by Alfred Hayes
“Oh?”
“One of the best Negro horn players in the country.”
“That should make her feel better.”
“He just got mean when he was juiced. Afterwards, he cried.”
“Don’t we all.”
There was a pause. Perhaps it was the light: gray and sourceless. It dislocated me. I said, finally: “It must be nice, waking up under that skylight.”
He smiled. The smile was faint and lopsided. He tightened the embrace about his knees. I had the impression he was trying to fold himself up and, if he could, disappear into a smaller box. Chin down, he began to talk of how each day he awakened.
To light. Heaven’s own. Was the pillow damp? He came out of sleep as from some encounter. What had he fought? Mano a mano. The room contained certain objects: he was one of them.
Now he moved. I was to envision him moving. On that bed. The knee had a hinge, the arm a socket, one was, after all, manipulable. Every morning he made the same discovery. He was the product of some mysterious piece of engineering. Undoubtedly. Go do a piss, you jerk.
His days (the eyes were focused not on me, not even on the folded knees) were purposeful. Yes sir. No son of a bitch was going to say he wasn’t organized. Take, for example, with what certitude he came down the four flights of stairs to the brownstone’s vestibule. With what confidence he applied his hand to the knob of the front door. With what character he avoided looking into the mailbox. A man can get hung up on that mailbox jazz. Now, intact, his own man, organized, his fly zippered like any other solid citizen, he issued out into the street.
Waking up was a real piece of cake.
And smiled. And hugged his knees. And again the room was silent.
“Michael?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t suppose you have any money?”
“Wha’ dat?”
“Well: I wondered if you’d be interested in a sort of a job.”
“Job?”
“Yes.”
He eyed me. I wouldn’t say with complete trust. What sort of a job? Oh, it wasn’t typing a manuscript. I saw him thinking it might be that. I had, regrettably, no manuscripts to be typed. It was, the thing I had in mind, a simple job.
“Doing what?”
“Walking.”
There were certain houses to be looked at; certain streets to be revisited, corners or restaurants or shops to which my past was attached. They were places I had been young in, or if, on closer examination, I had been less young in them than I thought, still they were the places or the landscapes in which I had been younger than I was now.
“Walking?”
“Yes.”
Actually: through my own past.
“And you want to pay me for that?”
“I’d be taking up your time.”
“My time.”
I was trying to be careful: I didn’t want him thinking I was being charitable. He’d resent the charity. He’d stiffen with pride. Or so I thought. For it was only pride, I thought, the venom of pride, that was behind the cavalier announcement he had made in the Pine Room that he would like to murder someone and any creep would do. The thing was to get past his sullen defenses. To show the boy that, despite what had happened in my hotel, when I had ignored him under the weight of the thing (but less now, curiously less since so absurdly in the Alexandrian Gardens I’d kissed the jeweled belly of Soraya of Istanbul) that had oppressed me, I would do what I could to help him. Of course: help. There was so little one could actually give. Still, money was better than advice.
Perhaps what I wished, not admitting it entirely to myself, was to attach the boy somehow to me. To establish between us (where the non sequitur existed) a connection of a kind. It wasn’t that I felt fatherly to Michael; I couldn’t even honestly say I liked him: it was simply that I felt he had a certain irritating importance for me. I might have been flattering myself, but I felt that, after all, something could be learned, that if I were rich in nothing else I was rich in experience, though perhaps not too rich in it. The generations touched somewhere. It was not as though we had spent a lifetime in some clip joint, and now it was after hours, and time to go. We couldn’t leave like that. Having simply paid the exorbitant prices and sat through a bad show.
I had taken out my wallet. I put fifty dollars on the big office desk. The boy’s eyes shifted from the money to the wallet. I put the wallet away.
He probably turned the electric heater on when they were in bed together. On the colder afternoons. When with her law books she came up the narrow stair.
And that skylight slanting over them.
“Well, what do you say, Michael? Is it a deal?”
He got up from the bed. He opened a drawer in the office desk. He took out what looked like a thin pamphlet.
