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.
--New York City and Hollywood, 1965
I CURSE THE LESSON AND BLESS THE KNOWLEDGE.
Okay, if you"ll for chrissakes stop leaning over my shoulder, I"ll start it again. How the h.e.l.l do you expect me to write this with you ... supervising the d.a.m.ned thing? Listen, nuisance, one of the reasons I became a writer was because I swore I"d never work under someone"s beady, watchful eyes ever again.
And here you are, telling me I haven"t got it right, that it didn"t happen that way at all. This is fiction, dammit, not real life. Fiction turns the mirror of reality; slightly, so things are seen in a new way.
That"s unfair. I"m not lecturing, I"m merely explaining the way I write so you won"t get all bent out of shape if I alter the facts. This isn"t supposed to be one-for-one. It"s supposed to be a story, and that means things will be changed.
Now I"ll start it again, and you just shut up and stop nuhdzing me. And okay, okay, I won"t call you Patti. (But I still think that"s a super name for the young woman in the story.) Now. For the third time. I begin.
The first thing Katie ever said to me was, "How much is the school paying you to come here to speak today?"
I said, "Eight hundred dollars."
She looked shocked and awe-stricken for a moment and then said, "That"s indecent. n.o.body should make eight hundred dollars just for amusing a bunch of imbeciles for an hour and a half."
"I usually get fifteen hundred," I said.
"You"re kidding. Just for standing up here and reading a couple of stories you wrote?"
"I"ve been told I read very well."
"So what? Dylan Thomas read better than you and he died broke."
"And an alcoholic to boot," I said. "Thank G.o.d I don"t drink."
She started to turn away. The rest of the mob of students pressing in for autographs jammed into the s.p.a.ce she"d vacated. I watched her as she walked away. "Hey!" I yelled. She stopped and turned around. She knew I meant her.
"Are you going with, engaged to, pregnant by, or hung up on?"
She thought about it for a moment. The mob ping-ponged their eyes between us, history in the making, before their very faces. "No," she said. "Why?"
"How"d you like to have a cup of coffee with me?"
The guy who had strolled up beside her looked as if he were about to get an enema with a thermite bomb. He started to take her arm, but she smiled and said, "Okay," and his hand never finished the grab.
She sat down in the first row of the empty auditorium and had a heated conversation with the guy who hadn"t finished the grab. I tried to catch what they were saying, but the fans were babbling in my face and I"ve never been able to listen to two things at once. I signed their books as fast as I could--I was afraid she"d disappear--and as the last straggler moved away, fangs finally removed from my throat, charisma leaking out of my body with a soft hiss, I stepped off the stage and walked over to her.
Yes, I know I"ve made you sound cooler and hipper than you were that day. Yes, I know you went fumfuh fumfuh a lot. But this makes it sound better. So what if you"ve never read Dylan Thomas, what does that matter? Will you just sit back and let me get into this b.l.o.o.d.y thing!
They both stood up. The grabless guy didn"t like me a lot; negative vibes hammered at me like the a.s.sault of noise made by one of those superpimp blacks in mile-hi platform wedgies who carry Radio Shack transistors with hundred and eighty decibel speakers, who boogie up and down Hollywood Boulevard blasting Kiwanis schmucks from Kankakee out of their white socks with the gain up full.
"Mr. Kane," Katie said, indicating the source of the negative emanations, "this is Joey. Joey, this is--"
He knew who I was. He"d sat through my lecture and my readings and had applauded. Until I"d hustled his girl, he"d been a faithful reader of my wonderful prose. I lose more fans that way. He didn"t wait for the introduction, just thrust his hand forward and said, "Howdyado."
We shook. Solemnly. On such dumba.s.s grounds as this did Menelaus and Paris get into one h.e.l.l of a lousy relationship.
Nothing happened for a few seconds. Everyone waited for the Earth to stop jiggling on its axis. As usual, I was the one to move the action. "Well, listen, uh, Joey, it was nice meeting you." I turned to Katie. "Are you ready to go?" She almost gave Joey a look: the muscles in her neck moved slightly: but then she just nodded and said, "Okay." I smiled at Joey, very friendly, very magnanimous, and we walked away from him. I am very grateful blowguns and poisoned darts have never been marketed in this country by Wham-O.
