Midnight Cowboy

by James Leo Herlihy

  But there were, from his many nights of wandering and looking, three pictures that had somehow fallen through to a level in him deeper than the surface, and these, in memory, showed themselves to him over and over again:

  One was a cutout image of a young Hollywood actor floodlighted on top of a movie marquee. He stood there with his suntanned snarl in full color, two stories bigger than life, legs apart, pelvis thrust forward, and he was in the act of turning a big gun on you. The barrel of it was coming at you thick and gleaming, and it was about to go off.

  The second article in this nighttime collection of images was a brief scene on a street corner. A long white convertible was stopped for a red light. The woman in the driver’s seat was looking at a tall, handsome young man in Western clothes standing at the curb. Her motor died under her. But she kept on looking at the young man. After a moment she said, “I can’t get it started without help.” And the young man said, “I’ll bet you can’t, honey.”

  The third picture to remain in him from these walks was the only one he couldn’t enjoy looking at later. But whether or not he liked it, it was one of the three and would not be discarded. This was a large poster depicting that bearded young man in whose eyes resides all the sorrow of history. Above his head was a message attributed to him in a large Gothic typeface, and on the bottom of the poster, scrawled there in raspberry-colored lipstick, were the words FUCK THEE.

  And these were the things Joe Buck found as he was seeking to find his way.

  part two

  1

  The power of a Greyhound bus impressed itself upon Joe at once, and during the first hundred east-bound miles he gave his attention over to it almost entirely: the sound the changing gears made, the breathing of the brakes, and, on the open road, the deep bass hum of a thing that was not exhausted by the miles but seemed to thrive on them. There was an empty seat in the front opposite the driver, and Joe sat up there smoking for a while, fascinated by what was taking place between the bus and the highway, the way the highway seemed to enter it underneath, all these miles disappearing into an enormous machine and the machine all the while seeming to get leaner and more fit. Before returning to his own seat, Joe wanted to make some remark to the driver. “It’s a powerful mothah, ain’t it?” But the driver didn’t look up.

  Walking back toward his own seat, Joe felt like a circus performer dancing on horseback. This great being through whose center he moved had something in common with himself, but Joe was little better equipped to think about it than was the bus itself. He felt it, though, some kind of masterful participation in the world of time and space, a moving forward into destiny.

  Back in his own seat, he smiled at this new sense of himself and blew a kiss at his new boots, and before long his eyes were closed and he was sleeping the deep black sleep of a creature who has not yet been born.

  The first half of Joe’s big trip East was passed in this way. Sometimes his eyes were open, but even at such intervals he dreamed himself into whatever landscape he was passing through, still so confident of himself and his future that he gave them scarcely a passing thought.

  It was on the afternoon of the second day, the day on which at five P.M. his arrival was to take place, that Joe became somewhat fretful. Perfection had begun to arouse his suspicions. It occurred to him that he might be embroiled in some colossal confidence game in which he was both victim and perpetrator. For instance: Exactly what in hell was he going to do in New York City? He kept glancing above him, taking reassurance from the presence of his black-and-white horsehide suitcase and all the fine articles it contained, and every few minutes he touched the hip on which his money rode. He searched the faces of other passengers, wondering if someone among them was a potential ally or if they were all strangers like himself, uneasy at the prospect of arrival in the richest and tallest of all cities.

  The last rest stop was at a Howard Johnson’s in Pennsylvania. Joe took his suitcase with him into the men’s room and spent the twenty minutes grooming himself for his arrival in New York City. He shaved, splashed himself with Florida Water, changed into a fresh shirt, and gave a quick spit-shine to his boots. Even though there were other men using the facilities, Joe could not resist using the mirror in his own peculiar way. He walked away from it, prepared his expression, his attitude, then spun around to surprise his image. What he saw was tremendously comforting to him. When he click-click-clicked out of that men’s room, other passengers were already returning to the bus. Two very young girls, occupants of seats near the front of the bus who had been keenly aware of Joe Buck’s presence throughout the trip, were climbing aboard just ahead of him. One of them, stimulated by his proximity, giggled breathlessly. Joe was as pleased as he could be. As he passed their seat, he tipped his Stetson and allowed them full benefit of the sweet, crooked smile he had developed. Their reaction was wild and hysterical: For miles, in a kind of heavenly hell of painful titillation, the girls stifled screams, hid behind damp handkerchiefs and struck each other. Joe was reassured and couldn’t remember what he’d been worried about. What to do when he got to New York? Shee-it, what could be simpler? Head for Times Square and follow his nose.

  Suddenly up ahead was the Manhattan skyline, buildings like markers in a crowded graveyard. Joe’s hand moved to his crotch, and under his breath he said, “I’m gonna take hold o’ this thing and I’m gonna swing it like a lasso and I’m gonna rope in this whole fuckin’ island.”

