Authors: Lawrence Block
“Then there is the nomenclature of Hip,” Lee Revzin said. “Man first, then Baby. Call everybody man and remember no names. Then call everybody baby. Strangers and afraid in a world we just can’t make. Where are you, Housman? Where is everybody?”
He coughed and the girl took the cigarette away from him. He smiled gratefully.
“I will recite a poem,” he said. “A poem to the world. A panegyrical paean for the poor peons. A poem, for the love of the lord, a poem.”
He said:
Never is a naughty word
Summer is a winter crutch
Lovers in a cinder block
Make a scene of nothing much.
Captains of the somewhere fleet
Say their prayers and go their ways
Lovers on a vacant roof
Sing the song of sometimes praise.
When the world is upside down
Inside out and also ran
See the prairie horses rush
Sifting gold in frying pan.
Halt the horses of the mind
Still the voice of autumn snakes
When somebody drops the clutch
That’s the time to hit the brakes.
The girl applauded wildly. “There’s more,” he said. “Then you may applaud. Beat your hands together with passion. The ego needs it. Also the id. We will of course omit the super-ego. We will always omit the super-ego.”
He went on in an Epicene and passionless frog-croak:
Slit the skins of silver eggs
Splash the ground that summer sings
Music mourns dead birds
Breath is sweet in broken things.
The girl applauded still more wildly.
“I wish I knew what in the world it means,” Lee Revzin said, more to himself than to the world. “It has to mean something. It really has to.”
The girl said nothing. She was busy unzipping him, stimulated beyond imagination by the force of his poetry.
Shank, meanwhile, was bored.
That was surprising. Judy Obershain’s parties had never bored him in the past. The people had interested him and the activities had appealed.
Now, however, he was bored.
The boredom, he decided, had a number of causes. For one thing, the thrill of smoking marijuana by way of being part of a group function no longer served to send him into the stratosphere. Pot was a part of his daily life—he bought it, he sold it, he smoked it. He found it no more delightful to smoke in public than in private. And the spectacle of twenty or more idiots blowing their brains out so thoroughly that they lost control of themselves was humorous no longer.
Another factor was his discovery that, although he was one of the youngest present at the party, the others seemed incredibly immature to him. He attributed this feeling partly to a change in his status. He was selling hard goods now; in fact he had made his first sale just a few hours ago. Basil could talk his head off about the similarity on the legal plane of marijuana and heroin. But Shank’s eyes were not those of the law, and for him a radical difference existed between the two drugs, so that he felt immeasurably superior to the idiots balling all over Judy Obershain’s apartment. Pot was fine, you could take it or leave it, Shank thought; smoke it on Madison Avenue or the Upper East Side or the Village. But junk was serious business—and pot was for kiddies. Now he was a businessman. You didn’t sell junk for the hell of it, Shank ruminated. You sold it for a profit, a good profit. Moreover, the stuff had a quick turnover and, as Basil had described it, a captive audience. You could make three, four, five bills a week if you were cool about it. And this potential for enormous profits further contributed to raising him above the level of the rest of the party-goers.
Even the sex was dull. Shank gave a mental shrug. He just plain wasn’t in the mood and there was no way to force it. The party was dragging him, the people were dragging him, the whole aura of child-play, love-play, sex-play was dragging him.
So he got up, carrying a good load from the pot he had smoked but carrying it easily, understanding it, able to master it with ease. Unlike Anita, who had just tried it for the first time and now was fornicating like a rabbit in the middle of the living-room floor. Shank walked to the door after stepping over a pair of errant lovers, and left the apartment.
The building elevator was the self-service type. But instead of pushing the button for the ground floor, he pressed for the floor below, the third, and headed for the apartment directly below that of Judy Obershain’s. He rang the bell. Rang it once, waited, then leaned on it.
The people were not home.
He opened the door with a key that fitted a surprising number of doors. He walked in, shut the door and began looking around for something to steal. Then, all at once, he decided there was no point to burglarizing the place. He was making enough money. He didn’t need any more.
Instead, he used the phone to call Bradley Galton, his stepfather, long distance. When Brad Galton answered, Shank waited for a second or two and then unleashed a stream of the wildest profanity he could think of. He did not pause for breath until the line went dead.
Then, smiling, Shank replaced the receiver and quit the apartment. He hoped the phone call to the coast would come as a great surprise to the people who would be billed for it.
