Tales Read online

  Crosby walked up and down the long narrow apartment as if he were looking for clues. Even though he had gone through all the really vulgar Sherlock Holmes shit quite awhile ago. He came to the front then walked to the back. He did it again. And on the fourth trip to the front he shook Mickey Lasker on the couch, and spoke very rapidly to him at the moment Mickey opened his eyes. “Is Rachel at Mauro’s house?”

  Because Mickey was not quite awake he answered immediately. “Yes . . . Yes . . . that’s where she is.” When he realized exactly what was happening, Lasker’s eyes flew open and his hands fell and tightened at his sides. “Lew . . .” but Crosby had turned and run out of the house.

  There was a light in Mauro’s window. Or Lew figured at three o’clock it was probably the only window lighted. The loft was only a few blocks, about five, from Crosby’s apartment. And the flaps then, thinking about the distance, fit a picture of something. For instance, “I’m going for a walk, Lew. I’ll be back in a little while.” Meaning, only five blocks, and not that brand of all-night magic. Finish my business while you read. And not with the cruelty it is to leave someone lying awake early mornings shuffling through faces.

  Or “dance class,” and a quick drink after, or stop in to hear some music, but home early, from jiving with the girls. (One of whom, “the girls,” Lew found out, the wife of Crosby’s closest friend, was fucking Mickey Lasker every chance she got. Mostly Thursdays . . . “dance” night.) “Oh, baby, it’s Brook Farm.” One of the things Lew pretended to say when the rain ran in his mouth.

  But Rachel looked so quietly guilty, and it canceled what Lew thought when she came in on time from her screwing. Oh, come on asshole, don’t make liars out of everybody. Or something, mixed with the slanting light on his book. The open bottle. His glass so handy, and plenty of good ideas. So fixed and necessary; that each thing remain understood. How can you read Pierre if you think your wife’s doing something weird? Then you got to take time out to think about her. Oh boy . . . and then what? How much time can you waste like that? A poem? An honesty, like watching the rain from a doorway. Any simple but really complex way of feeling can be distorted by all these people. These conversations and rationales. Opinions, posturings, lies. Just to pass the time. From one dismal minute to the next. A bad painter sweeping his brush like counting. Talk, talk, talk (in a foreign accent). I don’t want to say what I mean. But shutup anyway, I don’t want to hear about you. Just live your life and shutup! Railing like that. Wasting everything. After it had taken so long to get it together. I am Lew Crosby, a writer. I want to write what I’m about, which is profound shit. Don’t ask me anything. Just sit there if you want to. No, I’m not thinking. I’m just sitting. Don’t try to involve yourself with me.

  “Lew, Lew, answer me. Lew? Say, don’t you ever listen to what I’m saying?”

  Now it wanted to rain again, just as Crosby opened the downstairs door. The loft was on the third floor. When he got outside the door he could hear low music and conversation. He banged on the door, almost as hard as he could. There was only more conversation, a little louder, but much the same as before. He didn’t knock again, but the door swung open and he could see his wife sitting at a table just behind the short husky Japanese who opened the door.

  “Hello, Lew,” Mauro said, pulling the door wider. Crosby walked over to the table.

  “Get your coat, Rachel.” He wanted his voice to be soft and it almost was. “Get your coat and come on.” His wife got halfway up from the table and looked over her shoulder.

  “Lew,” the painter said, “Lew, sit down and have a drink. We civilized people.”

  Crosby got hold of his wife’s arm and pulled her out of the chair. He shoved her toward the door. The Japanese touched Crosby’s arm.

  “Lew, have a drink. We civilized people.” Lew, of course, wanted to turn and hit Mauro in the face. Then he wanted to kick him in the face. But Mauro used to teach him, Lew, judo. Lew figured this clown just wanted to throw him on his ass. Wow. Brook Farm.

  Lew got his wife’s coat and pushed her through the door. She began to cry when they got to the bottom of the stairs. Lew wouldn’t say anything. He walked a little in front of her. No rain now, only a damp sluggish wind off the river . . . and the spilling puddles. “Lew,” Rachel was still crying, and louder. “Lew . . . Lew!” He walked faster, beginning to cross the wide avenue closest to their apartment. “Lew,” Crosby’s wife called very loudly, and he walked very quickly up the front steps.

  He left the front door and the apartment door open. Rachel closed them as she passed. When she got inside the final door, Lew was standing in the middle of the room. Mickey Lasker brushed them both on the way out, tucking in his shirt. “Rachel,” he just about whispered as he passed her.

  “Lew,” Rachel walked very close to her husband. The room was half-lit by a streetlight through a window, but also the sky was turning a little gray.

  “You fucking whore. You goddamn fucking whore,” Lew was looking out the window at the light. But he kept calling Rachel a fucking whore. She cried again, calling his name over and over. And he kept looking out the window repeating his thing. When Rachel touched his arm he spun around and swung at her hand. But then he started talking. “Why with that bastard? If you wanted to fuck somebody, why pick a complete dope? A stupid asshole like that? For chris’sake, for chris’sake. You know what? It follows all along . . . you just don’t have any goddamn taste. A goddamn mediocrity. You were that when I first met you and goddamn you still are. A middle-class wreck. Christ, Christ . . . why don’t you go the hell back where you came from? Christ. God!”

