Midnight Cowboy (19 page)

But on the whole this person with the sunburst on his boots remained cranky and disagreeable in his behavior toward the little blond runt. He realized it, too. Joe knew good and well he had become a pain in the neck, and what’s more he was none too concerned about it. But there was a reason for his unconcern: He was happy.

For the first time in his life he felt himself released from the necessity of grinning and posturing and yearning for the attention of others. Nowadays he had, in the person of Ratso Rizzo, someone who needed his presence in an urgent, almost frantic way that was a balm to something in him that had long been exposed and enflamed and itching to be soothed. God alone knew how or why, but he had somehow actually stumbled upon a creature who seemed to worship him. Joe Buck had never before known such power and was therefore ill equipped to administer it. All he could do was taste it over and over again like a sugar-starved child on a sudden mountain of candy: cuss and frown and complain and bitch, and watch Ratso take it. For that’s the way in which power is usually tasted, in the abuse of it. It was delicious and sickening and he couldn’t stop himself. The only thing the runt seemed to demand was the privilege of occupying whatever space he could find in the tall cowboy’s shadow. And casting such a shadow had become Joe Buck’s special pleasure.

He enjoyed listening to Ratso, too. As they walked through the city, or shared a cup of coffee in a lunch stand or cafeteria, or shivered together in the progressively colder doorways of the waning year, he heard Ratso’s views on many subjects. Bit by bit, he was able to piece together a picture of Ratso’s early years in the Bronx.

Ratso was the thirteenth child of tired immigrant parents. He remembered his father as a hard-working bricklayer who in his off hours went to sleep whenever he found something even vaguely horizontal to lie upon. His mother, a burnt-out child bearer, usually sick, managed the family like a kindly, befuddled queen, issuing contradictory mandates from her bedroom. Occasionally she would pull a housecoat about her body and move through the flat trying to sort out the confusion she had wrought. On one such tour she found the seven-year-old Ratso under the kitchen stove in an advanced stage of pneumonia. Surviving this, he contracted infantile paralysis a few weeks later, and by the time he was discharged from the hospital the following year his mother was dead and gone. His three sisters and two of his nine brothers had left home, either for marriage or for other purposes. Of the eight remaining boys, none took any interest in cooking or housework; nor had Papa Rizzo ever given any special attention to the running of a family. When he thought of the job at all, it was in terms of supplying; food. Therefore once a week he stocked the shelves with saltines and cans of pork and beans, the refrigerator with cheese and cold cuts and milk. For six days the boys would grab what they could, and on the seventh Papa Rizzo gave them a real Sunday dinner at a neighborhood spaghetti place. Occasionally in an earlier time—usually at Easter or on Mother’s Day—he had hosted such dinners in this same restaurant, and the owner had always made him feel proud of his enormous brood by calling attention to the fact that he required the biggest table in the place.
“Ecco, che arriva Rizzo!”
he would say.
“Prende la tavola piu grande del locale!”
Even now, with only eight sons left, it was necessary to shove two regular tables together. But after the first month or so, these Sunday dinners were ill-attended, for the old bricklayer had developed a foul temper and took to using them as occasions for scolding and shouting. The boys, one by one, having learned to forage in ways they found easier than listening to the ravings of a disagreeable old man, wandered away from home altogether. Finally one Sunday afternoon at the family dinner there was only Ratso. When the owner led them to a table for two, the old man was shocked, and then embarrassed, and then chastened. He ate in silence, behaving with an almost ceremonial kindness toward the skinny, crippled, thirteen-year-old runt of his progeny. He also drank a good deal of wine, and then there came a moment in which he broke the silence and ended the meal by landing one tremendous wallop of his bare fist on the little formica-covered table, shouting his own name and reminding the world at large, and God, too, that he was accustomed to larger tables than this:
“Sono Rizzo! lo prendo la tavola piu grande del locale!”
The owner came over and the two old men wept together and embraced each other. Then Ratso led his father home. Entering the flat, the old man drew back and let out a dreadful howl. It was as if he had suddenly awakened from the longest of all of his naps and found his family wiped out by bandits and the walls of the flat all splattered with blood. Looking past Ratso as if the boy didn’t exist, the bricklayer started to sob, asking over and over again the whereabouts of his sons.
“Dove sono i miei ragazzi terribili?”
Gradually, and perhaps only by default, Ratso became the favorite, and for a while life was better for him than for the others. He was given an allowance and was never scolded. The Sunday dinners continued. There was not much talk at the small table, but a silent intimacy had grown between them and the atmosphere was affectionate and peaceful. Papa Rizzo, by now a fat, benign, baldheaded old bear in his late sixties, drank a quart of Chianti all by himself, and on the way home from the restaurant he would find a number of opportunities to place his hand upon the head of his last remaining son, or, waiting for a traffic light, to wrap a heavy arm around his shoulder. On one such afternoon of a summer Sunday, Ratso was undermined by the great burden of weight his father placed upon him, and they both fell to the sidewalk. When Ratso was able to disengage himself, he found that the old man had died on him, right there in the crowded sunlight of the Bronx River Parkway.

