Cain’s Book

by Alexander Trocchi

  Like many part-time hustlers she had had many affairs with other women. They always ended in the same way. The other woman did the hustling. When Pat had an accident and was taken to hospital Jody didn’t budge from the apartment. “I hate sick people,” she said. Pat sent Jody money from the hospital. When Pat came out she was confined to bed. “She thought I’d take care of her, Jesus! I’d be readin’ and she’d want somethin’! She always wanted somethin’!”

  We crossed 7th Avenue and went into Jim Moore’s.

  “She comes on with this baby stuff,” Jody said. “Jo-dee! It makes me sick. Always buggin’ me!”

  “What did you do?”

  “I ignored her. Then she got mad an’ said she paid the rent. I asked her what that had to do with it. She thought she’d bought me! Can you imagine that? You broke your leg, I said. I didn’t. If you didn’t get so damn lushed it wouldn’t’ve happened. I wouldn’t take the blame for anythin’, nothin’!” Jody said. She pulled her coffee to her and drank some as soon as it arrived. She put sugar into it and asked for some more jelly with her English muffin. “She screamed herself sick all day an’ next day she moved out. She went to stay with a friend till her leg was better.”

  I burst out laughing.

  The way Jody said it was funny. But that wasn’t what I was laughing at, although she was under the impression it was and burst out laughing in delight at my response. And her delight was no less affecting because it was, in a logical sense, mistakenly triggered. Spontaneous laughter is infectious and draws people together. And I had laughed first and found myself effectively delighting in her delight. The words, even their meanings, were in a sense superfluous. I remember wondering at that, how the fact of laughing together nullified the inauthenticity. Even now it is with a feeling of generosity that I remember what I laughed at then, which was the memory of her own pathetic indignation when someone up in Harlem burnt her – “The bastard! After all I’ve done for him! When he had no bread I used to turn him on!” – about that, and the self-criticism her hard talk about Pat implied, for, like people generally, Jody, no matter what she was talking about, talked exclusively about herself. I used to wonder whether she knew it.

  When we had finished our coffee and when no one we knew had come along... we were looking for loot to score with... we crossed West 4th to the Côte d’Or. We pushed in through the swing doors. The place was crowded, dark as usual, the bar on the left and the single row of tables on the right. The first thing you noticed was the exhibition of paintings along two walls just below the ceiling. At that time they changed them every so often, but soon it was just a bar again with a mixed clientele. I didn’t go there much by that time because it was one of the few places I was fingered. I had been waiting for Fay, drinking a beer, and I had been spotted by the barmen as one who was more interested in dope than in drink. That’s a bad thing in any bar, and barmen are quick to notice. Most barmen are very indignant about drugs. Still, one of the barmen had been in Paris and most of his customers were very friendly towards me. It’s true that Fay was as loud as a white feather in wartime; if anyone ever looked like a junkie, she did. With her unkempt hair, her fur coat and her blue face, she moved ferret-like into a noisy bar crowd and out again. I have seen many a drunken face frozen, the lower jaw dropping, to follow Fay with the eyes out of the bar. Fay and I left together and hadn’t gone much more than a block when we were suddenly grasped from behind and thrust roughly into the entrance hall of a small block of flats. A strange coolness descended on me as soon as I felt the hands; in my imagination I was already saying to the policeman: “And now be on your way, sir. You have no business with me.” And then I was looking at them. Middle-sized, they were dressed in leather lumber jackets and looked like competitors in the Tour de France. They were flashing some kind of identity cards which evidently convinced me. It hadn’t occurred to me that they could be anybody else. They were straight out of Kafka. And yet I knew they were real beer. I don’t know whether they were members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or of the Internal Revenue Service, but they were very ugly in their anonymity and very impertinent. Fay seemed to know them well and immediately adopted a doglike attitude towards them. She wagged her tail. Tongue and saliva drooled from her mouth in friendly effervescence. I found myself against the wall with one of the bicyclists ordering me to turn out my pockets. My passport would stop him for a bit. Ten years of border-crossing had furnished me with impressive documents. I was carrying some bennies,22 but I wasn’t worried about my vulnerability. I was worried about Fay’s. In fact she knew far more about these men than I did, having met them before. But I was a foreigner and might be deported very easily. Fay could expose more with less danger than I. As I slowly and absent-mindedly emptied my pockets, I ignored the man who was examining me and kept interrupting Fay’s interrogator.

