Eureka Man: A Novel (18 page)

A staunch ambassador of multicultural
experiences, she often brought along her Chinese, African and
Middle Eastern graduate students and he was always mindful of
making a fine impression.

Among other things, what he loved about the
time they spent together was the way she blended art and books and
theories right into conversations about their personal lives. One
minute they were discussing the Bay of Pigs incident, and the next
she was telling him about her husband Stanley. She wanted to know
about Oliver's friendships, so he told her about Early and Champ
the boxer and Albert DiNapoli who had remained a close and loyal
friend even after being home for two years. He showed her pictures
of his girlfriend Penelope who had recently moved out to California
to attend graduate school at UCLA. Just as he was about to start
bragging about his mother June he changed his mind and said,
“Enough about me, what about you?” The contentment he drew from
watching her reaction made him smile.

“Well, I've been teaching at the University
for the past twenty-plus years now, and I've been married for the
past thirty-three years. My husband Stanley is a professor of fine
arts at Carnegie Mellon. He's also quite a successful wood
sculptor. I believe I already told you we have two sons, Malcolm,
who's thirty-two, and Cab who's thirty. Malcolm is a highly
successful cabinetmaker; Cab is a watercolorist. They're both great
boys. I think you and Cab would get along well. As I mentioned to
you before, he had an addiction to cocaine a couple of years ago
and he almost lost everything. My husband and I found out about it
on the opening night of one of his watercolor exhibitions when he
showed up bug-eyed and talking a mile a minute. To make a long
story short, his father took him aside and told him to wise up, and
he eventually did but not before he overdosed twice, depleted all
his savings and stole money out of my purse. But that's another
story.”

“We have time. Why don't you tell me about
it,” Oliver suggested.

“We do? Well, that's a relief. To begin with,
he was still living at home at the time. I had been curious and
concerned for a long time, as his mother, you know?” She lowered
her voice as she remembered, and then continued. “I wanted to find
out what was so alluring about this cocaine stuff. Of course, I had
never taken anything stronger than an aspirin in my entire life.
Now, I'd been to several parties back in the seventies where other
artist friends of Stan's and professors I knew were snorting, is
that the right word? Anyway, snorting cocaine right out in the
open. But I didn't once entertain the notion of trying it myself.
Not until I entered Cab's bedroom one morning and found his stash.
The first thing I felt was shock. And then, strangely enough, I was
excited and nervous at the same time. There I was squatting in his
closet and staring into a sandwich baggie half-filled with white
powder and thinking, I need to find out what this is all about. And
I did. I took the bag downstairs and snorted a little pinch and
then a bigger pinch and I kept right on going in a complete state
of rapture. Later that day Cab went ballistic when he woke up and
discovered his cocaine was missing. He came running downstairs and
there I was cleaning the house from top to bottom in a complete
frenzy. We argued for a while and he was so irate I thought he was
going to hit me, but he didn't. Instead, he ran back upstairs and a
few minutes later he ran back down again and stormed out the front
door. Later, I discovered he had taken nine hundred dollars from my
purse.”

“That's a heck of a story. So did you find
out what the hype was all about?” Oliver asked.

“Oh God, Oliver. It was sheer nirvana. The
most blissful experience I've ever had. Not to mention the fact
that I've had chronic back pain for years, and that cocaine
obliterated any hint of pain for two days. But I'll tell you the
God's honest truth, Oliver. It scared the heebie-jeebies out of
me.”

“It did? Why?”

“Because every time I took some I wanted to
do a little more. And I did, that is, until it was all gone. The
euphoria was … well, have you ever tried it?”

“Can't say that I have.”

“Well, it's like this, Oliver. Once you
start, you don't want to stop, you know? It was better than
sex.”

Oliver's jaw dropped to his chest. “Nothing
in this world's better than sex.” He smiled and stared into her
baby blues. She blushed and grinned. He could have watched her all
day.

“Okay. Maybe I'm exaggerating. It's just that
it's been so long.”

“What has?”

“Well, that's another story, too.”

