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

  Outside, it was not so quiet. There were mutterings from dark corners of the central Georgia town. Murmurings, unrests, fear, and rising voices.

  In his cell, Daniel White returned to sleep. He knew what was going to happen. He had it locked. He was a poor darkie who was going to get all the benefits so long overdue his people.

  The man from the NAACP would tend to all that…even if he was a fruity-looking cat in a funny suit.

  “What the hell you mean, for the greater good? Are you crazy or something, mister? You can’t let that mob take him and lynch him?” Roblee’s face was a mask of horror. “Are you crazy or what?”

  Peregrin’s forehead was a crisscross of weaving shadow, caught in the flickering light of the candle. They sat at the table once more, joined by five others, all hidden in the grey and black of the room. The shades were drawn, and behind the shades, curtains had been pulled. And they sat staring at the man from the NAACP, Peregrin, who had just told them, without preamble, that they must not only let the whites lynch Daniel White, but they must do everything in their power to aid the act.

  “Say, listen, Mister Peregrin, I think you out of your mind. That’s murder, man!” The speaker was a stout, balding man with coffee-colored skin and a wart at the side of his wide nose.

  “Just what do you mean, ‘for the greater good?’” Roblee sank a hand heavily on Peregrin’s sleeve. Peregrin continued to sit silently, having said what he felt he must say.

  Roblee shook him. “Dammit, fella, you gone answer me! What’d you mean by that?”

  Peregrin looked up at them, then. His eyes caught the candlelight and threw it back in two bright lines. His face was shattered; there was conflict and fear and desperation in it. But determination. “All right,” he said, finally.

  They stared at him as he dry-washed his cheekbones and temples with moist hands. “Daniel White is sleeping up in that jail, and he doesn’t care what happens to any of you. He had his fun, and now he wants to capitalize on all the work we’ve done for so long, to escape punishment. He’s banking on everyone making such a hue and cry that no one will dare hurt the poor nigger being taken advantage of, down in rotten Georgia.”

  Roblee continued to watch the tall man, impassively, waiting. There was confusion in the cant of his head, in the frozen hand on Peregrin’s sleeve.

  “Those people out there,” Peregrin waved a fist at the shaded window, “they’re stretched as tight as piano wires. They’ve been told that everything they’ve believed for hundreds of years is a lie. They’ve been told the Negro is as good as them, they’ve been told their white sons and daughters are going to have to move over and share five-and-ten-cent store seats with them, and schools with them, and buses with them, and movies with them…”

  His breath came labored. He ground his teeth together and went on with difficulty.

  “They’ve had the rug pulled out from under them, and they’re still falling. They’ll be falling for a long time. Done slowly, they could adjust to it. But then Daniel White rapes a sixteen-year-old girl and they’ve got a reason to hate, they’ve got something to focus their hate on. So they start taking out their fear and confusion in any way they can.

  “Look what has happened in just the few hours since the girl was found. Your church has been bombed. Negroes have been fired and ostracized, some have been beaten up and perhaps that boy they stomped will die. Your homes and that bar have been burned. This isn’t going to stop here. It’s going to get worse. And it’s not even going to stop with your town. It’s going to march like a wave to the beach, washing all the work we’ve done before it.

  “If Daniel White goes free.”

  He paused.

  Roblee made to interrupt, “But to let them haul him out of there and lynch him, that’s…”

  “Don’t you understand, man,” Peregrin turned on Roblee with fury. “Don’t you hear what I’m telling you? That man up there isn’t merely a poor sonofabitch who got loaded and pawed a white girl. He’s a cold-blooded miserable animal, and if anyone deserved to die, it’s him. But that has nothing to do with it. I’m talking to you about the need for that man to die. I’m telling you, Roblee, and all of you, that if you don’t take their minds off the Negro community as a whole, you’re going to set back the cause of equality in this country fifty years. And if you think I’m making this up you better realize that it’s already happened once before, just this way.”

  They stared at him.

