Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (32 page)

Her explanation: she had spent the night talking ballet with the "boys" at one of their co-op apartments; yes, she had known I would be there; no, she hadn't considered it important to phone me or leave a note; if she was gone she assumed I would leave, ride the long ride back to Manhattan, and be ready to see her another time.

We went for our blood test that week. She had to hold my hand when the doctor took the sample. I was poor, and wrote an uncle of mine in New Mexico, who owned a jewelry store, asking him for a ring. He sent a lovely but inexpensive modern band.

Why? Because it is far better to be lonely with someone than to be lonely alone.

I was frightened of Stephie, I knew it was all wrong, she was killing me by obscure, dangerous degrees, but I needed someone. And in that unfathomable way all those who seek to destroy themselves share, I wanted her. What was worst for me, I needed most. Still, I had no understanding of her; I didn't really know her, and we were both running headlong down that path into the darkness, hand-in-hand, knives in backs.

It was a little like going mad.

We went to an art movie on Lexington Avenue, midtown; a dark and depressing thing that seemed perfectly suited to my being with Stephie. As the weeks had gone by I had started smoking more, my thoughts were strange, devious, my work at the shop hadn't suffered because there wasn't that much imagination needed for it, but I was more easily upset, nastier to customers, shorter with the creeps who sought the clinical sex books; my nights alone were introspective, troubled. We were walking back to the subway on Lexington when we saw a crowd.

Stephie hurried me along and as we came abreast of them Stephie pointed up. Everyone was watching a ledge fifteen floors up. A man was standing there, his hands finger-spread against the sooty brick, his feet half-hanging over the edge.

His eyes held me. Even fifteen floors below him, I could see the whites, gigantic, milky, terrified. He didn't want to jump ... whatever had driven him onto that ledge, he was like me, he was me... he wanted to fight it, but it had driven him there and he was held by it. But he wanted to live.

I glanced at Stephie, started to say something.

Her face.

How can I explain it so it will hold the impact it held for me then? How can I describe the expression of her face, the way she ground her teeth together, the contortion of her tiny features, the almost purple light across her cheekbones, the way her fists were clenched so tightly they went white. She wanted him to jump.

She didn't say a thing. I heard her. She was silent. I heard her!

Jump! she was saying, with her clenched teeth, her fists, that awful purple light playing across her face, Jump! The sight of him tumbling, going down, trying to fly the way falling men do with arms out, twitching. That was what she wanted to see. My throat went as dry as if I had chain-smoked for an hour straight. It was the most frightening thing I had ever seen.

I don't remember whether he fell, or was saved, or crawled back inside of his own volition, or whether we simply walked away. I don't remember. It didn't matter; just as what happened to me didn't matter. That guy up there was doomed--if not now, then sometime soon--just as I was. Something was destroying him, and something was destroying me. It didn't matter whether we fell now or later. It didn't matter. It had to happen.

Eight days before we were to go to City Hall--Billy and Stella were to be our witnesses--I learned who Stephie Cook was. I was allowed to discover how deep the layers of rust and decay on her soul were.

Jump!

We had been robbed at the bookstore on Broadway ... or almost. Davey Haieff, the manager of the shop, was a rough number, who called the tourists and perverts who shopped for "different" books in our shop kadodies. We were just at the slack period of the evening, nine o'clock when most of the out-of-towners were free of dinner at the tourist traps and had made the eight-thirty curtain at the theaters ... and we were loafing it.

That was when the four teenagers came in. They were like any other four teenagers you can see cruising Times Square, digging trouble. One of them meandered toward me in the back of the store, keeping his eyes on the showcase filled with Italian stilettos, Samurai swords, Solingen steel hunting knives--the sort of deadly looking but perfectly legal hardware sold to impress the yucks back home. I followed him, noticing that the other three hung around the raised cash register counter behind which Davey waited, watching, always watching everyone in the tiny shop.

"Can I interest you in a knife?" I asked the kid.

He was taller than I, by at least six inches, and the way he wore his T-shirt indicated he worked out on the parallel bars at the PAL gym. He looked more Bronx than Brooklyn; but they all looked pretty much the same, really. "Yeah, how 'bout that thing there." He jabbed a finger at the locked glass showcase, indicating a sixteen-inch Italian steel clasp-knife.

