Firmin (13 page)
Authors: Sam Savage
Tags: #Rats, #Fantasy Fiction, #Fiction, #Books and Reading, #Fantasy, #General
When I was able to climb out of the Hotel and limp around the room, Jerry did not object. He was a terrible housekeeper, and he did not object to anything I did, even pulling the stuffing out of Stanley, which I enjoyed doing, and getting down inside the springs, though I never tested him by snooping in his personal things while he was around. Once back on my feet, I took advantage of his long absences to sniff out every inch of the place, starting with the bookcase. I have never been in any other person’s home, so I don’t know how many books are usually in one. After Pembroke Books, of course, almost any number would seem small. I guess Jerry had about two hundred. I was happy to see
Portrait of the Artist
and
Ulysses
, though the Great Book was sadly missing - sadly, because I have never been able to recover the pages that Flo tore up and that I unwittingly ate. In addition to the books, the bottom shelf held a long row of notebooks of the kind Jerry did his writing in. Nosy as I normally am, I still did not feel it was right to snoop in these, though the temptation was awful. I did read his regular books, however - quite a number were new to me. I started at the bottom left and worked my way up, and it wasn’t long before he caught me at it.
Portrait of the Artist
and
Ulysses
, though the Great Book was sadly missing - sadly, because I have never been able to recover the pages that Flo tore up and that I unwittingly ate. In addition to the books, the bottom shelf held a long row of notebooks of the kind Jerry did his writing in. Nosy as I normally am, I still did not feel it was right to snoop in these, though the temptation was awful. I did read his regular books, however - quite a number were new to me. I started at the bottom left and worked my way up, and it wasn’t long before he caught me at it.
I had just discovered Terry Southern, and I had his novel
Candy
open on the floor. It was one of those glued paperbacks that are always trying to snap shut like clams, and I was holding it down with both forepaws. The story was very stimulating. I had gotten to the place where Candy is having sex with the dwarf, and I was so engrossed in it - seeing, as I could not fail to do, a certain similarity to my own situation - that I didn’t hear Jerry coming up the stairs until it was too late. The door must not have been latched, for suddenly there he was on the threshold, breathing heavily, a bag of groceries in one hand, still holding the room key in the other. He gave me a real start. For his part, he was so surprised he just stood there for a moment without moving, pointing his key at me like a pistol. Since I had, so to speak, been nabbed with the goods, I figured I now had little choice but to try and bluff my way through. So I just turned the page and went on reading. I expected him to be angry at me for dragging the book out onto the floor, but instead he thought it was terribly funny. When he got over his shock, he actually laughed aloud, something he did not do very often, throwing a whole lot of gravel on the roof. After that I did not hesitate to pull out a book whenever I was bored, open it on the floor, and read it through right there in front of him. I don’t think he ever caught on that I really was reading. I think he thought right up to the end that I was just pretending.
Candy
open on the floor. It was one of those glued paperbacks that are always trying to snap shut like clams, and I was holding it down with both forepaws. The story was very stimulating. I had gotten to the place where Candy is having sex with the dwarf, and I was so engrossed in it - seeing, as I could not fail to do, a certain similarity to my own situation - that I didn’t hear Jerry coming up the stairs until it was too late. The door must not have been latched, for suddenly there he was on the threshold, breathing heavily, a bag of groceries in one hand, still holding the room key in the other. He gave me a real start. For his part, he was so surprised he just stood there for a moment without moving, pointing his key at me like a pistol. Since I had, so to speak, been nabbed with the goods, I figured I now had little choice but to try and bluff my way through. So I just turned the page and went on reading. I expected him to be angry at me for dragging the book out onto the floor, but instead he thought it was terribly funny. When he got over his shock, he actually laughed aloud, something he did not do very often, throwing a whole lot of gravel on the roof. After that I did not hesitate to pull out a book whenever I was bored, open it on the floor, and read it through right there in front of him. I don’t think he ever caught on that I really was reading. I think he thought right up to the end that I was just pretending.
