The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  “Very colorful,” he says.

  “It’s not very colorful,” Ben says. “It’s a place.”

  Ben’s voice tends to groan with pretentious simplicity.

  Suddenly Aywak, the Tar-Baby on the floor, speaks up.

  “It has a lot of potential,” he says. “It really has a lot of potential. Doesn’t it? Or doesn’t it?”

  He looks straight at Parker with his eyes rolled up sadly. “We’re helping Bewak,” he says. “We’re helping Bewak put down the tiles. Bewak’s going to do a lot with this place because it has a lot of potential. We talked it over. We’re going to put all these tiles over he-e-e-ere, and then, over he-e-e-ere, on this wall, all these bricks. White bricks. We’re going to paint them white. I kind of like the idea, all these white bricks and the tiles. I mean, it’s not much. I’m not saying it’s a lot. But the important thing is to know what you’ve got to do and then do something about it and improve on it, you know?”

  “Cool it,” says Ben.

  This is all very bad for Parker. Suddenly Parker turns to Jaywak and says, “He’s an interior decorator. What do you do?” “I’m not an interior decorator,” says Aywak, “I’ve got a trade.” “I’m a social worker,” says Jaywak. Jaywak spreads his face out into the smile again.

  “Who do you social work for?” says Parker.

  “Well, it’s sort of like the Big Brothers,” says Jaywak. “You know the Big Brothers?”

  Jaywak says this very seriously, looking at Parker with a very open look on his face, so that Parker has to nod.

  “Yes,” Parker says.

  “Well, it’s like them,” says Jaywak, “only … only …”—his voice becomes very distant and he looks off to where the mantelpiece used to be—“only it’s different. We work with older people. I can’t tell you how different it is.”

  “I’m not an interior decorator,” says Aywak. “I don’t want you to think I’m an interior decorator. We’re not going to do miracles in here. This is not the greatest building in the world. I mean, that’s probably pretty obvious. But I mean, like I was going on about it—but that just happens to be the way I feel about it.”

  “What are you if you’re not an interior decorator?” says Jaywak.

  “You mean, what do I do?” says Aywak.

  “I mean, what do you do,” says Jaywak.

  “That’s a very important question,” says Aywak, “and I think he’s right about it.”

  “What do you do?’ ”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone ask Aywak what he does,” Jaywak says.

  “I have a trade,” says Aywak. “I’m a cooper. I make barrels. Barrels and barrels and barrels. You probably think I’m kidding.”

  So Parker turns on Ben. He speaks severely his only time. “Just what do you do?” he says to Ben. “I’d really like to know!”

  “What do you do?” says Ben. “What are you doing right now?”

  “Look,” says Parker, “I don’t care what you want to look like in front of these—”

  Ben reaches into an old tin of tea and pulls out a string of dried figs. This is one of the Lower East Side’s arty foods, along with Ukrainian sausages. Ben turns completely away from Parker and says to me, “Do you want a fig?”

  I shake my head no, but even that much seems stupid.

  “Are you going to listen?” says Parker.

  “They’re very good for you,” says Aywak, “only they’re filling. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Jaywak says to me, “sometimes you want to be hungry. You know? Suppose you want to be hungry, only you aren’t hungry. Then you want to get hungry, you know? You’re just waiting to get hungry again. You think about it. You want it. You want to get hungry again, but the time won’t pass.”

  “A dried fig ruins it,” says Aywak.

  “Yeah!” says Jaywak.

  I have the eerie feeling they’re starting in on me.

  “Are you going to listen?” Parker is saying to Ben.

  “Sure,” says Ben. “Let’s have a talk. What’s new? Is something new?”

  Parker seems to be deflating inside his Chesterfield. Here is Parker amid the flipniks, adrift amid the litter while the gas jets burn.

  Parker turns to me. “I’m sorry,” he says. Then he turns to Ben. “O.K., we’re going.”

  “O.K.,” says Ben.

  “Only one thing,” says Parker. “What do you want me to …”

  He doesn’t finish. He turns around and walks toward the door. Then he wheels around again.

  “What do you want me to tell your mother?”

  “What do you mean?” Ben says.

  “Do you have a message for her?”

  “Such as what?”

  “Well, she’s been praying for you again.”

  “Are you being funny?”

