Tornado Pratt (28 page)

When I got there I ordered a meal. They had a black jazz quintet and a buck-toothed white girl vocalist. For a long time the only thing I noticed that was wrong was that I only laughed at the buck-toothed girl vocalist, who was singing funny-sexy songs, when everyone else laughed. I couldn’t see the humour on my own. I also had a feeling that the roof rose above me in a chimney
stretching
thousands of miles into space. I tried to control the impulse to glance up because I was aware that my feeling was just a
psychological
quirk. I knew the roof was really normal. The part I could see was made of moulded white stucco but I suspected the chimney might begin where I couldn’t have seen it without glancing back conspicuously.

A girl I knew sat down at my table. She told me that Abner had punched her brother. She developed this story, laughing raucously, for a long time and I began to gasp and swallow. I perceived that I’d made a mistake in seeking my own kind. At first I hoped that she alone was turning into something revolting but when the waiter brought some cognac I saw that he too had
undergone
an unpleasant metamorphosis.

Now this is very hard to describe, Horace. I have to be careful because I cannot compare what I felt then with what I am feeling now, especially since there is no one in this white watch to examine. Those people at Debby’s did not assume unnatural or sinister shapes. No, I did not see snakes growing from their heads nor their eyes become red and huge. They remained people but I realized that people had always been horrible, lumbering, arbitrary shapes infesting eternity. I was so dismayed by their appearance that I tossed a bill—ten bucks maybe or even twenty—on the table and made tracks. At the door, I felt a pang of regret at my rudeness and I turned but the girl just waved drunkenly. Then I grabbed a cab and rode home with my eyes shut.

What I lost, Horace, was the sense of life and the value of life. One of the first things I did next morning was look at some flowers that Alexandra Wilks had given me. I always liked flowers and ensured that any room of mine was enriched by them. Now I inspected this bunch of mixed chrysanthemums. They didn’t seem
attractive or cheerful any more. They didn’t seem any more alive than a dry turd. But worse: they seemed cold and alien. Maybe arbitrary is the key word I’m looking for. I stood at the window, breathing like a man about to go into action and the people
shuffling
up and down seemed like automata, who could do nothing meaningful, who would only melt like ice in the end.

I said to myself: I’m having some kind of crack-up. I don’t want to end up screeching and shitting in a padded cell.

So I went and looked up shrinks in the phone book. I dialled one of them but hung up before he answered. I had a sense that if I came through on my own I’d be myself again afterwards but if I was piloted through by a shrink I’d leave a big part of myself in the frozen tunnel. A cheerful midget might dance out at the other end and that wouldn’t be Tornado Pratt. So I decided to buck it alone.

At first I tried to read my way through. I avoided philosophy but accepted anything else that came to hand. I had about a thousand books in the apartment and piles of mags. I started on
Anna
Karenina
by Tolstoy and I stuck to it with grim
determination
. The story and characters didn’t mean a thing to me. I didn’t believe in the woman, the lover, the husband or the child. I didn’t believe that such people existed or could exist. Tolstoy assured me they were concerned about love, death and reputation but I could no longer attach any force to such concepts. If he’d written: then Anna Karenina turned into a squirrel and lived in a tree eating nuts and her son exploded and her husband liquefied into whisky and was drunk by her lover—it would have seemed as real, or unreal, as the alleged adventures. What I got from the book was the simple, soothing mechanical discipline of reading, holding the volume and traversing the page regularly with my eyes. This was necessary because if, vigilance relaxing, I glanced up from time to time, I became aware of a noisy silence in the room. There seemed to be a mocking roar from one corner. I looked in that direction and then I’d hear the sound from some place else. In the roar were embedded particles of scream and flakes of laughter. I’d sweep the room carefully with my eyes. All the furniture was superficially inert but just might be preparing for an attack. So then I’d
carefully
return my eyes to my book and begin tracking through the senseless labyrinth of
Anna
Karenina
again. I stuck it for about a week, Horace. The worst times were when I had to go out for food. That forced me close to other people and I felt nostalgia for the love I had once borne them. Having to talk to them, order meat
or coffee, was like rehearsing a grim farce. We were wax robots, clicking with incomprehensible code:

