A cry of pained protest from my father. “Bloody people keeping me back! Can’t get my bloody work done! Messing up the bloody toilet seat with powder!”
Sometimes he came out almost immediately and sometimes he lingered so long that my mother, with children and lodgers all clamouring to use the bathroom, had to go tearfully again to the door.
Every moment someone else was in the bathroom was an agony for my father. Even when he was eating (and he ate quickly, like a wolf) he kept one ear cocked for sounds from the bathroom next door.
“What the bloody hell was that! What’s he doing in there anyway? I thought he was going to eat his bloody lunch! When are you going to get a chance to eat yours, eh?”
“I’ve already eaten. Now eat your lunch and forget about Mr Rusk.” She was not convinced by his concern for her eating. She knew that as soon as the lodgers and the children had gone out again he would return to the bathroom and lock himself in until around five, professedly performing his own ablutions.
In the evening my father was out and in between baths, cursing the last visitor who had disarranged towels, who, if he were a child, had drawn “bloody silly faces” on the steam-clouded mirror. “Annie, will you come and see this pigsty!”
So when my father said with throaty conviction that the house couldn’t have been run without him I grinned.
“I’m telling you the God’s honest truth, son. Your poor mother was too soft. Everybody said that.”
I laughed. “She was certainly too soft with you, Dad. Now why don’t you just admit it? You haven’t worked for a quarter of a century. Now I’m not working either, so I’m following in your footsteps. You ought to be proud of me. When we meet one of your friends you should say: ‘This is Joe, my youngest son. He’s unemployed. Of course he’s not quite up to his dad’s standard yet because he’s not unemployable, but I have great hopes for him because he’s had a much better education than I ever got.’”
That amused him. “You’re a devil, son!” He wagged his head. He became more serious. “But you’ll have to make up your mind to do something soon.”
“You didn’t. That’s the only difference... I knocked off a little earlier than you did. Strictly speaking, I never began. The trouble with you, Dad, is that you’ve always been ashamed of being unemployed and so you never learnt to enjoy your leisure. For God’s sake, even when we were starving you wouldn’t even collect the dole!”
“Queue up with that bloody tribe!”
“The proletariat?”
He smiled his little potato smile, distant, the better not to focus.
I went on: “You always pretended to be cleaning that bathroom of yours. That’s what made you the bad-tempered rascal you were!”
“I kept that bathroom spotless,” my father said rather gloomily.
“You want me to engrave that on your tombstone?”
“Don’t talk like that, son.”
“I’m not ashamed of you, Dad.”
“I know... I know...” He had begun to whistle soundlessly in the abstracted way he had. He drank another beer and then he said he was tired.
“You won’t come into town with me then?”
“No, I think I’ll go to bed early tonight, son. I think I have a cold coming on.”
I shook hands with him at the corner of the block where he lived. As he walked away I thought his room was always neat, the gas ring cleaned with Vim and steel work. And “electric fires are not dirty...” He eats one thin slice of bread with a cup of tea before retiring.
On the tramcar on the way home I wondered if it was mere fantasy that I was reliving the life of my father, except that my attitude was different. I wondered whether I was kidding myself. I had just quarrelled with Moira. It was the same New Year.
The present is shored up by the past; and the not-yet, a void haunted by naked will, is too slickly furnished by the world’s orators, like a harem in a Hollywood film, with no short hairs.
“READ IT,” GEO SAID. “But don’t be long. I don’t know when they’re coming for me. I’m tied up at the other side of the pier. Come across as soon as you can.”
He didn’t need to tell me what for. It was one of Geo’s peculiarities to turn up like that when you were least expecting him.
“I’ll be over in five minutes.”
“See you.” He went out.
It was as though someone had just said: “You have won first prize in a lottery.”
