Searches & Seizures (12 page)

I see myself caromed off the mirrors, fractured in space like a break shot in pool. I see the checkered reflection of my checkered jacket. It is expensive, even new, but it is gross. I have no taste, only hunger. I have never been fashionable, and it’s astonishing to me that so much has happened in the world. The changes I perceive leave me breathless. I am more astonished by what remains to happen. I have erratic, sudden premonitions of new packaging techniques—breakfast cereal in spray cans, insulated boxes of frozen beer, egg yolk in squeezable tubes. Avila’s barber sheet could be a shroud. I can’t stand looking at myself, so I pop into an empty chair at Avila’s side.

A barber sets his newspaper aside. He approaches me. “Haircut?”

“Leave me be,” I say too loudly. “Can we talk here?” I ask Avila.

“Of course we can,” he tells me mildly.

“ ‘Of course we can.’ Counselor, counselor, what a style you have! Yes, I like it. Niggerizing the neighborhood, spilling confidence like soup.” Going on the offensive shakes off a little of my passivity. “What a professional ethic you got there! ‘Can we talk?’ ‘Of course. What, is it a public library that we should lower our voices?’ Right. Smell that fart?
I
claim that. That came out of Alexander’s ragtime asshole, Main’s brown bellows. Why should I deny the obvious? No two men’s farts smell alike in the entire universe. Like snowflakes and fingerprints. Learned counsel’s point is well taken. We can talk here.”

“What are you on about?”

“Yes, well, we never did business till now, or you’d know my thoroughness, my eye for detail, my fastidious methods. I take more pains than aspirin. Tomorrow is April first, lest we forget.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Withers is to appear in court.” I raise my voice so that everyone in the shop can hear. “
That’s Withers, the banker. Eugene Withers who could not make good on his alimony payments of twenty-five hundred dollars a month and who was thirty thousand dollars in arrears when our paths crossed in the courts. Eugene Withers, the president of Ohio First Federal Savings Bank, lest we forget. Incidentally, if any of you barbers, manicurists or shoeshine guys do business with him I would suggest a small run on his bank. Pass it on. Withers.
”

“What’s the matter with you?” Avila says. “Where do you think you are?”

“He’s not in town.”

“Well, he’s probably upstate on business. Why don’t you wait for me in my office?”

“You know this for fact that he’s upstate on business? I’m not his ex-wife. I have no fond memories of President Withers in bed to tide me over while the arrears pile up. I call and call his bank. ‘Not here,’ they say, ‘we’ll take a message.’ Where upstate is he? I’ll put in a little person-to-person.”

“Charleen, call the guard, please,” Avila tells his barber. “I want this man out of here.”

“The guard? Call the guard? Charleen, dear, guards are my bread and butter. From baby sitters to electrocutioners, they’re all in my pocket, Charleen. Andy Frain stood up at my wedding. Call, call him, we’re old friends. Now, lawyer, the man’s trial is tomorrow. I want to be there to meet his train, his boat, his private plane. If he doesn’t show, I’ll look him up. See my gun? You want me to make him an April Fool?”

“You’d better leave, I think.”

“You give me a number where I can reach him.”

“I’ll see to it that your license is revoked.”

“
My
license? How are you going to do that? How are you going to revoke carte blanche? You think the system’s an Indian giver? Listen, LL.D., you could be disbarred easier. Poor Withers. Twenty-five hundred a month. Some lawyer. Twenty-five hundred a month for a broad who went down on every depositor in Ohio First Federal Savings. She gave it away to every guy who opened an account.
In all the branches.
Or are you talking about my license for the gun? I got papers on it like a naturalized citizen or the warrantee on your toaster. I got instruments for it like General Eisenhower’s honorable discharge.”

The man stares at me; he’s never seen such a performance in all his fancy practice. But suddenly I have run out of steam. I finish lamely. “Make sure he’s around. See to Withers.”

In the lobby I wait for each of the elevators to appear. I promise myself that should the old man be in one of them I will buy his trick, but the man is gone.

Back on the street. He’s tired. He’s made very little money for a Monday. It’s late, but not late enough to call the desk sergeants. When
is
the best time to call? Midnight when they’ve closed the books?
Too
late. The others will have skimmed the cream. The only sure thing would be to buy all the desk sergeants, but that would be prohibitive. Best to make it almost a social call, work it that way. Too much money shouldn’t change hands. If bondsmen had a trade journal I’d write a paper on it. This afternoon in Covington they voted to cooperate. Threats were made in my absence. My little leverage is leaking.

