God Geller ran a shaky hand through his short, curly hair. “The peyote cactus,” he answered conversationally. “We have it mailed to us from a nursery in Texas. It’s illegal in California, you know. I used to blast off on it when I was in Hollywood. You know I was in one of the Bowery Boys movies, don’t you—”
God Geller had once hitchhiked as far West as the Napa Valley where he had worked for two months hauling feed bags on a dude ranch. He had come back to astound his friends in New York with tales of his sexual prowess among the starlets, and his modicum of success in the cinema. He was paranoid.
“—the Indians have a religion based on the peyote. First you strip off the spines and the bark around the roots, and you cut them up, and boil them down into a tea. The stuff is too bitter otherwise.”
“Is it really that bad?” one of the girls asked, her young face lit with awe.
God Geller made a steeple with his fingers, and pointed the edifice at her. “I can tell you how bad it is. When you drink it, you have to cut it with Hawaiian punch or tomato juice, and toss it off real quick, otherwise you’ll barf right then. Your stomach can’t hold it down for very long, maybe a half hour.
“I’ve been able to keep it down over an hour before I vomited it back up!” he chimed proudly. “But that’s enough time for the stuff to saturate the lining of your stomach, and then boo-dow, it’s like you were a God or something!”
A chemistry major, a girl with freckles and a large nose supporting horn-rimmed glasses, interrupted his panegyric. “What does the peyote cactus look like?”
God Geller looked at her with annoyance. This was the only one he considered a dog. He had been trying to impress the others. He answered her sharply, “The biggest is about the size of a fist, the smallest like a walnut. The thing looks like a mushroom head without a stalk; it’s a root like a sweet potato.”
He turned back to the good-lookers who hung on his every word, dropping his hand to the knee of one sophomore with large breasts.
“It like heightens your senses,” he confided. “You see everything clearer, hear everything better, you just naturally dig more. The neons in the street look like little jewels, everything is better, it’s just a great kick, if you can stomach the ghast of the taste.”
“That bad, huh?” asked the sophomore. He moved his hand under her skirt slightly.
“Yeah, it’ll make you puke every time. After a while you kind of build up a tolerance. It’s worth it when you’ve been up on it for a few days, though. Great!”
He stood up and moved out of the room with her, into the darkened hallway. He had never sampled peyote; he had read Huxley on the subject. But the sophomore had large breasts. It was an opener.
The Chem major was jotting notes in a pocket notebook.
The party was swinging, everybody was digging. Everybody but Spoof.
Spoof was feeling down. The party was a flake.
There was another bang on the door, and Spoof rolled over on his stomach. He was lying on a Mexican shawl stretched out near the dead fireplace. Not more of these deadbeat creeps, he thought. What we have to put up with just to pay off the goddam rent.
Floormat opened the door, and Roger “Teddy Bear” Sims stood there with a girl on his arm. One of the button-down boobs let out a low, long, two-note whistle, and Spoof rolled over quickly. She was fantastic.
It wasn’t anything simple about her; it was more the overall effect. The moment she walked in ahead of Teddy Bear, her feet in their high heels carefully placed on the tilting floorboards, she was Irish to him. Whatever her name might be, she was simply Irish.
Spoof leaped up, his image passing rapidly across the now-peeling mirror standing at the side of the fireplace. It was a clever image, full of Machiavellian undertones; his eyes set deep and brown under his thick eyebrows, the planes of his gaunt face catching light and releasing it in a panoply of shadows. He wore a black walnut-colored crewneck sweater over a white shirt, and a pair of oatmeal-colored corduroy slacks that just lapped at the tops of his soft doeskin boots. He looked clean, and yet there was a Northern desire in his face. The look of the Visigoth and the Hun was there.
He was a writer with great talent and no drive. He lazed in the backwaters of New York, mouthing his philosophies and scrawling his sentiments in loose-leaf binders that might not ever get compiled into The Novel of Outrage.
But right now, as he stood up abruptly, he was a man, and what had come through the door was Irish; for him, perhaps for others, but especially for him, a sex symbol. This was Woman, and he had the scent.
