Bogeywoman (23 page)

By now it must have been midnight and I had a sense of flying down half-lit halls and up the stairs in my half of a hospital gown, barefoot, with a handful of magic keys. In the stairwell I heard rubber soles slapping the stone steps below me, but I clung to the wall and waited and soon they sank away. On the landing, an elevator flew by, pinging. I saw a white face in its square window. I fell to my knees and touched, just touched, the bottom of the ward door to East Six. On the oiliest, most lubricious of hinges it swung open without a squeak. Even in the middle of the night they didn’t lock the thing! Just as I always suspected, any nut could break into this rotten bughouse, even easier than any bugbrain could break out.

On my hands and knees I went by the green-glowing nurses’ station. Down the hall, into O’s room. Crawled by the delicate escarpment of O under white sheeting, snowfield from elbow to hipbone, arm flung over her eyes and, dangling down to the floor beside me, the golden climber’s rope of her hair. Crawled into her bathroom. Pulled the door to.

No locks on these temples of offing yourself of course, with their bloody bathtubs, noosy towel racks and ghostly cabinets of pills. Wedged two
Creepy Comix
from the back of the toilet under the door. Squeezed on the light to see, since O’s makeup case was the size of a doctor’s bag and stuffed to its froggy hinges. Pawed blind through the tubes and bottles, quarter pound of bobby pins on the bottom, dimes nickels quarters, bottle caps, two bullets of different calibers, tornado-shaped shard of mirror,
cannabis-smeared pipecleaner, some scary gadget that looked like a corkscrew but wasn’t and at last,
it
, the tweezer, two little silver bowlegs encircled with golden garters. I climbed into the gleaming bathtub and went to work.

It took hardly any time at all to open up a little bald spot, but from there on out it was rotten sameness, progress invisible, would it ever end? One by one, out they came, the hairs and the doomed crustaceans at the root of them, and finally they all lay in one big thin eyebrow around the drain at the far end of the tub, to be washed down at the end in one loud burst when I soaped and scrubbed and made my getaway. I had to keep my tracker’s eye on them of course, who knew if the crabs couldn’t smell me, a kind of mother to them, and come trooping back to me over the porcelain? And the longer I looked, the more the skimpy fringe around the drain looked like writing, a sentence in the round, a motto in some kind of letters I couldn’t understand. What could they have to say to me? I eyeballed the secret message around the drain and by and by it was like those crackles in the closet walls of Rohring Rohring where the queen of spades, or Margaret Meat or Karen Honey or Mahalia Chicken or Ruth Beandip, put in their appearances. Or any other
dame
I wished to summon, so long as she was
grande
. Suddenly I got this oracle:
SHE IS A LEVIATHAN, EVEN HER KISS IS LIKE A HOUSE FELL ON ME
. I blinked in the white light.

I was almost done. I mean I was only seventeen, maybe I wasn’t the grizzled she-gorilla I thought I was. By now where black hairs once grew there was only a rather raw pink heart, faintly perforated with tiny red dots. And inside it, that crack I hadn’t seen since I was twelve. Did it hurt? Did and didn’t. Of all pains, after all, the most agreeable is to pluck out a part of the body that offends, thus millions dine on cuticles and fingernails
and a Haitian lady on West Four, one Mrs. Yib, had landed in Rohring Rohring after polishing off her own chignon, a whole bowlful, with a fork and Thousand Island dressing. Bored parrots sometimes beak out their green-and-gold breasts feather by feather, and if you aren’t getting any, it must be tempting to hold the starving member to anything that whirls, even a whetstone. Anyhow the more the V between my thighs puffed and pinked, the goner the vermin seemed, and I was almost happy. I eyed the ring around the drain. It said
Who knows? She who eats, knows not, but she who plucks the chicken, knows
.

I began to think I might make it back to East Five in time to let out Doctor Zuk before she yelled for help. No sign of a Code Green yet, no little bells pinging and elevators whirring and rubber shoes slapping, though maybe they handled these crises differently in the middle of the night, maybe they were less eager to wake up the tamely snoring mental peons than to give them nightmares in broad day with technicians in beekeeper’s hats thundering by the ward doors. Anyhow there’d been none of those yet, and now that I was cured I imagined getting back to East Five, and me and madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse sitting down to talk. Yes, I was clean as a whistle and ready for philosophy. No one would ever know.