“You can read these if you want,” he said. They were his poems. It was, I guessed, his way of saying it was a deal.
15
Vote for Jose Fuentes it said on the window of the Puerto Rican grocery. The street was wider than I remembered it. A peeling tenement. I’d lived there. Michael stared up obediently. At night I used to hear the rats in the ceiling. We were on the top floor. When was it? Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. I split the rent: Willie Snow. He was a photographer. I had the front two rooms. Once, after a May Day parade, with a girl named Viola, I came up the stairs. A long gray hairless obscene tail hung out of the dumbwaiter.
A drunk. On Second Avenue. Old. Trembling hands. I gave him a cigarette. He couldn’t light it in the wind. He cupped his hands and bent over the flame. I could smell the booze and dried vomit. Michael waited. The old bum sucked at the cigarette. Fukn niggers he said ruint the country. Gawd bless ya. The National Winter Garden was gone. In the dairy Michael ordered barley soup. The onion rolls were still there in the wicker baskets. You could order white coffee in a glass. Sunday mornings I used to come to the dairy. Everybody was poor. Michael nodded. A thin chinless comic sat at the adjoining table. He was on his way to or had come from a TV studio. There was one now in what had been Ukrainian Hall. I kept saying goodbye to things. The chinless comic had or was about to perform in a Jello commercial. “There’s a big punchbowl, see?” He was talking to a woman in a suede coat. She wore boots. Everybody wore boots. “Only it’s full of Jello, see? I ladle the stuff out in a wineglass. I act like I’m drinking.” Gesture. Gulp. He had a huge Adam’s apple. “Then I sidle up to her, see? I say: have you tasted Jello? What a punch! Get it?” We finished lunch. Two boys were standing in front of a haberdashery. Everything was reduced. They carried musical instruments. One of them was white. They were looking at the turtleneck sweaters and the checked double-breasted jackets. The salesman stood in the doorway. The white boy carried a horn case. He had long black curly hair and wore a pea jacket. “He don’t look like a horn player,” the salesman said. “He looks like he come off a coal barge.” “He just needs a little D,” the young Negro boy said to the salesman. He wore jeans and a narrow-brimmed high-crowned hat. “D?” said the salesman. He stomped his feet. “De water. De soap. De bath,” the Negro boy said.
The wind blew. Meals, long since chewed, eaten and digested. Flats, leased and sub-leased, full of ancestral flushings and haunted couplings in beds that no longer existed. The weather of long ago. The menus of dead chefs. Assignations in taxis since junked and scrapped. Stuff gone from the shop windows of shops that didn’t exist in streets watered by other sanitation trucks. Vote for Jose Fuentes.
Perhaps to Michael, walking, hands buried in his coat pockets, beside me, it was like walking not through a city but a shrouded warehouse, an afternoon spent in some vast checking room with all the stuff in it, dusty and tagged, that nobody was ever going to come to claim again. I could see he might feel that. Christ: what was I in, the resurrection business? But I wanted his interest. I wanted him to see something, not a peeling tenement so much as a continuity, a thing that had been there and must, must have left a deposit of some sort. A sediment, a soil. Across Broadway. Thr
ough the park. Blocks of windowed concrete with spy-eyes in the vestibules. Slow smoke in the air. A time of conviction followed by a time of war. A time of war followed by a time of peace. A time of peace followed by a time of. Ah, there was the rub. Ambiguous moment. In which we sought ourselves. Fleeing down the bright aisles of spotless supermarkets. On our knees in attitudes of anguished prayer in the used-car lots. Standing with clouded eyes at the teller’s window trying to remember what it was we had come to put in the bank. I had paid for the boy’s attention. His contemporary ear. His, though bought, empathy. Walking, I’d led him through a ghost’s history. From economic cataclysm (here: the closed bank, the deprived winter) to military upheaval (December 7th and myself having eggs at that one-arm joint and the radio over the electric toaster that Sunday morning) and on to political ambiguity (myself the example, history concentrated in me, in my slightly receding hairline, in my dentures, in the furtive arch-supports of my shoes). Changes rung on le grand clochard. We were walking down Christopher Street.
