Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (39 page)

The hum of voices, all somnolent, no hilarity, not a laugh, not a snicker. The substitute was an occasional grunt, a forced sluggish thudding thrust of ughhh as of someone forcing a bowel movement, and usually from a woman, groped under a table. A place of base relationships.

The word immoral did not even apply. It was akin to the drunk who lay on the floor, propped against the wall between stacks of Coca-Cola cases, eyes wide yet unseeing, hands caked with unidentifiable filth, clothes shapeless and gray. An object of no identity, so sunk into alcoholism, addlewitted, that he was what the police called a wetbrain. The term drunk no longer applied, just as the term immoral did not apply. What Sorokin saw here, around him, poised holding Choate, at the door of the toilet, was the final descent of man, to base needs.

He saw the world as it really was, as it was for him, also. The world that was unaffected by ambition or history or social graces. He saw the real side of life, which he had not seen for many years. He saw, God help him, the seamy side of Life.

The bar was full, down reflecting the length of the streaked backbar mirror. Elbow to elbow as four o'clock curfew raced toward them, bending and drinking, not even talking, getting as much inside as possible before night overtook them and they were sent out into the world alone.

A Negro came up to Sorokin, a heavy-faced Negro with conked reddish hair and bloodshot eyes, character gone from the face and replaced with weary cunning. He held up a pair of red plastic dice. "You go'n th' toilet baby? We got us a few fren'z heah, wanna do a thang'a craps, huh, howzabout?" and he laid his hand on Sorokin's backside. Sorokin stiffened.

"Forget it," he said, thickly. Spade fag, he thought, and was ill. Of all the horrors Whitey has committed against the black man, homosexuality is the most perverse.

The black man drew himself up, snorted a word, and went away, smelling strongly of Arrid and Jean Naté. Out of the corner of his eye, Sorokin saw him join another Negro in a side booth for two, and knew they were discussing that damn straight whitey muthuh by the toilet door.

And in that instant, Sorokin was satisfied. He knew at last, somehow and inexplicably, he had come of age. Late adolescence, the chase for masculinity, were found and over. He had seen all there was to see, and what he had done since he had left this milieu, was to seek responsibility. To mature was to belong; where you wanted to belong, surely, but to care about a life with continuity. He was suddenly whole. And free.

He opened the door and went through into the filthy bathroom with Choate.

The moment they entered the white-tiled toilet, Choate broke away, and fell down on his knees by the stand-up urinal. He began to vomit heavily, a rhinoceros sound deep from his stomach. Sorokin moved away from him, realizing his own bladder cried for emptying. He entered the stall, letting the swinging door slam hard behind him, and unzipped.

He began to urinate, thinking a codifying series of thoughts about the moment of realization he had just known. He barely heard the sound of the outer door open, the scuff of feet against the tiles, a heavy thwack! of something heavy hitting something yielding, and an almost immediate soft ughhh of gentle pain.

Sorokin, still urinating, peered outside the stall, pushing open the door in idle curiosity.

Two Negroes, the same two from the bar, were working Choate over. One had smashed Choate behind the ear with a white tennis sock full of coins, and Choate was bleeding from the scalp, half-slumped into the vomit-filled urinal. The other one was groping for Choate's wallet.

Sorokin did not think about it. If he had, he would not have done it.

He charged out of the stall, head down, and plunged full-tilt into the Negro with the sockful of silver. It had been the Negro with the red plastic dice. He hit him at full speed, head against chest, hands pushing the black man sharply away from him. The Negro careened backward under the impact of the rush, and his head crashed against the white tiles with a sharp car-door crack. He sank to the floor instantly, eyes closed.

Sorokin turned, just in time to see the glint of honed steel as the second Negro flipped open the straight razor and set himself hard, slashing straight through in a flat arc from left shoulder across his body, like a good tennis player fielding a smash with a tight backhand. The razor silently hummed.

The black man caught Sorokin directly across the belly, and Sorokin felt it only as a tiny paper cut might feel. He plunged forward, still doing a ballet turn from the first Negro, unconscious against the tiles. Ingrained army infighting, learned at no small traumatic cost years before, leaped unbidden into Sorokin's reflexes. (You never forget how to swim, once you've learned. You never forget how to ride a bicycle, once you've learned. You never forget how to lay a woman, once you've learned. You never forget how to kill, once you've learned.)

