Me and the Devil: A Novel (36 page)

Autumn was here. The first sough of its lovely diapason wove through all that was. Exundant, glorious autumn. My season.

The last time I had escaped from one of these joints, it was a balmy summer night. I had jumped into a taxi, lowered the window all the way as the cabbie sped off with the fat guy in the toupee
singing “New York, New York” loud and clear through the cab’s speakers. I had him take me straightaway to the bar.

But this time was going to be different. I walked awhile, a good while, slow and easy. Then I got a cab to take me home. Yes, this time it was going to be different, very different.

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME, THE FIRST THING
I
DID WAS TO
fetch a thirty-gallon black plastic garbage bag from the cabinet under the kitchen island, swing wide the refrigerator door, and empty all the rotten, spoiled, and soured food from it into the bag. Without shutting the refrigerator, I opened the kitchen window to let in good air. I then went about, gathering up and tossing into the bag the mess of bottles, empty and dregful alike, and bottle caps and wadded paper napkins and such that were scattered, alone and in clusters, throughout the room. It was a shame to see the remains of that dead snake go.

I hauled the big, heavy bag out of the apartment to the disposal chute in the outer hall, pulled down the chute door, forced and maneuvered its weighty bulk through the disposal opening, and heard the bagged bottles bang and crash with loud noise in their five-flight fall to the basement. I never recycled garbage. Even if it didn’t all end up in the same landfill, I still wouldn’t do it. This world was shot, irremediably so. Recycling garbage was like flicking lint from the collar of a stiff as he lay in his coffin.

Back in the kitchen, I set the dirty glasses and silverware that were lying round into the sink to soak in hot soapy water. I dipped a sponge into the water and scrubbed the stains from the floor, counters, and tabletop. I went into the living room, took the overflowing ashtrays and emptied them into the toilet and flushed, then left them to soak with the glasses in the sink. With a wet
paper towel I cleaned the surfaces of the small tables at either end of the couch and some stains of unknown origin on the floor.

There were clothes strewn about. After going through their pockets, I tossed them in a heap into the washing machine. I threw back the sheet and light cover on the bed, opened wide the bedroom window. I poured bleach down the toilets, into the sinks. Then I slammed shut the refrigerator door. I left and bought fresh milk, eggs, butter, bread, some cold cuts, and some fruit. I boosted only a single but expensive bar of pure handmade bath soap.

The washed clothes were in the dryer, the cleaned, rinsed glasses were set on paper towels. I went to the telephone. Twenty-seven messages awaited me. I erased them all without listening to any of them. I went to the computer. There were at least a hundred e-mails in the in-box. I deleted them all without looking at them. Both of these acts felt very freeing.

I finished drying one of the ashtrays by hand. I poured cold, fresh milk into a sparkling clean glass, set them on the end table at my side of the couch. I washed down ten milligrams of baclofen, ten milligrams of Valium with big slugs of cool water, sat down wearily, lit a smoke, took a sip of milk, and sighed wearily. It was a most pleasant weariness.

Some of the erased messages must have been calls of care and concern from Lorna. Maybe there was among them even a plea or two to come back to me from Melissa.

This may not have been true, not any of it. But it made me feel good to believe that it was.

I called Frankie, let him know I was all right and thanked him for being a friend in need. We laughed about doctors and hospitals and illness and age. When I hung up, and then shut off the phone, I took to wondering what others might be thinking had become of me. Maybe they thought I was dead or lay dying in
some unknown place. Whether or not this was true, it too made me feel good somehow to believe it was.

