A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  “I want,” the man repeated, “to buy a gun.”

  “Yes sir!” said Feldman.

  He let the word get out that he wanted to see all persons with strange or unusual requests, explaining to his personnel that the only way anyone in charge of an operation like this could develop new markets or make intelligent suggestions to the designers and manufacturers was through experience in the field. He wanted no one turned away, he said, no matter how exotic or even out of the question the inquiry might be. These, he underscored, were particularly the people he wanted to see.

  He had his carpenters build a small office for him near the basement stairwell; a desk and two chairs were moved in and a telephone installed. He established fixed office hours, selecting an hour in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and one in the afternoon on the other days. On Monday evenings, when the store was open late, he let it be known that he would be in his office from seven P.M. until closing.

  He began a discreet advertising campaign—small, vaguely worded notices in the Personals column of the morning and evening newspapers. He phoned the ads in himself and told the girl that they were to run beneath those ads that sounded like trouble; in fact, they were not to appear at all on days when the paper did not carry these condensed telegrams of grief. Similarly, he had signs put up in the rest rooms of cheap hotels. A sign with the same vague message, but larger than the others and more decorative, appeared in the bus depot and the penny arcade. All right, Feldman thought, call me sentimental, say I’m a softy, but that’s where it all started.

  The first ad ran on a Saturday, and there were already people outside his door when he came in on Monday morning. If the people he had watched in his basement seemed reluctant or shy, these were direct, as if they had long since taken a professional attitude toward their troubles. Like sinners proclaiming their salvation or drug addicts their cure, they spoke of their weaknesses proudly.

  “I come up pregnant,” this high school girl told him, “the first time I ever let a boy. It’s my blood. It’s my big pelvis. A womb like a hothouse, my ma says. But that don’t mean I want to have his kid. I need to be cut or whatever they do.”

  Feldman nodded agreeably, and while she was still sitting there, called Freedman, already, even as he dialed, giving the small signals and high signs of success, the winks of private joke and communed confidence which even on this first outing he had adopted as his cheery style, letting the sun in on sin and discovering something useful to do with his hands.

  “Freedman? Feldman. How you doing? Listen, Doc, I need a favor. I won’t beat around the bush. Time, essence, and what are friends for? The name of a specialist, please…I’m looking for an abortionist…I say an abortionist doctor, Doctor…That’s right. Nobody scabby, no dirty rubber-gloved drunk. Somebody who shaves. No names, please—too shameful at this juncture, but trust me. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need this favor…Okay, all right, check. Spare me the righteousness…Okay, all right, check. I appreciate your reluctance. All I can say is I’ll never implicate you. That’s a promise, kid…All right, my back’s to the wall. It’s Lilly…That’s right. She’s been unfaithful. It’s hard for me to say this, Doc, even to you. A schvoogy, a schvartz…Well, hell, maybe some of it’s my fault, but I can’t stand by and accept some pickaninny bastard…Right. You will?” Here (to the girl) a Morse code, both eyes blinking like signals at a railroad crossing, the arm going down like a gate, the mouth and tongue in elaborate, exaggerated silent conversation that had nothing to do with Freedman. “You will? What are friends for, indeed? And, Doctor, I hope to God in Heaven above that Medicare is wiped out. That’s what I think of you, sweetheart. Wait, let me get a pencil.” (One was already in his hand.) “Is that last letter an m? Is it an m, I say, or an n?” (He had already written down the name.) “An m as in ‘miscarriage,’ or an n as in ‘niggerbaby’?…What’s that? Must be this connection…An m as in ‘miscarriage.’ Doctor, I gotcha. I’ll never forget. This is what they mean when they talk about the relationship between a doc and his patients. You don’t get this sort of thing in England. Listen, Freedman, listen to me. I want you to come into the store and pick out a suit…No, I mean it. Promise me, promise me now. Is that a promise?…Right, good. I'll look for you, Doctor.”

  Feldman gave the girl the name of the abortionist but would accept no money. “It’s a service of the store,” he explained. “We’re building good will.” He allowed her to fill out an application for a charge account.