He caught the Negro under the nose with the flat, hard edge of his palm, slamming back and up. The Negro's head whipped up as though on a wire, and he shrieked, high and piercingly, a woman's shriek. His knees buckled inward, and his arms flailed out to the sides. The straight razor went flying and clattered into a corner of the toilet, under the sink. The black man started to fall face-forward, and Sorokin realized he had not for a moment seen the black blood gushing out of the black man's black mouth onto his lower face. A torrent, a river, a dam burst of blood.

The Negro fell past Sorokin like a dropped sandbag. Empty and cold and heavily. He hit on his face, and lay silent, but the smear of blood ran across the white tiles. As he hit, something fell from his vest pocket, and tinkled away.

Sorokin knew the Negro was dead. One for certain, possibly two. He had to get out of there. He looked down, and the razor had cut through his Harris tweed jacket, through his shirt, through his undershirt, and through the top layers of his stomach's soft flesh. He was bleeding profusely, in a constantly welling red line, straight and clean and very, very neat. He touched it, and a bombshell went off in his head as shock set in. His eyes widened, and he said something but did not know what it was.

The thing that had fallen from the smashed Negro's vest winked up at him. It was one of the red plastic dice. It said two. Little white eyes in a clear red box.

Choate was still gasping and vomiting. Sorokin grabbed him up by the back of his jacket, and hauled him toward the door of the toilet. Behind him, neither black man moved, the scene of carnage just as it had been for almost a minute, an hour, forever.

They stumbled out of the toilet together, and Sorokin realized his fly was still open. He did the acceptable thing, and then zipped up his pants. He half-carried Choate toward the table.

Andover was making flirting, obscene gestures at the fat henna-rinsed sow locked in the over-shoulder embrace of a massive longshoreman, one booth away. Oh, Jesus, Sorokin thought, terror again bubbling up, these two are going to get me killed!

He pulled a ten dollar bill from his side pocket, and threw it down on the table. Then he grabbed Andover and pulled him out of the booth before the sow could complain to her paramour. "Get the coats!" Sorokin ordered him.

Andover grabbed the coats, and with Sorokin hauling both of the drunken Yale men, they stumbled and fell out of The Dog House Bar. Punky wanted very much to get as far away from the scene in the toilet as possible.

For it was entirely probable that death lay stretched out on those filthy white tiles. The final crap-out.

The streets were cold and empty at four o'clock November.

The blood would not stop. He had torn up his undershirt, and stuffed it around his middle, but it had done no good. The undershirt was soaked deep brown from rotted blood.

He could not feel his legs, yet they continued to move, one in front of the other, a puppet conditioned to go on moving even when the puppet-master was dead. An improbable concept, a dead puppet-master, but flamingos were fine, as well. And papaya juice, sweet, cold, milky. There was a toy soldier once, that he had buried in the ground behind his parents' garage, in the town where he had been born, very long ago. He would go back and dig it up. When the whistle blew. Or before. If he could.

The two Yale men were drunk out of their skulls. They laughed and tittered and followed Punky where he led them, which was nowhere, plodding through fresh-fallen snow in the New York streets; he was in shock, and did not know it. The Yale men did not seem to find the dripping slash across Punky's belly very funny, but they didn't talk about it, so it probably didn't matter.

The heavy Harris tweed jacket (a new jacket, recently bought, at Jack Breidbart's, on Sixth Avenue) was what had saved his life. It had absorbed much of the impact of that flat, whistling slash. Straight razor. Clean and true and deadly, made for death, not shaving.

And back there, in that toilet. If you strike a man hard enough under the nose, you will shatter the bridge and drive bone splinters into the brain, killing him instantly. And he will fall past you like a sandbag, like the Negro fell past Punky, so that you must sidestep, a torero who has made his kill. Back there, in that toilet.

And they walked the cold, chill, empty, screaming streets.

Punky put his hands in his pockets. He was cold, very cold. He felt a bit of cardboard. He pulled it out. It said: LOTTE Call Sid 611 East 101st.

