With both his money and his time, the Counselor was easy. He had an open face, suggesting timidly gregarious possibilities, as though, were he approached, he would be willing to be drawn into discussions of the relative merits of best-sellers or the batting averages of baseball players. Beneath that blond brush cut, behind those clear blue eyes and even white teeth, though, there resided the intelligence of an authentic cynic. The Counselor possessed this Ishmael-like quality, this thing ungroomable, this cowlick in his psyche; and watching him listen to one tale of woe or another, I was never sure whether he listened in sympathy or with scarcely contained amusement. Watching him listen, I was never at ease. After hearing and seeing them through their troubles during office hours, he had no heart for ridding himself of his clients during nocturnal hours; and all sorts of them, wringing their hands, mad with grief, and outraged at a million injustices, gamboled in and out of the apartment, more often than not chanting hurts that could not be remedied by law, man or God’s.
Ham-handed, enormous-muscled, and great-shouldered Studs—the plural always summoned up for me visions of multiple penises—had sleek black hair, a sleek black mustache, a matching leather jacket, and hip-hugging dungarees that ex posed both his bowed legs and his virilia. By profession Studs was a plaintiff. Or the Counselor suspected he was and for that reason refused to take any more of his cases. “What do
you mean?” I said. Studs, the Counselor explained, had been in a series of one-car accidents, cars that had missed turns and careened into virginal trees, cars that had hurtled headlong into solid bridge abutments, cars that had somehow and rather miraculously gone out of control, smashed up, and whose passenger roster had invariably been made up of four or five of Studs’s black-jacketed and adoring disciples. There was, besides, the Counselor continued, something somewhat peculiar in that only the owner-driver, who couldn’t sue himself, who was always heavily insured and who was of course to be sued by the others, and Studs, the ubiquitous passenger, were the only ones left unscathed by these mishaps. Or rather, as the Counselor explained, “The only things Studs hurt were his fists.” His motley and unfortunate followers came up with a superb collection of swollen lips, cracked teeth, broken ribs, squashed noses, and hideously outsized purple-yellow shiners. “In fairness to Studs,” the Counselor said with mock solemnity, “he might have strained himself when they were pushing the car into the tree.” Then I had this vision of this black-jacketed mob selecting some innocent maple, shoving the Chevrolet down some incline and into it, and broke up laughing as I saw the goons solemnly lining up before the bemuscled Studs to have their injuries administered. In both their duncedom and their wickedness there was something touching, and the thought that Studs was beating the rapacious auto insurance companies out of dollars made me admire him immensely.
When I got to know Studs better, I suggested that he invite me on one of his accident parties; but he explained that I had no income to have “loss of” and hence wouldn’t be worth much in the eyes of the companies. He laughed as though he were joking, and at the first opportunity I told the Counselor what he had said to me. “That’s the worst of it,” the Counselor said, and went on to explain that over his accident-prone career Studs had become altogether too conversant with such legal jargon as “loss of income,” “pain and suffering,” and “contributory negligence,” those determining factors in whether or not and how much one collects from the companies. The Counselor suspected it only a matter of time before Studs began bringing him negligence cases before they occurred and seeking his judgment as to whether slipped discs or the absence of upper teeth would be held dearer by a jury. “You, Studs,” the Counselor would say, his voice chilling with menace, “are going to find your black Wop of an ass right in Sing Sing and I’ll be goddammed if I’ll go with you.”
Immediately be it said in the Counselor’s ethical defense that Studs never admitted a knowledge of what the Counselor was intimating and always in a histrionic way proclaimed his innocence of any such collusion. His bowed legs skimming up and down the carpeted living room, he would feign hurt at the Counselor’s implications, almost sagging to the floor under the awful weight of such immoderate and unjust accusations. Like most Italians he was a consummate, if not superb, actor, and at such accusations he was marvelous at blessing himself, raising his hands in protest to the heavens, or, both hands slammed and forming a rood across his chest, swearing on his mother’s grave or saying, “Couns, as the holy Virgin was the mother of the infant Jesus—” “Is all that really necessary?” the Counselor would say.
Studs admired the Counselor greatly. He dwelt in that dim-witted world of roadhouses, western music, brawling, Genesee-Horse Ale, aborted girls, and B-class movies; and he de rived vast pleasure that a man of the Counselor’s tweedy refinement could speak his language and refer to him as a black-assed Wop. “The Counselor,” he told me in breathless admiration on our first meeting, “has got a lot of savvy—I mean, savvy.”
