Marilyn the Wild

by Jerome Charyn

  Gorillas from Mulberry Street were cruising Rupert’s neighborhood with firm instructions in their heads. Amerigo Genussa of the Garibaldi social club had warned them not to return to Little Italy without some token off the body of Rupert Weil; an ear, a fingernail, a Jewish bellybutton, anything that would leave him incapacitated for the next ten years. Rupert could see them in their long gray coats, huddling on Suffolk Street while they blew between their knuckles to soften a chill that was murderously close. A rotten wind off the Bowery must have pushed them onto Rupert’s heels. He had no respect for gorillas. The idea of bullying for profit was loathsome to him. He would have hurled Esther’s chair off the fire escape, watched it float down on top of their brains, if he hadn’t been in such a rush.

  He climbed out of a cellar window at the back of the house. The gorillas could blow air for the rest of their lives; the snot would have to freeze in their noses before they could find Rupert Weil. He ran to the pickle factory on Broome. The merchants had lit a small fire on the premises to keep their pickles warm. The brine coming off the barrels stuck to Rupert’s heart. He would have liked to soak his ears in a barrel. A fat man snorted at him with obvious disgruntlement. It was Tony Brill. The journalist had been waiting near the pickles for an hour.

  “Gimme,” Rupert said.

  “First talk. What did it feel like beating on Isaac’s mother?”

  Rupert glowered at the journalist “It didn’t feel. We had to smoke out Isaac. That was the necessary thing.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  “You a creep?” Rupert said.

  “But you almost killed her.”

  “Na. She fell. She hit her head. That wasn’t us … listen, it’s not so hard to kil when you got Isaac for a teacher.”

  The journalist removed a collection of dollar bills from his pocket, twenty singles that he’d borrowed from his landlady and his current employer, an underground newspaper called The Toad. “Now tell me your story,” he said, his tongue twisting in his mouth. “All of it. You, Esther, and Stanley Chin.”

  Rupert said, “Tomorrow.”

  Spit leaked off the journalist’s face. “Are you crazy? Are you insane? It could snow tomorrow. I could die of the flu. Money talks. I’ll take the story, or the twenty bills go back to me.”

  Rupert was halfway to Ludlow Street “You’ll get it,” he shouted, the dollars squeezed inside his fist.

  The journalist was trying to keep up with him. “Rupert, do you ever dream about Isaac’s mother?”

  “Only when my stomach is empty.”

  “How often is that?”

  “Every other night”

  Stanley Chin couldn’t have lunch or dinner without two detectives at his side. These gentlemen ate his stewed prunes. Stanley ignored the nurses’ harping about the state of his bowels. He was their favorite prisoner; the nurses of St. Bartholomew’s could adore a delinquent with a beautiful face. But his bowels shrank after detectives Murray and John told him Sunday’s news: the Jew girl, Esther Rose, had eaten powerful mayonnaise at Headquarters; the medical examiners had tweezed her eyebrows off the wall. The detectives poked behind their ears. They worked for Big Jew Rosenblatt, but they wouldn’t cry for Esther Rose. They’d handcuff this China boy to the bed if they had to. They were expecting Blue Eyes. Isaac had to send his “angels” down to kidnap Stanley Chin. The Chief was losing face.

  Stanley was beholden to detectives Murray and John; he couldn’t reach very far with fingers stuck in plaster mittens. So Murray, John, or a nurse had to put the water glass against his lip, change his pajamas, turn the radio on and off, take itchy mattress hairs off his leg. The detectives noticed Stanley was in a rotten mood. He hadn’t asked them to scratch his back once during their last three shifts. His biceps were growing haggard. The ropes of muscle in his neck had gone to sleep. He had Esther in his guts.

  It was no puppy love, the passion of a Hong Kong boy for a girl with white skin, an Anglo from Brooklyn, an ordinary “round eyes.” It had nothing to do with pale colors. Esther was darker than him. She had sweat in her armpits, a generous damp run from her shoulders to her elbows that made Stanley sneeze a lot. She couldn’t have enticed him with her frizzy hair. And it wasn’t her religious training (he’d never heard of Yeshivas before Esther Rose). It was a clutter of things; the throaty rasp of her voice, the way she rolled her sleeves, her ability to argue ancient and medieval philosophies (Esther knew the lore of five or six Arab priests), the grab of her nipples under her one dark shirt, the shape of her toes, the sores she had on her arms and knees from painting ceilings with chalk, the chalkings themselves, lashes of color that exemplified bitter mouths, long tongues, and hard, swollen genitals that grew and twitched without relief. The horrors Esther manufactured on a ceiling or a wall comforted Stanley; they were shriekings he felt inside his own head.

