Only sixteen, he thought, and wondered how often she'd smoked this much.
She came up and stood inches away, her upper lip curving up into the architecture of his high, and whispered, "Jesus, was that beautiful."
"What's that?" The words came out in two squeaks from his constricted throat.
"The way you knocked down that toke." Her eyes de-focused and then held him with their force again. "It's the most beautiful thing I've seen in my life!"
Neil, next to a ventilator, turned and lay face down and slapped the roof, and cried, "Love at first sight! Love at first sight!" The sunlight gilding his red-gold hair as he rolled.
On their way back, at a metal grate set into the sidewalk, Charles jittered over to Jackie and said, "You see those little bars? Those are little steps. They all go uphill." And then started climbing them. She followed, grabbing on to his belt, and they went straining, leaning forward, holding the side of the building for leverage and balance, going uphill for so long the others got dazed and went on ahead, and when they reached the peak, the summit of the end, the sidewalk, it was only natural for him to take her in his arms (enormous breasts encased in cloth taut as upholstery) and kiss those lips he admired. A policeman rapped on his back with a bat. "Hey," he said. "You two kids been using dope?"
"Yup," Charles said.
"You're high?"
"High as a kite." Kites? The officer looked surprised under his visor. Was that a flash of a smile from him? He wasn't much older than Charles and had motives in his eyes that were uncommonly well mixed.
"Go on, get out of here. You kind of kids make me sick."
Did he smile again?
"But, sir, we're really high-flying. Honest. Don't you want to arrest us?" Because Neil had told him you couldn't be arrested if you were high but not in possession. Was that true? Jackie, pale amber under her tan, took his arm and led him off, and said, "Don't do that again. It takes some balls, I know, but don't ever do that around me again, you hear?"
"What's the time?" she asked now.
"Come off it."
"Who cares?"
"Plenty of time for you, baby," Neil said.
"Why do—" Charles was interrupted by a delayed laugh.
Jackie came to the Village nearly every day in faded Levi's and a boat-neck top, and every day around six had to have somebody ride home with her on the subway because she was afraid of "perverts" and "the coloreds," as she called them, and yesterday was Charles's first turn at the task and after an hour-long lurching and clackety ride ("When these get going fast like this with that big zip, I get my gun," Jackie whispered, out of breath, in his ear) that left him in a vague and shattered limbo, the squealing of steel still running ribbons around where his ears should have been, he found himself among high rises with well-kept gardens and parks surrounding them—the Bronx?— and as he joined Jackie in the elevator of one of the most ostentatious of the crenelated banks of flower-bordered buildings, he saw that a single button. Penthouse, was lit; her father was a producer, her mother a movie actress, she scatted to him on the way up, ooo, and neither of them ever got back to this blankety place until after eight—and then the doors clattered back, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, ran over carpetry that covered her tennies to a copper-painted door, and started digging through her purse, a teenager afraid of her parents and the potential she felt in men, and then the corridor in which she was exposing this protected part of herself for his eyes only was encroached upon by shuddering torms, the black-joined elevator doors, and he fell back toward earth again, a blind light hurtling along the world.
He blinked and his head jerked—Jackie was across the table from him—and suddenly he had to have some sort of solidity. He leaned against the wall somewhere behind, but his center of equipoise stayed where his head had been, and the three shafts of rectangular sunlight, slanting in from the high windows down to the floor, were so substantial in the dim room they were buttresses supporting the wall he touched. How? New ingenuities? His fanny felt hot.
Neil had his elbow on the tabletop, forearm up, in arm-wrestling position, and with nobody opposing him was grunting and straining and trying to make a press—his face was crimson, beads of sweat arrayed over his forehead—and Charles realized he was taking on the world.
"I gotta know the time," Jackie said. "If they ever found out I've been down here, they'd break my back. Ma used to live in the Village, you know. Besides, it feels so strange—being so early, I mean. I mean, being early in the day. Isn't it? I can't explain. I never get stoned before three o'clock."