  Although he had many opportunities to use the abortionist’s name during those first weeks—later he would ask Freedman for the names of others, it being a matter of curiosity, as he would frankly tell him—something about his new business was disturbing to him. The world had begun to smell pregnant to him, spermy. He came to distrust all virginal appearance and thought of himself as love’s piker. Love was everywhere. It was June in January, April in May. Before long, he thought nervously, he would begin to make passes at the prim little fuckers himself. (Prim, they were prim, white-gloved, white-shod, their gynecological beings underscored by the graduation-dress packages in which they wrapped themselves, like gift-wrapped horrors in boxed practical jokes.) Indeed, he felt they expected his advances, that in their eyes his profitless continence made him more perverse, and he was careful not to touch any of their tokens, refusing even their fountain pens when he had to write down a name or a direction, calling them back to retrieve the forgotten purse, never touching it himself or daring to smell the cloudy, steamy face-powder-cum-chewing-gum odors of their open bags. To protect himself, he was short with them, scornful, encouraged them to think of him as of an agent, an advance man, someone who would later be cut in by the abortionist himself.

  He went further, and by stripping his office even of memo pads and desk calendars and blotters and paper clips, he managed to create an atmosphere of the guarded discussion, a place where deals were made while no tangible product, even money, was ever allowed to show; there was an overall impression of records self-consciously not kept and of a deliberate, guilty respectability. Still, he regretted his celibacy and found himself with a developing predilection that fed on his copious sense of the availability of these one-time losers. He was in love with their country-girl, milkmaid—in a way, they were already mothers—underdog sexuality, and with their flat-chested, smooth-thighed, stick-limbed, straight-assed boyish bearing. He was in love with adolescence, in love not with the blatant statements of brassiered and pantied organs, but with all the invisible code machinery of their insides, the clear, young, clean-as-a-whistle tunnels of their bodies. As smitten by their invisible treasures as any dirty old man his gray heel bending the counter of a lady’s shoe and a garter band trebled around his wrist, with the cheats of fetish.

  It was no joke: for the first time in years Feldman had a mixed feeling—anxious for excitement, thrilled and annoyed when it came, irritated and relieved when it didn’t. Finding no one there when he came for his office hour, he would shrug fitfully. Nothing ventured, he would think, and nothing gained, and only quits at that.

  Beyond this, something else bothered him. It hadn’t ever been profit that had driven him, but the idea of the sale itself, his way of bearing down on the world. Now, however, he had become a mere order-filler, no better than the kind of salesman he had always despised. He strove to counter this. “You seem oversexed,” he told one pregnant teenager, “hot-blooded. Come here. I’ll show you something.” He blew the fair, fine hairs along her arm. He put his mouth next to her ear, and without touching it or moving his lips, kept it there until she squirmed. He kissed the back of her neck softly. She sighed. Her flesh rose in goose bumps. “You see? You’ll always have trouble with that,” he told her. “Five minutes of this treatment and I’d be inside your blouse, ten more and my fingers would be strumming your crotch. In a quarter of an hour we’d be screwing. And mind you, I’m a stranger—fat, homely, older than your pa. You’ve pronounced erogenous zones, sweetheart. One out of a hundr
ed suffers. Sure suffers, certainly suffers. Are you Catholic? No, not even Catholic. Then why pay for some biological quirk not your responsibility? Fertility goes with your disease like night with day. You can’t help it. There’s sex cells on your pores thick as peanut butter. I tasted them when I kissed your neck. Listen. I say go ahead with your plans, have your abortion. But afterwards—listen to me—afterwards have this operation. Be spayed. Come on, who winces at a scientific term? Be made infertile then, become sterile. Whatever you want to call it. A small love knot in the Fallopian tubes.” It was the sort of terminology which made him lustful, though now he used it dispassionately, throwing it in to make his case. “We can’t operate on desire yet, dearie. The lust glands are contiguous with the synaptic neurons. Excuse my talking dirty to you, miss, but we’re both adult, n’est pas? It we destroyed your neurons it would be too dangerous. You wouldn’t feel pleasure, but you wouldn’t feel pain either. A neuronectomy is out. I couldn’t permit it. You’ll have to be sterilized. I’ll bring in the biggest man. As if you were my own daughter. Could I say fairer? Wait, where are you going? Sit down, where are you going? All right, smartie,” he shouted after her, “it’s your funeral.”