The street has changed. Not so much money here, not as much taste, but even more style. The shops burst with an egoism of the present tense, the bright letters of the bright wood signs molded in a sausage calligraphy like those quick, clever strokes that leg and backbone animals in balloon-blowing acts. Or black, no capitals, a svelte, spare geometry of case. He remembers these shops, could tell you stories, recalls like a perfect witness their former, failed incarnations. The woman’s shoe store, Bootique, was once Kefauver’s campaign headquarters, then a bookie joint with empty cigar boxes and tire irons half-heartedly showing form’s flag in a casual, lip-service hypocrisy in the front window. After that nothing at all for a time—though once, initially, Tyson’s Liquors, as he still thinks of it, really. Most of the shops won’t last the year. But never till now, the witness thinks, so uniform, locked into style’s faddish contagion, a terminal domino theory. What discrepancies he perceives between will and doom, these tenants’ signs like life’s campaign buttons. He looks for reasons but sees only the irrational, a self-conscious hedonism. The signs, these shops, this business and that enterprise, this landscape, seasonal as the pictures on one of his calendars, are all jokes. The toy shop, with its expensive Creative Playthings and Chinese boxes and big stuffed animals and folk dolls and folk tops and folk sticks and folk hoops and folk balls and miniature green and black boilers of real steam engines for curator kids who never existed, is called—in rainbow letters, yes, it
is
the rainbow sequence: yellow catching green, green blue and so on, on the glass—“Kinder Garden.” And the butcher shop, sawdust on the floor like cereal and the butchers in boaters, and skinned, unrefrigerated rabbits, plucked chickens and carcasses upside down on hooks that could hold coats, is “The Meating House.” A fabric shop: “Knits and Bolts.” An Italian restaurant: “Pizza Resistance.” “Sole Food”: a fish ’n chips. “Diaspora Travel.” A head shop: “Headquarters.” A cinema: “The Last Picture Show.” “Save Face”: a beauty parlor. A health food store: “Mother Nature’s.” “The Basic Premise”: a realtor. A carry-out chicken place: “Marcho Polio.” “Rock ’n Roll”: a lapidary and bakery. A tie shop: “Get Knotted.” A rug store: “Underfoot.” “Captain’s Courageous”: a men’s hat shop. A watch repairman’s: “Time Out.” “Howard Johnson’s.” (How the hell did that get there?) Even a small moving company: “Gutenberg’s Movable Types.”

They spoke of the breakdown of law and order, of crime in the streets, but what a discipline was in these streets, what a knuckling under and catering to the times. It is beyond his capacity to conjure up the future, he cannot even imagine what the safety razors will look like twenty-years from now, or a snow shovel. He passes a drugstore and sees a sign on the window: “Established 1961.” He laughs before he realizes that it is no joke. If it were a question of just this one neighborhood—but it isn’t; it’s spread now even to the shopping centers, even to the ghettos. In his own area—“Alexander Main, Licensed Bailbond Broker”—he has seen wide-windowed tour buses, the sight-seers’ attention close-order-drilled by the tour guide. What can they be looking at? Survivors for a lousy generation and a half? In history already? So soon? He’s not young. He’s seen good times and bad, but never times like these, time itself doing in a season what once it had taken a decade to accomplish. Shall he get paint? Send Crainpool to the window with a brush? Have him paint in…what? “Bail Out?” “I Been Working on the Bailbond?” “A Surety Thing?” It’s as if he lives trapped in the neck of an hourglass. Style, he thinks. As a young man he wanted it, hoped that when he wakened it would be there like French in his mouth. Now he sees it as a symptom of a ruinous disease.

He needs sleep, a nap. He pushes past the strollers and lovers and shoppers—it’s past three, the high school kids are out, the students from the university are—moving in the garishly dressed crowd like someone hurrying down an escalator. He brushes the arm of a young man in an ordinary white shirt with a master sergeant’s chevrons sewn to the sleeve. He dodges a girl in an ammunition belt, kids in flags, yarmulkes, the girls braless, their nipples erect, puckering their T-shirts as if they moved in perpetual excitation, the genitals of the young men askew, crushed packages in their tight jeans, both sexes horny, literally, their sex antlered inside their binding clothes. He sees colors which till now have never been printed on cloth. He sees all the good-looking young who seem some new species in their furred shoes, their boots, bags suspended from the shoulders of the young men, oddly courierizing them. The girls in pants, the ground rounds and roasts of their behinds, the lifting tension of their crotches making it appear as if they are actually suspended in their trousers, like parachutists perhaps, sunk in them up to their hips and the small of their backs. There is something strangely military about this crowd. Perhaps it is the stripy patterns of their clothes, like the tricolors of decorations.