Teddy Bear had been mobbed by all the unattached men in the place, all clamoring for an introduction.
Spoof stood near the fireplace, watching her face bobbing between their heads, waiting for the glance he knew would come, and when it did, she had been staring at him a long moment before he even realized it. “Irish” he said, loud enough for her to hear, because she was expecting it; but not loud enough for the others to make out.
She smiled that gamine smile, and they were mating, right then. Right then, they were doing it with their eyes.
Finally, he elbowed through them, said a vague excuse us to Teddy Bear, who worked for Pillsbury as a clerk and took his meager hedonism on weekends, and rescued the girl from the horde. They went out through the living room, into the hall, where he yanked open the door, and they passed through. Floormat, whose love was a rotting rose clutched between her teeth, watched them go with sorrow and a sour stomach.
Down the hall there was yet another flight of steps. He led her up, like a leaf borne unresisting, fatalistically, on a south wind. The trapdoor to the roof was easily thrown back, and it was only late summer.
Time of darkness.
Time of passion.
When they came down, she was his, and the party had subsided into mixed apathy and drunkenness. God Geller was under the dirty sheets with the sophomore, while the Chem major continued taking notes. The button-down boobs, each having made his try with the Salamander as a last resort, had noisily exited, damning Bohemians, and making plans for the White House.
Her name had been Lois Bishop when she had gone up that dismal flight of stairs; now, with tar stains on the back of her pencil skirt, her name was Irish, for all time.
The second time, under a bridge in Central Park, far uptown, she told him she had been a virgin the first time. He looked at her quizzically, and there was disbelief on his darkly handsome face. She recognized it for what she thought was pity, and soothed him with the information that a water bucket, at the age of twelve, had preceded him. But she had been a virgin.
The third time, at Valhalla, in the monstrous bed with its stiff, circular-stained sheets, she confided she was a Catholic. It annoyed him; he was a renegade Jew with no religion whatsoever. She toyed with the idea of converting; he ignored her.
The fourth time was a hurried thing, a demand made on her lunch hour that she paid simply because it was him, and she did hate the office and its eternally clacking typewriters—while this escape route seemed wide open.
The fifth time she told him about her parents in the Bronx. They lay side by side in the $3 hotel room in the hotel without a name, and she told him about her parents, and her kid brother, and the distance she had to walk each day to grab a bus to the subway station. She told him of seasons in Kansas City and the hard times and how her father had said New York was a jungle, but there were always bananas if nothing else in a jungle.
The sixth time she told him she was pregnant.
He laughed and went to sleep.
She had the baby on Riverside Drive, in the park, late at night, and left it head-down in a paper bag behind the stone wall bordering the sidewalk. For several months, since she had gotten large, she had lived in a cheap room in a residential hotel catering mostly to poor Puerto Ricans fresh in the city, and impecunious students at Columbia. She had used the name Mrs. Morris Walnack.
She had known a Morris Walnack in Kansas City when she had be
en a child.
Spoof had not called in three months, but she sent him a short note telling him what had happened.
He invited her to a party.
It was a bring-a-bottle party.
In the kitchen The Salamander was squeezing blackheads against the little mirror over the sink. PattyPeek was necking in a dim corner with The Green Hornet, who had recently grown a diabolical-looking red beard. Gig-Man had found Confucius, and PattyPeek was a passionate girl. On the Mexican shawl God Geller was sitting cross-legged (though his two-year active duty in the army had made them muscle bound and they cramped easily) picking out “Old Joe Clark” on the three-string banjo.
A Barnard girl was watching him rapturously.
Occasionally he winked at her.
The cats were clustered around a saucer of beer Shorty Jibbets had set out for them, and Boo-dow! was twitching just prior to what might be a cataclysmic feline epileptic fit. Shorty sat on top of the old TV in his undershorts, a towel from the Luxor Baths wrapped turban-style around his oddly shaped head, swearing he would fly the set to the Moon.