I opened the letter quickly. My father’s spidery handwriting:
Dear Son,
I was glad to learn that you are in the pink. Things have been going pretty slow with me. Philip says they are going to start later this year and he won’t be needing me until July. I know things are not what they were in the years immediately following the war but I do hope he will find a place for his own dad.
I am unhappy to say that your Aunt Hettie died last week. Only your cousin, Hector, was there, both of the girls being at Stranraer. Naturally young Hector phoned me and I went along at once. I made some tea but it was over very shortly. Young Hector said he had been expecting it. You know your Aunt Hettie was told to take it easy a long time ago. It was a great blow to me, son. Since your mother died and then your uncle I visited her now and again and she was a good soul and very good to me.
Hector is doing very well and very busy. He had to stay off work the following day and make the arrangements with the undertaker. I took him along and introduced him to old Urquart. You remember he buried your mother? He’s very reasonable and I have known him since we were boys together.
Now son, there is no more news. I’ll just have to hang on as well as I can until July although they’ve finally turned down my application for unemployment. It’s nothing but red tape and Philip is going to see what he can do about it.Hoping this finds you well. Best of luck.
Daddy
I read it over twice and then dropped it in the table drawer. I locked up the cabin, climbed onto the dock and went to look for Geo’s scow. I recognized it at once by the emblem nailed to the mast. The bluebird of happiness, Geo called it. He had painted a sixteen-ounce can white and on the white can he had painted the bluebird.
Geo was on the quarterdeck making up a dockline which was no longer in use.
“You go on in and I’ll be in in a minute,’’ he said. “It’s on the ledge near the bed. You go ahead and cook up enough for both of us.”
A bag of horse, a spoon, a dropper, a spike, and a book of matches. I was fixing when he came in. He locked the door behind him.
“Here, I’ll clean it,” he said, as I moved the empty dropper towards the glass of water.
I lit a cigarette, lay back against the bulkhead, and watched him fix.
“This is good stuff,” he said, smiling down at the place where the needle was embedded in his arm.
“Just a minute,” I said. I climbed off the bed, walked round him and across the kitchen to the bucket he used for a WC. I vomited. It wasn’t painful. It’s not like getting sick on alcohol. The little food I had eaten during the day was soon regurgitated. Geo was standing beside me with a saucepan full of water.
“Here.”
I drank and regurgitated, drank and regurgitated, the spasms lessening as whatever nervousness caused the nausea was neutralized first by the thought of my transcendent immunity, and then by the extreme but indefinable ecstasy at my senses. There was a wet, prickly sweat at my belly and thighs and temples. Geo thrust some Kleenex into my hand. I thought of him as a saint and said: “Geo, what do you think of Fay for an underground Florence Nightingale?”
“By the Marquis de Sade,” he said. “She’d suck the fix out of your ass.”
The first time I saw Geo he was standing on top of the load on his scow as the four tugs of the Cornell Sea Transport Corporation turned the tow on the river. There were forty scows in the tow, four abreast, ten scows long. The movement had already taken over half an hour because of the state of the tide and the small winking light at the en
d of the dark pier towards which we swung slowly was still over fifty yards away. Beyond the pier and the riverside streets the city rose up, the tall buildings, the Empire State, Rockefeller Plaza and the Chrysler building still brightly lit with neon and floodlights. Advertising signs flashed at both sides of the broad river: Lipton’s Tea, Cinzano Vermouth, Motoroil. The tugs hooted instructions at one another from time to time, moving busily about, pushing and pulling at the tow. At that time of the year there were a lot of mosquitoes about. As the scows slewed round they droned at the shuttered windows of the cabins and hung in clouds around all navigation lights.
Tugs of other companies were already standing by to pick up some of the scows and deliver them further afield. None of the scowmen knew as yet who would go out that night, and what conversation there had been during the past half-hour, shouted by shadowy figures across the water from one scow to another, had been about who would go straight out and who would remain at Pier 72 until next day. No one knew for certain. My own scow was almost in the middle of the island of scows. I would have nothing to do except let go my hawsers at the appropriate time. I was thinking of one thing only, the list. If I was not on the list I would be able to go into the city.
