by Nick Tosches
I still couldn’t get used to the television sets in these joints. News, baseball, commercials for dick-stiffeners and hair-sprouters. Half a dozen customers and three satellite television sets going. Some of the guys in these joints would rather stare at a soap opera than drink alone and face themselves and their drinks and the screaming emptiness and desperation inside them. It was as if they had forgotten how to talk, even if it was to talk only the nonsense of their shambled brains. Only when there was enough booze in them did they give voice to the empty, desperate screaming inside them. And still the television sets droned on.
From the bar I went to the knife store. I did not know why, but I wanted to pursue the possibility of having made for me a dagger with a leopard-bone handle. If it had been suggested to me an hour ago that I might be entertaining such a pursuit, I would have responded with a blank, nonplussed stare.
It was a short dagger that I wanted, I explained. A hishu, a tosa, a hishu-gatana. But I would also take a longer dagger, a tanto, or an old-style traditional hunting knife, a yamagatana.
Whatever the type, I wanted a knife that was at least about eight inches and not much more than about a foot in length. I suggested that the dagger should have a modest tsuba, or hand guard, of hard metal, maybe good silver or good, strong-alloy twenty-karat or twenty-two-karat gold.
To craft a knife with a leopard-bone handle, a true master craftsman, or two master craftsmen, one for the blade, the other for the handle, would have to be found.
A leopard-bone dagger, carved from treated fresh leopard bone or from petrified leopard bone, must be made by a true craftsman working with his own hands, not by a mere big-business designer who oversaw a modern assembly-line company.
The question was: could there be found a true traditional master? A true, old-fashioned knife-making artist?
Sugai-san knew real Japanese blade-forgers well. One of them was Keijoro Doi, an eighty-four-year-old master of masters. Sugai would be going to Japan at the end of the month. The more precise an idea I could convey of the knife I envisioned, and the amount of money I was willing to pay, the more likely it was that the very special knife I wanted could be made for me.
I knew that leopard bone was difficult to obtain here in the United States, but that it also was not too costly. Not long ago, a friend in Texas, where the remains of protected and endangered species can be sold legally to Texas residents by licensed dealers, bought me a leopard skull. As federal and local laws prohibited its interstate transportation, it was more difficult to get it to me in New York, where dealing in poodle skulls is probably a capital crime, than it was to purchase. And the price had been under four hundred bucks for a fine skull with all its teeth. It sat now atop my cherry television cabinet. I also knew that endangered-species bones, as I had seen firsthand, were far more easily and openly available in Asia, where I’d had many chances to buy leopard pelts but no way of getting them back home. So the cost of the bone would be the least of the expenses.
The problem was that I had no idea how durable or workable leopard bone was, or how it aged, treated or untreated. Could it, for instance, be gold-riveted in two identical simple, striking pieces to both sides of the tang? Could it be ornately carved, even carved out, katabori-like, for a hollow center, to be affixed to and expose glimpses of hard, dark-brown ebony or black onyx beneath it? And I had no idea what petrified leopard bone looked like, or if it was an available or desirable material. Without this information, it was hard to arrive at the more precise details of the leopard-bone handle I envisioned.
Would it be possible to obtain this information, so that I could then know the limits of my envisioning, the extent of possibility, and thus the extent of craftsmanship available to me, so that I might then be able to explain in more precise detail what I wanted, and how much I would be willing to pay for it? There would also be the saya, or wooden sheath. Leopards spend much of their time in the boughs of trees. I wondered if they had a favorite type of tree. If so, it was wood from that type of tree that I wanted. If not, any one of many dark and beautifully grained woods lay open to me. Or perhaps, going against tradition, a sheath of fine-tooled strong dark leather.
One way or the other, considering the blade-forging alone, I knew it would be an expensive proposition. The one thing I had going for me, I told myself, was that this knife would present a new and most enticing challenge to any true master. An elder master of masters might see in it the masterpiece that could prove to be the end note of his long years of workmanship.
