The Man Who Cried I Am

by John A. Williams

  Groaning under the lukewarm shower and feeling the sleeping pill going quickly to her head, she spat, “Zwarte klootzak!” She dried herself and went to bed. She sighed and closed her eyes and felt for a moment that she was sliding right off to sleep, but then, through a growing warmth, she became aware of her nude body. She pressed her eyes tightly and held herself tense. The warmth continued to grow. She found her hands near her breasts and quickly drew them away. Now they lay pressed tightly against her body. She turned on her back and placed her arms up above her head; the knuckles of her hands rapped softly on the headboard. Her eyes were used to the darkness now, and she could see the outline of her breasts beneath the sheet. She flung herself on her stomach and gripped the top of the headboard with both hands. Sighing, she kicked the sheets from her. She took one breast and began to caress it. The other hand flitted down over her stomach. Slowly, the fingers began parting the pubic hair. She would sleep better, she thought, and she would not have to bother with anyone, whether they smelled good or bad.

  But sleep did not come. She lay with her arms thrown out from her body. She felt soiled and young. But most of all she felt alone and fearful of it. She thought, De zak! Hij had me toch zeker weleen zoen kunnen geven?! The bastard! He could have kissed me on the cheek.

  He had kissed her the first night they met, at the party Roger held for him. He brought her home, up the stairs and to the door. She turned to thank him. He said, “Een kus?”

  She had smiled. Obviously he had asked somebody to tell him how to ask for a kiss. The dust of Africa hadn’t remained on him long; he adjusted very quickly. And she had thought that he might kiss her and had decided that she would let him. “Yes,” she said, and she had held up her lips, closed her eyes. But she felt his lips on her forehead, soft and very gentle. He drew away. When she opened her eyes he was looking at her with a little smile and he seemed very tired. Someone at the party had told her that he hadn’t slept for two days. What struck her was the innocence of the kiss, innocence, yes, and a kind of gratitude. For what, she had asked herself in the mirror, for what?

  The silver light of morning was already coming up and Margrit began to cry again. No sleep. And what had she done to herself? She would be tired and irritable all day. It would serve him right if she snapped at him. Oh, the bastard, the black bastard, she thought, he could have kissed me!

  When had he said it, how many times and in how many places? But she always forgot.

  “Maggie, for Christ’s sake, I don’t like to be kissed on the street.”

  “I forgot, Mox.”

  “Well, try to remember, will you?”

  “Why does it make you angry when I kiss you on the street?”

  “Never mind, just don’t do it.”

  So, she was always surprised when swimming—Spain, East Hampton, the Virgin Islands—he burst out of the water with a roar, kissed her, dragged her underwater and kissed her again, released her only to grab her again when they came sprinting to the surface to draw breath. Of course, he could have kissed her, if only on the cheek.

  She drifted by on a conveyor belt. She looked very much like herself, he noted with a smile. But she had a filter-tip cigarette in her vagina, and it was smoking. She wore no clothes. She came by again, only this time her hair was red. “Great!” he said, “never had a redhead, very good, Maggie!” And there was another filter-tip cigarette in her vagina. He shook his head. She floated by once more and this time her hair was jet-black. “Ah, Maggie,” he said. “Italian or Spanish?” Then he said, “Why do you smoke so much?” because there was another filter-tip cigarette right where the others had been. “Maggie, you’re a damned showboat,” he said, and he moved close to the line and plucked out the cigarettes as she came by on the conveyor belt again and again. He dropped them beneath his feet and crushed them on the floor. “Baby, you don’t watch it, you’re going to get cancer of the uh-uh.”

  “You’ve got it already,” she said. He tried to look behind him, but he could not; his neck, hands and ankles were strapped down. The room was different: sterile and white. He was naked now and his buttocks were turned up toward the ceiling. He heard the squeak of the cobalt machine being lowered into position.

  “Relax, relax,” Margrit said.

  “Now, wait a minute, Maggie, that’s not the way it works.”

  “I know what I’m doing. Relax. I’ll burn it out.”