He caught the elevator again, rode it to the first floor, ambled out into the night and hunted for a bar where he ordered a glass of draft beer and drank it down. He walked all the way home, looking around for anybody he might know. He saw a few people but nobody he wanted to talk to. So he wound up going straight back to the apartment on Saint Marks Place. But he felt too alert to sleep. He checked the cache of heroin, of which fourteen capsules remained. He checked the marijuana. He had sold Judy Obershain an ounce and had taken one hundred dollars for it, which meant he had two ounces of marijuana left and fourteen caps of horse and was already ahead by more than fifty dollars. A profitable day, he congratulated himself.
His mind returned to Anita.
Something was going to happen, Shank decided. There was more than enough for Joe there. The girl was appealing, and scared, and Shank was going to help himself to a little. Just a little. Not right away, but fairly soon. When he was ready he would simply take what he wanted. If she would not want to give it to him that would be just too damn bad. He would take it anyway. He undressed and stretched out on his bed. In his mind he concocted pleasant fantasies involving Anita. In one, her ankles were tied together, and her hands bound behind her back. She was shrieking in agony. He went to sleep and dreamed of pain.
They sat on a bench in Washington Square. Looking at her through the smoke from his cigarette, Joe was amazed at the change time had worked in the girl beside him. Before, Anita had worn a little lipstick; now she dispensed with it altogether and made up for it by wearing too much eye-shadow. Tight and faded dungarees encased belly and hips and legs. A loose black sweater covered her arms and chest. Her hair fell free, loose.
But the outer trappings were the least of the change. Any girl could replace lipstick with eye-shadow, could switch from skirt and sweater to dungarees and sweater, could unpin her hair and let her mouth go slack and her eyes droopy. Such could be accomplished overnight, and frequently was—generally by freshman girls from Brooklyn College making the perfunctory pilgrimage to Greenwich Village before they went home to marry dentists. Exchange students from Kew Gardens, Lee Revzin called them. Kiddie-beats.
Anita was different. More important than the outer wrapper was the girl inside. And there had been a change in that girl of direction, of attitude and mind. The words of Hip colored her speech now and sounded right coming from her mouth. The exchange students from Kew Gardens, when they used those words, made them sound like English from the lips of a Sudanese. She walked Hip and thought Hip and spoke Hip. Harlem and Long Island had drained away from her and the beat mystique had quickly replaced them. She accompanied Joe when he wanted her company; other times she remained at the apartment or wandered around the Village and the East Side by herself. She smoked marijuana with Joe, and had tried both codeine cough syrup and mescalin, neither of which had made much of an impression upon her. The cough syrup had merely drugged her for a while until she had unceremoniously thrown it up in the toilet bowl. The mescalin had given a weak high which she had found unpleasant and a bit frightening. But marijuana had seemed valuable, somehow, and she continued to smoke it whenever he did.
Joe looked at her now, his eyes all-seeing, and he thought perhaps he had done something radically wrong. The metamorphosis from Square to Hip was, he knew full well, far from complete. He knew she worried, and he knew she was firmly convinced that much of what she was doing was intrinsically wrong. He remembered her as she had been, fresh and eager and searching for something beyond her comprehension. And he was not at all sure that what she had become was an improvement on the original.
He recalled the first time she had smoked—at Judy’s Obershain’s party. He remembered their love-making on the floor, more or less center-stage, and he remembered how she had been when the effects of the marijuana had worn off. Scared, sick, frightened—and very much ashamed of herself. Then at last the shame had slipped away and the fear had claimed her altogether. And she was still not a girl who could make love in the middle of the floor in the middle of a party without there being something wrong about it for her, without some guilt that had to be buried beneath the rugged exterior of the perennial cool.
Bad, Joe thought.
“I hate this park,” she said now.
“Huh?”
“It drags me,” she said. “It really does. I sit here and all these people walk by. It used to be a kick. I mean, I didn’t know any of the people. They were strangers. And now either I know them or I’ve seen them so many times it’s like they’re relatives or like that. I want something to happen. God, I want something to happen.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. A small boy stopped and asked Joe if he wanted his shoes shined. Joe pointed to his tennis sneakers and laughed easily. The boy frowned, laughed and left them to bother somebody else.
“We could go to the coast,” he said. “North Beach or something. Everybody goes to the coast. It’s like the thing to do.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I mean, if you’re hung up on New York—”
“Not New York. Not New York, not the park, I don’t know. Just hung up in general, I suppose. Just bored and tired. I don’t know.”
“A change of scene might help.”
“I’m a leopard, Joe.”
