Love Ain't Nothing Part 24

So when my money ran out, and I landed the job selling books and souvenirs in the Times Square bookshop (seven P.M. to three in the morning) I decided to throw a small blast. G.o.d knows my room wasn't large enough for the full Elsa Maxwell treatment, but nonetheless I invited everyone I had even remotely grown to know, and urged them to bring friends. It was the perfectly ordinary sort of thing one does when the loneliness gets too oppressive, too obstinately endless.

It was an ordinary thing, and when I think back on it I want to cry. It brings on those dream fantasies about going back in time five minutes before the event, and just not doing it. How I've wished for those five minutes to live over again. Would it have saved her--I think not.

But it might have saved me.

They started arriving early, and the first ones were the Columbia students who wanted to souse-up their dates, lay them and get them back before Barnard curfew. They came with eighty-nine-cent bottles of Chianti and with routines borrowed from comedians' LPs. They were pretty much an empty lot, all sound and not a h.e.l.luva lot of fury, but they made good background noise and as bookends they eminently served the purpose of decoration.

At about nine o'clock Aggie arrived carrying a brown paper sack with a bottle of Pernod in it, and he flashed both the label and a secret smile as he retreated to a far corner. The label was the come-on and the secret smile said, The dishwater booze is for the tourists, podnuh, but the goodies is for us.

Billy and Stella blew in noisily, with a bowl of clam dip plastic-covered, and a box of stiff potato chips for dipping. Of all the horrors of the civilized world, I had decided clam, oyster and bleu cheese dips were the worst, and of the worst, Stella Soles's dips were the dippiest.

I beamed and thanked them. It smelled like decaying bodies.

Stella and Billy snuggled down on the sofabed and began pawing each other immediately. It was very much like the hippo and the dik-dik bird. Stella was perhaps six feet, three inches and big... really big, across the chest, across the shoulders, in the hips ... a big woman. Billy was a gnat. He was barely five four, and wore his hair in a style reminiscent of Farmer Al Falfa. When he went at her, it was like watching a dwarf storm the Bastille. But they loved each other almost outrageously, and the whining sound of Stella calling, "Bill-ee ... Billll-ee!" was a familiar sound in our building.

The mating call of the great musk ox.

The party was both dying and phoenixly rising when the knock came at the door. I went over without difficulty--for it was one of those parties where everyone settles down in an orderly, out-of-the-way manner--and opened the door.

She had come with three f.a.gs, each dressed entirely in black, and next to their lean, hard-muscled litheness her tiny white-swathed figure was a shock.

Her face was so clear and direct, the features arranged as they might have been by a simpering cameo-carver who saw perfection in the face of disorder, I was truly startled. I had no idea who she was, but I instantly related to her, instantly desired her, instantly saw her image of me rise up and be greeted with attention. The three h.o.m.os.e.xuals with her distressed me, for I was very nearly pathological in my abhorrence for those of the gay set--but the girl was so arresting I let them pa.s.s.

She came into my single room, smiling like a street gamine, and found a place for herself and her retinue by the far window. It was too much; my eyes followed her as though I'd lost all volition or personal desire except to be near her, even if it was only by sight.

I followed them and started making introductions ... for the first time in the evening they went badly. Inevitably they were set straight and she said her name was Stephie Cook, her friends were Blank, Blank and Blank Blank. Who the h.e.l.l listened, who the h.e.l.l cared what marcelled t.i.tles they had given themselves. That she was a queen of the f.a.g set did not seem to offend me. Before, when I had run into a seemingly normal girl surrounded and attended by queers, I had drawn my own conclusions as to the girl's personality and s.e.x habits. But with Stephie, somehow, it was entirely different. She was straight, I knew it, I could feel it, she was interested in me from the first, and I--by that weird alchemical nature of attraction--was completely in her power.

As the evening wore down, we gravitated toward one another on imbecile pretext: would you like a gla.s.s of Pernod? Do you work? Have you really read all these books? Where do you live?

The h.o.m.os.e.xuals seemed not to mind, smiling like indulgent duenas at Stephie as she nuzzled closer to me in a dim corner by the record player.

Sometime during the decaying last moments of the party, without either of us saying it aloud, we knew she would stay with me that night.

Aggie seemed to know, too. Perhaps it was that he knew me so well, took such a bemused view of my goings-on, and wished me well or perhaps he knew because he was also a writer who felt he had to know people to write honestly.

