“I don’t know. I can find out, I suppose,” I said.
“Do it, Snivack,” he said, sliding oozily into the doorway from whence he’d come. “Time’s getting short. The police commissioner is howling for action.”
“This is my concern, your job?” I demanded with outrage.
“You aware of the rap for statutory rape in this state?”
Funny how you can suddenly develop an interest in the affairs of your fellow man. Humanitarianism, that’s what it is, goddam humanitarianism.
I decided the night of the party, Saturday, was the time to find out if anyone had practiced medicine, or if they’d been to college for it. I had a very subtle plan all laid out. Scintillant, it was.
The party was in The Tower Suite, and somehow or other Bernie Katz had persuaded Aggie’s mother to let her attend. I more or less sulked in a corner while the usual crowd had their good time, seeing Aggie was playing the barefoot contessa bit again, on the table with her underwear showing.
The usual crowd consisted of Weep For Me, who was maybe the ugliest girl in the world, who had a lech for Scat Bell, and who made it a point of demonstrating her affection for him at least once every party, by throwing herself under his feet as he walked past. This sometimes proved unfortunate, for if Scat was hammered, as was his usual performance at social gatherings, he would pointedly ignore Weep For Me and stomp across her prostrate body.
Eventually, someone would help her up and either take her to the couch to rub her with Ben Gay, or haul her down to the Lying-In Hospital where she’d be admitted under some pretext or other.
The usual crowd: Enrico Massetti, who was the grocery boy in the neighborhood, and who thought he was the new Caruso. He had had his name legally changed from Bruno to Enrico to aid his career. He was pitiful. Whipper and Betty January, either of whom seldom came up for air, and who seemingly waited for parties so they could fall down in a corner and copulate. Someone once suggested they use the bedroom, and Miss January, after breaking the impertinent’s nose, advised him to take his dirty mind elsewhere.
There were about thirty others, of course, all neighborhood regulars who found in the Alley those things so dear to the existence of a liberal-minded, intellectual beat type: stimulating conversation, artistic atmosphere, cultural contacts, cheap booze and chicks.
The party was in full flower when Scat was called to the apartment’s door; he came back with a grin that wasn’t entirely drunkenness plastered across his ruggedly good-looking face. “Hey, like everybody,” he announced, “you know who that was at the slammer? It was our Zen Men and they’re here to wail a while.”
Scat always was impressed by pseudo-hip jargon. We indulge him; he has a wealthy family.
“So…come on in, Zen Men,” he chirped, as though he was the moderator on What’s My Line? And in violent contrast, through the doorway came these three weirdies. Everybody made small applause, and the poets clustered together by the wall. One of them was real short, with a lot of hair. He didn’t have much forehead. The second one was a Negro with a gigantic wart on his cheek, and a patch over his left eye. He had a violent tic in the wartcheek, and he clutched a sheaf of papers to his bosom with ferocity.
The third poet was The Hooded One, and he was about six feet tall, with muscular hands, and a black sack-hood, gathered by a drawstring, around his head. He wore a very sharp low-crown snap-brim with an Alpine feather-pin in the band. Perhaps he wore it to hide the fact that he was masked, on the street.
I could see where it might cause talk.
Scat got up on something (it turned out to be Weep For Me) and, standing there, announced that these three major poets of rebellion were here to impart truth, man, like to us!
He announced the first one as Flo Goldknecht, and the hairy midget came forward with a malevolent smirk on his ratty little countenance.
“My first poem,” he said, in a voice that brought back memories of the grave, from my first incarnation, “is called ‘Respects to a Shallow Parade’. It’s kinda short, to sort of get you in the mood.”
He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his jacket pocket, and smoothed it between his hands. Then his hair—for lack of a forehead—pulled down, and he began to read. This is what he read:
Roaring through midtown streets,
Brawling balloons of sound. Smite
the caustic unawareness of the teletypes.
