A Diet of Treacle

This tour of the 1950s Manhattan underworld begins with Anita, a good college girl with a bright but predictable future, who comes to Greenwich Village to find what else is out there.

Block’s New York is a noir wonderland, populated with junkies and beatsters (the dark predecessor to the modern hipster) spouting angular tough-guy dialogue, in which Anita plays curious, confused Alice. Down the rabbit hole, she meets Joe, an aimless loser, and his roommate, Shank, a violent drug dealer whose earnings provide them with a life of leisure. When psychopathic Shank murders a cop, however, they all go on the run toward an uncertain fate.

Block effortlessly immerses himself in the mind space of Joe and Shank, reporting their world of drugs, sex and disaffection with a matter-of-factness that hits hard, all the more convincing because Block never makes an overt effort to convince. A potboiler morality play at its finest, the novel doesn’t deliver much action until its last third, but the slow build of the first two will give readers the delicious (and all-too-rare) feeling that anything could happen.

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began in a great hurry; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well—”
“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.
“They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse.
“They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked. “They’d have been ill.”
“So they were,” said the Dormouse. “Very ill.”
—from
ALICE IN WONDERLAND

   Joe Milani studied the room with half-open eyes. He spent a long time absorbing every aspect of the interior of the coffee-house with the intensity of a person who had never been there before and who might never return. At last he rested his gaze on the small cup of coffee in front of him with the same concentration. And he decided that the coffee-house was the most logical spot in the world for him.

Item one: the name of the place was The Palermo—after the city in which his grandfather had been born.

Item two: the coffee-house had a Bleecker Street address—the street on which his father had been born.

Item three: the coffee-house belonged to the fringe of Greenwich Village—where all the world’s misfits were supposed to live. And he thought that he, Joe Milani, one of humanity’s round pegs, had found the world the squarest of holes.

He laughed to himself, pleased at his play on words. Then, chopping off his laugh as suddenly as he had started it, he raised the demitasse of espresso to his lips. He took a sip, savoring the thick, black liquid. Thirty cents was what The Palermo picked up for a cup of espresso, thirty cents for a squirt of ink, thirty shining coppers for a less-than-respectable swallow of liquid mud. Joe’s grandfather, who might well have sipped espresso in the same chair before coffee-houses had become fashionable, had probably paid a nickel for the slop.

Thirty cents. But, Joe reflected, as he swallowed the coffee, that gummy concoction was worth it. If you were stoned, that is.

   Stoned. He was that. Stoned, smashed, blind, turned on and flying so high and so cool and everything so just exactly right.

Softly he sang:

Every time it rains, it rains
Sweet marijuana
.
I grow pot in my backyard
,
Sweet marijuana
.
Sweet marijuana
.
I blow up in my garage
Any time I wanna…

Joe Milani looked across the table at Shank to see if the guy was digging the song, if the thin boy of the intense black eyes and the straight black hair would nod and mumble and laugh with him. But Shank was cooling it, his eyes shut, his hand supporting his chin. Shank, stoned, was listening in to something and digging something—maybe some music he had heard weeks ago or a chick he had balled or maybe nothing but his own private thoughts.

Joe took another bite out of the espresso, marveling at the way everything tasted so much better when you were high. It was as if you were getting the whole taste, inside and out, and as if, were you to close your eyes, you could see what you were eating. He felt that his lips tasted the coffee, and then flipped the liquid to his tongue and palate; and then, when he swallowed it he was convinced that his throat could taste the coffee as it made its way to his stomach. He finally finished the espresso and leaned back against the wrought iron chair, his eyelids low and his hands motionless in his lap. He was tuning in on himself.

Deliberately he concentrated on his right hand. He could see the hand vividly in his mind, the dark curling hairs on its back, the whorls on the fingertips. He could feel the pulse in his hand, and the blood moving through the palm into the fingers. His hand grew very heavy, throbbing as he concentrated on it.

Joe shifted his concentration from one part of his body to another, and each time the effect was the same. His heart pounded and was bright red in his mind’s eye. His lungs swelled and flattened as he breathed in and out.

Cool.

So cool…

How long had it been? Two joints a few minutes after noon, two joints he and Shank had split, two little cigarettes hand-rolled in wheat-straw paper and smoked rapidly, had been passed back and forth between them until there had been nothing left but two roaches, two tiny butts that they had stuffed into the hollowed-out ends of regular cigarettes and had smoked the same way. Just two joints—and they had gotten so stoned, so fly, that it seemed now as if the high were going to go on forever.