  “Yes, dammit, it happened once before. And though we didn’t have anything to do with the way it turned out—and thank God it turned out as it did—we would have told them to do it just the way they did.”

  They stared, and suddenly, one of them knew.

  “Emmett Till,” he breathed, softly.

  Peregrin turned on the speaker. “That’s right. They didn’t even know for sure what the circumstances had been but the trouble was starting up—not even as bad as here—and they hauled Till out and killed him. And it stopped the trouble like that!” he snapped his fingers.

  “But lynching…” Roblee said, horrified.

  “Don’t you understand? Are you stupid or something, like they say we are? Monkeys? Can’t you see that Daniel White dead can be more valuable than a hundred Daniel Whites alive? Don’t you see the horror that Northerners will feel, the repercussions internationally, the demands for justice, the swift advance of the program…can’t you see that Daniel White can serve the greater good. The good of all his people?

  “What he never was in life, that miserable bastard up there can be in death!”

  Roblee sank away from Peregrin. The taller man had not spoken with fanaticism, had only delivered with desperate and impassioned tones what he knew to be true. They had heard him, and now each of them, where there was no room for anyone else’s opinions, was thinking about it. It meant murder…or rather, the toleration of murder. What they were deliberating was the necessity of lynching. There was no doubt that the trouble could be much worse in the town, that more homes would be burned and more people hurt, perhaps killed. But was it enough to know that to sacrifice up a man to the mob madness, to the lynch rope? Was it enough to know that you might be saving hundreds of lives in the long run by sacrificing one life hardly worth saving to begin with?

  It might have been easier, had Daniel White been a man with some qualities of decency. But he wasn’t. He was just what the White Press had called him, a beast. That made it the more difficult; for had he been easier to identify with, they could have said no. But this way…

  There were murmurs from around the room, and the murmurs were, “I…don’t…know…I just don’t know…”

  It meant more than just saving the skins of the people in Littletown—though men had been sacrificed to save fewer lives—it meant saving generations of children to come, from sitting in the backs of movie houses, of allowing them to grow up without the necessity of knowing squalor and prejudice and the words “shine,” “nigger,” “Jim Crow.”

  It meant a lot of things, that thin thread of life that was Daniel White. That thin thread that might be stretched around Daniel White’s neck.

  It meant a lot.

  It was a double-edged sword that slicing one way would tame the wrath of the mob beast, and slicing the other would make a path for more understanding, by use of shame and example.

  But could they do it…?

  Were this a motion picture, and not a story of some truth, the camera might play about the darkened room, candlelit and oppressive. It might play about the gaunt, hardening faces of the men, and mirror their decisions. If this were a motion picture. And the emphasis on good camera studies. But it is not a motion picture, and when they threw up their hands saying they could not decide, Peregrin had to say, “Let’s go talk to someone who knows this mob.”

  So they agreed, because the decision was not one that men could make about another man.

  When they opened the door of the house on the edge of Littletown, and stepped out, they
did not see the mass of moving dark shadows. The first warning they had was the heat-laden voice snarling, “You goin’ tuh save that nigger rape bastard, Savannah man? Like hell you are!”

  Then they jumped.

  At first they used the lead pipes and the hammers, but after the first flurry they spent their fury and went on to fists and boots. Peregrin caught a blow in the face that spun him around, sent him crashing into the wall of the house. Off in the darkness he could hear Roblee screaming and the wet, regular syncopation of someone kicking at bloody flesh.

  Later, much later, when all the lights had stopped whirling, and all the strange new colors had become merely reds and greens and blues, they dragged themselves to their feet

  Roblee’s face looked like a pound of moist hamburger. He daubed at the ruined expanse of skin and said very defiantly, “It’s that White’s fault. All this. All this, it’s his fault. We don’t hafta take it for him.”

  Peregrin said nothing. It hurt too much merely to breathe. His rib cage had been crushed. He lay against the house, listening, hearing what they had to say.

  The others joined in, between sobs and rasps of breath. “Let them lynch him. Let them do it.”

