Tales Read online

  The Death of Horatio Alger

  The cold red building burned my eyes. The bricks hung together, like the city, the nation, under the dubious cement of rationalism and need. A need so controlled, it only erupted out of the used-car lots, or sat parked, Saturdays, in front of our orange house, for Orlando, or Algernon, or Danny, or J.D. to polish. There was silence, or summers, noise. But this was a few days after Christmas, and the ice melted from the roofs and the almost frozen water knocked lethargically against windows, tar roofs and slow dogs moping through the yards. The building was Central Avenue School. And its tired red sat on the corner of Central Avenue and Dey (pronounced die by the natives, day by the teachers, or any nonresident whites) Street. Then, on Dey, halfway up the block, the playground took over. A tarred-over yard, though once there had been gravel, surrounded by cement and a wire metal fence.

  The snow was dirty as it sat dull and melting near the Greek restaurants, and the dimly lit “grocey” stores of the Negroes. The rich boys had metal wagons the poor rode in. The poor made up games, the rich played them. The poor won the games, or as an emergency measure, the fights. No one thought of the snow except Mr. Feld, the playground director, who was in charge of it, or Miss Martin, the husky gym teacher Matthew Stodges had pushed into the cloakroom, who had no chains on her car. Gray slush ran over the curbs, and our dogs drank it out of boredom, shaking their heads and snorting.

  I had said something about J.D.’s father, as to who he was, or had he ever been. And J., usually a confederate and private strong arm, broke bad because Augie, Norman, and white Johnny were there, and laughed, misunderstanding simple “dozens” with ugly insult, in that curious scholarship the white man affects when he suspects a stronger link than sociology, or the tired cultural lies of Harcourt, Brace sixth-grade histories. And under their naïveté he grabbed my shirt and pushed me in the snow. I got up, brushing dead ice from my ears, and he pushed me down again, this time dumping a couple pounds of cold dirty slush down my neck, calmly hysterical at his act.

  J. moved away and stood on an icy garbage hamper, sullenly throwing wet snow at the trucks on Central Avenue. I pushed myself into a sitting position, shaking my head. Tears full in my eyes, and the cold slicing minutes from my life. I wasn’t making a sound. I wasn’t thinking any thought I could make someone else understand. Just the rush of young fear and anger and disgust. I could have murdered God, in that simple practical way we kick dogs off the bottom step.

  Augie (my best white friend), fat Norman, whose hook shots usually hit the rim, and were good for easy tip-ins by our big men, and useless white Johnny, who had some weird disease that made him stare, even in the middle of a game, he’d freeze, and sometimes line drives almost knocked his head off while he shuddered slightly, cracking and recracking his huge knuckles. They were howling and hopping, they thought it was so funny that J. and I had come to blows. And especially, I guess, that I had got my lumps. “Hey, wiseass, somebody’s gonna break your nose!” fat Norman would say over and over whenever I did something to him. Hold his pants when he tried his jump shot; spike him sliding into home (he was a lousy catcher); talk about his brother who hung out under the El and got naked in alleyways.

  * * *

  (The clucks of Autumn could have, right at that moment, easily seduced me. Away, and into school. To masquerade as a half-rich nigra with shiny feet. Back through the clean station, and up the street. Stopping to talk on the way. One beer gets you drunk and you stand in an empty corridor, lined with Italian paintings, talking about the glamours of sodomy.)

  Rise and Slay.

  I hurt so bad, and inside without bleeding I realized the filthy gray scratches my blood would carry to my heart. John walked off staring, and Augie and Norman disappeared, so easily there in the snow. And J.D. too, my first love, drifted against the easy sky. Weeping at what he’d done. No one there but me. THE SHORT SKINNY BOY WITH THE BUBBLE EYES.

  Could leap up and slay them. Could hammer my fist and misery through their faces. Could strangle and bake them in the crude jungle of my feeling. Could stuff them in the sewie hole with the collected garbage of children’s guilt. Could elevate them into heroic images of my own despair. A righteous messenger from the wrong side of the tracks. Gym teachers, cutthroats, aging pickets, ease by in the cold. The same lyric chart, exchange of particulars, that held me in my minutes, the time “Brownie” rammed the glass door down and ate up my suit. Even my mother, in a desperate fit of rhythm, was not equal to the task. Which was simple economics. I.e., a white man’s dog cannot bite your son if he has been taught that something very ugly will happen to him if he does. He might pace stupidly in his ugly fur, but he will never never bite.