Chapter 10
T
hough a person might not guess it to look at him, Jerry was a very conscientious and parsimonious person when he was sober. He liked to fish old broken things out of the trash and fix them, toasters and record players and the like. Sometimes he could and sometimes he couldn’t. If he couldn’t, he would throw them back out, and if he could, he would jam them in with the rest of the stuff in the closet. He could spend half a day taking some contraption apart on the table, fussing around with pliers and screwdrivers and rolls of black tape, talking to himself the whole time - ‘Now that wire must go over here, that’s the thermostat, and that’s the spring catch, O.K., and it’s broken right there’ - and then putting it all back together. His eyes were so bad he practically had to work with his nose against the table, and what with his bad eyes and his thick fingers he sometimes dropped some of the little parts on the floor. I loved it when he crawled around on all fours looking for them. He reminded me of a bear. I suppose I could have fetched them for him, but I never did. And it was funny too to see him bent over his work with his big walleye staring out to the side. He looked like a child caught doing something naughty. And then whenever he did manage to resuscitate some moribund gadget he was so happy he would bounce around the room chortling and chuckling to himself.
Repairing the World: A Mechanic’s Struggle
. Seeing him like that made me want to put the word radiance next to him. The happiness just flew off him and filled the room and I could take big breaths of it myself. After he had four or five of these things stacked in the closet and fixed up as good as new, he would load them all up in the red wagon and haul them off somewhere. I later learned he gave them away to people in the streets.
hough a person might not guess it to look at him, Jerry was a very conscientious and parsimonious person when he was sober. He liked to fish old broken things out of the trash and fix them, toasters and record players and the like. Sometimes he could and sometimes he couldn’t. If he couldn’t, he would throw them back out, and if he could, he would jam them in with the rest of the stuff in the closet. He could spend half a day taking some contraption apart on the table, fussing around with pliers and screwdrivers and rolls of black tape, talking to himself the whole time - ‘Now that wire must go over here, that’s the thermostat, and that’s the spring catch, O.K., and it’s broken right there’ - and then putting it all back together. His eyes were so bad he practically had to work with his nose against the table, and what with his bad eyes and his thick fingers he sometimes dropped some of the little parts on the floor. I loved it when he crawled around on all fours looking for them. He reminded me of a bear. I suppose I could have fetched them for him, but I never did. And it was funny too to see him bent over his work with his big walleye staring out to the side. He looked like a child caught doing something naughty. And then whenever he did manage to resuscitate some moribund gadget he was so happy he would bounce around the room chortling and chuckling to himself.
Repairing the World: A Mechanic’s Struggle
. Seeing him like that made me want to put the word radiance next to him. The happiness just flew off him and filled the room and I could take big breaths of it myself. After he had four or five of these things stacked in the closet and fixed up as good as new, he would load them all up in the red wagon and haul them off somewhere. I later learned he gave them away to people in the streets.
One day about a month after I came to live with him, Jerry brought home a toy piano he had dug out of the trash. It was white and stood on three little legs and came with a little bench. It was in every way like a real piano except it did not have so many keys, and some of the ones it had did not work. They made no sound at all when he struck them, or only a dull unmusical
thunk
. After hammering out three or four of those
thunks
, he sat down at the Camel and took the whole thing apart. He fiddled with it and talked to it for hours, and in the end he got most of the keys to work. Afterward he spent a couple of hours with it on his lap in the armchair, picking out tunes with two fingers, ‘Streets of Laredo’ and ‘Swanee River.’ Then he put it down on the floor and let me play with it. I loved that piano, and he knew it and never did give it away. I played mostly Cole Porter and Gershwin. And sitting on the bench, swaying to the music, I looked exactly like Fred Astaire, and I sang like him too. Sure, I know that this was true only from a certain perspective, and that all Jerry heard was a high ratlike squeak. But he loved it just the same. The first time I played and sang for him he laughed till tears ran down his cheeks. I would have preferred something other than laughter, but I did not really mind.
thunk
. After hammering out three or four of those
thunks
, he sat down at the Camel and took the whole thing apart. He fiddled with it and talked to it for hours, and in the end he got most of the keys to work. Afterward he spent a couple of hours with it on his lap in the armchair, picking out tunes with two fingers, ‘Streets of Laredo’ and ‘Swanee River.’ Then he put it down on the floor and let me play with it. I loved that piano, and he knew it and never did give it away. I played mostly Cole Porter and Gershwin. And sitting on the bench, swaying to the music, I looked exactly like Fred Astaire, and I sang like him too. Sure, I know that this was true only from a certain perspective, and that all Jerry heard was a high ratlike squeak. But he loved it just the same. The first time I played and sang for him he laughed till tears ran down his cheeks. I would have preferred something other than laughter, but I did not really mind.
