Riverworld and Other Stories

  “For God’s sakes, shut up!” Brass roared out of his window. “I’m a poet! I can’t write poetry while all this talk of money, which I don’t have, anyway, is making the welkin ring!”

  Mrs. Samantha Gold saw his mouth moving in the gold of his beard. She smiled and waved. Time was when she wasn’t so friendly. The day she looked out of her third-story window into the second-story window of the apartment building next door and saw a bearded man with long hair, wearing a hat, and reading a tall thick book, she thought he was a Talmudic scholar or a rabbi or both.

  It is a well-known fact that no Talmudic scholars or rabbis live north of Olympic Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It is not good for them, they can’t pay the high rents, and they cause embarrassing pauses in conversations. If caught in town on any day but Saturday, they are scourged back to Olympic and southwards with credit cards, which have sharp cutting edges.

  Mrs. Gold called the city police the first time she saw Brass. But the investigating officer reported that Brass had no car. He could not be persecuted with overtime parking tickets or a summons for running red lights. The officer would, however, watch Brass closely. There was always the chance he would jaywalk.

  The report ended up on the desk of the Gentile mayor. In a speech to the Chamber of Commerce, he revealed that there were people in the city who paid less than $400 a month rent. Some were not paying over $150 a month.

  “I’m all for the depressed and underprivileged, as you well know!” the mayor thundered. “But that kind of people must get out! They’re ruining the image of Beverly Hills!”

  Wild applause.

  Mrs. Samantha Gold talked to the cop and found out that Brass was not a rabbi. He wasn’t even Jewish.

  “Time was when you could identify a person by the way he looked,” she said. “Everything’s mixed up now. Even the young businessmen sometimes look like hippies.”

  She added, when the cop eyed her, “But well-dressed hippies with expensive clothes. And clean.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Take me. Irish Catholic, and yet my name’s Oliver Francis Cromwell.”

  Cromwell was not eyeing her because of her near-subversive remarks. She was just over thirty, and, if she would lose fifteen pounds, she could have worked as a double for Sophia Loren.

  Mrs. Gold, two months before, had looked more like Sophie Tucker or Sidney Greenstreet. She was of the Conservative faith, but, where others were addicted to whiskey or cigarettes or heroin, she lusted after pork on rye with mushroom gravy. Her husband locked her in the bedroom and slipped her a restricted but well-balanced and Mosaically correct breakfast through a small door originally installed for the dog. At noon the maid pushed through another tray. At evening her husband let her out of the bedroom but supervised her while she cooked.

  Nevertheless, she sometimes succeeded in her smuggling. Once, her husband unexpectedly came home at noon, and she had to put the sandwich and gravy in a plastic container and lower it outside the window on a string.

  Brass, the golden poet, hungry because he had spent his month’s money on rent and Old Turkey, took the sandwich and gravy and ate them.

  Mrs. Gold’s husband, searching for hidden food, discovered the string, but he could prove nothing. The next day, Mrs. Gold found that she had lost enough weight to squeeze through the dog door. She went to Brass’s apartment to thank him for having saved her and also to demand the sandwich back. And they fell in love.

  Samantha Gold read much because she had little else to do. She knew, or thought she knew, why she was in love with Brass. He resembled her father when he was young, though Brass was much taller. There were other reasons, of course. He was a poet. And she was even more thrilled because he was a cowboy, though he soon set her straight on that.

  There were obstacles to their romance. He was a Gentile, and he drank heavily. Mrs. Gold told him that his alcoholism was, however, no big problem for her. Her father hit the bottle more than was good for him.

  Brass said, “My drinking is no problem for me, either, except when I’m broke.”

  “You sure don’t look like a Gentile,” Samantha said, sitting on a chair and looking at him with the huge Loren-type eyes.

  “Madame, I am not a Gentile,” he said. “I’m a Mormon. You’re the Gentile, since all non-Mormons are Gentiles. Actually, I’m a jack Mormon, so, in a sense, you’re right. I’ve fallen from grace, which also happens to be the name of my ex-wife. It’s a statistical fact that the rate of alcoholism among Mormons is even lower than among devout Jews. But when a Mormon does drink, he dives deeper into the golden sea of alcohol—to quote Bacchylides—than anyone else, never emerging with the pearl of great price, of course.

