The Essential Ellison Part 11

So they had sat down to play, over the oilclothed kitchen table. He liked Lotte a lot. She was a sweet child, and extremely pretty. All that black hair, done up in a high intricate style.

That went on for a long time, the timeless time of just playing, and the two of them smiling at one another. Until Punky decided to tell her things, and say what he had learned that night, and what was in his heart.

She listened, and was polite. She did not interrupt. And this is what Punky Sorokin said ...

"You see before you a man eaten by worms. Envy, hungers most men don't even smell; l.u.s.t, nameless things I want. To belong, someplace, to say what I have to say before I die, before I waste my years. All of it, pouring out of the tips of my fingers, like blood, needs. You sitthere, and you live day to day and you sleep, get up, go eat, do things. But me, for me, each little thing should have been bigger, each book should have been better, all the riches, all the women, everything I want, just out beyond my reach, tormenting me. And even when I get the gold, when I get the story, when I do the movie, it still isn't what I want, it's something more, something bigger, something perfect. I don't know. I look every way, up and down the world, walking through rooms like something that's waiting for meat to come to it. I can't name it, can't say what it is, where I want it to come from. All I want to do, is do! At the peak of my form, at the fastest pace I can set. Running. Running till I drop. Oh, G.o.d, don't let me die till I've won."

Lotte, the fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican wh.o.r.e, stared at him across her cards. She laid the hand of gin rummy face-down on the kitchen-smelling oilcloth, and did not know what he was raving about. "Y'wanna can owf beer, hanh?"

In it, was all the gentleness, all the caring, all the concern AndyPunky had ever known. All the sweetness, all the warmth of someone who gave a d.a.m.n. He started to cry. From far down inside him, it started up, building, great gasps of power, wrenching sobs. He lowered his head onto his hands, still b.l.o.o.d.y from the wounds that dripped across his middle. He cried m.u.f.fledly, and the girl shrugged. She turned on the radio, and a Latin band was wailing: Vaya!

There were streets and he was alone now. Punky had lost his two Yale men. They had showed him the seamy side of Life. Streets he walked on. At six o'clock in the New York morning. And he saw things. He saw ten things.

He saw a cabdriver sleeping in his front seat.

He saw a candy-maker opening his shop to work.

He saw a dog lifting its leg against a standpipe.

He saw a child in an alley He saw a sun that would not come up behind snow.

He saw an old, tired Negro man collecting cardboard flats behind a grocery store, and he told the old man I'm sorry.

He saw a toy store and smiled.

He saw pinwheels of violent color that cascaded and spun behind his eyes till he fell in the street.

He saw his own feet moving under him, leftrightleft.

He saw pain, red and raw and ugly in his stomach.

But then, somehow, he was in the Village, in front of Olaf Burger's apartment house, so he whistled a little tune, and thought he might go up to say h.e.l.lo. It was six-thirty.

So he went up and looked at the door for a while.

He whistled. It was nice.

Punky pressed the door buzzer. There was no answer. He waited an extremely long time, half-asleep, leaning there against the jamb. Then he pressed the buzzer again, and held it down. Inside the apartment he could hear the distant, m.u.f.fled locust hum of the buzzer. Then a shout. And then footsteps coming toward the door. The door was unlocked, slammed back on the police chain. Olaf's face, blurred by sleep, peering out of wakelessness in fury, glared at him.

"What the h.e.l.l do you want at this-"

and stopped. The eyes widened at sight of all that blood. The door slammed shut, the chain was slipped, and the door opened again. Olaf stared at him, a little sick.

"Jesus Christ, Andy, what happened to you!"

"I fou-I found what I w-was looking for ..."

They stared at each other, helpless.

Punky smiled once, gently, and murmured, "I'm hurt, Olaf, help me ..." and fell sidewise, in through the doorway.

Was lost, and is found. The prodigal returned. Night and awakening. After a night of such length, opening of eyes, and a new awakening. The weavers, Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Atropos. She is the inflexible, who with her shears cuts off the thread of human life spun by Clotho, measured off by Lachesis.

Spun by Punky and his Yale men. Measured off by a fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican wh.o.r.e named Lotte in a four-bed pad in Harlem. Cut off by a Negro h.o.m.os.e.xual in The Dog House Bar in the Bowery.

Hospital white, hospital bright, and blood, instantblood, now downdropping from a bottle, and before the end, just before the end, Punky woke long enough to say, very distinctly "Escape, please ... escape ..." and went away from there.

The doctor on Punky's right turned to the nurse on his right, and said, "He had enough."

Circle-Insult.

A Prayer For No One's Enemy

"Did you get in?" He turned up the transistor. The Supremes were singing Baby Love.