Neil tried so hard not to laugh that a spray of mist, triangular-shaped, radiated around his lips and began to disperse, fine streamers trailing down from it, into a slow and dim-silver fade through the shaft of sunlight Charles was staring at while he tried to control himself. He couldn't look at Jackie or Neil, who were laughing the strained and tattered laughter of those so stoned they can't be sure they're attracting all the attention they think they are, if they are, because he was giddy, giggling, higher than he'd been in his life, which made their laughter like rising water beneath his giddiness, lifting it from below his tightening beltline until he saw he was sliding up the shaft of sunlight, up it not down, defying the laws of nature and going in shaking leaps up the buttresses and through the window into the green world.
"Hey," Hap said. "Did you all see that broad?"
The other four turned passive and solemn and their heads, in unison, swiveled toward the doorway behind him.
"No, no," Hap said. “Not here, not now. Jeez, you guys must all be stoned." His close-cropped hair began so far back from his forehead he looked perpetually startled, ' and with alternate thumbs he kept clearing his eyebrows of sweat, and then flicking them clean, fine spray flying in the light again. "No, I mean that broad I was talking to outside, the blonde, the bombshell, the big one. She must have been six feet three. And did you see those knockers on her? Whoh! She was some kind of high-class dish."
"That's a hell of a way to talk about a woman," Vi said, her voice throaty and green-blue with accusing shame.
"Zooks!" Neil said, and hooked his thumbs together and began waving his outstretched hands until they seemed wings, and then were. "Up, Bird of Paradise, seeker after truth, big fella." The wings beat more boldly and began to lift his arms. "Hey, up there! High! High!" He was drawn out of his seat and the wing tips started stuttering slappingly against the tin ceiling. "Eee! Eee! Eee! Motor scooter roto-rooter! Wheels! Vine and roses. Jigalong, please. Tote dat barge, lif dat— Hear dem gulls creak! D and D! OD! Take my hand now," he said, and as Charles reached out and Neil sank down it seemed everybody remembered being stoned again, except for Hap, of course, who stared at them with his startled look ("He'll want testimonials later," Neil said), encased in a pair of Tyrolean lederhosen with brightly embroidered braces that formed an H over his T-shirt, so you'd know him whether you were too inwardly spaced to see or hadn't met him in your life or seen him when you did. He was older, thirty or so, and could usually be found near the Square in his shorts and knitted knee socks with a gadget bag and two or three cameras dangling, professional tools; he sold dope and used the equipment for making deliveries {acid in a camera?), as if involved in some kind of Eastern European Communistic espionage.
"You can let go of my hand now," Neil said.
Had Charles ever had hold of it?
"I said that's a hell of a way to talk about a woman," Vi said again.
"What do you know?" Hap said.
"I know you bass-ackwards, buddy boy."
"Bull!" Hap was always stopping young, long-legged, big-breasted girls in the street, his face running and glistening with the perspiration that beleaguered him, and saying, after some everyday talk, "Hey, you want to pose for a couple nudies? I got dope." It was enlightening to hear about the kind and number of corners he had, and Vi was one, and an ex-one at that. She sang ballads and blues in a voice that brushed down close to a baritone, a bassoon moving in and out of textu
red melodies, in a beat-up basement coffehouse that seemed to keep changing hands every week and acquiring with each change a new name and a different shade of paint around its presently zebra-striped doorway, where burnt and unpalatable espresso, awful coffee, was served for a dollar a cup and a hat was hourly passed for the poor performers. She'd been sleeping there, too, recently, and was beginning to look worn and middle-aged, though she was only twenty or so; black hair oily and thin, pinched into a frizzy bun, violet stains of fatigue beneath her eyes; and she'd begun wearing matronly skirts and homemade blouses of calico, as though preparing to die a pioneer in New York.
"Oh, jeez," she said. "This grass of yours is fallin' apart inside a me, Hap."
"That's you, not the stuff. It's first-class, ask your friends."
"Hey," Jackie said, and leaned toward Charles, pressing her breasts into the tabletop until their tips were flattened into two round areas the size of saucers ("Dig it," Neil whispered), which made her hands, lying in front of them, shrink even more. "Hey, have you ever been to the Top of the Six's?"
"The only place I've ever been," Charles said, "is right here."