Throw from your gray-flanneled
balconies the arthritic conscience of
Nervous souls in jeopardy.
Oh! Sensuality of intent!
Cascading down, homage for a spent icon.
Waltzing to earth with false bravado,
Can you smell my hunger of defeat?”
He was perspiring, because he had read it in a great voice, with much compassion and clenching of hand. His voice had gotten deeper as he read, and if it was a mood he was trying to evoke, he evoked it. I was scared out of my wits. I didn’t stay to hear his second poem, “Puke.”
I went into the kitchen where Art Penny and his current wench Vania were on-lap enjoying each other’s affections. “Beg pardon,” I mumbled and helped myself to a beer from the sink. It wasn’t quite cold, having been left on top of the cracked ice mound. But it was better than “Puke.”
When I went back in, having heard applause, Scat was introducing Jathrath Hamutt, the Negro with the wartcheek. His first poem was “Essence of Peaceful Non-Existence” and it began:
When I am young, and the flesh-eating oldsters
Cry for my humanity…then do I suck dry the
Marrow of aggression with a carbine in my
Anointed fist and the blind upstaring eyes
Of my designated victims bright as stars in
A field of slime…
I had another beer.
When I came back in, I noticed that everyone was in a state of great anxiety, and I supposed it was because The Hooded One was now about to regale us with his efforts. I imagined they’d be called “Upchuck” or “Garbage” or something equally as charming, but when he came forward and began to speak in a quiet, dark voice, there was meter and rhythm and sensitivity in his work.
“The Opening” was his first poem, and it was a solemn, honest tribute to virginity, and the morality of innocence. It made some of the more loose types in the room look uncomfortable.
His second was “Respite” and it effectively damned the uselessness of war without being vitriolic. As a poet myself, I had immense respect for this hooded man, whoever he was.
We listened to them, and for a few moments after he had finished them, I leaned against the bookshelf with growing awareness that this was a major talent. How ugly he must be, under that hood, to be able to write such gutty, such effective stuff. He was the essence of what has been misnamed “beat,” for there was a strength in defeat in him.
I had completely forgotten my scintillant ruse to find out if anyone was a doctor in disguise. I had planned to cut my finger and see who knew the most about first aid. Now it didn’t seem like such a good idea. I was enjoying myself immensely.
Then Aggie got up from where she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and she threw herself at The Hooded One.
“You’re cool!” she squeaked, and her arms went around his neck. Aggie is a nice kid, a real sweet girl, well brought-up and that sort of thing, but she has one small character flaw: she’s a nympho.
And the slightest little thing can set her off.
The next thing we knew, she was smothering his hood with kisses, and he was trying to break away from her. His poems fluttered all around his feet as he flailed at her, and Bernie Katz was starting to get up, muttering, “Aw, c’mon, Aggie, knock it off…”
When a peculiar thing happened.
Aggie tried to get his hood off, and he straight-armed her as best he could. It only served to help her cause, and as she fell on her back, half of us were watching her thighs, and the other half were looking at The Hooded One.
A seismic gasp went the length of the room. And then The Hooded One had a knife in his hand, a switchblade, and he pressed the stud, with a phwip! the blade came up, and he screamed:
“You! You’re all alike! All of you! All you rotten women! You can’t let a man have his art! You’ve got to ruin him! I wanted my art, but she gave me this…this!” And he plucked at his face. Then he jumped for the white-faced, terrified Aggie.
I don’t know what happened, how I managed it, but I grabbed a book from the bookshelf at my shoulder, and brought it across in a wide sweep, catching him full on the nose. He went down like the Andrea Doria.
Later, I saw it was a copy of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. For a poet as beat as The Hooded One, it somehow seemed apropos.
Kroll showed up at the party, the following week, of all people. He mentioned something about a public citation, but I poo-poohed it; I had my reward; Aggie was back in the fold. Of my arm.
“The funny thing about it,” I said to him as we sipped beer in the kitchen, “is that Sally wasn’t a prostitute at all.”
