Midnight Cowboy

by James Leo Herlihy

  When he awakened there were streaks of daylight at the edges of the window shades. The same thoughts, thoughts of himself being weakened, rushed through his head now with a kind of dream continuity. He saw himself being drained and robbed and swindled in a thousand impossible ways: Every smile cost him some ungodly sum, and every time he nodded in assent to a stranger, a vital substance was exacted from him. If a clock ticked or a breeze blew or a wheel turned in his presence, within range of his senses, it seemed somehow to have stolen his energy to fuel itself.

  Nearly overwhelmed by these thoughts, he was surprised to discover that his power had returned to him while he slept. He put his hand on himself, touched deeply, almost to the point of hysteria, by a sense of relief and good fortune. But this passed quickly, giving way to a desire for some sort of vengeance. He wanted to say something with this power, wanted to make it count for something, use it for a protest, wanted to write his initials across the sky with it and a warning too in black letters that would make them tremble.

  The woman next to him was asleep on her back. He reached out and placed his hand over her, curving his palm and his fingers in the shape of a cup and pressing them against her great warmth.

  In a moment they were together and she was crying out with every breath. He drove at her in a measured, systematic way that seemed calculated not for his pleasure but for her punishment. But the woman liked this game. She bit his shoulder to earn more of this splendid wrath, and he had to cup his hand over her mouth and press on it hard to muzzle those teeth, and he continued to work and to work and to work and to work and the woman’s eyes were wild and she moaned through his hand and slobbered in the palm of it and worked her mouth against it, and with her body she said, Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Oh yeah? and met everything he had to say with his, and they had established a kind of dogged and laborious and insistent fight between them, but she wanted more anger and so she clawed at his back with her fingernails and Joe knew she’d brought blood out of him, that he was being drained again. Now they were taking his blood. But this time he’d caught them in the act; well, he’d show them; and so he drove at her harder, and deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and now there were tears coming from the woman’s eyes and all her breath came and went from her accompanied by some animal noise that was more vicious than a growl, and he took his hand away from her mouth and looked at her and saw that her face was something terrible, and so he called her something terrible and that helped her, something broke inside of her and she began to laugh and cry, alternating rapidly between the two like a madwoman, and it was clear to Joe Buck that the woman knew she was going to have her freedom, and he labored with greater and greater insistence to deliver it to her, not because he wanted her free but because he wanted to feel himself the deliverer, wanted to know that power again in himself, and then there was a long low cry like a deliberate scream coming from her, and he kept on for a moment as if he wanted to sign his name in blood and with a flourish to what he had done; and in doing this, something unexpected happened: He himself was set free. And then he allowed all of his weight to rest upon the woman. She kept her arms around him, smeared with her hand the blood she had drawn from his back. And she kept telling him over and over again the most common name for the act they had performed, as if the experience might be improved or prolonged or even somehow immortalized in the dirty-naming of it. And as Joe lay upon her, his eyes deep in the pillow, two young people in black walked into his mind, slender and blond and plain as day: the MacAlbertsons. And for a moment, briefly, while the woman recited her obscene litany of small words, he looked at these children in his mind and entered into their mystery. Saw them come into being full-grown before his eyes, saw them walking hand in hand against a backdrop of nothingness, together but unjoined, motherless and fatherless and without real gender, unconnected to the world or to who they themselves were, or where, or what, saw them wandering in search of others passing through the same empty regions, others born loose and alien and unconnected as they themselves were, and in this brief clarity Joe Buck had a sense of knowing just who the children were: his own. His own offspring, born full-grown from this very night’s union.

  4

  When Joe left the woman’s apartment that afternoon, he had his stomach full of food and hot coffee, he was freshly bathed and shaved, he had poured a lot of expensive-smelling cologne into his boots to counteract the odor, and he had twenty dollars riding on his hip.

  At Times Square he bought a pair of socks and some clean underwear and changed into them in the men’s room at the Automat. The old underwear and socks were in sorry shape, and, feeling extravagant, he flushed them down the toilet. Then he decided to spend fifty cents to have his boots shined, and while they were being worked on he counted his money and thought about what he might do with it. It occurred to him he should have bought some underwear and socks for the runt. And perhaps some food as well. And medicine.

  At the drugstore on Eighth Avenue he bought aspirin, cough syrup and vitamin pills and then proceeded to the army-navy store, where he bought a pair of long underwear and two pairs of red woolen socks, one large and one small, to accommodate the difference in Ratso’s feet.

  Hurrying down Eighth Avenue with these purchases, Joe sang The Last Roundup in double time, oblivious to the stares of other pedestrians. The afternoon sun was melting the piles of filthy snow along the gutters, and he had to step deftly over the soft slush to keep from spoiling the new shine on his boots. Certain store windows and two or three mirrors along the way gave him a reflection of a cowboy passing by in splendid style, and at some of them he paused to smile at himself and tense his buttocks a time or two to savor all the power he had in there. His final purchase, a carton of hot chicken soup, was made at a good Jewish delicatessen in the block near 30th Street.