Her hands began leaping in the air as if being manipulated by strings, and Charles, in this sentient state supplied by the herb of the earth, realized that somebody must have told her once that she had attractive hands. The purposeful and malign cruelty to children of family friends afraid to confront adults. "It's really neat," she said. "I go there with my folks. They say, 'Where do you want to go this weekend, Jack?' And I say, The Top of the Six's,' and we go there and get our table by the window and look out at the park while we eat, at all the lights and taxis moving around down there, and I order butterfly steak. It's beautiful, thin as paper, and evaporates up your nose. And I have wine. They let me have all the wine I want from their bottle and it really sends me up, looking down on the park like that. I want to go there with you and sit at our table and look right at you while we eat. Would you like that?"
"Yes," Charles said.
"Would you like to do it with me?"
"I certainly would."
"Do you have a suit?"
"I used to."
"I'll have to have you wear one there."
"I'll wear one for you."
"I'll pay!"
"Neil," Vi said. "Will you watch me if I get really sick?"
"Right," he said. "I feel it, too."
"Will you watch out for me?"
"Right, baby."
"Because I'm goin' over that line, Neil. I'm headed for it right now."
"I gotcha," he said, his flexed toes beating in a frantic rhythm that made the table wobble, and then leaned to Charles and funneled into his ear in a baby voice, "She's on coke. Been on it a year. Baa-aaa-aaad shit." His leg kept beating and the table swayed up and around as though asserting its existence among them now, more rectangular than square, oblong, with a red-colored carved wooden top.
"Do you know how to handle headwaiters?" Jackie asked.
"I guess," Charles said.
"Because Ma called the one at the Top of the Six's a finicky old bitch."
"I gotcha," Charles said. Did she mean this?
Hap pointed a camera around, and said, "Boy, is this shadow nice."
"You're tellin' me, Hap?" Neil cried. ''Hooo-wheee! Just watch it you don't get my head guillotined in that mother, you hear?"
"I used to have such pep," Vi said. "I ain't got no more pep. Shit."
The table seemed to tilt up toward Charles and he saw both of Neil's legs going at it underneath now, and then Neil began pressing his fingertips on the tabletop in patterns, as if chording on a piano. He leaned his ear close to his hands to listen for a time. His eyes closed. Ah. His face was boyish, and with his thin mustache, which he darkened with mascara (he often slept over), he reminded Charles of photographs of World War I R.A.F. aces—the same feverish bravado in his eyes, with the unnamable tentativeness behind, and when he laughed they went out of focus and looked homicidal and crazed.
Vi studied him, her hazy stare glazed but direct and considering, and said, "You know what coke does to your insides? It eats 'em up. I can feel every frigging cell in my goddamn bod."
"That's it!" Neil said.
"Every one has a set of teeth along the side, real sharp, and they're eating up the side that's left. Cannibals. Imagine that. Look at me and think of that. All those things like alligator teeth in there. Here."
"A crocodile. He's the color of your eyes. He's in your belly," Neil said. "Grarf!"
"Ah!" Vi cried, and covered her face.
"Why don't you lay off?" Hap asked.
"Lay off who?" Neil said.
"No, no. Why doesn't she lay off that crap?"
"What we're into here is shock therapy," Neil said. "You dig it, Hap?"
"Bull."
"You want a charge?"
"Why don't you lay off that stuff?" Hap said to her. .
Vi moved her eyes to him and they turned as cold as the reptiles around at the edge of hallucination. "Sit on your thumb, you bugger," she said, and poked out her tongue.
"Hey, Hap, why don't you come on up?" Neil said. "Use some of that classy stuff you got. Don't bother to run up on a roof. Eat an ounce here like wheat germ. A bowl, waiter! Or pop one of your"—he picked up a camera of Hap's and looked at its lens—"pop one of your handy Nikon tabs."
"Hands off, asswipe," Hap said, and grabbed it from him.
"Hey, hey, I'ze jes funnin' ya. Hap. A hee hee." A wave of violence radiated from Neil and surges of it kept coming in broadening bands that grew denser in hue. In spite of his boyish face and mustache, he was rough, trim and compact, with concave cheeks granular from acne, a thick scar through his right eyebrow, and fight scars around his mouth. One front tooth was broken off ("Karate," he said), and he bit his upper lip to keep it hidden when he laughed hard. "Really, Hap," he said. "Or a bit of that wee Hershey bar you wrap up in tinfoil for my brain? What is it you call that stuff? Home fries? Are you a closet dope-freak in disguise?"
