Erick shuddered violently, almost struck dumb by this abuse.
“Oh,” he said timidly, “I … see.”
His stomach was drawn in tight. He felt hot floods of mortification rushing through his body. He dropped the ring back into his pocket, his face flushed darkly. It was the wrong pocket. It had a hole in it and he heard the ring bounce on the floor.
“Ooops,” he said, without thinking. He stooped over awkwardly and picked it up, his fingers shaking. He got a splinter from the floor.
“Uh, okay,” he straightened up, “I guess w-we can’t do business.” Shut up! screamed his brain, shut up!
“I guess not,” snapped the old man, looking back to his ledger with his face curled up disgustedly, “School ring, no less.”
The door thudded shut behind him. His body was shaking with pent-up fury, unexpressed fury.
God damn you! thundered his mind, Why did you take that? That’s all brother, oh, that’s all!! Mentally he twisted from side to side as if looking for some escape, some way to get free of it all, end it all suddenly, sharply.
He walked along quickly, not seeing anything or anybody, caught deep in his humiliation. Oh no, that’s all. Never again. I don’t care if I starve to death. They can throw me in the streets. They can spit on my face by Christ but I’ll never, never go back there. Oh no! I’ll never humble myself to some sneering, stupid little usurer again. I’ll cut my throat first!
Then the thought occurred to him that this decision wouldn’t make the least bit of difference to the old man. The old man could see him ranting and he would only shrug. In his mind he saw the old man shrug, his eye-lids drooping, his mouth a bored, wrinkled line. And the vision made Erick even more furious. He hated and reviled the old man with an all encompassing hatred, hated the old man for the power he held over Erick.
He walked faster and faster. He didn’t care where he was going. His lips were pressed tight and drained of blood. His eyes blazed with a fury of shame. He hated the old man. He could have killed him for what happened. He kept thinking of different ways to destroy him.
That was the first time.
And, he had vowed, the last.
But how quickly the mood passed. How soon did the power of material necessity overshadow all emotion. The rent was still due and his money was gone and he was even hungry now. And in hunger, humiliation was a forgotten sentiment.
To his own mind he could not get a job. He had no skills anyway, except his writing. His college journalism training was forgotten in the mists, it was less than useless.
He couldn’t borrow any more money from Lynn. And he felt ashamed at eating at Lynn’s place so often. Because I still have honor, he told himself. But the alien voice kept injecting the unpleasant suggestion that it was because Lynn no longer raved about his “promise”, his “future”, no longer told him to “keep fighting it”.
Instead, Lynn now said occasionally, “why don’t you give up these college freshman ideas about writing? So you can’t make the grade. All right, you can’t make it. What’s the difference? There’s still room in the world for a man who can’t write deathless prose.” That’s when Erick first began to stiffen. He rarely paid attention to the rest which ran, “There’s all kinds of writing in the world. Why don’t you stop beating your head against a wall and try some of the other kinds.”
And that made him furious. He had to sit there eating Lynn’s food and listening to his criticism. A terrible combination of sensations filled him. He was torn between his desire to eat and his desire to get up, curse Lynn to his face and leave.
He always did the same thing. Made a sorry compromise statement that tried to hark back to their old college philosophy.
“What!” he’d say, “Ride the subways and sway in unison with a stupid, puerile office crowd? Live in some den of nine to five with fools until my brain turns to stone? Be miserable, fawning to idiots?”
And Lynn would get that old look of blasé disgust on his thickening features; thickening from financial success. And that gave Erick fuel for his little fire. Anyway, he rationalized; how many times he forgot; anyway, Lynn has degraded. He’s not the intelligent fellow he was at college. He’s atrophied. Visibly. I don’t hate him, no, he would think in broad-minded hypocrisy, I just don’t care for his mind anymore. He’s become mediocre like the rest. Our paths uncross.