Punky yelled for a taxi. He yelled and yelled and yelled, his voice rising up spiraling among the icicle-frozen buildings of the Manhattan where he had come to get slashed, where he had come to find his manhood so late in his life, and found it, now dripping out on the white snow of the Manhattan that had always taken him back.

Then there was a taxi, and a long ride uptown, and Sid opening a tenement door, and a gorgeous black-haired Puerto Rican girl who said her name was Lotte, and she was only fourteen, but did someone wanna good fokk?

And time spun hazily by. The two Yale men had gotten laid, and were sleeping on two of the four beds in the apartment. And Sid had sampled his own merchandise, and he was sleeping off a methedrine high on the third bed, and Punky Sorokin was insanely sitting at a kitchen table, at 5:30 in the gray-rising morning, in the four-bed crib of a fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican whore named Lotte, playing gin rummy.

"Knock on six." He grinned boyishly, and bled.

She had serviced the other three, then returned to him and asked, "Wal, you nex', guy. You ready't fokk?"

He had smiled at her in friendliness, totally removed from the world around him, a child in shock, and touched his own bleeding belly. "Did you see I'm bleeding?" he had asked her, very matter-of-factly.

She had looked at it, and they had examined it together with intense care. She had said a few nice things about it, and he had thanked her. But he didn't want to fokk. But, he had asked, did she play gin rummy?

Knock or straight gin, she had wanted to know.

So they had sat down to play, over the oilclothed kitchen table. He liked Lotte a lot. She was a sweet child, and extremely pretty. All that black hair, done up in a high intricate style.

That went on for a long time, the timeless time of just playing, and the two of them smiling at one another. Until Punky decided to tell her things, and say what he had learned that night, and what was in his heart.

She listened, and was polite. She did not interrupt. And this is what Punky Sorokin said ...

"You see before you a man eaten by worms. Envy, hungers most men don't even smell; lust, nameless things I want. To belong, someplace, to say what I have to say before I die, before I waste my years. All of it, pouring out of the tips of my fingers, like blood, needs. You sitthere, and you live day to day and you sleep, get up, go eat, do things. But me, for me, each little thing should have been bigger, each book should have been better, all the riches, all the women, everything I want, just out beyond my reach, tormenting me. And even when I get the gold, when I get the story, when I do the movie, it still isn't what I want, it's something more, something bigger, something perfect. I don't know. I look every way, up and down the world, walking through rooms like something that's waiting for meat to come to it. I can't name it, can't say what it is, where I want it to come from. All I want to do, is do! At the peak of my form, at the fastest pace I can set. Running. Running till I drop. Oh, God, don't let me die till I've won."

Lotte, the fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican whore, stared at him across her cards. She laid the hand of gin rummy face-down on the kitchen-smelling oilcloth, and did not know what he was raving about. "Y'wanna can owf beer, hanh?"

In it, was all the gentleness, all the caring, all the concern AndyPunky had ever known. All the sweetness, all the warmth of someone who gave a damn. He started to cry. From far down inside him, it started up, building, great gasps of power, wrenching sobs. He lowered his head onto his hands, still bloody from the wounds that dripped across his middle. He cried muffledly, and the girl shrugged. She turned on the radio, and a Latin band was wailing:

Vaya!

There were streets and he was alone now. Punky had lost his two Yale men. They had showed him the seamy side of Life. Streets he walked on. At six o'clock in the New York morning. And he saw things. He saw ten things.

He saw a cabdriver sleeping in his front seat.

He saw a candy-maker opening his shop to work.

He saw a dog lifting its leg against a standpipe.

He saw a child in an alley

He saw a sun that would not come up behind snow.

He saw an old, tired Negro man collecting cardboard flats behind a grocery store, and he told the old man I'm sorry.

He saw a toy store and smiled.

He saw pinwheels of violent color that cascaded and spun behind his eyes till he fell in the street.

He saw his own feet moving under him, leftrightleft.

He saw pain, red and raw and ugly in his stomach.

But then, somehow, he was in the Village, in front of Olaf Burger's apartment house, so he whistled a little tune, and thought he might go up to say hello. It was six-thirty.