Midnight Cowboy

by James Leo Herlihy

  Then he said to Ratso, “You know, it wasn’t too long ago I was setting in Sally Buck’s living room looking at the TV.”

  “Yeah? So?” Ratso looked at him. “I mean, so?”

  “Well, that was in Albuquerque, can’t you see? Way in the hell somewhere else. And what am I now? I’m in New York, ain’t I? Getting picked out for all these goddam—I don’t know, can’t you understand what I’m talkin’ about?”

  “Nope.”

  Joe’s thought was so clear to himself he felt Ratso’s failure of comprehension had to be deliberate.

  “Well,” he said, “I see you’re out to fix this party tonight, fix it good, cranky little wop bastard, you.”

  Ratso caught hold of Joe’s arm and hung on it. “What? What’d I say?”

  “Never mind,” Joe said. “They may not let you in anyhow.” “You want to bet?”

  A group of college people loitered in front of the Eighth Street Bookshop. Joe wished they all knew where he was headed. But there was no sensible way of letting them know.

  “I’ll make em let you in,” he said to Ratso. “I’ll tell ‘em they can’t have me unless they take you.”

  “Big fuckin’ deal!”

  “So don’t worry about it,” Joe said.

  “I ain’t worried!”

  “You’re as good as in. Besides, they’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “Who said there was?”

  “If you had a haircut and some meat on your bones, you be all right.”

  “Thanks a million!”

  “So I’ll say, uh, ‘Look, I don’t go nowhere without my buddy here.’ Okay?”

  They walked a block in silence. At the corner of University Place, a cold wind blew at them until they got across the street where the buildings protected them again.

  Ratso said, “You don’t want me to go. Right?”

  “Did I say that? I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but I’ll tell you something, Joe. I’m sorry, but I’m in the mood to let you have it. So listen: You are a very dumb person. You don’t know how to get in out of the rain. You need me! You can’t wipe your butt without me handing you the paper. So now you get invited to a party all by yourself and it’s like you’re the great man. Okay, are you ready for some news already? I don’t want to go no cutesy-ass party with no Hansel and Gretel MacAlbertson.” Ratso said their names in baby talk and then made a gagging sound in his throat. “Oooh, how kitchy-kitchy-koo! I’m nauseated already. The only reason I wanted to go in the first place was I thought, agh, they’ll prob’ly have a ring of baloney and a couple of soggy Ritz crackers. What the hell, can’t pass up a spread like that! Well, I lost my friggin’ appetite, so goodbye already. Okay?”

  He stopped walking.

  Joe said, “Gimme that address!” He snatched the orange note from Ratso’s hand and walked on. But he had gone no more than a block when his anger petered out. He stopped at Broadway and looked back.

  Ratso was still there, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, huddling into his coat, watching Joe.

  Joe gave him a signal with his hand, and Ratso started rolling toward him, hurrying to catch up, beating the air like a damaged bird. Joe wanted to shout at him, Don’t run! but instead he turned away, purposely not looking. And then he heard the step-drag step-drag step-drag coming closer and closer. By the time Ratso caught up with him, both of them seemed to have forgotten their altercation.

  They walked down Broadway to the corner of Harmony. Among several small signs in the outer lobby of a big loft building was one that said:

  The MacAlbertsons. Two flights up.

  Before proceeding up the stairs, Ratso leaned for a moment on the banister. His face and hair were wringing wet, and his breathing made a peculiar noise that was like a certain thin note on an organ. Joe had become so accustomed to hearing Ratso’s sneezes and coughs, and his voice like rocks being dragged across an unpaved road, and he had become so used to seeing discomfort and pain in Ratso’s face, that he had not for some weeks taken a really close look at the runt. Now he found that his coloring under all that perspiration was way off: His skin was more yellow than anything else, but it had some gray in it and a greenish cast as well; the whites of his eyes were a kind of pale peach in color, and lusterless; and his lips were lavender blue, edged with white.

  Joe said, “What’sa matter with you?”

  “Matter? What d’you mean, matter?”

  Joe didn’t know what to say. He kept looking at Ratso for a long moment.

  Ratso became agitated. “What? What is it? Am I bleedin’?’

  “No. No, you’re not bleedin’. You’re sweatin’, though. Haven’t you got a hanky?”

  Ratso wiped his forehead on the lining of his coat.

  Joe said, “You better dry your hair some.”

  Ratso made a swipe at it with his bare hands.

  Joe took out his own shirt tails. “Come here. Gimme y’ fuckin’ head.”

  Ratso growled, “No.” But Joe was louder. “Come here!” Ratso bent forward and offered his head to be dried. Joe rubbed at it with his shirt tails. “Can’t go to a party with a wet head,” he said. “Okay now, you got a comb?”

  “I don’t need a comb.” Ratso started working at it with his hands.

  Joe gave him his comb. “Few dozen cooties won’t kill me, don’t guess.”

  But the comb could not be passed through such a thick tangle of unwashed curls, and several of the teeth broke. Ratso handed the comb back and patted his hair into some kind of form. “How’d I look? Okay?”

