And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (5 page)

M
ONDAY MORNING
I
GOT A LETTER FROM A DETEC
-tive agency to report to work. I’d applied for the job about a month ago and almost forgotten about it. Evidently they hadn’t checked on my fingerprints and the fake references I’d given them. So I went down and accepted the job, and they handed me a batch of summonses to get rid of.

I stopped off at Al’s about six o’clock that night, after spending all day running around town to serve a summons on someone named Leo Levy, who is a very elusive Jew. Give a New York Jew a few partners and he will get himself so incorporated you will always end up serving papers on the wrong party.

Al was depressed. It seems that he had called Phillip earlier in the afternoon and Phillip had said, “I think it
would be better if you stayed away from here.” Al asked what he meant and Phillip had said, “Better for me.”

I said, “Did he seem serious about it?” and Al said, “Yes. It was all said in a very sulky tone.”

“Well,” I said, “let it ride awhile, why don’t you.”

I sat down in the easy chair.

At this point there was a knock on the door and Al said, “Who’s there?” and Agnes O’Rourke stuck her head in the door. She came in and sat down on the bed next to Al. She said, “I think Hugh is being held by the FBI.”

“Yeah?” I said. “He told me they were looking for him. He planned to go down there this morning and see them.”

“I called the House of Detention this afternoon,” Agnes said, “and they wouldn’t admit that they were holding him. I’m sure he must be there, because we had arranged for him to contact me if he could.”

“Did you ask if they were holding a Hugh Maddox?” I asked.

“They wouldn’t admit that they were holding anybody by that name.”

So I said, “Come to think of it, I never did know whether his name was Madix, Madox, or Maddox, or how many
d
’s are in it.”

We talked on about that for a while until the same things had been repeated three or four times. Finally, Agnes got up and left.

Al came back to the Phillip question. He said this new development was obviously a reaction from the scene on the roof, and I said, “You should have clinched the deal right there.”

To this, Al repeated the old stuff, that he wanted something permanent, and I didn’t even bother to argue. I said, “Let’s go eat,” and we went to the Center Grille on Sixth Avenue.

I had two vermouth and sodas before I could think about food. Then I ordered cold lobster. Al sat there looking sad and ordered one beer and cold lobster. Finally he said, “I think I’ll go down there tonight and climb into his room.”

I spat out a lobster claw and looked at him. “Well,” I said, “that’s taking the bull by the horns.”

But Al was serious. He said, “No I’m just going to go into his room while he’s asleep and watch him for a while.”

“And suppose he should wake up? He’ll think it’s some vampire hovering over him.”

“Oh no,” said Al in resigned tones, “he’ll just tell me to get out. This has happened before.”

“What do you do?” I asked. “Do you just stand there?”

“Yes,” he said. “I just get as close to him as I can without waking him up, and stand there till dawn.”

I told Al he’d probably be arrested for attempted burglary, or shot, more likely.

He said in the same resigned tones, “Well, I’ll just have to take the chance. I’ve looked the place over. I can take the elevator to the top floor, then climb up on the roof by the fire escape and wait there until three or four o’clock. Then I climb down into his room. His room is on the top floor.”

I told him, “Don’t get into the wrong room and start hovering over some perfect stranger.”

He said, “Well, I know which is his room.”

We finished dinner and walked outside. We took the Independent down to Washington Square and said good night at the entrance, because we were going in opposite directions.

I walked up Bleecker Street and there were a lot of Italian boys playing baseball with a broomstick as a bat. I was thinking about Al’s plan to climb in and look at Phillip. This reminded me of a daydream Al had told me about once, where he and Phillip were in an underground cavern. The cavern was lined in black velvet and there was just enough light so Al could see Phillip’s face. They were stuck there forever.

When I got back to my apartment it was too early
to go to bed. I fooled around the room for a while, played a few games of solitaire, and decided to take morphine, which I hadn’t done in several weeks.