Jerry was the first real writer I had ever known, and I have to confess that despite his kindness I was disappointed at first. As I have said, I was still very bourgeois, and his was not at all what I thought a real writer’s life should be like. For one thing, it was lonelier than I had ever imagined. Well, not lonelier than I had ever imagined, and not lonelier than I had experienced for myself, but it was lonelier than I thought real writers were. Only three times did anyone knock on our door during all the months we were together. I had always imagined that a real writer - and myself writing in my dreams - would spend a lot of time lounging about in cafes having witty conversations with scintillating people and that sometimes he would bring home a beautiful girl with long dark hair and then throw her out the next morning so he could get back to work - ‘Sorry, doll, I’ve got a book to write.’ I imagined him locked in his room for days at a time, drinking quarts of whiskey from a Woolworth tumbler and pounding at his Underwood into the wee hours. He was never clean-shaven and never had a beard, always just a two-day stubble. A certain bitterness lurked in the corners of his mouth, and his sad eyes betrayed an ironic
je ne sais quoi
. Jerry remotely conformed only to the whiskey part. I didn’t know where he went when he left me at night, but he never brought home any interesting people. All he brought home were matchbooks from Flood’s Bar and Lounge two doors down. And he did not seem to have any friends, even boring ones. Unless, of course, you counted mere acquaintances like Shine and the people who knew him as a character on the street. Everybody in the neighborhood knew Jerry Magoon in that way. In that way he was almost famous.
je ne sais quoi
. Jerry remotely conformed only to the whiskey part. I didn’t know where he went when he left me at night, but he never brought home any interesting people. All he brought home were matchbooks from Flood’s Bar and Lounge two doors down. And he did not seem to have any friends, even boring ones. Unless, of course, you counted mere acquaintances like Shine and the people who knew him as a character on the street. Everybody in the neighborhood knew Jerry Magoon in that way. In that way he was almost famous.
He did not spend a lot of time actually writing either, if writing means physically putting words on paper - an hour a day at most. When he did write in the physical way, he sat at the enamel-topped table, the same place he sat to eat and to fix things. It was always piled with stuff - papers, books, dirty dishes, clothing, an umbrella usually, and bits and pieces of things he was taking apart or putting back together - and he would push these aside to clear a space in which to write. He wrote with a pencil in school notebooks, the kind with black-and-white marbled covers and a white rectangle in the middle with lines for Name and Subject. The name on the one he was writing in the whole time I lived with him was
The Last Big Deal
. It did not have a subject.
The Last Big Deal
. It did not have a subject.
Jerry mumbled and hummed while he wrote. The hum was a high singsong and the mumble was just a mumble or maybe a drone. It sounded like someone saying prayers in a distant room - it carried an aura of meaning and yet it was impossible to make out a single word. He mumbled even when he was not sitting at the table writing. In fact, except when he was actually talking to someone in person, he mumbled all the time. I thought he was probably writing his books in his head the way I do. This was to me an encouraging thought, and it was around that time that I really got serious about my own writing.
Sometimes Jerry did drink a little too much, and then when he came back home he would bang into the furniture getting into bed and fall asleep in his clothes. I would hear him get up in the night to take them off. He always got up in the night anyway to pee in the sink. And now and then he went on a real knockdown binge. These invariably came at the end of one of his blue periods - down periods that rolled around like clockwork - and they always seemed to do him a lot of good. I didn’t mind the drinking - why should I, after all, given my own history? - but I hated the blue periods. All his buried despair, all the sadness and hopelessness that you found in his books, would float to the surface of his life, bubble up into his eyes and cover his face like a veil. During those periods he just sat in the big leather chair and studied the wall, practically catatonic.
