Mite winked and then was off to the wall of food.
She watched him go before turning to the man in the brown suit, who was still standing.
“Sit, please, Mr….”
He kept standing until she gestured at the seat Mite had pulled out for him and finally he sat.
The strange pull of revulsion she felt when she spied him outside the window, and then by the wall of food, strengthened in proximity. He had a peculiar smell, strong and furry, less the deep neglected tones of normal body odor, more the higher-pitched animal musk that arose with its own not-so-hidden message from the carnivora house at the zoo. His beard was dark, his hair, beneath his hat, long and greasy. There was something disconcertingly real about him, as if the rough edges of existence, normally smoothed by societal conventions or blurred by the plate of glass through which she viewed the world, were still jagged and sharp on him. He sat there in his dark glasses, unmoving, as if he were blind, but at the same time it seemed as if he were staring at her with a brutal intensity. She tried to stare back, to see beyond her own reflection in the dark lenses, but failed to connect with his eyes.
Suddenly he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out something small and golden. He flicked open the top, spun
the wheel. A small flame erupted. His smile increased its vast wattage.
Celia tilted her head, unsure of what the stranger was doing. In the way he smiled and held himself, he seemed to be trying to impress her, as if he were some prehistoric man showing off to the females of his clan his ability to make fire. She felt strangely flattered, there was something almost gallant in the gesture. To be polite, she reached into her purse, took out a cigarette, leaned forward and lit it on the flame, all the while staring into the dark lenses.
“Thank you,” she said. “Your name is Jerry?”
“Blatta is it? Jerry Blatta?”
“That’s an interesting name.”
He continued to stare.
Self-consciously she leaned back, crossed her arms over her breasts. “And you’re a friend of Mite’s?”
“Sure, I suppose. Any friend of yours…”
The register of his strange disjointed voice suddenly slipped higher, as if in imitation of her own, using even her own words. She began to laugh, she couldn’t help herself, the charming gesture, the flattering imitation, the disconcerting stare.
He drew back as if under attack, and then through his fixed smile he laughed too, a laugh as high and girlish as her own.
Mite returned with a tray laden with plates and cups and glasses. Before his friend Jerry, Mite placed a ham and cheese sandwich, cut diagonally into two triangles, an apple, a tapered glass filled with tapioca pudding and topped with
whipped cream, a cup of coffee. Ever frugal, for himself Mite brought only a hard roll, two pats of butter, a glass of water, and a cup of tea. Mite sat himself next to Jerry, solicitously close, and edged the plate with the apple, red and shiny, toward his friend.
“Go ahead, Jerry,” he said. “You know what they say, an apple a day keeps the coppers at bay.”
Celia watched the strange maternalistic display with a curiosity that turned to amazement as this Jerry Blatta devoured the apple in four bites, swallowing skin, core, all, leaving only the tiny stem sticking out from his teeth.
“He’s a hungry boy, your friend,” says Celia.
“Ain’t we all. Look at him close, Celia. He’s my ticket.”
“Your ticket?”
“Oh yeah.”
“To where, Mite?”
“To the pineapple pie, sweetheart, where we all wants to go. Just like Pinnacio. You ever hear of Pinnacio, what worked out of the Square a few years ago?”
Celia shook her head.
“He’s a legend now, sure, Pinnacio, but back then he was just an Alvin like me, a skinny hustler what styled hisself a show biz impresario with nothing but a single blue suit and a pretty face to get him through. He had two clients, a sad-sack comic who got the mokes laughing only ’cause he couldn’t stop sweating on stage, and a contortionist what had a fatal fondness for chocolate and couldn’t no longer touch her toes. Pinnacio used to hoard his nickels so he could sit over his coffee at the Automat and read
a
Variety
he’d pluck out of the ashcan and plot the careers of his two loser clients. And then each night he would squeeze his way through the stage doors of every cheap vaudeville and burlesque house in the Square, scoping for the next big thing. You asked anyone then, the next big thing for Pinnacio was going to be the Bowery. You want cream in that, palsy?”
Blatta didn’t answer but continued to stare at the cup filled with hot coffee. As Mite and Celia looked on, he stuck his finger into the cup, pulled it out, stared at it as it reddened from the heat.
Mite took hold of his own cup by the handle, pinkie sticking out absurdly, and lifted it to take a sip. Blatta, seeing this, did exactly the same. It is as if he is learning, thought Celia, as if he is a child learning his way in the world, latching onto the worst possible teacher in Mite.