Hap cleared the sweat from his eyebrows. "Hell, I ain't going to mess my Life up with that crap. I got enough problems the way it is. I'd end up in Bellevue, that's what I'd do. Besides, my old man would kill me if he found out. He's in— Well, he's got an important job."
"Hap's got a contact! Listen at him rag! Doesn't ole Pops ever wonder where you get all your classy clothes?"
"Lay off, you fruit," Hap said. "I'll burn you so bad you'll go blind."
Neil's body started jiving in spasms as he tried to contain or create a laugh. "Scary!" he said. "Hoo, boy, I'm scared shitless. Hey, I'm from Hollywood, Florida, right. Hap? Right." He spread apart the thumb and forefinger of each hand and unfurled a marquee. "Hollywood, Florida, movie capital of the world! Stars! Glamour! Flashy cars! Go go go go go-go girls! Dog races, no, no, I can't," he said. "Buck up, boy. Aha, thought you had me, huh? Mother. My mother, God bless her, a lovely lady—my mother, a big woman, could be a sumo wrestler — my mother works in the mail room of a freight shipping depot. Hobnobs with the truck drivers. Vroom! Vroom! Diesel coming through! Daddy's at the courthouse, typing up county records, tickety tackety tappety rippety. Daddy's the fastest typist they have. And when he comes home, how does he relax? Right, gets those aching pinkies in there and tickles the old Mozart and George Gersh. In my virgin days, I used to think, hey. Dads, ole poopsie, you got a prob, huh? Because he was always having young guys over on weekends—greasers in tight pants who ran around saying, Wheeee! He played the piano for them in a special suit, slippery gold, and one day walked up to me in those same threads, carrying his electric drill, and said. Tut 'em up. I'll grill ya.' Honk! Honk! Quackers coming through! You wanna go for an elevator ride? Ka-boom. Fooled ya, huh? And then when I was eleven I woke up in the middle of the night, and there was ole Dads beside the bed with a jug in his hand, looking like he was about to job me. I lived on the beaches for two weeks. Lots of fags. Some lonesome runaway mood music should come in here. Vi? Boo-hoo!
'Why'd you miss so much school?' teach wanted to know. 'Oh, well. Daddy, he—' hee —!"
Neil struggled with a cough that came so hard a spray of tears frazzled his face. "Inhale! Exhale! In— There's a skeeter on my peter playing Ping-Pong with my ding-dong! There's another on my brother playing Ping-Pong —with his ding-dong! Ahee dem dab, Zulu warrior, zee dem dab Zulu chief! chief! chief! It's like a feather up your ass, or else a flashlight, huh? Ringaling! Operatoree? Slending me a slingslong? Goo. Chatslip. Here, cheek a-cheek a-cheek! Yalp! Erb! Brrr-rat-a-tat-tat. Ooo! A-rat-a-tat-tat! Ugh! Buicks with BARs hidden in those old porthole vents, you say, Dick Tracy? Good gad! Dig that jaw! Glug! Is that wicked missile headed toward my eye, Mr. Prophet? I—ee ah oh uh I—" He signaled that he couldn't go on and laid his head on the table, on his crossed arms, and his multicolored shirt arched and leaped in a series of seizures intermingled with no-longer, understandable sounds.
"Oh, jeez, Neil," Vi said. "I didn't—"
"Beautiful," Jackie whispered in a new voice, the one that would be hers as a woman, next year.
The man at the rear of the room, who had on a black cowboy hat with the brim pulled low over one eye, moved his chair into a shaft of sunlight, settled the twelve-string in his lap, and started to play, simply and politely at first, and then, as he began to approve of his tuning, went into a growing volume and inventiveness that made the air darken and turn baroque with his stilled and frangible framelike stanzas formed out of the rush of individually illuminated time.
"Oh, jeez," Vi said, and a widening iridescence appeared in the violet depressions of her eyes. "Oh, shit, can that man play some bad-ass blues!"
She put her elbows on the table and covered her face.
Beyond the Bedroom Wall Page 53