The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Cool it a minute, kid. I was doing some business. We got money coming tonight.

  Money? What money?

  Big money. A hundred and fifty clams.

  Claudio’s eyes widen; his mouth forms an O. What? he says. Is this true? From where will this money come?

  From that guy Alex. Remember him? He was at the joint last night. From England or someplace. Great big nose.

  Yes, Claudio says, knitting his brow. I do remember. I talked to him. I thought something was not right about him and his wife. They seemed strange.

  They seem like a couple of junkies and grifters, which is what they are. That’s what makes ’em good for a touch. They’re giving us cash for junk.

  Stanley removes his shoes, then unzips his dirty jeans and pulls them off. He puts them on the counter and unrolls the gabardine slacks.

  Sorry, Claudio says. They will give us cash for what? Junk?

  Junk, Stanley says, pulling on the trousers. Hop. Shit. Dope. Get with the program, kid.

  Narcotics?

  What, are you the Kefauver Commission all of a sudden? What do you think of these pants? Pretty swank, huh? Do they go with the shirt?

  Stanley, Claudio says, what are you talking about? Where will you get this junk?

  Goddammit, would you relax? I got it already. I took it off a dead guy last night.

  A dead guy? Where is this dead guy? Where is your junk? Is it here? If the police—

  Shhhh, Stanley says, putting his hands on Claudio’s jaw, his thumbs on his lips. Just listen, he says. The junk I found, I already sold it to Alex. That’s the grift. I sold him a few buck’s worth, and I told him I’d get some more. He’s giving me the cash for it tonight. He’s leaving town in a week.

  We will keep his money, Claudio says, and give him no junk. That is your plan? This will not cause problems for us?

  I been thinking about that, Stanley says, and at first that’s how I had it figured. Now I got a better idea. If we rip him off the way you’re saying, we get the hundred-fifty, and maybe some bad feelings. But if we deliver the goods, we could net at least that much, or more. I think it’s worth looking into.

  But how? Where will you get such a quantity of narcotics? We know no one here whom this Alex does not know also.

  The hell we don’t, kid, Stanley says. What about the Shoreline Dogs?

  Claudio’s eyes narrow; he takes Stanley’s arms by the wrists, gently removes them from his face. What in hell are you talking about? he murmurs.

  This is genius, kid, Stanley says. It solves all our problems. We get a nice chunk of cash, and we get those clowns off our backs. We’ll have ourselves a little powwow, pass the peace pipe around, and we’ll make a deal. Everybody’ll go home happy.

  But the Dogs hate us. They want to kill us. We humiliated them.

  Stanley steps back, unbuttons his shirt. You don’t understand these chumps like I do, he says. All hoods are the same, the whole world over. They’re all looking for the big score, but they got no imagination. I guarantee you they know somebody who’ll get us what we need, and they’ll be happy with whatever cut we give ’em. I’ll talk to that guy, I’ll set this thing up, and bygones’ll be bygones. Him and me’ll be pals for life.

  What guy is this you will talk to?

  You know, Stanley says. The guy. The boss. That greaser I kicked in the nuts. The rest of that crew I wouldn’t trust to make me a sandwich, but that guy I can work with. He’s smart enough to know he’s dumb.

  Stanley slides into the new shirt, tucks in the tail: a cream-yellow rayon blend, ochre inset stripes running alongside its shiny shell buttons. It’s fancy—just the thing for the next time he sees Welles—but he’ll have to be careful about wearing it on the street. Any smart cop will know at a glance how he came by it.

  Claudio stands aside, his arms crossed, his thumb across his lips. Is there another way? he says. Another way to get money?

  Whaddya mean? There’s lots of other ways. But this is what came along, so this is what we’re doing. It’s a fast pitch, sure, but it’s in the strike zone. So we gotta take a swing. How do I look?

  Stanley smoothes the shirt’s fabric, holds out his arms, pivots. Claudio gives him a quick worried glance. You look nice, he says.

  If you like these duds, I can get you some, too. Those jokers in the shop—

  Your idea, Claudio says. It has many dangers. The hoods. The police. We do not know if this Alex is to be trusted. It is a serious crime we will do, Stanley.