  Her husband’s stream of useless profanity cleared Rachel Crosby’s head. She blew her nose while he shouted. And wiped her eyes. Lew went on shouting, but when he paused for a second Rachel said, as if she were holding a normal conversation, “What about you? What about you? I know you’ve been sleeping with Leah Purcell for the last few months. Nine o’clock in the morning. For God sakes! Lew, don’t come on like that. How can you be so angry when you’ve been screwing around with that girl like you have? Leaving me here all the time. God, Lew . . . what did you expect?”

  “I never slept with Leah Purcell.” Lew was screaming now. Then he would shut up. Then he would call his wife a whore. Then he would call her mediocre, then he would say she needed a fool like Mauro because she was a fool. He wanted to call the Japanese a bad painter, but he figured that would be dumb. Even if it was true. “You’re a dumb whore. A stupid mediocre bitch. Go away dumb whore. Go away.”

  He thrashed his arms, spit on the floor. Kicked tables and threw chairs against the wall. Smashed cheap glasses and pushed some flowers on the couch. Rachel started to scream now. All the things she’d said before. But now she screamed. And she hit her husband, on the chest and arms, till he stopped calling her a dumb whore, and began to grab at her arms. “I’ll slap the hell out of you.” He was trying to scream as loud as she was. She was saying go ahead . . . go ahead, and he slapped her once, across her face, and caught her before she fell. Then they stood holding each other for about thirty minutes.

  * * *

  When Lew pulled gently away from his wife it was even lighter in the room. He looked toward the front of the house and started walking toward the door. His wife said Lew again. But he left without speaking.

  He almost retraced his steps. Not wobbling so much, but quickly, and only moving his mouth when he had something to say. When he got to the loft the light was dimmer but there was still a light. But now the downstairs door was locked. Lew brought up his hand stiffly and shoved it noisily through one of the door’s small windows. Turning the knob from the inside he pushed the door open with his knee. There were three or four medium cuts on both sides of his hand, and they bled freely until Lew tied the hand in his handkerchief.

  Once in the hall he leaped up the stairs, but as quietly as he could, landing on each step on his toes. When he got to Mauro’s door his hand itched in the handkerchief and he remembered t
hat the painter could probably wipe up the loft with him. So Crosby went back down one flight of stairs and rummaged through a pile of wood he remembered. But he took a metal pipe out of the pile and stuck it in his pocket with the cut-up hand.

  When the door swung open this time Lew drew the pipe out and up and very hard down on Mauro’s forehead. The next blow struck Rachel’s lover near his ear. He fell quickly, with only a trifling wheeze. Blood was covering his head before he hit the floor.

  Crosby looked at the man on the floor and still took a step into the room. He looked at the table with two separate crowds of beer cans. Then came in and looked at the unmade bed. He kneeled and smelled the wrinkled sheets. When he straightened up he tossed the pipe over his shoulder toward the painting area. Then he walked quickly through the door running down the stairs.

  When the air hit him in the face, Lew got everything pretty straight. He even wondered whether the guy was dead. But he started, now, running in the street as fast as he could, twisting his hand up under a streetlight to see how badly it was hurt. He was running toward Leah Purcell’s house.

  * * *

  About fifteen minutes later, running, walking, holding his hand at the wrist, or swinging it in wide arcs trying to stop it from stinging, Lew moved past the narrow tenement where Leah lived, and kept pushing down the street.

  Seven o’clock he got to Bob Long’s house, and some people were already hitting the street. Mostly Puerto Ricans, in sad vectors toward whatever ugly trick “Charlie” had put them in.

  Another loft, with long shallow stairs. Bob lived at the top in a huge double studio with democratic antiques and his paintings. Blue girls, black girls, yellow and green girls. And in the background always some strange voyeur in a top hat riding a slow horse. Most of the paintings were that, or should have been that. Green people, orange people, magenta people. And they were always working out. Kama Sutra fashion. They made it from behind. Standing on horses. All ways. Girls and girls, men and horses. Girls and horses. And violent violet landscapes.

  Inside, early early in the morning, Bob and two bohemians were getting ready to bolster the economy by sticking old needles in their arms. They greeted Lew, who was bleeding very badly, but only Bob got up to look at his hand. While he cleaned his hand Lew told Bob everything that had happened that night. Very quickly, like stage directions. Bob looked at him without saying anything. Letting Lew finish. They bandaged the hand. “Mauro, huh?” was all Bob would say. “Wow! Mauro, huh?”

  “Yeh. I just left the cat. With his head caved in. I don’t know if he’s dead or not. I thought I’d sit around here for a while . . . you know.”

  “Yeh, man, yeh. Just sit.” And then a soft benevolence came into Bob’s voice. “Come on and get high with us. We got enough. And one of them turkeys can go get some more if we have to.”

  “What is it, horse?”

  “Uh huh.” Bob looked in the mirror at a mole on his chin. He ran some water in the sink and dabbed at the mole uselessly.

  “I didn’t know you did that.”

  “Oh, man, sure. Groovy stuff.”