Back in my own bed, in my own exorcised home, I slept long and well, and rose early the next day. I went out, bought buttermilk at a corner store, moved on to Whole Foods for more provisions: a big thick boneless rib eye steak, baking spuds, onions, strawberries, coffee, a pint of half-and-half. I was now adept at boosting from the butcher counter. After the meat was wrapped and price-stickered, I merely rounded an aisle and slipped it in a jacket pocket. On my way out, I slipped a sixteen-ounce container of Hemp Pro 70 protein-and-omega-3 into my bag. The stuff went for $24.99, but it was good—even better when free—and I liked to mix a big, heaping tablespoon of it into my buttermilk in the morning. Walking home, I bought bottled water and cigarettes at the same corner store where I had bought the buttermilk.

After putting everything away, I turned on the phone, called Elena, my cleaning lady of almost thirty years, and arranged to have her come by in a few days. Then I shut off the phone again.

I took my vitamins, my supplements, my baclofen, drank down a big glass of buttermilk and hemp protein. I put on some Bach cello suites, took a Valium, and poured myself a glass of cold milk. It was quiet outside. There was only the Bach. I sat and lit a cigarette. I felt great, calm, free.

There was a cigarette butt on the floor, where my fortune in gold bullion had lain. How this butt had escaped my previous notice I did not know. I rose, picked it up, and went to the kitchen to throw it in the trash. Sure enough, it was an English Oval butt. I had already found the English Oval pack in a pocket of the dirty clothes I had laundered. There were still a few cigarettes left in the pack, which I had set near the ashtray on the end table. How had I come to have a pack of English Ovals? I must have got them from the array of cigarettes on display for sale at Circa Tabac. I
hadn’t smoked one for so many years that I had forgotten what they tasted like, though not what they looked like: sort of as if someone had sat on them. Maybe I had wanted to take another shot at figuring out why Frank Costello had been so enamored of them. I knew that they were looked on as quite elegant in Costello’s heyday. But I did not know if they were still made of the same tobacco, or if they had ever even been English. I knew that their maker, Philip Morris, had started out as a tobacconist in nineteenth-century London, but I also knew that Philip Morris had moved to America in the early twentieth century. And I knew that, whatever they tasted like back in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Costello smoked between two and three packs of them every day.

I lit one, which was probably quite stale by now, inhaled, and sought not to figure out what Frank Costello had liked about them, but thought only of what he had said about there being only so many bullets in the gun. How true, I told myself, how true. And mine, like his when he said those words, were used up. Or were they?

My eyes closed, and I wandered. He was right, of course. I was afraid. Not foremost and above all of death. But something. Knowing this did not affect the loveliness of my mood. I pondered it as I pondered the silent mystery of clouds in the sky. No, not death. But something. For a very many years I had fancied myself, and been fancied by others, fearless.

Those years were behind me now. And in my acknowledging and searching for the fear within me, however unknown its nature, and doing so in serene, unflinching calm, perhaps the fancy of fearlessness was drifting cloud-like to the reality of fearlessness. Or, cloud-like, to nothing at all.

T
HERE WAS RISOTTO WITH MARROW ON THE MENU, BUT THE
waiter said they were out of marrow.

This sent us to studying anew the menus we had pushed aside. The waiter made several suggestions as we did so, but waiters seemed always to suggest what the kitchen was trying to be rid of. We each ordered a dry-aged young Hereford sirloin steak for two, telling the waiter that we wanted them burnt on the outside and very rare on the inside. Spuds with some kind of fancy name, peas with same. I told Keith I wasn’t drinking. “Well, I am,” he said, sipping his Campari and soda and looking over the wine list.

“Remember the last time we had dinner,” I said, “I asked you if you’d ever drunk blood?”

“Yes.” He laughed. “And how is the old vein-broaching business these days?”

“You were all, like, oh, God, no, don’t go there. You said you could tell by my eyes that I was headed for trouble.”

“As I recollect, you seemed half insane. Looked it, too, if you don’t mind my saying. ‘Barney Google with the Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes.’ ” He indecisively ordered a bottle of some grand cru or other. “My grandmother Emily used to love that song.”

He palpated the cork, took a snort of the wine, knocked off the taste in the glass, nodded, and the sommelier decanted and poured.

