by Janet Capron
“I don’t know whether you want to take this call,” Jimmy said, looking more red-faced than usual.
“Who is it?” Michael asked.
“Your mother. She sounds upset about something,” Jimmy said.
In a continuous, sweeping motion, Michael got up, toppling his chair as he did so, walked over to the extension on the wall next to him, picked up the receiver and, with one swift jerk, broke it clean away from the rest of the phone. It was such a pure gesture of righteous indignation, like Jesus taking a bullwhip into the temple. How dare his mother call him at one in the morning here, in the sanctuary, where he was speeding so calmly. Those customers sitting close enough stopped talking and stared, covered with awe. Michael handed the receiver, its severed cord dangling, to Jimmy.
“Tell her I’m not at home,” he said sweetly.
Now his pale face wore that same stunned expression, as if I had done him a great injury. He looked elegant, his lustrous, nearly black hair spilling onto his cream-colored cowboy shirt. And he looked formidable in his wrath, like someone I wished I had never crossed. But what had I done? Was this meant to be a test?
“Dammit. I knew this was going to happen,” he said.
“What do you mean?” It was my turn to appear stunned.
“You’re crazy, Janet.”
Something really was wrong. Ordinarily, he never called me by my name. It sounded too intimate.
“Well, if I’m crazy, so are you,” I said.
“That may be, but at least I’m not disappearing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Go home now. Get something to eat.”
“Go home?”
“You can’t hang out here, not in your condition.”
“What condition is that?”
“All right, let’s take a walk.”
He pulled me out of the saloon and next door to his building. He pushed me up the stairs. Oh, what a relief. He was only joking, or maybe he didn’t want the bar to see how much in love we were. Once inside his hermetically serene apartment, with its angel-white curtains and its lusty red bedspreads, once more in the cool and the dark of it, I felt safe.
“Stay. Don’t move until I get back,” Michael said in a loud voice, as if he were talking to a dog with hearing trouble.
Overjoyed, I sat very still. Then it was true. He loved me, he loved me. I had a vision of us living in the forest in Shaker simplicity. I was wearing an apron and sweeping the wide planks of a hardwood floor with a handmade broom, a bunch of straw tied with a string and attached to a stick. He was outside the house, turning the earth with a spade on the slope of a hill. The entire scene, inside and out, glowed with a singular harmony. We were two halves of a whole.
Then I switched to a heightened version of my current reality: I imagined us sitting at his reserved table night after night, presiding over what remained of the regulars at the Traveling Medicine Show. Not a particularly exalted dream.
Michael returned carrying a paper bag. He put it down in the kitchen and poured me a glass of pure rum with a dash of Coke.
“Here, drink this.”
I sipped it. The hot liquor just booted the speed along in my veins. I almost swooned.
He returned to the kitchen and came back with two take-out plates full of food, which he set on the big wood coffee table. One plate had a liverwurst sandwich on it, the other, congealing fried eggs with home fries. He threw down the side of toast wrapped in white paper.
“Eat something,” he said.
“I can’t.”
“OK, how about a piece of toast?” He held up a piece of white toast dripping with butter.
“OK.” I forced it down.
“Now, how about an egg?”
“No thanks.”
“You better eat something or you’re going to die.”
“Aren’t you being a little bit melodramatic?”
“I don’t think so.”
I bit off a piece of egg and chewed and chewed. It didn’t seem like it would ever go down.
“Maybe liverwurst is easier to take,” he said.
Liverwurst.
“Have you got any downs?” he asked.
“No. I hate downs.”
“Never mind. We’ve got to get you down. I’ll go find some at the store. Don’t follow me. I’ll be back. Here, listen to the radio while I’m gone. Try to rest.”
The radio was playing “Till the Morning Comes” by the Grateful Dead. The refrain was “Make yourself easy, you’re my woman now.” What clearer message could have been sent? I did make myself easy. In passing, I wondered why Michael had seemed so alarmed. It was the look of love I supposed that must have thrown him. I was pure in countenance. I was grace incarnate. It was most likely hard to take.
A lot of time passed. Michael returned with two big red Seconals. He handed my glass of rum to me along with the pills.
“Swallow these. Don’t fight ’em. Go to sleep when they hit.”
He disappeared again. I waited, but the pills did not make me sleepy, they only made me hallucinate more. Michael and me rolling in grassy fields behind the stadium. Michael was a girl and I was a boy. He was a brown-eyed, long-limbed girl with soft lips, and I was a sloe-eyed, downy-faced boy. I was taking her up in my arms...It was the beginning of a Van Morrison medley on the radio. I realized I had been watching his lyrics come alive in front of me: “behind the stadium with you...”
Before long, the shadowy, romantic movies degenerated into a series of garish, jeering cartoons. I decided to focus my attention on the physical world instead. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, objects began to leap out at me from nowhere. A small carving of a bird I never remembered seeing before suddenly appeared where I could have sworn there was nothing a second ago. Things—like the ashtray, an idle vibrator, a pile of books lying flat on the shelf behind the bed—began to unfold before me in a stately procession, as if they had been brought into being by the power of observation. Speed can have this effect, can make inanimate objects seem to happen into existence like events in time. It was getting too busy; I decided I wanted to go. Nevertheless, I debated with myself for a while first, knowing I was taking a risk. Something told me that once on the other side, I might not get back in again so fast, but I was too loose now from the combination of speed, booze, and downs to stay put. When I let myself out, the door automatically locked behind me. Immediately, I regretted my decision. All of a sudden, the night turned ugly. I felt displaced and estranged, as if I belonged nowhere at all on this earth.