He stared, feeling disoriented. “A leper? I don’t get it, baby. I—”
“Not a leper. A leopard. Like an animal. Leopards can’t change their spots. Remember?”
“Oh,” he said.
“Allee samee under the skin. New York or Chicago or San Francisco or…I don’t know. Portugal. Wherever you run it’s the same person running. Can’t run out of yourself. Doesn’t work.”
He said nothing.
“I think I’m going back to the pad,” she said.
“Want me to come?”
Anita shook her head no. “I just have eyes to walk. I’m going to buy a big cup of Italian ice from the cat on the corner of Thompson, the funny one with the wagon. And I’m going to walk all the way home eating the ice. Then I’ll sit around and wait for you.”
Joe shrugged.
“A nice long walk,” she said. “In the lovable afternoon. I’ll make dinner. Paella, I think. A pot of rice and some seafood. It’s cheap and it tastes good. Spanish. I made it last week.”
He remembered. “Shank may be around,” he said.
“I hope not.”
“You really put him down, don’t you? He’s a good cat. He’s making nice bread and giving us our share.”
“He’s making too much bread.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “That’s a lot of money from peddling pot. I think he’s doing something else. Muggings, hold-ups, I don’t know.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“He’d do anything,” she told him. “My God, you don’t know him at all. He’s a rotten son of a bitch, Joe. He really is. He’s a snake.”
He remained silent, having no great drive to spring to Shank’s defense. “He never did anything to you,” he managed after a few moments.
“I know.”
“So why the noise? There’s lots of studs I can live without. But I don’t go screaming on ‘em all the time.” She smiled. It was a strange smile. Then she stood up.
“Later,” she said. “Fall up around six or so for dinner. It’s okay to reheat it, you can keep the pot on the stove for a week. But it’s best the first day.”
He watched her walk away until she was out of sight and he wondered what was wrong. She was a leopard and she couldn’t change her spots. Solid. But why all the fuss? He thought about Shank. Somehow he couldn’t see Shank as a stick-up man. The picture did not add up. But there was no way to get around the fact that Shank had changed visibly. He was less talkative than ever. He didn’t seem to have any time for casual conversation. He rarely hung around the pad, rarely went out with them during the evenings. A few nights back a whole mob of them headed out around midnight, caught a late show in Times Square, then bought a few bottles of wine and went to Central Park. They stayed there all night long, singing at the top of their lungs, balling on occasion, making a major scene. But Shank hadn’t wanted to come along. He had said he had things to do. But what kind of things? And how come he never talked about them? A problem. But Joe Milani knew how to deal with problems. He had carefully cultivated a method over the days and weeks and months. He simply ignored the problem. From a pocket he took a paper-bound copy of Henry Miller’s
Sexus
that somebody had carefully smuggled in on a return trip from Europe. He opened it to an intriguing passage, began to read, and forgot completely the changes in Anita and Shank.
After Anita left Joe she did more or less as she had told him she would. She bought the paper cup of Italian ice from the man with the wagon on Thompson Street. Then she walked east on Fourth Street, stopping at a few stores along the way to shop. She angled up First Avenue to Saint Marks Place and the apartment, where she unpacked what she had bought. She put the kettle on the stove, filled it with water, put the rice into it. She let the rice boil for a while, then started to add the mussels and the chopped-up eel. She dropped other ingredients into the pot—some left-over chicken, two crabs, and miscellaneous seafood. Then she covered the pot, wondering if it were all right to watch it. A watched pot, they said, never boiled. That seemed physically illogical. Did watched pots boil? Did a pot burn when you watched it? Many things to think about. She sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to concentrate. She picked up a book and tried to read. Unable to concentrate, she gave up, tossing the book carelessly on the other bed. She stared across the room, waiting for something. For dinner to cook. For something, damn it. She was sitting on the bed when Shank entered. Anita did not greet him, nor did Shank greet her. He walked to the stove, lifted the lid off the pot and sniffed like a comic-strip husband. He sauntered to his bed, picked up the book she had tossed there and looked through it. He threw it on the floor. Then he turned his gaze on her. She felt there was something obscene in his expression. He kept staring at her till she flushed and turned away. When she looked back he was still staring at her in precisely the same way. She wanted to tell him to stop it but she did not know what to say. She wished again he would go away, so she and Joe could live alone. She would get a job—it would be worth it if she and Joe could have a place of their own. Shank still stared at her. She returned his glance now. She searched his eyes, trying to figure out what was hidden there.