“Gimme a cutlet—gimme a container of milk—”

Then I’d pace evenly home along the sidewalk but I felt I was scuttling like an ant. Indoors, one day, I heard a noise and I glanced out at the window-ledge. My apartment was on the first floor so there was nothing especially surprising in seeing what I saw: two little black kids crawling on hands and knees along the ledge. But the spectacle engaged some clutch of nightmare and set me screaming helplessly. The kids heard that and peered, noses flattened against the pane, into the room and I flapped them weakly away while accumulating the strength I finally used to sprint towards them and pull the curtains. Then I beat a retreat into my bedroom, which had no window, locked the door and drank a fifth of bourbon. I’d avoided booze up to then because I remembered the stone men and dust men of my delirium on the hobo trail and was scared that, in my present state, it would blow my mind apart.

After I’d drunk the scotch—or maybe it was bourbon—I made my way to Third Avenue and deliberately bumped against a big Irish hood. When he asked me to apologize I spat at him. Then—I let him beat me up. That hadn’t been my intention. I’d intended to fight him and, by so doing, fight the horror away, punch some humanity back into my life. But when he grinned, he seemed so grotesque and the idea of standing in the arena of the universe, clumsily swinging balled fists at another wad of mobile flesh seemed so—so vulgar!—that I just stood and let him work me over. Finally I sank to the ground. I could have taken a lot more and was not unconscious but I could tell it was not having a therapeutic effect and I wanted to get away from him. The next morning, I went to see Alex.

When she saw me she issued a palatal click of dismay. Then she stepped nimbly out into the passage where I was and pulled her front door partly closed behind her. She explained:

“I’ve got someone here—my God, what
have
you been doing?”

She was referring to the livid deformation of my features. I asked:

“Who’s here?”

“Dixie—you know, my agent. Paul Dixie—”

I gazed at her blankly or perhaps with a slight frown that accentuated still further the ruin of my face. In fact, I felt great distress. I had reached the end of my solitary powers of resistance and needed Alex. I didn’t know if she could help but I knew that
without help I was finished. But Dixie? He was small and exquisite, a silver mine of gossip. I’d never objected to him before and I’d laughed at his lewd shafts but now he seemed horrifying to my imagination. I pictured him coiled and buzzing in a chair like a rattlesnake. I saw him flashing violet bolts like an electric eel. I was afraid that, at the first mannered murmur from his lips, I’d either cower sweating or slap him to death like a mosquito.

And there was more: I wasn’t certain that this guy Dixie wasn’t Alex’s lover. I’d asked her once, coarsely:

“Does he ever screw you, Alex?”

And she’d laughed harshly and protested that he only liked college boys. Yeah, right, he had a queer trim to him okay but I also sensed virility. I didn’t think Alex would lie to me but I knew that the one thing people find it almost impossible to be truthful about is the social life of their genitals.

So now, in the passage outside Alex’s apartment, I stood reeling. All night my palms had been clasped round my skull to prevent nightmares leaking out. Finally I’d slept and, about nine, awakened to a joyous gulp of sunlight that was suddenly flapped out by a raven wing as I recalled my ruptured reason. Then I’d determined that night-fall would either find me with an ally or smeared thin on some sidewalk. And now this toxic Dixie was polluting my refuge.

Then—it was comic, Horace!—I thought I was still debating the issue with myself but I found myself parting the air in the wake of a powerful tractor. I caught a glimpse of map-lined walls and of Dixie’s surprised face and then Alex had towed me through her huge main room and into the bedroom beyond. She ordered:

“Get into bed!”

“What?”

“Three of these—bed—sleep!”

After taking the sleeping pills, which I wasn’t accustomed to, I slept till nearly midnight. When I woke up the first thing I saw was my own radio. Then I looked round the room and saw piles of my things. Alex came in and I asked her:

“You bring my things over?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Alex?”

“You’ll need them. You’ll obviously have to stay here for a while.”

I was affected, Horace, by her kindness but even more by her intuition.

“How do you know, Alex?”

“You had that zombie look. My husband had it. Did you go out and pick a fight?”

“Yes, I—hell—”

“Amazing. He did the same. Now, do you want souvlakis or a steak?”