I figured I would be willing to go the price of a bottle of great Cheval Blanc. Yes, the price of a bottle of great Cheval Blanc. Maybe even as far as a 1947. Why not? I would drink the bottle, and it would be gone. The knife would be forever.
I caught myself. Sober, on baclofen, and still calculating according to the wine standard.
Old habits die hard. And—an uncomfortable thought—all too often they die only when we do.
Standing on the pavement outside the store, I lit a smoke and wondered for a moment whence this yearning for a dagger with a leopard-bone handle had pounced. I had always loved leopards, which held for me a mysterious power that spoke to me in ways that went far beyond their surpassing deadly beauty. The leopard skull I possessed was a totem, a symbol of that power. I had wanted such a skull for a long time, and I drew much from its presence. But never before did I think of a killing knife whose grasp-hold might offer that same elusive power.
Heading north on Church Street, I stopped at We Are Nuts about Nuts, stepped through the storefront door, and inhaled deeply for the scent of a current or very recent fresh roasting. The scent was thick in the air. The roaster had been shut, and I asked which nuts had come from it. I was led to the big covered plexiglass bin of cashews, placed my hand to it, and felt that it was hot to the touch. Before the cashews, almonds had been roasted. I placed my hand to the bin of almonds and felt that it was somewhat warm. I asked for a quarter pound of each, took the two small brown paper bags, one hot and the other a bit warm, to the counter, laid down three dollars and seventy-five cents, and left. The aroma from the little bags was delicious.
When I got home, I put the little bags of nuts on the end table beside the couch, took a Valium, poured a glass of cold milk, and returned to the couch. As I did so, I paused to look at the two sheets of paper on the desk, the one with words I remembered writing and the one with words I didn’t remember writing.
I was a leopard awaiting glance in bowering shade.
I read the words slowly, silently, then simply stared at them awhile. My eyes moved farther down the sheet of paper and once more paused. Again I read slowly, silently, then simply stared.
Remembered now: what the lady and the leopard, the daemon-seeker and miller did know before me.
The lady and the leopard. The daemon-seeker and the miller. Why had I spelled it—“daemon”—in this archaic way? There was no doubt that this was my scrawl, but were they my words? The idea of spirit writing, in which I did not believe, insinuated itself once again in my mind. And the “miller”—could this be Blake’s “Miller of Eternity”? And who was “the lady”? Or what was “the lady”? And what, or whom, did this particular leopard represent?
And that phrase: “Awaiting glance in bowering shade.” What of that? Yes, leopards were given to lounging in quiet stealth on the boughs of trees. I had heard that this was what made the leopard so exceedingly dangerous. You could pass unawares beneath a leopard looking down on you from a great tree limb above you. But if by chance, distracted by a bird in the sky, or the sun receding or emerging from behind a cloud, or the first pale star of dusk, or anything that set the eyes to wandering upward, your glance met with the eyes of the leopard, in that instant the leopard would leap upon you and you would be dead. Your eye contact, though inadvertent and brief, would not be suffered by the leopard even in its most lulled and sated quietude. This was why, by comparison, lions were such easy game. They lay hidden in path-side gullies, and hunting gu
ides tossed stones lazily into those gullies until one of them hit a lion, which would instinctively rise and run, an easy target for the shot. Leopards, however, did not run, and if in coming upon one, your glance met the glance of the leopard, you were no longer the hunter but the prey, and you would be dead before you had the slightest chance to raise your gun. Your first trembling of fear would be your last.
I looked up “bowering” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Bowering, embowering. Participial adjective of “bower,” to enclose or shelter in leafy covert, or in seclusion overarched with the branches of trees.
I was a leopard awaiting glance in bowering shade.
I didn’t want my milk to get warm. Sometimes I wondered why I even took the Valium. I felt nothing from them. I once had told this to Dr. Yanoff, seeking something stronger to relax me. He said that the Valium did have an effect on me; it was just not a drastic one that I was conscious of. But still I wondered about this. There had been times when I had taken as much as eighty milligrams over the course of a day and a night, while drinking wine, and still nothing. I had come to more or less believe that it was the ritual, not the drug, that relaxed me: the Valium and the cold milk taken together in respite. I no longer took one of those ten-milligram pills without being able to sit awhile in peace with my cold milk afterward.
