Women: A Novel

  We drove along and then we saw Marshall Benchly standing in front of a brownstone. There was no parking. He leaped in the car and Gary drove off. Benchly looked like a poet, a private-income poet who had never worked for a living; it showed. He was affected and bland, a pebble.

  “We’ll take you to your place,” he said.

  He proudly recited a long list of people who had stayed at my hotel. Some of the names I recognized, others I didn’t.

  Gary drove into the unloading zone in front of the Chelsea Hotel. We got out. Gary said, “See you at the reading. And see you tomorrow.”

  Marshall took us inside and we went up to the desk clerk. The Chelsea certainly wasn’t much, maybe that’s where it got its charm.

  Marshall turned and handed me the key. “It’s Room 1010, Janis Joplin’s old room.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Many great artists have stayed in 1010.”

  He walked us over to the tiny elevator.

  “The reading’s at 8. I’ll pick you up at 7:30. We’ve been sold out for two weeks. We’re selling some standing-room tickets but we’ve got to be careful because of the fire department.”

  “Marshall, where’s the nearest liquor store?”

  “Downstairs and take a right.”

  We said goodbye to Marshall and took the elevator up.

  62

  It was hot that night at the reading, which was to be held at St. Mark’s Church. Tammie and I sat in what was used as the dressing room. Tammie found a full-length mirror leaning against the wall and began combing her hair. Marshall took me out in back of the church. They had a burial ground back there. Little cement tombstones sat on the earth and carved on the tombstones were inscriptions. Marshall walked me around and showed me the inscriptions. I always got nervous before a reading, very tense and unhappy. I almost always vomited. Then I did. I vomited on one of the graves.

  “You just vomited on Peter Stuyvesant,” Marshall said.

  I walked back into the dressing room. Tammie was still looking at herself in the mirror. She looked at her face and her body, but mostly she was worried about her hair. She piled it on top of her head, looked at it that way and then let it fall back down.

  Marshall put his head into the room. “Come on, they’re waiting!”

  “Tammie’s not ready,” I told him.

  Then she piled her hair up on top of her head again and looked at herself. Then she let it fall. Then she stood close to the mirror and looked at her eyes.

  Marshall knocked, then came in. “Come on, Chinaski!”

  “Come on, Tammie, let’s go.”

  “All right.”

  I walked out with Tammie at my elbow. They started applauding. The old Chinaski bullshit was working. Tammie went down into the crowd and I started to read. I had many beers in an ice bucket. I had old poems and new poems. I couldn’t miss. I had St. Mark’s by the cross.

  63

  We got back to 1010. I had my check. I’d left word that we didn’t want to be disturbed. Tammie and I sat drinking. I’d read 5 or 6 love poems about her.

  “They knew who I was,” she said. “Sometimes I giggled. It was embarassing.”

  They had known who she was all right. She glistened with sex. Even the roaches and the ants and the flies wanted to fuck her.

  There was a knock on the door. Two people had slipped through, a poet and his woman. The poet was Morse Jenkins from Vermont. His woman was Sadie Everet. He had four bottles of beer.

  He wore sandals and old torn bluejeans; turquoise bracelets; a chain around his throat; he had a beard, long hair; orange blouse. He talked, and he talked. And walked around the room.

  There is a problem with writers. If what a writer wrote was published and sold many, many copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold a medium number of copies, the writer thought he was great. If what a writer wrote was published and sold very few copies, the writer thought he was great. If what the writer wrote never was published and he didn’t have the money to publish it himself, then he thought he was truly great. The truth, however, was that there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter.

  “I sparred with Clay before he became Ali,” said Morse. Morse jabbed and shuffled, danced. “He was pretty good, but I gave him a workout.”

  Morse shadow-boxed about the room.

  “Look at my legs!” he said. “I’ve got great legs!”

  “Hank’s got better legs than you have,” said Tammie.

  Being a leg-man, I nodded.

  Morse sat down. He pointed a beer bottle at Sadie. “She works as a nurse. She supports me. But I’m going to make it someday. They’ll hear from me!”

  Morse would never need a mike at his readings.

  He looked at me. “Chinaski, you’re one of the two or three best living poets. You’re really making it. You write a tough line. But I’m coming on too! Let me read you my shit. Sadie, hand me my poems.”

  “No,” I said, “wait! I don’t want to hear them.”

  “Why not, man? Why not?”

  “There’s been too much poetry tonight, Morse. I just want to lay back and forget it.”

  “Well, all right…. Listen, you never answer my letters.”

  “I’m not a snob, Morse. But I get 75 letters a month. If I answered them that’s all I would ever do.”

  “I’ll bet you answer the women!”

  “That depends….”

  “All right, man, I’m not bitter. I still like your stuff. Maybe I’ll never be famous but I think I will and I think you’ll be glad you met me. Come on, Sadie, let’s go….”

  I walked them to the door. Morse grabbed my hand. He didn’t pump it, and neither of us quite looked at the other. “You’re a good old guy,” he said.

  “Thanks, Morse….”

  And then they were gone.

  64

  The next morning Tammie found a prescription in her purse.