  Would you quit bellyaching? Look, it’s no different from crossing a city street. Maybe a runaway cement truck’ll smash you dead. It could happen to anybody. But you cross anyway, right? It’s just like that. Kid, you have got to get tougher if you’re gonna make the grade out here. You can’t go around scared all the time.

  What about your man? Claudio says. Your poet?

  What about him?

  Can your man help us get what we want? In a way that does not break any law?

  Stanley thinks about that. Then he steps forward, pinches the elastic of Claudio’s shorts, and gives it a gentle snap. No dice, he says. From that guy, there’s something else I want.

  Later, when Stanley’s new clothes are draped on the clothesline, when he’s watching the shallow curves of Claudio’s back sway beneath the pencils of light, he remembers something.

  I changed my name again last night, he says.

  Claudio makes a soft quizzical sound, his voice sleepy and thick.

  I said I changed my name. It’s Stanley Glass now.

  Why?

  Stanley puts his nose between the boy’s smooth shoulder-blades and breathes in. It was time, he says.

  Mmmm. I only will call you Stanley.

  That’s fine. Oh, we need to steal a bucket, too.

  A bucket?

  Yeah, Stanley says, spitting on his fingertips. You know, a bucket. For fish.

  43

  The illuminated dial at the hardware store on Windward gives them the time: a little before nine o’clock. For an hour now it’s been raining hard, with no sign that it’ll stop. The sweep of headlights through the distant traffic circle makes it look like a dull carnival ride: the slow kind, for old people and little kids. From time to time a car rolls by, big drops streaking the air before it like scratches on a reel of dark celluloid.

  Stanley and Claudio huddle under the colonnade between the Forty-Niner and Semper’s Men’s Wear, stepping to the wall whenever the wind gusts, watching water ripple over the laughing faces on the cast-iron columns. It’s about time Stanley stole himself a watch: he’s been telling time by daylight, but tonight’s sunset got snuffed by the incoming storm and put them out in the rain an hour too early. Claudio’s quiet, like he’s frosted about something. So long as they’re already soaked, Stanley figures, they might as well head over to Alex’s pad. Somebody’ll probably be around.

  The boardwalk arcades keep them more or less dry till they’re halfway to Club House; after that, they scurry between canvas awnings and pinch their collars shut. As they make the turn they see three figures pass through the bright cone of a streetlamp, pails dangling from their fists, newspapers draped over their heads. The figures shout and pound at the door of Alex’s apartment, and after a moment they’re admitted.

  Stanley hunches his shoulders, doubletimes down the sidewalk. Claudio’s right behind him; Stanley can hear raindrops ping off the tin bucket in the kid’s hand. Ahead, flecks of red and orange light escape the apartment’s blacked windows where the paint is chipped, then vanish when shadows pass over them. Soon Stanley and Claudio are close enough to hear laughter, voices.

  A knock opens the door right away. A face appears: bespectacled and goateed, backlit and unintelligible. Not a face Stanley knows. Can I help you, man? it says.

  Stanley wipes rainwater from his nostrils and lips. Alex around? he says.

  Another shape steps into the doorframe, peeking over the goateed guy’s shoulder: Stuart, the bearded poet from the coffeehou
se. He was among the three who just arrived: his shirt is soaked, translucent, and droplets glint in his black hair. Hey, he says, I recognize these two drowned rats.

  Now Alex’s voice: Is that young Stanley already? he shouts. Don’t stand there in the bloody entrance, Tony. Let him in.

  Swinging back, the door pushes aside stacks of buckets: they scrape against each other, against the concrete floor. Stanley shrugs off his dripping jacket; Claudio shakes rain from their upended pail and steps inside. I see you brought the items I requested, Alex says. But you’ve come a bit early, haven’t you?

  Me and my buddy started Daylight Saving Time a month ahead, Stanley says. Trying to get a jump on the competition.

  Alex and Stuart chuckle, and Stanley scans the hazy room. The orange-crates are all occupied; more young men sit Indian-style on the floor, skunky smoke rising from their cupped hands. A sharp-looking Negro is in the chair behind the typewriter; when his eyes meet Stanley’s, the guy gives him a cautious smile. From everybody else, suspicious stares: their gazes move from Stanley to Claudio to Alex and back again.

