Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation Read online

  Norman Eney, leader of the group in which Tómas played bass, stared at the little pusher. His eyes were giveaways: he was just coming down off a high. Yet he had overcome his depression, his withdrawal (light now, but soon to get worse), to aid…who? Porky? Or Tómas?

  “That’s my business, Eney. Do you want to buy?” Norman Eney shook his head slowly. He stood away from Porky, not moving, watching him out of cool, grey eyes that said nothing. He was a tall crew-cut man, the natural conception of a trombone player.

  Finally, he murmured, “He’s not one of the good ones, Porky. You shouldn’t deal with him: he can’t defend himself the way we can.”

  They stared across a knowing abyss at one another. Buyer and seller, both knowing how the system worked. Both knowing Porky was a dealer, but not a decider.

  “Everybody’s got the right to go to hell in his own way, Eney,” the pusher said. “Nobody ruins anybody else. They only open doors. No one forces them through: that’s each man’s decision, whether to walk through the door or not.”

  “You open doors for too many people, Porky.”

  The pusher shrugged. He was a businessman. The ethics of the thing didn’t enter. He turned and left the alley. Tómas stirred feebly as Norman Eney lifted him under the shoulders, carried him back into Denny’s.

  The rat continued feeding. There was hunger, and a way to assuage that hunger. Traffic moved. So did the night.

  They came for Porky in his apartment.

  The pusher’s apartment was uptown, and insulated from the world in which he conducted his business affairs by sight and sound and frame of mind. With the door closed New York was a mythical kingdom, far away. A Babylon not to be confused with realities, as this apartment was a reality. With the door closed, and the draperies pulled, with the air conditioning making an atmosphere all his own, and the stereo handling its Scarlatti, its Bach, its Orff—he was where he wanted to be. In a world not of that other world, in a world he made for himself, with no taints or remembrances from beyond. The sanctity of Porky’s world was a matter of custom-fitted bookshelves, well-stocked larders, and full turntables.

  The sanctity was shattered by the ringing of the doorbell. Four-thirty A.M. The jazz joints were closed, the cops in the subways slipped their pennies into the candy machines and received their coated peanuts for the long beat, up and down the platform, looking for mashers, smokers. The cabbies lounged against steering wheels reading the finals. Somewhere the Pulmotor squad raced, siren-screaming, through the night streets. Gutter-cleaning machines with massive brushes churning marched up the cross streets. It was too late for visitors, here in the private universe of Porky’s.

  He opened the peephole and stared out.

  Norman Eney stood there, sweat-white pearls of hope and need and want on his face. He had come to the Man for his junk. Porky was annoyed; this was the first time—though his address was no great secret—one of his customers had come here to make a connection. He was annoyed—

  But the loss of the expected revenue from Tómas had made him fall behind in receipts this week, so he opened.

  Norman Eney was not alone.

  Out of sight on either side of the apartment door, below the peephole level, they hung at ready. When the door swung inward, they leaped. There were five and Eney. They slammed the door behind themselves, and Porky was afraid, quickly.

  But they made no move to hurt him. He knew them: all were junkies, all were customers. What was happening? Who…?

  “Get your soul together, Porky,” one of them said. He was a thin-lipped pianist, hooked through the bag and out the other end with a need and a monkey so big it played King Kong to an SRO audience. He knew them all. They were all jazzmen. Some the good, others the screamhorn, but all played that sound. He knew them, knew they could not afford to hurt him. There were other Men on the turf, but none so steady, none so honest, none so businesslike as Porky. He knew they would not hurt him.

  “I don’t keep my cache here, boys,” he assured them. “I’m not taking a fall for holding. So if it’s need you got, you’ll have to wait till business hours tomorrow.” He tried to usher up a smile, but it wouldn’t leave where it cowered, down there inside him.

  “Let’s do that thing, man,” said Orville Grande, who played piano at the Concourse Inn. “You need a hat?” It was rhetorical: mid-August, hot, Porky was a nonhatter. They moved him (the center of that group) out the door, closing it softly behind, and down the back stairs to a car. Ralph Shetland (trumpet, The Jazz Lab) drove, and they took Porky back downtown, to the street.