“I hope I’m not on that fucking list!”
These were the first words I heard Geo Falk say. He uttered them as he climbed down off his load onto the short foredeck and stood, ready to let go a hawser, about half a dozen yards away from me.
He told me afterwards that he was sick. It was on him like something voluptuous, and at the back of his mind a hedge of fear. It would be an oversimplification to say that Geo was a masochist (any more than the rest of us), but he did have a way of dramatizing his suffering, investing it with cosmic proportions, and the blood that trickled down his arms was like the blood of the ten thousand followers of Spartacus crucified along the Appian Way. If he was pulled out at once he wouldn’t get a fix. I could imagine him becoming conscious of the cold set grin of satisfaction at his jaws, a slave’s defiance, and asking himself what the hell that was for and who he was trying to con. I can see him standing on top of the load, his legs apart and his hands on his hips, his blond hair exposed to the wind.
“Where you gaun?” another voice said in the dark.
It was the voice of a squarehead Swede. He was carrying a flashlight at arm’s length. It was on and its bright yellow beam lit up the heavy gunwales of the scows as they swung closer together.
I watched Geo light a cigarette. “Port Jefferson,” he said.
“You go out wid de tide most probable,” the Swede said. “Day kom take you, I tink.” He pointed to one of the tugs that was standing by.
I could imagine Geo muttering: “Fuck you!”
“Oh for me I doan giva damn,” the Swede said. “I stay on de boat I save mawny. You go ashore you spend too moch an you drink an den you git broke...”
Feeding Falk his damn squarehead philosophy.
I couldn’t see either of their faces in the dark. I knew the Swede, but Falk I saw now for the first time.
“I gotta get off tonight,” Falk was saying. He was speaking to himself.
“Ya, I tink you go straight out,” the Swede said.
The bastard knows he’s bugging him, I thought.
“You don’t know a fucking thing,” I said to the Swede. Falk glanced at me for the first time.
“You’re Falk?” I said. “My name’s Necchi. Fay told me to look out for you.”
“Necchi? Yeah! Oh man, am I glad to see you! You hear the way that squarehead bastard’s been bugging me? Turning the knife in the wound. You’d think he wanted me to go out tonight!” His laugh was high-pitched.
“I heard.”
“Say, what’s your scow? The Mulroy?”
“Yeah.”
“Come over as soon as we tie up. Christ, I hope I don’t go out tonight! You know how far Port Jefferson is? I’ll croak if I don’t get into town first!”
I had to go back to my bow. I nodded and left.
Neither of us were on the list. We went up to Harlem together and copped some heroin. We turned on in a pad up there, Jim’s mother’s pad. There was Jim, slim and dark, who hadn’t been clean for three years, Dulcie, his girl, some trumpet-player I didn’t know who was sitting on the floor with his back against a wall, and Chuck Orlich. Chuck was sprawled in a big chair, his arms dangling, his tawny beard straggling on his chest, his shoulder-length hair as voluminous as the wig of Judge Jeffries, and his face was the kind of violet-grey colour faces have when the organism is at the edge of death.
“Will you look at him?” Geo said. “Is he all right?”
“Man, you can’t tell him anything,” Jim said. “He takes nothing for a week an’ then he comes here an takes an overdose.”
The shaggy head was thrown backwards, the mouth open exposing stumps of teeth, a noise – click, click, click – issued spasmodically from the throat.
“Naw, he’ll come round,” Dulcie said. “He’s always like that.”
At that time Chuck was working in a wholesale butcher’s. He cleaned up all the bones and the blood after the butchering. What a scene, the hairy Goth rummaging amongst the bones... and the man was as gentle in his demeanour as St Francis. Click, click, click – click, click, click...
He had come round before we left.