The Phoenician yawns and a young man turns to him. “Hey uncle, I dig your sport coat.”

“What, this?”

“No, it’s nice.”

“You think this is nice? You should see my doorman’s uniform.”

“You got a doorman’s uniform? Wow.”

“Yeah, well my daughter’s getting married Sunday and I’m giving her away.”

“Getting
married?
No shit?”

He talks to him as if asleep. (So accustomed am I to chatter, to giving as good as I get, coming on strongest, dialogue alive on my teeth like plaque. How long has it been since I’ve had a conversation? A long time. Since my wife died.)

He spots a taxi rank—black, right-hand-drive Austins imported from London: “Guv’s Taxi Company, Ltd.”—and goes over to the first cab, gets in and sinks back into the leather seat.

“Cor blimey, Guv, where to?”

He does not want to return to the office, does not want to go home. “Take me,” he says, inspired, “to a swell hotel.”

A doorman opens the cab for him and he steps out, pays the driver, goes through the revolving doors and checks in. He remembers he has no pajamas and asks the room clerk if there’s a men’s store in the hotel.

He tells the salesman he takes a D.

“Any particular style, sir?”

“Crisp. Linen. Crisp.”

He pays for the pajamas and returns to the desk to pick up his key.

“Luggage, sir?”

He holds up the new pajamas. The clerk hesitates. “What do you want? You want me to pay in advance? What’s the damage?” He looks down at the card he has just signed. “Twenty-eight bucks? Here.” He pushes the bills toward the man who at first does not pick them up. “What is it, you think I’m a troublemaker, a suicide? Furthest thing from my mind. Gimme my key. Gimme my key or I’ll get the manager.” The clerk extends the key and a bellboy steps forward. The Phoenician puts his hand in his pocket, takes out a dollar and gives it to the bellboy. “Save you a trip,” he says and, holding his new pajamas, moves off in the direction of the elevators.

He loves a hotel room. This one is large, new. He is on the twenty-third floor. Through the wide clean Thermopane he can see the ball park, the clipped chemical grass, bright, glowing as emerald, green as eyeshade, has a perfect view into the stadium’s open skull, the variously colored stands folded like nervous system along its sides. Cincinnati beneath him like a crescent of jawbone, the buildings dental, gray as neglect, the Ohio juicing the town like saliva. It is a corner room and commands the south and west; he can see Kentucky. He does not draw the drapes, bunched tight, coiled on a recessed track that runs along the ceiling above the windows, pleats on pleats in a loose reserve, a collapsed bellows of fabric. The blue drapes match the blue bedspread which looks as if it has never been used—looks new, as everything in this room does: the deep modern chairs, webbed as baseball gloves and with seats like the pockets in catchers’ mitts, the two-foot-high cherrywood strips set into two beige walls textured as taut canvas, the aluminum grill of the heating and air-conditioning unit flush with the top of the long window seat by the enormous western wall of glass. He admires the desk (of the same smooth cherrywood) that levitates against a wall, its drawers suspended, hanging in air like holsters. He sits in the red low-backed chair and moves his lap into position beneath the desk, opening a drawer, seeing with satisfaction the stack of thick white stationery, the golden logotype of the letterhead, the two ballpoint pens, the yellow Western Union blanks. He clears the menu, textured and greasy as a playing card, from the surface of the desk, removes the tented cards that announce check-out time and give instructions about the operation of the TV, and places them in a drawer beside the treated shoe-polishing cloth and folded paper laundry bag with its tough kite string and green laundry ticket, a framed gum reinforcement hole at the top. He trails his fingers in the pile of brochures, shuffling them like a magician preparing a card trick. He closes the drawers which move back silently along their grooves. On the right the smooth wooden desk—the wood in this room does not feel like wood, it is level as glass—becomes a chest of drawers, then a treaded slab on which to place suitcases. There are five lamps in the room: on the desk, on the chest, beside his bed, on a low white table; a chrome floorlamp with a tall narrow shade. The television swivels on a chrome stem before the southern window. He turns it on, and from his bed the figures on the screen seem to stand in the sky. He reaches over to the control panel—there is an electric clock, a radio, a speaker like a patch of brown canvas, rows of switches, buttons—and clicks it off. He walks into the bathroom, sees plastic jewel cases of soap, towels of different size and thickness like a complicated terry-cloth cutlery or a pantry of flag. He runs his hand along the rail angled like the trajectory of a banister above the tub, and touches the beautiful basin with its queer fittings. Like a dignitary cutting a ribbon, he tears the paper strip that packages the toilet seat. He pees long and hard into the bowl, drilling his urine solidly into the faintly blue water.