Ritual. To replace habit with ritual was good. Everything a Eucharist. But still I hoped this baclofen I was taking would prove more than ritual.
Awaiting glance. I had been like that for years. The dread of eye contact. The dread of physical contact, of any physical intimacy. Somehow, as the years had passed, these had become anathema to me. But now it was over.
Then I thought of my eyes as they were now. I thought of the way Lorna looked into my eyes. I took a drink of milk. I lit a smoke. I thought of Lorna on the cross.
I called for the results of my blood tests. “I don’t know how you did it,” the croaker said over the telephone, “but your A1Hc is down to seven-point-six. It was ten-point-three last time.”
A reading of seven-point-six on this glycohemoglobin test that measured the average level of sugar in the blood over the course of the previous three months was, I knew, only one-point-six percent over the upper end of the non-diabetic range. Even my diabetes was being cured, I thought, and not by any fucking hypocrite, Avandia-prescribing endocrinologist either. How did I do it? I felt like saying. By turning into a fucking god, that’s how.
“Your vitamin D is low. I want you to take a thousand units a day.”
“You’ve had me taking a thousand units a day for the past year,” I said. “Take two thousand,” he said.
I told him I would. And, like a fool, I probably would.
“And there’s some occult blood in your stool.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“The test can’t show that.”
“Is it red or black?”
“The test doesn’t show that, either.”
“It’s probably my hemorrhoids. I’ve been bleeding out of my ass for the last forty years.”
“I’d like you to come back in June for a colonoscopy so we can see what’s what.”
“Another one? I just had one last November.”
“You haven’t had a colonoscopy in two years,” he said.
“It was last November. Remember, the prep didn’t work, and I had to have it done twice.”
“Right, we did it twice. But that was two years ago.”
I wasn’t going to argue with this guy. I wasn’t going to tell him that I trusted my memory, not his. In any case, June was a way off, so I figured he didn’t think it was anything serious. If he did, he would have wanted me to come in right away.
“And I don’t know what this is,” he said, “but your blood seems different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your blood test. All your blood. It doesn’t really seem to be your blood type. It doesn’t really seem to be any stable blood type.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your blood type is A. But now it seems you’ve got some B glycoproteins mixed in with the A.”
“What’s that all about?”
“It’s like you’re an A becoming an AB.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Well, it did somewhere along the line. First there was O. Then about twenty thousand years ago some people evolved into type A’s. Then about ten thousand years later, other people evolved into B’s. Then some A’s and some B’s mixed and eventually their glycoproteins merged and produced the last of the four blood types, AB.”
“So it’s a natural sort of thing?”
“It was natural over the course of twenty thousand years of procreation. Not spontaneously, not in a few months.”
“So it has to be a mistake by the lab.”
“We’ll see.”
“What’s the difference between A and AB?”
“AB’s a lot less common. Type O’s called the universal donor. No matter what blood type, anybody can accept O.”
“What do you mean, ‘accept’?”
“A transfusion, say.”
“And what’s that have to do with type AB?”
“Well, AB is the universal acceptor. It accepts any and all of the four blood types.”
“So that’s not a bad thing?”
“I’ve just never seen anything like it before, an A developing AB characteristics. Never seen it, never read of it, never heard of it.”
I knew it. All blood was mine. It was part of my rebirth. Twenty thousand years of spinning life cycles in the time it took to smoke a cigarette. Out of the cradle endlessly rocking. Every beat of my heart and pulse brought procreation, new life to a new me. Only lesser beings were born but once. Re-procreation. Was that a word? It was now. Talk about virgin birth. Talk about parthenogenesis. Talk about agamogenesis. Talk about fucking ham and eggs. I wanted Lorna on that cross right now, that Virgin Mary juice of hers drizzling to the floor. I wanted that fucking whip in my hand right fucking now.
