The Bell Tolls for No One (3 page)

Save the World

S
he came in and I noticed that she was banging into the walls and her eyes didn't seem to focus. It was the day after her writer's workshop, and she always seemed that way as if she had been taking dope. Maybe she was. She hit the kid for spilling her coffee and then got on the telephone and had one of her everlasting “intelligent” conversations with somebody. I played with the little girl who was my daughter. She hung up. “Are you all right today?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you act kind of . . . distracted.”

Her eyes looked like the eyes of people in movies who played at being insane.

“
I'm
all right. Are
you
all right?”

“Never. I'm always confused.”

“Have you eaten today?”

“No. Mind throwing some potatoes in the pot to boil? The pot's in the sink, soaking.”

I had just come out of the hospital and was still weak.

She walked into the kitchen, then stopped and looked at the pot. She propped, stiff, swaying in the doorway as if the pot were an apparition. It couldn't have been the kitchen that scared her because she had been the worst housekeeper of all my ex-wives.

“What's the matter?” I asked.

She didn't answer.

“The pot's all right. It just has soapwater in it. Just scrub it out a bit and dump it.”

She finally came out, walked around a bit, bumped into a chair, then handed me a couple of magazines: PROGRAM OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY U.S.A. and AMERICAN DIALOGUE. DIALOGUE had a cover of a baby asleep in a hammock made out of a couple of gun belts with bullets protruding. The cover also indicated the contents: THE MORALITY OF OUR TIMES. ON THE SUPERIORITY OF THE NEGRO.

“Look, kid,” I said, “I'm not much on politics of any kind. I'm not much good that way, you know. But I'll try to read this stuff.”

I sat there and went through it, a bit of it, while she put some meat on in the kitchen. She called me in and the kid and I went in. We sat down to it.

“I read about the superiority of the Negro,” I said. “You know, I am an expert on the Negro. Down at work most of them are Negroes . . . ”

“Well, why don't you just be an expert on Whites?”

“I am. The article spoke of the ‘fine, tough muscular system. The beautiful, rich color, the full broad features, and the gracefully frizzled hair of the Negro' and that when Nature got to the white man she was pretty well exhausted, but she pinched up his features and did what she could.”

“I knew a little colored boy once. He had the softest, shortest hair, his hair was beautiful, beautiful.”

“I'll try to read the Communist Party Program tonight,” I told her.

“Have you registered to vote?” she asked.

“I never have.”

“You can register at your nearest school on the 29th. Dorothy Healey is running for County Tax Assessor.”

“Marina is getting more beautiful every day.” I spoke of my daughter.

“Yes, she is. Listen, we've got to go. She goes to sleep at 7. And there's something I must hear on KPFK. They read one of my letters over the air the other night.”

KPFK was an FM radio station.

“All right,” I said.

I watched them leave. She pushed the kid across the street in the stroller. She had the same old wooden stride, nothing fluid at all. I watched them go. A better world. Jesus. Everybody has a different way, everybody has a different idea, and they are all so
sure.
She's sure too, that wooden woman with the insane eyes and grey hair, that woman running into her walls, crazy with life and fear, and she would never quite believe it that I didn't hate her and all her friends who gathered 2 or 3 times a week and praised each other's poetry and were lonely and who made each other, and carried signs and were very enthusiastic and sure, they would never believe that the solitude, the privacy I asked for, was only to save myself so I might guess who
they
were and who the enemy was supposed to be.

Still it was nice to be alone.

I walked in and slowly began washing the dishes.

The Way the Dead Love

M
y head hurt for a week and a half. I had some beautiful hangovers that way. Lou would get on the wine and apologize until I felt like vomiting. I even worked a couple of days uploading boxcars. Lou found a wallet in the crapper of a bar with $35 in it. So we went on. A while. But I felt like I owed Lou something. I think I got it one night. Lou was talking about his girlfriend.

“What a body! What breasts! And she's
young
, Hank,
young
!”

“Yeah?”

“Only she can't stop drinking. She's drunk all the time. She can't pay her rent. She's down in the cellar.”

“Down in the cellar?”

“Yeah, that's where they put 'em when they can't pay their rent.”

“Is she down there now?”

“Yeah.”

We drank a while. Then I said, “Lou, I gotta call it off early tonight. I've got something to take care of.”

“Sure, kid.”