So I assembled on top of the bureau a glass of water, an alcohol lamp, a tablespoon, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and some absorbent cotton. I reached in the bureau drawer and took out a hypodermic and some morphine tablets in a vial labeled Benzedrine. I split one tablet in half with a knife blade, measured out water from the hypodermic into the spoon, and dropped one tablet and a half tablet into the water in the spoon.

I held the spoon over the alcohol lamp until the tablets were completely dissolved. I let the solution cool, then sucked it up into the hypodermic, fitted on the needle, and started looking around for a high vein on my arm. After a while I found one and the needle slid in, the blood came up, and I let it suck back in. Almost immediately, complete relaxation spread over me.

I put everything away, undressed, and went to bed.

I began thinking about the relationship between Phillip and Al, and the details which I had learned in the past two years pieced themselves together into a coherent narrative without conscious effort on my part.

The relationship between them went back some years, and since it was Al’s main subject of conversation, I was acquainted with all the details. I had known
Al about two years, having met him in a bar where I was bartender at the time. Here is the story as I pieced it together from hundreds of conversations with Al.

Phillip’s father was named Tourian and he was born of uncertain parentage in Istanbul. He was a slender man with very handsome features. There was something hard and dead and glassy about the eyes and upper part of his face, but he had a charming smile. He had a way of turning his body sideways when he walked through a crowd, in a movement that was aggressive and graceful at the same time.

Outgrowing the crudities of his early youth, he gradually established himself as a sort of underworld broker dealing in dope, women, and stolen goods on a wholesale basis. If someone had something to sell, he found a buyer and collected a commission from both ends. He let others take the risks. As Phillip put it, “The old man isn’t a crook, he’s a financier.” His life was a network of complex transactions through which he moved, serene and purposeful.

Phillip’s mother was an American of a good Boston family. After graduating from Smith, she was traveling in Europe when her lesbian tendencies temporarily gained the ascendance over her inhibitions, and she had an affair with an older woman in Paris. This affair plunged her into anxiety and conviction of sin. A typical
modern Puritan, she was able to believe in sin without believing in God. In fact, she felt there was something soft and sinful about believing in God. She rejected such indulgence like an indecent proposal.

After a few months the affair broke up. She left Paris, resolved never again to fall into such practices. She moved on to Vienna, Budapest, and came finally to Istanbul.

Mr. Tourian picked her up in a café introducing himself as a Persian prince. He saw at once the advantage of an alliance with a woman of good family and unimpeachable respectability. She saw in him an escape from her sinful tendencies and breathed for a moment vicariously the clear air in which there are only facts—and anxiety, inhibitions, and neurosis dissolve. All the subtle intuitive power that in her was directed toward self-destruction and self-torture was here harnessed to self-advancement. She made an attempt to incorporate this vision of harmony evoked by Mr. Tourian.

But Mr. Tourian was serenely self-sufficient. He did not need her, and she turned away from him and descended on Phillip with all the weight of her twisted affections. She dragged him all over Europe with her on continual obsessive tours and kept telling him he must not be like his father, who was selfish and inconsiderate of her feelings.

Mr. Tourian accepted this state of things indifferently.
He built a large house and started a legitimate business that prospered side by side with his other enterprises, which absorbed more and more of his time. Drugs, which he had used periodically for years to sharpen his senses and provide the stimulation necessary for long and irregular hours, were becoming a necessity. He was beginning to break up, but without the conflicts and disharmony that accompany a Western breakdown. His calm was becoming apathy. He began to forget appointments and spend whole days in homosexual dives and Turkish baths, stimulating himself with hashish. Sexuality slowly faded away into the regressive calm of morphine.

Al met Mrs. Tourian in Rumplemeyer’s in Paris. The next day he had tea with her at the Ritz and met Phillip.

Al was thirty-five at the time. He came from a good Southern family. After his graduation from the University of Virginia he moved to New York, which offered wider scope to his sexual tendencies. He worked as an advertising copywriter, a publisher’s reader, and often he didn’t work at all.