“So one night, Pinnacio’s at the Roxy and he sees a girl what looks no older than twelve doing a semistrip, and the geezers in the house theys just loving her show. She’s got something, sweet little Suzy does, something a twelve-year-old shouldn’t have, which makes sense ’cause this girl she’s twenty-two and working a second shift on her back after the theater darks. But on stage she’s playing the little-girl thing for all it’s worth and the yards in the joint are springing to life like a crop of winter wheat, you get the picture? So Pinnacio, with this Suzy, he sees his ticket.”
Jerry Blatta lifted half of the ham and cheese sandwich off the plate and squeezed the half in his fist until the cheese and mustard oozed out. He stuck the mess into his mouth, jamming
it all in until his lips could close one upon the other. Celia stared at him, dumbfounded. Blatta stared back with defiant humor, even as he reached for the other half.
“Well Pinnacio,” continued Mite, “just the day before, in a
Variety
he hawked from a can, spied something about an opening for a juvenile in some second-rate C movie they was filming in Brooklyn. He strolls right up to little Suzy what wasn’t so little and tells her he can get her an audition if she signs a management contract with him. She shrugs her shoulders and signs, figuring this skinny mope didn’t have the pull to get the audition in the first place. But the thing was, this audition it was open, he didn’t need no pull, and she didn’t need no him, but there it was. And in that audition room she gives it the full twelve-year-old-with-a-glimmer-in-the-eye treatment and the director is a perv through and through and so hot to lay his mitts on a twelve-year-old he practically throws hisself at her feet. Now she’s in Hollywood, a real star, and Pinnacio, he’s riding around with a tan and a Cadillac, living flush in the pineapple pie. All because he found his ticket.”
“Is that true, Mite, or just another one of your stories?”
“True, true, you could look it up. Her name is Susan Harrison or Susan Haywood or Susan something, they changed it for her, but it’s true, I’ll swear to it. And Celia, sweetheart. I have the damnedest feeling that Jerry here, he’s my sweet little Suzy. Ain’t you just that, palsy?”
Blatta ignored the question, maintaining his stare at Celia as he moved to the pudding. Reaching his hand into the tapered glass, he pulled out a glob of the yellow and white
goop, slurped it into his mouth, and then proceeded to lick his hand clean with his long pink tongue. The sight of him licking off the tapioca even as he continued to stare at her affected Celia in the most peculiar way. The raw hunger, the unmasked appetite, the disdain of elementary manners, the size and color of the organ, all of it she found both revolting and thrilling. Watching him lick the gaps between his fingers with his tongue was like having a cat reposition itself over and over on her lap.
“What do you know about him?” said Celia softly.
“Nothing,” said Mite.
“Where is he from? Where does he live?”
“No idea.”
“So why do you think he can help you?”
“Oh he can, believe you me.”
“And why do you think he will?”
“’Cause, Celia, I can help him too. See, he’s something special, but he needs guidance, he needs management, he needs me. With him and me together, there’s no telling where it will end.”
“Just like Pinnacio.”
“You got it.”
“Did you know him personally, this Pinnacio?”
“Nah, not really, but I heard, I heard.”
“So the whole story is apocryphal.”
“A pocketful of what?”
“Posies, Mite. And what about Big Johnny?”
“What about him?”
“Mite, don’t play the fool.”
“Let me tell you a secret, Celia.” He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “I gots the money.”
“You have the money?”
“Like I said.”
“How?”
“Sweet little Suzy here.”
“You have enough?”
“More than enough. I could pay the dirty creep off and still have enough left over to take you and me to ‘21.’ But it’s no sure thing paying that creep off is the answer. See, Celia, I gots Jerry on my side now.”
Just then Jerry Blatta reached into his jacket and pulled out a fistful of bills. He held his hand out and offered them to her. His face, his smile, had the same expression as when he flicked the lighter.
“Looking for a date?” he said. “Who ain’t? It’ll cost you five. You got it, sweet pea. Did you hear? No. Yes. Want to have some fun, honey? You look like you could use it.”
Celia was taken immediately aback by the offer of money and the strange words. No hidden meanings here, despite the garbled sentences. He was offering to buy her, like one would buy Sylvie. It had never happened before, no one had ever confused her with a whore, and for a moment her emotions teetered.
Suddenly, involuntarily, she laughed.
She laughed and the strange man in brown laughed and Mite, whose jaw had dropped in disbelief and had stared at her with a worried gaze, he laughed too. And as they laughed
and the money in Jerry Blatta’s hand trembled and the offer hung in the air like a helium-filled balloon, something stirred in Celia, some long-buried dream.