As he left, he raised the empty Pernod bottle in a pseudo-centurion salute, mumbled, "Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc," and grinned his way out of the room. Billy and Stella left soon after. They had been the last--the coeds and their spatula-handed paramours having checked out hours before, the three gay boys long since departed to their contorted repose--and when the door shut after them, we stared at each other from our seats without moving.

"Would you like a pair of my pajamas?" I asked. She nodded and gave me a look that was half-affection and half-trust. It was quite unlike anything I'd ever seen in a woman's face before.

I found my last laundry return had included only one pair of pajamas, so I offered her the tops. She took them, went down the hall to the bathroom and changed while I did the same in the room, and she returned as I was crawling into bed.

Wearing my oversized pajama tops, the sleeves rolled well above the wrists, the tails hanging down past her thighs, she was a Dresden doll figurine, come to life. It was an entirely commonplace, entirely believable and trite situation; I knew it had happened to a million other guys with a million other girls, but for me, it was the most astounding, the most hypnotizing experience of my life. In a matter of hours my loneliness had been ended.

She came to bed and we lay there talking for hours. We did not make love that night; we slept soundly, holding each other.

She lived in Brooklyn, and I would come running up out of the subway entrance, gathering speed as I raced down the half block to her building and--Doug Fairbanks-style--would bunch my muscles and leap, catching the railing of the little balcony that faced off her room. I would catch it, pull myself up and throw myself onto the balcony. It had all the demented romantic imagery of a Romeo seeking his Juliet. It was our own personal route to one another. And then the French doors would open into the broom closet that she rented as a room. It was perhaps five feet across and twelve feet long, a narrow coffin of a room whose only advantage was that little balcony. Her bookshelf was on the wall over the racklike bed, and her bureau was shoved into a niche on the opposite wall. Posters of Eglevsky, Maria Tallchief and the Ballet Russe covered that wall opposite the bed; staring at us all through the short nights of muggy pa.s.sion and unsatisfied demands.

In that room I grew to know Stephie more intimately than I had ever known anyone before. Not merely her body, which she gave rarely, unsatisfactorily, painfully. But her mind, and that commodity I had always thought was folly, her soul. But Stephie had a soul, one that at first confused me and invited attention; one that soon exposed itself for what it was--the soul of a demon.

Her thoughts were dark, strange, troubled.

She dwelled on facets of life that I had never even known existed. One night she sat smoking, her legs folded under her, and said: "l saw a boy run over a cat today, with his bike."

I looked up from the book of Jackson Pollock prints we had gone in on together, not really hearing what she had said, but suddenly letting it filter through, and catching meaning from her intention to explain. "Oh?" I said.

"Yes," she explained, "he ran over it lengthwise, and the guts came out of its mouth like a pound of raw hamburger; its eyes were bulged and there was a tire track up its back and through the center of the spilled innards. Ants were--"

"Jeezus, Stephie!" I shouted. "For G.o.d's sake, what the h.e.l.l is the matter with you?" I had a strong stomach, but this clinical attention to morbid detail gagged me.

She shrugged, got up and walked out onto the balcony, still smoking. She looked so tiny against the ma.s.sed darkness of Brooklyn at night.

She was a tiny, delicate girl. Tiny. Delicate. Like a cell of botulism.

How had it happened? How had something so pure and innocent and--the word seems alien to me, but somehow appropriate--charming become so demented, so twisted and destructive? Could it have been me ... could it have been that I had taken Stephie from paths she knew, paths that led deeper into the darkness of her own fears and past torments, and tried to lead her on a new path, out of the darkness? Was it that? Or is it preordained that some men will instinctively seek out those women who are worst for them, women who are good with other men but become evil in the hands of the wrong one? It tormented me, it haunted me, as the days went by and we continued to hurt each other in terrible, unnameable ways. Little ways that would have no meaning taken individually, but collectively painted a haunted canvas by Tchelitchew or Max Ernst.

There, existing in a chilly, tormented half-world of metamorphosed loneliness and vague desires, I sought ways to bedevil myself. I went far out of my way to discover trouble, to cultivate it, to urge its flagellant attentions on myself. Perhaps that was it: perhaps it was the smell of desperation and hopelessness on me that had attracted Stephie. Now, later, thinking on it, I have no doubt that a healthy man, someone not seeking the nit-picking of bits of destruction, would have avoided her.

Stephie was a Typhoid Mary, a plague-bearer, and only someone desiring illness would have rubbed up against her.

