Stalking the Nightmare (10 page)

I went crazy.

I grabbed for the sweeper. She pirouetted out of my reach. She never broke stroke. I lunged for her again, and got my hands around the sweeper. We struggled back and forth across the living room, caroming off the furniture, lousing up the carpet worse than before. She fought like one of those lady barbarians out of a Conan adventure, punching and kicking.

Then the sweeper went
that
way, and we went
this
way, and we fell over and wrestled over and over across the floor, thumping our heads and legs. Over and over, and I came up on top for a moment and pinned her arms and stared down at her, trying to catch my breath …

And in that instant I perceived a mad light glowing out of her eyes, and she murmured huskily, “Hit me.”

Oh shit.

Now you gotta understand: I’m a quiet, well-mannered, Jewish kid from Ohio. Not even years sunk to the hips in the fleshpots of New York, Chicago, London and Billings, Montana have been able to sully the rigidly Puritanical morals that have led me to the pinnacle of success and clear complexion you see before you today. To put it simply, I was terrified. After all that time, at long last, despite my best efforts at avoidance, I had encountered one of
those
kinda ladies.

“Uh … beg pardon,” I said weakly.

“Hit me,” she said again. The light in her eyes strobed.

“H-h-huh-to you?”

“Punch me around a little bit. I love it.”

“P-p-puh—?”

“Don’t leave marks. Just hurt me some …”

Oh shit.

She was watching me, naked lust in her face, her lips wet with unconcealed desire. Nice quiet Jewish kid from Ohio. But what the hell, I’m adaptable.

Bogart asserted himself. My voice dropped four octaves. “You like a little smacking around, right, shweetheart?” She nodded, bonking her head on the carpet “Okay,” I said roughly, “get naked.”

She looked troubled for a moment. “Naked?”

“Now!” I said, my voice a brutal rasp. I got off her. I stood over her as she stripped out of her clothes. My eyes slitted, my jaw tensed. I watched silently.

When she was naked—and pretty terrific she was, I might add—I said, “Okay, He on your back.” She lay down again. (For a crazed moment I wanted to tell her to “make an angel” the way we used to do it when there was a heavy snow in Ohio. You lie on your back and flap your arms up and down, making angel wings. But I didn’t. That would’ve been
really
crazy.)

The heavy drapes on the living room windows were secured by thick gold cord ropes with tassels. I unhooked four of them. I wrapped one around her left leg, secured it, and tied it to one leg of the baby grand. Then I did the same to her right leg and attached it to the piano at the other side. Then one arm stretched above her head and fastened to a leg of the massive sectional sofa. The other arm to another post of the sofa. She was spread-eagled, right in the middle of the word PHUQUE! (without the .) out flat on her back, her perspiring body trembling with barely-restrained passion.

“Can you move?”

She tried, then shook her head.

“Tied down tight? Can’t get loose?”

She nodded again, breathing raggedly.

“Terrific,” I said, heading for the door. “Say hello to your mama for me, and thank her for the chicken soup.”

And I ran for my life.

All I could think of was when her mother got home that night, and found her baby girl staked out like a gazelle at the waterhole, she’d take one look at this monstrous scene and start screaming, “My
caaaarpet … !”

You ask me if sex is one of the most important things in life? Absolutely. But the
lack
of it is even likelier to drive you nuts.

Not the pale, pallid nonsense Starsky and Hutch indulge in every week.
Real
violence. Sudden, inexplicable, ghastly.

How seldom we see it. How unhinged we become in the face of it. Because when it
really
happens, when it manifests itself on its most primitive, amoral level … we understand just how fragile is the tissue of social behavior. In a life singularly filled with violence, only one sticks out without even close competition as the most horrendously violent moment I ever witnessed. I’ll tell it briefly; even today, years later, my blood runs cold remembering …

New York. Early Seventies, maybe ‘73 or ‘74.1 was in the city on business. Business taken care of, I got together with a friend, a writer from Texas who loves movies as much and as indiscriminately as I do. The ritual: the movie crawl. Load up on junk food, start at the first movie theater on the downtown side of 42nd Street, and just work our way from Times Square to 8th Avenue, cross the street, and work our way back to Times Square. Days. Endless days. Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight time in the dark. We eat in there, sleep in there, piss and daydream in there. Hot dogs, popcorn, slabs of cheese, munchies, French bread, anydamnthing. And we see them all: the good flicks, the bad flicks, the kung-fu operas, the porn jobs, the superfly stomp the paddy flicks … all of them. One after another, till our eyes turn to poached eggs, staggering from theater to theater like refugees from a Macao opium den.

I don’t remember the name of the particular theater, but it was on the uptown side of 42nd Street, close to Broadway. It was something like four in the morning. My buddy and I were almost totally cacked-out. I remember the double-bill, however. The lower half, the B feature, was
Fear is the Key,
a really dreadful action-adventure turkey based on a crummy Alistair Maclean novel. The main feature was
Save the Tiger,
a contemporary drama starring Jack Lemmon. He won the Oscar for the role in that film.

And there we slumped, way the hell up in the balcony, our knees jammed under our chins, best seats in an almost empty house. Four ayem. Two rows below us—and it was
steep
up there, what I’m talking here is damned near per-pen-d/c-u-lar—some black dude was juiced out asleep, lying across three or four seats, snoring.

My buddy the Texas writer is dead asleep, having polished off a recent meal of three boxes Good’n’Plenty and a frozen chocolate covered banana on a stick. And, blessedly,
Fear is the Key
ends, and
Save the Tiger
begins.

