Mr. Vertigo

by Paul Auster

  “You ain’t no old bag, ma’am,” I said.

  “Ah, that’s nice. I appreciate that one. You’ve got a soft touch with the ladies, kid. In a few more years, you’ll be knocking them dead with that kind of talk.”

  I wanted to go on chatting with her like that, all calm and easy as if nothing had happened, but now that the car had stopped, the smell from my pants was getting more noticeable, and I knew it was only a matter of seconds before my secret came out. Humiliation stung me again, and before I could say another word, I was sobbing into my hands beside her.

  “Jesus, Walt,” I heard her say. “Jesus Christ almighty. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not daring to look at her. “I couldn’t help it.”

  “It’s probably all that candy I’ve been feeding you. Your belly isn’t used to it.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I just don’t have no guts.”

  “Don’t be dumb, boy. You had a little accident is all. It happens to everyone.”

  “Sure. As long as you’re in diapers it does. I ain’t never been so embarrassed in all my life.”

  “Forget it. This is no time to feel sorry for yourself. We’ve got to clean up that little backside of yours before any gunk oozes onto the upholstery. Are you listening to me, Walt? I don’t care about your bloody bowel movements, I just don’t want my car to bear the brunt. There’s a pond behind those trees over there, and that’s where I’m taking you now. We’ll scrub off the mustard and relish, and then you’ll be as good as new.”

  I didn’t have much choice but to go along with her. It was pretty awful having to stand up and walk, what with all the sloshing and slithering taking place inside my pants, and since I still hadn’t quelled my sobs, my chest went on heaving and shuddering, letting forth a whole range of weird, half-stifled sounds. Mrs. Witherspoon walked ahead of me, leading the way to the pond. It was about a hundred feet back from the road, set off from its surroundings by a barrier of scrawny trees and shrubs, a little oasis in the middle of the prairie. When we came to the edge of the water, she told me to strip off my clothes, urging me on in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. I didn’t want to do it, at least not with her looking at me, but once I realized she wasn’t going to turn her back, I fixed my eyes on the ground and submitted to the ordeal. First she undid my shoes and pulled off my socks; then, without the slightest pause, she unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my fly, and tugged. Pants and undies fell to my ankles in one swoop, and there I was standing with my dick in the breeze before a grown woman, my white legs stained with brown mush and my asshole reeking like yesterday’s garbage. It was surely one of the low points of my life, but to Mrs. Witherspoon’s immense credit (and this is a thing I’ve never forgotten), she didn’t make a sound. Not one groan of disgust, not one gasp. With all the tenderness of a mother washing her newborn baby, she dipped her hands into the water and began cleaning me off, splashing and rubbing my naked skin until every sign of my disgrace had been removed.

  “There,” she said, patting me dry with a handkerchief she’d pulled from her red beaded purse. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, “but what do we do with them fouled-up undies?”

  “We leave them for the birds, that’s what, and that goes for the pants, too.”

  “And you expect me to ride home like that? Without no stitch on my nether bottom?”

  “Why not? Your shirttails hang down to your knees, and it’s not as though there’s much to hide anyway. We’re talking microscopes, kid, the crown jewels of Lilliput.”

  “Don’t cast aspersions on my privates, ma’am. They may be trifles to you, but I’m proud of them just the same.”

  “Of course you are. And a cute little dicky-bird it is, Walt, with those bald nuts and smooth, babydoll thighs. You’ve got everything it takes to be a man”—and here, to my great astonishment, she gathered up the whole package in her palm and gave it a good healthy shake—“but you’re not quite there yet. Besides, no one’s going to see you in the car. We’ll skip the ice cream parlor today and drive straight home. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll smuggle you into the house through the back door. How’s that? I’m the only one who’s going to know about it, and you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll never tell.”

  “Not even the master?”

  “Least of all the master. What happened out here today is strictly between you and me.”