  They knew who to see…they knew the men with the ropes…the men who would start to hit them when they appeared, but who would listen when they said they had come to give up Daniel White. They knew who to see.

  They told Peregrin: “We’ll be back. You rest there. We’ll do it.” And they moved off into the night, to make their vengeance.

  Peregrin lay up against the building, and he began to cry. His voice was soft, and deep as he said to the sky, “Oh God, they’re doing it, but they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. They’re hating, and that isn’t right. They’ll give him up, and that’s what we need, Lord, but why do they have to do it this way?”

  Then after a while, when he had fainted several times, and had the visions of the men storming the jail, and striking the guards and dragging the snarling, defiant Daniel White from his cell, his thoughts became clearer.

  It was worth it. It had to be worth it. What they did, what they allowed, it had to be worth something in the final analysis. For the greater good, he had said. It had to be that. Because if it wasn’t, surely there could be no hell deep enough to receive him.

  If it was worth it, the end had to be in sight.

  And had this been a motion picture, with a happy ending desirable—instead of a grubby little story out of central Georgia—then the man called Peregrin would have considered the inscription they must carve on the statue of the martyr, Daniel White.

  Lady Bug, Lady Bug

  Ivor Balmi found the party already in progress when he arrived back at his studio. “Studio” was a lofty coloring for a colorless loft, but in the New York of that season, so vastly in flux with all the right people either just returning and unsettled, or moving to the Coast, to Europe, especially to the Maritime Alps—Ivor Balmi’s “studio” was one of the few places to go for stimulation. For all to go, that is, but Ivor Balmi; to him, the parties—the interminable, dull-gaudy brawls with rising laughter and empty tears—were hunting sessions.

  For tall Ivor Balmi, whose eyes had a caked look of European deprivation and a glistening look of American hunger, the parties not only served to pay his rent, but furnished him with fresh prey. It was simply too much trouble, the barbaric dating and picking-up, the ritualistic fencing and prancing so necessary to get a girl within reach.

  Ivor Balmi was very much a self-contained man, and his interest in women was on an elementary level: they were sex. He felt no warmth for them, felt no desire to do for them or give to them or have them around when they became complicated. It was a very transitory warmth Ivor Balmi sought.

  He came through the hall, ignoring the two college students in madras Bermuda shorts, propped against the wall sharing a rope-bound bottle of Chianti and some Jeremy Bentham philosophy. It was the usual crowd. The ones who had come to pick up someone clean and not too clinging, others who needed the heat and pulse of a party…a get-together…a something-outside-loneliness; and the ones who needed to watch. Ivor hated them the most, the watchers. Self-styled Isherwoods. “We are cameras,” they proclaimed, seeing superficialities, lacking the perceptivity to understand or apply what they had seen. They were, to the frozen soul of Ivor Balmi, voyeurs in the game of life. Unable to detach themselves as he did, unable to novocaine their emotional umbilicus, they sought halfway answers in subjective inadequacy. Too many knothole-peepers. Seekers after clichés.

  Someone had turned up the hi-fi and, of all things, Bobby Short, miGod! It was a bedlam; not as bad as three weeks ago but still fetid with wearing-off under-arm deodorant, frantic perfume, and the stink of slowly disintegrating egos—the smell of clothing caught in the rain. Tight. Hot. Desperate. Nasty. He stumbled over a girl who had passed out, her pearls caught up under her nose and over her forehead. He looked at her for a passing-overhead instant and went on through the crowd.

  Someone shouted “Hey, Ivor!” and it was Jeff who had thrown the party (who would donate half the two-bucks-per-head door charge to Ivor’s rent fund); Ivor Balmi waved a hand in his direction. Another shout, and it was one of the girls he had kept overnight several weeks before. She had called four times; he had ignored her.

  With the intense purpose of an animal streaking for safety in the bush, he wanted the sanctuary of his bedroom, and struck toward it shouldering them aside one after another.

  He saw her leaning against the wall, being talked at.

