The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  Now a terrible thing had happened to me in jail. I was beat on the head by another prisoner, and I lost some of the use of my right eye, so that I am always straining by pushing my neck around as if to try to see better, and when the convict hit me that day and I was unconscious for several weeks and they despaired of my life, later on when I come to myself at last, I could remember everything that had ever happened in my whole twenty years of life except my landlord’s name, and I couldn’t think of it if I was to be alive. That is why I have been in the kind of difficulty I have been in. It is the hardest thing in the world to hunt for somebody if you don’t know his name.

  I finally though got the idea to go back to the big building where he and I had lived together, but the building seemed to be under new management, with new super, new tenants, new everybody. Nobody anyhow remembered any singer, they said, nor any composer, and then after a time, it must have been though six months from the day I returned to New York, I realized that I had gone maybe to a building that just looked like the old building my landlord and I have lived in, and so I tore like a blue streak straightaway to this “correct” building to find out if any such person as him was living there, but as I walked around through the halls looking, I become somewhat confused all over again if this was the place either, for I had wanted so bad to find the old building where he and I had lived. I had maybe been overconfident of this one also being the correct place, and so as I walked the halls looking and peering about I become puzzled and unsure all over again, and after a few more turns, I give up and left.

  That was an awesome fall, and then winter coming on and all, and no word from him, no trace, and then I remembered a thing from the day that man had beckoned me to come follow him into that theater, and I remembered something, I remembered that on account of my landlord being a gay or queer man, one of his few pleasures when he got an extra dollar was going to the porno movies in Third Avenue. My remembering this was like a light from heaven, if you can think of heaven throwing light on such a thing, for suddenly I knowed for sure that if I went to the porno movie I would find him.

  The only drawback for me was these movies was somewhat expensive by now, for since I been in jail prices have surely marched upwards, and I have very little to keep me even in necessities. This was the beginning of me seriously begging, and sometimes I would be holding out my hand on the street for three-fourths of a day before I got me enough to pay my way into the porno theater. I would put down my three bucks, and enter the turnstile, and then inside wait until my eyes got used to the dark, which because of my prison illness took nearly all of ten minutes, and then I would go up to each aisle looking for my landlord. There was not a face I didn’t examine carefully. . . . My interest in the spectators earned me several bawlings-out from the manager of the theater, who took me for somebody out to proposition the customers, but I paid him no mind. . . . But his fussing with me gave me an idea, too, for I am attractive to men, both young and old, me being not yet twenty-one, and so I began what was to become regular practice, letting the audience take any liberty they was in a mind to with me in the hopes that through this contact they would divulge the whereabouts of my landlord.

  But here again my problem would surface, for I could not recall the very name of the person who was most dear to me, yes that was the real sore spot. But as the men in the movie theater took their liberties with me, which after a time I got sort of almost to enjoy, even though I could barely see their faces, only see enough to know they was not my landlord, I would then, I say, describe him in full to them, and I will give them this much credit, they kind of listened to me as they went about getting their kicks from me, they would bend an ear to my asking for this information, but in the end they never heard of him nor any other singer, and never knowed a man who wrote down notes for a living.

  But strange as it might seem to anybody who will ever see these sheets of paper, this came to be my only connection with the world, my only life—sitting in the porno theater. Since my only purpose was to find him and from him find my own way back, this was the only thoroughfare there was open for me to reach him. And yet I did not like it, though at the same time even disliking it as much as I did, it give me some little feeling of a resemblance to warmth and kindess as the unknown men touched me with their invisible faces and extracted from me all I had to offer, such as it was. And then when they had finished me, I would ask them if they knew my landlord (or as I whispered to myself, my lord). But none ever did.

  Winter had come in earnest, was raw in the air. The last of the leaves in the park had long blown out to sea, and yet it was not to be thought of giving up the search and going to a warmer place. I would go on here until I had found him or I would know the reason why, yes, I must find him, and not give up. (I tried to keep the phrase My lord only for myself, for once or twice when it had slipped out to a stranger, it give him a start, and so I watched what I said from there on out.)

  And then I was getting down to the last of the little money I had come out of jail with, and oh the porno theater was so dear, the admission was hiked another dollar just out of the blue, and the leads I got in that old dark hole was so few and far between. Toward the end one man sort of perked up when I mentioned my landlord, the singer, and said he thought he might have known such a fellow, but with no name to go on, he too soon give up, and said he guessed he didn’t know after all.

  And so I was stumped. Was I to go on patronizing the porno theater, I would have to give up food, for my panhandling did not bring in enough for both grub and movies, and yet there was something about bein’ in that house, getting the warmth and attention from the stray men that meant more to me than food and drink. So I began to go without eating in earnest so as to keep up my regular attendance at the films. That was maybe, looking back on it now, a bad mistake, but what is one bad mistake in a lifetime of them.