  Arriving at the X-flat, he stopped on the stairs to check his parcels: socks, underwear, medicine, soup, cigarettes. Something about the socks stopped his mind. He placed the other packages on one of the steps and removed the socks from the paper sack, holding one pair in each hand. He looked at them for a long time, straining after some thought or other. He pondered for a moment the peculiarity of Ratso’s foot sizes, but that wasn’t what he was after. He wanted something that would clarify a feeling he had in himself about all of these purchases, not just the socks. But whatever it was, it wouldn’t stand still for him.

  He gathered up the packages and climbed the stairs to the flat.

  Ratso had a number of blankets wrapped around him and his teeth were clamped together to keep them from chattering. He swallowed two aspirins with a little water, but he couldn’t get any of the soup down until the chills subsided. By then, Joe had to warm it again in a little pan over the canned heat, and now Ratso was sweating so that he wanted to remove all of his blankets entirely. They quarreled over the wisdom of this, and also over the question of a name for Ratso’s complaint. Joe wanted to call it cat fever, a name Sally had liked to apply to a number of disorders he’d suffered in childhood on the theory that all sicknesses came from cats, but Ratso said he hadn’t been near a cat, and besides, what he had was the flu.

  While he drank the soup, Joe showed him the socks and long underwear. Ratso looked at them and shook his head.

  “They wrong?” Joe asked.

  “No. But while you was buying the underwear I could’ve hooked the socks. That’s okay, though.” As an afterthought, he added, “Thanks.” Then he said, “Hey, Joe, don’t get sore about this or anything, you promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I don’t think I can walk.” Ratso looked at the wall. He was obviously embarrassed. “I mean, I been fallin’ down a lot and—uh.”

  “And what?”

  “I’m scared.” He put the soup on the floor next to the pile of blankets and began to shiver again. He clamped his jaws together and held his arms tight against his body.

  “What of?” Joe said.

>   “I tole you already!”

  “I know, but …”

  “Of what’ll happen” Ratso said. “I mean what do they uh, you know—do with you—if you can’t, uh … Agh, shit!”

  “Who? What does who do with you?”

  “I don’t know. The cops. Or the—how should I know?”

  “You mean,” Joe said, “like if you can’t walk?”

  Ratso nodded.

  “Then what do they do with you?”

  Ratso nodded some more. Then Joe got to his feet and began to shout. “Well, what’s the cops got to do with that? That’s none of their fucking business who walks and who don’t! Man, I swear, you talk like a person with a paper asshole! Don’t you know what you and me’s going to do? You and me’s going to Florida.”

  “Florida! What the-”

  “Just a matter of bus fare is all.”

  “Come on with Florida already. Cut the crap.” Ratso frowned and searched Joe’s face for some sign of sense.

  Joe said, “I been figuring main thing we break our ass for here is keep warm. Right? What you’re doing now, you’re shivering, see? Second main thing is food. Right again, right? Well, in Florida it’s a matter of coconuts and sunshine and all that, and you don’t break your ass at all. Use y’head, Ratso, you know them things, we talked about all this shee-it plenty times, did you forget?”

  He took out his money and displayed it, spreading the bills out like a poker hand. “This here’s the start, what I made last night. Tonight I’m making the rest. It’s all set, I was just waiting to let you know is all. Now tell me this, we figure the bus to take thirty-eight a piece, okay? So times two is how much?”

  “What, you gonna take me?” Ratso said.

  Joe nodded. “So times two is how much?”

  “Seventy-six. Listen, Joe, I got nineteen. It’s in that shoe.”

  “Where’d you get nineteen?”

  Joe went after the shoe and pulled out the money.

  Ratso said, “I went through them coats last night.”

  “What coats?”

  “At the party, at the party, for chrissake! ‘Member in the stairway? All them coats? Well, I got nineteen dollars.”

  “All right. And with this nine it makes what? How much more I got to get then?”

  Ratso closed his eyes for a few seconds, then said, “Fifty. Let’s say fifty. That’s too much, huh?”

  “Too much fooey,” Joe said. “Mood I’m in, it ain’t nothing. I’ll see you later.”

  At the door, he looked back. “You get into them long johns,” he said. “And the socks! We ain’t hauling ass onto no bus and you stinking it up with feet!”

  Ratso was staring at Joe and past him. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. I just cannot goddam believe it.” Then he sat forward, “Hey, wait a minute!” He shook his head back and forth as he said, “You’re not gonna do something real dumb, are you, and end up with your ass in a sling?”

  Joe said, “Can’t you shut up? Can’t you? Can’t you just once shut up and let me do something? I mean is they a law says Joe Buck can’t have a one lousy i-dea ‘thout getting his ass in a sling, just one puny little i-goddam-fuckin’-ifea?” He came back into the room and flopped into a chair, making his feet land heavy on the floor. “Now you gone and shot m’whole mood right in the ass!