  Denny’s was a dark waiting place. Chairs lay up on the tables like so many dead animals, feet rigor mortis in the air. The still-moist hush of dead smoke, weak booze, loud voices, bad jazz. It was still there, a million smells and sounds and scrabbling touches imbedded in the whatcolor? walls. Porky was apprehensive, not frightened, merely apprehensive:

  (I’m not a crook. I’m a businessman. I only take care of a need. If they didn’t want it, I wouldn’t push it. Take away the bottom of the pyramid of hungers and the top collapses. I’m a link, not a totem. There’s no need for violence here…)

  (Can you hear me?)

  But he was silent, and they were silent. Even when they pulled the slat-back chair off the bandstand and tied him to it with their belts and silk rep ties. Even then they were nothing but silent. So cool.

  It was not important before, but it is now. This is what Porky seemed to be, looking from the outside. He was short, perhaps five six and, except for the roll of baby fat about his middle, not particularly porcine. His face however, was that peculiar combination of stubble and sallowness that melded with pudge and pinpoint eye, immediately conjuring the impression of a hog. Hence, Porky. His hair was short, thinned across the temples and forehead, and the nose pugged back revealing two hair-overgrown nostrils. Despite this, he was not an unpleasant-looking man. He was clean, almost to a fault, and carried himself very straight. In other circumstances in some other walk of life, he might easily have been thought of as a credit and a caller. It was not important what Porky seemed to be, before, but it was now. The change was in the offing.

  Norman Eney was the first to reach the bandstand. The others followed him, and from the darkness came three more. Nine jazzmen. All in a row. See how they blow. Go!

  Porky watched, and tried to devise a rationale. There was a theme here, a statement, a meaning, they were trying to do, say, convince, something. What it was…well, perhaps there would be an explanation. Porky was phlegmatic, and his worldview contained the unquenchable belief that whether or not the questions get asked (how many neon bulbs, flickering on Times Square, to make the riddle high enough and bright enough for the right people to see it?), the answers are always given.

  “Do you know what you do, Porky?” Norman Eney asked. “Do you know what you’re killing? Every time you let us feed ourselves, you take something. You take it and you bury it, man, and not only we miss it, because it’s us, but everybody, all of them, they lose it. We’re going to let you know. Tonight.”

  Porky grasped for a handle. “Why tonight?”

  Orville Grande, the pianist, turned on the stool: “Tómas got busted by the fuzz tonight. He was trying to hold up the deli on the corner so he could buy his stock from you.” He paused and saw something in the darkness, something nothing, then went on, “He was so sick, man, he tried to split, and they burned him down.”

  A sax man—a customer named Eli—added, “He’s got the last sign on him, man. He’s got that big toe tag in the morgue.”

  “So we’re going to show you, Porky,” Eney explained. “All these years you been living at the mountains of blindness, not knowing, not caring, just selling, man. Now we’re going to show you what you take from us, what we’ve got.”

  And they played.

  What did they play? They made their sounds in the dark moist cavern of the jazz club, and some of it said things and some of it didn’t, but it was them. All of them, from the shall
owest part to the deepest niche, and the wail was first lonely then blaring and demanding, driven on a pastel breeze from a corner of the universe where the ones-who-hear-things-always lived. Porky listened, and knew he had better listen, because this was a credo for him, there was a test coming and notes should be taken, because this was the final exam. He was not a punk, nor was he a stupid man…he had thought himself a businessman, and his morality, his living, was a separateness, not to be confused with what he sold these damned ones. But it now seemed he was wrong. They wailed, they blew, these creatures who had drawn themselves on elbows and knees into his light-life. Now he could not ignore them. He had been thrust into Bedlam with them, and to survive, to ken their meanings, he must pay close attention.

  Willow weep for me in the still of the night when the world was young…

  That was it. But not all of it. Men who had done their living without mamas and without papas, in a half-light legend of junk and sound. These were the things they said:

  I don’t sleep nights; I hear the rhythms.

  There ain’t no good women for me because they don’t see me, they see an image, a jazz musician and that’s a false bit. I’m lonely, where’s a good broad in all this?

  You got to have roots to sink, a place to go. I’m thirty-seven, man, and it’s been a long time since I had a place to lay my head.

  Take this from me and I’m hollow.