  “No, it’s true,” says Parker. “She has been praying for you again. I hear her in the bedroom. She has her eyes shut tight, like this, and she is on her knees. She says things like, ‘O dear Lord, guide and protect my Ben wherever he may be tonight. Do you remember, O Lord, how my sweet Ben stood before me in the morning so that I might kiss him upon his forehead in the early brightness? Do you remember, O Lord, the golden promise of this child, my Ben?’ Well, you know, Bewak, things like that. I don’t want to embarrass you.”

  “That was extremely witty,” Ben says.

  “What do you want me to tell her?” says Parker.

  “Why don’t you just go?” Ben says.

  “Well, we’re all going to be on our knees praying tonight, Bewak,” says Parker. “So long, Bewak.”

  Down in the hallway, in the muddy tableau, Parker begins chuckling.

  “I know what I’m going to tell Regina,” he says. “I’m going to tell her Ben has become a raving religious fanatic and was down on his knees in a catatonic trance when we got there.”

  “What is all this about kneeling in prayer?”

  “I don’t know,” Parker says. “I just want everybody who is japping me to get down on their knees, locked in a battle of harmless zeal. I discovered something up there.”

  “Which was?”

  “He’s repulsive,” says Parker. “The whole thing was repulsive. After a while I didn’t see it from the inside. It wasn’t me looking at my own son. I saw it from the outside. It repelled me, that was all. It repelled me.”

  At the corner of Avenue B and 2d Street Parker sticks out his hand and bygod there is a cab. It is amazing. There are no cabs cruising the Lower East Side. Parker looks all around before he gets in the cab. Up the street, up Avenue B, you can see the hulk of the Avenue B Cinema and the edge of the park.

  “That is a good augury,” he tells me. “If you can walk right out on the street and get a cab—any time, any place, just stick out your hand and a cab stops—if you can do that, that is the sign that you are on top of it in New York.”

  Parker doesn’t say anything more until we’re riding up Fourth Avenue, or Park Avenue South, as it now is, up around 23d Street, by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building.

  “You tell me,” he says. “What could I say to him? I couldn’t say anything to him. I threw out everything I had. I couldn’t make anything skip across the pond. None of them. Not one.”

  Chapter 18

  A Sunday Kind of Love

  LOVE! ATTAR OF libido in the air! It is 8:45 A.M. Thursday morning in the IRT subway station at 50th Street and Broadway and already two kids are hung up in a kind of herringbone weave of arms and legs, which proves, one has to admit, that love is not confined to Sunday in New York. Still, the odds! All the faces come popping in clots out of the Seventh Avenue local, past the King Size Ice Cream machine, and the turnstiles start whacking away as if the world were breaking up on the reefs. Four steps past the turnstiles everybody is already backed up haunch to paunch for the climb up the ramp and the stairs to the surface, a great funnel of flesh, wool, felt, leather, rubber and steaming alumicron, with the blood squeezing through every
body’s old sclerotic arteries in hopped-up spurts from too much coffee and the effort of surfacing from the subway at the rush hour. Yet there on the landing are a boy and a girl, both about eighteen, in one of those utter, My Sin, backbreaking embraces.

  He envelops her not only with his arms but with his chest, which has the American teen-ager concave shape to it. She has her head cocked at a 90-degree angle and they both have their eyes pressed shut for all they are worth and some incredibly feverish action going with each other’s mouths. All round them, tens, scores, it seems like hundreds, of faces and bodies are perspiring, trooping and bellying up the stairs with arteriosclerotic grimaces past a showcase full of such novel items as Joy Buzzers, Squirting Nickels, Finger Rats, Scary Tarantulas and spoons with realistic dead flies on them, past Fred’s barbershop, which is just off the landing and has glossy photographs of young men with the kind of baroque haircuts one can get in there, and up onto 50th Street into a madhouse of traffic and shops with weird lingerie and gray hair-dyeing displays in the windows, signs for free teacup readings and a pool-playing match between the Playboy Bunnies and Downey’s Showgirls, and then everybody pounds on toward the Time-Life Building, the Brill Building or NBC.