Because I was the Counselor’s friend, Studs soon developed a crush on me, too, and within the dimensions of his B-class milieu began to romanticize about me. Detecting that I seldom left the apartment, that I lay there unshaven and morose, he at one point got it into his head that I was “on the lam” from something (as indeed I was) and “holed up” in the Counselor’s apartment until the latter determined it a propitious time to surrender me to the authorities (I’d volunteer to “turn state’s evidence”). In whatever manner, my paranoia presently seeped through to him, and he became convinced that the forces of authority were hotly pursuing me. Anybody you want me to take care of? became Studs’s daily query to me. It was always put with such snarling sincerity that there were times I wished I could summon out of my past an image of someone I loathed enough to have his jaw broken, undoubtedly one of Studs’s specialties. Like most Americans, though, I had led that numbingly chaste and uncommitted existence in which one forms neither sympathies nor antipathies of any
enduring consequence. Hence, sighing, I was invariably forced to respond, “No, not today, Studs.”
“Well, baby,” he’d say, flexing his enormous biceps, “if you ever think of anybody, you just let Studs know.”
“A deal,” I always responded. The two new friends would beam boundless admiration on one another.
Still another of these “clients” was Oscar. The son of a wealthy New York realtor, he was Ivy League from his molded haircut to his grained, expensive loafers, bespectacled, and so gaunt he listed. Though a “high” Episcopalian, his wife had obtained from him a civil divorce and until the Counselor had rectified the matter had refused to let him see his six remarkably handsome children. Removing a photo of the latter from his wallet, he was utterly mad (which he was, it turned out, anyway) on showing it about the apartment, and there were days when, for approbation, he thrust it at me a half-dozen times. The print was much soiled and tattered from intense and loving care.
On the grim morning I met Oscar, he crept stealthily into the apartment and without acknowledging me slumped furiously down at the end of the davenport, almost atop my malodorous and stockinged feet. Though it was a cool day, he was sweating heavily, and in the forehead harbors of his receding hairline were globs of perspiration as full-bodied and shiny as Vaseline. Where the perspiration had seeped into the hair, there were dark wet splotches, giving his head a sad-comic checkered effect. It was the first time I had seen an Ivy League cut so ill-kempt (one brushes and brushes to achieve this farcical composure and still grief comes!). Sitting there, totally oblivious of me, Oscar once, twice, three times emitted the groan of a man in terrible agony. Hardened to agony, I ignored him. Then he broke down and began to weep uncontrollably, the racking sobs hideously contorting his spindly frame. As much in annoyance as in sympathy, I rose, walked to the kitchen, poured a stiff drink of whisky, returned, and handed it to him. Ten minutes had elapsed and that proffered drink was the first acknowledgment either of us had made of the other’s presence. Sipping, he began to talk, o
ften weeping as he did so. The police, cab drivers, Mafia types, mystery men—men, all sorts of men, were searching for him.
“What for?” I said.
To beat him up, to knock him down, to kick his teeth in, to rip his intestines out. For what else? He sat there sneering at me, his frail and empty hand clutching fiercely at his imagined eviscerated parts. He left me no doubt that he considered me simple-minded.
“I see,” I said, nodding knowingly, much as a few months before I had acquiesced to the Negro with the little man inside him.
After that I just kept pouring drinks for Oscar until, in no time at all, he got drunk and passed out. Removing his tweed jacket, his black-rimmed glasses, his Scotch grained loafers, I tenderly (I was as solicitous as a maiden aunt) laid the
poor bastard out on the davenport, put a wool blanket over him, and lovingly tucked him in. While doing so I could feel his skeletal ribs through both blanket and shirt, and it occurred to me that Oscar was so distraught he hadn’t eaten properly in weeks. For two hours I sat in a chair across from him and took pleasure in his heavy, contented sleep, punctuated only now and again by a startling and heart-breaking groan. When the Counselor came in that night, he looked at Oscar, rolled his eyes up to his brows, wagged his head in feigned and weary exasperation, and proceeded into the kitchen. Following him there and cornering him, I came as close as I would ever come to expressing my concerns about the behavior of the apartment’s habitués.
“Of course, you know,” I said, “that this Oscar, or whatever the fuck his name is, is sick. I mean, nuttier than a fruitcake.”
The Counselor laughed. “He’s all right,” he said. “Been through hell. He’ll pull out of it.” Then, by way of an after thought and as kind of consummate explanation, he said, “We’re all sick, Freddy.”
The Counselor rolled his eyes again, let his tongue sag out over his chin, and put on his most cretinous facade. He, too, was sick, he was saying. He was also testing my nihilism.
I met that test.
“Actually,” I offered in mock protest, “I’m sicker than Oscar is, and all I’m really worried about is your figuring he needs the davenport more than me.”
“No sweat,” the Counselor assured me. Still he played the slobbering idiot. Rapping me gingerly on the pate, as though fearful a heavier blow would unleash unimaginable demons, he repeated, “No sweat at all. There ain’t nobody sicker than you, Freddy.”
I smiled my agreement.