“I thought it was the dope or the booze that was dragging you down by the yoke. Believe me, mate, you were not you.”

“And what was all that about seeing things coming out of people?”

“What?” He laughed. Then: “Oh, that. I did at one time or another. I saw things come out of people. I didn’t say that things came out of them. I said that
I
saw things come out of them.”

“And you said it led to their death.”

“Well, hell, look, they are now pushing up daffodils, but my seeing things coming out of them had nothing to do with it.”

This was somewhat like getting him to try to remember what he had said about Paganini, or whoever it was.

“Did you ever hear of Magnan’s sign?” he asked. “It’s a type of—what the fuck do they bloody call it?—some sort of, some kind of paraphasia, or paraesthesia, or para-something-or-other where you feel things moving under your skin or coming through your skin or whatever. It’s mostly an end-of-the-line coke thing.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Well, maybe I had a spot or two of it in reverse, seeing it in others rather than myself. Or maybe their ranting about what they felt under their skin and saw coming through it made me, in whatever state I may have been in at the time, see it too. Worms, I think it might have been, or little baby snakes, some such nonsense.”

The steaks arrived, and the spuds and peas with the fancy names.

“That was the first song I ever learned to play properly, drop-down, on guitar: ‘Cocaine.’ I learned it from an album, ten-inch album, that Jack Elliott put out in England in 1958 or so. I learned that in the john of my art school. It was so pretty. I had no idea what cocaine was. I just surmised it was some weirdo grown-up perversion. I really didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know what cocaine was.”

He burst out in laughter, shook his head, cut off a piece of steak, swabbed it in the blood that ran from it.

“I don’t use cocaine,” I said. “The only times I ever did, it was to help me stay awake to drink more. Never really saw much in it.”

“You never had the good stuff, the real Bolivian marching powder.”

We chewed awhile in quiet.

“Anyway, all the same shit,” he said. “Smack, coke”—he gestured with his fork to the glass of Médoc before him—“booze. All the same.”

“Well, all I know is I wasn’t fucked-up that night.”

“You’d checked your mind in the cloakroom of a place you couldn’t remember.” He laughed.

Schizophreniform disorder. Drive-by psychosis. Magnan’s sign.

“I saw ghost-rats, shadow-rats come out of me,” I said.

“Worms, rats, snakes, belching frogs. Whatever. We could start a zoo of empty cages and terrariums. People have paid more to see less.”

“You had me going that night,” I told him.

“Ah, you know me. Preaching is the one thing I’ve never been accused of. But I wanted to give you a kick, a gentle kick, in the right direction.” He ate some of the spuds with the fancy name. “Right direction,” he repeated. “Sometimes I wonder what direction that might be.”

I finished my peas with the fancy name. I always dispose first of what I like least.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’ll take you any way I can get you, but I prefer you like this. Nobody at this table is getting any younger. And you’ve got that diabetes thing, like my old man, Bert.” His tone lightened. “He looked just like Popeye, old Bert did.”

I asked him how the Hoagy Carmichael album was coming
along. He looked at me as if he suspected that I was trying to give him a dig, which I was.

“We will sell no wine before its time.”

He told me that he didn’t even have a record label these days. Then we were on to the evaporation of the recording business, and the publishing business, the downloading from the ether of both music and books, all executed with the suckers’ shibboleth of “back money.”

We were lucky, we reflected, to have grown up as boys in a world full of magic vinyl and cheap paperbacks all about and waiting to be discovered for a few coins. The best stuff was happened upon by accident. Discovery after discovery in the oddest of bins in the oddest of shops. But now the age of discovery was over. All were reduced to industrially bred cows at the same trough of the same slop.

Suddenly we realized that we had not taken a cigarette break.

“If only our forgetfulness could have gone on forever,” he said as we made our way out of the restaurant into the street.

I asked him if he knew whether or not English Ovals had originated in England.