Gentleman Junkie and Other Stories of the Hung-Up Generation Page 19

  She shook her head, and addressed herself to the sweet things. Then she licked the corner of her mouth with her tongue tip. It was a singular movement.

  “Usually a room with twin beds. But, yes, I guess that would work, about his driving. He has a bad heart, and he can’t keep at it too long, he gets tired fast. And his reflexes aren’t too good, that’s why I’ve been driving. How’ll I know which room is yours?”

  That simple. We had it all planned that simple. “I’ll leave my light on. At that hour, there shouldn’t be any others on. And I’ll keep an eye out so you don’t wander into anyone else’s room.”

  “Why, Mr. Schuster, Mr. Norton, Mr. Mickey Mouse, I think you must believe I’m some kind of loose woman or something.”

  She smiled a smile that was not intended for an eighteen-year-old face, got up, and walked away. The sound of her nylons rubbing at the thighs set me up erect, and I watched the way her body smoothed and rolled as she stopped by the candy counter to buy some chewing gum, giving me time to pay the check and get to the truck just after she’d slid behind the wheel of the Mustang. The old man raised up, looked around with total disorientation, murmured something to her and she said something back. Then he nodded, thumbed his sleep-sticky eyes with a pair of weathered claws, and she got out, went around to the passenger side as he slid under the wheel. She got in and they peeled off. Badly; he swerved around the gas pumps. You have an exhausting five, six hours ahead of you, old pop, I thought, smugly.

  That day I kept in sight of them straight across the beefy middle of Pennsylvania, the dead face of the turnpike staring up at me vacuously. One road sign after another, no rest breaks, and the old man must have been pleading. But she kept him going, on and on, and there I was, hanging back so I could get my big hands around those breasts of hers, bend her double and work off the road strain I’d been building for I didn’t know how long. And then, as we passed over the line into Ohio, with night bombarding us, I got the most eerie feeling. What was pulling me on like this? Why was I so hot to get this little teenie-bopper? I’d seen the swingers before; they peppered the bars off Times Square every Saturday night, in from Jersey where the age limit was higher. But why this one? What song had she been silently singing that got my groin all tingly? What emptiness was there in me, what wrong bell bonging, what snail crawling through my inward side, what height I hadn’t reached, what door slammed when I was a child, what act I’d begun and never completed, what vision I’d had that had been shattered for me…what meal had turned rancid in my belly, what bill had never been paid, what game had I chanced everything and been taken like a patsy…what wind had chilled me, what sun had scorched me…all uselessly, all senselessly…that had brought me through four years of college to the day of graduation when I’d run shrieking into the fields of reality and never gone back for the passport into the big time? What was it, that made me follow through the night that blue Mustang with the waving banner of yellow hair? What was it, and would it kill me?

  We pulled off the turnpike just east of Cleveland. I passed them doing seventy and in the rearview I could see the eyes of her dear old father, like a pair of mushrooms grown in somebody’s basement.

  The Red Coach Motel was a U-shaped complex, twelve little ticky-tacky boxes, with a VACANCY sign burning vermilion in the night. I plowed in across the gravel and got my room as quickly as possible. I watched from the window as they emerged from the office and hesitated till they spotted the room number. Five down from me on the long arm of the U. They went in. I took a shower.

  There I lay on the tacky bed, the phony farm-furniture furnishings all around me. The hurricane lamp, the borax bureau in imitation Quaker, the hooked rugs, the antique hat rack from Sears. I lay with the towel wrapped around my middle, and the light on. My arm thrown over my eyes. I didn’t count time.

  Finally, the footsteps, and the door opened.

  She didn’t wait for bugles or sightings, for banners unfurled or stately pavannes danced. She came across the room throwing the door closed behind her, and off came the trench coat. She was naked underneath, and she fell down on the bed, right on top of me, one leg dumped over mine, the moist heat of her coming straight through the towel.

  And then she moved.

  And then she mewled.

  And then she attacked.