He even stopped eating and, closer to home, stopped feeding me. That made me feel really apprehensive. And I felt useless too. As you have probably guessed by now, I am a pretty depressive character myself and know all about the seventeen kinds of despair, so even if I had been able to talk I could not have said anything that would have made him feel better. When someone is in despair and tells you how cold and unkind the world is and how much pointless suffering there is in life and how much loneliness, and you just happen to agree with him on every point, it puts you in an awkward position. These spells of his lasted a couple of days usually, and I never gave up trying to snap him out of them. I did all sorts of tricks to amuse him - sang, played boogie-woogie on the piano, pulled funny faces, did my epileptic rat act, everything that in better times would have called forth a pretty big guffaw - but he seemed never to notice. Then, regular as sunrise, after two or three days, he would suddenly get up from his chair, splash cold water on his face, put on his jacket and tie, and without a word walk out the door.
These sudden exits terrified me at first. I thought he was probably going to look for a tall building or maybe a bridge over icy water. Sometimes I pretended I was Ginger and went out looking for him. I always found him before it was too late, usually in some wharf-district dive, sitting alone in a booth watching the ice melt in his whiskey. Timidly I would tug at his sleeve. ‘Come home, Jerry, please.’ He would jerk his arm free and angrily turn away. ‘Please, Jerry, come back home. I need you.’ And in the end I always managed to persuade him. I loved the way everybody in the bar looked at me and Jerry and felt sad for us. In reality, of course, I just sat home and worried. He would be gone for one night, maybe two, and then he would come back home again looking really terrible and fall into bed and sleep a long time. And when he woke up, he would be his old self again. Psychologically speaking, drunkenness is a lot more useful than people think. One morning a couple of days after I moved in, when I was still confined to the Hotel, I was startled awake by a huge commotion. Poking my nose over the edge of the box, I was surprised to see Jerry with his arms around the big leather armchair. Panting and grunting, he was struggling to shove it through the open window. I thought at first that he was throwing old Stanley out, and I expected a tremendous crash from below. But in fact he was just pushing the chair out onto the metal fire escape, and once it was there he climbed out after it, clutching a cup of coffee in one hand and a
Life
magazine in the other. On the cover it said ‘Survive Fallout.’ It turned out he often sat out there in fine weather, reading the paper or napping. Sometimes he took his shirt off and sunbathed. He had a mat of gray curly hair on his chest that tapered down in a v to his navel, and on his left bicep he had a tattoo of a red rose with a scroll of pale blue writing beneath it, so faded you could not read it anymore. I think it said ‘forever,’ though it might have been ‘clever’ or ‘roll over.’ He called the fire escape with the chair on it a balcony, just the way I had, but all you could see from his balcony was the backs of some buildings, the alley below, and a lot of very bent-up garbage cans. And the sky, of course. The city had stopped replacing the bulbs in the streetlights and one by one they had gone out until the neighborhood had grown so dark that we could sit out on the balcony at night and see the stars. They were my first stars. Like Jerry’s arm, they said ‘forever.’
Life
magazine in the other. On the cover it said ‘Survive Fallout.’ It turned out he often sat out there in fine weather, reading the paper or napping. Sometimes he took his shirt off and sunbathed. He had a mat of gray curly hair on his chest that tapered down in a v to his navel, and on his left bicep he had a tattoo of a red rose with a scroll of pale blue writing beneath it, so faded you could not read it anymore. I think it said ‘forever,’ though it might have been ‘clever’ or ‘roll over.’ He called the fire escape with the chair on it a balcony, just the way I had, but all you could see from his balcony was the backs of some buildings, the alley below, and a lot of very bent-up garbage cans. And the sky, of course. The city had stopped replacing the bulbs in the streetlights and one by one they had gone out until the neighborhood had grown so dark that we could sit out on the balcony at night and see the stars. They were my first stars. Like Jerry’s arm, they said ‘forever.’
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