Standing clear I stuffed the hairs in the drain and opened the
HOT
faucet for one short blast, and was answered by one of those serenades for bass ophicleide the old plumbing was prone to. At such times, the pipes boomed like Judgment Day clear down to Pathology, so that all the stiffs banged their foreheads trying to
sit up in their refrigerator drawers. I screwed the
HOT
faucet off again, but too late.
Creepy Comix
noodged scratchily along the floor, the door creaked open. There stood O, blinking through her Mary Hartline hair. Those long platinum strands were all she was wearing. She gazed sleepily at my nakedness and suddenly said, “Coooool.” Slowly I understood what she was admiring. The tweezer was still in my fingers.

“Let’s do me too,” she yawned. “Why?” “It looks so mean and nasty.” “Yours won’t look mean and nasty. You gotta be ugly at the bottom for that.” “I don’t care. I wanna see my crack.” Reluctantly, I held out the tweezer to her. “No, you do it,” she said coyly, “I’m chicken.” What was I supposed to say to her?—I have an appointment? “I gotta go,” I said. “Hey, whatcha doing in my bathroom?” she finally woke up and remembered to ask, “ain’t you down on East Five? stuck in a quietroom?” “I ran away,” I said, “that’s why I gotta get back. Before they see I’m gone.” “You escaped and you’re going back? Are you nuts or sumpm?” “I, er, uh, try to be,” I mumbled, thinking of Doctor Zuk. Zuk! Panic tightened on my forehead like plaster. I had left her locked in a broom closet on East Five. I had to get back to her
right now
.

“What kinda checks you on?” O asked. “Fifteen-minute but mostly they don’t come till twenty.” “Then you’re too late already, it don’t matter, stay with me.” “No I’m not, if I leave right now.” “First pluck me.” “It takes too long and anyhow you don’t need it. Yours is … really really … okay the way it is.” And it was. I dared to look straight at it—an escutcheon of pinkish rosettes, as dainty as the Girl Scout badge for venery. But O was mad. Her eyes pinched to slits and she angrily plunked herself on the toilet seat, folded her arms and peed. The pee boiled in the bowl. Her cotton candy hair vined in and out of her arms.
She glared at me. “Who ya going with? Down there on East Five?” “Huh? Nobody. I’m stuck in a quietroom for godzillas sake.” “Who else is there?” “No one. Some old bag opera singer’s in the room under your room, I don’t even know her name.” “You love her, ain’t it, you cheatin jew bulldyke,” she spooky-fluted, sitting all cramped together on the throne like some Old Witch Anti-Birth. “I only even noticed her cause she was in your room,” I said. She softened slightly but softness made her even scarier, squeezed her spooky-flute down to a snaky hiss. Her eyes glowed at the bottom of gratings that were half-erasures of their usual blacking. In a way she had never looked so beautiful. “What’d you come here for?” she wanted to know and I could hardly say
To borrow your tweezer
, now could I? “I was gonna surprise you,” I mumbled.

She got up and turned to flush the pot and when she turned back around, to my amazement she was wreathed in smiles as well as hair. She draped her long black fingernails about my neck, she could do that of course since I was still standing in the bathtub and therefore half a foot off the floor, otherwise I’d have been no taller than she was—and looked up into my face at its ersatz fuddy altitude and kissed me. “You did,” she said. “So, er, uh, do you like me with a bald coochie like five years old?” She stepped back a little and gazed. “Wooo,” she said. What did that mean? She patted the edge of the bathtub, hinting I should stand up there to get a look at myself (legless, headless) in the mirror over the sink. I climbed up. Well it was terrible, and nuttin like five years old. The halves of the knoll of coochie fit together swollenly, like lips that had been punched, and that once preverbal slit looked deep and dangerous, ready to curse, or spit. “Cheese,” I said, and shuddered. “Now do
me
,” she commanded.

I got down on my knees, tweezer shaking between my fingers, but she pulled me back up. Led me to her bed and spread herself out on the edge of it, with one bare foot on the floor. I began. I began with a sense of ruin, of pulling apart some secret of nature like a birdsnest that no human could build or rebuild, but soon I got into it, nibbling my tweezer along the border, making the shield perfectly symmetrical, dexter like sinister, the raw cooked. All the same my hand shook. It was her coochie after all. I tried not to look at the curtained, bubblegum-pink tunnel at the center of it. Neatly I heaped the questionmarky hairs to one side on the hospital sheet. Stepped back to view my work. “It looks like a perfect little keyhole—sumpm from a lady’s writing desk. Lemme leave it like that.” “No, all of it.” “I’m the artiste in this salon and I refuse.” “Sufferin cheeses.” She scrambled up on the side of the bathtub, craned her neck at herself and sniffed: “Take the rest.” And she rearranged herself on the bed.

