Angry Candy Page 10

  When he was able to get to his knees, he felt an excruciating pain in his side and knew at once several ribs had been broken. All he could think of was the great man.

  He crawled across the floor of the rotunda to the base of the slab, and looked up. There, in the shadows . . .

  The great man, in terrible pain, was staring down at him.

  A moan escaped the huge lips.

  What can I do? Kneller thought, desperately.

  And the words were in his head. Nothing. It will come again.

  Kneller looked up. Where the scar tissue had glowed faintly, the chest was ripped open, and the great man's heart lay there in pulsing blood, part of it torn away.

  Now I know who you are, Kneller said. Now I know your name.

  The great man smiled a strange, shy smile. The one great green eye made the expression somehow winsome. Yes, he said, yes, you know who I am.

  Your tears mingled with the earth to create us.

  Yes.

  You gave us fire.

  Yes; and wisdom.

  And you've suffered for it ever since.

  Yes.

  "I have to know," Frank Kneller said, "I have to know if you were what we were before we became what we are now."

  The sound of the great wind was rising again. The destroyer was in the night, on its way back. The chemicals of man could not drive it away from the task it had to perform, could not drive it away for long.

  It comes again, the great man said in Kneller's mind. And I will not come again.

  "Tell me! Were you what we were . . . ?"

  The shadow fell across the rotunda and darkness came down upon them as the great man said, in that final moment, No, I am what you would have become . . .

  And the carrion crow sent by the gods struck him as he said one more thing . . .

  When Frank Kneller regained consciousness, hours later, there on the floor where the scissoring pain of his broken ribs had dropped him, he heard those last words reverberating in his mind. And heard them endlessly all the days of his life.

  No, I am what you would have become . . . if you had been worthy.

  And the silence was deeper that night across the face of the world, from pole to pole, deeper than it had ever been before in the life of the creatures that called themselves human.

  But not as deep as it would soon become.

  IT'S NOT ONLY that Pink's has the best hot dogs in what we have come to accept as the civilized world (and that includes Nathan's, the original stand out at Coney Island, not those fast-shuffle mickey-mouse surrogates they've opened up from time to time all the way from Broadway to the San Fernando Valley, which, in a less enlightened era, I thought was the dispenser of the ne plus ultra of frankfurters), it is also that Michael, who works at Pink's, is one of the best conversationalists on the subject of Dostoevsky in what we have come to accept as the civilized world (and that includes the academic-turned-screenwriter from New York who did a sorta kinda Dostoevskian film about an academic-turned-gambler, back in 1974).

  Which double incentive explains why I was down there at 711 N. La Brea Avenue, almost at the corner of Melrose, at Pink's, founded in 1939 by Paul Pink with a pushcart at that very same location where a heavensent hot dog cost a decent 100, what now sets one back a hefty dollar-and-a-quarter punch under the heart, even if the quality of dog has not diminished one iota, or even a random scintilla . . . quality and Michael Bernstein who knows what there is to know about the Fabulous Fyodor were the double incentives to drag me out at dead midnight.

  Because I had been lying there in my bed, all the way out on the top of the Santa Monica Mountains in the middle of the Mulholland Scenic Corridor, overlooking the twinkling lights of the bedroom communities of the San Fernando Valley which, I have been led to believe, each one represents a broken heart that couldn't make it to Broadway, unable to sleep, tossing and turning, turning and tossing, widdershins and tormented, backing and filling in my lightly starched bedsheets, and of a sudden visions, not of sugar plums, but of dancing hot dogs, fandango'ing frankfurters, waltzing wienies, gavotted through my restless head. Eleven-thirty, for god's sake, and all I could think about was sinking my fangs into a Pink's hot dog and discussing a little Karamazov hostility with this Israeli savant who ladles up chili dogs on the graveyard shift behind the steam table. Go figure it. Facts are definitely facts.