  He was wringing wet when he sat down again. Have I gone crazy? he thought. He closed the office, canceled the appointments of two people and did not come in at all for a few days.

  It was only that he had been overanxious to make the sale, he was able at last to reassure himself. He had to accept it: abortions were closed circuits, dead ends. Though it was stimulating to do business with anyone with a private shame, he was coming to resent the distinctly medical emphasis of sin. The doctors had a cartel, he saw; businessmen were just their errand boys. But, he thought, what can I do? Love makes the world go round, damnit.

  He had five full weeks of this. Only then did he realize that he never saw a man in his office unless he was there with the girl, or by himself on the girl’s business.

  He began to wonder about the fellow to whom he had sold the rifle. Had he killed anyone yet?

  Then he had a break. A young man came in alone one day. Feldman expected that it was more of the same and greeted him without interest. The man’s uneasiness—-usually these fellows were as matter-of-fact as himself—might have provided a clue to his difference, and perhaps it was an indication of his flagging faith that it didn’t. He accepted the boy’s halting quality as sincerity, and told himself that it was refreshing to come upon a fellow so unused to the feel of his compromise. To make it easier for him to begin, he said, “You’re not married?”

  “No sir.”

  “Not in a position to marry, I suppose?”

  “No sir.”

  “Though it sticks in your craw to do something like this, you see no alternative.”

  “I’m sorry?” the young man said.

  The customer’s bashfulness was a waste of time, but Feldman understood it. To the man he must have seemed someone unlicensed or lightly so, like a tip-off man to the cops perhaps, paid with taxpayers’ money, or a prostitute, or the man who sells fireworks out on the highway.

  “I say you see no alternative to the abortion.”

  “I’m sorry?” the young man repeated.

  Then he realized that they were speaking at cross-purposes. (Ah, it was no piece of cake. The customer was always right in this business.) He held his tongue and let the young man tell it, ignoring his own last statements as if they had been part of the room’s packed silences.

  “I saw your ad in the P-Personals column—” he began falteringly. (My, the dignity, Feldman observed, as though truth required an imperfect delivery, the boy’s faint stutter like the riddling of an oracle.) “I didn’t know. I mean—about this p-place. I’ve come by. I’ve s-seen the g-girls outside. They seemed f-frightened to me. Then I rec-recognized one from my b-block who got into trouble with a guy. I s-saw her here.” Feldman enjoyed the cave style; he actually folded his hands at one point. There could have been diplomas behind him on the walls; he could smell the diced breath that comes through the grills of confessionals. His face fixed in a mask of stern encouragement. But when would he get to it? Were there no gestures? The boy was too coltish, yet he dared not risk a single sepulchral “Yes?” “I thought you could h-help me.” A good sign. You could see light with a good sign like that. (These people actually have to want to be helped.) Soon they would both be all over the kid’s needs, taking their greedy draughts, travelers at a well.

  “I’m not an addict,” the boy blurted. “I don’t even have a habit.” Now the rush of his speech muffled his impediment. Feldman wondered where it had gone, then tuned in on the spurious, jazzy scat of his tumbling speech. The kid could be a fake.

  Feldman interrupted him. “What is this? What are you pulling here? What do you mean you’re not an addict? What’s all this? What’s going on? What are you driving at?”

  “Oh,” the boy said, “oh. I’m sorry. Maybe I had the wrong idea about this setup.”

  “Setup?”

  “I heard talk.”

  “Talk? What talk?”

  “That you do f-favors.”

  “Yes?”

  “That you d-do favors. I need something. I’m too listless. I need a prescription.”

  “A prescription? What prescription?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know the name of the stuff. But I had it once and it h-helped.”

  Feldman picked up the phone and began to dial at random. The young man jumped. It was all the test he would ever take, Feldman thought prophetically, seeing his alarm as the sign of his legitimacy, that single reflex the springing of his addiction. He remembered for him what the boy would forget: that instinct did him in, that he had been hooked at such and such a time on such and such a date by nothing more palpable than his brief alarm. “Busy,” he said curtly. “I’ll try again in a minute.” The boy settled back, and in a moment Feldman dialed Freedman’s number.