But now when I knelt to the work I saw a sort of candle glint in the pink tumblers and before I could think she pressed my hand against the wetness there. Somehow I got rid of the tweezer and finally, finally, sank a finger into the dark center of some beauty, felt along the satin muscle banks to her blind end and felt her burst around me. Implode, shudder, dissolve. Her skinny arms flew around my neck and wrenched me to her nuzzies but when I opened my mouth to taste them, she shoved me mightily away. “I ain’t no bull dagger,” she panted, and at last I deduced what this must mean. “I know,” I politicly replied. I rolled away from her, closed my eyes, only now the darkness organized itself around the wet pink jewel of

“Finish me,” she whispered in my ear. She was pressing the tweezer into my fingers but I made a fist against it. “Don’t wanna,” I said, staring into the black, half expecting one of her
knives in the gut. “Come on,” she spooky-fluted. “Don’t wanna and anyhow you don’t need it. You’re too pretty down there already.” “Pretty? Cheeses.” To my surprise her hand folded around my hand. Her thumb made lazy circles on my palm. I felt the quick length of her against me, soft swellings and concavities, fluted bones. “I got a joke for you,” she breathed in my ear.
“This guy’s walking down the avenue, right? Joe. On the corner he runs into his old friend. Joe, what’s wrong, you look awful. I do? Well I feel good, Joe says, and he keeps going and sees this other old friend. Are you sick, Joe, the other friend says, cheese, you look bad! Well I feel good, Joe says, and walks on and soon he comes across his third old friend. Joe, what happened to you, this one says, you look terrible. But I feel good, says Joe, and he decides he better see a doctor. Doc examines him and shakes his head and says, I don’t know, Joe, I never seen a case like this. He opens this big black book and runs his finger down the column, Hmmm, looks good and feels good, that’s not you, Joe. Looks terrible, feels terrible, that’s not you either. Wait a minute, here it is, looks terrible and feels good. Say, Joe, you’re a vagina!”
We snickered, helplessly.

The city glowed at the window bars and its glow pooled on the bed. I dared to look in O’s face. She was unearthly beautiful in that light. She was crude and bloodthirsty, and under her icy billows of hair and fake calm she had turned out to be one of those menstrual fantod types strung tight as a toy violin, but I kind of loved her. “Guess who told me,” she whispered. “Reggie.” “How’d you know?” “Who else?” We laughed into each other’s hair. “I can’t figure out if the Regicide likes girls or hates girls,” I said. O sighed. “What’s the difference? He’s the best we got in here, I mean think of the dreambox mechanics, what a buncha nuttins.”

I did. I sat up like one of those stiffs in their refrigerator drawers, bonk. “I gotta go,” I said. “You better not leave me now,” O
spooky-fluted, sinking her black nails into my hand. “I gotta. I told you.” “How come,” she said,
“for who?”
She peered at me and I bit down hard to heat up the fat between my ears, tried to fry away Zuk, knowing O could see right through my headbone when she got in this state. “
For who?
” “I gotta get off East Five,” I said, “I’m going buggy up there.” That much was the truth. “I gotta make em think I’m getting better.” “Sufferin cheeses, you left more’n an hour ago. Don’t you think they found out by now? They’ll throw you in leg irons or sumpm.” “I gotta go.” “Don’t go,” she sing-sang warningly, “you can hide in my closet.” “I gotta.” I stood on my feet. “You two-timing jew oink, I hate you.” At this I lifted her up by her skinny shoulders and shook her a bit, so that her dark nuzzies trembled. Now that we knew each other down to our coneyholes, I wasn’t going to stand for this kind of talk. “You can call me Jew if you want, that’s not even a cuss word ya know, but if you call me a this jew or a that jew anymore I’ll punch you right in your popey nose. It’s not ladylike.”

Naturally I wouldn’t have done anything to her unless completely necessary, but I was way stronger than she was and people from her side of town understand that kind of thing. She lay there blinking up at me and I took the opportunity to run. On my way I snatched a fuzzy robe from the hook on her bathroom door. I knew that first she would puzzle on that queer pheenom, a Hebrew toughgirl, and next she would come looking for me, maybe throwing knives and maybe not.

No I did not forget the keys and a very good thing I didn’t. By now the ward doors on East Six and East Five were locked
inside and out, and this change of policy, which had rolled over in a single midnight hour, was not a good sign. They had found me out. They were upping the security in my wake. Outside East Five I hunched down below the little porthole, thumbed through the keys and tried them one after the other. Finally a key worked and there I was, back on that gleaming green hall of glassed-in chicken wire and locked steel doors.