  “I’ve got to get this filled,” she said. “Look at it.”

  It was wrinkled and the ink had run.

  “What happened here?”

  “Well, you know my brother, he’s a pill head.”

  “I know your brother. He owes me twenty bucks.”

  “Well, he tried to get this prescription away from me. He tried to strangle me. I put the prescription in my mouth and swallowed it. Or I pretended to swallow it. He wasn’t sure. That was the time I phoned you and asked you to come over and kick the shit out of him. He split. But I still had the prescription in my mouth. I haven’t used it yet. But I can get it filled here. It’s worth a try.”

  “All right.”

  We took the elevator down to the street. It was over 100 degrees. I could hardly move. Tammie started walking and I followed along behind her as she weaved from one edge of the sidewalk to the other.

  “Come on!” she said. “Keep up!”

  She was on something, it appeared to be downers. She was woozy. Tammie walked up to a newsstand and began staring at a periodical. I think it was Variety. She stood there and stood there. I stood there near her. It was boring and senseless. She just stared at Variety.

  “Listen, sister, either buy the damned thing or move on!” It was the man inside the newsstand.

  Tammie moved on. “My god, New York is a horrible place! I just wanted to see if there was anything about the reading!”

  Tammie moved along, wiggling it, wobbling from one side of the pavement to the other. In Hollywood cars would have pulled over to the curbing, blacks would have made overtures, she would have been approached, serenaded, applauded. New York was different; it was jaded and weary and it disdained flesh.

 
We were into a black district. They watched us walking by: the redhead with the long hair, stoned, and the old guy with gray in his beard walking behind her, wearily. I glanced at them sitting on their stoops; they had good faces. I liked them. I liked them better than I liked her.

  I followed Tammie down the street. Then there was a furniture store. There was a broken down desk chair out in front on the sidewalk. Tammie walked over to the old desk chair and stood staring at it. She seemed hypnotized. She kept staring at the desk chair. She touched it with her finger. Minutes went by. Then she sat down in it.

  “Look,” I told her, “I’m going back to the hotel. You do whatever you want to do.”

  Tammie didn’t even look up. She slid her hands back and forth on the arm rests of the desk chair. She was in a world of her own. I turned and walked off, back to the Chelsea.

  I got some beer and took the elevator up. I undressed, took a shower, propped a couple of pillows against the headboard of the bed and sucked at the beer. Readings diminished me. They were soul-sucks. I finished one beer and opened another. Readings got you a piece of ass sometimes. Rock stars got ass; boxers on the way up got ass; great bullfighters got virgins. Somehow, only the bullfighters deserved any of it.

  There was a knock on the door. I got up and opened it a crack. It was Tammie. She pushed in.

  “I found this dirty Jew son-of-a-bitch. He wanted $12 to fill the prescription! It’s 6 bucks on the coast. I told him I only had $6. He didn’t care. A dirty Jew living in Harlem! Can I have a beer?”

  Tammie took the beer and sat in the window, one leg out, one arm out, one leg in, one holding on to the raised window.

  “I want to see the Statue of Liberty. I want to see Coney Island,” she said.

  I got myself a new beer.

  “Oh, it’s nice out here! It’s nice and cool.”

  Tammie leaned out the window, looking.

  Then she screamed.

  The hand that had been holding on to the window slipped. I saw most of her body go out the window. Then it came back. Somehow she had pulled herself back inside. She sat there, stunned.

  “That was close,” I told her. “It would have made a good poem. I’ve lost a lot of women in a lot of ways, but that would have been a new way.”

  Tammie walked over to the bed. She stretched out face down. I realized she was still stoned. Then she rolled off the bed. She landed flat on her back. She didn’t move. I walked over and picked her up and put her back on the bed. I grabbed her by the hair and kissed her viciously.

  “Hey…. What’re you doin’?”

  I remembered she had promised me a piece of ass. I rolled her on her stomach, pulled her dress up, pulled her panties off. I climbed on top of her and rammed, trying to find her cunt. I poked and poked. It went in. It slid further and further in. I had her good. She made small sounds. Then the phone rang. I pulled out, got up and answered it. It was Gary Benson.

  “I’m coming over with my tape recorder for that radio interview.”

  “When?”

  “Ill about 45 minutes.”

  I hung up and went back to Tammie. I was still hard. I grabbed her hair, gave her another violent kiss. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was lifeless. I mounted her again. Outside they were sitting on their fire escapes. When the sun started to go down and some shade appeared they came out to cool off. The people of New York City sat out there and drank beer and soda and ice water. They endured and smoked cigarettes. Just being alive was a victory. They decorated their fire escapes with plants. They made do with what there was.

  I went straight for Tammie’s core. Dog fashion. Dogs knew best. I whammed away. It was good to be out of the post office. I rocked and socked her body. Despite the pills she was trying to speak. “Hank …” she said.

  I came finally, then rested on her. We were both drenched with sweat. I rolled off, got up, undressed, and walked to the shower. Once again I had fucked this redhead 32 years younger than I was. It felt fine in the shower. I intended to live to be 80 so that I could then fuck an 18 year old girl. The air conditioner didn’t work, but the shower did. It felt really good. I was ready for my radio interview.