One night I had a date with her--it was my single night-off from the bookstore; usually I took the subway during the still hours after work; Times Square at three A.M. is another world, filled with weird types and wanderers who will never find their paths out of the darkness; riding to Brooklyn in that peculiarly No-Doz-chilled world was a surrealistic experience--and I had stopped off to buy her a trinket. It was a silver lavaliere; it had only cost a few dollars, but there was always this intense feeling in me that I might break through her wall of strange and disturbing distantness with a word, a gift, a kiss, a gesture. I never did, of course, but the attempts were constantly being made.

I see them now as adolescent attempts to buy her, but at the time I thought they were unselfish. Was this a refusal on my part really to give of myself? Was it perhaps an attempt to gain without offering myself exposed? Did I sense she had the power to cut and hurt?

With the little silver pendant in its nest of cotton, the box tucked into my pocket, I vaulted to the balcony. The doors were locked.

I waited, sitting against the cold night with my back to the French doors, until early morning. I fell asleep that way, and only chance prevented the beat cop from seeing me there like some fetus-positioned cat-burglar. She didn't come home till almost three that afternoon. By then I was so sunk into a waiting stupor that even when she opened the French doors and I fell sidewise, half into her room, I didn't realize she had come back.

Her explanation: she had spent the night talking ballet with the "boys" at one of their co-op apartments; yes, she had known I would be there; no, she hadn't considered it important to phone me or leave a note; if she was gone she a.s.sumed I would leave, ride the long ride back to Manhattan, and be ready to see her another time.

We went for our blood test that week. She had to hold my hand when the doctor took the sample. I was poor, and wrote an uncle of mine in New Mexico, who owned a jewelry store, asking him for a ring. He sent a lovely but inexpensive modern band.

Why? Because it is far better to be lonely with someone than to be lonely alone.

I was frightened of Stephie, I knew it was all wrong, she was killing me by obscure, dangerous degrees, but I needed someone. And in that unfathomable way all those who seek to destroy themselves share, I wanted her. What was worst for me, I needed most. Still, I had no understanding of her; I didn't really know her, and we were both running headlong down that path into the darkness, hand-in-hand, knives in backs.

It was a little like going mad.

We went to an art movie on Lexington Avenue, midtown; a dark and depressing thing that seemed perfectly suited to my being with Stephie. As the weeks had gone by I had started smoking more, my thoughts were strange, devious, my work at the shop hadn't suffered because there wasn't that much imagination needed for it, but I was more easily upset, nastier to customers, shorter with the creeps who sought the clinical s.e.x books; my nights alone were introspective, troubled. We were walking back to the subway on Lexington when we saw a crowd.

Stephie hurried me along and as we came abreast of them Stephie pointed up. Everyone was watching a ledge fifteen floors up. A man was standing there, his hands finger-spread against the sooty brick, his feet half-hanging over the edge.

His eyes held me. Even fifteen floors below him, I could see the whites, gigantic, milky, terrified. He didn't want to jump ... whatever had driven him onto that ledge, he was like me, he was me... he wanted to fight it, but it had driven him there and he was held by it. But he wanted to live.

I glanced at Stephie, started to say something.

Her face.

How can I explain it so it will hold the impact it held for me then? How can I describe the expression of her face, the way she ground her teeth together, the contortion of her tiny features, the almost purple light across her cheekbones, the way her fists were clenched so tightly they went white. She wanted him to jump.

She didn't say a thing. I heard her. She was silent. I heard her!

Jump! she was saying, with her clenched teeth, her fists, that awful purple light playing across her face, Jump! The sight of him tumbling, going down, trying to fly the way falling men do with arms out, twitching. That was what she wanted to see. My throat went as dry as if I had chain-smoked for an hour straight. It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.

I don't remember whether he fell, or was saved, or crawled back inside of his own volition, or whether we simply walked away. I don't remember. It didn't matter; just as what happened to me didn't matter. That guy up there was doomed--if not now, then sometime soon--just as I was. Something was destroying him, and something was destroying me. It didn't matter whether we fell now or later. It didn't matter. It had to happen.

Eight days before we were to go to City Hall--Billy and Stella were to be our witnesses--I learned who Stephie Cook was. I was allowed to discover how deep the layers of rust and decay on her soul were.

Jump!

We had been robbed at the bookstore on Broadway ... or almost. Davey Haieff, the manager of the shop, was a rough number, who called the tourists and perverts who shopped for "different" books in our shop kadodies. We were just at the slack period of the evening, nine o'clock when most of the out-of-towners were free of dinner at the tourist traps and had made the eight-thirty curtain at the theaters ... and we were loafing it.