The nameless nuisance in the background tells me I"m lying, and making Joey look like a jerk. That is true. Even though her affair with Joey was at an end at the time we met, she was still f.u.c.king him occasionally, and though I like to believe I"m very sophisticated about such things, I was born in 1934, which makes me forty-one, and I spent the greater part of my life as a s.e.xist, not knowing I was doing anything wrong, and though I"ve had the error of my ways pointed out to me by a number of voluble women infinitely smarter and better-adjusted than myself, I cannot deny that the oink of the beast can occasionally be heard in the velvet tones I now affect. (Like an ex-drunk proselytizing for Alcoholics Anonymous, or a reformed head who"s found Jesus, there are few things in this life as dichotomous, neither fish nor fowl, as an apostate male feminist. I try, but it"s Fool"s Gold, and I despise myself for the hypocrisy.) Nonetheless, the truth of the matter is that Joey was a very good guy, and he urged her to have the cup of coffee with me. But I still hated him. He"d had his hands on her for two years, and I was jealous, And it"s my story, dammit!
So we went to Yellowfingers where I ordered with all the aplomb of Gael Greene and Alexis Bespaloff melded into one unis.e.xual gourmet.
"We"ll have the spinach and mushroom salad for two, a sausage, cheese and ratatouille c.r.a.pe for the lady, and I"d like the fried baby and a cup of warm hair," I said, dimpling prettily. Katie broke up, the waitress stared at me with a charming mixture of nausea and loathing. "Make that a Croque Hawaiian and an iced tea," I said hurriedly. "And what would you like to drink?"
"A c.o.ke."
At that instant I saw the future, "the evening spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table." Gray and chill and inevitable. This moment during which I sit here writing it, as it hurtles down on me; I saw it then.
In a few minutes I would discover that Katie was eighteen, and I would discover that I was forty, nearly forty-one, she nearly nineteen, and she didn"t even have to tell me how it was going to end. d.a.m.n you, Nabokov!
"Bring the lady a Coca-Cola," I said, and knocked my silverware into my lap trying to pull loose the napkin.
(It was too like that! Shut up and leave me alone; I feel like s.h.i.t. Let me write, woman!) The lunch went well. I snowed her like crazy. I was by turns serious, clever, amusing, controversial, urbane and Huck Finn. Her eyes were mostly green. Sometimes blue. Her hair fell over one side of her forehead in a soft sweep that paralyzed me.
I told her I was putting the make on her. She said, "You are?" She wasn"t being coy, she simply didn"t know that was what was happening. Lesson one for the old man trying to play graba.s.s with (what the nuisance b.i.t.c.hily calls) "young stuff" (when she"s trying to bug me): they don"t do it that way these days. They are free--they a.s.sure me they"re free. They just seem to raise invisible antennae and the libidinous message pulses off them. And in some marvelous, thaumaturgical progression of events without time or measure, like a fast wipe in a Chabrol film, pow! there they are in bed together, free and libidinous, everybody o.r.g.a.s.ming just the way Alex Comfort would have it, no effort, no hangups, no groping and no seduction. In the sweet and amoral world of the children there is no stalking, no hunting, no hustling; just the act, final and total and contained, as Merwin puts it, "one tone both pure and entire floating in the silence of the egg, at the same pitch as the silence."
I have no idea what I was thinking. It had been just another pain-in-the-a.s.s speaking engagement; Price Junior College, an agro school that got confused and wound up with a bedroom-community commuter day-care babysitting population of twenty-five thousand acne-festooned urchins taking dingbat cla.s.ses in Science Fiction, Artificial Flowers I, Bowling, Inert Gas Welding and Current Events in the Arts (which, so help me, Amen-Ra, turns out to be a course in how to be a good audience). Because it is essentially a free tuition college for state residents--$6.50 per semester for students carrying 6 units or more, $2.50 for schmucks handling under 6 units--it is a refuge for post-p.u.b.erty illiterates who would better serve the commonweal if they were out planting Ponderosa Pines in an effort to stem the floodtide of concrete threatening to pave over the entire state.
If, from these utterly objective and well-mannered remarks you get the impression that I have very little use for young girls, I am content in the knowledge that I absorbed Lord Alfred Korzybski"s theories of General Semantics. I have but nothing to say to young girls. They"re fine to look at, in the way I would look at a case filled with Shang dynasty glazes, but expecting to carry on a conversation with the average teenaged young lady is akin to reading Voltaire to a cage filled with chimpanzees. I"m certain they would feel the same alienation for me. I can live with that knowledge.
For instance ...
Yes, I realize I"m digressing, nuisance! This is what is called background color. It lends depth to a story; it establishes character, motivation. Please! Do you mind?
