Marilyn the Wild

by Jerome Charyn

  Mordecai had a guest. Only a moron would visit you in the middle of a squall. He opened his door to a phantom in Cordovan shoes. A Manhattan snowdrift couldn’t influence Philip Weil’s queer sense of fashion. Philip came in his church clothes, Scotch plaids and tight gloves. Always the dapper hermit, in Mordecai’s estimation. Their friendship had soured over the last twenty years. Without Isaac to cement them with his bearish charm, they slipped apart.

  “I didn’t expect you, Philip. I would have prepared. But it’s hard to shop in a storm. I hear the A & P is out of goods. People hoard, you know. They want to safeguard their deliverance. You can’t blame them. If you’re old, you remember the hard times. And if you’re young, you have a brutal imagination.”

  “Don’t be alarmed, Mordecai. I didn’t come to steal your salt herring. Tell me about Honey. Has Isaac found her yet?”

  “Isaac’s a big man. Why should he help me twice in the same month? He drinks tea with commissioners. He rides in limousines. He knows the best opera stars.”

  “So he isn’t perfect,” Philip said. “He can still find Honey for you.”

  “Sure, stick up for him. He could have saved Rupert, but he didn’t. I begged him. ‘Isaac, go to Philip. Philip needs you.’ Does a Chief listen? He has special wax in his ears to make him deaf to old friends.”

  “That’s how a policeman survives. He shuts out certain noises. Do you expect him to redeem every wandering boy in New York?”

  Mordecai glowered at the fineries of Scottish wool. “And how do you survive? Philip, it interests me. You sit home morning and afternoon. You can get pimples on your ass from so many daydreams. It’s no picnic sorting mail in a post office, but it keeps me occupied.”

  “I don’t daydream, Mordecai. I watch soap operas, I browse in Rupert’s library, I play handicap chess against myself, I polish my shoes. My mornings aren’t dull to me.”

  Mordecai despised talk of handicap chess. He couldn’t tolerate Philip’s eccentricities today. But he smiled at the joke in his head. “We’re dunces,” he tittered out. “We could have put together a small family of Schapiros and Weils. What’s wrong with arranged marriages? Rupert and Honey. They wouldn’t have crept so far.”

  “Why curse fifteen-year-olds with marriage?”

  “Hypocrite, your boy wasn’t sleeping with that Yeshiva girl? Everybody knows the Sephardim are a little crazy. They’re more Arab than Jew. Did you want that in your family?”

  Mordecai was ranting to an empty room. Philip had gone back into the storm. “Fuck him,” Mordecai said. “He’s too much of an aristocrat to fight with me.” But Mordecai couldn’t find much solace in his schnapps. The cucumber was pulpy in his mouth. He wouldn’t get through the winter without his girl. Let her be a whore, he reasoned flatly, staring at the buttons missing from his robe. Whores can manage a needle and thread, whores can sew. Mordecai was exuberant. If enough pimps died in the storm, Honey would have to come home.

  Cowboy Rosenblatt couldn’t withdraw to the Rockaways, where he was keeping house with a Polish widow who owned a chain of hardware stores. There were no exits out of Manhattan that Cowboy could use. Rows of abandoned cars blocked every bridge, and the subway lines into Brooklyn couldn’t unsnarl themselves; no train got beyond Flatbush Avenue.

  The Chief of Detectives had made provisions for the storm: he wore his thermal underwear. But it couldn’t exempt him from the wind that howled through his suite of offices, rattled his many drawers and his great supply of lamps, hurled pencils off his cabinets, toppled wastepaper baskets, and bit into his secret files. The lamps began to twinkle around 8 P.M., and Cowboy’s office went dark. He groaned his way to the outermost room, calling for some lieutenant with a flashlight, or a match. “Where is everybody?” he shouted. “Son-of-a-bitch.”

  He strolled out on the landing, clutching the bannister rail. Dark stairs couldn’t intimidate him, a man with two guns, a superchief, three thousand detectives under him. He was dreaming of his Polish lady, and the empire of bolts and nuts he would soon share with her, Rosenblatt the hardware king. He felt a shiver in the rail. Cowboy was no mystic; wood didn’t shiver on its own. Another policeman had to be moving up or down the stairs. A match sputtered near Cowboy’s thighs. He saw a pair of cheeks in the shadows, a burrowing forehead, the broad nose of Isaac the Just. Cowboy fondled the pearl on his. Colt He could have shot out Isaac’s eyes.