He left and I went out and got a fifth of whiskey. I went down to the cellar. There was only one door down there. I knocked. The door opened and here stood this young piece in panties and bra, in high heels, with just this thin negligee on. I pushed my way in. She screamed:

“Get out of here! You get out of here!”

I took the fifth out of the bag and held it before her eyes.

“Get out,” she said in a lower voice.

“You've got a nice place here. Where are your glasses?”

She pointed. I went over and got 2 waterglasses, filled them half up and we sat on the edge of the bed.

“Drink up. I live upstairs.”

I worked her breasts loose. They were fine. I kissed her on the throat and mouth. I was in form. We had another drink, then I worked her pants off and put it in. It was still good. I stayed all night, we went another round, and then once again before I left in the morning. She seemed to like me. And she was a very good piece.

I was sitting up in Lou's place one night and I asked him, “You seen your girlfriend lately?”

“No, no, I meant to tell you. They threw her out. They threw her out of the cellar. I can't find her anywhere. I've looked everywhere. God, I'm sick. What a piece she was! You don't have any idea how I feel!”

“Yes, I do, Lou.”

We both drank one to her in silence.

I
have met enough writers, artists, editors, professors, painters, none of them were truly natural men, interesting individuals. They looked better on paper or in paint, and while you can't deny this has importance, it is still very uncomfortable to sit across from these same creatures and listen to them talk or look upon their faces. The life-seed, if there is any, is lost in their work. For my amusement and fill and grace and look-upwardness I have had to seek elsewhere. And in the manswarm, stamped so alike, there is still always the individual madman or saint to be found. I have found many but will tell you about a few.

There was this hotel at Beverly and Vermont . We were on the wine, my ladyfriend and I. Jane was a natural, and she had delicious legs and a tight little gash and a face of powdered pain. And she knew me. She taught me more than the philosophy books of the ages. We'd see some man or woman walking down the hall and they would reek of the death and the plague and the vomit of sell-out, and I'd feel it but stand silent in some morning hangover shade, rather cleaved in half again about how low the human being could descend without effort. And I'd be thinking this thing and then I'd hear her voice: “That son of a bitch! I can't STAND him! He makes me sick!” Then she'd laugh and she always made up some nickname for the creature—like Greenjaws or Anteyes or Deadears.

But to get on with it, one time we were sitting around our room drinking our port wine and she said, “Ya know, I think you'd like to meet the F.B.I.” She worked as a maid in the place and knew the roomers.

“Forget it, sweetie,” I told her, “I've already met the F.B.I.”

“Well, o.k.”

We gathered the half empty wine bottle and the two or three full ones and I followed her down the hall. It was the darkest hall of hell, dozens of people leaning up against the wallpaper, all behind in the rent, drinking wine, rolling cigarettes, living on boiled potatoes, rice, beans, cabbage, hogshead soup. We walked a little way down and then Jane knocked, the insistent little knock that said: this is not trouble.

“It's Jane. It's Jane.”

The door opened and here stood a fat little bitch, rather ugly, a bit dangerous, demented, but still all right.

“Come in, Jane.”

“This is Hank,” she introduced me.

“Hello,” I said.

I came in and sat down in a straightback chair and one of the ladies went around filling the large waterglasses full of deathstink wine.

Meanwhile, in the bed, unintroduced, sat, no
sprawled
, was this male creature ten years later than I.

“What goes, shithead?” I asked him.

He didn't answer. He just looked at me. When you get a man who doesn't care to rejoinder in common conversation, you've got a wild one, you've got a natural. I knew that I was in deep. He just SPRAWLED there under that dirty bedsheet, wineglass in hand, and worse, he looked quite handsome. That is, if you think the vulture is handsome and I think that he is. It is. He had the beak and eyes of living and he lifted that glass and ran the wine down his throat, one run down, all that deathstink wine, without a blink, since I was the heaviest drinker born in the last two centuries there was nothing for me to do but throw that filthy poison into my stomach, hold mentally to the sides of the chair and keep the straight pokerface.

A refill. He did it again. I did it again. The two ladies just sat and watched. Filthy wine into filthy sadness. We went around a couple more. Then he started to babble. The sentences were energetic but muddled in content. Still, they made me feel better. And all the time, this big bright electric light overhead and these two drunken madwomen talking about something. Something.

Then it happened—the sprawl was over. He pushed upward in the bed. The beautiful vulture eyes and the big electric light was upon us. He said it very quietly and with easy authority.