  Helpless, he watched the long, slender shadow of the machine descend. He felt the eye of it poking near his anus and he strained at the straps, cursing. “Goddamn it, Margrit, let Dr. Woodson handle it, you dumb bitch!”

  “Zak! Shut up!”

  “Maggie, when I get up from here, it’s going to be your ass, really.”

  “Whose ass, whose?”

  “C’mon, now Maggie. I’m through playing with you. Get Dr. Woodson. Get him! Help!” (Maggie, you rotten bitch!) “Help, doctor, help! (Loose me, damn you!) Help!”

  “Shut up. Dr. Woodson is in New York.”

  “Where are we?”

  “New York.”

  “New York?”

  “No, Amsterdam.”

  “Amsterdam?”

  “No, Lagos.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead in Lagos, Maggie. You know that.”

  “You’re not dead. Yet.”

  “Maggie, take it away. Listen, sweetheart: New Lucky Strike Filters Put Back the Taste Others Take Away … Try New Lucky Strike Filters.”

  “No, that one’s no good. Besides I tried Luckies, in the uh-uh, you remember.”

  “Yes, darling, but how about this one: Kent Satisfies Best …”

  “Like hell they do. Something about that filter; kept slipping.”

  “My love, give me a chance.”

  “Did you ever give me a chance?”

  “Dearest, dearest!” He had felt the eye punching savagely. Quickly he said, “Lark! darling. Richly Rewarding—Uncommonly Smooth; Charcoal Granules, Inner Chamber … how about that, baby?”

  “No!”

  “Help!” he screamed.

  “They are much too sweet; no body,” Margrit said, busy with the machine.

  “Don’t be like that, Maggie. How about this: BIG Change! Now Tempo Has Good Old-Fashioned Flavor.” Max felt the eye of the cobalt machine draw tentatively away. He waited anxiously.

  “Didn’t I try that one?”

  “No, darling. You see, not only is it a brand new filter-tip, but it has already been improved! You know, more charcoal—by the way, Maggie, I don’t think you tried the one with the ground coconut in the filter either—white fiber, new rich tobacco …”

  “… taste,” Margrit said, “it is always the taste that counts.”

  “Yes, dearest one,” Max said, and he kept up a steady stream of endearments while she loosened his straps. Once freed, he grabbed his trousers, pulled them on and raced shoeless past the conveyor belt where Margrit lay trying out the new filter-tip cigarettes.

  Trembling, Max reached for a cigarette. He touched his behind and found the cotton wet. He had taken the precaution of sleeping on a towel. He moved and pain lanced through him and it was heavy and dull and he knew it would stay with him this time unless he took the morphine. He rose, changed the cotton and took the drug. It was still dark outside. He looked at the syringe. If he could just avoid steady use of the morphine for the next few days, just a few more. He started to nod. Suddenly there was a sharp pain in his hand and he jerked it up to find that the cigarette had burned down to his fingers. He thought of the dream; if he’d had a filter-tip cigarette, it wouldn’t have burned him. He placed the cigarette in the ashtray. He didn’t have strength enough to crush it out. Then he went to sleep wrapped in a morphinated stupor.

  But by the time his morning call came, he felt better. He couldn’t feel the pain anymore and the morphine had not left him too drowsy. He called down for a breakfast he didn’t want, then showered. The sun was already bright on the Leidseplein. It made him feel good. He wondered what M
argrit was doing, if she were already on her way to work. He should have kissed her last night, on the cheek, the forehead, some damned where. It had been good to see her. It would be good to see her later, when he returned from Leiden. His breakfast of soft foods came, and he picked over it. Then he called to make arrangements for the car. He was shaken by his toilet and he took one of his pills and lay on the bed, a routine prescribed by Dr. Woodson.

  He could hear the city waking. The trams rattled around the curve downstairs, bells clanging. The horns of the cars grew in number and volume. He knew the bicycle riders were flowing past too. The hotel was fully awake now; he could hear doors being closed, maids walking heavily up and down the carpeted halls, the harsh sounds of Dutch being spoken in semi-whispers. And there was the rattle of breakfast dishes being removed from the rooms. Soon, Max knew, the chambermaids would be at his door. He dozed again. Another half hour, he told himself.