  2

  At the Times Square Palace Hotel, Joe was conducted to his room by a shriveled old bellhop who called him “sir” a number of times and carried his suitcase for him. Joe gave him a dollar and then closed the door and examined the room. It was twice as expensive as the place in Houston, but many times more pleasant, and it had a private bath as well. The walls had been freshly greened; the bedspread was spotlessly clean, tan in color; the furniture was maple. Over the bed was a water color of the Manhattan skyline, and next to the bed a telephone on a stand. Joe believed himself to be in a first-class situation.

  He unpacked, placing his radio on the bedside table. Then he lighted a cigarette and sat at a small desk in front of the window, looking back and forth in amazement at his two new worlds, 42nd Street out there, throbbing and rich and noisy, and this place inside where his hat would hang and where his head would rest.

  He sat for a long time studying the bureau, and for one crazy moment he found himself unable to believe that his personal belongings were still there, even though he himself had just placed them there. For that brief moment he was convinced that when something was out of sight it lost its existence altogether.

  He hurried across the room and looked into the mirror. It was a relief to find that he himself was still there, but he was not entirely certain until he had waved and smiled at his image and blown a cloud of smoke at it. Then he checked the drawers of the bureau and the closet. Reassured, he crossed the room again, stopping to smile once more at his reflection in the mirror, saying: “Now you take it easy, cowboy. You’re all settled in here, about to get rich.” He performed a little hip dance, mimicking copulation, and returned to the desk to finish smoking his cigarette.

  “New York City,” he said, looking at the street. A fat incredibly sloppy old woman, sitting on the sidewalk under a movie marquee across the street, poured something from a bottle onto her filthy, naked feet and rubbed them with her free hand. No one paid much attention to her. A policeman watched with some interest but no concern and then moved on.

  “Your room,” he said to his radio. He went over and turned it on, hoping its sounds would give him the feeling of having truly arrived in this new place.

  A woman’s high-pitched, somewhat hysterical voice was saying: “And that’s my system!” Then she giggled. A man’s voice with a special electronic fervor in it said: “Well! That beats anything I’ve ever heard! When you have insomnia, you simply get out of bed?” “Yes!” shrieked the woman, losing control of herself. “What on earth do you do?” the man
urged. “I turn on my lights!” she said breathlessly. “And I get dressed! And I do my work, maybe even cook something! Or bake!” Seemingly overcome, the woman was unable to continue speaking. The man said, “Aren’t you very tired the next day?” “Oh, no!” the woman swore, suddenly in dead earnest as if she had been accused of something dreadful, like malingering. “Honestly, I’m not; honestly!”

  Joe felt sorry for the lady but at the same time he was delighted by what he’d heard. For it seemed to bear out all those rumors about Eastern women. Aloud, he said, “What’s wrong with you, lady, is perfickly clear to me. Get me over t’that radio station, I’ll put you in shape.”

  “Of course,” the woman said, “I’ll probably col lapse right here at this microphone!” Then she gave way to utter, breathless hysteria.

  “Well!” said the announcer, chuckling fatuously, “I hope you won’t collapse until you’ve sung for us!”

  He played a record on which the woman, in a quieter mood and through an echo chamber, sang My Foolish Heart.

  While she sang Joe opened the desk drawer. He found a ballpoint pen and two post cards picturing this very hotel. After some study he was able to determine which of the windows was his own. Encircling it with the pen, he turned the card over and wrote “Dear” in the message space. Then he stopped writing, wondering dear who. Unable to think of a name to place there, he tore the card in half and dropped it out the window.

  The lady on the radio sang that this time it wasn’t fascination, this time it was love.

  Joe picked up the second card, encircling his own window again, and wrote: “This is me,” across the sky. And on the message side, skipping the dear part entirely, he wrote: “Well I am settled in here—new york is not so much but I have got my own place and very clean too—” In the space intended for an addressee, he printed the word SHIT. Then he tore the card in half and said, “I’m fucked if I come to this town to write post cards.” Just as he threw the pieces of the card out the window, he thought of someone to whom he might have addressed it: his Negro colleague in the scullery of the Sunshine Cafeteria. He put his head out the window and saw the fragments still floating toward the street. For a moment it looked as if one of them might drop right into the cap of a loitering sailor, but the sailor moved on, joining a stream of early-evening pedestrians.

  3

  Joe adjusted his pace so that he and the rich lady might arrive at the corner at the same moment. With luck, the light would be red and they would wait there together and somehow a conversation would begin in which the rich lady would be afforded an opportunity to place a bid on his wares. Park Avenue was not what he had expected: Of the few persons walking here at twilight, not one had given him a second glance. His faith in himself and in his project was a delicate thing at best, and he had now to be especially agile in avoiding any doubt that might bump up against it and wreck it entirely.

  For instance, there was no single aspect of this rich lady he followed that might suggest any hunger for what he had to offer. But he knew that if he pondered even for a moment her flawless, elegant self-sufficiency, evident in every detail of her appearance and in ever)’ step she took, his own resolve would be lost to him at once.