I grinned. This was my specialty. I could operate one of the clasp-knives by wrist action faster than any switchblade on the market, illegal though they were. We weren't allowed to sell switches or gravity or shake knives, so I had mastered the technique the better to push the merchandise we could sell.

Just as I unlocked the case, the other three made their move. I had the knife in my hand as one of them came up with an ironwood billy club and took a swing at Davey. I saw the action from the corner of my eye, and it was like a Mack Sennett comedy, sped up fifty-times normal.

Davey reached down, in and out, and up all in one fluid motion, and belted two of them with the rubber hose he kept there for just that purpose. They went down instantly, one of them open above the eyebrow with a five-inch gash that blinded him with his own blood. The third one bolted into the street.

My customer stood where he was. He had to, I had whipped open the knife and jammed it against his windpipe as I saw Davey move. It made a tiny indentation in the flesh, and he was still standing, staring wide-eyed at it when the cops came to take them away.

Davey told me to take the rest of the evening off.

I took the subway to Brooklyn and arrived just before ten o'clock--six hours earlier than usual. The balcony was vaulted, the doors thrown open and I bounded into the room carrying two popsicles, like something out of The Thief of Bagdad.

Stephie wasn't alone. She wasn't in bed, which made it worse.

A man would have driven me insane, I would have probably killed them both, so keyed up with violence from the action in the shop was I, but it wasn't a man. I was stopped, and stopped and stopped and stared and felt myself saying things to myself. Don't ask what I was saying, I have no idea.

Two girls lay on the bed, sucking on each other. Stephie sat naked, cross-legged on the floor, watching them with that same terrible expression she had had while watching the man on the ledge.

One of the girls on the bed lay perfectly still as I came bursting in, playing possum, not stirring to draw attention. The other looked up and went white, deathly pale, the way I had written it a million times in my inadequate stories that avoided true confessions like this because they were improbable, written for sillyass housewives who would swallow only improbability. And I was part of it. They stared at me, all three of them. The first girl blankly, the second with fear--a puffy moth of a girl whose suntanned body seemed gross and fleshy to me--and Stephie, defiantly.

She wore a wedding ring. But not mine.

She wore a ring all right. On her little finger, left hand. A wedding ring--a lesbian's token of love and commitment. I was ill.

Had she been on the bed with one of them, it might have made some difference, then there would have been a reason, I could have rationalized. But watching...

I dropped the ridiculous popsicles and stumbled toward them, thinking I was moving back, away from them. The pudgy girl leaped off the bed, glistening with sweat, and flattened like a sack of brown sugar against the wall. "Don't hit me," she cried, "I can't stand pain ... don't hit me!"

Stephie recrossed her legs in front of her, and her eyes were cold, dead, like a pair of gravestones. It became clear so suddenly, as I saw those eyes empty now of their ghoulish pleasure, that I felt a hurling, a dropping, a heaving in my stomach. She had hit me solidly. She had used me as a cover, would have gone to the extreme of marrying me to cover. Why? What did I care? Her family, her job, the world in general, what did it matter? She had used me, and I was used up.

Then she tinkled. She let loose a Snow White giggle that sliced like a butcher's blade right through my stumbling consciousness and drained me of all energy.

Watching.

She had been watching.

The one lying there still. Still as dead. If I lie silently here no one will hurt me. Fright. The room stank of it.

The other, against the wall. Terrified. Of me. The gross, hurting man. And my Stephie ... watching.

Watching it all. Smiling endlessly.

Somehow, I got out of there, and back to Manhattan. Somehow.

Did I go by subway ... was it underground or was I some sort of dead man on the way to the river Styx? Did I think about it, did I see that scene again and again? I don't know. I can't remember. Never!

I didn't know what to do.

I found Aggie and managed to tell it all, what I could tell, so driven out of my mind was I at the thought of her watching them on that bed ... those dykes! He gave me a drink, and then called a girl he knew. She was a West Indian and she smelled of oregano. It couldn't have been worse.

Oddly, I kept feeling the doctor's needle in my arm, drawing the blood for the test, all through it. Everything was shaded in crimson.

I never saw Stephie again. The ultimate cliché for the ultimate hackneyed pain-story. Unfortunately, life is not a magazine story, with a sharp ending and a clear-cut moral; it drags on, there are sloppy ends, little after-touches, occasional phone calls, taperings-off that dull the edges of the most magnificent of tragedies. So it was with my Stephie, my woman-child and her Arctic chill. I later heard she had contracted tuberculosis and was suffering with it rather than asking her parents in New Jersey for money to see a doctor. Some made it nobility, I saw it as empty bravado, a further step on the path to self-destruction Stephie had chosen all-knowing.