  “You stay outa this!”

  “Look. I kicked. I’m clean, I tell yah!” Fay repeated.

  “Can’t you see she’s telling the truth?”

  “Look, who are you, mister? Didn’t I tell you to stay outa this?”

  They didn’t find anything on us and Fay was shooting in her hand and not in her arm at that time. They didn’t look at her hand and fortunately they didn’t look at my arms either.

  “It was that bar fink in the Côte d’Or,” Fay said when they let us go.

  So I wasn’t going much to the Côte d’Or. I thought twice about going there.

  Jody was past caring. Sometimes. I found it difficult to distinguish between her and my own projections and caught myself from time to time accepting her mask of bravado at its face value. And yet I knew that she, like the rest of us, was not always impregnable. I suppose there was a contradiction in my own desire. I found myself attracted by her pose of outrageous independence. At the same time I did not anticipate she would expect me to take it seriously all of the time.

  I wanted to say: “Look, Jody, I understand. I too have a mirror.” But somehow I couldn’t get through to her. I said instead: “You’re beautiful, Jody. I don’t know how you can be with those stinking innards of yours, but you are.”

  Someone said she was a whore.

  “Me too,” I said. “I couldn’t have anything to do with a woman who didn’t know she was a whore. I couldn’t connect for long with a woman who wasn’t conscious of having been, at one time or another, a whore.”

  The fact that Jody did turn a trick now and again, when it was necessary, and that at the same time she didn’t think of opening a shop, endeared her to me.

  At hustling her fats she was the best and the worst.

  She drew young Jewish businessmen like a magnet iron filings, but they soon found out she was a sleepwalking whore, and they got uneasy and often indignant when they found out she used heroin. “Man,” Jody said, “can you imagine me lettin’ them screw me if I wasn’t high on somethin’?” In itself heroin doesn’t lead to prostitution. But for many women it does make tolerable the nightly outrage inflicted on them by what are for the most part spiritually thwarted men.

  Moreover, Jody didn’t always turn up for a date. This unreliability was attributed to the fact that she was a drug fiend by her indignant customers. And, of course, if she had been hung up without bread and with no junk she would probably have turned up to get the money for a fix. Which confirmed for those gentlemen that the best things in life cost money.

  Men were always asking Jody to marry them. They wanted to protect her, to save her from herself. Many of them were rich and at least one was very rich. But what she wanted was a john who would send his cheque each week from the North Pole, one she could love at a distance for being so generous, while she got down to the business of loving one of her own (un)troubled kind. At all times I sensed a great capacity for love in Jody. As, I suppose, her (other) johns did.

  For us to be together was difficult, at least until I went on the scows again. I met her during a period when I had quit, when I was sleeping wherever I could find a bed. By t
he time I went back on the scows it was too late. She was too strung out. I no longer cared enough to make the effort. I wanted a woman who could sometimes be casual, even about heroin.

  During those few months there were several ways we might have made it together. We could have stopped using junk. She could have hustled for us. Or we could have boosted from department stores. Or pushed.

  Most male addicts are eventually pimps, boosters or pushers. We made the motions of kicking. Jody couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. That was the scene that inspired Moira to say: “Jody! She just uses you! She’s like a bird, a fat, greedy little bird waiting for you to come back to the nest to feed her. How much do you want this time?” I couldn’t get through to Moira either so I returned to the room where Jody lay nursing her general outrage, compounding her spite, in the single bed which she hogged. As soon as I entered she accused me of forgetting the cakes.

  “What cakes?”

  “The cakes I asked you to get for me! The Twinkies!” she screamed. “I told you to bring two packages of Twinkies!”