William Arthur Henderson-Kalish was pontificating at a trio of black musicians who had fallen in at a stranger’s sidewalk-mention that someone had a few sticks up here. He was saying in loud tones: “Miro was a self-plagiarist. Just the same images, turned sidewise and stood on their heads. Nothing new. No élan vital in the later stuff. Now, if Heinrich Kley had ever left his little world of fantasy, he might have burst forth…”
No. 1, having found Maureen wanted sex and not culture, had gone back to the uneasy relationship with Stanley Reskoff, and now they lay together on the great bed, arguing softly about who should put the make on that sweet young boy from Connecticut Teddy Bear had brought from the Pillsbury office this evening.
Maureen lay drunkenly across Big Walt’s lap, her mambo dress with its flaring hem about her ample thighs. Abruptly she pulled herself to a sitting position with one arm around Big Walt’s neck. She screeched into the semidarkness of the living room:
“How many of you girls want to go to a party?
“A real party!”
She hung there absently for an instant, and in that instant Gig-Man rose from the shadowy corner, and with vitriol dripping in his voice shouted, “What the hell do you know about real parties?”
There was such hatred in his voice, that for an instant there was a dead, uncomfortable silence.
Then he followed it up with: “What the hell do you know about anything?”
Maureen started to say something, but Big Walt belched grotesquely at that moment, and put a meaty palm in her face, forcing her back across his lap. She lay there breathing stentoriously, and feeling pale.
Gig-Man found another can of beer and settled back into his corner.
Floormat sat in a straight-backed chair by the big living-room window, the rubber plants shadowing her, a pen in her left hand, a pad of drawing paper propped on her lap, and she drew things eating each other. Her face was dirty, and ink stains smudged her sausage fingers.
For a long time there was the sound of music in the loft, as Clifford Brown issued his ultimatum to the night. Then, when the world had rolled over him like a tank, his sounds were gone, and like life on Second Street, embalmed in its own inactivity, suffocated by its own inadequacies, pockmarked by its many intemperances and outright sins, all that was left was the memory of a muted trumpet.
There were many people at the party, and in one corner of the great living room, sitting on the lap of a boy she did not know, was a girl with dark eyes. Her hair had been hand-cut awkwardly, and though it did not dull the attractiveness of her features, it made her look strange, Bohemian, unclean and unkempt.
The boy had his hand on her thigh, and she was whispering to him of Kafka and dull moonlight, of what roaches think and how to escape the dullness of a regimented life.
The boy was not listening, but it did not matter. He knew what he wanted from this girl, and there was no doubt in either of their minds that he would get it, if he told her he loved her.
The girl had had a name once.
Now she was Irish, for all time.
Some diseases are more easily communicable than others, and the recruiting gets done come hell or high water.
It was a good party. There were lots of new faces.
Turnpike
Formless, some kind of heart-bearing creature all sense and instinct, I’ve swum my life through a sea as black as the motivations that have driven me. Limpid reason, dulled at birth, has played so infinitesimal a part in my doings, that I cannot truly say it has ever sent me with the proper tides. Bumped and jostled and once or twice I have cleaved to another entity in that lightless ocean, sucked it dry of whatever it had, and floated away. If I knew, if I had the faintest idea why I do what I do, why a man such as myself—and God knows I’m anything but stupid—cannot find direction and ethic it might save me from tomorrow. Better still, from tonight.
But tonight began three days ago, and tomorrow is as inevitable as the way it started.
Riding high in the cab of a tandem-axle semi; underneath me twelve big overweight doughnuts out of Goodyear; behind me seventy billion uncounted ground-up Brazilian coffee beans mixed with some mocha java and a little Guatemalan, packed in double-foil bags with turndown closures guaranteed to keep the grind “brewpot-fresh” all the way from the loading dock in mid-Manhattan across the turnpike route to San Francisco, California, where “brewpot-fresh” coffee is treasured, worshiped, bought at the very highest mark-ups in specialty gourmet shops. As pushed—like a pea with the nose down all the highways of tomorrow—in a 12-wheel, tandem-axle etcetera by this heart-bearing creature, this Neil Danzig, this truck driver with the soul of Rimbaud.