  Once, down in Biminy, I went to a cockfight. It was one of those threepenny operations where the foam and the blood spattered high; and the higher and foamier, the more the swine around the taffrail leered. The winner got the loser down and stripped him, and they watched. Flesh came off bit by bit, all matted with blood-soaked feathers; and the eyes, like little bits of soft jelly, running down off the killer-beak.

  She attacked.

  Hard inner thighs, locked around my waist. Arms that pressured me tight to her hard little belly. The breasts hanging over me and then suddenly rolling, and the breasts squared flat against my chest. The mouth an open wetness, all good wine and musky. Teeth clenched, breath sucked in heavily, and pinwheels of color that went cascading over me like sparklers from a kid’s dynamite stick on a holiday outing. And that word; yeah, that word, the one with the eff opening, over and over again, and begging. Then a pow!

  Another pow!

  A string of oil wells gushering, wetness all over everything. “It’s a shame we have to wait for tomorrow night,” I said, drying myself. “Ten doesn’t seem like nearly enough.” She looked at me in the bathroom mirror. “He gets nappy about two in the afternoon. Where on the map does that put us?”

  I laid her in Galesburg, Illinois.

  I laid her in Omaha, Nebraska.

  I laid her twice in Arizona, Flagstaff and a little town without much of a name near the Grand Canyon.

  That old man, that father of hers, half-conscious from driving and sleeping, dogging it behind the wheel while she was getting her backside and her brains banged out in every two-bed twitchery along the Great Divide.

  She popped it to me, the big cross-country hustle, in Salt Lake City. The Mormon fathers would have crapped.

  I said no, forget it, that wasn’t my bag. So she showed me a new trick. It was very close in there, very strained. I couldn’t remember my answer after a couple of hours.

  So here I am now, on this rainy night with the rain coming down like rain never came down before, sending cars off bridges and pedestrians over like nine-pins. Here I am on this high-fatality night in the parking lot of a California motel, loosening the lug nuts on the left front wheel of that blue baby Mustang, so she can ask that old man—who never was, and never had been her father—to drive into the next town across that fatal damned slippery careening sure-death turnpike and get her a certain medicine from a druggist that will stop the sudden cramps she planned to have, way back in Salt Lake City.

  Here I am loosening the lugs so her old-man husband—who had heard the same song, so much earlier than I did—can go off and get himself killed and the investigation started that will sure as hell show someone loosened the lugs and I’ll be grabbed, and all that coffee won’t get to the gourmet shops.

  Here I am, doing it, all for that hard little ass back there on the motel bed. And what I want to know is, why? Why, dammit, when I know I’m going to get skewered for it, without a prayer in the world? If I knew the answer, I could put down this lug-wrench and get in my truck and cut out of here. But I don’t know why.

  And never have.

  And never will.

  Is it ladies-first in California gas chambers?

  Hey…what’s her name?

  Sally in Our Alley

  They found this child, this Sally, lying on her stomach, behind the garbage cans. Somebody had tried to separate her from her head, and they’d come pretty close; looked like a dull bread knife.

  Actually, I’d have found her myself in a couple of hours, when I came to sweep out the rear doorway at 3126 McMurdo Alley. I’m the janitor there. I mean, it’s not the best job in the world, but they give me the basement apartment at
3128 rent-free, plus twenty-five a week, so I janitor it up for the old Polack who owns the buildings. It gives me time to finish my epic.

  I’m writing this epic poem about the destruction of the Great Wall of China, and you can yuck, but it’s a subject that’s needed talking about for a helluva long time. Besides, I like being a poet; it’s easier than working.

  McMurdo Alley is glutted right now with the beat element. A bunch of lazy ne’er-do-wells all talking about Hegel and Kant and Nietzsche and writing The Great American Whatchamacallit. They’ll never do it, of course, they’re not like me, they’re all phonies. Besides, they like to party it too much. Well, so do I, of course, but my work…you know, that’s big with me, too.

  I just janitor to keep eating. It helps.