There was a lot that the croaker had never seen, never read about, never heard about. A lot that the croaker did not know and never would. I told him I’d see him in a few months. Maybe I would, and then again maybe I wouldn’t. I was pro-choice. My body, my bankroll. We’d see what Paeon advised. Otherwise happy fucking Passover and a mise meshune.
Inspiration came while I stroked my cock, ate almonds and cashews, and thought of Lorna spread-eagled on her cross.
I went to the hardware store on Chambers Street, then over to Weinstein & Holtzman on Park Row. I walked north, zigzagging in a wider and wider range, until, at a surplus joint on Sixth Avenue in the teens, I found what I wanted.
Heavy, rough three-quarter-inch raw-strand Manila rope. I bought seven yards and had it cut into five equal lengths of a little over four feet each. Enough of that cop shit, those cuffs and those leg irons, I thought. Tonight we were doing it the old-fashioned way.
I shelled and skinned a bunch of fava beans, the first of the season I had seen. This was always a time-consuming chore, a real pain in the ass, but it was worth it. I chopped up some pecorino Romano, put the pieces in a bowl with the fresh beans, poured in some olive oil, and ground in some black pepper. I cut into chunks what remained of the cheese, wrapped them in slices of tasso pork, and tossed them onto a paper plate. I sliced a red pear and put that on the plate as well. I took it all to the couch and feasted slowly. There might be a lot of hours, I figured, between now and that Shun Lee delivery that would come only after the crucifixion and the flogging and the wonders that followed.
It was still light out when I arrived at her place, but the dark soon set in, and that dim red glow from behind the black curtain became more pronounced. She made some coffee. She told me about her day, I told her about mine. She went off to her bedroom for a few minutes, then emerged before me in her see-through raincoat. In the room where the red light cast its hue, she began to fix the iron to her left ankle.
; “No,” I said, “wait.”
She had seen the bulky plastic bag I had brought with me, eyeing it curiously but saying nothing. Now she watched as I withdrew the first length of rope from it. I hunkered down, wrapped it round the ankle she had been about to shackle, pulled tightly, knotted it, and with the two long end lengths, bound her leg with not much slack to the lower left lag of the cross. Removing a second length from the bag, I wrapped it round her other ankle, pulled tightly, knotted it, and with the two long end lengths, bound her leg with not much slack to the lower right lag of the cross. Then, with another length, and another, her wrists. I turned her head to the side and kissed her. Slipping my tongue from her mouth, I saw that it remained open. Her eyes were softly shut. I took a segment of the last length of rope between my hands and brought it taut to her open mouth, then wound the rope round her head so that a second thick mouthful of it further widened and filled that sweet open mouth. I tied the rope tightly at the nape of her neck. I stood back, looked at her, and stroked my cock. Her skin was already beginning to redden near where the harsh pricking bristles of the rope dug into her. This reddening was noticeable even in the diffuse red of this room. I stuck my hand under the raincoat and brought it to her cunt, to see if the rough piercing rope made her wet. I felt her moisture, wondered what of it came from anticipation and what of it came from the rope.
I took the blacksnake whip, encoiled it, held the coil between my hands. With fast hard movements, compressing the coil with a jerk of my hands and quickly jerking it wide again, I was able to produce a series of muted crackling sounds. From the swooning-ripe cries that barely escaped her rope-filled mouth, I knew that these sounds excited her. My first cast of the whip was tentative—I could not straightaway recapture the movements to which my previous wielding of this whip had led me—but it struck her, lightly, across her back with a soft smack of leather on vinyl, to which she seemed to react as if being teased by a touch of foreplay that, instead of pleasantly arousing her, brought her to the pitch of torment of overwhelming, unrelieved passion. Slowly it came back to me, the physics of it all, and, with increasing strength and accuracy, I gave it to her, harder and then harder, until her rainy juices trickled to the floor and her long, lithe limbs strained and shook, and her hair flung to and fro with the wild movements of her head.