  “Two packages of Twinkies...” Repeating it to control my exasperation.

  It lasted four days and then Jody turned a trick and we got high. A couple of times and I got fed up hanging around all night diners, waiting.

  We could have boosted. Most junkies we knew did that eventually. They had to to keep up their habit. But at the point at which one decides to make it as a booster one has already faced up to the probability of spending a large part of one’s life in an iron cage. No doubt a man can adapt, even to periodic incarcerations. And the world will certainly look doubly beautiful each time one returns to the street. But for myself I couldn’t have chosen that life any more than I could have chosen to live out most of my existence in Greenland. There is infinite possibility everywhere, up until the moment of dying, even in the skin of a leper wielding the power of his bell, but the extremity, the violence, and the sudden nature of the transitions in the existence of the inveterate convict, a life, as it were, of continual shock therapy, of brutalization, the daily endurance of machine-like discipline imposed from without, the mob and lynch-law of the numbered men, guarded by men vaguely resembling themselves in whatever “big house” of men, the daily insults, the small indignities, the constant clang of steel and glare of artificial light, eat, sleep, defecate, the daily struggle to escape the limit of one’s perceptions – the Baron de Charlus, chained naked to the iron bed in Room 14A at Jupien’s, was still master of his destiny in a sense in which no convict is23 – it would have been improbable for me to choose all that.

  As for pushing the stuff, we never seriously considered that. To do it properly you have to make it your profession, and as a profession, with the vague, arbitrary, and ambiguous alliances along the boring way, it stinks.

  Jody and I stayed together a few days longer until that moment we had both anticipated when we parted somewhere near Sheridan Square, she to return to Pat’s, I... I don’t remember.

  Jody moved ahead into the bar. Moe, Trixie catatonic under goofballs, Sasha, the White Russian, lushed, at the brink of tears; avoid them.

  “Jody!” A small woman, nearing fifty, with brown hair, leant out from between two men at a table in the rear. It was Edna.

  Jody nodded to her uncertainly.

  “I wonder if she’s got any bread?” she whispered to me.

  I shook my head.

  The woman made a sign, gesticulating with her fingers. It might have meant anything. Jody shook her head to show she hadn’t understood and when Edna began to gesticulate more vigorously Jody turned away with a short sharp shake of the head. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  Outside again we hesitated in the drizzling rain.

  We crossed the avenue and went into the drugstore which sells the paperbacks. “We gotta get some loot!” Jody whispered urgently when she saw I was about to examine the books.

  “Sure,” I said. “But I don’t know how yet.”

  “There must be someone...”

  “There he is! Wait here,” I said to her.

  Alan Dunn, a man I had known in Paris and who owed me a favour, had just entered the drugstore. It was a break. I knew he would lend me some money.

  “Hullo, Alan.”

  “Hi, Joe! It’s good to see you, man! I heard you were here and tried to look you up. I saw Moira the other day and she said you were working on the river. Getting much writing done?”

  “A fair amount,” I said cautiously. But I knew Dunn too well to feel obliged to mention it again. I brightened at the thought and said: “Listen, Alan, I need some money, now, tonight...”

  “Sure, Joe... how much do you need?”

  “Twenty dollars would do.”

  He already had his wallet out. He handed me two tens.

  “How about a coffee?” he said as I accepted the money.

  “Let’s,” I said. “And thanks for the loot, Alan. I appreciate it.”

  “OK boy, any time,” he said.

  “Excuse me a moment,” I said to him. I walked over to Jody. “I’ll meet you in a quarter of an hour in Jim Moore’s. See if you can set something up.”

  “How much?”

  “Depends what it is. I got twenty.”

  Her smile was beatific. “We could go round to Lou’s. I’ll phone him now.”

  “OK. See you.” I returned to Alan who was sitting at the counter.

  “Who’s the girl?” he said when I sat down beside him.

  “Her name’s Jody.”

  “She’s got beautiful eyes. But she looks beat. Are you living with her?”

