The Essential Ellison Part 10

... beep, bip, boop, blah, bdip, chee chee chee ...

"... a ga.s.s! A real ga.s.s! The joint is laid out like an Arabian Nights kind of thing, with the waitresses in these transparent pants, and all the waiters in pasha turbans, and you lay on your side to eat, and I've got to admit it's hard as h.e.l.l eating laying on your side, which is almost as bad as laying eating on your side heh heh, I swear I don't see how the h.e.l.l they did it in those days, but the food is ab-solutely a ga.s.s, man. They've got this lemon drop soup, they call it kufte abour and it's a g-"

... bdoing, bupp, bupp, beep, bip, chee chee chee ...

"... this compendium of aborted hours and dead-end relationships is of minor concern, for at this moment, this very instant in weightless timeless time, this moment that I am about to describe minutely, all of what I have been through before this will outline itself. If not in particular, then in essence, hindsighted as it were, and what went before will be seen as merely a vapor trail of incidents one like another, building to this moment and ... oh for CHRIST'S sake, Ginny, take your finger out of your nose ..."

... bang bang bang, bding dong, clank, crunch, chee chee chee ...

Technically, it might have been a party. Superficially it resembled a party, with too many people clogged into too small a s.p.a.ce, a dingy loft off Jane Street in the Village. But there was more going on than just that.

The ritual dances of the friendly natives were being staged, both physically-as Simone and her husband's agent did a slow, extremely inept, psychos.e.xual Skate-and emotionally-as Wagner Cole scathingly sliced up the peroxided poetess whose aspirations of literary immediacy were transparently Sat.u.r.day Review-as well as ethnically-minor chittering of who-balled-who in the far corner by the rubber plant. The whole crowd was there, because it was Florence Mahrgren's birthday (wheeee!) and not just a dreamed-up reason for getting together.

Andy Sorokin stood against the fireplace wall, his margarita in his two cupped hands, talking to the whey-faced virgin Andover had found and brought to him. She was talking at him, about a bad movie made from one of his lesser novels.

"I never really thought Karin was completely bad," the virgin was saying. "And when they made the movie, I just did not like the way Lana Turner played the part."

Sorokin stared down at her benignly. She was very short, and large-bosomed. She wore a Rudi Gernreich and it had her pushed all up tight in front; she smiled with her lips but not her teeth. "That's very kind of you to say; there wasn't a great deal in the motion picture version to like, though I thought Frankenheimer's direction was nice."

She answered something totally irrelevant. He bore these conversations neatly or badly, depending on the final objective. In this case, it was getting the short, buxom virgin into the master bedroom; he gave it what charm he could spare.

Around them, like mist encircling a cleared s.p.a.ce, the eye of a storm, the party pitched itself a noticeable degree higher in hysteria. Florence Mahrgren was hoisted on the shoulders of Bernbach & Barker (producers of three current Broadway hits) and carried around the room, as Ray Charles sang in the background, her skirt crumpled about her thighs, Bernbach & Barker improvising obscene happy birthday lyrics to the tune of their current success's theme song. Sorokin felt his gut tightening on him again. It never seemed to change, no matter how many times the people changed. They said the same stupid things, did the same senseless things, postured and played with themselves insipidly. He wanted either to screw the virgin or to get out of the party.

From another corner of the living room someone yelled, "Hey! How about Circle-Insult?" and before Andy could make for the door, the virgin had been snapped up by Andover, and she in turn had clutched his sleeve, and daisy-chain, they careened into the center of the maelstrom.

Circle-Insult. They were already forming the circle, everyone hunkering down cross-legged on the floor. The idle talented and the idle rich and the idle poor and the idle bored playing their games; affectation of innocence, the return to honesty in form-if not in content. Circle-Insult. The women sitting in the preordained postures, careless, nonchalant unawareness of lingerie and pale inner flesh flashed and gone and flashing again, beacons for the wanderers who would home there that night, keeping the coastline firmly in sight, keeping the final berth open to the lost and the needy. Charitable bawds.

They began playing Circle-Insult, the world's easiest game.

Tony Morrow turned to Iris Paine on his right. Tony to Iris: "You're the worst lay I've ever had. You don't move. You just lay there and let a guy, any guy, stick it in, and you whimper. Jeezus, you're a lousy lay."