  Fellas, Alex says, I’d like you to meet—if you have not yet met—Claudio and Stanley, two criminal toughs of my recent acquaintance with a burgeoning interest in art and poetry and other fine things. It falls to us, gentlemen, to see that these lads are not lost to the felonious abyss.

  A voice from the corner: Maybe these two can save the rest of us from art and poetry, it says. Make us into honest crooks.

  It’s Charlie. Stanley almost doesn’t recognize him: he looks sober, or nearly so. He’s giving them a tight smile and a narrow knowing glare, but it’s not convincing. It’s a look that says I had the goods on you, buddy, but then I forgot. Stanley plays it cool, laughs a little at Charlie’s joke. Nobody else does.

  Clockwise from left, Alex says, meet Bob, Bruce, Milton, Saul, Maurice, Jimmy, Charlie, Stuart whom you know, and Tony, our doorman. Now take your friend’s jacket, Stanley, and come with me.

  In the bedroom—sheets haphazard on the bare mattress, drooping indecipherable paintings tacked to the walls—Alex takes the jackets and hands Stanley a wad of bills. Count it, he says, and Stanley does: one-fifty. He nods, and Alex whisks him back to the main room.

  Stuart and a couple of other guys have restarted what seems to be a favorite argument. One of the new faces—fleshy, fake-professorial, probably queer, sipping red wine from a coffeemug—has the floor now. Of course poems should be like paintings! the guy’s saying. Why wouldn’t they be? I mean, ut pictura poesis, man: that’s the whole history of the form in a phrase. It’s right there in Horace—and Horace was just quoting Simonides. The instant impact of the image, the negative space of the blank page, the depth of potential detail. That’s what we all want, right?

  I’m not sold on that, the colored guy—Milton—says. How many of the poets in this room are painters, too? Just about all, unless I’m mistaken. If you’re satisfied with one, why bother with the other?

  Tony, still standing by the door, motions Alex over, speaks quietly in his ear. He keeps looking at Stanley and Claudio, unhappy about something. Stanley can’t hear what he’s saying.

  Stuart’s arguing with the tubby professor. You missed the scene at the Coastlines reading, Bruce, he says. If you’d caught it, there’s no way you’d still be trying to shovel this shit. Ginsberg ain’t no painter, man. You take the most massive painting you can think of—take the Sistine Chapel ceiling, for chrissakes—and you’re still nowhere near the thing he read. You’re hung up on some kind of museum-academy trip, man. You’re filling little jars with formaldehyde. I love paintings, but they don’t exist in time. Poems don’t happen on the page. They’re made from living breath.

  Ginsberg? somebody says. He’s the striptease star, right?

  —just theater, someone else mutters under his breath.

  So what’s the matter with theater? Stuart says. Poetry needs more theater! It needs more music! Get it off the page, man, and onto the stage! Get some red blood pumping in those paper veins!

  Oh, christ, Bruce says, refilling his cup from a gallon jug on the floor. Here we go again with the jazz canto jive.

  Across the room, Alex has an avuncular hand on Tony’s shoulder, a raised finger in his face. Tony isn’t talking anymore.

  Poets and painters gotta quit shadowboxing each other, Stuart says, and start aping jazz. Free up the forms! Smash the phony barriers between art and life! That’s how we’ll reach people, man. It’s guerrilla warfare. Nowadays everybody’s an image junkie, everybody’s hypnotized. The frontal attack is no good. You gotta get in through the ear, you gotta communicate with the inner eye, the eye that won’t be tricked by some subliminal projection.

  Charlie speaks up, his voice a little too loud in the small room. Whoa, Trigger! he says. Now you’ve got me confused. Are we talking about poetry or advertising?

  Stuart and Bruce shoot glares at him, exasperated, at a loss, knocked off their rhythm. In the sudden quiet, Tony’s low voice comes through the room: on top of being dope-peddling JDs, he says, they’re an illegal sex, to boot.

  Let me let you guys in on a little trade secret, Charlie says. This is my area of expertise, dig? You know what’s even better than subliminal projections for selling stuff? Super-liminal projections, man! Just put it out there! You guys talk about people like they’re sheep, like they can’t think for themselves, like if they weren’t all such saps they’d be right here at the oceanfront with us, painting pictures, writing poems, sleeping on the sand, living off horsemeat from the pet shop. Truth is, they love to be fooled. They want to be told what to do, what to want, what to like. They love their illusions. Just like us, right? But we think our illusions are better. If you guys want to change the world, start paying attention to your Starch Ratings. Just like we used to say around the office: you can’t sell a man who isn’t listening!