“I am the F.B.I. You are under arrest.”

And he would arrest us all, his woman, mine, me, and that was all. We would submit, then, the rest of the night would go on. I don't know how many times in the next year that he put me under arrest, but it was always the magic moment of each evening. I never saw him get out of bed. When he crapped or urinated or ate or drank water or shaved, I had no idea. Finally, I decided that he just didn't do these things—they happened in another way, like sleep or atomic warfare or snow melting. He realized that the bed is man's greatest invention—most of us are born there, sleep there, fuck there, die there. Why get out? I tried to make his woman one night but she said that he would kill me if he ever found out. That would have been one way to get him out from under the sheets. Killed by an F.B.I. agent in dirty underwear. I let her go; she didn't look that good.

Then there was another night when Jane set me up for another. We were drinking. The same cheap stuff, of course. I had gone to bed once or twice with her and there wasn't much else to do when she said: “Howja like to meet a killer?”

“Wouldn't mind,” I said, “wouldn't mind a-tall.”

“Less go.”

She explained the whole thing to me on the way. Who he'd killed and why. He was now out on parole. The parole officer was a good guy, kept getting him these dishwasher jobs, but he kept getting drunk and losing them.

Jane knocked and we went on in. Like I never saw the F.B.I. agent out of bed, I never saw the killer's girlfriend get out of bed. She had this
totally
black hair on her head and this whitewhitewhitewhite skim milk terribly white SKIN. She was dying. Medical science be damned: all that was keeping her alive was port wine.

I was introduced to the killer:

“Ronnie, Hank. Hank, Ronnie.”

He sat there in a dirty undershirt. And he didn't have a face. Just runs of skin. Veins. Little fart eyes. We shook hands and started in on the wine. I don't know how long we drank. One hour or 2, but he seemed to get angrier and angrier, which is rather commonplace with commonplace drinkers, especially on the wine. Yet we kept talking, talking, I don't know about what.

Then, suddenly, he reached over and grabbed his black and white wife and picked her out of bed and began using her like a willow rod. He just kept banging her head against the headboard:

bang bang

bang bang bang

bang bang bang bang

bang

Then I said, “HOLD IT!”

He looked over at me. “Wuzzat?”

“You hit her head one more time on the headboard and I am going to kill you.”

She was whiter than ever. He placed her back in bed, straightened the strands of her hair. She seemed almost happy. We all began drinking again. We drank until the crazy traffic began running up and down the streets far below. Then the sun was really up. Bright, and I got up and shook his hand. I said, “I have to go; I hate to go; you are a good kid; I gotta go anyhow.”

Then there was Mick. The place was on Mariposa Ave. Mick didn't work. His wife worked. Mick and I drank a lot together. I gave him 5 dollars once to wax my car. I didn't have a bad car at the time, but Mick never waxed it. I'd find him sitting on the steps. “It looks like rain. No use waxing if it looks like rain. I'm gonna do a good job. Don't want it spoiled.” He'd be sitting on those steps drunk. “O.K., Mick.” Next time he'd be sitting there drunk and see me. “I'm just sittin' here lookin', deciding what I'm gonna do. You see, you got those scratches on there. First thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna paint in those scratches. I'm gonna get me some paint . . . ”

“Jesus Christ, Mick. Forget it!”

He did, but a fine fellow he was. One night he insisted that I was drunk although he was the one who was drunk. And he insisted that he help me up the 3 flights of stairs. Actually, I helped him up. But it was a lumbersome, cumbang bang bang bang bersome journey and I think we awakened everybody in the apartment building with our cussing and falling against walls and doors and stair-rails. Anyhow, I got the door opened, and then I tripped over one of his big feet. Down I went, straight and flat upon a coffeetable with a one-quarter-inch glass covering. The whole table smashed straight to the floor—I weigh around 218—and all 4 legs crushed under, the top of the table cracked in 4 places, but the slab of glass itself remained perfect, unmarred. I got up. “Thanks, old buddy,” I told him. “Nothin' to it,” he said. And then I sat there and listened to him crashing into doorways and falling down the steps. It was like the whole building was under bombardment. He made it on down, gravity was on his side.

He had a good wife. I remember one time they cleaned up my face with cotton and some kind of sterilizer when it was all smashed-in from a bad night out. They seemed very tender and concerned and serious about my smashedin face, and it was a very odd feeling to me, that care.