Iris Paine turned to Gus Diamond on her right. Iris to Gus: "You smell bad. You have really vile bad breath. And you always stand too close when you talk to someone. You stink completely."

Gus Diamond turned to Bill Gardner on his right. Gus to Bill: "I hate n.i.g.g.e.rs, and you are the most obnoxious n.i.g.g.e.r I ever met. You got no natural rhythm, and when we played tennis last weekend I saw you were hung smaller than me so stop trying to horse around with Betty, n.i.g.g.e.r, or you'll find your throat cut!"

Bill Gardner turned to Kathy Dineen on his right. Bill to Kathy: "You always steal outta these parties. One night you stole thirty-five bucks from Bernice's purse, and then split, and they called the cops but they never found out it was you. You're a thief."

Around and around and around. Circle-Insult.

Andy Sorokin stood as much of it as he could, then he rose and left, Andover and Choate trailing all quiet and sadly sober behind him. "You didn't like it," Choate said, following him down the stairs.

"I didn't like it."

"It wasn't the core of reality."

Sorokin smiled. "It wasn't even particularly seamy."

Choate shrugged. "I tried."

"How about The Ninth Circle?" Andover asked.

Sorokin stopped on the stairs, half-turned. "What's that?"

Choate grinned conspiratorially. "It's a joint, you know, a pub, a place." Sorokin nodded silently, bobbed his head and they followed him.

They took him to The Ninth Circle, which was a Village hangout, the way Chumley's had been a hangout when Andy had walked the weary streets. The way Rienzi's had been the spot to go and read The Manchester Guardian on a wooden hang-up pole, and sleep on Davey Rienzi's sandwich-cutting board when the rent was too much to make. The way there was always an in-hole for the colder children who couldn't bear to stand on street corners naked to the night.

And Choate and Andover-again-grew furious.

For the moment they entered the noisy, dingy bar with its inauspicious bullfight posters and sawdusty floor, a tall, skeletal man erupted from a seat tilted back against a wall, and dashed for Sorokin. "Andy! Andy Sorokin!"

It was Sid, big Sid, who had operated the tourist bus dodge on 46th Street and Broadway, in the days when Andy Sorokin had worked selling p.o.r.nography in a bookshop on The Gay White Way. Cadaverously thin Sid, who had been one of the coterie of early-morning residents of Times Square, a closed society of those who were with it, as Andy had been.

Sid made a great fuss over Sorokin, pulling him to a table full of pretty girls and buffalo-moustached pickup men for the pretty girls. They reminisced about the old days before Sorokin had told his bosses at the bookshop to pick it and stick it, he was going to write. Before Sorokin had sold his books, gone in the army, married the women, made it in Hollywood. The old days before.

And the two Yale men grew furious at Punky.

Here they were, determined to show him the raw and pulsing inner heart of the seamy side of Life, and he was a familiar of all the types even they could not get to know. It was frustrating.

"So what are you doing these days?" Andy asked Sid. Sid flip-flopped a deprecatory hand. "Not much. I'm working a couple of hookers, you know, making a buck here and there." Andy grinned.

"Remember the night that chick wandered into the bookstore, and she wanted to get laid, and Freddy Smeigel started hustling her, and she pulled her skirt up to her chin and she was sans pants-"

Sid interrupted, "What pants?"

Andy grinned. "Without."

"Oh, yeah, tell it, g'wan, these guys'd laugh like h.e.l.l."

Sorokin warmed to the story of the tourist woman from Sheboygan, and how they had quickly locked the front door and pulled the blind and she had pulled up her skirt again and let them look. She had done it half a dozen times, like a yo-yo on a string, just say the word and zip up went the dress. So they'd taken her next door into the record shop and Freddy had told her to do it for them, and she had done it zip again. So then they'd taken her around the block, upstairs of the Victoria Theatre, to the stockroom, and everyone had balled her.

Sorokin and Sid laughed over it, and Andover got nearly as furious as Choate. So they started drinking again, trying to resurrect their buzz of earlier that evening. Finally, when Andy had had enough of The Ninth Circle, he suggested they leave, and Sid handed him a card.

It said: LOTTE Call Sid 611 East 101st.

There was a phone number, and it had been scratched off, and another phone number written in, in ball-point. Sid laid an incredibly thin arm around Sorokin's shoulder. "It's one of my hustlers. Fourteen years old. Puerto Rican meat, but too much. You want a little bang, just call me, I'm usually around. On the house. Old times, like that."