And stopped. And stared up again. A summer’s afternoon. What was her name? In the small rear bedroom twelve dollars a month. Lying there on Guk’s bed nude the professor’s wife. And walking in absolutely without a stitch mind you just trying with the thermometer up in the nineties that day to get a breath of air. And standing there that frozen moment having my shirt sticking to me her breasts large dark-nippled the tuft triangular dark my coming in so abruptly had surprised beyond even hiding going to her not a word we didn’t say a word she’d just run away her marriage was breaking up she was in love with Frank he was an engineer a civil engineer and the Professor looking for her and Guk looking for Frank she had a yarn store that was it thirty years ago she sold yarn right up there that house Christopher Street one summer’s afternoon and she didn’t say a word I didn’t either a fan going in the room I didn’t know her name she didn’t ask mine large breasts dark-nippled I just walked to her sat down on the bed was it a bed a davenport with a sheet thrown over it a sheet rumpled by her in her sleep looking at me too exhausted by the heat by the running away by all the emotion I never did understand sat down bent down not a word kissed the dark nipple put my hand on the dark tuft she was leaving the Professor she was in love with Frank Guk did nothing but cry a summer afternoon it was so hot and I came in she’d been asleep not a word the heat God the heat thirty years ago up there that window to the right that was my bedroom twelve dollars a month a couple of years before the war before I went into the army before I got divorced before I got married again before I had money before the money stopped before I crawled out of the bush and away from the window and ran.
16
That night I read Michael’s poems.
I sat, under the lamp, in the secure and warm hotel, turning the pages carefully. I didn’t want to be hasty. When I had finished the thin book, I reread the poems carefully. They, at least, deserved that, and I had begun my reading hoping they would give me some clue to the boy himself. They didn’t, really. They weren’t confessional poems; they were poems in defiance of, and in celebration to, certain objects. All the objects had a tendency to become phallic.
The voice in the poems, even with my limited knowledge of contemporary poetry (like others I read it less than I respected it), seemed to me to be derivative: it was the sexual vocabulary, I supposed, that he claimed as his own. The anthologists, it became apparent, were going to have trouble with Michael. I sat there, a man with a thin collection of pages in his hand, thinking about the poems. I didn’t like them. But as I thought about them a curious thing began to happen. In the first place, I found that I hesitated in my choice of the exact descriptive word to apply to them: were they obscene? But even as I attempted to apply that word to them, I found that I was already in my mind qualifying that to mean something less than censorable. Very well then, if not obscene, how about “erotic”? Was “erotic” just, since what I wanted was the just, the fair word? Well, no: not erotic. They used to (in more innocent times) say that about the Indian Love Lyrics, didn’t they? Erotic was those special limp bindings and those black-and-white line drawings of emaciated Englishwomen holding lilies at the edge of solitary garden pools. You couldn’t say erotic. All right then, how would “salacious” grab you, I said to myself, a little desperate now and still wishing to find that elusive category to which the poems could attach themselves. Again no, I was forced to admit, because you could see there was something abrasive about the sex. I looked again at the poems.
The sex he celebrated took place in a world not quite my world: it seemed more destructive, more finally poisoned, tiled like a great urinal, aimed at one like a gun, a world like a Santa Fe boxcar packed with doomed steers, a world that made the shattering noise of a motorcycle on a banked speedway, skidding, caught in an oil-slick, and the poems suffocated, lashed out, howled, were battered by that world. I could see then that he meant the sex to be the one elementary good in that uncontrollable world. But it did not succeed in presenting itself as the thing he intended it to be. These penetrations he wrote about, this great tangle of legs, took place like bank hold-ups. The place was being broken into. All the burglar alarms were ringing. Squad cars were on their way. He didn’t mean the sex to be what it seemed to be to me. He meant it to be an affirmation. To be the poetry of some cosmic orgasm. To be the veritable thrust of life. He meant it to be mythology.