  She could be a good egg, that woman, and whenever it really counted, she was about the best there was. At other times, though, I couldn’t make heads or tails of her. Just when you thought she was your bosom buddy, she’d turn around and do something unexpected—tease you, for instance, or snub you, or go silent on you—and the beautiful little world you’d been living in would suddenly go sour. There was a lot I didn’t understand, grown-up things that were still over my head, but little by little I began to catch on that she was pining for Master Yehudi. She was bingeing herself into the blues as she waited for him to come round, and if things had gone on much longer, I don’t doubt that she would have jumped off the deep end.

  The turning point came about two nights after the shit episode. We were sitting on lawn chairs in the backyard, watching the fireflies dart in and out of the bushes and listening to the crickets chirp their tinny songs. That passed for big-time entertainment in those days, even in the so-called Roaring Twenties. I hate to debunk popular legends, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot that roared in Wichita, and after two months of scouring that sleepy burg for noise and diversion, we’d more than used up the available resources. We’d seen every motion picture, slurped down every ice cream, played every pinball machine, taken a spin on every merry-go-round. It wasn’t worth the effort to go out anymore, and for several nights running we’d just stayed put, letting the torpor spread through our bones like some fatal disease. I was sucking on a glass of tepid lemonade that night, I recall, Mrs. W. was off on another bender, and neither one of us had punctured the silence in over forty minutes.

  “I used to think,” she finally said, following some secret train of thought, “I used to think he was the most dashing stud ever to trot out of the fucking stable.”

  I took a sip of my drink, looked up at the stars in the night sky, and yawned. “Who’s that?” I said, not bothering to conceal my boredom.

  “Who do you think, pisshead?” Her speech was slurred and barely comprehensible. If I hadn’t known her better, I would have taken her for a stumblebum with water on the brain.

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing where the conversation was headed.

  “Yeah, that one, Mr. Birdman, that’s the one I’m talking about.”

  “Well, he’s in a bad way, ma’am, you know that, and all we can do is hope his soul mends before it’s too late.”

  “I’m not talking about his soul, nitwit. I’m talking about his pecker. He’s still got one, doesn’t he?”

  “I guess so. It’s not as if I’m in the habit of asking him about it.”

  “Well, a man has to do his duty. He can’t leave a girl high and dry for two months and expect to get away with it. That’s not how it works. A pussy needs love. It needs to be stroked and fed, just like any other animal.”

  Even in the darkness with no one looking, I could feel myself blush. “Are you sure you want to be telling me this, Mrs. Witherspoon?”

  “There’s no one else, sweetheart. And besides, you’re old enough to know about these things. You don’t want to walk through life like all those other numbskulls, do you?”

  “I always figured I’d let nature take care of itself.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. A man’s got to tend his honey pot. He’s got to make sure the stopper’s in and it doesn’t run out of juice. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “I think so.”

  “Think so? What kind of bullshit answer is that?”

  “Yeah, I hear you.”

  “It’s not as if I haven’t had ot
her offers, you know. I’m a young, healthy girl, and I’m sick and tired of waiting around like this. I’ve been diddling my own twat all summer, and it just won’t wash anymore. I can’t make it any clearer than that, can I?”

  “The way I heard it, you’ve already turned down the master three times.”

  “Well, things change, don’t they, Mr. Know-It-All?”

  “Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. It’s not for me to say.”

  It was on the point of turning ugly, and I wanted no part of it—to sit there listening to her blather on about her disappointed cunt. I wasn’t equipped to handle that kind of stuff, and peeved as I was at the master myself, I didn’t have the heart to join in and attack his manhood. I could have stood up and walked away, I guess, but then she would have started screaming at me, and nine minutes later every cop in Wichita would have been out there in the yard with us, hauling us off to jail for disturbing the peace.

  As it was, I needn’t have worried. Before she could get in another word, a loud noise suddenly exploded from within the house. It was more of a boom than a crash, I suppose, a kind of long, hollow detonation that immediately gave way to several resounding thuds: thwack, thwack, thwack, as if the walls were about to tumble down. For some reason, Mrs. Witherspoon found this funny. She threw back her head in a fit of laughter, and for the next fifteen seconds the air rippled out of her windpipe like a swarm of flying grasshoppers. I’d never heard laughter like that before. It sounded like one of the ten plagues, like two-hundred-proof gin, like four hundred hyenas stalking the streets of Crazytown. Then, even as the thuds continued, she started raving at the top of her voice. “Do you hear that?” she shouted. “Do you hear that, Walt! That’s me! That’s the sound of my thoughts, the sound of the thoughts bouncing in my brain! Just like popcorn, Walt! My skull’s about to crack in two! Ha, ha! My whole head’s going to burst to bits!”

