by Nick Tosches
“A veteran NYPD officer assembled an ‘army’ of his fellow not-so-Finest,” the two-page spread began. The cop had “boasted to an FBI informant” that he could pull together the perfect “crew” for any crime. The army had been branching out from smuggling guns and cigarettes and slot machines to offering violence for a price. “We got cops with vests and guns,” the veteran officer had told the fed. “I’m setting up a good army here. A good f—kin’ army.” There was a bunch of pictures. The guy who shot his mouth off to the informant, several of his “army” members. My eyes passed over the pictures, returned very suddenly to one of them. And I heard his voice:
“I know this guy. He’s all right.”
Those two cops that morning last spring. Numb-nuts and glue factory. It was glue factory. Good old glue factory.
I had wondered a lot about that strange visit from those cops. I had wondered even more about the events of the night before. Had I really slashed those girls’ throats? All I remembered was a dim, indistinct flickering in the blackness of what could have been a dream. But I had seen the blood. On the blade of that knife. On me. Or had I only imagined seeing it?
I had wondered about the old cop in my kitchen with his moronic young acolyte. He seemed so intent, old glue factory did, on simply writing me off as innocent and getting the hell out of there. It left me wondering, and I had been wondering ever since.
He, not I, was the killer, I told myself at times. He was, I told myself at other times, a secret brother, a fellow blood drinker, who somehow recognized me as one, and who understood.
When I wondered, my mind went everywhere. Now, as I put the paper on the bench and sat on it, I told myself that he was likely far more concerned with unloading his latest shipment of assault rifles than with any kind of pain-in-the-ass cop work.
Sitting on that paper, the awning overhead, sipping coffee and smoking a cigarette, looking into the foggy drizzle that seemed to quiet the street, I wondered again if I had really killed those girls that night in that doorway. I recalled my last words with the Japanese guy at the store, just a few blocks from here, where I had bought that knife. My last words to him were about the long knife with the leopard-bone handle that I wanted to have made. He told me that the knife master had spoken with several of the great craftsmen in Japan. Using leopard bone was totally against the law, he reported; it could not even be obtained in Japan. One of the craftsmen could make for me a higonokami—a folding knife—with a handle of ivory, maple, and ebony. I could also have a tanto, a dagger, with a handle of ivory, persimmon, and white sharkskin. I could, if I wanted, have a higonokami made entirely of silver. I asked the guy to thank the knife master for me, but also tell him that he should trouble himself no further. “The special knife,” I told him, “can only be made of leopard bone.”
I still didn’t know why I wanted this thing, this “special knife” with a leopard-bone handle. Why did anyone want anything he didn’t need?
As I sat there, I tried to remember what those two girls looked like. I stared into the diffuse mist of silent rain, trying to bring forth their faces.
In that diffuse mist under a sky that showed nothing but a gathering of heavy gray clouds, there were here and there the odd faint twinklings of the slight refractions of stray half-light passing through the raindrops.
If I had in fact killed them, I should at least have the memory of having done so. This at least should be mine. The feel of their warm flesh in the springtime night, the drawing of the blade across that flesh, the terror in their eyes, their blood in my mouth. These things, the memory of them; they should at least be mine. If one was to be a killer, then the memory of killing should be his. What was it to be a killer who had not even the pleasure of—
It was there and then that I caught myself and turned away from wondering. I gave myself to, became lost in, the semitransparent windblown veil of the muted light-falling rain. I did not feel so good. It was the weather. The humidity.
IT WAS NOT WITHOUT FEAR, OR FEARLESSNESS, THAT I DECIDED to call Melissa and Lorna. I wanted to know. Whatever it was, if anything, that I was to know, I wanted to know it.