But, inside, he knew very well that he did hate Lynn. For this and for other things. But for this because Lynn showed up his weakness, held it up to glaring light, turned it over in prying fingers until Erick, in self defense, could do nothing else but hate him.
* * * *
A few days after the first attempt at pawning, Erick went to another shop with his cufflinks and his camera. At least he would have the dubious pleasure of not going to the old man’s shop even if it was the one closest to his room.
He was shocked and appalled by the small amount of money he was offered for the camera and the cuff links. His stomach sank as though it had turned to stone suddenly and were falling, falling. At first he flushed angrily and dragged the articles from the counter, his mind made up to leave in a blaze of outraged fury. The man had shrugged, turned away.
Then, halfway to the door, he suddenly realized that he had no other choice. He stood there for a long moment, motionless, hating himself for not stamping out and slamming the door so hard the glass broke.
And, sullenly, hardly speaking a word through the transaction, he returned to the counter and put down his camera and his cuff links. And the man paid him and gave him the pawn tickets. He crumpled the money in his fist, getting little pleasure in treating it thus brutally and scornfully as if, somehow, he were paying it back in physical pain for the mental torture it had caused him.
He then shoved the pawn tickets in his pocket and walked out quickly, heart pounding as violently as it had when German shells had crashed about him and his life was almost lost. He avoided what he believed to be the mocking, insulting eyes of a man who just came in at the door.
* * * *
Next he went to the bookshops on Fourth Avenue.
He sold a few of his books at a time, miserable every time for days after. Suffering a detailed remembrance of the infinite pleasures he had known at college building up his little private library; looking through the books each time before he sold them, holding them in loving hands, recalling the times he had read them, re-reading passages and relishing them, ignoring the knowledge that, if he weren’t about to sell them down the river, he would never even glance at them. He wouldn’t even dust them off.
He sold them.
And, every time he came back to the room with money, he felt a chilled emptiness at the dwindling amount of books. And cherished those that remained. And took hours to decide which ones he’d sell next. He would sit there cross-legged before the bookrack staring at the books, pulling out one at a time, perusing it, stroking it as though it were something well-loved, then replacing it. And he saw himself as holding a child in his lap, kissing and fondling it. Then shrugging his shoulders, slit eyed and carting the child off to the butchers for a fee. Pride and Prejudice was his child. Jane Eyre, U.S.A., The Way of All Flesh. He had loved them all. Sister Carrie and War and Peace and Ulysses and Anna Karenina and The Idiot and The Short Stories of De Maupassant. And the most horrible moment he had felt in years occurred to him when, after selling a group of books, he realized that one of them he had never even read.
They went fast. Ten books, twenty, twenty-five, thirty of them.
And, one morning, he woke up and saw that his book shelves were empty.
He got up and walked slowly over to the shelves, feeling a terrible rising of anguish in himself. Then, without control, he slumped to the floor and ran his hands over the dusty shelves. He tried to remember where each book had been but he couldn’t and the walls shivered through the jelly lenses of his tears.
That afternoon he sold the book shelves.
Because they remind me that my books are g
one, he told himself. Because you want money, said his other mind. Regardless, it was easy for him to carry the shelves through the streets. He had acclimated himself to selling things. He brought them to book stores, to second-hand stores, to pawn shops, without the slightest sense of embarrassment now. He dumped them unceremoniously on the counter and waited in stolid silence for a price to be named. And, even, he got to the point where he could haggle and argue the price up thirty or forty cents.
And, in that way, went his suits and his raincoat and shoes and all the jewelry but his watch and his school ring. Then he even managed to sell his school ring at another shop. Once, when the check for his only story sale came, he took the ring out of hock and wore it all day and night, looking at it, holding it proudly before his eyes as a clear symbol of his return to affluence. From then on things would be different.
The ring went back into hock after three weeks.