THE AIR WAS SO CHARGED
with astonishment the
blackbirds came to see. At one o'clock in the afternoon a platoon
of blackbirds circled the hospital sun deck three times before
disappearing over the wall. The nurses and orderlies came out to
look, too, but didn't stay. Handsome Johnny sat in his wheelchair
but never looked up. Fat Daddy stared at him, oblivious to
everything except the summer of 1978 when they took Handsome Johnny
away. And though he could never mistake that face for another's,
Fat Daddy asked, “That you, Handsome Johnny?”

Johnny's face was slow to form a smile and
when he spoke his tongue was thick and heavy. “Whooo…you…think?”
Though Handsome Johnny's words came out heavy and slow, Fat Daddy
thought he recognized the sarcasm and was glad.

“How you been, Johnny?”

Handsome Johnny rolled his head in figure
eights and said, “Goood…Fa-Fat…Da-a-ddy.” He stood slowly, shuffled
over to the rail and looked down into the flower beds.

In his eight years as a hospital janitor, Fat
Daddy had been around enough mental patients to recognize the
Thorazine shuffle.” They got you on that zombie juice, Johnny? They
got you on that shit, man?” Fat Daddy walked over and stood beside
his old friend and business partner.

Johnny's lower lip slid to one side and
slowly over his upper lip. He looked at Fat Daddy with limp,
pitiful eyes, looked away and back again.

Fat Daddy looked back at him, slowly. The
last good memory he had of Handsome Johnny was when he'd shown up
at Fat Daddy's favorite crime scene seven years ago with the
prettiest nineteen-year old white boy Fat Daddy had ever seen.
Posing as a hospital pass runner for the tenth time, Handsome
Johnny had escorted the blue-eyed boy across the hospital lobby to
the abandoned basement where Fat Daddy, dressed in a dirty white
doctor's smock, complete with a broken stethoscope draped around
his neck, waited to play doctor. “You Mr. Blossom?” he had asked
the boy.

“Yes, I am, Doctor,” Donnie Blossom said.

“You got to have a physical. Go behind that
screen and get undressed, then sit up on this table.”

Donnie Blossom had followed Fat Daddy's
instructions to a tee. When he came from behind the screen, he was
shivering and his milk-white skin was covered with goose bumps. He
sat on the table, hiding his privates with his hands. Fat Daddy
took the broken stethoscope and pretended to listen to his
breathing while Handsome Johnny guarded the door. After a minute or
so, Fat Daddy said, “Now stand up and bend over. I got to check
your anal cavity.”

No sooner did Donnie stretch his arms out in
front of him and bend over the table than Handsome Johnny appeared
in front of him and threw an extension cord tied into a noose
around Donnie's wrists. After securing the cord to a brace under
the table, Handsome Johnny said, “Now pay me, Fats, so I can go get
mines.”

Fat Daddy was so tricked up over what
Handsome Johnny had brought him that he told Johnny to take five
instead of two packs of Kools out of his gym bag that was sitting
on the countertop. Handsome Johnny stuffed the cigarettes into his
pockets, then be-bopped out of the room just as Fat Daddy pulled
Donnie's ass cheeks apart and told him to buck back.

Later that day, a faulty elevator brake ended
Handsome Johnny's career as well as his own love life. Whereas Fat
Daddy could mop and shine floors like nobody else, Handsome Johnny
had been a highly skilled orderly with certification to prove it.
He could feed a needle into a collapsed vein quicker than any nurse
and his fists were more adroit than any defibrillator. A fine black
nurse named Veronica had depended on Johnny for everything: coffee,
gossip, hot sandwiches, the daily newspaper, clean bedpans, Kools,
monitoring her patients, good conversation and a heads-up whenever
her supervisor was on the prowl. He had asked for only one thing in
return: to be the only Handsome Johnny to ride in her elevator. And
he was. For four years, twice a week at about the same time
(seven-thirty pm), the hospital elevator shook and trembled to a
stop between the first and second floors long enough for them to
beat out a rhythm on all fours or standing up against the back
wall. Rumors and gossip abounded. “He got it made, don't he?” “She
carrying his baby?” “Takin' a big chance, ain't she?” Rumors and
gossip, that's all it was until that evening when the elevator
brake slipped and that steamy hot box descended all the way to the
first floor lobby. Veronica heard the ring-a-ling of the elevator
door as it slid open, and then she looked right up into the eyes of
Captain Ned Twyman who was staring at her pretty black
buttocks.

