, but any impartial jury would have found them adequate, if not exactly winners. And they would have had something to say about her throwing over entire decades to fretting about them. But she had cut through the underbrush of her young days, and come out into some kind of clearing. Instead of running off with Greek pilots (the cabaret piano player), she was making floor-shellacker notations on kitchen bulletin boards, whipping up gourmet beef stews, and sneaking in time to help a costume designer on off-Broad way shows. She was dutiful and responsible in bed, and i
f she had any fleeting concern about her ankles, she held it at just that. She had fought her way out of the Pretty Business. She was really something. It was as if she had taken a handful of tank-town rookies, some overage outfielders, gone out of the franchise for a few authentic hitters, and turned this pick-up crew into a pennant contender. The only trouble was that Harry Towns had lost his interest in baseball.

  He did a Cosmopolitan magazine thing one night, staying out late with her and checking into a hotel with no luggage. He fed her cocaine (his idea, not Cosmopolitan's) and predictably, asking no questions, she lunged out for it and swore she was reborn. She tore at him, her body pleading, but she could go only so far with it, and at one point, she drew back, holding his cock, as though in mortgage, and asked him to say he would never use it on anyone else. As her part of the bargain, she would take care of it. He asked her if she would please give his cock back, because he didn't feel like making that kind of promise to anyone. He didn't see any need to. It was all very desperate. He wanted to be with someone he didn't have to make that kind of promise to. If and when he found that kind of person, there wouldn't be any need for promises. And it followed he wouldn't go passing it around, either. And what if he did once in awhile? How would it affect Western civilization?