  So at midnight I'm pulling into the parking spaces beside Pink's, right next door to that shoe store that sells funny Italian disco shoes the heels of which fall off if you spin too quickly on the misguided belief that you are the reincarnation of Valentino or merely just the latest Travoltanoid to turn female heads, and I'm slouching up to the counter, and Michael sees me coming even before I'm out of the car and he's got a hot one working, ready to hand me as I lean up against the clean but battered stainless steel counter.

  Just a dog, light on the mustard, hold the relish. No chili, yuchhh the chili; I'm a purist.

  And as the front four sink into that strictly kosher nifty, Michael opens with the following: "It wasn't his fault he was so mean to women. Dostoevsky was a man swayed by passions. Two of these, his lamentable love for Paulina Suslova and his obsession for gambling, overlapped."

  I'm halfway finished with the first frank as Michael is building the second, and I respond, "You see how you are? You, like everyone else, are ready to condemn a genius simply because he was a liar, a cheat, a pathological gambler who borrowed from his friends and never paid them back, a man who deserted his wife and children, an epileptic existentialist who merely wrote at least half a dozen of the greatest works of fiction the world has ever seen. If he brutalized women it was simply another manifestation of his tormented soul and give me another dog, light on the mustard, hold the relish."

  Having now defined the parameters of our evening's discussion, we could settle down to arguing the tiniest, most obscure points; as long as the heartburn didn't start and the hungry hookers and junkies coming in for sustenance didn't distract Michael too much.

  "Ha!" Michael shouted, aiming his tongs at my head. "Ha! and Ha again! You fall into the trap of accepted cliche. You mythologize the Russian soul, several thousand years' retroactive angst. When the simple truth that every man in Dostoevsky's novels treats women monstrously invalidates your position. The canon itself says you are wrong!

  "Name one exception of substance. Not a minor character, a major one; a moving force, an image, an icon . . . name one!"

  I licked my fingers, nodded for my third sally of the night and said, with the offensive smugness of one who has lured his worthy opponent hipdeep into quicksand, "Prince Myshkin."

  Michael was shaken. I could tell, shaken: he slathered too much mustard onto the dog. Shaken, he wiped off the excess with a paper napkin and, shaken, he handed it across to me. "Well . . . yes . . . of course, Myshkin . . ." he said slowly, devastated and groping for intellectual balance. "Yes, of course, he treated women decently . . . but he was an idiot!"

  And the six-foot-two pimp with the five working girls at the far end of the counter started screaming about sleazy kike honkie muthuhfuckuh countermen who let their Zionist hatred of Third World peoples interfere with the speedy performance of their duties. "But. . . the image of the brutalizer of women was the one with which Dostoevsky identified . . ." He started toward the other end of the counter where black fists were pounding on stainless steel.

  "Myshkin was his model," I called after him. "Some men are good for women . . . "

  He held up a chili-stained finger for me to hold that place in the discussion, and rushed away to quell the lynch tenor in the mob.

  As I stood there, I looked across La Brea Avenue. The street was well-lit and I saw this guy standing at the curb right in front of the Federated Stereo outlet, all dressed up around midnight in a vanilla-flavored ice cream suit as pale and wan as the cheek of a paperback heroine, his face ratty and furtive under a spectacular Borsalino hat that cast a shadow across his left eye. Natty and spiffy, b
ut something twitchoid and on the move about him. And as I stood there, waiting for Michael to come back so I could tell him how good some men are for some women, this ashen specter comes off the curb, looking smartly left and right up and down La Brea, watching for cars but also watching for typhoons, sou'westers, siroccos, monsoons, khamsins, Santa Anas and the fall of heavy objects. And as I stood there, he came straight across the avenue and onto the sidewalk there at the front of Pink's, and he slouched to a halt right beside me, and leaned up close with one elbow on the counter just touching my sleeve, and he thumbed back the Borsalino so I could see both of his strange dark little eyes, set high in his feral, attractive, strange dark little face, and this is what he said to me:

  "Okay. This is it. Now listen up.