  “Isaac, you shouldn’t walk these steps without an escort. God forbid, you could fall on your face. Where’s Coen?”

  Isaac let the match go out. Cowboy leaned into the bannisters.

  “Push me, Barney. I’d love the ride. But remember I have a gun next to your ribs. It sits at a funny angle. If you shake me hard enough, it could explode in your groin.”

  “You’re an animal, Isaac, that’s what you are. My family comes from a line of cantors, all holy men. The Rosenblatts raised three synagogues in Brooklyn alone. You, Isaac, you suck garbage in the street.”

  Isaac brushed past him without uttering another word. Cowboy kept to the rail. Where could he go? Should he run to the cellar and kibbitz with the fingerprint boys, or throw himself into the storm and tunnel a path to the property clerk on Broome Street? He decided to stand still. Tinkering with Isaac brought him to the subject of daughters, Isaac’s and his own. The Chief of Detectives was crawling with lecherous ideas. He had an insane urge to make Marilyn the Wild, get inside her clothes, chew her nipples, scratch her armpits, drop sperm between her eyes. He’d avenge his daughter’s ugliness on Marilyn’s body. Cowboy had to grub through Brooklyn locating a husband for his Anita, nab a struggling bachelor older than himself, wed his last daughter to a man with rotten teeth and a swollen prostate, while cunty Marilyn flew from her husbands and had an affair with Manfred Coen. The world wasn’t right. Cowboy had been passed over by whichever angel distributed charity to fathers in the boroughs of New York.

  A hand swished against his jacket. Cowboy jumped. A flashlight snapped on. It was one of his “crows.”

  “Boss, what are you doing here?”

  “Idiot,” Cowboy said, “I’m airing my pockets,” and he took the flashlight away.

  Rupert plunged from snowbank to snowbank. His progress was minimal. It took him half an hour to go from Essex to Orchard Street, two skinny blocks. He couldn’t see the end of his thigh. He would sink down to his hip pockets with every forward push. He had to wiggle with all his might to rise out of the snow. Rupert was disappointed in the Mulberry Street gorillas. They couldn’t keep up with a growing boy. He shook them without having to disguise the stab of his sneakers. He left tracks in the snow that an elephant could follow.

  Not all of Rupert’s plunges were successful. He landed in a snowslide that carried him off his feet. He couldn’t get out of the drift. At ten miles an hour he could carve a path with his ears. Coming into a patch of firmer snow, Rupert held on, and found himself overlooking the signboard of Melamed’s Grand Street department store. Rupert was amazed at the fury of moving snow; he must have flown twelve feet off the ground. The signboard couldn’t be any lower than that.

  The wonders of a snowslide began to wear off. Rupert became depressed. Melamed’s reminded him of his former struggles, when he and Esther had been put at the mercy of a store detective, maybe a month ago. They were shopping for clothes in Melamed’s underwear department. Rupert made a little belly for himself, stuffing boxer shorts under his shirt Esther was the brazen one. She squeezed an entire load of lollipop pants through the neck of her blouse, and toured Melamed’s with a hump on her back. A short rabbi with curling sideburns and a black religious coat, who had been sifting through the barrels of underwear together with Rupert, came behind Esther Rose, mumbling “Pardon me,” and clapped a handcuff on her wrist. Rupert gawked at him. The rabbi tugged, his politeness gone. “Girlie, shake a leg, before I tear your arm off.”

  The rabbi dragged her up three flights to Melamed’s detention cell, a cage about four feet high, designed to humiliate s
hoplifters, forcing them to live with their shoulders bent, while the assistant manager called the police. Rupert stalked the cage, testing the thickness of its wire mesh. The rabbi plucked off his sideburns and shed his religious coat, coming into the natural grubbiness of a store detective with tobacco between his knuckles and spit on his tie. Rupert couldn’t pierce the mesh. Esther screamed, with her forehead under the detective’s ribs. “Daddy, I have to pee.”

  “Pee as much as you like,” he said, muggering at her. “You aint coming out”

  Shoppers began to collect around the cage. Esther dipped her thighs and peed. The shoppers backed off, their mouths widening with disgust as Esther’s urine streamed towards them. The detective couldn’t be swayed. The urine traveled under his leg in two long fingers. “You’ll wipe it up, sister. With your tongue.”