  “No. I once thought it might be nice to fall in love with her. But it wouldn’t. It’d be like loving Goneril.” I sipped my coffee. “When did you get back?”

  “Just a week ago.”

  I was glad to see him. I liked to talk about France. Soon we were laughing about how L’Histoire d’O had been banned in Paris at the same time as it was awarded a literary prize.24 In Paris the corruption of literary censorship is a war the wise have waged against the foolish for centuries.

  “It’s good to see you, Joe!”

  “It’s good to see you, Alan! Where are you staying?”

  He gave me his address.

  “Have you heard from that Arab friend of yours?... What was his name?...”

  “Midhou,” I said. We had taken Alan by bus to Aubervilliers where we knew a Spanish place. It was hidden away in the Spanish slum of Paris near a canal. It was to this district that those who were not poets came over the Pyrenees after the Spanish Civil War.

  Midhou was a great smoker of hashish, a troubadour, an Algerian in Paris who ate with his hands. Seated cross-legged on the floor, the snarl of his lips emphasized by his Mexican moustache, he made his hands upwards into claws and spoke of flesh. The heavy brow, the receding forehead, the small, pointed ears, the black eyes of a bird of prey, the foreign words spat from clenched teeth, the claw becoming a fist, becoming a knife, becoming a hand.

  “Yeah, I heard he went to Algeria,” Alan said.

  “I got one postcard,” I said. “But I heard indirectly he lost half his face driving a truck into a brick wall in Algiers. There was a police roadblock. I don’t know whether he was carrying guns or hashish.”

  “Poor guy,” Alan said. “Is he all right now?”

  “I heard he was. I heard he was back in Paris for a while and was the same as ever. Do you remember his guitar?”

  We were talking excitedly when Jody came back.

  “You comin’, Joe?”

  “Sure. This is Alan Dunn... Jody Mann.”

  Jody nodded and Alan smiled at her.

  “I won’t keep you,” Alan said, standing up.

  “Yeah, Joe, come on,” Jody said.

  “I’ll give you a ring,” I said to him.

  “And finish that book,” he said.

  When we were outside Jody said: “What kept you so long?”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

&
nbsp; “Lou’s waitin’!” she said.

  “Did you hear what he said to me?”

  “No. Who? Lou?”

  “No, not Lou. The guy we just robbed.”

  “Oh, him? No. What did he say?”

  “He said to me: ‘Get that book written.’”

  “What book?” Jody said.

  “Man, any book!” I said.

  “Yeah!”

  “As though that were my fucking raison d’être!”

  “Your what?”

  “I mean I didn’t say to him ‘Get that soap sold’, did I?”

  “Yeah man, he was too much! Lou said to hurry.”

  “What happened?” I said, exasperated.

  “Fay’s making the run. She’ll be back by the time we get there.”

  “Who put up the loot?”

  “Lou. He’s puttin’ up ten for us.”

  The count we got for the dime wasn’t much. Lou had poured out the shit onto a mirror and was dividing it with a razorblade when we arrived. There was Fay, and Harriet, Lou’s wife, who was making a bottle for the baby; Willie, everybody’s parasite, who when his personal needs were met was a man of goodwill, thirty-five, with bad brown teeth and thick-lensed spectacles; Lou, Jody and myself. Geo arrived almost immediately with Mona. He was looking hot and red in the face above his white collar. He usually wore a white collar when he was with Mona. She was wearing a hat and had had her hair permed and looked like someone’s maiden aunt, incongruous in her tweed costume beside Fay who had taken off her fur coat and was rolling up the sleeve of her shapeless green dress, and Harriet, her hair in rats’ tails, wearing her shirt and jeans, and dangling her baby on one arm. When Geo went out with Mona he adopted a mock sanctimonious air which was to tell the rest of us he knew she was fattish, with newly permed hair and a hat she wore indoors. He explained her saying she had an ass he could get a good grip of. But his apologies embarrassed us and only tended to make Mona exaggerate her air of respectability. Mona was all right. It was sad to see Geo turn her into an awkward plagiarism of herself.