  "The first girl I ever fell in love with was this raven-tressed little beauty who lived down the block from me when I was in high school in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. She was sixteen, I was seventeen, and her father owned an apple orchard. Big deal, I said; big fucking deal. An apple orchard. We're not talking here the Sudetenland. Nonetheless, he thought he was landed gentry, my old man worked with his hands over in Kutztown. So we ran away. Got all the way to Eunice, New Mexico, walking, hitching, slipping and sliding, sleeping out in the rain, she comes down with pneumonia and dies at a lying-in hospital over at Carlsbad.

  "I'm shook. I'm ruined. What I'm sayin' here, I was distraught.

  "Next thing I know I'm signed up with the Merch Marine, shipped out to Kowloon. Twenty minutes in town on shore leave I fall across this little transistor girl named Orange Blossom. I don't ask questions. Maybe her name was Sun Yung Sing, how'm I to know? She likes me, I like her, we go off hand in hand to make a little rice music, if you catch my drift. Sweet, this was sweet, two young kids, okay so it's miscegenation, a little intermingling of the Occidental with the Oriental, so what? It was purely sweet, and we're talking here about cleaning up some bad leftover feelings. I treat her good, she has respect for an innocent young man, everything's going only terrific until we're walking up Three Jade Lacquer Box Road looking for this swell little dimsum joint that's been recommended to us, when some nut case off a harbor junk that caught fire and killed his wife and three kids comes running down the street brandishing a kukri, this large knife used for hunting and combat purposes by the Nepalese Gurkhas, and he sticks it right through this sweet little kid possibly named Orange Blossom, and the next thing I know she's lying in a pool of it, right at my feet as this maniac goes screaming up Three Jade Lacquer Box Road.

  "Well, let me tell you. I'm devastated. Freaked out of my mind. I'm down on my knees wailin' and cryin', what else was there to do?

  "So I get myself shipped back home to recuperate, try to blow it all away, try to forget my sorrow, they put me up in a VA hospital even though I'm not a vet, they figure, you know, the Merch Marine's as good as the service. Well, I'm not in the hospital three days when I meet this terrific candy striper name of Henrietta. Blonde hair, blue eyes, petite little figure, a warm and winning personality.

  "She takes a real fancy to me, sees I'm in need of extensive chicken soup therapy, slips in late at night when the ward's quiet and gets under the covers with me. We fall desperately in love, I'm on the mend, we go out to lightweight pizza dinners and G-rated movies. Move in with me, she says, when my time is up at the hospital. Move in with me and we'll whistle a jaunty tune forevermore. Okay, says I, okay you got it. So I move in all my worldly possessions, I'm not there three weeks when she slips boarding a number 10 uptown bus, the doors close on her left foot and she's dragged half a city block before the driver realizes the thumping sound is her head hitting the street.

  "So I'm left with the lease on a four-room apartment in San Francisco, you might think that's a neat thing to have, what with the housing shortage, but I'm telling you friend, without love even the Taj Mahal is a cold water flat. So I can't take it, I'm whipped, really downtrodden, sorrowful and in misery.

  "I know I shouldn't, but I get involved with this older woman on the rebound. She's sixty-one, I'm twenty, and all she can do is do for me. All right, I admit it, this wasn't such straight thinking, but I'm crippled, you know what I mean? I'm a fledgling bird with a crippled wing. I need some taking care of, some bringing out of myself. She's good medicine, maybe a little on the wrinkled side but who the hell says a sixty-one-year-old woman ain't entitled to a little affection, too?

  "Everything's going great, strictly great; I move in with her on Nob Hill, we go for long walks, take in Bizet operas, Hungarian goulash in Ghirardelli Square, open and frank discussions about clitoral stimulation and the Panama Canal. All good, all fine, until one night we go a little too deeply into the Kama Sutra and she has this overwhelming uplifted celestial experience which culminates in massive cardiac infarction, so I'm adrift again, all alone on the tides of life, trying to find a soul mate with whom I can traverse the desert of loneliness.