Al had an older brother who was ambitious and a steady worker. This man was about to go to town with a paper mill of which he was part owner. So Al went back home and got a job in his brother’s paper mill. He had excellent prospects of being a rich man in a few years.

Phillip was twelve at the time and very much flattered that an older man should take the trouble to see him constantly and take him to cinemas, amusement parks, and museums. Phillip’s mother would no doubt have been suspicious, except that nothing concerned her anymore but her illnesses, which were gradually taking organic form under the compulsion of her strong will to die. She had heart trouble and essential hypertension.

Al had tea with her almost daily in Paris and kept suggesting that, after all, she should return to America, now that she was so ill. There she could get the best medical care, and if the worst should come, at least she would be in her own country. Here he looked piously at the ceiling.

When she confided in him that her husband was a dealer in dope and women, he said, “Great heavens!” and pressed her hand. “You are the bravest woman I have ever known.”

Now, it happened that Mr. Tourian was also looking toward the new world. His deals were so extensive that the number of people with real or imaginary grudges against him was growing to unmanageable proportions. So he began dickering with an employee of the American consulate. Needless to say, he had no intention of going through the tedious steps prescribed by law for immigration to America.

The negotiations took longer than he had planned. While they were still in progress, Mrs. Tourian died in Istanbul. For seven days she lay in bed looking sullenly at the ceiling as though resenting the death she had cultivated for so many years. Like some people who cannot vomit despite horrible nausea, she lay there unable to die, resisting death as she had resisted life, frozen with resentment of process and change. Finally, as Phillip put it, “She sort of petrified.”

Phillip arrived in New York with his father. Mr. Tourian had lost his grip. About a year after arriving in New York, he was caught negotiating the sale of twenty thousand grams of heroin. He drew five years in Atlanta and the fines left him flat broke.

A relative of Tourian, a Greek politician, took over the guardianship of the boy. Phillip stole a
WANTED
poster of his father from a post office, had it framed, and hung it in his room.

As soon as Phillip arrived in America, Al began to commute by plane from his home in the South. Weekends in New York started Thursday and ended Tuesday.

One day, Al told Phillip that he had quit his job.

Phillip said, “What did you do that for, you damned fool?”

Al said, “I wanted to spend all my time here in New York with you.”

Phillip said, “That’s silly. What are you going to do for money?”

I got up the next morning with a morphine hangover. I poured myself a large glass of cold milk, which is an antidote for morphine. Pretty soon I felt better and went down to the office to pick up my assignments for the day.

I happened to be in the midtown district around noon, so I stopped off at Al’s and we had lunch together at Hamburger Mary’s. Al told me what had happened the night before.

When Al arrived at Washington Hall to hover over Phillip’s sleep, they wouldn’t let him up on the fifth floor in the elevator because no one was home, which upset his plan to get up on the roof before the front door of the place was locked.

So he went over to Washington Square and slept on a bench until two-thirty. Then he went back and climbed over the fence into the courtyard in back of Washington Hall and jumped up to grab the fire escape. This made a loud creaking noise, and before Al had even started to go up, the colored elevator man stuck his head out of a window and said, “What are you doing there?”

Al said, “The elevators aren’t running. I just want to see a friend of mine, so I thought I’d climb up here
instead of bothering anybody. How about taking me up in the elevator?”

The elevator man said, “All right. Come in here,” and he helped Al climb in through the window.

As soon as Al got through the window, the elevator man produced a length of steel pipe stuck in an equal length of rubber hose. He said, “You wait right here till I get Mr. Goldstein,” and waved the pipe in Al’s face.

Al said he’d wait, and the elevator man went to roust out Mr. Goldstein, the landlord.

Al could have run out of the place at this point, but he realized that if he did that, he wouldn’t be able to come back. So he decided to wait and talk his way out of the situation when Goldstein got there.

Goldstein arrived a few minutes later, in a dirty blue-and-white bathrobe with egg and coffee stains all over the front of it, followed by Pat, the elevator man.