“Mmm,” he agreed, slurping, “but who’d ever think a female plastic surgeon would be living in McMurdo Alley? And a renegade at that.”
“We always thought the guys who came to visit her were clients. I guess they were, but of a different kind.”
Kroll finished the beer and squashed the can with one hand. “This Hooded creep was really buggy,” he admitted, watching Scat and Weep For Me. Scat was trying to stuff a dirty sink sponge in Weep For Me’s mouth to stop her protestations of love. “He went for plastic surgery, and she misunderstood. Did it just the opposite of what he wanted.”
“Yeah,” I mused, “pretty weird. You’d think the guy would be happy to look like that. But he wanted to be ugly, so he could commune with God, or whatever it is these beatniks want to do. Couldn’t stand being a good-looker. Said it destroyed his work, his oneness with his art. Pretty bad.”
Kroll nodded. “Well, I got to go. Just wanted to stop over and thank you for your help.”
“Any time, Lieutenant,” I waved as he went out the door.
Fattest man I ever saw.
I sat there a few minutes, hearing the sound of the party in the other room. What a weird world it was. A female plastic surgeon, carrying on illegal operations in McMurdo Alley, everyone thinking she was a whore, and when a screwball slices her up, they find her operating equipment, and think someone came to perform an abort on her. How weird.
The weirdest part of all, though, was the cuckaboo with the hood. He wore it because he detested what he looked like. She probably hadn’t done too much to him, only shaved and altered select parts of his kisser, but what kind of a nut is it that gets sore when he turns out to look like Rock Hudson.
I mean, how beat can you get?
The Silence of Infidelity
William: thirty-one years old, five feet ten inches tall, weighing one hundred and seventy-seven pounds. A slight bulge just under his belt due to an affinity for pizza with pepperoni. A man who once considered elevator shoes, though he didn’t really need them. A man with heartburn and a bank account of $612.08, jointly entered in his wife’s name. A thin scar that runs from his wrist to his inside elbow, which he got in his early twenties, in a threshing machine on an Iowa farm. William was happily married to Madelaine: twenty-nine years old, five feet six inches tall, weighing just over one hundred and twelve. A woman with rich chestnut-colored hair, and friendly brown eyes. A comfortable woman, who kept a clean home, and worked part-time in a shipping concern, as ledger recorder. A woman with definite tastes in reading matter and the type of breakfast cereal kept in the apartment. She had two children, both girls, named Roxanne and Beth, whom she treated fairly, impartially, and lovingly. She had seen her husband rise from stock clerk to manager to district advisor for a group of cooperative grocery stores. She felt deep within herself that she had aided his climb by being a good wife and an understanding companion. They had been happily married for ten years.
There was a third person.
The Woman.
“We’re out of ketchup, Bill,” Madelaine’s voice reached him in his chair before the television set. The smell of lamb chops filled the five-room apartment, and the kitchen seemed a magical country composed of nothing but delicious odor.
“Want to send Roxy down?” he asked, turning his attention from the news.
Madelaine’s voice was ever so lightly tinged with worry. “No. Bill, would you mind running to the corner to get some? The neighborhood’s getting pretty wild, and you just never know. We’ll be eating in a few minutes…would you?”
He swung up out of the chair with a short bemused half-chuckle. “Sure, honey. Be back in five.”
He didn’t bother to slip on a topcoat, it was the end of October, and though the nippiness was in the air, still it was warm enough for a stroll to the Puerto Rican bodega on the corner for a bottle of ketchup.
He rang for the elevator, and lit a cigarette as he waited. If the blankness of a mind constantly thinking can be called blankness, then blank his mind was. No thoughts surged to the top, yet a vague feeling of security, of relaxation, ran through him.