  But what really stays to be found completely out, except stupid enterprises like art? The word on the page, the paint on the canvas (Marzette dragging in used-up canvases to revive their hopeless correspondence with the times), stone clinging to air, as if it were real. Or something a Deacon would admit was beautiful. The conscience rules against ideas. The point was to be where you wanted to, and do what you wanted to. After all is “said and done,” what is left but those sheepish constructions. “I’ve got to go to the toilet” is no less pressing than the Puritans taking off for Massachusetts, and dragging their devils with them. (There is in those parts, even now, the peculiar smell of roasted sex organs. And when a good New Englander leaves his house in the earnestly moral sub-towns to go into the smoking hells of soon to be destroyed Yankee Gomorrahs, you watch him pull very firmly at his tie, or strapping on very tightly his evil watch.) The penitence there. The masochism. So complete and conscious a phenomenon. Like a standard of beauty; for instance, the bespectacled, soft-breasted, gently pigeon-toed maidens of America. Neither rich nor poor, with intelligent smiles and straight lovely noses. No one would think of them as beautiful but these mysterious scions of the Puritans. They value health and devotion, and their good women, the lefty power of all our nation, are unpresuming subtle beauties, who could even live with poets (if they are from the right stock), if pushed to that. But mostly they are where they should be, reading good books and opening windows to air out their bedrooms. And it is a useful memory here, because such things as these were the vague images that had even so early helped shape me. Light freckles, sandy hair, narrow clean bodies. Though none lived where I lived then. And I don’t remember a direct look at them even, with clear knowledge of my desire, until one afternoon I gave a speech at East Orange High, as sports editor of our high school paper, which should have been printed in Italian, and I saw there, in the auditorium, young American girls, for the first time. And have loved them as flesh things emanating from real life, that is, in contrast to my own, a scraping and floating through the last three red and blue stripes of the flag, that settles the hash of the lower middle class. So that even sprawled there in the snow, with my blood and pompous isolation, I vaguely knew of a glamorous world and was mistaken into thinking it could be gotten from books. Negroes and Italians beat and shaped me, and my allegiance is there. But the triumph of romanticism was parquet floors, yellow dresses, gardens and sandy hair. I must have felt the loss and could not rise against a cardboard world of dark hair and linoleum. Reality was something I was convinced I could not have.

  And thus to be flogged or put to the rack. For all our secret energies. The first leap over the barrier: when the victim finds he can no longer stomach his own “group.” Politics whinnies, but is still correct, and asleep in a windy barn. The beautiful statue of victory, whose arms were called duty. And they curdle in her snatch thrust there by angry minorities, along with their own consciences. Poets climb, briefly, off their motorcycles, to find out who owns their words. We are named by all the things we will never understand. Whether we can fight or not, or even at the moment of our hugest triumph we stare off into space remembering the snow melting in our cuts, and all the pimps of reason who’ve ever conquered us. It is the harshest form of love.

  * * *

  I could not s
ee when I “chased” Norman and Augie. Chased in quotes because they really did not have to run. They could have turned, and myth aside, calmly whipped my ass. But they ran, laughing and keeping warm. And J.D. kicked snow from around a fire hydrant flatly into the gutter. Smiling and broken, with his head hung just slanted toward the yellow dog ice running down a hole. I took six or seven long running steps and tripped. I couldn’t have been less interested, but the whole project had gotten out of hand. I was crying, and my hands were freezing, and the two white boys leaned against the pointed metal fence and laughed and slapped their knees. I threw snow stupidly in their direction. It fell short and was not even noticed as it dropped.

  (All of it rings in your ears for a long time. But the payback . . . in simple terms against such actual sin as supposing quite confidently that the big sweating purple whore staring from her peed up hall very casually at your whipping has never been loved . . . is hard. We used to say.)