With an effort Joe pushed open his eyes and straightened up in the chair. The good thing about pot was that you could turn yourself on and off and on again and never lose control—unlike beer or wine or whiskey that rocked you only to dull everything finally. And pot had it all over heroin or morphine or cocaine—the hard stuff that sent you on the nod and left you in a fog until it wore off and you were down on the ground.

No, Joe Milani weightily concluded, pot was so much better. No habit, no hangover, no loss of control. And it didn’t take more and more of the stuff to get you high each time, no matter what the books said, because the books were all written by people who didn’t know, people who hadn’t been there. Joe had been there, and he was there right now, and he knew.

And he idly wondered what the time would tell him. There was a clock on the wall behind the cash register. By squinting, he could just about make out the numbers—nearly 3:30, which meant that he had been high for better than three hours on two little joints. And the three hours felt like at least six, because when you were high you noticed everything that was happening and the time crawled by and let you stroke it on its furry back.

He glanced at Shank, who hadn’t moved since Joe’s benevolent eye had last fallen on him. Then Milani gazed around the coffee-house again—and saw the girl.

She was extremely pretty. Joe dwelled a long time on the girl, taking careful note of the brown hair verging on black, long lovely hair falling very neatly to her shoulders. He studied the full mouth slightly reddened by lipstick, and the clean, small hands whose slender fingers curled around the sides of a cup of cappuccino. Her enormous eyes were enhanced by a clear and lightly tanned complexion, and her bare forearms, covered by downy hair, were neither too heavy nor too thin. Joe searched her face, hoping she wouldn’t turn toward him while he examined her. He tried to see through her, into her.

She appeared to be out of place in The Palermo. Her simple attire of white blouse, dark green skirt and flats was appropriate enough for a Villager, but there was an aura about her that made Joe certain she didn’t live in the area.

She was hardly more than a few tables away from him, sitting alone at the window, and doing nothing but looking pretty. But doing that quite well indeed. Joe leaned across the table and shook Shank by the shoulder. At first he aroused no response; then Shank’s eyes slitted and his features assumed a what-the-hell-is-it-now expression.

“Man—” Joe Milani began.

“Yeah?”

“Dig.” Joe nodded in the direction of the girl. Shank flicked, then turned back.

“The chick?” Shank barely made the question.

Joe managed his head up and down a half inch either way.

“What about her?”

“Watch, man. I’m going to pick her up.”

Shank took in the sight of the girl again, more closely this time. Then he shrugged.

“You won’t make it, man,” he said.

“You don’t think so?”

Shank shook his head slowly, his eyes dreamy, his face completely relaxed again. When he spoke, the words were spaced wide apart and enunciated precisely, as if he were rolling each syllable on his tongue in order to taste it.

“Never, man. She is a pretty chick and like that, but she is also a very square chick and she will put you into the ground if you so much as say hello to her. She will put you down so hard you will have to crawl back to the table, man. On your knees, like.”

Joe giggled softly.

“Go ahead,” Shank said. “Try, if you have eyes. But you won’t make it.”

“Look, I’m stoned, Shank.”

“So what?”

Joe giggled again. “Don’t you dig, Shank? I’m blind, and when I’m blind I become very cool. I say everything just right and I play everything off the wall and I never strike out, man. I’m just so cool.”

He repeated “cool,” dragging out the word so he could feel just how cool he was, how clear-headed and icily calm.

“You just think you’re cool,” Shank said. “You’ll scare the girl, baby. You’ll scare her and she’ll put you down.”

“Why do you put it there?

“That’s where it’s at.”

Joe smiled, a lazy smile. “Bet me,” he said. “Bet me I don’t pick her up.”

“What do you want to bet?”

He considered. “Bet me a joint,” he offered.

“A joint?”

Joe nodded.

“Cool,” Shank said. “I got a joint you don’t get to first base.”

“You’ll lose the bet, baby. Us wops never lose a bet, you know. Especially when we’re high.”

He did not wait for Shank to reply. Instead, he stood up, light on his feet, calm. He was extremely sure of himself, sure he was tall and good-looking enough to attract her, sure he would come on strong enough to interest her. He was twenty-seven, which meant he had a good five years on the girl at the very least, and he was a little more than six feet tall—wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted and muscular. He rubbed the palm of one hand over his cheek, glad he had taken the trouble to shave this morning.