Next morning around nine we were pulled out together and during the next three days Geo and I were able to spend a lot of time in each other’s company.
Geo was fed up with the scows. I was the only other man he could groove with. Some of them were OK but they were mostly alcoholics or men saving up to retire. He didn’t want to die on the scows. He didn’t want to die anywhere for that matter. But there was no other gig which paid so well for so little work. And no supervision. That was important. He often thought of Mexico where he had spent three years. The years in Guadalajara were Geo Falk’s golden years. He had had money then, from the GI Bill.12 And at that time shit was cheap and plentiful in Mexico. (NB: It isn’t today.) Three years in the sun with plenty of horse, not too much, but enough, and he had painted. He hadn’t really painted now for two years. Back in New York it was different. Without money and unable to sell any of his paintings he had been forced to push the drug to keep up his own habit. The girl he was living with finked on him and one day they came pushing him back into his room, treating him like cattle.
“OK, Falk, we’ve come for you. Where is it? Where’s your stash, knucklehead?” They didn’t find the heroin but they found two spikes and with his marks and the girl’s evidence that was enough. They built it up big for the tabloids so that John Citizen had the impression that Lucky Luciano’s13 first lieutenant had been trapped by intrepid agents and that half the opium smuggled by Mongolian-faced agents of Chou En-Lai14 from Communist China to sap the strength of the American people had been seized in the raid; and in return for two Leica cameras they played it down before the judge who, it must be assumed, didn’t read the tabloids.
Geo spent three months in the Tombs15 and when I met him he was still on probation. He walked everywhere now with a sense of his own criminality. Sometimes the Man would stop him on the street and play with him.
“Howya doin’, Geo? Still livin’ it up?” Flat eyes sizing him up, lingering on his pockets, watching the set of his hands; and his own inane smiling at the man who had arrested him.
“How about a drink, sergeant?”
And walking into the bar in front of him, his pride like an insect struggling under a lethal weight, he heard his own voice currying favour: “Feel much fitter now since I kicked. Back on the old booze!”
“That so, Falk? I’m glad to hear that.” And ten minutes later: “Mind letting me see your arm, Falk?”
The time they put him in the Tombs he was in the cell with a young Italian. Geo was in the bottom bunk. He was lying with his eyes closed trying to steel himself against nausea. The sobs of the Italian came to him and Falk found himself hating him. Why didn’t
the bastard shut up? They wouldn’t give him anything, not even a wet cotton. For a murderer yes, but not for a junkie, a junkie couldn’t even get an aspirin. Then he felt the wetness on the back of his hand. What the hell? Jesus Christ! It was blood. Another blob fell on the floor and splashed his hand. The Italian was committing suicide. Call the Man. The Man took a long time to come and when he came he said: “Why you dirty little junkie bastard! What do you think this is, a pigsty?” They dragged him out, bleeding at both wrists. The door was closed and Geo was left alone with his mounting nausea.
If anything had broken him it was kicking his habit in the Tombs. When he thought of it he thought of destiny and he felt himself without will.
Geo is balding and he combs his blond hair forwards, slightly oiled. His face has the battered look of an ex-boxer’s. At thirty-three he is deteriorating; he is preoccupied with disappearing muscle. He watches, horrified, fascinated, the insectal movement of his private decay. And he massages the flesh which fascinates him with witch hazel. Thinking brings a pained expression to his face and he is afraid.
We talked about how the world was just a conglomeration of rooms, other people’s rooms, to wander about in. For ever and ever. For where our kind made a room the fuzz came, like something out of the movies, with drawn revolvers. It was like being at the mercy of a gang of belligerent children. We composed songs:
Where the buzz is
there the fuzz is
comin’ through the door.
Where the fix is
there the dix is
comin’ through the floor.
There was soon something between us. There were moments beyond all disbelief of good generosity. And I like the flaring of his paint, an abstract of Van Gogh’s, but simpler. A yell in paint.
Cain’s Book Page 9