  Then I pushed to my knees and could only see J. leaning there against the hydrant looking just over my head. I called to him, for help really. But the words rang full of dead venom. I screamed his mother a purple nigger with alligator titties. His father a bilious white man with sores on his jowls. I was screaming for help in my hatred and loss, and only the hatred would show. And he came over shouting for me to shut up. Shut up, skinny bastard. I’ll break your ass if you don’t. Norman had both hands on his stomach, his laugh was getting so violent, and he danced awkwardly toward us howling to agitate J. to beat me some more. But J. whirled on him perfectly and rapped him hard under his second chin. Norman was going to say, “Hey me-an,” in that hated twist of our speech, and J. hit him again, between his shoulder and chest, and almost dropped him to his knees. Augie cooled his howl to a giggle of concern and backed up until Norman turned and they both went shouting up the street.

  I got to my feet, wiping my freezing hands on my jacket. J. was looking at me hard, like country boys do, when their language, or the new tone they need to take on once they come to this cold climate (1940s New Jersey) fails, and they are left with only the old Southern tongue, which cruel farts like me used to deride their lack of interest in America. I turned to walk away. Both my eyes were nothing but water, though it held at their rims, stoically refusing to blink and thus begin to sob uncontrollably. And to keep from breaking down I wheeled and hid the weeping by screaming at that boy. You nigger without a father. You eat your mother’s pussy. And he wheeled me around and started to hit me again.

  Someone called my house and my mother and father and grandmother and sister were strung along Dey Street, in some odd order. (They couldn’t have come out of the house “together.”) And I was conscious first of my father saying, “Go on, Mickey, hit him. Fight back.” And for a few seconds, under the weight of that plea for my dignity, I tried. I feinted and danced, but I couldn’t even roll up my fists. The whole street was blurred and hot as my eyes. I swung and swung, but J.D. bashed me when he wanted to.

  My mother stopped the fight finally, shuddering at the thing she’d made. “His hands are frozen, Michael. His hands are frozen.” And my father looks at me even now, wondering if they’ll ever thaw.

  Going Down Slow

  Ah, miserable, thou, to whom Truth, in her first tides, bears nothing but wrecks

  —Melville

  In his mind Lew Crosby was already at Mauro’s loft. But the soft neon rain and long wet city streets caused the separation. The logical affront of reason, or imagination, staled into thinking of itself as reality, or “a reality.” As mediocre neo-freudians always say in bars, leaning on one arm, half to themselves, “That’s your reality.”

  But Crosby was no neo-freudian, so he measured a real distance on top of his fantasy, and continued very swiftly to walk. If he was a neo-anything, and this was his own thinking, he was a neo-shithead, a neo-dope. He opened his mouth pretending to talk to himself so the curiously refreshing drizzle would spray onto his tongue. He pretended talking to himself, like a Genet heroine pretending he is a woman. The more fully Crosby knew he was pretending to talk, and that no real sound was issuing from his lips, the more he felt that he was actually in conversation with himself. And it made him move even faster through the rain; knowing that he was a comfort to himself, and could make interesting conversation, entertain himself, even against the ugliest situations.

  He said, “Ugly,” and only once. He meant it about the weather, the tone of the sky. And not, oh shit no, about whatever was running him through the streets. At quarter to three Saturday morning.

  The long street grew shorter as he approached the avenue that intersected it, and divided it from another seemingly endless crosstown city block. The rain stopped, and a light wind slowly whirled shallow puddles off the few awnings of stores and apartment buildings. A car would go by occasionally. A whore. One time a policeman watched Crosby from a doorway, lighting a cigarette. And probably wondered why this skinny little man was crying and shaking his head, working his jaws like speech, almost bulling up the deserted street. Crosby did break into a run occasionally, and usually when he did he would actually say some things. Usually he said, “Shit,” or, “Goddamn goddamnit,” clenching his teeth at the sound, his hands ripping away his jacket pockets, they were driven in so hard.