Not to be a whore, no, not that, never that, but at least to be desired in that way. Isn’t that part of it, the dream of love, not just a commingling of purposes, or an acquiescence to another’s earnestly held political beliefs, but a commingling of desires too? That was the dream that had died in her, killed off by the virus that had lodged in her spine and the thick sole and brace she now wore on her left foot and the limp that scattered desire onto the floor like so many jacks with each pathetic step. Her mother had been wrong, the boys had not come, the dream had fallen into a deep hibernation, and with the dream went her courage to touch anything beyond the muffled voices of other lives seeping from a distant room. But now it stirred again, the dream, roused by the outstretched bills, the carnivora musk, the long pink tongue, the cat turning in her lap, the strange brutal reality of this man, all of it, and the muffled song of her own pale life seemed so ridiculously wan in its presence that she couldn’t help but laugh.
The man in brown, this Jerry Blatta, he turned to Mite and let out a strange hissing sound, almost like a warning. There was a moment when he appeared to begin to rise from his seat.
She fought to regain control, let the laughter fade, tried to compose herself, not sure what was going on in Blatta’s strange psyche, whether he took the laughter as an insult when that was not her intention, not her intention at all.
And then she imagined the expression on Gregory’s face, the shock, when she would tell him that he absolutely had to move out, and she fell again into a hysterical fit that had them all looking, the politicians and the college boys, Sylvie, Tab, the comics and trombonists at the center table, all of them, and she didn’t care, she didn’t care, she did not care.
Kockroach feels a surge
of excitement roll through him as the female makes her strange high-pitched bray, the same roll of excitement he had felt as a cockroach when the scent of a willing female’s pheromones started his antennae to twitching. It must be part of the human mating ritual, that sound she makes, and so he echoes it as closely as he can, all the while holding out to her the green pieces of paper he means for a tribute. He is ready to mate, certain it is going to happen, when, to his shock, he hears the same mating bray from the little human beside him.
He turns to stare and lets out a warning hiss, but the little man continues to make the seductive sound. Normally this would be a time to fight, to rise up on stiff legs and battle for the attentions of the female, and he is about to do just that, to rise and attack with no mercy and destroy utterly the little man beside him, when something stops him.
The woman’s braying subsides and she is looking at him, not at the little man named Mite. And Mite is offering up no tribute of his own, just his braying. And suddenly somehow Kockroach realizes that with this female Mite is not a threat, will never be a threat, as if he were of an entirely different spe
cies. Kockroach turns back to the woman, makes the braying sound again, and the female joins in.
Kockroach is certain, absolutely, beyond any doubt, that now, finally, he is going to mate.
The female rises from the table and Kockroach rises with her. Will they do it here, right on the table, atop the scattered plates, like two cockroaches, or will they go instead to her lair? Humans, Kockroach has noticed, don’t mate in the open, unless they mate in some strange way he has not heretofore recognized. Maybe that claw-to-claw thing he has seen so often in the street.
The female reaches out her claw to him. He reaches out his claw in the same way and she grabs hold. A jolt of power tingles through his arm and down into the worm between his legs.
“It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Blatta.”
“Enough with the blatta-blatta-blatta.”
She makes the braying sound again and lets go of his claw. Is that it, is that all there is to it for humans? If so, what a sad pathetic species.
“I’ll see you around, Mite,” says the female. “Be careful, please.”
“It’s them what oughts to be careful now,” says Mite.
She turns her attention again to Kockroach. “Take care of my friend Mite, won’t you?”
“You got it, sweet pea,” says Kockroach, aware through his assimilation of the bizarre but handy human language that she
is asking him to protect the little man and that he has agreed.
But why does she have any concern for Mite if she and Mite are not to mate? And why did he agree to her request, as if instinctively? Is that what human males do as part of the mating ritual, promise anything? What kind of species can survive doing that? It is all a puzzle, and the puzzle grows as the female turns and walks away, walks away without him, her hip rising awkwardly with each step, walking away as if one leg had been twisted by some fearsome predator.
He stares at the female walking away, at the strange uneven gait, at the rods of metal attached to her leg, at the strange rocking motion of her tail. He feels the tingling in the worm again and begins to follow, until Mite grabs hold of Kockroach’s arm.
“Is that what you want, palsy, you want a little barbecue?” says Mite.
“Girls, girls, girls.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Nothing could be easier. Half the girls in the Square this time of night have gone commercial, one way or another. Put the spinach back in your pocket and I’ll get you one, no problem, anyone you want, just not her, all right? You got that, Jerry? Not her. She’s a nice girl, Celia is. But I’ll gets you someone else. Look over there. That’s Sylvie, what with the tits like atom bombs. A bit mismatched too. We calls them Fat Man and Little Boy, we do, but variety, it’s the spice of life, ain’t it? What do you think of her? Hubba hubba hubba?”
