King of the World

by Thomas Berger

  He was stopped by the novelty of it, or so he told himself. He slogged slowly back, head down, and climbed in. Then he glared at her, but she was smiling. Finally he could not help smiling too.

  “Give me that purse,” he said. As expected, there was a supply of Kleenex within. He removed a tissue and, boldly grasping her chin, wiped away most of the pigment on her lips. He held her face away for inspection. “This lipstick’s too red for your complexion and features.” Her chin felt so small in his hand. She seemed to have diminished in size since their first meeting in jail.

  “You know,” he said, “I can’t help thinking that you were a strange choice for the assignments given you by the FBI. I’ve never seen anybody who looks less like a man. I’d think they would use some big, husky woman.”

  “I fooled you,” she said. “For a while, anyway.” She blinked the heavily mascaraed lashes. “It’s like what I was saying about authority before. You don’t have to be physically big and strong. It’s your belief in yourself that other people see.”

  “Now, about those eyes,” said Cornell. He reluctantly let her chin go at last and searched the bag on the off chance he might find some cleansing cream. There was none. A boy did not expect to have to redo his eyes completely while out somewhere; the usual boy, that is, though Cornell had known vain types who went everywhere with valise-sized cosmetic kits.

  He wound a Kleenex around his index finger and did what he could with the worst failure of her eyeliner, then took the tiny brush from the tube and touched up here and there.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said, going back to her theory. “In jail you weren’t wearing any makeup at all, and yet I assumed you were a man. And you didn’t wear any as barracks leader either. But then of course I knew who you were.” He got out the mascara kit and did what he could with the little brush on her clogged, sticky lashes. “When did you recognize me?”

  “As soon as I saw you in the classroom corridor.” She was completely submissive as he worked on her. “You see, once again it was because of a conviction, an expectation. I knew you were in camp, and the informant had also said you had had a nose job. I also remembered your general build and the way you moved. Taking off the breasts didn’t change that. Then of course when you spoke….”

  “There,” said Cornell, putting away the eye stuff and taking the mirror from its pouch in the lining of the bag. “Take a peek. I’m not going to try to do anything with the shadow: I’d only make it worse. If you want to stop at a drugstore, I’ll help you choose the right things. I like the Revlon line myself. And you’ll need perfume or cologne anyway, and nail polish—”

  “And Tampax,” she said bluntly, in one of her brusque changes of tone, slammed in the gear, and accelerated down the street. After a block or so, she said: “Why are you encouraging me?”

  A good question. Perhaps it was because Cornell, who had forsaken cosmetics for himself, was nostalgic for them. His answer was, however, “I don’t see that it hurts anybody. You know, that arrest for transvestism, which I really was not guilty of, in the sense of perversion, opened my eyes. It ruined my life, but maybe something good has come of it. My life wasn’t that much to begin with, and I learned—well, what can I call it? Not tolerance exactly.” He raised his eyebrows. “Not tolerance at all! More likely bigotry. You know how ordeals are always supposed to make you a nicer person in the end, more forgiving, patient, understanding, kind, and generous? Well, I’m less of those now than I was when I used to foul up Ida’s correspondence, get runs in my pantyhose, and spend evenings home alone with a Chinese TV dinner, head in curlers, undies soaking in the washbasin.”

  “Hey,” said the girl, “maybe we’ll find a gas station soon.” They had come into a warehouse area. Some signs of life at last: trucks being unloaded by portly male figures in coveralls, various women standing about talking or sitting on platforms eating sandwiches from metal lunchboxes.

  “Look at those eunuchs,” said Cornell. “That’s what I’ve got to look forward to if I’m caught.”

  Without turning her head, the girl said: “Georgie, do you want to stick with me for a while? We’ve got a better chance together.”

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  She nodded silently.

  “I don’t want anybody to feel responsible for me,” he said. She swallowed. “It’s me. I don’t know if I could make it alone.”