  They went back to the nodding bohemians. Both of whom had taken as much out of the bag as they possibly could without making it 100 noticeable that they had gotten some of Bob’s. Before he even looked at the bag Bob said, “O.K., which one of you faggots burned me?” Both of the bohemians laughed. “Eddie, you gonna have to make the run.” Bob picked up the bag, shaking it and holding it up to the light. “Yeh, faggot, you better get on your horse.”

  Bob showed Lew what to do. And even put the needle into his arm. It was warm and dead in Lew’s stomach throat and head. He sat so far away from anything you can name. Inside a deadness that kept so much uselessness away. Slow greedy pictures of dominoes.

  Lew volunteered Eddie five dollars to make the run. Sitting with his knees hugged up under his chin; trying not to vomit, but harder and straighter anyway. And just out of everybody’s reach.

  Heroes Are Gang Leaders

  My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. Attack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me something very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.

  Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism. And what to do to make the wildest, brightest dispersal of our energies. In our not really brief flight into darkness. Either it is done against the heavens, sky flyers, or against the earth. And the story of man is divided brusquely between those who know the sky, and those who know only the earth. And the various dictators, artists, murderers and ministers can come from either side. Each Left and Right, go right up to the sky, and the division is within their own territory. Lindberghs and Hemingways, Nat Turners and Robespierres. What they do is gold, and skyward, from whatever angle, they fly and return to an earth of mistakes. So Christopher Tietjens being made a cuckold, and trying vainly to see through mist and shadows down to Sylvia’s earth. She called so furiously for him to fall. My friend, Johnny Morris, fighting off the Ku Klux Klan only to return from those heights to the silent hallway of some very real shack and watch some fool wrestle with his wife. Various scenes complete each other with desperate precision.

  Sitting there being talked to by an old Tory, fixed and diseased by my only life. And surrounded, fortunately enough, by men like myself, who are not even able to think. Wood alcohol drinkers, dragged in from the Bowery, with their lungs and bellies on fire. Raving logicians who know empirically that Christianity can only take its place among the other less publicized concerns of men.

  Sixty-year-old niggers who sit on their beds scratching their knees. Polacks who have to gurgle for the rest of their lives. Completely anonymous (Scotch-Irish?) Americans with dark ratty hair, and red scars on their stomachs. They might be homosexuals watching me read Thomas Me-an, and smelling the mystery woman’s flowers. Puerto Ricans with shiny hair and old-fashioned underwear shirts, eating their dinner out of Mason jars.

  And we are all alive at the same time. Contemporaries in that sense. (Though I still think myself a young man, and am still in love with things I can do.) Of the same time and source. Inheritors of so many things we will never understand. But weighted with very different allegiances, though if I am silent for a long time I hope we all believe in a similar reality. That I am not merely writing poems for Joel Oppenheimer or Paul Blackburn . . . but everything alive. Which is not true. Which is simply not true. Our heroisms and their claims are fictitious. But if we are not serious, if we do not make up a body of philosophy out of which to work we are simply hedonists, and I am stretching the word so that it includes even martyrs. Flame freaks.

  In the bed next to mine was a man, Kowalski, a very tall Polish man with a bony hairless skull, covered with welts and scratches. He had drunk paint remover and orange juice. He was the man who gurgled now, though he kept trying to curl his lips and smile. But I was hoping he would find out soon what a hopeless gesture that was, and stop it. I wanted to say to him, “Why don’t you quit fucking around like that? It’s certainly too late to be anybody else’s man now. Just cut that shit out.” With his weird colored teeth hanging below his lip, cutt
ing the smile into strips of anguish.

  He would eat my fruit when I offered it, or the nuts a rich lady gave me. Since I was not merely a “poor man” or a derelict, but a writer. That is, there was a glamorous reason I was in this derelict’s ward. Look at my beard, and all the books on the table. I’m not like the rest of these guys. They’re just tramps. But I’m a tramp with connections.

  He would talk too, if I didn’t watch him. He would gurgle these wild things he found in the tabloids. And point out murders and rapes to me, or robberies where everybody got away clean. He described the Bowery to me like it was a college, or the Village, or an artist’s colony. An identical reality, with the same used up references . . . the same dishonesties and misplaced loyalties. The same ambition, naturally. Usually petty and ravaging. Another cold segment of American enterprise, and for this reason having nothing at all to do with their European counterparts, beggars . . . whom I suppose are academic and stuffy in comparison. Bums have the same qualifications as any of us to run for president, and it is the measure of a society that they refuse to. And this is not romanticism, but simple cultural observation. Bums know at least as much about the world as Senator Fulbright. You better believe it.

  But one day two men came into our ward. A tall red-faced man, like from his neck up he had been painted by Soutine, or some other nut. The other man was lost in his gabardine suit, like somebody who was not even smart enough to be rich. When I looked up from my book at them, I thought immediately what a stupid thing to think about people that they were cops. Although, of course, that is just what they were: cops. Or detectives, since they were in “plain” clothes, which is as hip as putting an alligator in a tuxedo. Very few people would make a mistake, except say those who would say it was a crocodile. That is, zoology majors.