Andy grinned, and shoved the card into the pocket of his Harris tweed jacket. "Take care, Sid. Nice seeing you again." And they left.

The two Yale men had an air of determination about them now, a frenzy almost. They would find a seamy side of Life to reveal to this wisea.s.s giant, Sorokin, if they had to scour every grimy garbage can in the greater Manhattan area.

There is an infinitude of grimy garbage cans in the greater Manhattan area. They scoured many of them that night, that morning, winding up finally, stone-drunk, all three of them, in The Dog House Bar, a filth-pit of unspeakable emptiness, deep in the Bowery.

Sorokin sat across from the Yale men. Choate's face was once again blotchy with pink. Andover was giddy.

"Punky, p.u.s.s.ycat." Andover smiled lopsidedly.

"Luv'ya!" Choate sneered. The strain of surliness that lay close to the surface needed only a whisper of wind, a rustle of leaves, a murmur of direction, to come to the top.

"Cop-out," he mumbled. Then he swallowed hard. And his face went puce. "I'm going to whooppee," he mumbled.

His cheeks puffed out. There was a moist sound.

"You talk like a dumb New Yorker story," Andover said, very carefully. "Now if you were a Playboy story, you'd say puke, 'cause it's a realie word, and it has'a lotta reality, huh? And if you were a Kenyon Review story, you'd say vomit, because it has history behind it, roots, so t'speak. And if you were an Esquire story, you'd say upchuck, 'cause they're still trying to con everyone into thinking they're the voice of college. And if you were a National Geographic story-"

Choate slid sidewise in the booth, crab-style, and started out of the booth. "Ergh," he hummed soggily, "toil-ed?" Andy stood to help him.

Supporting Choate with an arm around his waist, and a hand under his armpit, Andy moved back through the crowded, smoke-dense bar, to the battered door marked GENTS. All around them, suddenly, Sorokin realized what a dismal, sinister place The Dog House Bar really was.

In a far corner sat a trio of men in black, all leaning hunkered down in, one next to the other, till they seemed to be one great black gelatinous ma.s.s. A whisp of conversation, like a sibilant ghost, hushed through the instant of silence, from that ma.s.s, to Sorokin: "Man, I gotta get off... gotta take a drive..."

Old junkies.

Back behind the jukebox, which was silent, lights faded, a tired harridan merely waiting for a john to slip a coin into her to show her jaded charms, a man and woman were doing something uncomfortable, the woman straddling the man's lap.

The booths were all filled. Groups of men in heavy sweaters, still feeling November with them, outside the fly-specked windows of the bar. Longsh.o.r.emen, sandhogs, merchant mariners, night truckers; a group of Chinese over from Mott Street; hefty-thighed women cl.u.s.tered about one man with a pack of tarot cards; no one was clean. The smell of swine was in the room. Heavy, changing tone, first garlic, then sweat, then urine, it roiled overhead mixed layer on layer with cigarette and pipe smoke, occasionally clearing sufficiently to smell the acrid aroma of bad marijuana, too many seeds and stems to give any kind of a decent high. And dark. Dim shadows moving here and there, like plankton dark under a sea heavy with silt.

The hum of voices, all somnolent, no hilarity, not a laugh, not a snicker. The subst.i.tute was an occasional grunt, a forced sluggish thudding thrust of ughhh as of someone forcing a bowel movement, and usually from a woman, groped under a table. A place of base relationships.

The word immoral did not even apply. It was akin to the drunk who lay on the floor, propped against the wall between stacks of Coca-Cola cases, eyes wide yet unseeing, hands caked with unidentifiable filth, clothes shapeless and gray. An object of no ident.i.ty, so sunk into alcoholism, addlewitted, that he was what the police called a wetbrain. The term drunk no longer applied, just as the term immoral did not apply. What Sorokin saw here, around him, poised holding Choate, at the door of the toilet, was the final descent of man, to base needs.

He saw the world as it really was, as it was for him, also. The world that was unaffected by ambition or history or social graces. He saw the real side of life, which he had not seen for many years. He saw, G.o.d help him, the seamy side of Life.

The bar was full, down reflecting the length of the streaked backbar mirror. Elbow to elbow as four o'clock curfew raced toward them, bending and drinking, not even talking, getting as much inside as possible before night overtook them and they were sent out into the world alone.