  As he got into the VW (there had been nothing else available) he had another of those periods when he felt good, impossibly good, so much like his old self. Once again he permitted himself to think that the cotton, the pills, the pain, the morphine, Dr. Woodson, were a hideous comedy of errors. Even now, he thought, some obscure lab technician might be on the phone talking to the doctor, saying there had been a mistake. Max shook himself out of the daydream and started the car. Take what you get, man. It’s nice, enjoy it. You knew as soon as you could know things that you weren’t going to live forever. You got twenty extra years. Remember the war. The tanks. Cinquale Canal. Viareggio. The mountains. The Ghoums. The donkeys. He drove slowly through the streets. They did not look familiar. That is, they did not look unfamiliar; they looked, each one, just like one he had passed. He felt his way and was pleased when he arrived at the road south, Europa 10.

  A fine silver mist hung low over the level, neat green fields. You could say that for the Netherlands; their neatness was blatant, as blatant as New York’s high risers. Going back toward the city were two highway policemen with their helmets and sunglasses and white shoulder belts. They roared along in a Porsche. Max settled back in the seat. It was a nice day. Why was he messing it up with Harry Ames, now dead and gone, sprinkled somewhere over the Seine? Once he and Harry had planned to drive through Holland, but like so many things they’d talked about doing, it hadn’t come off. But there had been other things, a hundred thousand other things, he thought, driving along at a steady clip under a rapidly warming sun …

  5

  NEW YORK

  … and he started to feel a little too warm. He rolled down the windows of the beetle-backed Ford he had borrowed. He felt good. A part of things. Bigger than the things he was a part of. It was about time. He bounced over the Long Island roads that F. Scott Fitzgerald had made famous, and thought of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, of Gatsby. Hell, he was going to write Fitzgerald out of existence. Most of the reviews of his first book, published only two weeks ago, made him think so, although not one failed to compare him with Harry Ames. He was not going to let that bother him just yet. He would meet Ames that day, at Wading River, at the summer home of Bernard Zutkin, the literary critic. Of course, Max had read Ames, had liked the very hell out of his big book, the one that had made him. He wondered what kind of man Ames was. There were always stories around the newspaper, the Harlem Democrat, which, after the acceptance of his novel for publication, had finally moved him from hustling ads from the owners of bars and barbecue joints to editorial. Now Max wrote about shootings and stabbings and cases of discrimination. And the scandals. Especially the ones involving chicken-eating ministers caught with someone else’s wife in a fleabag hotel. Ames got a lot of attention in the paper, along with Bolton Warren. So there were always stories. Max knew that Ames was thirty, six years older than he; that Ames had been born in Mississippi, but had traveled around the country, to Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington. Max knew Chicago, had been born there, and he had lived in Cleveland for a while before coming to New York to settle down. New York, the Big Apple.

  Max looked forward to the weekend. Perhaps the people at Zutkin’s would be groovy. Going in for the beach scenes and all, lots of whiskey and dancing. He wondered if Ames could swim. Yes, it would be an absolute groove, if Harry Ames hadn’t sewed it up already. He pictured Ames (on the basis of the love scenes Ames had written) as being pretty great with the chicks. He’d see.

  And he’d have to feel his way with Zutkin who’d already asked him to write articles for his magazine. Zutkin, a loner, so the talk went, was a highly regarded critic. His criticism seemed to have roots in the struggles taking place within the society. In Harlem, where no one cared, it was said that Zutkin once had been a big man in the Party. No one knew for sure. He was a small, bald, retiring man with a slow, deep smile. He was the only Jew in Wading River and once the Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross on his lawn. Max had covered the story and it appeared on the front page of the Democrat.