  But that has nothing to do with this Sally kid. The two who found her were Whipper Georgulis (his first name is Philoctoden, but who the hell can pronounce that?). And Betty January. That isn’t her name, either, but who needs a last name like Manzenetti to be a stripper. You see what I mean? Phonies, all of them.

  Anyhow, they were out in the alley, having left a party upstairs in the Tower Suite, which is what Bernie Katz calls his pad. Be kind enough not to ask what they were doing down in the alley, behind the garbage cans, as it was a rainy night, and whatever they were doing, they would be doing it messily.

  So Whipper and Miss January (as she’s billed) found her, oozing into a puddle, and they called the cops. As well as the rest of the damned neighborhood. This January kid has a great set of screamers on her; she even woke old Mrs. Perlmutter, who hasn’t heard a sound since Alf Landon got his ears pinned back.

  Then the fuzz descended on us, stringing up ropes to keep everyone back, and all the bearded ones yelled bloody murder because the Alley was the only way into most of their pads. The fuzz had a rough time, let me tell you.

  It went that way for a couple of days, with them dragging everyone down to Homicide East, and asking questions you’d at least think they’d offer haggis or baggis for answering. But they drew a blank.

  Because the funny damned thing, for a whore, nobody knew who this Sally’s customers were. None of the artists knew her; they had enough amateur talent around ever to go pay for it. In the Alley, payment in cash is a rarity. Everybody had seen the trade slouching up to her door, but no one knew who.

  Finally, my turn came, and they took me down in a prowl car, sitting between two yo-yo cops whose faces would have looked great on the lions’ heads in front of the Public Library.

  They ushered me into a dark little room, sat me in a chair as hard as the Polack’s heart, and went away. There was a glob of fat and slime behind the desk, and the nameplate read LT. B. C. KROLL.

  Let me tell you, this Kroll character was so far out, he’d automatically have to have a ticket stub to get back in.

  “You want to help us, Spivack?”

  “The name is Snivack. My cat will get hungry if I’m not home in an hour.”

  “Screw your cat. You want to help us?”

  “Since when do the badges need help from impecunious poets?” I demanded, crossing my legs.

  “Since now,” he answered, staring at my thong sandals and my dirty feet.

  I uncrossed my legs.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said automatically. Philo Vance always said that, and I figured I’d best get on record before the ranks got cluttered.

  “Not very well you couldn’t.”

  “How do you know? What’s the matter, I’m not good enough?” I was offended.

  “Not unless you have abnormally long arms. Your alibi was in here yesterday, and she had corroboration.” He seemed damned smug about it. I was still piqued.

  “Aggie never could keep her yap shut.”

  “Nice-looking girl.”

  “Mind your business, cop. My sex life is nobody’s business.”

  This Kroll got up from behind the desk; “got up” isn’t the best way of describing it, but I have a gorge that becomes buoyant easily. So Kroll “got up” and came around the desk. He must have weighed as much as a small Percheron.

  “You know what we found in Sally James’s apartment?” he asked. He wanted to tell me, so I saw no reason to be nasty and not wonder. Besides, he could have beaten the hell out of me. Have I mentioned that brutality frightens me? I’m basically a very gentle person. My art demands it.

  “A set of bagpipes?”

  “Who the hell’s been writing your material? Goodman Ace?” He was getting peeved. I was sorry I had jested with him. The constabulary in our precinct was never known for its riotous sense of humor, and Homicide East could only be the kings of the bland stare.

  “All right, I give up,” I fell in with him with a thump, “I’ll play your silly little game; what did you find in Sally James’s apartment?”

  Had he said a matched set of cockatoos or a full symphony orchestra, I couldn’t have been more rocked. I pride myself in being rather blasé. Even a no-vacancy parking lot in that little apartment off McMurdo Alley wouldn’t have thrown me as much as what Kroll said.

  “That’s crazy,” I answered him, “what kind of a whore would use a set-up like that? Or was she having an abortion pulled on herself?”

  Kroll shrugged and offered me a cigarette. It was so dim in his office, I didn’t see it coming: it was abruptly like getting a fence post thrust into my eyes. I took it out of reflex, and when I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, it dawned on me that I didn’t smoke.