This would have been a lot easier, a hell of a lot easier, if I had a few drinks under my belt. The booze would bring forth my words with ease and without anxiety. But those days were over, the days of the slaking silver tongue. The booze was behind me. I took some baclofen, some Valium, poured a glass of cold milk, turned on the telephone, and dialed Lorna’s number. Truth be told, I had a premonition. A bad one. I had the eerie feeling that Lorna was dead. This Venus born from a sea of gloom, this night flower whose wails of ecstasy sounded so much like cries of suicide, or of one being murdered. She was dead and was no more. I was almost sure of this as I listened to the phone ring once, twice, three times. I should be doing this in the light of morning, I told myself, not now, when all was dark. I was about to end the call when I heard her voice.
“Hey, stranger,” I said. “It’s me.”
There was a pause, as if she did not recognize my voice. Then she spoke. There seemed in her a mixture of curiosity, surprise, and concern. The emotion that lay under these things was unreadable.
“What happened to you? It was like you vanished. One day you were there, and then you weren’t.”
It made me breathe easier to know that she was all right, or at least that she was still there, still alive.
“I was sick, baby. I got sick, really sick. I ended up in the hospital for a while. I’m just now starting to feel better.”
There was another pause. I could hear her breathe. I felt that there was anger in her, but that she could not speak it after what I had said. It was good to know that I could still cast my cape of deceit over the cheap prop of the truth on its worn little pedestal.
“God.” She sighed. “I don’t know how many messages I left, how many times I called you.”
“I haven’t listened to any messages. They told me just to rest, to take it easy. But I had to call you.” I took a swig of milk. “I had to call you.”
“Can I bring you anything?”
“I’m OK.” I tried to sound as weak and sickly as I could, and I hated myself as I did so. “I’d love to see you, though.” Why did I say that? Why?
“You sure you don’t need anything?”
Why had it taken her so long to answer the phone? Was she in the middle of prodding that stun-gun gizmo into her own crotch?
“I just needed to hear your voice and know you were all right.”
And to know that you were not dead. To know that you had not killed yourself, and that I had not killed you, and that you do not want to kill me.
“Do you remember the last time we saw each other?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. For a moment I grew tense, as if she would say no more. “I knew something was wrong then. I knew you’d been drinking. A lot. I was going to ask you to leave, but I was worried about your diabetes. With the drinking and all. I asked you about it and you waved it away. I should’ve done something, but I didn’t.”
“How long ago was that?”
“I don’t know. A couple months ago.” Again, her breath, nothing but her breath. “Maybe more. Then you weren’t there. I didn’t know what to think. The worst things went through my mind.” Then a moment of further silence. “But you’re going to be OK, right?”
It was hard to tell if this was an addio senza rancore or an utterance of heartfelt concern, a caress of undiminished closeness. Yes, I assured her, I was going to be all right. I tried to temper my best weak and sickly voice with something like an aspiration of strength.
“I love you,” I said, cursing myself as I said it.
Then there was just the sound of our breathing together. At last I heard what I wanted to hear.
“I love you, too.”
For some reason, a reason I did not seek, that made me feel better, made me feel happy that I had called her.
“Maybe in a few days?” I said. I thought of her, and of
that haunted flat of hers and that curtained room with its dim red glow, and her cross and her whips and her stun gun and her blood and her cries. I wanted nothing to do with those things. Nothing. “Maybe for breakfast or something,” I said.
“That sounds great,” she said. The unreadable emotion that lay under her voice was gone. These were plain and simple words of plain and simple happiness.
“And now I’m going to drag myself off to bed again,” I lied. “I’m really glad I talked to you,” I said in all truth. “Really glad.”
I heard her kiss the phone, then I like a fool kissed my phone as well, and then slowly ended the call.
Calling Melissa required a fresh glass of milk and a fresh cigarette. I sipped, smoked, and dialed.
“Hey, baby,” I said, humbly but nonchalantly.
I heard her breathe. It sounded nothing like Lorna’s breath had sounded. Nothing at all like it.
“Fuck you,” she said. And that was that.
I faltered for a moment with the phone dead in my hand before shutting it off. Then I merely smiled and slowly shook my head. Well, I told myself, she was certainly all right. No doubt about that.
