Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation Page 14

  First the peeping, then the trouble on the Bluffs Road, and so terribly this evening, Sir Epicure, and now—now—

  This!

  He felt his hands clenching into fists.

  Herbert Mestman was a calm man, a decent man; but the game had been declared, and it was no game for children. He realized despite his pacifist ways, there were lice that had to be condemned.

  He huddled Margaret in her torn blouse closer to him, soothing her senselessly with senseless mouthings, while in his mind, he made his decision.

  FRENCHIE MURROW

  Mornings had come and gone in a steady, heady stream of white-hot thoughtlessness. After that night, Frenchie had stayed away from Mestman and his wife, from even the casual sight of Mestman’s house. Somehow, and he was thankfully frightened about it, Mestman had not reported him.

  Not that it would have done any good…there was no proof and no way of backing up the story, not really. A stray fingerprint here or there didn’t count too much when they lived next door, and it might easily be thought that Bruce Murrow had come over at any time and left them.

  So Frenchie settled back into his routine.

  Stealing hubcaps for pocket money.

  Visiting Joannie when her old lady was swing-shifting it.

  And then there were the Laughing Princes:

  “Hey, man, you wanna get in the group?”

  Frenchie was amazed. Out of a clear field of vision, this afternoon when he had come into the malt shop, Monkey had broached the subject.

  “Well, hell, I mean, yeah, sure!”

  “Okay, daddy, tell you what. You come on out to the chickie-run tonight, and we’ll see you got gut enough to be a Prince. You dig?”

  “I dig.”

  And here he was, close to midnight, with the great empty field stretching off before him, rippled with shadows where the lights of the cars did not penetrate.

  It had been good bottom land, this field, in the days when the old city reservoir had used water deflected from the now-dry creek. Water deflected through the huge steel culvert pipe that rose up in the center of the field. The culvert was in a ditch ten feet deep, and the pipe still rose up several feet above the flat of the field. The ditch just before the pipe was still a good ten feet deep.

  The cars were revving, readying for the chickie-run.

  “Hey, you, Frenchie…hey, c’mon over here!”

  It was Monkey, and Frenchie climbed from his Stude, pulling at his chinos, wanting to look cool for the debs clustered around the many cars in the field. This was a big chickie-run, and his chance to become one of the Princes.

  He walked into the group of young hotrodders, clustered off to one side, near a stunted grove of trees. He could feel everyone’s eyes on him. There were perhaps fifteen of them.

  “Now here’s the rules,” Monkey said. “Frenchie and Pooch and Jimmy get out there on either side of the road that runs over the cul. On the road is where I’ll be, pacin’ ya. And when Gloria—” he indicated a full-chested girl with a blond ponytail, “—when she gives the signal, you race out, and head for that ditch, an’ the cul. The last one who turns is the winner, the others are chickie. You dig?”

  They all nodded, and Frenchie started to turn, to leave. To get back in his Stude and win this drag.

  But the blond girl stopped him, and with a hand on his arm, came over close, saying, “They promised me to the guy wins this run, Frenchie. I’d like to see you bug them other two. Win for me, willya, baby?”

  It sounded oddly brassy coming from such a young girl, but she was very close, and obviously wanted to be kissed, so Frenchie pulled her in close, and put his mouth to hers. Her lips opened and she kissed him with the hunger and ferocity of adolescent carnality.

  Then he broke away, winking at her, and throwing over his shoulder, “Watch my dust, sweetheart,” as he headed for the Stude.

  A bunch of boys were milling about the car as he ran up.

  “Good luck,” one of them said, and a peculiar grin was stuck to his face. Frenchie shrugged. There were some oddballs in this batch, but he could avoid them when he was a full member.

  He got in and revved the engine. It sounded good. He knew he could take them. His brakes were fine. He had had them checked and tightened that afternoon.

  Then Monkey was driving out onto the road that ran down the center of the old field, over the grade atop the culvert pipe. His Ford stopped, and he leaned out the window to yell at Gloria. “Okay, baby. Any time!”