  She was a small-boned, brown-haired lady of medium height. As she preceded him down Park Avenue, Joe admired her ankles. They were slender, beautifully formed., and they seemed to say: “We are not very strong, but we are strong enough—and rich.”

  At the corner of 39th Street, waiting for the light, Joe removed his hat and held it over his heart. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said, putting many facial muscles to work on a powerful smile. “I’m new here in town, just in from Houston Texas, and lookin’ for the Statue of Liberty.”

  The rich lady continued to present him with a perfect view of her profile, a fine, delicate, pretty thing to behold, but she gave no sign at all that she had heard him speak.

  When the light was red, the rich lady crossed Park Avenue. Joe followed. On the east side of the street she stopped and turned to him, saying: “Were you joking? About the Statue of Liberty?” Her tone was direct, neither friendly nor hostile.

  “Joking? No, ma’am. Oh, no! I mean business!”

  “Do forgive me, then,” she said, clearly unconvinced, but going along with it for reasons of her own. “I thought you were making some sort of—never mind.” She smiled and Joe was touched suddenly by the very special beauty of a lady at the far, far end of her youth—old age just under the surface of her skin, but not yet emerged, not yet—and by the still-young blue of eyes that were more deeply sympathetic than truly young eyes could ever be.

  She faced south. “I’ve never actually seen it, except from the boat. But what you do, let me see, you take the subway, I’m almost sure of this, the Seventh Avenue Subway, and you get off at the end of the line. Oh, but I’m not really certain. You’d better ask someone else, play it safe, don’t you think?”

  Joe was so taken with the lady he hardly listened to the words she spoke, but each of them, as formed by her lips, seemed to him a miracle of beauty. “You sure are a pretty lady,” he said, surprising himself.

  The lady turned to him quickly, taken aback and blushing in a way that thrilled him.

  “Oh!” she said, trying to frown—but she was clearly not a frowner. “You’re not looking for the Statue of Liberty at all!”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, “I’m not.”

  “Why, that’s—that’s perfectly dreadful. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  She began to smile, increasing the number of lines in her face and intensifying the blue and the twinkle and the sympathy of her eyes. This face, especially these remarkable eyes, seemed to be saying: “You and I are wonderful people who understand all the beautiful things of the world that are lost to others, but now that we have had this greatly amusing and secret moment, it is time for us to part.”

  Aloud, she simply said goodbye. And walked away from him.

  He watched her leave, noting that her trim rear end was now intensely conscious of itself. This pleased him. It also caused a disturbance in his stomach. He had always been an appreciator of the walking-away of certain women, the way they had of switching the fanny from side to side in such a carefully measured way and yet holding the head so high you were supposed to believe the thoughts in it were seven thousand miles north of the Arctic Ocean, and as cool. But now, along with the enjoyment, Joe Buck felt this weakness, an anxious churning deep in his body; he had to tighten the muscles in his thighs in order to remain standing, and his toes gripped the soles of his boots.

  “Cute lady,” he said aloud but very softly as he watched her proceed up 37th Street. “Rich, too,” he said, following her slowly on the opposite side of the street and admiring her more with every step she took. “Too bad she ain’t the buying kind,” he said, watching her turn and walk up the steps of a great brownstone house.

  He watched her open the front door. And he watched her enter the place. And then he made a sound that was not a word at all, as something cold and awful touched his heart: Her door had closed.

  He sat on a nearby stoop and continued watching the place, wondering at the nature of his sudden new suffering. And then the dark windows on the parlor floor silently and softly exploded into light. This light was the color of amber and warm as flesh, but Joe had no notion of why it hurt him so to look at it. He only knew for certain that the twilight had ended and it was time for a good long drink of liquor.

  He forced himself to his feet and began to walk. And pretty soon he came upon another kind of rich lady altogether.

  4

  The second rich lady was walking a white French poodle on Lexington Avenue in the Thirties. Joe found her looking at some yellow pompoms in front of a florist’s window.

  The poodle was so small it looked like a windup toy; but the lady herself was very large. She was like some movie star you’d read about who had wrecked her career with food. She was brunette, her eyelashes stuck out a good thre
e-quarters of an inch, and there was a lot of paint on her face and fingernails. Altogether this ornamentation gave her the look of a marionette inhabited not by a mere hand but by an entire person: you saw those little green eyes peering out of this big doll and wondered who in the world the tiny person inside could be.

  While she studied the pompoms, Joe pretended to look at the roses until it was clear to him that the lady was keenly aware of his presence.

  “Hurry up, Baby,” she said in animated irritation, addressing the dog, who was crouching and straining under the florist’s table. “Do-um goody-goods for mama. Go on, do-um goody-goods.”

  Joe held his Stetson over his heart. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he said, “I’m brand spankin’ new in town, come from Houston Texas, and hopin’ to get a look at the Statue o’ Liberty.”