I missed her. Terribly. I was alone, once more, and now I was alone with the knowledge that Stephie and I were very much alike; the victims of the world; too weak to win.

I didn't even have the satisfaction of knowing I could use it as story-material. It wouldn't play; it was too much a tearjerker, too obviously probable to be a story; reality often stinks.

In any case--

Don't believe them. It's possible. You can keep a good man down.

--New York City and Chicago, 1960

When they first broke out of the machine shop, holding the guards before them, screwdrivers sharp and deadly against white-cloth backs covering streaks of yellow, they made for the South Tower, and took it without death. One of the hostage guards tried to break free, however, in the subsequent scuffle to liberate the machine gun from its gimbals and tracks, and Simon Rubin was forced to use the screwdriver on the man. They threw the body from the Tower as an example to the remaining three hostages, and had no further difficulties. In fact, the object lesson was so successful that it was the guards themselves that carried the cumbersome machine gun, with all its belts of ammunition, back down into the yard. The Tower was an insecure defensive position, interlocked as it was with the other three Towers and the sniping positions on the roofs of the main buildings. They had decided in advance to make it back down into the yard and there, with backs to the wall itself, to take their stand for as long as it took the second group to blow the gate.

Construction on the new drainage system had been underway for only two days, and the great sheets of corrugated sheet metal, the sandbags, the picks and shovels, all were stacked under guard near the wall. They were forced to gun down the man on duty to get into the shelter of the piles of material, but it didn't matter either way--if he lived or died--because they were going to take as many with them as they could, breakout or not.

Nigger Joe and Don Karpinsky set up the big-barreled machine gun and braced its sides as well as fore and aft with sandbags, digging it in so the recoil would not affect its efficiency.

Gyp Williams, who had engineered the break, took up a solid rifleman's position, flat out on his belly with legs spread and toes pointed out, the machine rifle braced against right shoulder and the left elbow dug deep into the brown earth of the yard, supporting the tripod grip. His brown eyes set deep into his black face were roaming things as he covered the wide expanse of the yard, waiting for the first assault; it had to come; he was the readiest ever.

Lew Steiner and the kid they called Chocolate made up the rest of the skirmish team, and they were busily unloading the homemade grenades and black powder bombs from the cotton batting of the insulated box ... when the first assault broke out of cover around the far wall of the Administration Building.

They came as a wave of white-winged doves, the ivory of their uniforms blazing against the hard cold light of the early morning. First came the sprayers, pocking the ground with little upbursts of dirt, and shredding the morning silence with the noise of their grease guns. Then a row of riflemen, and behind them half a dozen longarms with grenades, if needed.

"Away, they comin'!" Gyp Williams snapped over his shoulder. "Dig, babies!" and he got off the first burst of the defense, into their middle. Three of the grease gunners went down, legs everywhichway and guns tossed off like refuse, clattering and still chattering on automatic fire, pelting the wall with wasted lead. The second wave faltered an instant, and in that snatch of time Nigger Joe fed the belts to Karpinsky, who swung the big weapon back and forth, in even arcs, cutting them down right across the bellies. None of the riflemen made it a fifth of the distance across the empty yard. One of them went down kicking, and Karpinsky took him out on the next, lowered, arc.

"I am," Lew Steiner screamed, arching high to toss a black powder bomb, "home free!" It hit and exploded fifteen yards too short, but the effect was marvelous. The longarms caught up short and tried to turn.

"Bang

"Bang

"And bang," Gyp Williams grinned and murmured as he snapped off three sharp, short bursts, ending it for a trio of grenade carriers. And it was over that quickly, as the remaining grease gunners and three longarms fell, clambered, tripped, sprinted, raced back around the building.

"We done that thing." Gyp Williams rolled over on his back, aiming a thumb-and-finger pistol at his troops. "We sure enough, we done that thing."

"Send those guards outta here." Chocolate nodded his head at the hostages. Gyp agreed with a small movement of his massive head, and the three white-jacketed guards were shoved around the side of the enclosure, out into the open. For a moment they tensed, as though they expected to be shot down by the men in the tiny fort, but when no movement was made, they broke into a dead run, across the yard, arms waving, yelling to their compatriots that they were coming through.