  Just then, the thuds were replaced by the noise of shattering glass. First one thing broke, then another: cups, mirrors, bottles, a deafening barrage. It was hard to tell what was what, but each thing shattered differently, and it went on for a long time, more than a minute, I would say, and after the first few seconds the din was everywhere, the whole night was screeching with the sound of splintering glass. Without even thinking, I jumped to my feet and ran toward the house. Mrs. Witherspoon made a stab at following me, but she was too drunk to get very far. The last thing I remember is looking back and seeing her slip—flat on her face, just like a sot in the funnies. She let out a yelp. Then, realizing there was no point in trying to get up, she started in on another giggling jag. That was how I left her: rolling around on the ground and laughing, laughing her poor potted guts all over the lawn.

  The only idea that flashed through my head was that someone had broken into the house and was attacking Master Yehudi. By the time I got through the back door and started climbing the stairs, however, all was quiet again. That seemed strange, yet even stranger was what happened next. I walked down the hall to the master’s room, knocked tentatively on the door, and heard him call out to me in a clear, perfectly normal voice: “Come in.” So I went in, and there was Master Yehudi himself, standing in his bathrobe and slippers in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets and a curious little smile on his face. Everything was destruction around him. The bed was in a dozen pieces, the walls were gouged, a million white feathers floated in the air. Broken picture frames, broken glasses, broken chairs, broken bits of nameless things—they were all strewn about the floor like so much rubble. He allowed me a couple of seconds to take in what I was seeing, and then he spoke, addressing me with all the calm of a man who’s just stepped out of a warm bath. “Good evening, Walt,” he said. “And what brings you up here at this late hour?”

  “Master Yehudi,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “All right? Of course I’m all right. Don’t I look all right?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, well, maybe you do. But this,” I said, gesturing to the ruins at my feet, “what about this? I don’t get it. The place is a shambles, it’s all in smithereens.”

  “An exercise in catharsis, son.”

  “An exercise in what?”

  “No matter. It’s a kind of heart medicine, a balm for ailing spirits.”

  “You mean to tell me you done all this yourself?”

  “It had to be done. I’m sorry about all the commotion, but sooner or later it had to be done.”

  From the way he was looking at me, I sensed he was back to his old snappy self. His voice had regained its haughty timbre, and he seemed to be mixing kindness and sarcasm with the old familiar cunning. “Does that mean,” I said, still not daring to hope, “does that mean things are going to be different around here now?”

  “We have an obligation to remember the dead. That’s the fundamental law. If we didn’t remember them, we’d lose the right to call ourselves human. Do you follow me, Walt?”

  “Yes, sir, I follow. There ain’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about our dear darlings and what was done to them. It’s just…”

  “Just what, Walt?”

  “It’s just that time is wasting, and we’d be doing the world an injustice if we didn’t think about ourselves, too.”

  “You have a quick mind, son. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

  “It’s not just me, you understand. There’s Mrs. Witherspoon, too. These last couple of weeks, she’s worked herself into quite a conniption. If my eyes didn’t fool me just now, I believe she’s passed out on the lawn, snoring in a puddle of her own barf.”

  “I’m not going to apologize for things that need no apology. I did what I had to do, and it took as long as it had to take. Now a new chapter begins. The demons have fled, and the dark night of the soul is over.” He took a deep breath, removed his hands from his pockets, and clasped me firmly on the shoulder. “What do you say, little man? Are you ready to show them your stuff?”

  “I’m ready, boss. You bet your boots I’m ready. Just rig up a place for me to do it, and I’m your boy till death do us part.”