  He’d been dreaming of Esther with a pill the nurses had stuck in his mouth, a yellow thing that he would soon squash under his tongue, when he saw a wizard come into the room, a wizard with bony ears, in a St. Bartholomew orderly’s coat a size too small, pushing a wheelchair with his sleeves. The wizard steered around the detectives’ triple-tone shoes. “Pardon me,” he said. Detective Murray didn’t care for the orderly’s tight cheeks, but he wouldn’t contradict hospital rules.

  The wizard smiled. “Therapy room. Help me get him off the mattress.”

  Detective John raised the slats of Stanley’s hospital bed, and the two detectives sat him down in the wheelchair with a soft push. John growled at the orderly. “You be careful with Stan. We want him back alive.” Then his natural suspicion came out “Hey sonny, what floor’s this therapy room on?”

  The wizard started to pull the chair. “It’s on the roof. By the solarium.”

  Stanley was giggling before they arrived at the door. “Rupert, where’d you get the outfit, man?”

  “Quiet,” Rupert said, wheeling him into the corridor. “I stole it from a laundry closet”

  “What about the chair?” Stanley said, shaking the armrests.

  “That I got from the nurses’ station.”

  “Out of sight … Rupe, the detectives in there, they would’ve shot your face off if they figured you was Rupert the lollipop. They got no brains. But they were nice to me.”

  They found a ramp that took them to the main floor. Rupert ordered nurses and hospital men about. His official gruffness seemed to cut through the illogic of a boy leaving St. Bartholomew’s in a wheelchair, with plaster on his fingers and toes, and pajamas. Rupert spilt him into a taxi cab by angling the wheelchair against the door. The cabby wanted to fold the wheelchair for the boys. “Leave it,” Rupert muttered. They bumped across the flatlands of Corona. The exhilaration was gone. Thinking of Esther, the boys grew morose.

  The cab was alive with static that rubbed off Stanley’s knees; he couldn’t snuggle into the upholstery without suffering little electrical shocks. Rupert seemed strange to him with sunken jaws. Up to a month ago he’d been Stanley’s pudgy messiah. It was torture for Stanley to read a book (the English alphabet made him gag), but Rupert could pull meanings out of any text. He chased off instructors at Seward Park with his deliberations on Coleridge, Karl Marx, and Shakespeare’s corpse. The world was suicidal for Rupert. He got Stanley to sense the polarities between Manhattan and Hong Kong. The rich climb higher, Rupert said, and the poor shake like roaches at the bottom of the can. They squeeze one another and die. Stanley tried to resist Rupert’s attitude. “How you know Hong Kong?” he said. “You been there, Rupe?” The messiah sucked on his cheeks, which were fatter at the time.

  “Schmuck, I want Hong Kong I look at you.”

  Stanley could have broken Rupert’s ear. He could have taken off a nose with one hooked finger. He could have severed Rupert from his scalp, Indian-style, by pushing at the temples until this messiah felt the burn in his skull. He respected bookishness too much. He kept his fingers out of Rupert’s face.

  The messiah didn’t fail. He di
scovered a locus for his cause: Isaac Sidel. The Chief had come back to Seward Park on Career Day to give the key address. Rupert pointed to the stitching on the great man’s sleeve (Isaac wore his Riverdale coat). “There’s the cunt who rules us all.” Isaac sang about opportunity, about the openness of his Headquarters to fresh ideas, about the job of a detective in New York; he brought the pretty boy with him. He paraded Coen. The girls ogled in their seats. Blue Eyes was asked to show his gun. Rupert and Stanley shrank down inside their row. The venom passed from boy to boy; their tongues were raw.

  The cab couldn’t make it to Chinatown. Mott Street was clogged with celebrants. So they had to disembark on Canal. Rupert lent his body as a crutch. Stanley could only take short hops on his mittened toes. They approached Mott from Bayard Street Firecrackers roared around their ears, puffing their faces with smoke and impossible noise. Rupert shivered with the deafness that invaded his head. Street dancers, wearing dragon masks with molded eyes and horns that reached the fire escapes, slithered behind the boys, forcing them into johnny pumps and the windows of fruit and vegetable shops. They laughed at the banners of the Fell Street Republican Club, honoring the New Year with slogans that had been shot through with cherry bombs.