  The girl ran into the middle of the road, as the three racers gunned their motors, inching at the start mark. They were like hungry beasts, waiting to be unleashed.

  Then she leaped in the air, came down waving a yellow bandanna, and they were away, with great gouts of dirt and grass showering behind…

  Frenchie slapped gears as though they were all one, and the Studelac jumped ahead. He decked the gas pedal and fed all the power he had to the engine.

  On either side of him, the wind gibbering past their ears, the other two hunched over their wheels and plunged straight down the field toward the huge steel pipe and the deep trench before it.

  Whoever turned was a chicken, that was the rule, and Frenchie was no coward. He knew that. Yet—

  A guy could get killed. If he didn’t stop in time, he’d rip right into that pipe, smash up completely at the speed they were doing.

  The speedometer said eighty-five, and still he held it to the floor. They weren’t going to turn. They weren’t going…to…turn…damn…you…turn!

  Then, abruptly, as the pipe grew huge in the windshield, on either side of him the other cars swerved, as though on a signal.

  Frenchie knew he had won.

  He slapped his foot onto the brake.

  Nothing happened.

  The speedometer read past ninety, and he wasn’t stopping. He beat it frantically, and then, when he saw there was no time to jump, no place to go, as the Studelac leaped the ditch and plunged out into nothingness, he threw one hand out the window, and his scream followed it.

  The car hit with a gigantic whump and smash, and struck the pipe with such drive the entire front end was rammed through the driver’s seat. Then it exploded.

  HERBERT MESTMAN

  It had been most disconcerting. That hand coming out the window. And the noise.

  A man stepped out of the banked shadows at the base of the grove of trees. The fire from the culvert, licking toward the sky, lit his face in a mask of serene but satisfied crimson.

  Monkey drove to the edge of the shadows, and walked up to the man standing there half-concealed.

  “That was fine, son,” said the tall man, reaching into his jacket for something. “That was fine.”

  “Here you are,” he said, handing a sheaf of bills to the boy. “I think you will find that according to our agreement. And,” he added, withdrawing another bill from the leather billfold, “here is an extra five dollars for that boy who took care of the brakes. You’ll see that he gets it, won’t you?”

  Monkey took the money, saluted sloppily, and went to his Ford. A roar and he was gone, back into the horde of hot-rods tearing away from the field, and the blazing furnace thrust down in the culvert ditch.

  But for a long time, till he heard the wail of sirens far off but getting nearer, the most brilliant student of Elizabethan drama in the country, perhaps in the world, stood in the shadows and watched fire eat at the sky.

  It certainly was not…not at all…a game for children.

  The Late, Great Arnie Draper

  We had all gotten the news by seven o’clock. I’d heard it first on the early news, and rushed to tell the other kids. We somehow wound up at the Campus Malt Shop, about twenty of us, all sitting around gloomy and sick and miserable about it.

  Charlie Draper was dead. He had cracked up in his Valiant, on the highway. Charles Arnold Draper, whom some called Charlie and some called Arnie. Funny about that: the girls all called him Arnie, I was one of them, and the guys all called
him Charlie. Funny about that, but just typical of Arnie Draper. Friendliest guy in the wide world. Number-one man on campus, with everybody. Not stuck up or self-centered, though God knows he could have been, what with being star quarterback on State’s Big Ten championship team, a brilliant student, head of the Jazz Committee, president of his fraternity, and a dozen other accomplishments. He could have been the most egotistical slob in the world, but he wasn’t. Wanted everybody to call him Arnie, as though he’d known them all his life. Just like that; Arnie. Or Charlie.

  Now he was dead. Just like this, he was gone from our lives, and we’d lost a good friend. Not just another kid we were sorry to see die, but a real honest-to-goodness swell fellow, who had figured prominently in our lives.

  We sat around the Campus Malt Shop, not ordering anything, just dragging on cigarettes, and staring at each other, as each one of us told what we felt about Arnie. Not that we felt we had to say anything, but it seemed as though we were reciting in a class we liked very much, and we wanted very much to be very much a part of it; we had to let out what we felt about Arnie Draper, now that he had been taken from us.