Many girls came to the apartment. The Counselor, bless his black and insatiable heart, often had one going out the back door as another came in the front. He was most magnanimous with his castoffs. One arrived one azure and sunny Saturday and departed the following gray and rainy Friday, leaving then only because she was the next day being married. She had pale, heartless eyes; high, prominent, and lovely cheekbones; and the nostrils of her pert nose dilated constantly with an incandescent and disarming contempt for all humanity. At the end of the second day she took me, and for the final five of her prenuptial days we lay naked about the apartment, drinking and making love till we went limp with exhaustion. She did not talk at all, and because I had my own pain I did not attempt to draw her out. At one undetected point the alarmingly hostile dilations of her nostrils abated, and twice each day she made phone calls, to her mother and to her fiancé, calls both to ac count for her whereabouts (presumably a resort hotel in the Catskills) and to explain that she was thinking things through and that everything was going to be okie-dokie. Often during the calls we engaged, at her perverse insistence, in that cruelly cynical sex (so that her conversations were punctuated with the laborious breathing of love and brought solicitous queries from the other end), afterward slumbering heavily in each other’s arms. It was through her I discovered my animal nature. Then it was Friday, and as arbitrarily as she had come she went. Two, three weeks later I saw her on the street with her husband. Oscar, whose wallet always contained, along with that soiled print, plenty of green, had taken to buying me beers during the long afternoons; and walking down the main drag toward a favored saloon, I heard Oscar, his voice tremulous, say, “Isn’t that—?” and looked up to see them.
Both were handsome and elegantly dressed; they were laughing and chatting at a furious clip; they were in love. In the moment of our passage I studied them as well as I could. The man was prettily handsome, but not without a rough gaiety that lent him virility; his suit was dark and beautifully cut. But it was she who astonished me. All pink and bounce she was. Her mute apathy had led me to believe that she was moronic or so repressed as to be unredeemable; but now, with her cheeks fierce pink with bliss, dressed in her pink and white checkered dress, bouncing along on her pink pumps, she appeared the unqualified vision of the health-exuding, intelligent, and attractive “young married.” Passing me, and with a barely perceptible withdrawal of attention from her husband, she all but shouted, “Hi, Fred!” In her voice was conquest, and that conquest forced the blood to my face. This, she seemed to announce, is ever so much better than that. At first I was furious, but the ire instantly subsided and, grabbing hold of Oscar’s arm, my body broke and bent under the weight of sudden and unrestrained laughter. Why take it out on me? It was that week of degradation that had provided the contrast by which her marriage now seemed so pink, pure, and thrilling to her. After all, unsolicited, that pert and dilating nose had spent a good part of the week buried in my genitals; and she seemed now not able to grasp that her animality had been not a lapse but as much a part of her as the marrow in her bones. Still clutching Oscar, I stopped, pivoted, taking Oscar with me, and, laughing, watched them bounce up the street. “She sure acts different,” Oscar said in solemn amazement. “She sure does,” I agreed.
The straight-legged girl and her hairy-nosed attorney continued to come to the apartment; he continued to wink lasciviously and remark his wonder that I was still on Lolita. Studs came daily and, like a caged animal, skimmed his bowed legs up and down the carpeting, intently seeking the names of people I wanted “done in.” Oscar was always there. He liked to mix the drinks and light everyone’s cigarette. But as jovial as he tried to be, he could muster no interest in the girls, and those girls who became interested in him were quickly discouraged. At a moment during the course of the evening, he invariably produced from his wallet the soiled print of the six kids and showed it about to the uninterested company, in his drunkenness taking particular care to point out the woman whom he called “wife,” who was not his wife and who sat stolidly behind the handsome children. She was a horn rimmed, stout, pale, severe-looking old cow, but Oscar loved her and one knew that it would be a long time before another woman moved his manhood to desire. Oscar was largehearted and beautiful to be with. Some days he was very good and coherent, but as the days passed he got very bad and seemed to be getting worse. The last I heard of him—some months ago—was that he was confined in a madhouse and expected to be there a long time. I think of Oscar quite a bit; on those infrequent occasions when I wonder about the efficacy of prayer, I think I would like to ask God in His infinite mercy to restore Oscar to life.
By the time the man called Mr. Blue arrived at the apartment I had come to expect anything and hence did not know that in the end he would be the cause of my getting off the davenport and moving on yet again. Mr. Blue claimed to be fifty, but I suspect he was closer to sixty, perhaps older. He stood five feet, three in his shiny black shoes, elevated and made of alligator. He had thin, snow-white hair splotched with an aging, uncomfortable yellow, and crinkly, sad, great-sized eyes of so penetrating a blue that when he looked directly at me I found myself fingering my face for food particles or nose phlegm: his eyes seemed a constant reproach that one did not live up to his expectations. Around his knifelike mouth were many deep wrinkles, giving his face a feline quality; when he talked I stared at his lips apprehensively, as though I expected vibrissa to sprout there. Tiny and slender, Mr. Blue weighed no more than a hundred and fifteen. Still, his strength and agility were incred
ible. From a stand-still position he could do either a front or back flip, in machine-gun-like succession twenty hand springs without even winding himself; and on anyone’s suggestion he would drop proudly to the floor and oblige the apartment’s stunned occupants with a hundred push ups. It was wondrous to watch the old codger go at these feats.