That was when the four teenagers came in. They were like any other four teenagers you can see cruising Times Square, digging trouble. One of them meandered toward me in the back of the store, keeping his eyes on the showcase filled with Italian stilettos, Samurai swords, Solingen steel hunting knives--the sort of deadly looking but perfectly legal hardware sold to impress the yucks back home. I followed him, noticing that the other three hung around the raised cash register counter behind which Davey waited, watching, always watching everyone in the tiny shop.

"Can I interest you in a knife?" I asked the kid.

He was taller than I, by at least six inches, and the way he wore his T-shirt indicated he worked out on the parallel bars at the PAL gym. He looked more Bronx than Brooklyn; but they all looked pretty much the same, really. "Yeah, how 'bout that thing there." He jabbed a finger at the locked gla.s.s showcase, indicating a sixteen-inch Italian steel clasp-knife.

I grinned. This was my specialty. I could operate one of the clasp-knives by wrist action faster than any switchblade on the market, illegal though they were. We weren't allowed to sell switches or gravity or shake knives, so I had mastered the technique the better to push the merchandise we could sell.

Just as I unlocked the case, the other three made their move. I had the knife in my hand as one of them came up with an ironwood billy club and took a swing at Davey. I saw the action from the corner of my eye, and it was like a Mack Sennett comedy, sped up fifty-times normal.

Davey reached down, in and out, and up all in one fluid motion, and belted two of them with the rubber hose he kept there for just that purpose. They went down instantly, one of them open above the eyebrow with a five-inch gash that blinded him with his own blood. The third one bolted into the street.

My customer stood where he was. He had to, I had whipped open the knife and jammed it against his windpipe as I saw Davey move. It made a tiny indentation in the flesh, and he was still standing, staring wide-eyed at it when the cops came to take them away.

Davey told me to take the rest of the evening off.

I took the subway to Brooklyn and arrived just before ten o'clock--six hours earlier than usual. The balcony was vaulted, the doors thrown open and I bounded into the room carrying two popsicles, like something out of The Thief of Bagdad.

Stephie wasn't alone. She wasn't in bed, which made it worse.

A man would have driven me insane, I would have probably killed them both, so keyed up with violence from the action in the shop was I, but it wasn't a man. I was stopped, and stopped and stopped and stared and felt myself saying things to myself. Don't ask what I was saying, I have no idea.

Two girls lay on the bed, sucking on each other. Stephie sat naked, cross-legged on the floor, watching them with that same terrible expression she had had while watching the man on the ledge.

One of the girls on the bed lay perfectly still as I came bursting in, playing possum, not stirring to draw attention. The other looked up and went white, deathly pale, the way I had written it a million times in my inadequate stories that avoided true confessions like this because they were improbable, written for sillya.s.s housewives who would swallow only improbability. And I was part of it. They stared at me, all three of them. The first girl blankly, the second with fear--a puffy moth of a girl whose suntanned body seemed gross and fleshy to me--and Stephie, defiantly.

She wore a wedding ring. But not mine.

She wore a ring all right. On her little finger, left hand. A wedding ring--a lesbian's token of love and commitment. I was ill.

Had she been on the bed with one of them, it might have made some difference, then there would have been a reason, I could have rationalized. But watching...

I dropped the ridiculous popsicles and stumbled toward them, thinking I was moving back, away from them. The pudgy girl leaped off the bed, glistening with sweat, and flattened like a sack of brown sugar against the wall. "Don't hit me," she cried, "I can't stand pain ... don't hit me!"

Stephie recrossed her legs in front of her, and her eyes were cold, dead, like a pair of gravestones. It became clear so suddenly, as I saw those eyes empty now of their ghoulish pleasure, that I felt a hurling, a dropping, a heaving in my stomach. She had hit me solidly. She had used me as a cover, would have gone to the extreme of marrying me to cover. Why? What did I care? Her family, her job, the world in general, what did it matter? She had used me, and I was used up.

Then she tinkled. She let loose a Snow White giggle that sliced like a butcher's blade right through my stumbling consciousness and drained me of all energy.

Watching.

She had been watching.

The one lying there still. Still as dead. If I lie silently here no one will hurt me. Fright. The room stank of it.

The other, against the wall. Terrified. Of me. The gross, hurting man. And my Stephie ... watching.

Watching it all. Smiling endlessly.

Somehow, I got out of there, and back to Manhattan. Somehow.

Did I go by subway ... was it underground or was I some sort of dead man on the way to the river Styx? Did I think about it, did I see that scene again and again? I don't know. I can't remember. Never!

I didn't know what to do.