Riding high above the Pennsylvania Turnpike, somewhere just past King of Prussia (leave it to the stiff-necked, proper-miened Dutch to preserve absolutely nothing), I pulled alongside the Mustang convertible with the blond girl driving. We matched speeds, just sixty, lane-by-lane. She drove with her face straight-forward and didn’t look at the behemoth pounding along beside her. The top was down, her hair was loose in the flat, long teenage style, and it fitted: she was eighteen. Not a dime older.
I was fascinated; it was the best thing I’d seen on that imbecile stretch of turnpike with the unbroken concrete grey and mindless in front of me. I was able to drive and stare at her, both at the same time. The road went flat-out and the concentration was useless. Tunnel vision and road hypnosis were my excuses. Stare at the broad, and don’t let the highway kill you. We fled along beside each other for half a dozen miles, and finally she looked up at me, right across the old man asleep on the other side of the front seat.
She had eyes as blue as a diesel exhaust, and a wet mouth. The hair was like a banner flying out behind her in the wind. She gave me a smile that was the end product of a million female mouths. I smiled back.
We kept abreast of one another for twenty miles, flirting with each other. I would make half-assed funny faces at her and she would toss back her head and laugh, the sound lost in the whipping backwind. We couldn’t talk to each other, but it was somehow more satisfying than the usual fencing conversation a guy has to use when first he meets a girl. We got all that out of the way in the first twenty miles.
Finally, I caught her eye on one of our interchanges, and made a pantomime of a cup of coffee with my left hand. I pointed to her, then back to me. She shrugged, gave me a helpless little moue of resignation, and jerked a thumb almost into the left ear of the sleeping old man on the passenger side. Then she shrugged again. Sorry, Neil, but old dad is in the way.
We continued up the pike, and I kept urging her, all in dumb show. Finally, she nodded. Reluctantly. I pointed ahead to the next turnpike sign that was coming up on us. It said rest stop ten miles. She nodded and smiled, and we both decked the accelerators at almost the same moment. When we were within a mile of the rest stop, she fell behind, and I speeded up, and pulled into the service area a
minute ahead of her.
Old juices were coming to life in me as I sat in the Howard Johnson’s, waiting for her. She was a kid, but even sitting down, some of her concealed, she was some kid. The poor-boy sweater she was wearing showed me a tasty abundance of high, round meat. Her face was something you see in a television commercial, all lean and sleek and well-fed and clean. Eighteen, but as Pushkin put it: “Old enough to bleed, is old enough to butcher.”
She came through the entrance and looked around.
Then she walked to me, without guile, and sat down. The waitress came with the two coffees, then.
“Is this a pick up?”
“That’s what it’s called.”
“I think I’d like a piece of pie.”
The way she looked at me, I knew it was there, if I could figure a way to get it. Cross-country, on turnpikes? Her in her little blue Mustang, me in that semi? It was impossible. She had a piece of pumpkin pie, with a scoop of maple-walnut ice cream.
“Who’s the fellow you’re with?”
“My father. He’s very strict. We came from Pittsburgh. We’re going to Sacramento, California. Some property he has to take care of.”
I told her my name was Ken Schuster. She told me her name was Stephanie Lane. We grinned at each other in a mako-shark sort of way. I told her my name was Jack Norton. She told me her name was Jane Doe. We both laughed. We didn’t bother telling each other the truth. It wasn’t that kind of conversation.
“Too bad we can’t find some place to stop along the way, to get to know each other better…” I suggested.
She shrugged. “It’s very hard.”
My little mind went ker-whump and I felt gears clashing, as the nativity the crucifixion and the resurrection all merged into one. “If we drove all day, and kept each other in sight, we could stop over in the same motel tonight.”
“What about…?”
“Your father? How about you let him do all the driving. He doesn’t look like he can cut three, four hundred miles of hard driving and still stay alert. Then when you suggest overnight, he’ll go for it. Do you take separate rooms when you stay overnight?”