From then on, Ratso was on his own. He was sixteen, with no special training for life. But he did have a quick natural intelligence, and, like most persons raised in large families, he was a good, fast liar. With these assets, he took to the streets.

Ratso could talk about the Bronx, and he could talk about Manhattan, and he could talk about nearly any thing under the sun. But his best subject was Florida, and though he had never been there, he spoke more positively and with greater authority on this topic than on any other. He often studied folders in color put out by transportation companies or perused a stack of travel clippings collected from newspapers; he also owned a book called
Florida and the Caribbean
. In this splendid place (he claimed) the two basic items necessary for the sustenance of life—sunshine and coconut milk—were in such abundance that the only problem was in coping with their excess. For all that sunshine you needed wide-brimmed hats, special glasses and creams. As for coconuts, there were so many of these lying about in the streets that each Florida town had to commission great fleets of giant trucks to gather them up just so traffic could get through. And of course coconuts were the one complete food: This was common knowledge. Anytime you got hungry, all you had to do was pick one up and stab it with a pocketknife, then hold it up to your mouth. Ratso was unable to tell about this without demonstrating with an invisible coconut. “Here your only problem is,” he would say to Joe, sucking at the air between phrases, “—you want to know what your only problem is here, diet-wise? It’s the warm milk running down your face and neck. Yeah, sometimes you got to exert yourself, you got to reach up and wipe off your chin. Tough, huh? You think you could stand that? I could. I could stand it.” As for fishing, he made this sound so simple Joe actually got the impression you didn’t need a rod and reel or even a pole. Without examining the picture too carefully for probability, he had formed a kind of cartoon image of the two of them standing near the water saying
here fishy-fishy
, at which point a pair of enormous finned creatures would jump into their arms precooked. A silly, happy thought, and he could smell the fish plain as day. Sometimes to keep this pleasant discussion going, Joe might feed a question: “But shee-it man, where in hell would you sleep? They got no X-flats down there, you can bet your smart ass on that.” But Ratso had an answer for everything. At this cue he would begin to tell of the endless miles of public beaches on which had been built hundreds of pagodas and pergolas and gazebos; under these, on sun-warmed sand or softly padded benches, protected from rain and wind, one slept the sleep of Eden.