The first burst of machine-gun fire came from the North Tower and took one of them in mid-stride, making him miss his footing, leap and plunge in a half-somersault to crash finally onto the ground, sliding a foot and a half on the side of his face. The second burst cut down his partners. They tumbled almost into a loving embrace, piled atop one another.

Chocolate expelled breath through dry lips and asked "Who's got the cigarettes?" Simon Rubin tossed him the pack and for a while they just lay there, smoking, alert, watching the bodies of the dead white guards who had been shot by their own men.

"Well," Gyp Williams commented philosophically, after a time, "everybody knows a white cat gets around niggers is gonna get contaminated. They just couldn't be trust, man. Dirty. Dir-ty."

"And kikes," Lew Steiner added. "Ding ding."

They settled down for the long wait, till the second group could blow the wall. They watched the shadows of the sun slither across the yard. Nothing moved. Warm, and nice, waiting. Quiet, too.

"How long you been in this prison?" Chocolate asked Simon Rubin. There was no answer for the space of time it took Rubin to draw in on the butt and expel smoke through his nostrils; then his long, horsey face drew down, character lines in the bony cheeks and around the deep-set eyes mapping new expressions. "As far back as I can remember," he replied carefully, thinking about it, "I suppose all of my life." Chocolate nodded lightly, turning back to the empty yard with a thin whistle of nervousness.

Something should happen. They all wanted it.

"When the hell they gonna blow that gate?" Nigger Joe murmured. He had been biting the inside of his full lower lip, chewing, biting again. "I thought they was gonna blow it soon's we got a position here. What the hell they doin' back in there?"

Gyp Williams motioned him to silence. "Quiet, willya. They'll get on it, you take it easy."

"I'm really scared." Don Karpinsky added a footnote. "It's like waiting for them to come and kill you. My old man told me about that at Belsen, how they came around and just looked at you, didn't say a word, just walked up and down, gauging you, looking to see if there was meat on you, and then later, boy oh boy, later they came back and didn't have any trouble picking you out, just walked up and down again, pointing, that one and that one and ..."

"Can it." Gyp Williams hushed him. "Boy, you sure can talk!" He was silent a second, scrutinizing the young man, too young to need a shave every day, but old enough to be here behind the wall with them. Then, "What you in for, boy?"

Don Karpinsky looked startled, his face rearranging itself to make explanations, excuses, reading itself for extenuating circumstances, amelioration. "I, I, uh, I hurt some people."

Gyp Williams turned toward him more completely (yet kept a corner of his eye on the empty yard, where the bodies remained crumpled). "You what, you did what?"

"I just, uh, I hurt some people, with a, uh, with a bomb, see I made this bomb and when I tossed it I din't know there was any--"

"Whoa back, boy!" Gyp Williams pulled the young man's racethrough dialogue to a halt. "Go on back a bit. You made a what? A bomb?"

Karpinsky nodded dumbly; it was obvious he had never thought he would be censured here.

"Now what'n the hell you do that for, boy?"

Don Karpinsky turned to the belts of long slugs, neatly folded over themselves, ready for the maw of the machine gun. He would not, or could not, answer.

Simon Rubin spoke up. He had been listening to the interchange but had decided to let the young Karpinsky handle his own explanations. But now it needed ending, and since the young man had confided in him one rainy night in their cell, he felt the privileged communication might best be put to use here. "Gyp," he called the big black man's attention away from Karpinsky. It seemed to halt the next words from Gyp Williams's mouth.

"He bombed a church, Gyp. Some little town in Iowa. The minister was apparently some kind of a monster, got the local Male White Protestants convinced Jews ate goyishe children for Passover. They made it hell on the kid and his family. He was a chemistry bug, made a bomb, and tossed it. Killed six people. They threw him in here."

Gyp Williams seemed about to say something, merely clucked his tongue, and rolled over once more into a firing position. The only sound in the enclosure was the metallic sliding of the machine rifle's bolt as Gyp Williams made unnecessary checks.

Lew Steiner was asleep against the wall, his back propped outward by a sandbag, a black powder bomb in each hand, as though in that instant of snapping awake, he might reflexively hurl one of the spheroids more accurately, more powerfully than he had in combat.

"Whaddaya think, Gyp?" Chocolate asked. "You think they gonna try an' take us in daylight, or wait till t'night?" He was as young as Don Karpinsky, somewhere under twenty, but a reddish, ragged scar that split down his left cheek to the corner of his mouth made him seem--somehow--older, more experienced, more capable of violence than the boy who had bombed the small Iowa church.