  “You?” But he sensed her embarrassment, and quickly said: “It’s O.K. with me.”

  It soon turned out that he had misinterpreted her admission. He thought she meant she was scared to defect from the FBI, to continue to dress as a man, whatever her motives, which he still did not understand, for so doing: they were her own, whatever they were, and he could not claim a right to his freedom while denying it to another, even a woman.

  But what she proceeded to say was not germane to this argument.

  “There it is, a Citgo station.” She pointed through the windshield. “Three blocks up the street. We’re going to hold it up.”

  Cornell turned the mirror, which she had not taken, on himself and watched his ghastly smile.

  “Well,” she went on, “what choice do we have? No gas and no money.”

  He returned the mirror to the purse.

  “Look,” she said, “you don’t have to do anything unless the attendant jumps me. Even then, I can probably take her alone. I had judo and karate training at the FBI Academy. But some of these girls keep a pistol near the cash register. If she goes for it, grab her. That’s all you have to do.”

  Cornell prissily closed the catch on the bag. “Uh-huh,” he muttered, matching two thuds in the series issuing from his heart. His voice sounded as if it came through a sack: “What are you going to use for a weapon?”

  “One of these tubes, lipstick or eyeliner, inside my pocket. She’ll think it’s a gun barrel.”

  She had slowed down while sketching this insane plan. Still they approached the station too rapidly for Cornell’s comfort. He was considering a desperate lunge for the brake.

  “Only,” he said breathlessly, “you don’t have any pockets. You’re wearing a skirt.”

  “Right! You’re in the pants. You do it.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Cornell, taking great gasps that would have made his quondam breasts leap.

  They were only a block away now. She reached over, patted his thigh, and suddenly kicked the gas pedal. Before his terror crested, she had wheeled into the station, passed the pumps, and made a tire-shrieking stop at the door of the office.

  This did not seem to startle or even interest the attendant who sat inside at a desk, reading a comic book. Cornell could see her quite clearly through the glass wall.

  “Get going!” The girl pushed him violently. He fell against the ambulance door, caught himself on the handle and so depressed it. The door opened and had he not got a foot under him and a hand extended, he would have met the concrete with his behind. As it was, he probably sprained both ankle and wrist. He struggled up, the bad foot threatening to give way and the hand benumbed.

  In a moral state like sleepwalking, he limped through the open door of the office and faced the comic book, which was Wonderwoman.

  He waited an eternity without acknowledgment from the attendant. He stared through the glass at the girl, who was gesticulating madly in the cab of the ambulance.

  Dully, he said: “Your money or your life.”

  The attendant lowered the comic book and said in an even duller voice than his: “Standard or high test and how many?” She was about twenty, low-foreheaded and acne-cheeked.

  Cornell had forgotten to pretend there was a gun in his pocket. He began to tremble.

  “You don’t understand,” he said nevertheless. “This is a holdup.”

  The attendant remained motionless, impassive, the comic book flat on the desk. Cornell touched his thigh with his left hand, the right still feeling numb. “Don’t make me use this,” he said. By accident he had patted his
penis, which had lodged there in the disorder of the fall. He made his ghastly grin again.

  The pimpled attendant was trying to say something. Cornell leaned helpfully over the desk in an effort to hear.

  The frightened youth pushed her chair back. “Don’t kill me,” she said. “Take it all.”

  She pointed at a cash register on top of a showcase full of canned oil arranged in a pyramid. Cornell went there and pried at the drawer. “Press the No Change button,” said the youth. He did so. The drawer shot out, making a bell ring and hitting him in the belt buckle.

  He claimed the bills from all three slots, and took the zinc dollars too. He was wondering about the lesser change when he heard the ambulance horn.

  “Thank you,” he told the attendant, and ran to the door, where he stopped long enough to say: “I wouldn’t really have killed you!”

  The girl was behind the wheel, but a hose from the gas pump was attached to the filler pipe of the ambulance and the pump was whirring away.