A Negro came up to Sorokin, a heavy-faced Negro with conked reddish hair and bloodshot eyes, character gone from the face and replaced with weary cunning. He held up a pair of red plastic dice. "You go'n th' toilet baby? We got us a few fren'z heah, wanna do a thang'a c.r.a.ps, huh, howzabout?" and he laid his hand on Sorokin's backside. Sorokin stiffened.

"Forget it," he said, thickly. Spade f.a.g, he thought, and was ill. Of all the horrors Whitey has committed against the black man, h.o.m.os.e.xuality is the most perverse.

The black man drew himself up, snorted a word, and went away, smelling strongly of Arrid and Jean Nate. Out of the corner of his eye, Sorokin saw him join another Negro in a side booth for two, and knew they were discussing that d.a.m.n straight whitey muthuh by the toilet door.

And in that instant, Sorokin was satisfied. He knew at last, somehow and inexplicably, he had come of age. Late adolescence, the chase for masculinity, were found and over. He had seen all there was to see, and what he had done since he had left this milieu, was to seek responsibility. To mature was to belong; where you wanted to belong, surely, but to care about a life with continuity. He was suddenly whole. And free.

He opened the door and went through into the filthy bathroom with Choate.

The moment they entered the white-tiled toilet, Choate broke away, and fell down on his knees by the stand-up urinal. He began to vomit heavily, a rhinoceros sound deep from his stomach. Sorokin moved away from him, realizing his own bladder cried for emptying. He entered the stall, letting the swinging door slam hard behind him, and unzipped.

He began to urinate, thinking a codifying series of thoughts about the moment of realization he had just known. He barely heard the sound of the outer door open, the scuff of feet against the tiles, a heavy thwack! of something heavy hitting something yielding, and an almost immediate soft ughhh of gentle pain.

Sorokin, still urinating, peered outside the stall, pushing open the door in idle curiosity.

Two Negroes, the same two from the bar, were working Choate over. One had smashed Choate behind the ear with a white tennis sock full of coins, and Choate was bleeding from the scalp, half-slumped into the vomit-filled urinal. The other one was groping for Choate's wallet.

Sorokin did not think about it. If he had, he would not have done it.

He charged out of the stall, head down, and plunged full-tilt into the Negro with the sockful of silver. It had been the Negro with the red plastic dice. He hit him at full speed, head against chest, hands pushing the black man sharply away from him. The Negro careened backward under the impact of the rush, and his head crashed against the white tiles with a sharp car-door crack. He sank to the floor instantly, eyes closed.

Sorokin turned, just in time to see the glint of honed steel as the second Negro flipped open the straight razor and set himself hard, slashing straight through in a flat arc from left shoulder across his body, like a good tennis player fielding a smash with a tight backhand. The razor silently hummed.

The black man caught Sorokin directly across the belly, and Sorokin felt it only as a tiny paper cut might feel. He plunged forward, still doing a ballet turn from the first Negro, unconscious against the tiles. Ingrained army infighting, learned at no small traumatic cost years before, leaped unbidden into Sorokin's reflexes. (You never forget how to swim, once you've learned. You never forget how to ride a bicycle, once you've learned. You never forget how to lay a woman, once you've learned. You never forget how to kill, once you've learned.) He caught the Negro under the nose with the flat, hard edge of his palm, slamming back and up. The Negro's head whipped up as though on a wire, and he shrieked, high and piercingly, a woman's shriek. His knees buckled inward, and his arms flailed out to the sides. The straight razor went flying and clattered into a corner of the toilet, under the sink. The black man started to fall face-forward, and Sorokin realized he had not for a moment seen the black blood gushing out of the black man's black mouth onto his lower face. A torrent, a river, a dam burst of blood.

The Negro fell past Sorokin like a dropped sandbag. Empty and cold and heavily. He hit on his face, and lay silent, but the smear of blood ran across the white tiles. As he hit, something fell from his vest pocket, and tinkled away.

Sorokin knew the Negro was dead. One for certain, possibly two. He had to get out of there. He looked down, and the razor had cut through his Harris tweed jacket, through his shirt, through his undershirt, and through the top layers of his stomach's soft flesh. He was bleeding profusely, in a constantly welling red line, straight and clean and very, very neat. He touched it, and a bombsh.e.l.l went off in his head as shock set in. His eyes widened, and he said something but did not know what it was.