  Joe looked at him carefully and for a long time.

  The bare fact was that Ratso did not look okay. Joe was willing enough to lie about it and let the matter pass, but something else happened as he continued to look into Ratso’s face.

  What was it?

  Neither of them really knew.

  Some vague, awful thing had come into evidence between them, hovering in the air between them like a skeleton dancing on threads, something grim and secret that filled Joe with terror, making him feel locked out and alone and in peril.

  As for Ratso, the signs of it, whatever it was, were subtle, almost not there. He simply turned his head away, somewhat sheepishly. There was a kind of stillness in his eye, a fixed look to his shoulders and the set of his head.

  Joe opened his mouth to speak, but Ratso made a quick gesture of impatience and started up the wide, dark stairway.

  Joe watched him. When Ratso was halfway up the first flight, Joe said, “Hey, wait a minute! Hey, whoah!”

  Ratso stopped climbing and looked down. His eyes begged Joe not to speak, but for good measure he threw in this challenge: “Are we goin’ to a goddam party or what?”

  Joe was too bewildered to move. Something awful had just taken place here at the foot of these stairs. Or had it? He couldn’t really be certain.

  “Nothin’s wrong, is it?” he said.

  “Come on!” Ratso was impatient, then pleading. “Will you come on, please?”

  He waited until Joe had begun the climb, then he took hold of the banister once again and pulled himself up the stairs.

  part three

  1

  The banister on the third-floor landing was being used for a coat rack. It was piled high with sweaters and scarves and parkas and every kind of winter wrap imaginable. Ratso left his sheepskin on the stack and looked over the rows of boots and galoshes and rubbers on the floor.

  “I’ll pick me out a nice pair of rubbers when we leave,” he said.

  The door was wide open. Ratso led the way in. Joe felt painfully self-conscious, not knowing what behavior was expected of him. He walked with a swagger, frowning, not wanting to be caught without an attitude.

  The room was enormous; it ran the entire length of the building and it was as wide as a house. There was a good deal of noise but not enough for so large a crowd. Laughter was aware of itself, and so was conversation, and there was a certain timidity in the sounds produced by a bo
ngo drum, a recorder, and a jug, suggesting that the musicians had not yet hit any kind of stride. One couple was making an effort to dance, and an even greater effort to do so without being seen. There were many small groups, some standing, some sitting on the floor, all loosely formed, and many persons standing alone or near the periphery of a group that did not quite include them. One couple—boys of college age, one white, one brown—sat in the middle of the floor holding hands, but it wasn’t so much an interracial romance as a marriage of two shades of despair; they were joined at the hands but not at the eyes; each of them frowned into some distance of his own. Many of the lone persons, male and female alike, seemed to be ashamed of their solitary condition. You could see them casting about for a place to lose it, a way to camouflage it or something to attach it to: a drink, a cigarette, a corner, a conversation, a smile, a stranger, an attitude.

  Along one wall was a big table with a good selection of cheese and lunch meat and crackers and bread, and on the floor next to it were washtubs filled with ice, ice water and cans of beer.

  At the far end of the room Joe spotted the Mac Albert-sons, sitting on the floor at the feet of a skinny painted lady with long white hair.

  Behind this trio, covering a portion of wall from ceiling to floor, were several long strips of butcher paper on which had been painted in black the legend

  IT’S LATER THAN YOU THINK

  and next to the sign was a bucket of black paint with a broom sitting in it, the handle leaning against the wall.

  Joe kept looking at the MacAlbertsons. They sat before the sign like figures on an altar, quietly, and with that same unholy tranquillity that had caught his interest earlier at Nedick’s.

  The lady behind them was even more disturbing to him. He didn’t like looking at her, but his eyes kept returning to her on their own. There was something wrong with her. But what? She had a blob of dark paint on each eye and a little red mouth. She blinked often. The lids of her eyes seemed to be operated by strings in the control of someone whose attention had wandered. Her head sat upon her neck in a loose way, precariously balanced, bobbing about like a toymaker’s trick. Seen from a distance, she might even have been inhuman, something pasted together by those two silent, sinister children at her feet, an effigy perhaps of a missing parent, made from sticks and straw, candy sacks and Crayolas.

  The boy had some jars in front of him, and he was shaking something out of one of them (a spider? a worm?) and handing it to a beautiful Negro girl. Whatever it was, the girl popped it into her mouth, downed it with beer, and then, in a comic imitation of sensual pleasure, she stretched her arms, wiggled her lean, jersey-clad body and danced across the center of the room into the arms of a splendid black giant, gaining and holding the attention of nearly every other person in the place.

  But Joe watched the MacAlbertson boy, who was still preoccupied with those little jars. He drew closer, hoping for a look at their contents, when the one called Gretel caught his eye and beckoned to him with her head. Joe turned to get some guidance from Ratso, but Ratso was busy at the refreshment table, looking about furtively and stuffing his pockets with salami.