"None'a your d.a.m.n business, man; a gentleman doesn't talk." The other one peeled a third stick of Juicy Fruit and folded it into his mouth. The sugary immediacy of it stood out for a moment, then disappeared into the wad already filling his left cheek.

"Gentleman? s.h.i.t, baby, you're a lotta stuff, but you aren't one of them there." He snapped fingers.

"D'jou check the plugs 'n' points like I said?"

He switched stations, stopped. The Rolling Stones were singing I Can't Get No Satisfaction. "I took it into Cranston's, they said it was in the timing. Twenty-seven bucks."

"Plugs 'n' points."

"Oh, Christ, man, why don't you shine up awreddy. I'm tellin' you what Cranston said. He said it was in the timing, so why d'you keep sayin' plugs 'n' points?"

"Lemme use your comb."

"Use your own comb. You' got scalp ringworm."

"Get stuffed! Lemme use your d.a.m.n comb already!"

He pulled the Swedish aluminum comb out of his hip pocket and pa.s.sed it over. The comb was tapered like a barber's comb. Gum stopped moving for an instant as the other pulled the gray shape through his long brown hair in practiced swirls. He patted his hair and handed the comb back. "y'wanna go up to the Big Boy and get something to eat, clock the action?"

"You gonna fill the tank?"

"Fat chance."

"No, I don't wanna go up to the Big Boy and drive around and around like red skins at the Little Big Horn and see if that dopey-a.s.s chick of yours is up there."

"Well, whaddaya wanna do?"

"I don't wanna go up to the Big Boy and go round and round like General Custer, that's for d.a.m.n sure..."

"I got the picture. Round and round. Ha ha. Very clever. You oughta be in Hollywood-well what the h.e.l.l do you wanna do?"

"You seen what's up at The Coronet?"

"I dunno, what is it?"

"That picture about the Jews in Palestine."

"Who's in it?"

"I dunno, Paul Newman, I think."

"Israel."

"Okay, Israel, you seen it?"

"No, y'wanna see it?"

"Might as well, nothin' else happening around here."

"What time's your old lady come home?"

"She picks my father up at seven."

"That don't answer my question."

"About seven-thirty."

"Let's make it. You got money...?"

"Yeah, for me."

"Jesus, you're a cheap b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I thought I was your tight close buddy?"

"You're a leech, baby."

"Turn off the radio."

"I'm gonna take it with me."

"So you ain't gonna tell me if you screwed Donna, huh?"

"None'a your d.a.m.n business. You wanna tell me if you screwed Patti?"

"Forget it. Plugs 'n' points, you'll see."

"C'mon, we'll miss the first show."

So they went to see the picture about the Jews. The one that was supposed to say a very great deal about the Jews. They were both Gentile, and they had no way of knowing in advance that the picture about the Jews said nothing whatever about the Jews. In Palestine, or Israel, or wherever it was that the Jews were.

It wasn't even a particularly good film, but the exploitation had been cunning, and grosses for the first three days had been rewarding. Detroit. Where they make cars. Where Father Coughlin's Church of the Little Flower reposes in sanctified holiness. Population approximately two million; good people, strong, like peasant stock. Where many good jazz men have started, blowing gigs in small roadhouses. Best barbecued spareribs in the world, at the House of Blue Lights. Detroit. Nice town.

The large Jewish Community had turned out to see the film, and though anyone who had been to Israel, or knew the first thing about how a kibbutz functioned, would have laughed it off the screen, for sheer emotionalism it struck the proper chords. With characteristic Hollywood candor, the film stirred a fierce ethnic pride, pointing out in broad strokes: See, them little yids got guts, too; they can fight when they got to. The movie was in the grand, altogether innocent tradition of cinematic flag-waving. It was recommended by Parents' Magazine and won a Photoplay gold medal as fare for the entire family.

The queue that had lined up to see the film stretched from the ticket booth across the front of the building, past a candy store with a window full of popcorn b.a.l.l.s in half a dozen different flavors, past a laundromat, around a corner and three-quarters of the way down the block.

It was a quiet crowd. People in lines are always a quiet crowd. Arch and Frank were quiet. They waited, with Arch listening to the transistor, and Frank, Frank Amato, smoking and shuffling.

Neither paid much attention to the sound of engines roaring until the three Volkswagens screamed to a halt directly in front of the theater. Then they looked up, as the doors slammed open and out poured a horde of young boys. They were wearing black. Black turtleneck T-shirts, black slacks, black Beatle boots. The only splash of color on them came from the yellow-and-black armbands, and the form of the swastika on the armbands.

Under the staccato directions of a slim Nordic-looking boy with very bright, wet gray eyes, they began to picket the theater, a.s.sembling in drill-formations, carrying signs neatly printed on a hand-press, very st.u.r.dy. The signs said: THIS MOVIE IS COMMUNIST-PRODUCED! BOYCOTT IT!GO BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM! STOP RAPING AMERICA!TRUE AMERICANS SEE THROUGH YOUR LIES!THIS FILM WILL CORRUPT YOUR CHILDREN! BOYCOTT IT!.

and chanting, over and over: "Dirty little Christ-killers, dirty little Christ-killers, dirty little Christ- killers..."