“That does it. Get out of here” was all Michael said when I appeared again at the Traveling Medicine Show.
I didn’t budge. He came over abruptly to where I stood and for a second I thought he was going to hit me, but he merely took hold of me and shoved me out into the street. I would have been mortified if I weren’t so overcome with grief. The pain was precisely the same kind of hurt as ordinary heartbreak, only magnified and intensified by the drugs and the madness to a gargantuan, God-mocking degree. The torment was primordially great; it literally took my breath away. I gasped and reeled with it. I staggered over to a lamppost and put my forehead up against the cool metal. I could not take it in. ‘He must be testing me,’ I thought. For one instant, I entertained the possibility that I was crazy, but quickly dismissed it. No, the love was real. I must hang on to that. And God was real. I wrapped myself in a zealot’s faith, in the faith of one who has apprehended God; like the true believers patrolling Times Square, I began to rant. I couldn’t believe Michael’s cruelty. One image remained fixed in my mind: how my true love had stared at me, the whites of his eyes showing, when he pushed me roughly out the door. He was in a silent frenzy.
“Your chosen one is weak,” I said to God and His Mother, referring to Michael and his inability to love me.
“Don’t worry. Be patient,” they said.
“How long do I have to wait?” I was pleading with them.
They never answered me with specif
ics. I went into a fury of frustration.
“How damned long? A week, a month, years?”
The opaque sky blinked.
“What, years? No, I couldn’t stand that. Tell me a year. I could bear a year.”
The night blinked again.
“At the most?”
The black sky revealed nothing. God and His Mother were gone.
The bullet hole in the middle of the glass oval in the front door of Sigrid’s apartment house began to swing and toll like a bell, until I realized it was the methodical beep of the garbage truck pulling up to the curb. Once inside, I don’t know how long I sat on the bed without moving on my side of the partition behind the closed venetian blinds. But I remember it seemed like too much of an effort to acknowledge Sigrid when she arrived home the following afternoon.
She came over, sat down next to me. Her large, generous blue eyes stared into mine. “You’re very ill, Janet.”
“It’s even worse than that,” I said. I was referring to the pain in my heart.
“Yes, I know. Listen, I’m going to call your mother.”
I started. “Oh no, please don’t.”
“But I have to, Janet. I don’t know what else to do.”
“Haven’t I paid the rent? On time? Well then, you’ve got no right...”
“It has nothing to do with that. Please try and understand. You’re gravely ill, Janet, please understand. I have to do something. I can’t just stand by and watch you destroy yourself this way.”
“Why not? What business is it of yours? I have every right to destroy myself, if that’s what you think I’m doing. What’s so great about life anyway? Chummy, cozy animal life. Either you’re eating or shitting or sleeping. And I’ve got news for you, you’re always dying. What’s so goddamn virtuous about longevity? Is it some kind of moral objection you have?”
“No, it’s got nothing to do with morality—”
“Then let me go, friend.”
Sigrid shrugged her shoulders and made as though she were going to pick up the phone.
“All right, all right, never mind. I’ll go, I mean I’ll go home to Maggie’s. I promise, OK? Just don’t call her. I don’t want her coming by here and making a scene. I’ll pack up right now, OK?”
Sigrid came over and grabbed me by the shoulders. “You do promise? To go right home, I mean? You will call me then to let me know you’re OK?”
I shook her off. “Listen, pal, don’t act so concerned when we both know you couldn’t give less of a shit. You’re adding insult to injury now. All you want is to get me out of your hair and I don’t blame you. Just cut the caring act, OK? It gives me the creeps.”
“Janet, since when did you become so cynical? Don’t you believe that anyone could care about you?”
“Hey, stop laying that hippie love shit on me, will you please? Sure, lots of people could care about me. The streets are full of ’em. Now get out of my way while I pack.”
In spite of my recent spree, I still didn’t own much of a wardrobe. I threw what clothes I had in my suitcase along with the few books I had acquired, my sacred speed-inspired labyrinthine drawings, and my precious, cryptic poetry and dragged the thing out onto the street, slamming the door behind me. The fifty- and hundred-dollar bills from underneath the mattress and what was left of the speed in its tinfoil I had shoved recklessly into my jeans pocket. I was caught in a drizzle on a bleak October day that prophesied winter. For the first time in a long time, I felt tired, bone-tired. I was afraid I might collapse. Sigrid watched me from between the slats of the venetian blind while I stood very still in the rain until a cab finally turned down the street. She did not stop watching me until I climbed inside it.
“Seventy-Sixth and Second, please, the northwest corner.”
I didn’t go there willingly; I knew it was hopeless. But it was as if some vicious dybbuk had moved into my soul and was now dictating every humiliating move. I guessed this phase was part of my trial, something I must endure for a greater good.