As I was saying. For instance, one night I had a date with a certifiably mind-blowing, color-coded, lathe-turned, rhodium-plated gorgeous. I picked her up and she was wearing an evening dress that, had Lee Harvey Oswald turned around from his position crouched in front of that window in the Texas Schoolbook Depository, 1940 vintage Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano in his mitt, and seen it, with her in it, would have burned out the clown"s eyeb.a.l.l.s and we"d be living in a much better country today. What I"m saying here, if you catch my drift, is that this female was a positive paralyzer.
Visions of sugar plums danced in my steamy gutter of a mind.
We went to The Magic Castle, which is a fornigalactic private club with dining room that specializes in showcasing the craft of the magician. We were carrying our drinks around the many fascinating rooms, and wandered into one where they had an At.w.a.ter-Kent setup that was playing tapes of old time radio. Amos "n" Andy, Jack Armstrong, Lux Presents Hollywood, Gangbusters. And above the radio was a gla.s.s-fronted cabinet in which reposed half a dozen Captain Midnight secret decoder badges. I began enthusing over the nostalgic wonders of the little plastic-and-metal icons, and only paused in my panegyric when I caught the look of total noncomprehension on the face of my Helen of Troy. "Captain Midnight," I said. "He was on the radio in the Forties, when I was a kid. I used to lie on my stomach and listen to the program. It was sponsored by Ovaltine. I had a map of the Pacific Theatre of Operations on the wall. I used to mark the progress of the war with little maptacks with red heads on them." Absolute bewilderment on her face. "The war in the Pacific. Bataan, Corregidor, Saipan, Palau, Wake Island?" Nothing. "V-J Day?" More nothing. "World War II? It was in all the papers. 1941 through 1945."
She looked at me, perfection in every line and tremble, holding the Remy Martin of l.u.s.t in the crystal snifters of her eyes, and she said, "World War II? I was born in nineteen--" and she named the year that coincided exactly with the date of the fire-bombing of my third marriage. I computed rapidly and came up with her age as not quite seventeen. I hastily ran the numbers through my terrified mind a second time and, even allowing for a recent birthday on her part, I was still in deep trouble. I removed the stinger from her paw very gingerly, smiled my brightest, and said, "It"s time to go home now, dear." Fifteen minutes later she was inside her own home, safe and unsullied. Christ, I could have been arrested just for what I was thinking!
All of which brings me back to Katie, who was eighteen, and who was the exception to my loathing of young women that proved absolutely nothing. I was bananas over her from the git-go.
All of which totals up to make the point that we talked to each other. I got answers. Good answers. A marvel, this Katie. I didn"t want to let her get away.
What do you mean: what impressed me most about you? The size of your t.i.ts, what do you think?
Don"t hit me, I"m a sick man. I was only kidding, for G.o.d"s sake!
All kinds of things impressed me. That look on your face like a depraved munchkin. The dumb imitations of Lily Tomlin you do. The word you made up for the feel of velvet against skin, smoooodgee. And what the h.e.l.l do you think you"re doing now? You"re not going to put up that d.a.m.ned Christmas tree in here while I"m working? Can"t you keep an eye on me from the living room? Oh, boy. Okay, okay, but if you make a sound I"ll do a Jose Greco on your head.
I didn"t want to let her get away. I knew I had to solidify the thing. I told her I had a few interesting errands to run, and did she want to come along before I returned her to Price and the parking lot where she"d left her car? She said okay, we finished eating, and left Yellowfingers.
She accompanied me to the post office to buy stamps for the office; to the hardware store to buy a half dozen packages of gopher ga.s.sers as weaponry in my losing battle against the carnivorous rodents systematically gnawing my lawn and flowers to death; to the record shop to pick up the new sides by The Spinners and Grover Washington, Jr. And then I purposely made a detour through Bullock"s Fashion Square so we could hit the bookstore. And there, right in front, between E. L. Doctorow"s sensational RAGTIME and Rod McKuen"s SUCK UP THE COOL (or whatever), right on the front table, was a stack of my new book with my name in bright red letters. THOMAS KIRLIN KANE. "Oh, that"s my new book," I said offhandedly, walking past the table as if it were a matter of absolutely no consequence. I wandered back to the "obscure stuff and incunabula" section, pretending to look for a book on quahogs (an edible clam) while surrept.i.tiously watching her reactions as she picked up the book, read the cover, turned the book over, opened it and read the front flap copy, flipped to the back flap and saw my photograph, a stunner by Jill Krementz, showing me in thoughtful contemplation, pipe in mouth, finger up left nostril. She kept looking from the photo to me and back again, like an immigration official trying to penetrate a pa.s.sport disguise, trying to see if Robert Vesco is really dumb enough to try sneaking back into the country posing as Leo Gorcey.