  If I had a son, I’d want him to be a horn man, it’s God right in the stomach, the way to go.

  This is my truth, all of it. All I want. All I need.

  That was what they played, and that was what they said. So Porky listened, and knew what they wanted. They did not want him to stop pushing, because they would only need it from someone else. They did not want to hurt him for denying Tómas, because that had been the kid’s gig, and not Porky’s. But they wanted him to know. It wasn’t the punishment, or whether anything happened, it was merely being aware, of knowing what was reality, and what was blindness.

  How long can you live in that thatch hut without windows, without cracks of light at the foot of the mountains of blindness? How long? Forever, unless you’re shown.

  He was trapped, and they were trapped, one by the other—him by demand, and them by supply. But now he could not turn his non sequitur eyes on them, without knowing what things boiled in them. Porky listened, and they restated their theme.

  The sax lifted the dusky night and slid it out on a wave of tired but struggling. Horn came up, trumpet from the sea, and with eyes closed, hunkered down into his shoulders, a man told of the freight cars left on the sidings, still rank from pig and cow, where the army blanket spread lumpy for a needed sleep. The sound of the country, of a hundred million nameless bad ones and bedouins, tramping away from Louisiana graves with a fast jog time-step funeral chant. The wails of lonely and depressed and sick and hungry and down at the socks guys who needed what was roiling and tumbling and kicking in the gut. That was the theme, softly snaggingly bangwham repeated. That was it, for all the world (who was Porky only) to hear and put down just right.

  Yeah, even Lawrence Welk.

  In there somewhere.

  And when the sound had flown off, an almost extinct bird with plumage that crumbled to dust motes if touched too harshly, they stared down at Porky from the bandstand, their eyes cat and bird and snake intent. To see if he had seen. To hear if he had heard. To find out if they had written their primer so that even a pusher could dig.

  Porky nodded his head. He still lived at the mountains of blindness, but it was different. He could not move, because home is where the home is, where you’ve been, and where you can exist, and for Porky this was the only way to make it.

  But the difference was the greatest difference in the whole wide world. Now he knew.

  Nothing would change.

  The pyramid of hungers still existed, because it was the way the scene was run, and who changes it? Not a damned soul. Especially not the damned souls.

  Porky knew and said with eyes that were mouths of sense: I’m one of you. I’m not the preying animal, I’m the preyed upon. By life, by need, by circumstance. I’m one with you, and though I can’t help you, I understand.

  And that, in its own way, was the worst punishment of all.

  This is Jackie Spinning

  Hi, y’all, this is Jackie spinning. That’s right, it’s 7:00, Eastern Standard Time, and this is Jackie Whalen spinning the hot ones, the cool ones, the bop and the rock ones, and all for you, just you, little old you. And tonight’s show is a real joy-popper! Be sure to stick right by that radio, kids, because as our special guest tonight Jackie has got the lovely, luscious Kristene Long, singing star of Sapphire Records, as his guest. We’ll be playing Kris’s new smash, “Mocking Love,” as well as her hit parade topper, “Shagtown Is My Town,” a little later; and we’ll be talking to that living doll, Miss Long, as well. But right now—right now—let’s hear a little of Ricky Nelson’s new one.

  (Fade music up)

  (Jackie Whalen, a short man with a great deal of curly hair tumbling onto his forehead, almost to the eyebrow line, cues the next record and stands up behind the consoles. He stretches out of his severely Ivy League sports jacket and hangs it on the back of his chair. He unbuttons the cuffs of his piqué buttondown shirt and, scratching a wrist, rolls the sleeves up to the biceps. He pulls down the small four-in-hand knot of his conservative challis tie and unbuttons the collar of the shirt. Then, pouring a glass of water from the carafe at his left, he takes two small pink pills from the neat pile on the edge of the right-hand turntable, and tosses them off, with the water in close pursuit. His dark, angry eyes track across the control room and light on the sheer nylon-encased legs of the tall blonde sitting expectantly in the metal chair near the control booth’s big picture window. He smiles at her legs, and the smile travels up carefully, slowly, till it reaches her blue eyes, where the smile has magically been transformed into a leer. She smiles back insinuatingly. “Later, baby,” he tells her, licking his lips. She moves languidly in the chair, revealing a knee. Jackie Whalen reluctantly looks away from her, to the record that is almost ending. He sits down and flips a toggle switch.)