  A tide of grumbles wells up around Charlie; he’s smirking, pleased with himself. That’s a bunch of cynical crap, man, Milton says quietly.

  C’mon, Charlie says. Just ’cause I don’t buy my own BS, that makes me a cynic? I’d love to be wrong about this, believe me. Am I wrong, Alex? What’s it that your left-wing deviationist friends say? Give people the choice between love and a garbage disposal, most of them choose the garbage disposal. Right?

  Alex half-turns from Tony with a wan patronizing smile. I think you’ve made your point, Charlie, he says.

  I’m not trying to make a point, Charlie says. Shrillness creeps into his voice, and he lifts his hands to his face: a little like Jack Benny, a little like a mortified child. His hands are trembling. I just want to know what I should do, he says. What I should write. I want to be honest, I want to renounce Moloch and all his works, I want to not make the world any worse. How do I go about that, Alex?

  Alex leans against the wall, his arms crossed, his head cocked. Everybody looks at him except Claudio, who looks at Stanley. The people here all treat Alex like he’s famous or something, Stanley realizes. Maybe he is.

  When Alex speaks, it’s less to Charlie than to the rest of the room. The writer’s task, he says, is to make a record of his times. To stand apart, and to bear witness.

  Oh! Charlie says, snapping his fingers, then slapping his knees, rising to his feet. Well, that sure clears it up! Boy, do I feel like a dunce! All this time, I’ve been trying to create something. I guess I ought to take up painting if I want to do that. Huh, Stuart? Or maybe just go back to the ad firm. I could be very creative there. Hey, Alex, can I borrow my old john back for a minute? I need to take a crap.

  I trust you remember where it is, Alex says. And how it works.

  Charlie moves through the room, tiptoeing between orange-crates and the mugs of wine. I sure wish you’d caught that Coastlines thing, Charlie, Stuart says as he passes. That cat Ginsberg, he used to write ads too, y’know.

  Ginsberg still writes ads, Charlie snaps. You guys are always talking down Larry Lipton for selling the Beat Generation like
soap, but your real gripe is that he’s not cool enough about it. The poet always stands naked before the world! Great. Hey, Alex, I just took some Polaroids of my crotch. You think Evergreen Review’ll publish ’em?

  Charlie steps through the bathroom door, shuts it, curses, opens it again to find the matchbox and the candle. I don’t know what the hell you want, Charlie, Bruce shouts.

  I want a fucking drink, Charlie mumbles, and closes the door again.

  Everybody stares into space, avoids eye contact. The room is starting to smell bad, like too many bodies and too few baths. It’s quiet except for the sound of Charlie pissing, and then it’s just quiet. Two hands reach for the wine-jug at once; both withdraw awkwardly. Somebody—Maurice? Bob?—moves toward the old Zenith, but Milton intercepts him with an upraised palm. Listen, he says. I think the rain stopped.

  In a rush the men are on their feet, slipping into their jackets, passing the buckets around. Stanley and Claudio stick close together, drift with the pack back onto the street. A sticky mist still billows, everywhere at once. The dense fast-moving clouds are lichen-green with moonlight, but Stanley can’t make out any moon.

  Charlie catches up, still buttoning his pants, as Alex is closing the door. You didn’t erase the mirror! he says, clapping a hand on Alex’s shoulder. Then he runs ahead, his voice breaking with sounds like joy. Stuart! he shouts. He didn’t erase it! The thing that you wrote for me is still on the mirror!

  They move to the boardwalk in a ragged column, two and three abreast, buckets swinging jauntily. Streetlamps and patches of sky flash around their feet from deep puddles in the potholed pavement. Stanley can see small bonfires on the beach, shadows passing between them.

  He and Claudio walk in silence, bringing up the rear. Claudio has no clue what they’re doing. It’s not that he didn’t understand what Stanley told him; the kid follows well enough. He’s just dead set on being behind Stanley no matter what, never mind what the reasons are. Stanley should be grateful for that, he figures, but instead it annoys him a little.