“Help me, sir! Help me!” Veronica unlocked
herself from Handsome Johnny, got to her feet and threw her arms
around the captain's waist. “He forced me down there, sir!” She
cried like a little girl.

Captain Ned Twyman consoled her.

Handsome Johnny cried too. Then he laughed.
But the laughter was serious. Astonished, he got to his feet,
pulled his pants up and sighed before his laughter broke out again.
He had to lean against the elevator door to keep the laughter from
pulling him down to the floor.

“Look how he bruised my breast,” Veronica
cried. She showed Captain Ned Twyman the martialed nipple of her
left breast.

Handsome Johnny should have hated the woman,
rose to his feet and hated her, but what he felt was just as
relevant. Guilty and beaten.

And he was. The guards came and hauled him
off to the redbrick Home Block. When they were finished beating him
late into the night, there was nothing left unbruised or unbroken.
They broke and scattered him into pieces and hurled him back
together in a meaty ball of pain. His mind was gone, too, shattered
into a thousand halls, each with its own echo.

The next morning the prison ambulance carried
Handsome Johnny away, and that evening his name appeared on the
most-dangerous-patients ledger at the hospital for the criminally
insane.

Now the doctors had declared Johnny harmless
and returned him to the same prison hospital where he had once been
the best orderly they ever had. Fat Daddy wanted to see how far his
friend was gone so he said, “You want to know what happened to her,
Johnny? Want me to tell you what happened to Veronica?” Handsome
Johnny frowned before his eyes got wide and he turned and stared at
Fat Daddy, who took it as a gesture of sanity. “A bullet from a
drive-by shooting sliced her jugular vein in half while she was
standing on the corner of Hamilton and Homewood Avenue. Happened
about a year after you was gone, man. It was in the paper. I cut
the story out. I'll bring it to you if you want. Oh, here, look.
There's somebody I want you to say hello to. Come here, Donnie. You
remember this boy, don't you, Johnny?”

Handsome Johnny swiveled his head in the
direction of the rooftop door. “I-I-I…re-memm-berrr…yeah, I dooo.”
Handsome Johnny's smile was twisted.

“Hello, Mr. Johnny. Nice to see you.”

“Yeahhh.” Handsome Johnny maintained his
twisted smile while he looked up in the sky.

“I've got to get you right, Johnny boy,” Fat
Daddy said. “We got to get you off that shit, man. You going to let
me help you, Brother?”

This time Handsome Johnny laughed like a
house on fire. “Yeahhh, yeahhh, yeahhh! Help meeee!”

WHEN HE STARTED receiving three sticks of reefer
every morning in exchange for his daily dose of Thorazine, Johnny's
mind was grateful but his body was confused. The joints in his
knees locked up and his tongue shot out of the side of his mouth
uncontrollably. Fat Daddy stayed with him day and night for an
entire year, altering his treatment as he saw fit. He fed him
valium and Percodan he purchased on the black market and increased
the reefer from three sticks a day to five. After a year, Johnny
started picking up his feet again instead of shuffling them and his
sentences contained both a subject and verb.

Handsome Johnny was grateful for having been
saved. Except occasionally. Occasionally, when he smelled perfume
in the hallways or heard the pulleys turning on the nurse's
elevator, or when he watched Fat Daddy bartering for rouge,
lipstick and bobby pins-he wondered if it would have been just as
well to have died in a psychotropic stupor than to feel so much
loneliness.

He had a solid year of school in Rhoda
Cherry's special needs class, a bed in the big St. Regis, and a job
as a groundskeeper before he got the courage to whistle again, and
when he did, it all came back to him. Once again he started shining
his shoes and polishing his nails with clear coat floor wax. He
went to the barbershop and told Chinaman to give him the
works-shampoo, shave and a high fade. Now he was ready. Now when
the secretary with the bright colored skirts swished by him in the
mornings as he squatted to pull weeds from the cracks in the
sidewalks, he stopped and squeezed his groin.

With his groove back, Handsome Johnny started
a friendly garden rivalry with Early. The front and side yards of
the hospital grounds, for which Johnny was the official keeper,
were given over completely to growing flowers. Irises, poppies,
daffodils and peonies took up his time.