  As I did not eat now but only give my favors to the men in the porno, I grew pretty unsteady on my feet. After a while I could barely drag to the theater. Yet it was the only place I wanted to be, especially in view of its being now full winter. But my worst fears was now realized, for I could no longer afford even the cheap lodging place I had been staying at, and all I had in the world was what was on my back, and the little in my pockets, so I had come at last to this, and yet I did not think about my plight so much as about him, for as I got weaker and weaker he seemed to stand over me as large as the figures of the film actors that raced across the screen, and at which I almost never looked, come to think of it. No, I never watched what went on on the screen itself. I watched the audience, for it was the living that would be able to give me the word.

  “Oh come to me, come back and set me right!” I would whisper, hoping someone out of the audience might rise and tell me they knew where he was.

  Then at last, but of course slow gradual-like, I no longer left the theater. I was too weak to go out, anyhow had no lodging now to call mine, knew if I got as far as a step beyond the entrance door of the theater, I would never get back inside to its warmth, and me still dressed in my summer clothes.

  Then after a long drowsy time, days, weeks, who knows? my worse than worst fears was realized, for one—shall I say day?—for where I was now there was no day or night, and the theater never closed its doors—one time, then, I say, they come for me, they had been studying my condition, they told me later, and they come to take me away. I begged them with all the strength I had left not to do so, that I could still walk, that I would be gone and bother nobody again.

  When did you last sit down to a bite to eat? A man spoke this direct into my ear, a man by whose kind of voice I knew did not belong to the porno world, but come from some outside authority.

  I have lost all tract of time, I replied, closing my eyes.

  All right, buddy, the man kept saying, and Now, bud, and then as I fought and kicked, they held me and put the straitjacket on me, though didn’t they see I was too weak and dispirited to hurt one cruddy man jack of them.<
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  Then as they was taking me finally away, for the first time in months, I raised my voice, as if to the whole city, and called, and shouted, and explained: “Tell him if he comes, how long I have waited and searched, that I have been hunting for him, and I cannot remember his name. I was hit in prison by another convict and the injury was small, but it destroyed my one needed memory, which is his name. That is all that is wrong with me. If you would cure me of this one little defect, I will never bother any of you again, never bother society again. I will go back to work and make a man of myself, but I have first to thank this former landlord for all he done for me.”

  He is hovering between life and death.

  I repeated aloud the word hovering after the man who had pronounced this sentence somewhere in the vicinity of where I was lying in a bed that smelled strong of carbolic acid.

  And as I said the word hovering, I knew his name. I raised up. Yes, my landlord’s name had come back to me. . . . It had come back after all the wreck and ruin of these weeks and years.

  But then one sorrow would follow upon another, as I believe my mother used to say, though that is so long ago I can’t believe I had a mother, for when they saw that I was conscious and in my right mind, they come to me and begun asking questions, especially, What was my name. I stared at them then with the greatest puzzlement and sadness, for though I had fished up his name from so far down, I could no more remember my own name now when they asked me for it than I could have got out of my straitjacket and run a race, and I was holding on to the just-found landlord’s name with the greatest difficulty, for it, too, was beginning to slip from my tongue and go disappear where it had been lost before.

  As I hesitated, they begun to persecute me with their kindness, telling me how they would help me in my plight, but first of all they must have my name, and since they needed a name so bad, and was so insistent, and I could see their kindness beginning to go, and the cruelty I had known in jail coming fresh to mind, I said, “I am Sidney Fuller,” giving them you see my landlord’s name.

  “And your age, Sidney?”

  “Twenty, come next June.”

  “And how did you earn your living?”

  “I have been without work now for some months.”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Hard labor.”

  “When were you last employed?”

  “In prison.”

  There was a silence, and the papers was moved about, then: “Do you have a church or faith?”

  I waited quite a while, repeating his name, and remembering I could not remember my own, and then I said, “I am of the same faith as my landlord.”

  There was an even longer silence then, like the questioner had been cut down by his own inquiry, anyhow they did not interrogate me any more after that, they went away and left me by myself.

  After a long time, certainly days, maybe weeks, they announced the doctor was coming.

  He set down on a sort of ice-cream chair beside me, and took off his glasses and wiped them. I barely saw his face.

  “Sidney,” he began, after it sounded like he had started to say something else first, and then changed his mind. “Sidney, I have some very serious news to impart to you, and I want you to try to be brave. It is hard for me to say what I am going to say. I will tell you what we have discovered. I want you, though, first, to swallow this tablet, and we will wait together for a few minutes, and then I will tell you.”

  I had swallowed the tablet it seemed a long time ago, and then all of a sudden I looked down at myself, and I saw I was not in the straitjacket, my arms was free.

  “Was I bad, Doctor?” I said, and he seemed to be glad I had broke the ice, I guess.

  “I believe, Sidney, that you know in part what I am going to say to you,” he started up again. He was a dark man, I saw now, with thick eyebrows, and strange, I thought, that for a doctor he seemed to have no wrinkles, his face was smooth as a sheet.