On the street, he walked briskly, stepping in and out of the shadows without conscious awareness of them. Yet his thoughts agreed with what Madelaine had said. The once-wealthy neighborhood had deteriorated. Stately apartment buildings had been cut up into single rooms and rented out to Puerto Ricans, fresh from the boats. And though he had no malice in his mind, though he did not dislike a people for its race, still they were new to American New York, and their habits were not the most sanitary.
Madelaine had been wise in not allowing Roxanne to walk these streets, even at seven o’clock.
In the bodega he said a friendly hello to the Puerto Rican owner, a drooping-moustached fellow named (inevitably) Juan. They exchanged cursory pleasantries over the counter as Juan slipped the ketchup into a bag, and accepted the coins.
William stepped out of the bodega and crossed the street against the light. Far down, at 80th Street, a stream of cars double-eyed brightly toward him, and he stepped to the curb rapidly.
He walked up from the corner, toward his apartment building, passing the bus stop. The Woman was there, at the bus stop, waiting. He saw her as he approached, and even then his interest rose.
It was that simple, without fanfare and without preamble. She was tall, slightly taller than he, wearing black patent-leather high heels that seemed a trifle higher than any he had seen before. Her legs were slim and well formed, what he could see of them below the tweed of her skirt. The wedge of skirt that showed beneath the thigh-length leather car coat was tasteful, and matched perfectly, somehow, with the steel-gray leather. She had the collar up, and it collided with the shoulder-length blond hair that fell in soft waves.
Her face was half-turned away from him, and he only caught a sheer glance of uptilted nose, blue eye, and full mouth. It was, more than anything, the way she had her feet set, that made him stop.
As he passed, he looked back over his shoulder, and saw she had one foot turned outward, the way the fashion models do it when they are being studiedly fashionable. He stopped and there was something about the street light that cast a sheen across those few inches of nyloned legs. His eyes rose to her face; she stared at him fully.
He gripped the ketchup bottle tighter, for she didn’t turn away, as a woman should who is being stared at by a stranger on the streets. She watched him intently, and there was an arch to her well-formed eyebrows. Her eyes said something to him. William was by no means a deeply perceptive man. His blood speeded up, and he felt a quivering in his legs. Thoughts flashed in and out of his mind like bright fish in a clear stream.
Then the Woman smiled.
Her full, rich red mouth curved upward, and her hands, which had hung at her sides till now, rose to smooth her hips. At that moment the thought crossed William’s mind that she was a prostitute.
But as her hands moved,
he retracted the thought. No, not a prostitute. A Woman, yes, but not a whore.
Almost without realizing he was moving, he stepped back toward her. Very close they stood for an instant, and he saw the swell of the car jacket over her breasts. Her figure was hidden by the bulk of the steel-gray coat, yet he was certain it must be magnificently proportioned.
He could smell the faint muskiness of her, and it filled his head with an aphrodisia that made him stagger mentally.
As he stood next to her, staring into her symmetrical, unlined, sensuous face, she wet her lips. It was a slick, quick, razored movement that abruptly brought to mind pictures of women lifting their skirts, showing their bodies. It was a completely sexual movement, and the pale tonguetip slipped out and in again in an instant.
He knew then that she wanted him to come with her.
Not a word had been spoken, yet he knew what her eyes said, knew what the positioning of her feet meant, knew what that wicked little tongue had ordered in its journey.
She turned away and walked back down toward the corner, looking over her shoulder once, to let him know she was leading him. He started after her, and the thought of Madelaine and the kids and the dinner scurried out of his way. He watched the fine taut line of movement as her legs scissored inside her skirt, and the pain hit him in the deepest, most remote area of his belly. The Woman was reaching him.
She turned up the steps of the one brownstone apartment house, and he followed quickly. She opened the door with a key, and led him up three flights of stairs, to another door.
She opened this one with the same key, and reached around the inside of the jamb, flicking on the lights.
He stepped inside, and she shut the door, locking it quickly.
The apartment was tastefully furnished, without being either ultra-modern or period. It was a conglomeration of furniture, the kind of assortment a person collects having moved many times in many cities.