  “It’s a case of overcompensation, I suppose. But I am a poet. Therefore, it is an aesthetic, and perhaps a theological, obligation for me to drink. I’ll thank you to leave me now. I feel a poem coming on.”

  “Robert Graves says that every true poet worships at the feet of the Goddess,” she said. “Is that what you mean by theological?”

  She looked and felt at that moment like an Athena, although not as slim as she would have liked it, and she knew it. He knew it, too, because he got down on his knees, put his hands on her knees, and looked up at her while he recited an extemporaneous sonnet. She liked the poem, and she loved the feel of his hands on her knees, which had been untouched by male hands for months. But she didn’t like the odor of booze, even though it was very expensive booze. However, when she was offered a ham sandwich, she decided she could tolerate Old Turkey.

  Between bites, she said, “I would’ve thought you’d go to Haight-Ashbury or West Venice or Mount Shasta. This is a strange place for a practically penniless poet.”

  “This is a strange place for anybody,” he said. He was still glowing with the sparks of his poetry and the comets ejected by his gonads. “I wanted to go someplace nobody else would think of going to, a really alien place for a poet. So I’m here.”

  His grandfather had left him a small sum which was parceled out in monthly lumps by lawyers. His grandfather had deplored Brass’ fall from grace, but he had admired him because he refused to kiss any man’s boots, manured or clean. And Brass was, at least, “a bum with honor,” and “a beard with a stiff neck.” This last phrase delighted Brass.

  “Let’s not talk of money. Let’s talk of love,” he said, getting on his knees again. He looked up past her breasts—like an astronaut staring past the enormous circle of Earth—at the long and lovely Mediterranean face behind the sandwich.

  “Not talk of money?” she said. “This is Beverly Hills. My husband says that money comes first here and love just naturally tags along. Like a shark follows a boat for garbage.”

  Brass winced. His poetry dealt with beauty.

  Samantha finished that sandwich and looked at the refrigerator. Brass sighed and got to his feet and clumped across the bare floor on his high-heeled boots. While she watched him prepare another sandwich, she told him folk tales of Beverly Hills.

  There was Mrs. Miteymaus, who labored for twenty hours before giving birth to a thousand-dollar bill. The Internal Revenue Service agent, clad in mask, gown, and gloves, assisted the obstetrician and deducted 90 percent before the umbilical cord was clipped. Mrs. Miteymaus decided to ship the baby off to an orphanage and claim a deduction for charity. The baby was eventually adopted by a bank and thereafter yielded 8.1 percent interest. News of this reached Mrs. Miteymaus through a malicious friend (the adjective was redundant, Samantha admitted), causing Mrs. Miteymaus such grief that she swore never again to have sexual intercourse, even with her husband.

  Brass asked her if the tale was true that Beverly Hills was the only city in the world with so many cops they had to be pulled off the streets during rush hours to keep them from hindering the flow of traffic.

  Samantha replied that that folk tale was true.

  Uninhibited by her third sandwich, she told him of her personal life and some of its sorrows. Once, she thought she was losin
g her husband’s love because she was getting too fat. But now that she had slimmed down, relatively speaking, she still was getting no loving from him. Irving was stepping out on her with a shicksa who drank.

  “The world is one fester of hate and betrayal and grief,” he said. “Even when I used to stand night watch on the lone prairie, with only the horses and me and the moon, the wind brought sounds and smells of hate and betrayal and grief and of a rotting world from hundreds of miles away.

  “I could hear sobbing and screaming and smell gasoline and dead robins. Then I’d put my nose down into my horse’s mane and breathe deeply. It was good honest beautiful horse sweat. Few smells are lovelier, I can tell you.”

  Mrs. Gold put her ham sandwich aside so it would not interfere and bent over and stuck her nose against his chest. The woolen plaid shirt still radiated faint odors of horse.

  “One more washing in detergents with enzymes, and it’ll be gone forever,” he said. “I’ll hate that day.”