“Hubba hubba hubba?” says Kockroach as he continues to watch the strange swaying of the first female’s tail as she leaves through the spinning glass door.
Mite waves his claw in front of Kockroach’s face. “Yo, Jerry, you listening? Anyone but her, all right? Not her. Celia ain’t interested in that stuff. She’s a cripple, for Christ’s sake. No, the Norma Snockers what I was talking of, Sylvie, she’s over there.”
Kockroach slowly swivels his head in the direction of Mite’s pointing digit until his gaze lights on a female sitting alone at a table. Her hair is yellow, her long legs are crossed, she has huge mounds deforming the chest of her thorax, mounds which Kockroach finds strangely appealing.
“Hubba hubba hubba?” says Kockroach.
“Attaboy. Wait here, I’ll set it up.”
Kockroach watches as Mite walks over to the female with the yellow hair. Kockroach turns for a moment to look at the door where he had last seen the first female, the one known as Celia, but she is gone. He turns back quickly enough to see Mite point at him. The second female, the one known as Sylvie, twists her face in a strange contortion and then shakes her head back and forth. Mite offers her a tribute, waving the green pieces of paper, and then clasps his claws together in a symbol of submission, and still she shakes her head back and forth.
Mite makes his way slowly back to Kockroach. With his eyes narrowed, he looks at Kockroach’s face and then lets his gaze drop all along his body.
“Hubba hubba hubba?” says Kockroach.
“Sure, palsy. Sure. But first, maybe, let’s wait out the night and then we’ll sees if we can clean you up a bit.”
It is the substance that slinks out of holes in the street, that rises in slippery wisps and foul exhalations, it is colorless and hot and looks like smoke but it is wet to the touch and it now surrounds Kockroach on all sides with its heat and its pressure and the slime it leaves on his strange pale skin and his dark glasses.
At first, sitting next to Mite with only the glasses on and the single white cloth over his lap, Kockroach’s nerves were shouting and he felt more defenseless than he had ever felt before, even more than when he was a white nymph and the mouse sprinted into their midst. There are other humans in the room with the hot wet smoke, sitting on the benches, water appearing on their soft round bodies as if by magic, and he was certain, naked before these other humans, he would be discovered, finally, for what he was and squashed. But the pale hot stuff, schvitz Mite called it, surrounded him and turned the walls dim and his never-ending urge to be protected on all sides eased and he now feels strangely comforted.
It is no wonder that he feels at home in the steam bath. Cockroaches developed in the steamy marshes of the tropical forests in the early millennia of earth’s natural history, and while the heat tends to sap the energy of humans, Kockroach finds it positively invigorating.
“Schvitz,” says Kockroach.
“It’s a machiah, ain’t it, bubelah,” says an old human in the corner.
“Bubelah,” says Kockroach,
“Hey, you Jewish?” says Mite.
“Right off back of truck,” says Kockroach, with the accent of the man at the table where he found his dark glasses.
Mite laughs and shakes his head.
Through the smear of fog on his glasses, Kockroach examines the other humans in the schvitz. They all have glistening skin and big pink bellies and the same worm between their legs as does he, although his is bigger. What does that mean? he wonders. Is it good or bad? He is about to ask Mite when Mite speaks to him instead, speaking strangely, using only half his mouth to pronounce the words.
“Yo, Jerry. I might got an opportunity for you if you’re interested. Something with huge possibilities what could put us both in the money.”
“Opportunity?” says Kockroach.
“A little business.”
“Beeswax?”
“Yeah, that’s it, beeswax. Something rich. I thought up a plan, see. All you gots to do is follow my lead and let it happen. You interested?”
“Bubelah.”
“Good. Great. This is gonna turn out, you’ll see. All right, let’s hit the shower. I suppose that’s a word you ain’t heard much lately, is it? Shower.”
“Shower,” says Kockroach.
“Attaboy.”
A torrent of water falls all about him. Kockroach squeals as he runs about the long gray room with metal tubes sticking out from above, trying to avoid the spray because that is what cockroaches do. They like the water, like to crawl through it, fornicate in it, slurp it with their food, but they fear it when it comes from above, and at the first dangerous drops they scurry to a place of safety.
“What, too cold?” says Mite. He twists a knob. “Try this.”
Kockroach sees Mite standing under one of the waterspouts, getting drenched, seeming to welcome the streaming fluid, lifting his face up to it as if it were a gift. Kockroach steps tentatively beneath the water and lets it pound on his belly, his shoulders, over his dark glasses, onto his head. He wonders why he had been afraid of it all those many molts.