  Gretel MacAlbertson, meanwhile, had risen and come toward Joe. Her face and voice were completely without expression. From close on, she was less sinister, and her tranquillity might even have been simple boredom.

  “You’re here,” she said. “Do you need anything? I mean there’s beer and …” She opened a fist and showed him a big brown capsule.”… This, if you want it.” Reading the question in his face, she said, “It’s a bomber—good for about four hours.”

  Joe looked at the capsule, and then at the girl, smiling to cover his ignorance and wondering what to do.

  She frowned slightly. “Well, take it,” she said, her tone somewhere between a command and a dare.

  Joe took the capsule and popped it into his mouth, worked up some saliva and swallowed it. Proud of himself, he smiled and looked to the girl for some sign of appreciation or approval. But all his bravado seemed only to have deepened her boredom. She pointed a lan-quid hand toward the refreshment table. “Beer’s all right with it,” she said. This time there was something in her voice: gentleness, perhaps.

  Ratso was at that moment approaching with two opened beer cans. He handed one of them to Joe.

  Joe tried to perform an introduction. “This here is, uh, Ratso Rizzo, and—”

  Ratso corrected him. “Rico!” he said.

  But this sort of routine was clearly too taxing for Gretel MacAlbertson, who had wandered away.

  Joe took a good, deep swallow of the beer and wondered what to expect of the capsule.

  “If you want the word on that brother and sister act,” Ratso said, “I’ll give you the word: Hansel’s a fag, and Gretel’s got the hots for herself. So who cares, right?” He thrust a thumb into the air in the direction of the refreshment table. “They got salami up to here. So put some in your pocket already.”

  Joe felt himself being stared at. He turned to look and there, standing in front of the bathroom door, was a girl in an orange dress, smiling at him in a dark, provocative way. She leaned on the door frame in a manner that made the bathroom seem to be her very own tent on a technicolor desert—or perhaps she shared it with other members of the harem. She met his eyes boldly, opening her own even wider, and then bared her teeth and gave a mad little trill of a laugh. Running her fingers through her rich, black hair, she came toward him. Joe liked her body: It was slim-legged but thickly sensual, built close to the ground.

  She said, “I can tell, can’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Joe faked it. “Hell yeah, I can tell.”

  “Well then,” she said, “what’ll we do? Leave now, or what? Have you got a place? Because I’ve got this damned roommate. Well, that doesn’t matter, I can fix it. Because we have this arrangement. Oh God! the second I looked at you, I knew. Did you know right awayr

  “Did I know, uh …”

  “That we were going to make it?”

  Ratso spoke up. “You really want to do business, don’t you, lady?”

  Obviously the woman hadn’t noticed Ratso; she looked at him with surprise. “Who are you? Oh, God! Don’t tell me you two are a couple!”

  “I happen to be his manager,” said Ratso. “And he happens to be Joe Buck, a very expensive stud.”

  “Expensive! Expensive?” Her mouth dropped open. She looked away, blinked, looked at Ratso again, and then at Joe. “Is this true?”

  “Well, now …” Joe began to hedge.

  “Oh God!” she cried. “It is! I can’t believe it.” She wandered away—not escaping, just stupefied. She opened a beer for herself, then leaned against the refreshment table, looking at the tall cowboy, shaking her head, blinking.

  Ratso said, “She’s hooked. I’d say she was good for ten bucks. But I’ll ask for twenty.”

  Joe said, “Listen, money or no money, I could use some of that.”

  “Oh hell yeah, you’re richl Go talk to her. I’ll move in later.” Ratso walked away.

  Joe was beginning to feel weightless. He rolled his shoulders in slow circles, as if to test his ability to move, and found that he had some new possession of his body: It had become remarkable to him again, a thing of grace and power. And he even experienced that old longing for a mirror.

  The black-haired woman was at his side looking up at him as if there were a vast difference in height between them.

  “I’m terribly excited,” she said. “This is the first time in my life I’ve ever been confronted by, well, that I’ve ever even heard of the mere existence of this sort of a situation. And I’m frankly terribly excited. I can’t wait to tell my man but I don’t have an appointment till Monday, isn’t that rotten? Listen, I’m just speculating, you know, but what would happen if I said, ‘Okay I’m buying’? Oooh!”

  The woman suddenly shuddered. She had a fine, handsome nose. The nostrils dilated. She was breathing in short gasps. “I am embarrassed,” she said, “and th
is is not Dexedrine! I’ve had my weight in Dexedrine, and it never did this to me. I should definitely take notes: the breathing, the heart, the stomach, and look! Goose pimples!”

  She showed him her arm; Joe smiled modestly.

  “What is this? Buying a man, is that it? Well, I guess it’s the most thrilling thing I’ve ever heard of. It’s like, well, you take virginity, that’s one end of something. And on the other, absolute opposite, farthest, most utterly distant pole is buying a lover, I suppose. Isn’t it? Of course, leave us face this, I am a long way from virginity. That was never my problem. It’s just that way way way back, years ago, I used to think I had to marry everybody I had an affair with. Primitive?”