  He kissed the back of her neck. She shuddered as if she were a mare into whose flanks spurs had been pressed, and she ate no more of ham that day.

  They continued to meet in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. But the day came when she could no longer slide out on her back through the dog door. She went to the window after a struggle to free herself and signaled Brass. He was sitting at his window with nothing on but his ten-gallon Stetson. He was polishing his boots and composing a poem to the Bitch Goddess. He was also wondering if he should take an oath of chastity for a week or two. The divine spark was cooling off. The Muse liked her worshippers to be horny, but She did not want them to expend all their fire and seed on lesser beings, in this case, Samantha Gold.

  Neither had a telephone available, so she was restricted to waving at him. She did not call out because her neighbors would then have known what was going on—as if they didn’t already know.

  Finally, having found a conjunction of words which would rhyme with “equine,” he opened his eyes. After some mystification, he understood her. The maid had gone to the grocery store and he could come in because the maid usually forgot to lock the door. He dressed and put food and booze in a sack and went over to her apartment. She explained why she couldn’t leave, and after he had quit rolling on the floor and laughing—and smashed the sandwich while doing so—he took the key to her bedroom out of the dresser drawer in Irving’s bedroom.

  Her bedroom was as elegantly middle-class as he had expected. The huge framed photograph of a World War I Zeppelin in flight was something he had not expected. Beside it was a photograph of a young man with a handlebar moustache. He wore the uniform of a German naval officer, circa 1918.

  “My father,” Samantha said.

  “Your father was an airship?”

  “You’ve been drinking again. No, he was a leutnant on a Zeppelin.”

  Brass was intrigued, but he was also impatient to get away before the maid returned. And the consciousness that she was wearing nothing under a thin dress was making him forget his primary fidelity to the Goddess.

  Later, while they were resting in his darkened room, he said, “All right, I’ll meet your father, though I don’t know why he’d be glad to know me.”

  “He’s a poet, too, in a way,” she said. “He’s a lovely old man even if a little odd. I think he’s in love with his big dirigibles. That’s all he wants to talk about, except when he happens to think about the governor. Then he raves and rants and calls him Abdul von Schicklgruber, the Plutocrats’ Pet. I don’t pay any attention to politics; if you can’t make it big in the movies, try something else, I always say. Anyway, Zeppelins are his love. He dreams of them, builds models of them, reads books on them. And I dream of Zeppelins, too, after I’ve visited him. Every Sunday night, those big things sail through my dreams.”

  “I dreamed of my horse the other night,” Brass said. “She’s dead now, hit by a truck two days before I came to Beverly Hills. She had big dark eyes, like yours. Liquid, full of love, and a hunger in them for something I couldn’t ever figure out. Mostly, a horse just wants hay and carrots and water and rest and sugar lumps now and then. But when I looked into those eyes, I knew that tiny brain behind them had its dreams, too. Or maybe they were mirrors for my dreams.”

  She sat up and said, “Your horse’s eyes remind you of mine?”

  “That’s a compliment,” he said. He did not dare tell her the rest of the dream. “When I woke I thought I smelled her sweat, but it wasn’t hers.”

  “Mine?” she said, and she went to the refrigerator.

  “You better lay off,” he said, “or you won’t be able to get back through the front door, let alone the dog door.”

  She was bending over. He could visualize the beautiful dark tail of the mare swishing back and forth.

  Sunday, she told Brass that she had convinced Irving that he had forgotten to lock the bedroom door. She had had to lie because the maid had told him that his wife had left the bedroom. Usually, Irving accompanied her on Sundays on her visits to her father. He did so not because he liked her father or her company but because he wanted to make sure she ate nothing forbidden. But today he had had to attend to business that had suddenly come up.

  “Some business, that shicksa he’s seeing,” she said. “But I’m getting my revenge.”

  She walked out. A few minutes later, Brass followed. He met her on the porch of her father’s house in the most depressed area of Beverly Hills. The house cost a mere $50,000 and would have brought $12,000 in Peoria, Illinois, after effective heating had been installed.