  “Freedman? Feldman. What do you say, Freedman?…Listen, I meant to thank you about Lilly, but I’ve been a little queasy about the whole thing…Well, it’s a bad business all around…No. Lilly’s all right. He was a first-rate man. But what I called you about—well, she’s depressed. I forgave her, but the whole thing still doesn’t sit right with her. I tell her a thousand times a day, ‘Lilly, it’s all right. Everybody makes mistakes.’ I’ve even confessed to fictive infidelities of my own, but the girl’s ridden with guilt…Tranquilizers?” He looked at the boy in the chair; the young man shook his head. “No, Doctor, she’s been on tranquilizers, and they just don’t seem to do the job. As a matter of fact, your man prescribed them himself as a precaution. I’d call him back to ask for something stronger, but Lilly doesn’t want to have anything more to do with him. Too ashamed. She ripped his name off the label first thing. I’ve never seen anything like that girl’s shame. You know Lilly, she’s a ball of fire when she’s herself…Won’t stir out of the house, doesn’t even want to get out of bed. I wanted to bring her over to see you, but she doesn’t know you gave me that fellow’s name, and she’s afraid she’d blurt out the whole story in the consultation room. She’s in terrible shape, Doctor. I’m really worried this time. I’m thinking maybe I should have let her have the kid. She’s so listless. I’ll tell you the truth—I’m afraid she’s going to start seeing him again…Him. The nigger. Well, he’s our dry-cleaning man. Big black brute he is. I think of that nigger’s cock in my Lilly’s pussy, and I want to cry. I need some help on this, Doc…Her bowels? How are her bowels?” The boy nodded agreeably. “One thing, Doc, her bowels are right as rain…A fever?” He looked at the young man. “No. No fever.” The boy imitated a sleeper. “It’s just this listlessness. Sleeps around the clock…What? What’s that? The superamphetamines?…What they give the advanced catatonics, you say?” He looked at the beaming boy. “Well, that sounds all right to me. Why don’t we just try that? Tell you what, call the pharmacist in your building, and I’ll send my boy over to pick it up. And say, Doc,
I want you to come by for that suit. Hear?…I mean that…Much obleeged. Really, Doc, much obleeged to you.”

  He scribbled an address and handed it to the young man. “If you run out we can have it renewed,” he said.

  And still he was at their mercy, riding passenger to their driver’s seat. He undertook to teach himself the pharmacopoeia—much as, weeks before, he had pored over the illustrations in medical texts, learning the uterus like the parts of speech—and in a week had a junkie’s knowledge of all soft anodynes, and thought in ampules and capsules and decimaled grain. The pusher, he thought, there’s a salesman. But it was hopeless, he reflected bitterly, with a wishful pitch, like the acceptance speech of a dark horse, already half formed in his head. “Shit! Shit for sale! Shit for shooting, for snuffing and smoking. Swallow it with water from the tap or stir it in lemonade sweetened to taste. Imported shit shipments. Domestic shit grown in our own vacant lots. Airplane glue for the kiddies and Dad’s war-earned morphine and Demarol for Grandma. Psychedelics for the whole family. (The family that prays together stays together.) Why toss and turn another moment? Throw away those sleepless nights. Shit here. Shit for pain and shit for pep, shit for languor, shit for gloom. (Thank you, and will there be anything else, sir? A hypodermic, sir, a syringe? Needles? Have you thought of everything?)” Too bad he would never make it. To wheel and deal in ultimate products: ah! oh! me oh my! Hangmen’s rope, warheads, heavy water and the life of Christ. (Judas, there was a salesman!) Damn, he thought. Damn the ICC, damn Food and Drugs and SEC. Damn the board of health and the FCC and the fire and boxing commissions. Damn all rulings of the Supreme Court in restraint of trade, and the laws that keep my help from going naked in the aisles. Damn the timers of the stoplights, and those who license, and those who make the rules for the safety checks of airplanes. Curse the up-to-snuff thickness of rails that support such and such a weight at such and such a temperature. Damn, too, the snoops who oversee the construction of bridges and insist on precautions before letting a single worker go into a mine or a tunnel. Damn that measly conspiracy of the civilized that puts safety before profit and makes hazard illegal, and damn finally, then, those at the top who would extend longevity by requiring dullness and who this morning reduced almost to absolute zero the possibility that when I left my house after a handsome breakfast that followed an eight-hour restoring sleep, I would see one man come after another man with a knife.