  Grover was talking at her, in his coming-on-strong way. She was letting her eyes wander. To anyone but Grover it would have been a signal that he was not getting through. Yet Grover continued to come on.

  She wasn’t young, but there was youth about her. She was not beautiful, but she had known beauty of several kinds. Her hair was caught up in an auburn bun at the nape of her neck, held in place by a tortoise-shell clip. Her face was long and the chin spade-shaped. The hair and the face were adjuncts to her cheekbones, wondrously attractive, high and round features that commanded attention particularly when (as now, gratuitously) she smiled (Grover welcomed it, took it as a go-ahead) and inclined her head (in boredom), catching a sheen of light across them, shadowing the eyes.

  The eyes caught Ivor Balmi and she let them widen.

  She broke into Grover’s explanations of inconsequentialities to murmur something. Grover turned and tracked the crowd with his dull little brown marmoset eyes, finally picking out Ivor. “You, Ivor, c’mere a minute, baby, I want you to meet someone.”

  He continued walking, side-stepping. When he reached the bedroom he went in, slammed the door behind himself, and tossed the books littering the bed onto the bureau. Then he tossed himself onto the bed, and fell asleep immediately.

  The door opened very quietly, the woman stood looking down at him with a particular peculiar expression on her planed light-and-shadow face, then just as quietly closed the door behind her, and went back to the party.

  There was an air of resigned boredom about her: she was determined to wait out this charade. More important things were coming.

  Ivor Balmi, wrapped in the security of his aloneness, slept the sleep of the lazyweary. Later, he would paint. Badly, but that was as he wanted it. Always; badly.

  In the dream, there was a newspaper caught by the breeze, lifted from the sidewalk and slapped across his face. In the dream, he pulled it free and stared at it: the newspaper was blank. In the dream, he smiled, then awoke.

  Awake, he saw her leaning against the closed door, her legs crossed, the cigarette just coming away from her lips.

  “Do I know you?” he asked, half-rising.

  She gave him a smile totally unlike the smile she had given Grover, and did not answer.

  Ivor Balmi swung his legs off the bed, and rose. His hair was mussed, his shirt wrinkled and tacky from sleeping in it. The time seemed to be much older than any time he had known before. He felt something w
as wrong.

  Then he recognized it.

  The party was over. There was no sound from the other rooms. Silence in the land of Ivor Balmi. Silence, and this woman who stared at him, her lips saying he was—what? A fool? A wastrel? A sex-symbol, the Ivor Balmi? What?

  “They’ve gone,” he said. There was no fear in him, in fact, no determined interest. His observations were one and the same with reality. If the woman was here, it was for one reason, essentially. If he felt like one that night, if he felt like that one that night, then he would include her in the worldview. If not…

  He moved to the door and she stepped aside, letting him open it. In the huge living room, lights still burned, and a couple had fallen asleep, still joined, on the big battered sofa by the window.

  Ivor Balmi’s loft had been a bare box when he had moved in, and through the device of liberating old furniture placed out for the rubbish collectors in front of the more expensive apartment buildings, he had been able to furnish it, if not in style and luxuriance, at least in moderate comfort.

  That comfort was now being enjoyed by half a dozen dozing drunks—one on the homemade window seats, one on the long table, and four on the floor—and of course, the couple on the sofa. Ivor walked to them, and nudged the man with his knee.

  “Jeff, you got my rent?” He looked down at the nude figure, his hand extended. The figure mumbled something.

  “Sleep like hell,” he said quickly, “either get it up or get out of here.” Jeff struggled free of the girl, who mewed sensitively, rolled over, and exposed a pimpled backside.

  “Jeesus, Ivor, you coulda let me sleep, couldn’tcha? I’d of given it to ya in the morning…” He tapered off embarrassedly. Balmi stood with hand outstretched, his face turned elsewhere. He simply was not interested.

  Jeff went to his pants, thrown carelessly over a beaded lamp, and fished some bills from a side pocket. He gave them to Ivor Balmi, who counted them twice. Then the naked figure returned to the sofa.