  The boy and the girl just keep on writhing in their embroilment. Her hand is sliding up the back of his neck, which he turns when her fingers wander into the intricate formal gardens of his Chicago Boxcar hairdo at the base of the skull. The turn causes his face to start to mash in the ciliated hull of her beehive hairdo, and so she rolls her head 180 degrees to the other side, using their mouths for the pivot. But aside from good hair grooming, they are oblivious to everything but each other. Everybody gives them a once-over. Disgusting! Amusing! How touching! A few kids pass by and say things like “Swing it, baby.” But the great majority in that heaving funnel up the stairs seem to be as much astounded as anything else. The vision of love at rush hour cannot strike anyone exactly as romance. It is a feat, like a fat man crossing the English Channel in a barrel. It is an earnest accomplishment against the tide. It is a piece of slightly gross heroics, after the manner of those knobby, varicose old men who come out from some place in baggy shorts every year and run through the streets of Boston in the Marathon race. And somehow that is the gaffe against love all week long in New York, for everybody, not just two kids writhing under their coiffures in the 50th Street subway station; too hurried, too crowded, too hard, and no time for dalliance. Which explains why the real thing in New York is, as it says in the song, a Sunday kind of love.

  There is Saturday, but Saturday is not much better than Monday through Friday. Saturday is the day for errands in New York. More millions of shoppers are pouring in to keep the place jammed up. Everybody is bobbing around, running up to Yorkville to pick up these arty cheeses for this evening, or down to Fourth Avenue to try to find this Van Vechten book, Parties, to complete the set for somebody, or off to the cleaner’s, the dentist’s, the hairdresser’s, or some guy’s who is going to loan you his station wagon to pick up two flush doors to make tables out of, or over to some place somebody mentioned that is supposed to have fabulous cuts of meat and the butcher wears a straw hat and arm garters and is colorfully rude.

  True, there is Saturday night, and Friday night. They are fine for dates and good times in New York. But for the dalliance of love, they are just as stupefying and wound up as the rest of the week. On Friday and Saturday nights everybody is making some kind of scene. It may be a cellar cabaret in the Village where five guys from some place talk “Jamaican” and pound steel drums and the Connecticut teen-agers wear plaid ponchos and knee-high boots and drink such things as Passion Climax cocktails, which are made of apple cider with watermelon balls thrown in. Or it may be some cellar in the East 50’s, a discotheque, where the alabaster kids come on in sleeveless minksides jackets, tweed evening dresses and cool-it Modernismus hairdos. But either way, it’s a scene, a production, and soon the evening begins to whirl, like the whole world with the bed-spins, in a montage of taxis, slithery legs slithering in, slithery legs slithering out, worsted, piqué, grins, eye teeth, glissandos, buffoondos, tips, par lamps, doormen, lines, magenta ropes, white dickies, mirrors and bar bottles, pink men and shawl-collared coats, hatcheck girls and neon peach fingernails, taxis, keys, broken lamps and no coat hangers.…

  And, then, an unbelievable dawning; Sunday, in New York.

  George G., who writes “Z” ads for a department store, keeps saying that all it takes for him is to smell coffee being made at a certain point in the percolation. It doesn’t matter where. It could be the worst death-ball hamburger dive. All he has to do is smell it, and suddenly he finds himself swimming, drowning, dissolving in his own reverie of New York’s Sunday kind of love.

  Anne A.’s apartment was nothing, he keeps saying, and that was the funny thing. She lived in Chelsea. It was this one room with a cameo-style carving of a bored Medusa on the facing of the mantelpiece, this one room plus a kitchen, in a brownstone sunk down behind a lot of loft buildings and truck terminals and so forth. Beautiful Chelsea. But on Sunday morning by 10:30 the sun would be hitting cleanly between two rearview buildings and making it through the old no-man’s-land of gas effluvia ducts, restaurant vents, aerials, fire escapes, stairwell doors, clotheslines, chimneys, skylights, vestigial lightning rods, mansard slopes, and those peculiarly bleak, filthy and misshapen backsides of New York buildings, into Anne’s kitchen.

  George would be sitting at this rickety little table with an oilcloth over it. How he goes on about it! The place was grimy. You couldn’t keep the soot out. The place was beautiful. Anne is at the stove making coffee. The smell of the coffee being made, just the smell … already he is turned on. She had on a great terrycloth bathrobe with a sash belt. The way she moved around inside that bathrobe with the sun shining in the window always got him. It was the atmosphere of the thing. There she was, moving around in that great fluffy bathrobe with the sun hitting her hair, and they had all the time in the world. There wasn’t even one flatulent truck horn out on Eighth Avenue. Nobody was clobbering their way down the stairs in high heels out in the hall at 10 minutes to 9.