  Max had met one other critic at a party in Manhattan, Granville Bryant, the “Great White Father.” Bryant was a tall and extremely thin, pale man who wore his hair in a long, luxuriant brown mane. He was never seen without a velvet jacket or a silk scarf looped casually around his neck. Bryant singlehandedly had undertaken to open publishing doors for Negro writers and was the inspiration and guide for what was now called the “Black Reawakening.” Aspiring young black writers sweated and clamored for an invitation to Bryant’s Fifth Avenue duplex, and over the years, just to be invited to one of his affairs came to be a mark of artistic status. Max, however, had kept his distance, for one was either in the Bryant camp or the Zutkin camp and he preferred the latter.

  There were a number of cars already parked near Zutkin’s large, dark-shingled house. As he was parking, Max heard the slopping beat of boogie-woogie and a number of voices and, punctuating these, the soft, deceptive spit of a .22. Shorts, he guessed, were being fired. As he approached the house, the music and voices began to come low and flat. Zutkin’s house was near the ocean. Max circled the house, saw dancers moving to the music, but he wanted to look at the water. He knew people who cared nothing at all for oceans and lakes and streams, and he found that strange. He could not pass a body of water without looking at it and wondering how it was that he and the millions of others had started in places like that. He marveled at it.

  A group of people were standing on the sandy ledge overlooking the ocean, clustered around a crouching, broad-shouldered Negro man who was firing a pump rifle. The man lowered the weapon, raised it again and sighted. About seventy-five feet away, down on the shelf of the beach, a can bounded in the air and fell back. The man (Ames! Max had thought) lowered the rifle and looked around triumphantly. His eyes had just locked with Max’s when Zutkin approached.

  “Hello, Max,” Zutkin said, holding out a Scotch highball. “Saw you come in. How’ve you been? Glad you could come.”

  “Thanks, Bernard. I’m all right, thanks.” His eyes swung back to Ames.

  “I’m glad he’s not angry with me,” Zutkin said loudly.

  “Don’t count on it, man,” Ames said, pulling out of his crouch. The people around him now turned to Zutkin and Max.

  “Max Reddick,” Zutkin said, and proceeded to introduce Max around. Now Max and Ames stood face to face. They were about the same height, Max noticed with satisfaction. Ames had big hands, but they weren’t hard.

  “Hello, brother,” Ames said. “How’s your shooting eye?” He turned back to the beach and fired at the can once more. They could hear sand spray with sharp tinny sounds from the near miss. Ames spun around and thrust the rifle, barrel straight up, to Max.

  Max recognized the challenge. The people would be sympathetic if he missed. Even Ames. The comparison would be obvious. It might even carry to the writing of novels. “I’ll give it a try,” Max said, handing Ames his drink and taking the rifle. It had a bead sight and was light, almost too light, even for a .22.

  “I’ll bet he’s like one of those guys who ha
ng around the pool-halls and pretends he’s a sucker can’t shoot a lick, but he’s really a hustler,” Ames said.

  “Exactly,” Max said, as he aimed, and he knew that Ames had him at both ends; if he missed, well, Ames was a better shot and perhaps all the rest. If he didn’t miss, well, he was a hustler, jiving them. Max stood at the lip of the ledge. He moved his elbows and glanced back at Ames. Ames had braced on one of his thighs. Max was showing him that he needed no brace. There was a flicker of Ames’s eyes; he understood. A polite silence fell. Max took a breath, let it out part way and held it. He squeezed. The can jumped. He squeezed again. The can bounded in the opposite direction. A murmur ran through the onlookers. Not quite like shooting squirrel or rabbit in Wisconsin, just to show the old man that you could get something, Max thought, but it would do. He pumped and fired again and while the can was still in motion, drilled it twice. He pumped, sighted and the trigger snapped, flatly. Empty. Max was grinning when he turned and handed the gun back to Ames.

  “Told you, didn’t I?” Ames said, taking the rifle.

  “Squirrels and rabbits,” Max explained.

  “And pigeons,” Ames said sarcastically. He smiled. “I don’t like nobody who can do things better than me. Ask Bernard. Hey, how’s your drinking?”

  “Tolerable,” Max said, smiling.

  “Tolerable? Where the hell you from?”

  Max knew then that Ames hadn’t read his book and he was disappointed. The dust jacket would have told Ames where he was from.