  But he rose again at once and returned to the door. “No you didn’t neither,” he said. “I’m damned if you did! You and me’s leavin’ town tonight.”

  He slammed the door and went down the stairs two at a time.

  5

  Joe scanned the doorways and theater lobbies and penny arcades of Times Square in search of a moneymaking opportunity, and for the first two hours nothing much happened. It was too cold to stand still for long periods. He wasted some fifteen minutes in Duffy Square on a prospect too frightened to speak up, and another even larger piece of an hour was squandered in following a pretty woman all the way over to Grand Central Station only to watch her board the train for New Haven. He walked back to Times Square and all the way up Broadway to 50th Street, over to and down Eighth Avenue and across 42nd again, then covered the same ground a second and a third time, warming up between trips in a dirty-books shop and at a gameroom called Fascination where he lost a dollar and twenty cents.

  And then along about eight o’clock, having forgotten for the moment the object of his hunt, he was looking idly in the window of a Seventh Avenue magic shop when he realized that the liveliest possibility of the evening had shown itself less than three feet from him and was looking in the same store window.

  This was a red, white and blue person of about fifty. He was stocky, almost fat, with very black eyebrows. He had a pleasant, round face that seemed always to be smiling, even in repose, and his eyes were anxious and uncertain of every single thing in the world. But the most vivid aspect of the man were those colors of a musical comedy American: the red of his complexion, the pure white of his hair and his silk muffler, and the lively blue of his eyes and his overcoat.

  Joe had been taught that you weren’t supposed to be the first to speak. You had to let them do that. There were a number of theories in support of this policy: For one thing, speaking first showed a certain eagerness that was apt to lower your price, and for another, if your prospect turned out to be a policeman in disguise, he would arrest you for soliciting.

  But Joe felt the necessity of making a strike before the cold really got through to him. At a certain point on these winter nights in the doorways of Times Square his face became numb and pale and he was unable to think clearly or behave with any ease at all; from then on he would begin to look and act like a loser and no one would want anything to do with him at all.

  And so he threw caution to the winds and screwed up a good big smile and swung his eyes onto that red, white and blue face, and was about to speak when the man himself spoke up.

  “How are you?” the big face broke open in the middle, showing still more red and white in the gums and perfect teeth, and he clasped Joe’s hand in both of his own.

  From his first words the man succeeded in establishing an atmosphere of extraordinary intimacy. A stranger observing the scene might have said that two friends of long standing had come together in a surprise reunion after years of agonizing separation.

  His voice—he started talking at once in a way that suggested he might never stop—was deep and rich and vigorous and at the same time oddly prissy, giving him the aspect of a hysterical, somewhat sissified bull. Introducing himself as Townsend P. (for Pederson) Locke of Chicago (“Call me Towny”), he said he was “in paper” and had come to New York to attend a manufacturers’ convention. “And frankly, to have a little fun, dammit,” he added, like a person who has decided to put his foot down.

  “This is my first night and I’ll consider it a ghastly omen, clouding my entire ten days, if you don’t consent to have dinner with me. Please! It’s awfully important to me. You will? You’ll say yes?”

  Joe found that his assent wasn’t really needed. For he had hardly begun to nod when he found himself being almost forcibly conducted up 42nd Street. Towny did not once stop talking. What’s more, he wasn’t the kind of talker who required any sign of listening. He flitted from topic to topic in butterfly fashion: Chicago, food, his mother, the convention, New York, people in general, cowboys, the need for “fun,” his mother again, the Midwest, restaurants, religion, Michigan Avenue, the art of conversation. (“That’s what I like about you, you’re such a wonderful conversationalist,” he said at one point, causing Joe to open his eyes wide and nod in amazement.)

  “Now where would you like to eat? I give you your choice of all the restaurants on the island of Manhattan. No, no, on the entire East Coast. If there’s some place in New Jersey or Long Island or even Philadelphia that you absolutely hanker for, we’ll hire a car. Now you say! Chambord? 21? The Luau? Never mind how you’re dressed. They know me. I’ll tell them you’re with the rodeo, there’s always a rodeo in
New York. Besides, you look very elegant, and these places, the really good ones, never fret over neckties or any of that nouveau chichi crap. Oh!”—a snap of the fingers—”But dammitall, I’ll tell you what we’ll have to do, we’ll have to eat in my room because I have this phone call coming at nine-thirty. My mother always calls me at her bedtime and I’ve got to be there. She’s ninety-four and at that age it seems to me you can just damn well be there when they call up to say good night, don’t you agree to that? So won’t that be nice? To have dinner sent up? I’ve got a very modest, perfectly pleasant suite at the Europa near Ninth Avenue. All my fancy friends stay at the Pierre or the Plaza and they can have it! ‘Why do you stay down there, Townsend, please?’ Well, of course, I know and you know that fifty years ago the Europa was the only hotel in Manhattan: those high ceilings, all that marble in the bathrooms. We have an eye for real quality.” He squeezed Joe’s arm. “As opposed to mere fashion. Here! Look!”