Months passed. And, slowly, piece by piece, the familiar things left his room and it grew more and more strange and alien and less and less a place to be lived in. Why don’t you wear your black pin-stripe, Leo would ask. No, I don’t like that suit, it’s funereal, he would answer and want to kick himself for not flaunting the truth, saying—Oh, I hocked the damn thing, you know us starving writers. Ha Ha.
Ha. Ha.
He kept the radio until last.
He couldn’t bear the thought of selling it. When the idea occurred to him first he shuddered and wouldn’t even consider it. The money he’d get for it would never be equal to the pleasure it gave him. He was sure of that. The radio meant so much to him. It filled the hours. If it were taken from him, it would create a horrible, unfillable vacuum in his life.
Every morning when he woke up, he’d turn it on.
And listen to the Sunrise Symphony on station WNYC. He’d lie in bed and look drowsily at the ceiling or half slumber. And listen to the music, letting it seep into his brain like a gentle, early morning tonic.
At eight o’clock he’d turn to station WQXR and listen to the Breakfast Symphony. He’d be almost awake then. His eyes would stay open. The music would flow into him and give him the needed desire to rise and work.
Then, at nine, he’d get up, have some crackers and peanut butter and a glass of water and sit down to write. And, while he wrote, music from WNYC’s Masterwork Hour would help him along. It meant so much that he’d even taken to writing his stories in long hand so the clatter of the typewriter wouldn’t drown out the music.
And music filled his days and padded them and increased their brightness more than anything else could do. It came to him in the drabness of his Third Avenue room and carried him away. It brought a lovelier life and a lovelier world to his ears. He’d never loved and needed music more in his life than he loved and needed it then. It gained more and more importance to him. All consolations failed, they died quickly. But music sustained him, it went on and on, powerful and curative, making him happy when in silence he might have despaired, might have dreamed even more violent thoughts.
How many nights did he lie in the darkness and listen to the beautiful music that all the great minds of centuries had written for him? How many hundreds, thousands of hours did it comfort and uplift him, bearing him easily away on its soaring shoulders? He couldn’t answer.
He sold the radio.
He had to sell it. That’s what he told himself. I have to sell it. What am I supposed to do? Live on music and, finally, eat the radio, tube by tube, wires and all? And, trying to coat his unhappiness with this shade of glib humor, he walked the streets carrying the radio like a child to its doom. It was simple mathematics. Of course. It had to be sold.
It broke his heart.
Whenever he went to Lynn’s place, he listened to symphonic music. Fatelike, it had to happen that just about that time Lynn had gotten in with a Greenwich Village clique of jazzophiles. He’d borrowed a mass of jazz albums and listened to them interminably. Erick could hardly ever listen to classical music.
“Oh boy, have you gone to hell!” he’d storm at Lynn.
“Yes, yes,” Lynn would reply in gauling patience and drift into as careful an intellectual analysis of the jazz as Erick had seen him do with a Mozart string quartet.
And Erick would leave him, casting up a great, hypocritical despair for all lost young intellectuals in the world, struggling to conceive that his outlook was still as broad as ever and that it was Lynn’s that had gone downhill.
Every day, knowing that he was missing wonderful music made him miserable. He’d stop outside record shops and listen to music, sometimes go inside and browse to exhaustion so he could hear music. And he’d grit his teeth when they put on jazz even though he had once liked it. Walk quickly from the shop as though he had been insulted to his face.
And every time he did those things, his alien mind would chuckle and say—Boy are you getting to be a fucking reactionary.
He paid no attention. He knew it was otherwise. That he was the only true liberal and the rest were idiotic pleasure hunters, accepting anything as a measure of the day, enjoying only fads, only passing sensations.
Sometimes, he even stopped by apartment houses when he heard a radio playing symphonic music.
But that didn’t happen much. It happened less and less. He didn’t go out much. And finally, by some strange chemistry of the mind, he got used to not having music in his life. At first it proved a shock when he realized, one day that he wasn’t even missing it. But, in time, he wondered if it had ever mattered at all. And, although he enjoyed music when he did hear it, he convinced himself that he could do without it. And whenever he did, his other mind like the hollow mocking voice of some impossible stage prompter would say—That’s because you’re lower now.