And so I knew. Whatever it was, whatever it meant, I knew it. I sat in the dark and savored my cold milk and my smoke.
I DECIDED THAT EVENING THAT MY LAZARUS ACT AT CIRCA Tabac was long overdue. I went for a haircut, shave, and man-icure, then went home, took a long hot bath, put on a custom-made Stefano Ricci black-on-black silk shirt and a beautiful gray custom-made chalk-striped suit of Dormeuil pashmina. I pulled on new black lisle socks, freshly buffed crocodile shoes. I put on my cashmere-lined python-skin duster with the dark mink collar, my Lock & Co. midnight-blue homburg, and I went out into the night.
“Gimme a club soda with lemon,” I said. “The bartender reached instinctively for a wedge of lime. I caught him and repeated the word “lemon.”
Lee was at the other end of the bar. I smiled at him, let him be. I knew that he would sooner rather than later use me as an excuse to get away from whoever was bending his ear.
It had been a long time, I reflected. A long time without a drink. I did not know exactly how long. But a long time. The club soda, effervescent with the tang of the lemon, was refreshing. It was good. I was changing, goddamn it, and I felt great.
The talk of those in their cups could be overheard. One spoke of the fine line between good and evil.
People were always talking about the fine line between this and that. The fine line between genius and madness. The fine line between love and hate. The fine line between pleasure and pain. But where were these and all the other fine lines to be discerned?
The truth was that there were no such fine lines. They did not exist. There was not the least, most translucent filament of a line between the one and the other. It was as impossible to see where love became hate, where genius became madness, and so on, as it was to distinguish where red became orange or green became blue on the spectrum.
There was a certain sense of dejected festivity in the air. The little tootsie with the pizza was coming.
Already I had begun to receive invitations to Christmas celebrations. I merely threw them into the trash, along with most of the seasonal cards that arrived.
It was my editor Michael who told me of the card that Evelyn Waugh had concocted to send in response to most of those who wrote to him, asking him to do this or that, inviting him here or there: “Mr. Evelyn Waugh deeply regrets that he is unable to do what is so kindly proposed.” A bit archly polite perhaps, but oh so wonderful a stroke.
“Hey,” said Lee when he worked his way down to me. “You’re looking pretty damn good there for a corpse.”
“Hell, man, you know me. Best-dressed cat in the boneyard.”
So much for the thin line between life and death.
“You hear about the Jewish dilemma?” he asked. I’d heard this one before, but not from a Jew, and he was a Jew, so I shook my head.
“Free ham.”
I laughed. He laughed. He asked me what I was drinking. I told him it was vodka and soda. He called the bartender, who was nearby, and told him he’d have the same. Only then did I tell him what was really in my glass.
“Put some vodka in mine,” he told the bartender.
I loved this guy. So much in common. So much apart. Yet together, we always let all the birds fly free from the cage. We talked a good long time. We laughed a good long time. We sloughed the layers of secrets from us and came away clean with new skin.
“You know,” he said to me at one point, referring obliquely to the night the ambulance took me from here, and probably to a lot of other nights as well, “with you it’s not the booze and drugs that worry me. It’s the diabetes.” Then, as if intuiting that I wanted him to change the subject, he asked me if I was at work on something new.
“Nah. In fact, I’m thinking of quitting the racket.”
“You could never stop writing,” he said. His words made me think of something else Michael had told me: “You’re only happy when you’re writing.” I wondered if they were right, the both of them.
“Besides,” Lee said, “it’s all a fucking racket. All of it. Everything.”
I told him about my plan to get a driver’s license, my dream of a little place with a hammock, far away from it all.
He laughed. I grew defensive for a moment, then reminded myself that it was him.
“Yeah.” I laughed a little as well. “I guess dreaming’s a racket, too.”
“Well, dream on. It’s how I make my money.”
We laughed a little together then. Yeah, I thought, the fine line between this racket and the next. The endless fine lines that simply weren’t there in the infinite wheel of suckers’ rackets that constituted the racket of being. World without end. Amen.