The thing that had fallen from the smashed Negro's vest winked up at him. It was one of the red plastic dice. It said two. Little white eyes in a clear red box.

Choate was still gasping and vomiting. Sorokin grabbed him up by the back of his jacket, and hauled him toward the door of the toilet. Behind him, neither black man moved, the scene of carnage just as it had been for almost a minute, an hour, forever.

They stumbled out of the toilet together, and Sorokin realized his fly was still open. He did the acceptable thing, and then zipped up his pants. He half-carried Choate toward the table.

Andover was making flirting, obscene gestures at the fat henna-rinsed sow locked in the over-shoulder embrace of a ma.s.sive longsh.o.r.eman, one booth away. Oh, Jesus, Sorokin thought, terror again bubbling up, these two are going to get me killed!

He pulled a ten dollar bill from his side pocket, and threw it down on the table. Then he grabbed Andover and pulled him out of the booth before the sow could complain to her paramour. "Get the coats!" Sorokin ordered him.

Andover grabbed the coats, and with Sorokin hauling both of the drunken Yale men, they stumbled and fell out of The Dog House Bar. Punky wanted very much to get as far away from the scene in the toilet as possible.

For it was entirely probable that death lay stretched out on those filthy white tiles. The final c.r.a.p-out.

The streets were cold and empty at four o'clock November.

The blood would not stop. He had torn up his undershirt, and stuffed it around his middle, but it had done no good. The undershirt was soaked deep brown from rotted blood.

He could not feel his legs, yet they continued to move, one in front of the other, a puppet conditioned to go on moving even when the puppet-master was dead. An improbable concept, a dead puppet-master, but flamingos were fine, as well. And papaya juice, sweet, cold, milky. There was a toy soldier once, that he had buried in the ground behind his parents' garage, in the town where he had been born, very long ago. He would go back and dig it up. When the whistle blew. Or before. If he could.

The two Yale men were drunk out of their skulls. They laughed and t.i.ttered and followed Punky where he led them, which was nowhere, plodding through fresh-fallen snow in the New York streets; he was in shock, and did not know it. The Yale men did not seem to find the dripping slash across Punky's belly very funny, but they didn't talk about it, so it probably didn't matter.

The heavy Harris tweed jacket (a new jacket, recently bought, at Jack Breidbart's, on Sixth Avenue) was what had saved his life. It had absorbed much of the impact of that flat, whistling slash. Straight razor. Clean and true and deadly, made for death, not shaving.

And back there, in that toilet. If you strike a man hard enough under the nose, you will shatter the bridge and drive bone splinters into the brain, killing him instantly. And he will fall past you like a sandbag, like the Negro fell past Punky, so that you must sidestep, a torero who has made his kill. Back there, in that toilet.

And they walked the cold, chill, empty, screaming streets.Punky put his hands in his pockets. He was cold, very cold. He felt a bit of cardboard. He pulled it out. It said: LOTTE Call Sid 611 East 101st.

Punky yelled for a taxi. He yelled and yelled and yelled, his voice rising up spiraling among the icicle-frozen buildings of the Manhattan where he had come to get slashed, where he had come to find his manhood so late in his life, and found it, now dripping out on the white snow of the Manhattan that had always taken him back.

Then there was a taxi, and a long ride uptown, and Sid opening a tenement door, and a gorgeous black-haired Puerto Rican girl who said her name was Lotte, and she was only fourteen, but did someone wanna good fokk?

And time spun hazily by. The two Yale men had gotten laid, and were sleeping on two of the four beds in the apartment. And Sid had sampled his own merchandise, and he was sleeping off a methedrine high on the third bed, and Punky Sorokin was insanely sitting at a kitchen table, at 5:30 in the gray-rising morning, in the four-bed crib of a fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican wh.o.r.e named Lotte, playing gin rummy.

"Knock on six." He grinned boyishly, and bled.

She had serviced the other three, then returned to him and asked, "Wal, you nex', guy. You ready't fokk?"

He had smiled at her in friendliness, totally removed from the world around him, a child in shock, and touched his own bleeding belly. "Did you see I'm bleeding?" he had asked her, very matter-of-factly.

She had looked at it, and they had examined it together with intense care. She had said a few nice things about it, and he had thanked her. But he didn't want to fokk. But, he had asked, did she play gin rummy?

Knock or straight gin, she had wanted to know.