“Where do you want me to put this bag, miss?” the handsome, young Vietnam vet driver, still wearing camouflage army fatigues, politely asked me as he hauled my suitcase out of the trunk.
“Just leave it on the curb, thank you.”
I tried to act as if I had a will of my own, as if this were not on orders from some hostile spirit that had invaded my being, but I could not march through the door confidently, head high. I could take only a few feeble steps until I was just across the threshold.
“There, that’s as far as I go,” I said to my dybbuk.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, the place was nearly empty except for one or two customers at the bar, the bartender, and Michael, who sat with his feet up on a second chair, his face hidden behind the Village Voice. His hair still damp from his wake-up shower, he was sipping the first rum and Coke of the day, slowly stirring the liquid and the ice together with one long, patrician finger while he held the folded paper against his face with his other hand. He pretended not to see me.
The imperious soul-invader forced me to approach the table where he sat.
“I love you, Michael.”
He lowered the paper and looked at me, and for one instant I thought I saw compassion pouring from the inflated black pupils that were his eyes. Then he snapped the paper open again.
“That’s not my problem,” he said.
I turned and left, my sole intention having been to plant those words on him like a curse before I surrendered to Maggie.
She looked stricken when she saw me shivering wet, and she ushered me through the door as if there were not a minute to spare. Perhaps there wasn’t. Through persistence, Maggie managed to find a doctor willing to come to the house. My old pediatrician, semiretired now, finally agreed to do it. He shook his head when he saw me as if I were one of his uncooperative patients at risk of being denied a lollipop. In spite of his parietal manner, he was a wise old doctor; the first thing he did was to make me get on the balance scale in my mother’s bathroom. I weighed ninety pounds. “Big deal,” I thought, “gymnasts weigh less than that.” But the doctor shook his head again, more vigorously this time. Then, although he had no experience with amphetamine psychosis, he knew enough to take my temperature, which was 105. He gave me a shot of penicillin and a big dose of chloral hydrate, and made me get under the covers in my pink-and-cherry-red bedroom.
‘Not this place again,’ I thought.
I heard the doctor and my mother conferring in the hallway, and I knew it was just a matter of time before she put me away. I could see that one coming, even in my state, even as heavenly zephyrs swooped around my body and a host of much gentler spirits softly sang lullabies. God and His Mother were allowing me to rest.
But sleep, which I wasn’t much courting anyhow, still eluded me. I waited until I could hear Maggie snoring, and then I threw on some clothes and snuck out. I had to pass Oscar, the wall-eyed, arthritic doorman who worked the shift from two until ten A.M., and I was afraid that like a prison guard, he might try to hold me back, but he just said, “Isn’t it a bit late, Miss Janet? Let me hail you a cab.”
When I reached the Traveling Medicine Show, I went and hid under an awning across Seventy-Sixth Street. Whatever I had expected to see, somehow the last thing was Michael emerging before closing time with the Comanche hanging on to his arm. Everyone called her the Comanche because in the sixties she always wore a headband around her long, dark hair.
No, not the Comanche.
She was a cunning woman about my age, with a gorgeous little body and great brown pools for eyes, who always managed to be there when Michael was trying to shake someone loose.
I ran up to them and pulled her away from Michael’s arm. I thought it was a coy move anyhow; it never would have occurred to me to take his arm in such a familiar way, and this in spite of the fact he belonged to me now.
“Jesus, Janet, you scared me, coming out of nowhere like that. What do you want?” the Comanche said.
“Get away from him,” I said, inwardly wincing at my own histrionics.
“What’s the matter with you, honey?” the Comanche said. She sounded genuinely bewildered.
“I said get away.”
“All right, that’s enough. Better leave us alone now,” Michael said.
“Wow, Janet, you flipped or something? I think you flipped,” the Comanche said, and the two of them hurried into his building.
I followed them up the stairs. They shut the door in my face. I reluctantly started to bang against it, not wanting to, but once again in the thrall of that evil force. I banged and banged my fists against the door. Madness procures strength from its own untapped resources, hidden valleys of energy in the brain. I called on those resources now, throwing the weight of my entire body against the door, slapping up against it hard in a relentless rhythm. There was no response. Eventually I sank to the floor and started to wail, scratching at the painted metal with my fingernails. Throughout all of this, I felt as though I were only going through the motions, as though I were a slave to an inferior script, coerced by the bluntest and the crudest of devils into imitating another bad actress in another foolish scene I had witnessed a long time ago.
Finally Michael opened the door. Defensively crossing his arms and hugging himself, he stood against it and looked down at me crumpled up on the ground. I could see the unlikely combination of honest shame and twisted pride dance in his glittering eyes.
“You better get out of here ’cause I just called the cops.”
He slammed the door in my face.
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ I thought, but then I heard their sirens in the street. As I came out, I saw the flashing lights from the tops of two cars that had pulled up in front of Michael’s building. One was parked on the deserted avenue at a right angle to the sidewalk, movieland style. I tried to look dignified, but the cop riding shotgun nailed me. He pulled his big lumbering body out of the car and yelled for me to stop.