  With Rupert crouching low, they picked their way across the gutter and landed at the New Territories tea parlor, a hangout for gentlemen from Hong Kong. Rupert had to shove a bit. He seated Stanley at a counter decked with oranges and tangerines. No one smiled at the boys. Rupert began taking dollar bills out of his pocket. “Here,” he said, crushing the singles into Stanley’s pajamas. “I got to split. We can’t be ten blocks from Isaac’s office. I don’t need detectives sitting on my tail.”

  Stanley scowled at the mittens on his fingers. “I wish I could help you, Rupe … give Isaac an earache that wouldn’t go ’way.”

  “Ah, forget about it. Isaac’s my baby.”

  Stanley felt a touch on his shoulder, and Rupert was gone. He shook off images of Esther by ordering shrimp balls and bean curd soup in strict Cantonese. Watching the Hong Kong bachelors with their rice bowls next to their chins, he realized the futility of his situation. He couldn’t hold a fork (chopsticks would have crashed into his lap). The shrimp balls arrived. Stanley wouldn’t grovel with his face on the counter, licking under the dough for pieces of mashed shrimp. He couldn’t even drop the shrimp balls into his soup. Gesturing ferociously with his mouth, he was able to steal a cigarette. He smoked, leaning into the counter, trapped on his stool. He couldn’t have gotten to the door by himself.

  A line of faces peered at him from the window. One by one the faces registered a grin. Stanley thought of whiskered cats. These boys had short hairs stuck on their chins. They were the Snapping Dragons. Joey, Sam, Sol, and Marv could have been the names of Yeshiva boys. That’s how Stanley figured. With a stiff-legged walk, their bodies knifed into the New Territories café. The air turned thick with the fragrance of oranges and Hong Kong soap. The bachelors drew their knees together to accommodate the Snapping Dragons of Pell Street, who overturned napkin holders and mustard pots with a swish of their winter jerseys. The Dragons surrounded Stanley Chin.

  “Aint this a trip. The man himself.”

  “How’s it going, Big Stan? Do you still love all the ‘round eyes’?”

  “He looks sad without his lollipop.”

  Marv was the quiet one. He took a fork from the counter and scraped it against Stanley’s thigh. The other three Dragons scrambled for silverware. Sam tried to force a shrimp ball down Stanley’s throat. Joey fed soup inside the neck of Stanley’s pajamas. They grabbed the dollar bills. Stanley had his weapons. He could whip at them with an elbow. He could rupture a Dragon with his teeth. But he couldn’t maintain his balance. He fell off the stool going for Marvin’s nose. The boys began to trample him. He had a heel in his kidneys. He was swallowing blood. Four Dragons stood on top of him. Then they got off. He heard them say “Mother.” The winter jerseys floated out of his reach. Somebody had frightened them away.

  Stanley couldn’t find who his savior was. He saw strings of oranges. He peeked right and left. The café floor nudged the bones in his skull. The bachelors were sloppy with their rice. His mittens were dirty. His mouth hurt. Soon he was muddled in overcoats. Three men had picked him up. They could only be cops. Even with blood in his nose he recognized Isaac’s blue-eyed detective, Manfred Coen. This cop had a way of creeping into Stanley’s life. Blue Eyes, Stanley wanted to say. Bubbles came out. Rupert hates you, Mr. Coen. Manfred wiped the blood with an embroidered handkerchief. Stanley bit down on the handkerchief to release the pressure in his nose. He didn’t want to sneeze blood on a camel’s hair coat. Blue Eyes had tender pinkies. He could massage a boy’s skin under a bloody handkerchief.

  13.

  BRODSKY had been glowering at transvestites for the better part of an hour. He couldn’t direct his rage at the Chief. Isaac scrounged on Times Square when he was due at Headquarters for a press conference to celebrate the recapture of Stanley Chin. Talk about sleuths. Isaac was the only cop at Headquarters who had the brains to guess where Stanley would run. A Chinese boy goes to Chinatown, Isaac announced, while Cowboy Rosenblatt had his tongue in his ass, shoving detectives through Brooklyn and Queens. Ten minutes after the dispatcher gave Isaac the news of Stanley’s flight from St. Bartholomew’s, a squad of “angels” led by Manfred Coen walked from Centre Street to Mott, scooped the lollipop out of a Chinese cafeteria, and delivered him to the prisoners’ ward at Bellevue. And now Isaac the Just was sleepwalking on Eighth Avenue.