In the queue was a sixty-year-old woman; her name was Lilian Goldbosch.

She had lost her husband Martin, her older son Shimon, and her younger son Avram in the furnaces of Belsen. She had come to America with eight hundred other refugees on a converted cattle boat, from Liverpool, after five years of hopeless wandering across the desolate face of Europe. She had become a naturalized citizen and had found some stature as a buyer for a piece-goods house, but her reaction to the sight of the always remembered swastika was that of the hunted Jewess who had escaped death-only to find loneliness in a new world. Lilian Goldbosch stared wide-eyed at them, overflowing the sidewalk, inundating her eyes and her thoughts and her sudden this moment reality; arrogant in their militant fanaticism; and as one they came back to her-for they had never left her-terror, hatred, rage. Her mind (like a broken clock, whirling, spinning backward in time) sparklike leaped the gap of years, and her tired eyes blazed yellow.

She gave a wretched little scream and hurled herself at the tall blond boy, the leader with the gray eyes.

It was a signal.

The crowd broke. A low animal roar. Men flung themselves forward. Women were jostled, and then joined, without reason or pausing to consider it. The m.u.f.fled sound of souls tom by the sight of stalking (almost goose-stepping) picketers. Before they could stop themselves, the riot was underway.

A burly man in a brown topcoat reached them first. He grabbed the sign from one of the picketers, and with teeth grating behind skinned-back lips, for an instant an animal, hurled it into the gutter. Another man ripped into the center of the group and snapped a fist into the mouth of one of the boys chanting the slogan. The boy flailed backward, arms windmilling, and he went down on one knee. A foot on the end of gray sharkskin trousers-seemingly disembodied-lashed out of the melee. The toe of the shoe took the boy in the groin and thigh. He fell on his back, clutching himself, and they began to stomp him. His body curled inward as they danced their quaint tribal dance on him. If he screamed, it was lost in the roar of the mob.

Also in the queue were two high school boys. Arch; Frank.

They had been alone there, among all those people waiting. But now they were part of a social unit, something was happening. Arch and Frank had fallen back for an instant as others rushed forward; others whose synapses were more quickly triggered by what they saw; but now they found their reactions to the violence around them swift and unthinking. Though they had been brushed aside by men on either side, cursing foully, who had left the line to get at the picketers, now they moved toward the ma.s.s of struggling bodies, still unaware of what was really taking place. It was a bop, and they felt the sting of partic.i.p.ation. But in a moment they had collided with the frantic figure of Lilian Goldbosch, whose nails were raking deep furrows down the cheek of the tall blond boy.

He was braced, legs apart, but did not move as she attacked him.

There was a contained, almost Messianic tranquility about him.

"n.a.z.i! n.a.z.i! Murd'rer!" she was mouthing, almost incomprehensibly: She slipped into Polish and the sounds became garbled with spittle. Her body writhed back and forth as she lashed out again and again at the boy.

Her arms were syncopated machines of hard work, destructive, coming up and down in a rhythm all their own, a rhythm of which she was unaware. His face was badly ripped, yet he did not move against her.

At that moment the two high school boys, faceless, came at the woman, one from either side; they took her by the biceps, holding her, protecting not the blond boy, but the older woman. Her movements went to spastic as she struggled against them frenziedly. "Let me, let go, let-" she struggled against them, flashing them a glance of such madness and hatred that for an instant they felt she must think them part of the picketing group, and then-abruptly-her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted into Frank Amato's grasp.

"Thank you...whoever you are," the blond boy said. He started to move away, back through the rioting mob. It was as though he had wanted to take the woman's abuse; as though his purpose had been to martyr himself, to absorb all the hate and frenzy into his body, like a lightning rod sucking up the power of the heavens. Now he moved.

Arch grabbed him by the sleeve.

"Hold it a minute...hero! Not s' fast!"

The blond boy's mouth began to turn up in an insolent remark, but he caught himself, and instead, with a flowing, completely a.s.sured overhand movement, struck the younger boy's hand from his arm.

"My work's done here."

He turned, then, and cupped his hands to his mouth. A piercing whistle leaped above the crowd noises, and as the signal penetrated down through the mob, the swastika-wearers began to disengage themselves with more ferocity. One picketer kicked out, caught an older man in the shin with the tip of a tightly laced barracks boot, and shoved the man back into the crowd. Another boy jabbed a thumb into his opponent's diaphragm and sent the suddenly wheezing attacker sprawling, cutting himself off from further a.s.sault.