  Anne would make scrambled eggs, plain scrambled eggs, but it was a feast. It was incredible. She would bring out a couple of these little smoked fish with golden skin and some smoked oysters that always came in a little can with ornate lettering and royal colors and flourishes and some Kissebrot bread and black cherry preserves, and then the coffee. They had about a million cups of coffee apiece, until the warmth seemed to seep through your whole viscera. And then cigarettes. The cigarettes were like some soothing incense. The radiator was always making a hissing sound and then a clunk. The sun was shining in and the fire escapes and effluvia ducts were just silhouettes out there someplace. George would tear off another slice of Kissebrot and pile on some black cherry preserves and drink some more coffee and have another cigarette, and Anne crossed her legs under her terrycloth bathrobe and crossed her arms and drew on her cigarette, and that was the way it went.

  “It was the torpor, boy,” he says. “It was beautiful. Torpor is a beautiful, underrated thing. Torpor is a luxury. Especially in this stupid town. There in that kitchen it was like being in a perfect cocoon of love. Everything was beautiful, a perfect cocoon.”

  By and by they would get dressed, always in as shiftless a getup as possible. She would put on a big heavy sweater, a raincoat and a pair of faded slacks that gripped her like neoprene rubber. He would put on a pair of corduroy pants, a crew sweater with moth holes and a raincoat. Then they would go out and walk down to 14th Street for the Sunday paper.

  All of a sudden it was great out there on the street in New York. All those damnable millions who come careening into Manhattan all week weren’t there. The town was empty. To a man and woman shuffling along there, torpid, in the cocoon of love, it was as if all of rotten Gotham had improved overnight. Even the people looked better. There would be one of those old dolls with little flabby arms all hunched up in a c
oat of pastel oatmeal texture, the kind whose lumpy old legs you keep seeing as she heaves her way up the subway stairs ahead of you and holds everybody up because she is so flabby and decrepit … and today, Sunday, on good, clean, empty 14th Street, she just looked like a nice old lady. There was no one around to make her look slow, stupid, unfit, unhip, expendable. That was the thing about Sunday. The weasel millions were absent. And Anne walking along beside him with a thready old pair of slacks gripping her like neoprene rubber looked like possibly the most marvelous vision the world had ever come up with, and the cocoon of love was perfect. It was like having your cake and eating it, too. On the one hand, here it was, boy, the prize: New York. All the buildings, the Gotham spires, were sitting up all over the landscape in silhouette like ikons representing all that was great, glorious and triumphant in New York. And, on the other hand, there were no weasel millions bellying past you and eating crullers on the run with the crumbs flaking off the corners of their mouths as a reminder of how much Angst and Welthustle you had to put into the town to get any of that out of it for yourself. All there was was the cocoon of love, which was complete. It was like being inside a scenic Easter Egg where you look in and the Gotham spires are just standing there like a little gemlike backdrop.

  By and by the two of them would be back in the apartment sprawled out on the floor rustling through the Sunday paper, all that even black ink appliqued on big fat fronds of paper. Anne would put an E. Power Biggs organ record on the hi-fi, and pretty soon the old trammeler’s bass chords would be vibrating through you as if he had clamped a diathermy machine on your solar plexus. So there they would be, sprawled out on the floor, rustling through the Sunday paper, getting bathed and massaged by E. Power Biggs’ sonic waves. It was like taking peyote or something. This marvelously high feeling would come over them, as though they were psychedelic, and the most common-place objects took on this great radiance and significance. It was like old Aldous Huxley in his drug experiments, sitting there hooking down peyote buttons and staring at a clay geranium pot on a table, which gradually became the most fabulous geranium pot in God’s world. The way it curved … why, it curved 360 d-e-g-r-e-e-s! And the clay … why, it was the color of the earth itself! And the top … It had a r-i-m on it! George had the same feeling. Anne’s apartment … it was hung all over the place with the usual New York working girl’s modern prints, the Picasso scrawls, the Mondrians curling at the corners … somehow nobody ever gets even a mat for a Mondrian print … the Toulouse-Lautrecs with that guy with the chin kicking his silhouette leg, the Klees, that Paul Klee is cute … why, all of a sudden these were the most beautiful things in the whole hagiology of art … the way that guy with the chin k-i-c-k-s t-h-a-t l-e-g, the way that Paul Klee h-i-t-s t-h-a-t b-a-l-l … the way that apartment just wrapped around them like a cocoon, with lint under the couch like angel’s hair, and the plum cover on the bed lying halfway on the floor in folds like the folds in a Tiepolo cherub’s silks, and the bored Medusa on the mantelpiece looking like the most splendidly, gloriously b-o-r-e-d Medusa in the face of time!