I found Aggie and managed to tell it all, what I could tell, so driven out of my mind was I at the thought of her watching them on that bed ... those d.y.k.es! He gave me a drink, and then called a girl he knew. She was a West Indian and she smelled of oregano. It couldn't have been worse.

Oddly, I kept feeling the doctor's needle in my arm, drawing the blood for the test, all through it. Everything was shaded in crimson.

I never saw Stephie again. The ultimate cliche for the ultimate hackneyed pain-story. Unfortunately, life is not a magazine story, with a sharp ending and a clear-cut moral; it drags on, there are sloppy ends, little after-touches, occasional phone calls, taperings-off that dull the edges of the most magnificent of tragedies. So it was with my Stephie, my woman-child and her Arctic chill. I later heard she had contracted tuberculosis and was suffering with it rather than asking her parents in New Jersey for money to see a doctor. Some made it n.o.bility, I saw it as empty bravado, a further step on the path to self-destruction Stephie had chosen all-knowing.

I missed her. Terribly. I was alone, once more, and now I was alone with the knowledge that Stephie and I were very much alike; the victims of the world; too weak to win.

I didn't even have the satisfaction of knowing I could use it as story-material. It wouldn't play; it was too much a tearjerker, too obviously probable to be a story; reality often stinks.

In any case-- Don't believe them. It's possible. You can keep a good man down.

--New York City and Chicago, 1960

BATTLE WITHOUT BANNERS.

When they first broke out of the machine shop, holding the guards before them, screwdrivers sharp and deadly against white-cloth backs covering streaks of yellow, they made for the South Tower, and took it without death. One of the hostage guards tried to break free, however, in the subsequent scuffle to liberate the machine gun from its gimbals and tracks, and Simon Rubin was forced to use the screwdriver on the man. They threw the body from the Tower as an example to the remaining three hostages, and had no further difficulties. In fact, the object lesson was so successful that it was the guards themselves that carried the c.u.mbersome machine gun, with all its belts of ammunition, back down into the yard. The Tower was an insecure defensive position, interlocked as it was with the other three Towers and the sniping positions on the roofs of the main buildings. They had decided in advance to make it back down into the yard and there, with backs to the wall itself, to take their stand for as long as it took the second group to blow the gate.

Construction on the new drainage system had been underway for only two days, and the great sheets of corrugated sheet metal, the sandbags, the picks and shovels, all were stacked under guard near the wall. They were forced to gun down the man on duty to get into the shelter of the piles of material, but it didn't matter either way--if he lived or died--because they were going to take as many with them as they could, breakout or not.

n.i.g.g.e.r Joe and Don Karpinsky set up the big-barreled machine gun and braced its sides as well as fore and aft with sandbags, digging it in so the recoil would not affect its efficiency.

Gyp Williams, who had engineered the break, took up a solid rifleman's position, flat out on his belly with legs spread and toes pointed out, the machine rifle braced against right shoulder and the left elbow dug deep into the brown earth of the yard, supporting the tripod grip. His brown eyes set deep into his black face were roaming things as he covered the wide expanse of the yard, waiting for the first a.s.sault; it had to come; he was the readiest ever.

Lew Steiner and the kid they called Chocolate made up the rest of the skirmish team, and they were busily unloading the homemade grenades and black powder bombs from the cotton batting of the insulated box ... when the first a.s.sault broke out of cover around the far wall of the Administration Building.

They came as a wave of white-winged doves, the ivory of their uniforms blazing against the hard cold light of the early morning. First came the sprayers, pocking the ground with little upbursts of dirt, and shredding the morning silence with the noise of their grease guns. Then a row of riflemen, and behind them half a dozen longarms with grenades, if needed.

"Away, they comin'!" Gyp Williams snapped over his shoulder. "Dig, babies!" and he got off the first burst of the defense, into their middle. Three of the grease gunners went down, legs everywhichway and guns tossed off like refuse, clattering and still chattering on automatic fire, pelting the wall with wasted lead. The second wave faltered an instant, and in that s.n.a.t.c.h of time n.i.g.g.e.r Joe fed the belts to Karpinsky, who swung the big weapon back and forth, in even arcs, cutting them down right across the bellies. None of the riflemen made it a fifth of the distance across the empty yard. One of them went down kicking, and Karpinsky took him out on the next, lowered, arc.

"I am," Lew Steiner screamed, arching high to toss a black powder bomb, "home free!" It hit and exploded fifteen yards too short, but the effect was marvelous. The longarms caught up short and tried to turn.