  Esther unbuttoned her blouse. The shoppers crept back to the cage, standing in pee to gape at a shoplifter’s nipple. The detective skipped in front of Esther, screening her with his arms; even a touch of nudity in the cage might cost him his job. He unlocked the cage door and prepared to handcuff Esther again. He shouldn’t have turned his back on Rupert. As Esther moved into the door, her blotchy, pissed-over skirt clinging to her thighs, and her neckline plunging below her bosoms, Rupert dug his teeth into that portion of the detective’s heel resting outside the hump of his shoe. The detective howled, losing the handcuffs, grabbing at his wounded foot. He was still in Esther’s way. She had to tweak his testicles before she could slip between him and the cage. The shoppers had never met such a vicious girl. They pinched their bodies in to avoid fouling themselves with Esther. She shoved Rupert towards Melamed’s escalators, helping him bounce off the metal tips of the stairs. Esther wasn’t finished with Melamed’s. She had more lollipop pants and a huge, impractical girdle when they arrived at the main door. Esther hadn’t gotten off totally free. It took a week for her shoulders to unbend.

  Rupert crawled to a different snowbank. It was easier to launch himself with his fists. Having no gloves, he stretched the sleeves of his coat. Rupert enjoyed the heights; the snow was mushier near the ground. He could see into living rooms, touch the fire escapes, eat a crisp hunk of snow. Crossings didn’t matter to him; traffic lights blinked their colors. Rupert snuffed at the warning signals. He was perfectly safe on Grand Street. Cars and buses couldn’t ride over a mound.

  Crawling with abandon, snow in his eyes, he bumped into the window of a live poultry market. Rupert was a vegetarian. He despised the smell of roasted flesh. The idea of meat darkening in a stove made his gums twitch. The only flesh Rupert would have nibbled on was Isaac’s. No lie. He’d have gone cannibal for Isaac the Pure.

  He saw young roosters, hens, and rabbits in the window. The roosters were the lords of the market. They lived two in a cage, while the hens were piled four and five deep, sitting on each other’s back, some of them picking at their own necks until bald areas emerged above the wings. These chickens disgusted him. He watched the pink-eyed rabbits, white and gray, chewing lettuce, sniffing for their water trough near the edge of the cage. Their coats seemed incredibly soft. Rupert wanted to stick his thumbs in the fur, stroke their pink eyes to sleep. Who the hell would eat a rabbit? he argued to himself. The transom over the window wasn’t snug. Rupert could squeeze a knuckle inside. He began clawing at the space between the transom and the window bar. His knuckles were growing raw. He rubbed them in freezing spit. The transom couldn’t worry him. He was three fingers into the market.

  Squirming, wedging with a shoulder, he raised the transom high enough to slip through the glass. The chickens squawked. The roosters wagged their fleshy combs with a sad pull of the head. Who had castrated these birds, fattened them, groomed their combs for marketing? The bunnies blinked their noses in terror of Rupert. It was dark in there, the snowbank ending just below the transom, allowing a meager peck of light. Rupert had to deal with so many eyes. He walked on his toes to calm the hens. He funneled bits of corn into the roosters’ mouths, getting scratches on his hand. He felt the pulse in a white rabbit’s pink wet nose. He wished for Esther. She would have loved a live rabbit under the blanket, nudging against her skin. What would the bunny do when Rupert and Esther went down together on the blanket? Rupert stopped. He could hurt himself with blanket dreams. Tasting Esther put smoke in his skull, made him recollect how much Isaac had stolen from him. Rupert preferred a bunny with a drier nose.

  Brian Connell shouldn’t have budged from the station-house. No one would have blamed him for sleeping in the locker room during a hard snow. But he had to redeem himself. He undressed the big Jew’s daughter, fed her whiskey in a bar, fucked her, and sent her home to Blue Eyes. The cunt had snitched on him. She cried rape, rape, and now the First Dep’s killer squads were gunning for Brian Connell. How do you duck an “angel” with a sharpshooter’s ribbon? Brian had one means of escape: catch little Rupert before Isaac takes his revenge.

  He’d been stalking Rupert’s grounds, from Clinton to West Broadway, in Bowery clothes that were beginning to rot. He had a few appendages today; a silk scarf that he wore on his face, and hunter’s boots from Abercrombie’s to protect his delicate ankles from snowbite. The wind imposed hallucinations on him. Rabbits were crossing Grand Street. It had to be devil’s work, or a mirage caused by the particular slant of falling snow. He kept a medallion in his pocket from the Holy Name society. But rubbing a piece of cold metal couldn’t scare the rabbits away. They would come and go between the nod of an eyelash. Brian was terrified. He’d have to surrender his body to a Catholic nursing home, or move out of the state. Run to Delaware and join his cousins on a skunk farm.