  65

  Back in L. A., there was almost a week of peace. Then the phone rang. It was the owner of a Manhattan Beach nightclub, Marty Seavers. I had read there a couple of times before. The club was called Smack-Hi.

  “Chinaski, I want you to read a week from Friday. You can pick up about $450.”

  “All right.”

  Rock groups played there. It was a different audience than at the colleges. They were as obnoxious as I was and we cursed one another between poems. I preferred it.

  “Chinaski,” Marty said, “you think you have trouble with women. Let me tell you. The one I’ve got now has a way with windows and screens. I’ll be sleeping and she’ll appear in the bedroom at 3 or 4 AM. She’ll shake me. It scares the shit out of me. She stands there and says, ‘I just wanted to make sure you were sleeping alone!’”

  “Death and transfiguration.”

  “The other night, I’m sitting and there’s a knock on the door. I know it’s her. I open the door and she isn’t there. It’s 11 PM and I’m in my shorts. I’ve been drinking and I’m worried. I run outside in my shorts. I had given her $400 worth of dresses for her birthday. I run outside and there are the dresses, on the roof of my new car, and they’re on fire, they’re burning! I run up to pull them off and she leaps out from behind a bush and starts screaming. The neighbors look out and there I am in my shorts, burning my hands, snatching the dresses off the roof.”

  “She sounds like one of mine,” I said.

  “O.K., so I figured we were through. I’m sitting here two nights later, I had to work the club that night, so I’m sitting here at 3 AM drunk and in my shorts again. There’s a knock on the door. It’s her knock. I open it and she isn’t there. I go out to my car and she has more dresses soaked in gasoline and burning. She had saved some. Only this time they are burning on the hood. She leaps out from somewhere and starts screaming. The neighbors look out. There I am again in my shorts trying to get these burning dresses off the hood.”

  “That’s great, I wish it had happened to me.”

  “You should see my new car. It has paint blisters all over the hood and the roof.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “We’re back together. She’s coming over in 30 minutes. Can I put you down for the reading?”

  “Sure.”

  “You outdraw the rock groups. I never saw anything like it. I’d like to bring you in every Friday and Saturday night.”

  “It wouldn’t work, Marty. You can play the same song over and over, but with poems they want something new.”

  Marty laughed and hung up.

  66

  I took Tammie. We got there a little early and went to a bar across the street. We got a table.

  “Now don’t drink too much, Hank. You know how you slur your words and miss your lines when you get too drunk.”

  “At last,” I said, “you’re talking sense.”

  “You’re afraid of the audience, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but it’s not stagefright. It’s that I’m there as the geek. They like to watch me eat my shit. But it pays the light bill and takes me to the racetrack. I don’t have any excuses about why I do it.”

  “I’ll have a Stinger,” said Tammie.

  I told the girl to bring us a Stinger and a Bud.

  “I’ll be all right tonight,” she said, “don’t worry about me.”

  Tammie drank the Stinger down.

  “These Stingers don’t seem to have much in them. I’ll have another.”

  We had another Stinger and another Bud.

  “Really,” she said, “I don’t think they’re putting anything into these drinks. I better have another.”

  Tammie had five Stingers in 40 minutes.

  We knocked on the back door of the Smack-Hi. One of Marty’s big bodyguards let us in. He had these
malfunctioning thyroid types working for him to keep law and order when the teeny-boppers, the hairy freaks, the glue sniffers, the acid heads, the plain grass folk, the alcoholics—all the miserable, the damned, the bored and the pretenders—got out of hand.

  I was getting ready to puke and I did. This time I found a trash can and let it go. The last time I had dumped it just outside Marty’s office. He was pleased with the change.

  67

  Want something to drink?” Marty asked.

  “I’ll have a beer,” I said.

  “I’ll have a Stinger,” said Tammie.

  “Get a seat for her, put her on the tab,” I told Marty.

  “All right. We’ll set her up. We’re S.R.O. We’ve had to turn away 150 and it’s 30 minutes before you go on.”

  “I want to introduce Chinaski to the audience,” said Tammie.

  “O.K. with you?” asked Marty.

  “O.K.”

  They had a kid out there with a guitar, Dinky Summers, and the crowd was disemboweling him. Eight years ago Dinky had had a gold record, but nothing since.

  Marty got on an intercom and dialed out. “Listen,” he asked, “is that guy as bad as he sounds?”

  You could hear a woman’s voice over the phone. “He’s terrible.”

  Marty hung up.

  “We want Chinaski!” they yelled.

  “All right,” we could hear Dinky, “Chinaski is next.”

  He started singing again. They were drunk. They hooted and hissed. Dinky sang on. He finished his act and got off stage. One could never tell. Some days it was better to stay in bed with the covers pulled up.

  There was a knock. It was Dinky in his red, white and blue tennis shoes, white t-shirt, cords and brown felt hat. The hat sat perched on a mass of blonde curls. The t-shirt said, “God is Love.”

  Dinky looked at us. “Was I really that bad? I want to know. Was I really that bad?” Nobody answered.

  Dinky looked at me. “Hank, was I that bad?”