  The girl pointed down the street to something he could not see from his angle. “Cops!” she shouted. “Let’s go,” and started off as he climbed in. He heard the gas hose tear away and then a sharper noise as they roared off the apron. Looking back, he saw the attendant shooting at them with a pistol. A police car came slowly up the street and stopped abruptly when its occupants saw the attendant. Both cops got out and began to fire at her. At this point the girl negotiated the corner in a sweeping turn that took them over the curb and across a portion of sidewalk before she could straighten the vehicle.

  After they had bumped down into the street again, she asked: “How much did you get?”

  Cornell stared at the money still clutched in his hands. He had probably dropped some of the zinc dollars. He counted the bills. “Forty-seven dollars in paper…. And six zincs.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Enough for two hamburgers.”

  “With coffee,” said Cornell. He had become strangely calm since climbing into the ambulance, perhaps owing to the total unreality of the experience. It was impossible to believe he had robbed a gas station.

  “No wonder she didn’t resist,” said the girl. “You sure you got everything in the register?”

  “I cleaned it out.”

  She peered at the fuel indicator. “Good thing I thought about the gas. About half a tank. Next time we get filled up first, then hit the register.”

  “Next time?” He instantly felt awful again.

  “We’d better pick a station in a more prosperous area. Forty-seven dollars!”

  “Plus six zincs.”

  “Damn!” She hit the wheel. But after a moment she said: “You did a good job, Georgie. I knew you had it in you.”

  His ankle and wrist were sore again. He had forgotten them during the action.

  “I don’t know what I would have done if she had pulled out that pistol while I was in there.”

  “Kick it out of her hand,” said the girl. “Karate-chop her arm.”

  Cornell closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

  “Where are we heading? New York?” He looked out. Once or twice a year the smog was slight enough between Manhattan and Jersey so that you could see one from the other. It was too much to expect this would be one of those days. “We can reach Manhattan on the gas we have now, can’t we? So why rob more stations?”

  “We can’t go to New York,” she said firmly. “That’s definite. Eventually, even the Army will get around to putting out an alert, and some time or another even a stupid New York cop might spot one of us, even if we maintained our disguises. You don’t look like a real girl, and I don’t look like a man.”

  This puzzled Cornell, though it was true enough.

  “Then what was all that stuff about you wanting to be a man?”

  She was driving intently. “What stuff?”

  Cornell was annoyed. “Why,” he said, “that act back at the hospital, and then the desperation about getting into those clothes as soon as we left camp. And before that Lieutenant Aster told me you had sex-identification problems. And what about in jail and as a barracks leader? You must have thought you looked like a man then!”

  She murmured, not in the least disturbed, “Mmm.”

  “Mmm? I think you owe me an explanation.”

  “Well, what about you?” He saw now that she had been pricked and that behind her apparent calm she had prepared a counterattack. “You were all aggressive and effective at the hospital. You took charge. But as soon as we got into the ambulance you acted like a basket case, huddled there naked in your blanket, whimpering and sniveling.”

  “I was not whimpering and sniveling.”

  “You were too.”

  “I was—” He halted. This was degrading. He cleared his throat and said: “Well, I’m not in the blanket now. As to the ambulance, I don’t know how to drive. That puts me in a weak situation. I can go only so far when I lack knowledge of how to do something. The girl friend who was supposedly teaching me to drive sneered at every little mistake I made and kept joking about men drivers. That attitude may be why men are often none too effective behind the wheel—and at a lot of other things as well.”

  Now she surprised him again by nodding in agreement. “Maybe it is. And maybe always expecting a woman to perform perfectly in any assignment, or if she meets with a reverse to accept it like a female, with a stiff upper lip, never surrendering to pressure, never betraying her emotions—maybe that’s wrong too.”

  “I never thought of that,” said Cornell. “I always assumed women had things pretty much their own way.”