  He had come, at 2:30 a.m., from a woman’s house. A woman he had slept with many times. He had slept with her that night again. And when they had finished the action part of his visit, and the woman pulled his narrow body tightly against her own, he looked at his watch, which he hadn’t taken off, and thought with a little start and maybe relief that he ought to be starting home. “It’s two o’clock,” he said to the woman. And she held him a little tighter, burying her face in his throat. “Leah, I’ve got to make it now.”

  The woman let him go suddenly, stretching one arm with its hand so they both hung awkwardly off the couch. That’s where Crosby and Leah Purcell had been, for maybe an hour. Turning and grabbing on a narrow day-bed couch. Tearing each other’s clothes, panting and pulling, till they both lay naked, or nearly naked, and now a little wasted, still shoved against each other so as not to fall off the narrow cot.

  “You wouldn’t stay all night?” Leah, on the outside, stretched one of her legs trying to get it solidly on the rug.

  “I wouldn’t. How could I?” Crosby pushed himself up on his hands. “How could I stay here all night?”

  “I don’t think you want to.”

  “No?”

  “No. And besides, your wife wouldn’t mind.” The girl rolled completely away from him, putting both her feet on the floor. She ran her hand over a mound of clothes, trying to find her pants.

  “No?”

  “Hey, Lew.” She got the pants and then the brassiere. “Would you mind if Rachel were staying with somebody? No, I mean seeing somebody . . . like you do?”

  Crosby pulled himself onto the floor and started to get his clothes together. He could do it more quickly than the girl, because even in the most fearful throes of passion he still knew exactly where he had thrown, or placed, his clothes. He started with his socks, and then his underwear. “What do you mean, seeing somebody?” His shirt, then the pants, fastening the belt. He took his tie out of the jacket.

  Leah was still in her underwear. She stood now more in the center of the room, pulling her long hair together. “Suppose Rachel was seeing someone—sleeping with them—just like you and I sleep together, have been sleeping together, about twice a week for the last two months. Would it bother you?”

  Lew smiled. He had his jacket on, and ran his hands through the pockets searching for cigarettes. When he got one in his mouth and knew that his speech would be muffled he half-shrugged half-didn’t say some kind of affirmative answer. It meant yes though. And he even repeated it.

  Leah stopped pulling her hair and bent down toward the floor to retrieve her large reddish comb. As she bent Lew squinted in the almost darkness, grimacing self-consciously at the woman’s large self-conscious behind
.

  “It would, huh? It would really bother you . . . even though you do the same thing?”

  “Uh huh.” Lew took a step in the direction of the hall.

  “What kind of thinking is that?”

  “Mine.” There was a book Lew came in with that he missed now, and he stooped to feel along the floor.

  “Lew, don’t go now. Stay for a while . . . let me make some tea. I’ve got some brandy too.”

  He got the book, and threw his raincoat over his shoulder. “Uh uh, I’ve got to make it.”

  “Oh, come on Lew, you don’t have to go. Rachel won’t mind. She’s not even home.”

  A hot laugh dug through Lew Crosby’s feelings, coming in through the nostrils and eyes. A good punch line. He was in the street and looking for money for a cab. But by the time it occurred to him to get a cab he had run almost thirteen blocks. A bunch of dominoes spilled over. Flap, flap, flap, etc., the white dots blinding him like monster streetlights. Flap, flap, flap. All kinds of recent history, in cold images ate at the white-hot screaming in his skin. The screaming he watched float up out of his stomach and scratch his eyeballs sideways. Now what? Now what? Now what? Or flap, flap flap, his steps, and legs, stretching out along the pavement. And his fiction still beat wet against his leg . . . flap flap flap.

  At the house he stood a long time on the front step looking at the two front windows. It was dark inside. For sure For sure. And he had to put his head between his knees to cool the blood and nausea pumping at it from the inside. He put his hands on his hips, holding his head between his knees. Like a hurdler or half-miler. A bent wire squeezed together among the pictures. The stone tablets of conversation and act. He got days mixed up and dates, and stories. Fantasies replaced each other. Fantasies replaced realities. Realities did not replace anything. They were the least of anybody’s worries. Even when he got inside and there was no one there. Or only the baby, sleeping very quietly in her crib, and an old college friend who had been staying at the house over the last few weeks.