Mite rubs a shiny white stone all over his body, creating a weird white froth. Other humans do the same thing. Kockroach takes the same white stone. It is slippery, easily bruised like no stone he has ever touched before. He licks it and spits out the bitter taste. He rubs it all over his own body as the other humans do, and the froth covers him head to toe until the water washes it off.
“The thing,” says Mite, again using only half his mouth to speak, “is to let me do all the talking. I know these guys, what they’re looking for. But there’s going to be a time when you got to show your stuff. You’ll know it when you see it, and then, baby, slam bam you do your little act.”
“Your little act.”
“Yeah, the thing what you did with Roscoe.”
“Take care of my friend Mite, won’t you?”
“Attaboy. We’re a team, ain’t we, Jerry? A team.”
“You got it, sweet pea.”
“Sweet pea. I love that sweet pea thing. You kill me, you know that, Jerry? You kill the hell out of me.”
Mite brays and rubs the white stone over his hair and Kockroach does the same and as the water rinses off the froth he feels different than he ever felt before, looser, lighter, fresher.
One thing he has learned for sure. Never again will he lick himself clean.
“My friend Mite,” says the tall thin human with the dark skin in a room filled with cats. “Always a pleasure. What can I do for you this morning?”
“I need a suit, Clive, with all the trimmings. Shirt, hat, skivvies, everything.”
“Lovely. This suit, you’re looking discount or executive?”
“Designer, baby.”
“Designer? You’re buying designer? Have you found God, little brother?”
“Something better. But I need a class look for it to go over.”
“Do tell. But I’m sorry, darling. I don’t think I have designer in your size.”
“It ain’t for me, Clive, I’m all set.” Mite jerks his thumb at Kockroach. “It’s for my pal Jerry here.”
The tall man puts a hand on his cheek, turns to Kockroach, gives him a long look. “Oh my. Oh yes. Lucky you, we just received a load, headed for Des Moines, that never found its way over the bridge. Poor Des Moines. And they could use it so. Let us see.”
The tall thin man slips a yellow cord out of his pocket and dances around Kockroach as he stretches the cord along Kockroach’s arms, his legs, around different parts of his thorax.
“Mr. Average, isn’t he?” says the man, nodding with a smile. “Which is good, because that’s what they grow in Des Moines. Forty-two jacket, best as I can tell. Seventeen-inch neck with thirty-five-inch sleeves. Waist thirty-four. I have some nice blues for you, or a lovely gray.”
“What color you want, Jerry?” says Mite.
“Color?” says Kockroach.
“That’s right, palsy. It’s your choice.”
Kockroach steps forward and reaches toward the tall thin man. His skin fascinates. It is the color of his old chitin. He misses his chitin, the strength and stiffness, the color. Running around with this white skin, he feels lost and frail, like the weakest of nymphs. He wishes his skin were like this man’s, dark and rich and full of protection. He reaches up and touches the man’s cheek. “Color,” he says.
“Oooh,” purrs the tall thin man. “Just so happens I have a forty-two in brown pinstripes, double-breasted. You want to see it?”
“Don’t want to see it,” says Mite. “I just want to buy it.”
“No checks, Mite.”
“No checks.”
“My, you did find something better, didn’t you?”
“How long to get it altered?”
“If you have time, I’ll do it right now.”
“Clive, my man, you are magic.”
“Yes, yes I am.”
Kockroach is lying back in the chair, a thick white cloth tight around his neck, surrounded by humans, all grooming him. One man in a red vest, having already smeared Kockroach’s face with hot white foam, is now scraping his cheeks and chin with a brutal-looking edge of metal. One man is whipping a cloth back and forth across the shiny brown things on the ends of his legs. One female is cutting and scraping and rubbing the hard tips of his claws. Being so close to so many humans is frightening and yet comforting too. Kockroach feels as if the proper order of things has been established, as if these humans have indeed seen him for exactly what he is and, in lieu of squashing him, have exalted him to his rightful place.
But Kockroach knows it is not his inner self that has caused all this to happen. It is the little pieces of green paper Mite has been giving to all he meets: the human behind the counter at the schvitz, the human with the dark skin who gave him the new brown cloths and hat, the human with the brutal edge of metal who cut and greased his hair and now is scraping his cheeks. He is beginning to understand the power of the little green pieces of paper. He can use them to maintain the proper
order of things. He can use them to get the humans to serve his needs. He wonders how many there are and how he can get hold of them all.
“You play chess, Jerry?” says Mite, sitting in a chair set against the wall across from Kockroach.