  “We have done all we could to save you, you must believe us,” he was going on as I struggled to hear his words through the growing drowsiness given me by the tablet. “You have a sickness, Sidney, for which unfortunately there is today no cure. . . .”

  He said more, but I do not remember what, and was glad when he left, no, amend that, I was sad I guess when he left. Still, it didn’t matter one way or another if anybody stayed or lit out.

  But after a while, when I was a little less drowsy, a new man come in, with some white papers under his arm.

  “You told us earlier when you were first admitted,” he was saying, “that your immediate family is all dead. . . . Is there nobody to whom you wish to leave any word at all? . . . If there is such a person, we would appreciate your writing the name and address on each of these four sheets of papers, and add any instructions which you care to detail.”

  At that moment, I remembered my own name, as easily as if it had been written on the paper before me, and the sounds of it placed in my mouth and on my tongue, and since I could not give my landlord’s name again and as the someone to whom I could bequeath my all, I give the inquirer with the paper my own real name:

  JAMES DE SALLES

  “And his address?” the inquirer said.

  I shook my head.

  “Very well, then, Sidney,” he said, rising from the same chair the doctor had sat in. He looked at me some time, then kind of sighed, and folded the sheaf of papers.

  “Wait,” I said to him then, “just a minute. . . . Could you get me writing paper, and fountain pen and ink to boot. . . .”

  “Paper, yes. . . . We have only ball-point pens, though. . . .”

  So then he brought the paper and the ball-point, and I have written this down, asking another patient here from time to time how to say this, or spell that, but not showing him what I am about, and it is queer indeed isn’t it, that I can only bequeath these papers to myself, for God only knows who would read them later, and it has come to me very clear in my sleep that my landlord is dead also, so there is no point in my telling my attendants that I have lied to them, that I am really James De Salles, and that my lord is or was Sidney Fuller.

  But after I done wrote it all down, I was quiet in my mind and heart, and so with some effort I wrote my own name on the only thing I have to leave, and which they took from me a few moments ago with great puzzlement, for neither the person was known to them, and the address of course could not be given, and they only received it from me, I suppose, to make me feel I was being tended to.

  SHORT PAPA

  for Barry Horwitz

  When I caught a glimpse of Short Papa coming through the back yard that cold sleety February afternoon I had straight away a funny feeling it might be the last time he would visit me. He looked about the same, tall and lean and wind-burned, but despite the way he kept his shoulders back and his head up he spoke and shook hands like a man who didn’t expect you to believe a word he said.

  Neither Mama nor Sister Ruth budged an inch when I told them who was out on the back porch, but after a struggle with herself, Ma finally said, “You can give Short Papa this plate of hot Brunswick stew, and let him get his strength back from wherever he has been this time. And then you tell him, Lester, he has got to light out again soon as possible.”

  “But, Ma,” I began, “can’t he stay just the night?”

  “Father or not father,” she began, “after what that man has done to us, no . . . I’ll feed him but I won’t take him in, and you give him my message, hear? Eat and get!”

  But I seen that my remark about how after all it was my own Dad who had come to see me had moved Ma more than a little, for her breast rose and fell like it always does when she is wrought up.

  “He’ll only get in more trouble if he stays, Lester, and he’ll get you in trouble too. I do regret to talk against your Papa, but he is a no-account, low-down . . .”

  She stopped, though, when she saw the expression on my face.

  Short Papa sat, hands folded, on a littl
e green wicker upright chair before the round green wicker table as I brought him his hot plate of Brunswick stew to the back porch.

  “Thank you, Les.” He eyed the plate and then took it from me. I can still see the way he ate the fricassee chicken and little bits of lima beans and potatoes. He was most famished.

  “You can assure your Ma I’ll be on my way right after sunset,” he replied to the message I bore from her. “Tell her I don’t want folks to see me in town . . . by daylight.”

  I nodded, looking at his empty plate.

  “Your ma has taken awful good care of you, Les. I observed that right away. I’m grateful to her for that, you can tell her. The day I get back on my feet, son, I will see to it that a lot of the things owin’ to you will be yours. . . . Count on me.”

  I didn’t quite know what he meant then, but I was pleased he felt I deserved something. Ma didn’t often make me feel deserving.

  Short Papa got up from the table, loosened his suspenders under his suit coat, felt in his breast pocket as he kept clearing his throat, and then sat down again as he said, “Matter of fact, Les, I have brought you a little something. But first you best take this plate back to the kitchen, for you know how fussy your ma is about dirty dishes standing around.”

  I rushed with the plate back to the kitchen and on the double back to Short Papa, and sat down beside him on a little taboret which we use for sitting on.

  “I want you to promise me, though, you won’t lose it after I give it to you,” Short Papa said solemnly.

  I promised.

  “Cross your heart and all that.” Short Papa sort of grinned, but I knew he was dead serious and wanted me to be.

  “Cross my heart, Papa.”

  “All right, Lester. Then here it is.”