  "Then in rapid succession I meet Rosalinda, who gets polio and refuses to see me because she's going to be an invalid the rest of her life; Norma, whose father kills her because she's black and I'm white and he's disappointed she'd rather be just a housewife for some white guy than the world's first black female heart transplant specialist; Charmaine, who was very high on me till she got hit by a cinder-block dropped from a scaffold on a construction job where she was architect in training, working during her summer college session toward a degree in building stuff; Olive, who was a stewardess who got along fine with me even though our political orientation was very different, until her dinner flight to Tucson came in a little too low and they sent me what was left of her in a very nice imitation Sung dynasty vase from the Federal Aeronautics Administration; and then Fernanda and Erwina and Corinne, all of whom wound up in destructive relationships with married men; and finally I meet Theresa, we'll call her Terry, she preferred Terry, I meet her at the track, and we're both on the same horse, a nice little two-year-old name of Leo Rising, and we get to the window at the same time and I ask her what's her sign, because I overhear what horse she's betting, and she says Virgo, and I say I'm a Virgo, and I ask her what's her rising sign and she says, of course Leo, and I say so's mine, and the next thing I know we're dating heavily, and she's gifted me with a sterling silver ID bracelet with my name on the front and WITH LOVE FROM TERRY on the reverse, and I've gifted her with a swell couple strands genuine natural simulated pearls, and we name the date, and we post the bands whatever that means, and I meet her family and she can't meet mine because I haven't seen mine in about twenty years, and everything is going just swell when she's out in Beverly Hills going to select her silver pattern, something simple but eloquent in Gorham, and they left a manhole cover off a sewer thing, and she slips and falls in and breaks her back in eleven places, her neck, and both arms.

  "Sweet kid never comes out of the coma, they keep her on the machine nine months, one night her father slips in there on all fours and chews off the plug on the electrical connection, she goes to a much-needed peace.

  "So that's it. That's the long and the short of it. Here I am, deeply distressed, not at all settled in my mind, at sixes and sevens, dulled and quite a bit diminished, gloomy, apathetic, awash in tribulation and misery, confused and once more barefoot on the road of life.

  "Now what do you think of that?"

  And he looks at me.

  I look back at him.

  "Hmmmpf," he snorts. "Try and find a little human compassion."

  And he walks off, crosses La Brea at the corner, turns left onto Melrose, and disappears.

  I'm still standing there, staring at where he'd been, when Michael comes over, having served the pimp and his staff. It had been three minutes; three minutes tops.

  "What was that all about?" he asks.

  I think I focused on him.

  "On the other hand," I say, "there are some guys who are strictly no god damned good for a woman."

  Michael nods with satisfaction and hands me a frankfurter. Light on the mustar
d, pleasantly devoid of relish.

  "Left hand," the thin man said tonelessly. "Wrist up."

  William Bailey peeled back his cuff; the thin man put something cold against it, nodded toward the nearest door.

  "Through there, first slab on the right," he said, and turned away.

  "Just a minute," Bailey started. "I wanted—"

  "Let's get going, buddy," the thin man said. "That stuff is fast."

  Bailey felt something stab up under his heart. "You mean—you've already . . . that's all there is to it?"

  "That's what you came for, right? Slab one, friend. Let's go."

  "But—I haven't been here two minutes—"

  "Whatta you expect—organ music? Look, pal," the thin man shot a glance at the wall clock, "I'm on my break, know what I mean?"

  "I thought I'd at least have time for . . . for. . ."

  "Have a heart, chum. You make it under your own power, I don't have to haul you, see?" The thin man was pushing open the door, urging Bailey through into an odor of chemicals and unlive flesh. In a narrow, curtained alcove, he indicated a padded cot.

  "On your back, arms and legs straight out."

  Bailey assumed the position, tensed as the thin man began fitting straps over his ankles.