  (Music up and out)

  Well, that was Ricky’s new one, and there’s no doubt about it being number seventeen on your Top Sixty list this week. And speaking of the Top Sixty, all you tough teens, when you want a record to while away those hours, make sure you do your shopping at The Spindle, 6720 Seventeenth Street. All the boys out there, especially Bernie Glass the manager, they’ll take good care of you. Just tell ’em Jackie sent you, and you can expect that big Jackie Whalen discount.

  But right now here’s one that your “disc Jackie” thinks will be in number-one spot real soon. In fact, if I can make a prediction, this will be number one. It’s that new star, the voice of Rod Conlan, singing and swinging his smash hit…“I Shouldn’t Have Loved You So Much!”

  (Fade music up)

  (He cues the next record and turns to stare at the girl again. She grins at him and says, “Have you told your wife about us yet?” His face darkens momentarily as honest emotion shows through; then the façade of sleek, well-fed humor moves back into place and he replies, “Don’t worry about it, baby. When the time comes, she’ll find out.” The girl stands up, smoothing the tweed skirt over her thighs, and walks to him at the console. “Gimme a cigarette,” she says. As he shakes a filter-tip cigarette free of its pack, she adds, “Florey made some pretty broad hints in his column this morning. Won’t she read it and wonder where you were last night?” He lights the cigarette for her with a slim sterling-silver lighter, and the affected, boyish grin spreads up his face once more. “She’s not too bright, Kris. You forget I married her when I was with that dinky two-hundred-and-fifty-watter upstate. She’s a farm girl…she may have read it, but it won’t dawn on her that Florey meant me. She thinks I was at a retail record distributor’s convention last night. Don’t let it bug you; when I want her to know
, she’ll know. Right now I’ve got bigger things to worry about.” The girl recrosses to her chair and sits down. “You mean things like Camel Ehrhardt and the Syndicate?” His face once more loses its sheen of camouflage and naked fear shines wetly out of his eyes. “You’ve been pushing that Conlan dog for over a week now. They’re not going to like it, Jackie. They covered Patti Page’s version with their own boy, and every other jockey’s fallen in line to give it the big play. You’re cutting your throat by pushing Conlan.” Jackie Whalen pulls at his petulant lower lip and replies, “To hell with those hoods. I’ve got dough in Conlan, and this could be the big one for him. They won’t press their luck. They’re afraid I’ll go to the Rackets Committee if they push me too hard. Besides, I’m working an angle. The Conlan gets the big shove from this jock!” The girl grins wisely and adds, softly, “Jackie, baby, I’d hate to have to lose you so soon. Those guys don’t play games. You know what they did to Fred Brennaman when he refused their stuff for his jukeboxes.” Visions of a man being fished from the river, hair matted with scum and plant life, flesh white, eyes huge and watery, skitter across Jackie Whalen’s mind. He sits in the comfortable foam-bottom chair, and his thoughts consume him to such a depth that only the shushing of the needle repeating in the final groove of the spinning record brings him to attention.)

  (Music down and out)

  And that was the big one for Rod Conlan, kids. “I Shouldn’t Have Loved You So Much,” and it’s going right to the top. I’ve heard ’em all for a good many years, but Rod has got it locked this time, if I’m any judge.

  So I hope you’ll all drop over to The Spindle, 6720 Seventeenth, and pick up a copy of Rod Conlan’s big new one, “I Shouldn’t Have Loved You So Much.”

  And it’s time right now to run down the top five of the Top Sixty, kids, so here they are:

  In first place is Kris Long’s “Shagtown Is My Town”—and don’t forget, in just a few minutes we’ll be talking it up with Kristene Long herself. In second place Fats Domino’s “When the Saints Go Marching in” is still holding its own, and third place this week is occupied by Sam Cooke and “Nobody Could Hate the Cha-Cha-Cha.” Fourth spot goes to Steve Don and the DonBeats with “Foolin’ Around Too Long” and that big fifth place goes to Rod Conlan’s “I Shouldn’t Have Loved You So Much.” So let’s catch Rod again with that smash, because we think it’s bound for the million mark.