  She laughed bitterly. “You know that treatment of Aster’s? I hated to play with guns when I was a child. I made the mistake of telling her that, and how they made me be a cowboy and forced me to play cops ‘n’ robbers, and how I’d get hysterical and vomit. She said that’s why we should try to recapitulate that time of life and brought me that toy tommygun. And I was terrible at sports and I hated them. So she brings the football and baseball bat and hockey stick!”

  “Careful,” said Cornell, pointing to an acute fork into which the street divided. She chose the right leg and darted into it. They were now getting towards the suburbs, passing five-story apartment houses separated one from the next by concrete yards full of clotheslines, the kind of places where male commuters lived. One of the boys at Huff House lived in Jersey and swore by it, despite the two-and-a-half hour trip he had to make to reach Manhattan each day: said it was worth it to breathe fresh air in the evening. It was true that the atmosphere here had just a tinge of yellow, nowhere near the bright lemon hue of the New York sky, which often indeed deepened into dark mustard.

  Cornell got some relief from observing the area. He was rather embarrassed by the girl’s confession, though he had solicited it. “Gee,” he said, “I haven’t worn a gas mask in—” How many days was it since he had come to camp? Not even a week?

  Or was he jealous of her emotional problem, having a massive one of his own? If so, then he was weaker than she.

  “Yes,” he said, “that therapeutic reprise didn’t work with me, either. But I don’t think it disturbed me as much as yours did you. She never really drew blood with me. I was mainly bored as a teenager.” Which of course was not true. He had been utterly miserable since the beginning of pubescence, getting a beard, pubic and armpit hair, and an odor to his sweat. “But I always liked the dolls they made us play with as little kids, though I could seldom get the one with the prettiest dress.”

  “I stole a doll for my very own once,” the girl said slyly. “But they took it away from me.”

  “I remember some girl doing that!” Cornell said eagerly. “Which elementary facility were you in?”

  “AC-2967, in Boston.”

  “Couldn’t have been you then. I was in New York. But of course you’re a lot younger than me anyway.”

  “I’m twenty-two,” she said. “You can’t be over twenty-five.
”

  He murmured. But then this other self (whether a better one or worse had yet to be proved) again made its assertion. He stared bravely at her. “I’ll be thirty next month, to tell the truth.”

  She frowned. “How can that be?”

  He explained.

  “Well,” she said, “you don’t look it.”

  He thanked her ritually, but was more interested in another matter than in the compliment. “I thought you would have known that, being FBI.”

  “I don’t know anything about you, Georgie, except you got away from me in jail.” She steered around a pothole in the street. “The liaison between the Bureau and the New York Police Department is very poor. I was on assignment in the Men’s House of Detention without the knowledge of the police. It’s our practice to let them in on a case only at the arrest, otherwise they would blow the whole operation, either because of ineptness or corruption. Most of them are on the take from criminal elements. For example, that men’s-lib movement. The police have known for years about the subway tunnel.”

  “They have?”

  She removed a hand from the wheel and rubbed two fingers together. “The payoff. We’ve known about it too, but have failed to act for different reasons. To arrest those Movement clowns would be to give them undeserved publicity. As they are, they’re completely ineffectual. This sperm-camp action, the jerking-off stunt you were supposed to incite, is the only new idea they’ve had in years. You saw how hopeless that was. Otherwise it’s endless so-called revolutionary manifestoes, which they can’t get any boy to read, let alone believe.”

  “You could hardly have been waiting in jail for me,” said Cornell. “It was totally accidental that I was there at all.” She looked a lot better since he had toned down her makeup; he was even getting used to the clashing colors of her outfit.

  “It was a crappy assignment,” she went on. “With no particular aim, just to sniff out whatever sedition might exist. We had anonymous reports from time to time that the prisoners were talking revolution. And of course, if they were it might be serious, unlike that subway Movement, prisoners being supposedly hardened, ruthless criminals, not a bunch of prating buffoons with mimeograph machines.”