  “Downtown, Isaac, that’s where we belong. Why are you pussying up here?”

  The Chief ignored him. He was looking for a girl. Honey Schapiro had fled the coop again, disappeared from Essex Street to rejoin her pimp. Isaac wasn’t on an errand for her father now. Mordecai could play his own shepherd. Isaac wanted information from the girl. The Chief couldn’t squeeze Esther out of his mind. Living with Ida and Marilyn in two congested rooms, he imagined Esther Rose sitting naked on a floor with her finger in a mayonnaise jar.

  “Isaac, there she goes.”

  They trapped Honey Schapiro between two Cadillacs. She had eyelashes on with thick corrugations that couldn’t have been contained in a fist. You could see the imprint of her crotch through the flimsy material of her skirt “Screw,” Honey said, seething at Isaac. “My father’s man.”

  Five pimps, “players” in floppy hats and suede coats that brushed against their ankles, came down the block to rescue Honey. Ralph, her old protector, was one of them.

  “Brother,” he said, “why you annoying an innocent girl?” With four other “players” backing him up, Ralph could afford a touch of arrogance.

  Brodsky interposed himself between Isaac and the “players.” “This isn’t a pinch. It’s a friendly conversation between my Chief and Honey Schapiro. So walk away, or you’ll lose your pimping hats.”

  Isaac snatched Honey up from the bumpers of the Cadillacs and deposited her on the sidewalk. “Tell me about Esther and Rupert Weil.”

  “Fuck you.”

  The “players” chortled under the protection of their hats.

  “Honey, have you ever been to the Bronx juvenile house? The lady wardens have ticklish thumbs. They turn girls into zombies. You’ll wake up with a baldie head. The wardens like to explore with pliers. Do you know what it means to have a bleeding nipple?”

  Honey was petrified. Her shoulders wagged.

  “Give me Esther’s pedigree … You must have grown up with Rupert. What’s he like?”

  Honey scratched around her eye. “What do you want from me? I never saw them get it down together. Rupe, he came out of the crib pretty weird. With a chessboard tattooed on his belly. Call that normal? It takes Rupert to pick a mama who’s a bigger fruit than him.”

  “Did Esther say anything to you?”

  “Yeah, she said I should save my cunt for the proletariat Shit like that. Who asked her advice?”

  The five pimps f
igured Isaac was a crazy man; why else would he interrogate a bimbo in the street? Brodsky had his own suspicions. Isaac was stuck on a dead girl, a lollipop who would have been happy to kill him. “Chief, it’s getting late. Those crime reporters have no loyalty. They’ll interview Cowboy if you aint there to satisfy them.”

  The First Dep’s sedan remained on Times Square. Brodsky had to go inside the Tivoli Theatre to scratch around for Wadsworth, Isaac’s milky nigger. The chauffeur came out alone. He popped his head through Isaac’s window. “Wadsworth says he don’t sit in police cars. He’ll meet you in the lobby. That’s as far as he goes.”

  Isaac sent the chauffeur into the Tivoli again. “Brodsky, tell him I’m hurting today. I’m too nervous to breathe the air in a movie house.”

  Wadsworth sneaked into the sedan; he sat up front with Isaac, while Brodsky dawdled under the marquee, staring at the bosoms on a signboard near the ticket booth. Wadsworth kept hunching into his seat. He had the pink eyes of a captured flounder. He wouldn’t greet Isaac in Yiddish, or English. Isaac had to speak.

  “Wads, I wouldn’t pull on your shirt without a reason. You know that I need. The Guzmanns stole a corpse away from me. They’re meddling in my affairs. I don’t want their dice cribs, Wads. Let them gamble in peace. Just tell me where the local whore market is, the place where the Guzmanns can trade in all the little girls they snatch from the bus terminal.”

  Wadsworth wouldn’t shift from his corner. He showed Isaac a crumpled palm. “Put a razor in my hand, why don’t you, Commissioner? So I can slit my throat before the Guzmanns get the chance.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Wads. I’m not looking for a bust. I’ll lean on the whore merchants, that’s all. The Guzmanns will never know who my source is. How could they? And why curse me with the title of ‘Commissioner’? I’m just a lousy chief.”

  “Isaac, Zorro doesn’t sleep with his ears in the ground. You tap his marketplace, and he’ll know.”