  “She had the bedroom set up as an operating room. What we think now is that somebody was performing an illegal on her, and something went wrong, she made a fuss, and the doctor used something sharp on her.

  “The trail of blood shows she managed to get from the bedroom to the alley before she collapsed. Almost impossible, but she made it…and then dropped.”

  I thought it was about time I ferreted out my place in this little saga of gore and sex. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “You get around in the Bohemian section, Snivack. They trust you; they think you’re nuts, but they know you. We’re going to need help on this thing. We want you to get some leads for us. No detective work, just a little judicious spadework.”

  “What’re ya, crazy or something?” I started. “I’m no cop. What good could a janitor do? You better get somebody else.”

  Kroll leaned over my chair. “Do you know how old Aggie is?”

  “When do I start?” I mumbled. Aggie never could keep her mouth shut.

  The next week was a series of low blows for me. I felt like a minor-league Herbert Philbrick, spying on all my friends in the Alley. First, I got so annoyed at Aggie—she came sneaking down to my pad at six one morning when her mother went off to empty waste baskets at the Crane building—I tossed her out on her underage can, and she stood in the Alley yelling she was going to dispense her favors in the future to Bernie Katz. That got back to her old lady, and she being of the shotgun set, it was nip and tuck for a few hours later that day.

  Then Priscilla and Teddy, the lesbos on the second floor at 3126, had their monthly falling-out, and this time—since Teddy was playing the male—Priscilla came tumbling out onto the fire escape howling murder, rape, incest, carnage, and I had to go up and separate them.

  I came away from that gallant effort with a handsome shiner. Right eye.

  As though I hadn’t found my share of aggravation, the union came around and demanded to see my card. I hedged; I didn’t have one. So they sent around a pair of bully-boys who proceeded to convince me of the merits of joining the janitor’s union. Left eye.

  Three young toughs from Gulliver Street caught one of the three ballerinas who lived at 3128 on the front stoop, and gave her a real hard time. When I tried to scare them away they yanked shake-knives on me and I decided cowardice was the better part of living, which cut me off from the three ballerinas.

  So it went, through the week, helter-skelter, sort of devil-may-care digging my own grave.

  Then ca
me Saturday night, which was always big for parties in the Alley, and Scat Bell, the ex-Mr. Newark who had discovered he had a psyche and had moved into McMurdo Alley to nourish it, decided to import talent. He had heard about a whole colony of Zen-oriented poets from way Uptown, and had convinced them to come over, to read their stuff with a jazz background.

  Half a dozen boys from the neighborhood got their instruments together, and we had a pretty fair combo. It promised to be a fine bash, with everybody letting their beards grow, and the chicks dying their hair stringy black to go with the turtlenecks.

  Interest was running high, particularly when Scat told us one of the boys coming from way Uptown was The Hooded One.

  This made no sense whatever until he informed us this guy was really far out; he wore a hood like an excommunicated Ku Klux Klanner. They said he was the beatest, like he had the word and the word was TRUTH! So we were all looking forward to his showing up and reading the stuff. Hood and all.

  Seeing as how it had been a rotten week anyhow, it was no surprise that as I was emptying the trash cans behind 3126, Kroll should emerge from a doorway.

  “Hey,” he commanded with a syllable. I set down the can full of beer bottles and muscatel flagons, and walked over to him.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I said. “Am I overdue?”

  “Did you find out anything for us yet?”

  I spread my hands. “I told you I was no Nero Wolfe.” I regretted having referred to the 1/4-ton detective because Kroll did look like Nero Wolfe. He was pretty stout in the rex.

  “Any of these characters,” he saluted both buildings in the Alley with a sweeping gesture, “ever go to college to study medicine? None of them have any police record, except Yarbrough.”

  He was referring to Pastey Yarbrough, who had a thing about stealing from the five and ten. He’d been picked up so many times, Woolworth’s was thinking of making him a tax exemption.