The books were gone and he only read newspapers and magazines with pictures. The music was gone and he only listened to the newscasts and the motley jazz that crept serpentine through the wall from the drunk’s room. The fact that the drunk had never hocked his radio gauled Erick. He drank. Yet he was better off than Erick.
The diet became steady and grey. Newscasts, magazine prose and jazz. It all reflected in his writing, which got worse and worse, drifting farther and farther from reality with every passing day. Conversely as his life grew more and more flattened by drab reality, his prose lost touch entirely with reality. The only factors remaining equal in both his life and his writing were flatness, drabness, and monotony.
Anyway he was used to pawning things. And the day the old man offered him nine dollars for his watch he almost took it. Shocked and hurt, an old wound re-opened, still, he almost took off the watch and pawned it for nine dollars.
That night he dreamed that he had taken the money and that he had met his mother in the street and she had said,
“Erick, you didn’t sell that watch I gave to you, did you? Oh my darling, how could you do it?”
And he had awakened in a cold sweat, shaking helplessly. And stared at the bleak darkness of his room and heard traffic snoring in the street. Reached out to hear music and touched only a bare table top.
16
Outside:
He heard horns.
He heard the shuddering start of the elevated trains.
He heard motors, smooth humming motors and sharp, rattling gagging motors.
He heard voices, stray bits of dialogue floated to his ears.
He heard fenders shaking.
He heard car doors slamming and the bus doors unfolding shut with a gasp of hydraulic melodrama, heard train doors sliding open, sliding shut, the rubberized ends bouncing.
He heard brakes screeching and grabbing, tires gripping, skidding.
He heard chains rattling.
Men shouted. He heard the shouts and wondered who the men were and wondered what they had to shout about.
Inside:
He heard footfalls on the stairs, in hallways, in rooms.
He heard the door thudding in its frame, sucked by a dragging current of wind.
/> He heard other doors opening, closing.
He heard the drunken man in the next room coughing and spitting. He heard the man’s radio blaring out an evening’s report of devious calamities in the world.
He heard the old lady’s cat meowing for milk.
He heard the swallowing in his throat.
And, when all other sounds had died away for seconds at a time, he heard the walls crackling. He heard the house settling by centuries into the earth again.
17
His neck was stiff. It felt as though it were slowly calcifying. He twisted it to try and loosen the knots. The pain shot in waves into his brain.
He had a headache.
It throbbed and burned. There were invisible hands all over his skull. They pressed down calloused palms on his head. They melted together into a steel vise that fit precisely over the contours of his head. Then someone strolled by and started to tighten the vise. They turned the screws blithely.
Something had to give.
Either at the bottom or the top. At the top, his head would pop open, his brains would spout up in an eruption of grey tissue and bloody juices. Or, at the bottom, it would all go down his throat, gorging and choking him. His head kept swelling up into a balloon and then down into a hard, hot lump. It made him dizzy and tiny, gurgling groans rose into his throat.
His bladder was distended again. He reached down and felt it, gasped at the hot shooting pain it caused. He felt his stomach cramping again. The body was not meant to lie motionless like this. The blood slowed down to a lethargic flow, the heartbeat grew sluggish, the process of decay began. Everything stagnated. And he had a bullet in him.
In a fit of pain he pressed down spasmodically on his stomach and felt the hot urine gush out. There wasn’t much. It soaked his underclothes and pants again. It reactivated the smell of the dried-up body wastes. The reek became a cloud that rose up over his body and hung mistlike.
It is the smell of the grave, he thought in revulsion. It smells like the rotting shit of a million horses. It smells like a mountain of decomposed corpses. It smells like an ocean of hot bloody pus. It smells like every desiccated and moldy piece of garbage in the world baked into a pie.