I couldn"t find a book on quahogs. She came walking up beside me. I held my breath. This was the moment. Actually, there is no book on quahogs. "Jesus Christ," she said, "I didn"t realize you were famous."
"You thought I was just another pretty tuchis?"
"I got to your lecture late. The auditorium was full, so I stood at the back with some friends. None of us knew who you were."
"So why"d you come up to talk to me?"
"I thought you were funny."
"Funny? Funny!?! A man stands up there and explains the Ethical Structure of the Universe, the Convoluted Nature of Life in the Cosmos, the Core Dichotomies of Love in a Loveless World ... not to mention how to replace washers in leaking spigots ... and you think he"s funny?"
"I thought you had a nice tuchis, too."
Okay, so you didn"t say that. You were slack-jawed that I was a world-famous author, come on, admit it. All right, you dumbs.h.i.t nuisance, don"t admit it, and will you fer chrissakes stop dropping that tinsel all over the typewriter! It"s making the keys stick.
Then what happened ... ? Oh. Yeah. We went up to my house in the hills. Nice view, straight across the San Fernando Valley, above the smog line. Clear view to the Ventura Freeway and the pall of yellow-gray death produced by the thousand-wheeled worm. When people ask me if I find it hard living in Los Angeles with the smog, I tell them it doesn"t hang where I am; but I have a dandy picture of the stuff killing all the Birchers out there in the Valley. It isn"t a line that goes over very well in Ohio. But then, what can you expect from a state that lets the Kent State killers off without even rapping their pinkies?
She wandered around the house with her mouth hanging idly open. It"s a super house. Like a giant toy shop furnished in Early Berserk. "My G.o.d," she murmured, pa.s.sing me on her way toward the dining room with its posters from the Doug Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad, Errol Flynn Sea Hawk and Gary Cooper Beau Geste on the ceiling, "you really are famous."
She didn"t want to break her date that night with her roommate and another girl friend. I took all three of them out. She mentioned she was going to look for work as a restaurant hostess. I left her at three in the morning, went home and m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed till I went blind. Next morning, early, I called her and suggested she come to work for me, as an a.s.sistant to my office a.s.sistant. She said she didn"t take charity. I said it wasn"t charity, that I needed someone, that the work load was getting too much for Lynne, what with all the fan mail. She said she didn"t believe me. I called Lynne out in Santa Monica. A guy answered. I said, "Let me talk to Lynne." After a second a muggy voice came on. "What time is it?" she asked. I told her. She groaned. "Call Katie," I said, on the verge of hysteria. "Tell her we need her." She wanted to know who Katie was. I told her the whole story. She continued groaning. I badgered her. She held out. I gave her a six dollar a week raise. She called Katie.
That day Katie came to work for me. She didn"t go home. That night we f.u.c.ked. I"d like to say we "made love" or that we "slept together" but the simple, unadorned truth of the matter is that I was blind with Technicolor pa.s.sion and I went at her the way a troop of backpacking Boy Scouts fresh off the Gobi Desert would go at a six-pack of Hostess Twinkies. There is no firm memory anywhere in my head of what happened or how long it went on, though I keep getting a recurring vision of myself hanging upside-down from the shower curtain rod. That can"t possibly be an accurate recollection.
She moved in two days later.
I ingratiated myself with her ex-roommate, her parents, her friends from Price, her hairdresser, and the mechanic who serviced her Fiat, just to be on the safe side.
That first month we went to Denver and Boulder on a lecture tour; I took her to New York (it was her first time out of the state) and turned her loose with my credit cards; and when she came back with a superb silver choker for me, and told me she"d bought it with her own money, I was hopelessly, desperately, irretrievably hooked through the gills. I put the ordering of c.o.kes with duck l"orange out of my mind. This was no kid, this was a woman; the one I"d been waiting for through three scungy marriages and forty-one lonely years. Thus doth Cupid make a.s.sholes of us all.
What"s that? Oh, so I finally said something nice about you. It"s all nice. Except the c.o.ke thing, which I keep harping on because it"s supposed to portend ugliness to come. I know it"s not important. Look out, you"re going to drop that ornament ... oh s.h.i.t, now look at it, all over the floor, and I"m barefoot. Merry Christmas, with me in Mt. Sinai, my foot rotting away from gangrene. No, don"t get the vacuum, it"ll tear it up inside. Get the broom and the dustpan. Nag, nag, nag: it"s my gangrenous foot we"re talking about here!
Okay, where the h.e.l.l was I?