  Verna Abernathy, a tall blond English major was talking. “He was so…so…so damned refined. He always seemed to know just what to say at just the right moment. He had a ready action for any situation, you know what I mean?”

  Everybody nodded, because we all agreed.

  Finley Withers coughed and stared down at the tiny pile of ashes he had been accumulating, chain-smoking since we’d gathered. “It was more than that,” he added, “just the knowing what damned movement to make just when.

  “What I mean is, he was poised, relaxed, as though he didn’t have a worry in the world, even during finals week, when you knew damned well he was worried. It was—” He waved his hand absently, as if to finish the sentence visually.

  Everybody nodded, because we all agreed.

  Grant Lawson, who had been his roommate at the fraternity house, spoke up. He had a deep voice and a distinctly masculine way about him. “Not only that, but Charlie was a fine person. I saw him pick up a cat that had been struck by some kid’s bicycle, and nurse the animal, actually, really nurse it back to health. It’s still at the House. We call it Satyr. And Charlie wouldn’t let anybody help. It was his own good deed, and he wanted it to be that way all the time.”

  Everybody nodded, because we all agreed.

  From the end of the five tables we’d shoved together, Annie Vester, moved I suppose by the honesty everyone had in their voices, and the sorrow of the moment, said, “He was a gentleman, Arnie was. He went steady with me for three months, before he met you, Pauline,” she explained unnecessarily to me. I knew Arnie had been going with her before me, but it had just been a slight campus flirtation, like a million others, and there had been no real hard feelings, though I knew Annie had still cared a great deal for him. It hadn’t been the real thing with them, as it had been between Arnie and myself. Real love for us, the real thing.

  She went on. “Arnie could have taken advantage of me a couple of times. I wouldn’t have minded at all, I even, uh, encouraged him slightly,” she added, blushing slightly, “but he was a gentleman. We made love the way all girls want to make love before they’re married. I’ll—I’ll never forget him…”

  She sank into a soulful silence, and we all nodded, because we all agreed.

  Brant Pinch, with whom Arnie had collaborated on several group science projects, said, “Not to mention his genius. Charlie would have been a great leader some day. His grasp of science was phenomenal. We never could have gotten in those projects on time if he hadn’t done a hell of a lot of the work on them.” Everybody nodded, because we all agreed.

  “Francine Hasher and I were always amazed at how well-read, how rounded he was,” Margie Poole stuck in. “He could talk on any subject from Plato to…to Presley. He knew what was going on in the world, and he was seriously interested in what he could do about it.

  “And migod, when it came to the arts, Arnie seemed to be able to do anything. We used to go to Iris Pedlang’s sculpture classes, at her apartment, you know, and he used to come up with the most exotic, I mean exotic forms, you can believe me!” Everybody nodded, because we all agreed.

  It went on for over an hour, with everybody chiming in, retelling some little anecdote, spotlighting some feature of his personality, lauding him, and then abruptly, it was my turn.

  Silently, it was my turn, because they knew how much I had lost. Charlie and I had been going steady. We were going to be engaged next year, both in our senior year at State. They knew I was crying inside, and shattered, and they turned to me for the capper, the final words that would sum it all up, now that we had lost our Arnie. Our Charlie. He was gone.

  “He was so big,” I said, trying to explain a concept I hardly had words to explain. “He was a gentleman, and a genius, and a leader, and kind, and good, and everything everybody says, but beyond that,” I stumbled for words, “he was…he was…big! Do you, can you, know what I mean?”

  Everybody nodded, because we all agreed.

  Then—we hadn’t even seen her till then, or if we had, we hadn’t paid her any attention—a girl in a booth near us spoke.

  She couldn’t have helped overhearing everything we’d been saying, and she had been there since before we arrived, so we knew it hadn’t been contrived, but she said:

  “Arnie was a lousy bastard.”