Afterwards I went over to the Lakeside, then later dropped in at Reade Street.
Yeah. The dirty unshaven drunk slobbering on his dirty shirt, shaking in his dirty stinking pants. Or he who stood before them now. Which would they remember? Both perhaps. But if so, it would be the power of transformation that they remembered most of all. And the embodiment of that power would be me.
Yeah. I showed them all what change looked like. Showed them all what they could never look like, change or no change.
AT HOME THAT WEEKEND, I WATCHED TEN THOUSAND bucks I’d bet on the Raiders against the Packers plunge down the shitter. Eleven grand with the vig. Eleven fucking grand. I would have done better to lay three grand straight across on a horse. Even if I had lost, I would have saved two grand, and the whole thing would’ve been over in minutes rather than hours. Jesus fucking Christ. I was insane.
I poured a glass of cold goat milk, took two ten-milligram Valiums, and sat there. The thought of fucking Melissa’s clothes passed through my mind. It might bring some sort of release, I told myself. But fuck it, I concluded. I was even mad at her pantyhose and shoes. I felt like killing somebody.
THE LONGEST NIGHT PASSED, AND THE SUN BEGAN ITS northward ascent in the sky. The winter solstice. The witches’ Sabbath of the Yule.
I mulled over my Christmas feast to come. I craved lasagne with a nice cool salad of iceberg lettuce, cucumber, radishes, and mint with a dressing of unpressed, unfiltered olive oil, Regina red wine vinegar, and garlic. Yes, that is what I wanted, but I did not feel like putting in the work to make the lasagne. Feast days were for feasting, not for work. I had turned down the few invitations that I had got to join others. That was work of a different kind—beholden socializing—and without even my lasagne as a payoff. I would get a kurobuta pork roast from Lobel’s, put it in the oven with some stock, spuds, onions, and parsnips. I’d have it with applesauce and garlic sauerkraut. And I would make the salad that I would have made to go with the lasagne. That would be work enough.
The more I thought about it, the more I looked forward to that salad. I had been having a lot of dry-mouthed thirst lately. There was something about the idea of the chilled cucumber s
lices and fresh mint, the cool iceberg lettuce hearts and oil-rich dressing that promised to quench this thirst where water failed.
I wanted another glass or two of good champagne. But I had ended up pouring half of the last bottle down the drain, which had resulted in a tab of about five hundred bucks each for the two glasses I had drunk. There was no way I would ever get to keep this joint and have a little place with a hammock in the hills if I kept up that sort of shit.
Then again, as a great man once said, what the fuck.
ON CHRISTMAS EVE MORNING I LISTENED TO WQXR, the classical station, as I sat with my cold milk and Valium. I heard something about a belief that Paganini had made a deal with the Devil. I heard something about the blood of Christ, something about eternal life. I made a mental note to watch Abbott and Costello Go to Mars that night. I felt loneliness go through me like a breath that had nothing to do with breathing. I saw those who had beckoned me to follow them down side paths that led away from loneliness. I wondered what those remembered beautiful faces looked like now after the passing of the years. I wondered what horrors, what miseries, what more doleful loneliness had lain hidden in wait at the end of those side paths. Or could it have been happiness?
I bundled up and walked against the cold wind down to Reade Street. It was Saturday, and I was hoping that the usual small weekend gathering would be there: Andy, Jim. Bill, Dewi, and the one or two or three others who constituted our convocation of kindred buddies. Maybe Musial would be there. Maybe even Bix, who was boycotting the joint in a one-man war of pique, would be stirred by some Christ-hating sort of Christmas spirit to put in a surprise appearance. It was a good bunch. Some of us drank, some of us didn’t, some of us went back and forth.
There was no one there when I got there. It was early, not quite eleven yet. It was too cold to sit outside on the bench for any good length of time, so I took my coffee inside, made some small talk with the bartender, and gazed out through the window. I asked myself why I had never called Lorna back, never had that breakfast with her.