  He couldn’t ignore the squabbling in the snow. There was a rooster near his legs. This was no pale beast, fickled over by a storm. The rooster had wattles and a red hat. Brian chased after the stupid bird; it rushed between his Abercrombie boots. He flopped in the snow, unable to keep up with a chicken. He noticed a man skulking on the opposite side of Grand Street. Brian drew his gun. The man was trying to stuff the rabbits in a shopping bag. Brian called to him. “Sonny boy, stay where you are.”

  The man hurled the shopping bag; a rabbit flew out. Brian fired over the man’s ears to prove that you couldn’t throw shopping bags at a city cop. A hill collapsed behind the thief. “Come out with your hands in the sky.”

  He heard a loud slapping noise. His own hill of snow was disintegrating under his boots. The thief had a gun in his hand. Brian dove into the tires of an abandoned truck. He squinted around the tires to shoot at the rabbit thief. He could feel dull, trembling pocks in the snow. The guy had to be holding a cannon on him, or a Detective Special. Nothing else could make holes like that. The man was waving a yellowy object. Brian shuddered when he recognized the indentations of a gold shield. “Prick,” the man said, coming out of the snow. “I’m from the Second Division. Who the hell are you?”

  Brian was too weary to sniffle. The sergeant would slap his eyes with paper work. Brian would be typing forms in triplicate until his fingers dropped off, explaining why he had the urge to blow skin off a detective’s ears. They’d flop him for sure. And Isaac had all the authority in the world to kidnap Brian, feed him to the rat squad, who would nibble on his ears, suck his lifeblood away, sneak him out of the borough, and deliver him to Ward’s Island in a box, before the snow disappeared. The property clerk would claim his Smith & Wesson. Brian could look forward to a wet grave, and the anonymity of a policeman buried without his gun.

  “Are you nuts?” the rabbit thief said, shaking Brian out of his gloomy visions. “You shoot at a man for finding pets in the street? Bunnies are dumb. They could die in Manhattan. I was bringing them out to Islip, for my lads.”

  Brian shrugged. “Dangerous,” he said. “Lollipops … I’m looking for Rupert Weil.”

  All things returned to Isaac. Isaac was the freezing river, the rock, the snow. Isaac was the sewer under Grand Street, the snot in Philip’s handkerchief, the dust on the wings of Mordecai’
s nose. Isaac was the holy warrior who swept Philip and Mordecai under with his good deeds and gutted Esther Rose, who sleeps in the vulva of his daughter and gets his nourishment from the pubic hair of a fat blintze queen.…

  Two men were following Rupert while he speculated in the snow. These weren’t the Mulberry goons. They didn’t have long overcoats. They were dressed like foreigners, it seemed to Rupert, in softer clothes: sweaters, earmuffs, and wool hats. It was hard to appraise their look in a storm, but Rupert could swear they were brothers. Their faces had a cunning that didn’t respond to the snowbound shops of Grand Street. The brothers might be slow in commercial matters, in geography and arithmetic; they walked with a mental twitch, as if they were moving into strange territories. They couldn’t be connected to Isaac; they were much too awkward for a team of cops.

  Rupert didn’t bother trying to shake them; he’d ride under their fists, if he had to. He’d wrap the earmuffs around their eyes. He’d bite the wool on their heads. They couldn’t grab Rupert off the snow. He cut into Allen Street, but the wind drove him back. He had to burrow with his knees, dig his way around the corner. The trip exhausted him. He winked at the sweater boys, whose tits were covered with snow. Woolly heads were no match for Rupert Weil. He had a spoon in his pocket, a spoon that could gouge a path to Lady Marilyn, or splinter the cheeks of an enemy. He revived, watching the earmuffs labor. The brothers were stuck. They couldn’t make Allen Street. Rupert dismissed them as Brooklyn refugees. He was clear to move at a pace that was convenient for him. He had ice on his toes, and his nipples had turned blue. He put a hundred yards of crawling between himself and the refugees. He fell over a hand. “What is this shit?” A foot wiggled out of the snow. Rupert pulled. An old man emerged, hugging bits of snow to his body. He’d been buried alive, without galoshes or a scarf. Rupert rubbed the old man against his coat. “Who are you? Where do you live?”