The only thing Alex couldn’t quite understand, Horace, was my determination not to consult a professional shrink. She had
extensive
acquaintance amongst brain masseurs and put a lot of faith in them. She tried to persuade me of their merits and particularly of one of them that had cured her husband, but in the end I erupted:

“Shit, Alex, they don’t cure anyone. I want to stay myself, Alex, so if you don’t stop advocating mental mutilation I’m going to have to high-tail it out of here. And that wouldn’t be so good because I have an idea I really need help this time.”

She gave in to me—or appeared to. Maybe ten years later, I discovered, with irritation only neutralized by Alex’s sad
emphysemic
condition then, that she’d been secretly in touch with a shrink the whole time I was nuts—the best part of a year—and that he’d monitored my condition and given her advice on how to handle me. But by then, I didn’t care too much, Horace, because I knew that my work in the world was done and I also knew that, like all the men that have ever lived, I too had been a failure.

There was a little moving disk of sanity, like a follow-spot, around Alex and I tried to stay in it as much as possible. I’d lumber about with her on professional calls, to visit editors and sometimes literary celebrities she was interviewing. On these occasions, I’d usually be confided, like a lovable but sometimes clumsily destructive dog, to a servant or secretary. But Alex soon learned that there was nothing much to fear. I’d sit docile in a corner studying a framed certificate with appalled wonder or gazing warily at a paper cup.

I let Alex infantilize me to a considerable extent, tucking me up in bed with sleeping pills, occasionally, if I hollered in the night, scrambling purposefully in beside me and holding my head pressed firmly to her nylon-sheathed breast until I went to sleep again. Because of my habit of sitting immobile in the water with the soap clutched in my hand, she took to bathing me, lathering me
energetically
all over, including between my legs. None of these intimacies develped any kind of erotic impetus, mainly because the thought of
having sex that year was about as inviting as the thought of eating slops from a pig trough and that, in fact, was what food seemed like to me.

It was in Acapulco that I began to recover. We’d tried a few trips to mountain and sea and they hadn’t helped so Alex thought she’d try the plutocratic vulgarity of Acapulco. It wasn’t the place itself but a cruel incident one night, which might, I guess, have
happened
anywhere, that tripped the vital relay and set me fumbling back towards the world. Alex asked me to dance with her. I declined and she persisted. After a while I became irritable and muttered:

“No dice, Alex. You’re no—”

I bit that one short but she pounced on it.

“I’m no what?”

“You’re—the same.”

“The same as other people, you mean?”

“Hell, I’m grateful for everything. If it hadn’t been—”

“Oh, shut up! Don’t be so mealy-mouthed. I want to know what you mean.”

“About what?”

“About me—other people—dancing. You said I was the same—the same as what?”

“I—I can’t remember.”

“I disgust you. That’s it, isn’t it? We all do. People disgust you, don’t they?”

I watched a girl spin off a high-board and cleave the blue crystal of the floodlit pool. I asked:

“How did you know that?”

“Well, of course I know it! My husband had it. He had a very similar crisis. I had a minor one myself. Jane did—Jane Merlandine—oh, dozens of people. It’s quite standard.”

“How do you mean, standard?”

“Good God, don’t you know? Haven’t you read any psychopathology?”

“Some—not much.”

“You’re a stubborn imbecile. Any good psychiatrist—Tornado, you’re suffering from a schizophrenic withdrawal. This symptom—dehumanizing people—is quite normal. My husband—oh, I wish you’d met him. A splendid man—even if we couldn’t get on together. He had all your things but he was cured—permanently
cured—in six months. Because he wasn’t a pig-headed, egotistic—oh, to hell with you!”

It was the first time Alex had given way to natural irritation. I was a trifle alarmed but probably the shock was beneficial. But the most important thing was the sudden revelation, as it seemed to me, that what had happened to me wasn’t unique, that I shared it with a whole class of my fellows. This was a little humiliating and I perceived wryly that I’d been, in some corner of my mind, gloating on the heroic proportions of Tornado Pratt’s crack-up. But—okay!—so it was standard. On the whole I was relieved. I’d had enough by then. I gazed about, mentally, at the seas and skies and glowing cities. They seemed like dross but other men had seen them that way and returned to them in the end.