Well, sitting there, I thought about sex as sex and sex as mythology. Now sex as sex, if I’d been asked, was sex more or less as a ballgame. You singled, you doubled, you tripled to left. You homered or you flied out. Missed the bunt or went down on strikes. Depended. There were times when you were glad to break out of a long slump with a solid hit. If the luck was real good, and you were mysteriously back in shape, wham, that was the day you cleared the bases. Depended. I decided that I did not like sex as mythology and I didn’t like the way the boy’s poems backed me up against a wall. The little bastards. They made you, in spite of yourself, feel like a hypocrite. They filled the national air with a derisive obscenity. The modest deb said all the dirty words and the solemn judge read the disputed passages aloud to packed courtrooms. I put the damn poems away and went to bed.
17
I lied. That is: I decided to be diplomatic. He was waiting downstairs. I was surprised he was so punctual. It didn’t seem like Michael to be conscientious about that. But there he was, shaved, brushed, in one of the big red lobby chairs. It might have been a real job.
“Good morning.”
He managed an alacrity getting out of the chair. It was minutely annoying. He didn’t have to be quite that alert. Nor, among the stout women and the bellhops, that prompt, as though he were punching some huge invisible time-clock. I might have been the boss walking into some resplendent office. The “good morning” he gave me sounded like the greeting of an assembled staff.
We went to breakfast. He ordered chili. My god. I shuddered, and had a soft-boiled egg.
When the coffee came, I said, casually: “I read the poems last night.”
“Oh?”
He had a smear of chili at the corner of his mouth.
“Very interesting.”
And there it was: the politic lie. There was no point in saying I hadn’t exactly been swept away. “Interesting” was a nice, neutral word. It was one of the words one could always use to hide one’s hostility behind.
He gave me one of his sidelong looks, the enigmatic one: but he evidently decided, as I had, against any further discussion of the poems. He even allowed himself to look pleased I thought them interesting. We began to talk about the day’s itinerary.
“I thought maybe we could walk through Harlem.”
“Harlem?”
He sounded astonished.
I said: “Here. Wipe your mouth.”
“Why?”
“There’s chili on it.”
I extended a napkin. He looked at it. Then a long tongue came deliberately out, explored, licked away the smear of chili. I put th
e napkin down.
“Harlem?” he repeated.
“Lower Harlem. I grew up there.”
“That’s enemy country.”
“It’s only morning. And I’m talking about 106th Street.”
“Is that where you did your growing up?”
“If I’ve grown up.”
He stood up. We were about to be parachuted into, at least, Dien Bien Phu. “I ought to get combat pay,” he said, “even in lower Harlem.”
We took the A train. There, as I remembered it, was my decapitated head in the darkness of the tunnel. We walked down 110th Street. He was right: it had the smell of enemy country. The synagogue was gone: the candy store, enormously dilapidated, remained. From these roofs, infinitely extended, tarred or graveled, I’d hurled milk bottles in forgotten street wars. Home in the evening, carrying his bag of tools, in the high stiff collar, came my father. Here was the ancestral tenement.
From the doorway, cold, chewing sunflower seeds, with the thin legs of a diseased heron, teetered on worndown high heels, a girl looked out. Electrified hair. She didn’t smile. She ignored Michael. He was just the pilot fish. She said (because I’d stopped, because I was staring skyward): “Yuh lookin’ for somethin’, honey?” I was. Up there. A vanished boy. Who, under a great quilt, prayed, while his mother, in the room beyond, screamed. Who, with the hot proceeds of a theft in his hand (the money divided, quartered among four thieves), crouched over the stairway carpet, burying his share. Who wasn’t, like his father, in the fall of evening, going to come wearily home with his bag of tools. So he’d thought, long ago, starting out. In the doorway, the girl spat out the chewed husks of the sunflower seeds. Their rats are larger, I thought: their filth more variable. She moved again. The stockings bagged. She said: “Whatcha want, huh?”, querulous now. And moved again, toward us, and all the remembered darkness moved with her. The menacing hallways, the embittered cellars, the hostile stoops. Michael was right: even lower Harlem. I fled.