Most often under discussion, however, was the subject of their financial problem. Ratso was inclined to belittle any so-called honest solution. Neither of them was sufficiently presentable to get a job that would pay them at a worthwhile rate, nor had either of them been trained for such work. Besides, any course of action involving full-time employment did not seem worthy of being called a solution; such talk Ratso considered frivolous and had no patience with. Of course, living by one’s wits was just as problematical in its own way as legitimate work: Competition was overwhelming, one had constantly to be on the lookout for a new angle and, finding one, to be ready for its sudden obsolescence. (“For example, them goddam parking meters; right?”) As for Joe Buck’s earning potential, it was Ratso’s considered opinion that he had not a hope in hell of making a living from women. Such a profession was extremely specialized, requiring a wardrobe, polish, and a front. The cowboy gambit wouldn’t work on New York women. Not only was this costume an almost purely homosexual lure;, it was severely specialized even within that group, attracting to it almost exclusively a very small masochistic element. (“Never mind
what
that is, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”) Sometimes, against his own better judgment, but in an extremity of hunger, he would arrange for Joe a fast five-or ten-dollar transaction in which little more was required of the cowboy than standing still for a few minutes with his trousers undone. But these unhappy conjunctions usually left Joe in a depressed and disturbed state of mind. He felt as though something invisible and dangerous had been exchanged, something that was neither stated in the bargain nor understood by either of the parties to it, and it left him sad and perplexed and with an anger he couldn’t find any reasonable place for. Ratso agreed this was a poor way to earn a dollar. He claimed that prostitution had always been the hardest profession in the world as well as the most competitive—and even worse in today’s world, where the commodity was being given away free in such liberal quantities. The only way to do really well at it was to rob the patron, but this required an adroitness and a sense of timing Ratso felt was lacking in his cowboy friend, and he did not encourage him to enter this extension of the market. Ratso did credit himself with the needed wit and cunning for it, but his chances of success were severely limited by the condition of his leg. (“Now you take your average fag: Very few of em want a cripple.”)

Ratso had a specialty better suited to him: He was a pickpocket. But he wasn’t very good at it. Too often he would be caught in the act by someone twice his size who could have hauled him off to a policeman with no trouble at all, and Ratso would then have to undergo the indignity of pleading for mercy on the basis of his crippled leg. He was more skilled at a variation of this form of theft, but this variation required a greater investment of time and was apt to be less lucrative as well: He would sit in a bar and strike up a conversation with a stranger, then watch for the moment at which he could steal the person’s money. Sometimes he would lose up to an hour and come away with nothing more than a little change in his pocket and a beer or two under his belt.

Joe was disgusted by this kind of operation (“Makes me
puke!”)
and would have nothing to do with the gains from it. Ratso would have to invent some cock-and-bull story to explain this kind of money, otherwise Joe would refuse to swallow so much as a hamburger purchased with it and would go around for days with a face as long as time.

But Joe was still in the first flush of his friendship with Ratso Rizzo, and during these weeks nothing that happened seemed quite so terrible to him as the prospect of being once again a totally alone person. Even though he had stepped free of those lone years and had entered upon this new time, they still existed somewhere, shadowing even the present like some creature of nightmares, black and ruthless and many-armed, ready to snatch him back into more and more and more solitude.

The pair drifted along through October and into the foul November weather with nothing very remarkable taking place in their lives.

The sameness of their days, and the feeling of being trapped with no real prospect of things getting better, caused in Joe a growing restlessness, an agitation that was often downright painful. It was as if Manhattan were his cell and the cell was shrinking at a nightmare rate, and he was doomed to pace back and forth in it in ever smaller steps until finally it would press in upon him altogether.

They suffered one cold after another. Ratso especially: His voice had taken on a basso profundo rattle that Joe found comical in one so small. He gulped cold remedies and cough syrup in such quantities he went about light-headed and drowsy, and he had no appetite for real food. Now and then he got down a few spoonfuls of soup or a Hershey bar. And of course coffee. He could always drink a cup of coffee and smoke a cigarette. Whenever he watched Ratso smoke, Joe got the feeling there must be some special life-giving substance in the tobacco that only Ratso knew how to extract.

November was a cruel month for persons who hovered as much in doorways as they did, a cold month and a damp one, and windy, too. And it seemed that as the weather worsened, they were more and more in the streets. The temptation, of course, was to stretch the nights out as long as possible, lingering in the shelter of the X-flat. But each in his own way had developed a kind of fear of the place, and the extra hours spent there were hateful ones. Threatening, too. Somehow they knew that if you settled for this kind of hiding there was no telling what would become of you. No wizard was on his way there to knock on the door and offer them magic to change their fortunes, or even food for that matter. And they knew it, and so it was all right to lie down in such shabby, make-do safety in the nighttime for real sleep. But to be awake there in the daylight, when the shadow of that big white X fell across the room like a message, was to indulge in a comfort so sinister as to be actually tiring. Nor was this matter ever discussed. It didn’t need to be. For in any kind of foul weather, no matter how sick they felt and no matter how grimly attractive the place seemed by contrast with their poor, poor prospects on the streets, they were out of there by noon.