  We all just sat and looked at her. There wasn’t even any violence in us, so calm had she been in saying it. We sat and stared at her, with her pale face and haunted eyes. No one knew her, no one knew her name, though we’d seen her around the campus, of course.

  We stared at her silently for a few moments, the quiet of the Campus Malt Shop broken only by the sounds of cars, just like our Arnie’s, going by in the street.

  Then…

  Everybody nodded, because we all agreed.

  High Dice

  I was in the toilet with Kurt, and I was golden.

  Every time those dice hit that plywood wall and bounced back on the linoleum, they read heavenly. They couldn’t go sour if they’d wanted to go sour. I must have rolled six straight passes at one point, and every time they twinkled up seven, Kurt got meaner and banged his big black fist against the inside of the sink.

  And I was getting sicker by the second.

  I was starting to see halos around the two naked bulbs in the ceiling, and the pains were starting to come chop! chop! hitting me at regular-spaced intervals like labor pains. My mouth was dry as hell, I was smoking one after another, lighting the new one off the roach of the last, and my skin fairly crawled.

  The sonofabitch. He knew I needed a fix, otherwise I’d never have got sucked into a crap session with him. He was a cheating sonofabitch to begin with, and when he was down, it was just that much worse.

  So I was golden.

  I could do no wrong.

  And the pains hit me; down on my haunches there in the toilet, tossing those ivories, I doubled and sagged and wrapped my arms around my knees, and it hurt, it really hurt, so help me.

  He was into me for about seventy beans, and it didn’t show signs of getting any better. All I needed was thirty-five for a pop, but goddam that Kurt, he wouldn’t pay me off, kept saying, “Double mah bet, double mah bet,” and when I’d say, “C’mon, man, when are you gonna pay up here?” he’d just get a hard shine like the finish off a new car, back in those bloody eyes of his, and give me a little rough nudge with his elbow in my back, and he’d snap, “C’mon, bitch, throw them dice!”

  I was trapped. I was sewed up solid. I had to have the bread to get fixed, and my Man was outside that toilet in the restaurant, the Shack, sitting in a corner booth sipping at a chocolate Coke and humming to himself. Man, it was a bee-itch! I could feel my skin itching and crawling and wow it was like about a million and a half crab lice all over me. I scratched my thigh and my side, but it came right back.

  That Kurt knew. He kn
ew.

  Someone banged on the door and rattled the knob, but Kurt didn’t even look up. “Hey, man, someone wants into the head,” I informed him. His eyes stayed right down there below, and he gave me that damn nudge again, and said, “Roll, guy.”

  The knob-twister made a helluva ruckus like his bladder was going to pop, because we’d been in there a good twenty-five minutes already, and everybody’s back teeth were probably floating by this time, but Kurt just nudged me again, and I rolled.

  Six was my point.

  Thank God it wasn’t another pass. I was really getting scared. I mean, how would you dig it, being so sick you wanted to puke, and locked in a little bitty dirty toilet with the biggest, strongest, meanest colored cat in the world, who wanted what little loot you had, and wouldn’t pay off what he owed? It was bad, very unhappy, is all.

  I tossed them and they hit that wall and rattled back an eight. Then a twelve; then a five and a single. Point made. Kurt said something guttural and mean under his breath.

  That was a hundred and forty dollars and I knew that crook didn’t have it! I mean, I knew he was shacking with Dotty, the waitress, and he had to give his wife something for the kids, and he was always down in the basement of the Shack’s building, shooting high dice or playing poker with the janitor or any of the college kooks he could fish in. I mean, I knew he was coming on lying.

  Jeezus, did I feel helpless: it was like being strapped into a straightjacket, the way they have to do it sometimes at Lexington when you go into withdrawal and want to smash. I was breathing too deep now, and my face was wet like I’d wee-wee’d all over myself, kind of crawly sweat, moist and sticky and not water at all, but something else. I was really beginning to blow my cool.

  Oh, it was getting worse.

  Whump! I caught a good one right through the gut, and had to stand up. I got to my feet and the pains in my cramped legs made me totter against Kurt for a second, and that fink just shoved me away.