  They found Mr. Goldbeater in the backyard working on a model of his last ship, which had gone down in flames in a raid over England. It was his tour de force model. Thirty feet long, it had four gondolas with gasoline motors that worked and a control gondola in which a small man could fit if he didn’t mind a prenatal position. A big black formée cross, American flag, California state flag, and Star of David were painted on the sides.

  Brass did not comment; he had seen stranger conjunctions.

  The old man looked surprised, but he smiled and pumped Brass’ hand vigorously. They went into the house, which was crowded with smaller models of Zeppelins and dirigibles. The old man insisted on pouring a drink six fingers high, and Brass was not reluctant to accept.

  “Here’s to the return of horses,” Mr. Goldbeater said. “And to the downfall of Abdul von Schicklgruber.”

  “Here’s to the comeback of gasbags,” Brass said, and they drank.

  Samantha surprised both by filling a glass with bourbon.

  “Here’s to the triumph of true love,” she said, and she drank.

  “The waters of Kentucky bring out what lies dearest to our hearts,” Mr. Goldbeater said.

  He looked at his daughter and at Brass.

  “How long have you been laying Samantha?”

  “Papa!”

  “Not long enough,” Brass said, holding out his glass for a refill.

  “A fine figure of a woman,” Mr. Goldbeater said. “And a big heart, if a weak mind. Too good for that schlemiel Irving. And you’re a fine broth of a lad.”

  He drank again and then said, “Irving runs around with a shicksa that drinks daiquiris.”

  He shuddered.

  Samantha sat down and held out her glass for a refill. She hated alcohol, but it was the only anaesthetic handy.

  “Papa, how long have you known?”

  “When you walked in. It was bound to happen, unless you became so fat eating forbidden fruit—if you don’t mind my calling pork on rye that—that a man wouldn’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  Brass looked at the portrait of Samantha’s mother. He knew then where she had gotten her magnificent breasts and why a man who loved Zeppelins would have asked her mother to marry him.

  When he left, Brass was reeling in body and mind. Around him was a cloud, and through it poked the huge nose of a black Zeppelin high over London. This was the recurring dream of old man G
oldbeater.

  ‘In Brass’ apartment, Samantha confessed that that was her recurring dream, too.

  “There’s this black curly cloud miles up, and there’s the city sprawled out on its back below. And then, suddenly, there’s a drone of motors, and this tremendous round-nosed and very long thing slides out of the clouds. It’s great and powerful and also sinister, so sneaky and evil, and it penetrates the air so irresistibly. And it horrifies me, yet attracts me.”

  He looked down at her and said, “Feuer Ein!”

  “Fire one!” she said a moment later, breathing hard. “I didn’t know you knew German?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of movies about submarine warfare,” he said when he had regained his breath. “I don’t know what the krauts said when they ordered bombs dropped. Lässen fallen die Bomben, Dreckkopf?”

  “I have to go home,” she said dreamily. “Or I’ll fall asleep, and Irving will come home, and then you’ll see the bombs drop. Right on me.”

  “I must have had too much bourbon at your father’s,” he said. “Otherwise, why would I be asking you to stay here and let Irving find out about us? So he divorces you? Don’t you love me?”

  “You keep telling me that money isn’t all,” she said. “And I keep telling you that love isn’t all, either. I’m secure with Irving. He isn’t ever going to divorce me unless I get very nasty. He thinks it’d give him a bad name with the wives of his business friends, which means his friends would give him a bad name. He’d find a way to cut me off without a cent. And you …”

  “So what do we do, just continue our affair?”

  “Until it comes to a natural end.”

  “All endings, from the viewpoint of the person being ended, are unnatural,” he said.

  That phrase possessed him; a poem started to come on. He did not even see or hear Samantha leave the room.

  After his poem on the finality of things was cast in its final form, Brass began to think of Samantha again. But he had little time to think and less to act. The absentee landlord, a goy Gentile, sold the apartment building. Two days later, the crane and its giant steel ball and the bulldozer arrived. The tenants threatened to sue, and the landlord, on vacation in Hawaii, said, “Sue me.” He pointed out that he had sent the tenants letters six months ago telling them why and when they must leave. If they had not received them, they should blame the postal service, which was deteriorating along with everything else.