  I gave my first public performance on August 25, 1927, appearing as Walt the Wonder Boy for a one-show booking at the Pawnee County Fair in Larned, Kansas. It would be hard to imagine a more modest debut, but as things turned out, it came within an inch of being my swan song. It wasn’t that I flubbed up the act, but the crowd was so raucous and mean-spirited, so filled with drunks and hooters, that if not for some quick thinking on the master’s part, I might not have lived to see another day.

  They’d roped off a field on the other side of the horticultural exhibits, out past the stalls with the prize-winning ears of corn and the two-headed cow and the six-hundred pound pig, and I remember traveling for what seemed like half a mile before coming to a little pond with murky green water and white scum floating on top. It struck me as a woeful site for such a historic occasion, but the master wanted me to start small, with as little fuss and fanfare as possible. “Even Ty Cobb played in the bush leagues,” he said, as we climbed out of Mrs. Witherspoon’s car. “You have to get some performances under your belt. Do well here, and we’ll start talking about the big time in a few months.”

  Unfortunately, there was no grandstand for the spectators, which made for a lot of tired legs and surly complaints, and with tickets going at ten cents a pop, the crowd was already feeling chiseled before I made my entrance. There couldn’t have been more than sixty or seventy of them, a bunch of thick-necked hayseeds milling around in their overalls and flannel shirts—delegates from the First International Congress of Bumpkins. Half of them were guzzling bathtub hootch from little brown cough-syrup bottles and the other half had just finished theirs and were itching for more. When Master Yehudi stepped forward in his black tuxedo and silk hat to announce the world premiere of Walt the Wonder Boy, the wisecracks and heckling began. Maybe they didn’t like his clothes, or maybe they objected to his Brooklyn-Budapest accent, but I’m certain it didn’t help that I was wearing
the worst costume in the annals of show business: a long white robe that made me look like some midget John the Baptist, complete with leather sandals and a hemp sash tied around my waist. The master had insisted on what he called an “otherworldly look,” but I felt like a twit in that getup, and when I heard some clown yell at the top of his voice—“Walt the Wonder Girl”—I realized I wasn’t alone in my sentiments.

  If I found the courage to begin, it was only because of Aesop. I knew he was looking down on me from wherever he was, and I wasn’t going to let myself fail him. He was counting on me to shine, and whatever that soused-up mob of fools might have thought of me, I owed it to my brother to give it the best shot I could. So I walked to the edge of the pond and went into my spread-arms-and-trance routine, struggling to shut out the catcalls and insults. I heard some oohs and ahs when my body rose off the ground—but dimly, only dimly, for I was already in a separate world by then, walled off from friend and foe alike in the glory of my ascent. It was the first performance I had ever given, but I already had the makings of a trooper, and I’m certain I would have won over the crowd if not for some birdbrain who took it upon himself to hurl a bottle in my direction. Nineteen times out of twenty, the projectile sails past me and no harm is done, but this was a day for flukes and longshots, and the damned thing clunked me square in the noggin. The blow addled my concentration (not to speak of rendering me unconscious), and before I knew which end was up, I was sinking like a bag of pennies to the bottom of the water. If the master hadn’t been on his toes, diving in after me without bothering to shed his coat and tails, I probably would have drowned in that crummy mud-hole, and that would have been the first and last bow I ever took.

  So we left Larned in disgrace, hightailing it out of there as those bloodthirsty hicks pelted us with eggs and stones and watermelons. No one seemed to care that I’d almost died from that blow on the head, and they went on laughing as the good master rescued me from the drink and carried me to the safety of Mrs. W.’s car. I was still semidelirious from my visit to Davy Jones’s locker, and I coughed and puked all over the master’s shirt as he ran across the field with my wet body bouncing in his arms. I couldn’t hear everything that was said, but enough reached my ears for me to gather that opinions about us were sharply divided. Some people took the religious view, boldly asserting that we were in league with the devil. Others called us fakes and charlatans, and still others had no opinion at all. They yelled for the pure pleasure of yelling, just glad to be part of the mayhem as they let forth with angry, wordless howls. Fortunately, the car was waiting for us on the other side of the roped-off area, and we managed to get inside before the rowdies caught up with us. A few eggs thudded against the rear window as we drove off, but no glass shattered, no shots rang out, and all in all I suppose we were lucky to escape with our hides intact.