Gyp Williams rose up on an elbow, gaining a better field of vision across the yard. He talked as much to himself as to Chocolate. "I don't know. Might be they'd be careful about waiting till dark. That's a good time for us as much as them. And when the other boys make the move to blow the gate, the dark'll be on our side, we can shoot out them searchlights ..."

He chuckled, lightly, almost naively.

"What's so funny?" Nigger Joe asked, then turned as Simon Rubin asked, "Hey, Joe, I got a crick in my-back, here, want to rub it out for me?" Nigger Joe acknowledged the request and slid across the dirt to Rubin, who turned his back, indicating the sore area. The Negro began thumbing it smooth with practiced hands, repeating, "Gyp, what's so funny?"

Gyp Williams' ruggedly handsome face went into a softer stage. "I remember the night they came for us, the caravan, about fifteen twenty cars, came on down to Littletown, all of them with the hoods, lookin' for the one who'd grabbed a feel off the druggist's wife. Man, they were sure pretty, all of them real black against the sky, just them white hoods showing them off like perfect targets.

"They's about ten of us, see, about ten, all laid out like I am now, out there on a little hill in the tall grass, watching them cars move on down. Show-offs, that's what they was. Show-offs, or they wouldn't've sat up on the backs of them convertibles, where we could see 'em so plain. No lights on the cars, all silent, but the white hoods, as plain as moonliglit.

"We got about thirteen or fourteen of them cats before they figured they'd been ruined. I was just thinkin' 'bout it now, thinkin' 'bout them searchlights when they come on. Those white uniforms gonna be might fine to shoot at, soon's it gets dark." Then, without a break in meter, his tone became frenzied, annoyed, "When the hell they gonna blow that goddam gate?"

As if in reply, a long, strident burst from a grease gun, sprayed from the roof of the Administration Building, pocked the wall behind them, chewing out irregular niches in the brick. They were spattered with brick chips and mortar, dirt and whizzing bits of stone. Lew Steiner came rigidly awake, grasped the situation and ducked in a dummy-up cover, imitating the other five defenders.

They were huddled over that way, when they heard the whispering, chocking whirr of helicopter rotors chewing the air. "They're coming over the wall in a 'copter!" Don Karpinsky shrieked.

Gyp Williams turned over, elevating the machine rifle, bracing it on an upright sheet of corrugated metal. "Lew! Get set, them bombs ... they comin' over ... Lew!"

But Steiner was lost in fear. It was silence he heard, rather than the commanding voice of Gyp Williams. His buttocks stared out where his face should have been, and Gyp Williams cursed tightly, eyes directed at the wall, scanning, tracking back and forth for the first sight of the guard helicopter, coming with the tear gas or the thermite or a ten-second shrapnel cannister. "Joe, do somethin' about him, you Joe!"

Nigger Joe slid across the ground, grasped Lew Steiner by the hair, and jerked him out of the snail-like foetal position he had assumed. Steiner still clutched the black smoke bombs, one in either fist, like thick, burnt rolls, snatched from an oven.

The colored man was unconcerned with niceties. He slapped Steiner heavily, the sound a counterpoint to the copter's rising comments. Lew Steiner did not want to come back from wherever he had gone to find peace and security. But the black man's palm would not be ignored. He bounced the work-pinkened flesh off Steiner's cheeks until the milky-blue of sight unseen had faded, and Steiner was back with them.

"Them bombs, Lew," Nigger Joe said, softly, with great kindness. "They comin' over the wall right'cheer behind us." Steiner's defection was already forgotten.

No more was said as Steiner rolled over, ready to meet the helicopter with his bombs. Chocolate and Don Karpinsky stayed with the fixed machine gun, prepared for a rear-guard attack in the face of the aerial threat. Nigger Joe and Simon Rubin lay on their backs, rifles pointed at the sky.

The whirlybird came over the wall fifty feet down the line, and Gyp Williams quickly readjusted himself for its approach. The machine was perhaps twenty feet over their heads, and came churning toward them rapidly, as though intent on low-level strafing. Gyp Williams loosed his first burst before the others, and it missed the mark by two feet. The helicopter came on rapidly, steadily. The six men lay staring at it, readying themselves, trying at the same time to find places for their naked bodies in the earth.