About ten minutes into this serious, sensitive study of a garment center guy who is killing himself with floating ethics, and from the very first row of the balcony, below and to the right of us, but still very high above the floor of the theater, I hear a shrieky black voice start mouthing off. Dialogue straight out of ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING.

“Muh-fugguh! Gahdamn muh-fugn stupid piece’a shit. Dumb sunbish cah-suckin’ piece’a shit garbage … Leroy! Hey, you sumbish nigguh prick
Leroy!
Le’s get th’ fuggoutta here, Leeeee-
roy!”

Clearly, the critic in the first row of the balcony found this deeply penetrating study of middle class morality as seen through the dissolution of Jack Lemmon’s knock-off sweat shop less than relevant to his existence as a mid-Twentieth Century denizen of the shitty slum to whence he would wend his way once this stupid kike film about muh-fuggin’ honk paddy bastids ended. Which wasn’t soon enough for him. “Leeeee-ROY!”

I had the feeling that Leeee-ROY was the terminal case lying over the seats two rows below us. Out of it.

Well, I peer through the gloom and see the dude down there in the front row of the balcony, his feet up on the brass rail, his partner beside him, silently watching the film but not stopping the noise. And I watch the two of them for a little while, hoping the third member of the group, good ole Leeee-ROY, will bestir his ass and go rejoin them there sepia Athos and Porthos, and maybe just maybe vacate the site quietly so I can watch the goddam muh-fuggin’ movie.

But no such luck. The critic only gets wonkyer, yelling at the top of his lungs. Leeee-ROY don’t twitch a bun.

And just as the critic is reaching a pitch that will cause sonic tremors, squealing sunbish and muh-fugguh at the top of his lungs, from
behind
me I hear The Voice of Doom:

“Shut your face, nigger, before I come down there and kill you.”

Pause with me for a nanoinstant. This was not one of those angrily shouted
shutups
one encounters all-too-frequently these days in pillbox-sized Cinema I/II/III/IV closets filled with slope-browed, prognathous-jawed pimplebrains who jabber endlessly as though they were still in front of the tube in their living room. This was—trust me—the most blood-curdlingly
threatening
voice I have ever heard. It was the kind of voice one suspected would accompany the body attached to the moving finger writing
mene mene tekel
in letters of fire. This was an abominable snowman, a tyrannosaurus, a behemoth, a stone righteous muh-fuggin’
killer.
Deep, resonant, commanding, powerful… and very very black.

I don’t want to belabor this but
whoever
or
whatever
was sitting back up there behind my Texas buddy and me, it was
bad.

Beside me, I felt the hand of my Texican partner on my wrist. Softly, he asked, “What the fuck was
that?”

“Voice of Doom,” I said. “Pretend we’re black. Better still: pretend we’re at another theater.”

All this happened in a second. And only an idiot would have talked back to the owner of that voice. Guess whose name was in the envelope in the category of Most Outstanding Performance by an Idiot? You got it: Leeee-ROY’s buddy with the scoop shovel mouth.

Is violence important in this life?

The critic started shrieking, “Who said that? Who said that gah-damn shit t’me? You c’mawn down here, nigguh, I’m gonna
cufch.nl
I gonna
cut
on you, nigguh muh-fugguh!”

And he did go on. And on and on. “Oh shit,” I murmured, slumping down even deeper in the seat, till my knees were up around my ears like a grasshopper. Beside me, my Texican buddy was praying in High Church Latin, Yiddish and Sufi, all at the same time.

I do believe that the joker down in the first row of that cockroach-ridden movie house was the single
dumbest
sonofabitch I have ever encountered; and what happened next was the swiftest, most deadly moment of violence I have ever seen.

Motormouth was still working over the conjugation of
to cut
when suddenly and without warning there was a rush of wind past me, down those steep steps, fast, fast, so damned fast I couldn’t make out whether it was a human or a
yeti
or simply some terrifying force of nature, and all I saw was a dark blur as something BIG went smoothly down to the front row, something GIGANTIC moved into that row … and that stupid sonofabitch joker just
stood up,
still working his wet jaw … as if he could do something against that HUGE dude come to silence him … and that monstrous black fury just grabbed Motormouth by the shirt front and
yanked
… and pitched him headfirst
over
the rail.

I heard a terrified scream as the guy fell, and then a sickening
crack!
like the snapping of a T’ang dynasty chopstick, and then there was silence.

The only sounds were Jack Lemmon talking about what emotional violence he was suffering.

Shut up, Lemmon.

No one in the theater moved. There weren’t that many people anyhow. Just my buddy and me and sleeping Leeee-ROY and the buddy of the guy who’d taken the dive … and that humungus
shape.
In the balcony. And if there was anyone down below, they weren’t saying anything.

The diver’s buddy didn’t move or look around or say a word. He just sat there staring straight ahead, as if he could not possibly have found anything more interesting in the universe to think about than Jack Lemmon’s problems. The dark shape moved back up the aisle … I didn’t look left or right … I saw
nothing,
Jim,
nothing
… and it went up past me and was gone.

I watched that entire flick in silence. No one moved to see if the diver was still alive. After a moment’s wait the diver’s buddy slipped out of the balcony like oil washing down a gutter, and gone. From below … nothing.

And when the film was finished, and the lights came up, we rose, and turned slowly. The balcony was empty. Leeee-ROY was still
tabula rasa.
Just us, all alone. I looked at my buddy from Texas, and he looked at me, and without saying a word we walked down that precarious stairway and came to the railing and peered over.

The diver lay across the back of a shattered seat. He was bent double. Stomach up. His spine was broken. He didn’t move. The theater was empty. We walked back up the aisle, through the upper vestibule, down the winding staircase, into the lobby, and out. We didn’t look back. No one could help the diver. We wanted to get away.