Anyhow, the drinking got to Mick, and it gets to each of us differently. With him, the body swelled up, doubled, tripled in size in various places. He couldn't zip his pants and had to cut slits in the pant legs. His story was that they didn't have a bed for him in the vet's hospital. My feeling was that he didn't want to go there. Anyhow, one day he made a foolish move and tried the General Hospital.

After a couple of days he phoned me. “Jesus Christ, they're killing me! I've never seen a place like this. No doctors anywhere and nurses don't give a damn and just these fruit orderlies running around like snobs and happy that everybody's sick and dying. What the fuck is this place? They're carrying the dead out by the dozens! They mix up the food trays! They won't let you sleep! They keep you awake all night fucking around with nothing and then when the sun comes up, they wake you up again. They throw you a wet rag and tell you to get ready for breakfast and then breakfast, if you want to call it that, arrives around noontime. I never knew that people could be so cruel to the sick and dying! Get me outa here, Hank! I beg you, pal, I beg you, let me out of this pit of hell! Let me die in my apartment, let me die with a chance!”

“Whatcha want me to do?”

“Well, I asked to get out and they won't give me my release. They've got my clothes. So you just come on down here with your car. You come up to my bed and we'll bust out!”

“Don't you think we better ask Mona?”

“Mona don't know shit. Since I can't fuck her anymore she don't care. Everything about me swelled up but my dick.”

“Mother nature is sometimes cruel.”

“Yeah, yeah. Now listen, you comin' on down?”

“See you in about 25 minutes.”

“O.K.,” he said.

I knew the place, having been there 2 or 3 times myself. I found a parking spot near the entrance building and walked on in. I had the ward number. It was the stink of hell all over again. I had the strange feeling that I would die in that building some day. Maybe not. I hoped not.

I found Mick. The oppressive helplessness hung over everything.

“Mick?”

“Help me up,” he said.

I got him to his feet. He looked about the same.

“Let's go.”

We went padding down the hall. He had on one of those chickenshit gowns, untied in back because the nurses wouldn't tie them for you, because the nurses didn't care about anything except catching themselves some fat young subnormal doctor. And although the patients seldom saw the doctors, the nurses did—in the elevators, pinchy pinchy! oh hee hee hee!—with the smell of death everywhere.

The elevator door pulled open. There sat a fat young boy with pimples sucking at a popsicle. He looked at Mick in his gown.

“Do you have a release, sir? You have to have a release to get out of here. My instructions are . . . ”

“I'm on my own release, punk! Now you move this thing down to the street floor before I jam that popsicle up your ass!”

“You heard the man, son,” I told him.

We moved on down, smartly, and straight through the exit building where nobody said a word. I helped him into the car. In 30 minutes he was back at his place.

“Oh fuck!” said Mona. “What have you done, Hank?”

“He wanted it. I believe a man should have his own wishes as much as possible.”

“But there isn't any help for him here either.”

I went out, bought him a quart of beer and left them in there together to fight it out.

A couple of days later he made the vet's hospital. Then he was back. Then he was at the hospital. Then he was back. I'd see him sitting on the steps.

“Jesus, I could sure use a beer!”

“How about it, Mona?”

“All right, goddamn it, but he shouldn't!”

I'd go get him a quart and he'd light up all over. We'd go inside and he'd show me photos taken when he'd first met Mona in France. He was in his uniform. He'd met her on a train. Something about a train. He'd gotten her a seat on the train when the brass had wanted to kick her off. Something like that. The photos were of 2 young and beautiful people. I could not believe that they were the same people. My guts hurt like murder. They gave me some kummel they said Mick couldn't have. I made fast work of the kummel. “You were a very handsome man, Mick.” There he sat, puffed out of belief, all chance gone. “And Mona. What a babe! I still love you!” I said. Mick really liked that. He wanted me to know that he'd caught a good one. I think it was about a week later I saw Mona outside the apartment house.

“Mick died last night,” she said.

I just kept looking at her. “Shit, I don't know what to say. Even all puffed up like that I didn't think he would die.”

“I know,” she said. “And we both liked you very much.”

I couldn't handle it. I turned around and walked into the apartment house entrance, right past apt. #1 where we had had so many good nights. He wasn't in there anymore. He was gone like last year's Christmas or an old pair of shoes. What shit. I made my way up the stairs and started in. The Coward. I drank, I drank, I drank, I drank. Escapism. Drunkards are escapists, they say, unable to face reality.