Me and the Devil: A Novel (39 page)

Ponce de León was about sixty when he kicked. Alexander was thirty-two. At least I had beaten those fools out.

I still have six of the volumes of the American Artists edition of
The Complete Works of Mark Twain.
They must be all but a hundred years old by now. They were, as inscribed in one of them, the “Property of Ernest Tosches,” a great-uncle of mine who did not read. These were the books with which my mother introduced me to the idea of literature, reading to me from them before I myself could read. All I remember is asking her to begin over and over again with the sixth chapter of
Huckleberry Finn,
“Pap Struggles with the Death Angel,” because it had the word “damn” in it and I liked to hear this curse word, and there was something even better about hearing her read it to me. I’ve kept these books out of the childhood associations they hold for me: my great-uncle (the oldest member of my family to have been born here rather than in Italy), the vaguely remembered voice of my mother, and the books themselves, and her reading them to me, having been my introduction to what I later learned was called literature.

I stopped right there. Yes, these beat-up old books held a certain sentimental value. But my later love of words was, as much as in them, rooted elsewhere. I could just as easily trace my scurrilous and dirty mouth to my mother’s repeated reading to me of that chapter I so liked solely for its cussing. Wordsworth was full of shit: the child was not the father to the man. The child was just a child, a stupid fucking kid.

As it turned out, I never came to care much for Mark Twain. But I did like a few of the things he said. In his autobiography, he said something about there being more satisfaction to be had from a single wicked deed, if it was truly heartfelt, than in all the kind deeds in the world. And as pertains to this business of my particular madness and the sought-after Fountain of Youth, he is supposed to have said that life would be infinitely happier if we
could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach the age of eighteen or so.

The champagne was good, and so was the duck, and the blood that trickled out when I tore the limbs from its body.

But I didn’t want more champagne than the two flutes I’d had. And I sure didn’t want any blood.

T
HE FULL BEAVER MOON CAME, THE BEAVER MOON WENT.
The last of the leaves, golden yellow in the brilliant beauty of their death, fell and were swept from the trees. The lackeys of business proprietors and luxury-priced dwelling-coops were made to brush them away with brooms, blow them away with handheld electric leaf blowers, treating the leafy colors on the pavements and in the gutters as if they were trash, as if they were litter, as if they were an unsightly intrusion in this played-out neighborhood where great old trees were few and unsightly intruders crowded the streets in ever-increasing numbers.

Then came the cold moon, the last full moon of the year, the moon of long nights, as it was also known. This autumn, my season, would soon be no more. Winter was on its way, drawing closer every day. The sun began to hide, and with it all else.

As the days of autumn dwindled, I spent a lot of time on the bench outside the joint on Reade Street. I wanted as much of what remained of my season as I could get. I wanted to fill my lungs, heart, and spirit with it.

By some blessing of nature, I began to rise earlier and earlier, until I woke daily with the dawn. Down the block from the bar and the bench, there was a New York Sports Club. I passed it almost every day, shaking my head as I saw all those unsightly intruders on window display as they trotted, going nowhere, on treadmills facing the street. But downstairs, unseen, where the
yuppie window vermin in their designer athletic fashions rarely ventured, there was a real gym with real gym equipment. I hadn’t worked out in years, not since I quit going to La Palestra uptown. The gym on Reade Street involved no subway rides; it was just a few minutes’ walk away. Sure, it was less fancy, less exclusive than the joint uptown, but it was a gym all the same, with the same fucking equipment. And it opened every weekday morning at just about the time I was waking up. I joined up and began to work out there early every morning after taking what medications and supplements I needed to take, drinking my pint of buttermilk and hemp protein, taking my first Valium of the day, and sitting with my first glass of cold milk and a few cigarettes. After a couple of weeks of this, hitting the gym more mornings than not, I began to regain strength in my decrepit carcass. I looked as I had looked—or had imagined that I looked—months before, when I had believed that the blood of virgins and their reasonable facsimiles had brought me new life. I emerged on those mornings from the gym, after awhile in the steam room, a good shave and shower, hot water followed by cold, and a change of clothes, full of energy and life. I picked up a coffee or cappuccino, sat with it and my cigarettes on the bench—on some mornings the bar was not even open yet—and breathed out my energy and breathed in the sweet calm of autumn’s long farewell.

On that bench, I fell into reveries, feeling at times like one of the old men in Fellini’s teacup. Not long after my birthday, I came to see that the darkness within me was not, and never had been, a curse from which I suffered. I was born into darkness, literally—uttering my birth cry a moment before the stroke of nine in the dark of night, in a hospital in downtown Newark that no longer exists—and by the cast die of something that might be called fate. I could live with that. In fact, I could not live without it. To deny the darkness, to seek escape from it, would be to deny and seek
escape from myself. I must not do that. I must not do what most do, deny and seek escape from themselves. To betray one’s nature is to be betrayed in turn. What was in me embraced itself, and I smiled and breathed very deeply.

I came also to see, with a lighter and more wistful smile, that as the years flowed by, I had come to take after my grandmother in so far as religion was concerned. Born in Abruzzi in 1896—her birth certificate described her mother as a
contadina,
a peasant; her father a
mugnaio,
a miller; the both of them
analfabeta,
illiterate—she came here as a stowaway early in the last century. She was a woman full of life and love and laughter. Overflowing with them. She could also be a formidable character at times. She once dispatched a nigger punk who tried to steal her purse while she was waiting for a bus on Broad Street in Newark, on her way home from the doll-eyeball factory where she worked. “God-a-dam, you little tootsie sumabitch bastid!” she had said as she struck him, favoring as always the epithet “tootsie” to the down-and-dirty
tizzun’,
whence it derived. She was also an ardent and accomplished shoplifter, methodically having obtained by theft over time complete settings for six of fake Tang dynasty chinaware from the Canton restaurant. As I grew up, my father and I took turns going to fetch her and get her out of Dutch every time she got caught loading her big purse at Bamberger’s.

She would have told you she was a Roman Catholic. She had rosary beads, and there were a few crucifixes around. I recall her on a few occasions going to church with some kind of doily on her head. I remember her, when I was small, lying beside me telling me the story of the little manger scene that was set up under the tree. I don’t know where she got it from, but it was a lot better than the one in the Gospel of Matthew. In her version, one of the three wise men who held forth a box was, I think, bearing
“a piz”
from Ilvento’s Pizzeria on West Side Avenue. And the black wise
man was, of course, an endearing “little tootsie” who had happened along.

She probably even believed she was a Roman Catholic. But what she really was, deeply and devoutly, was a superstitionist. For her, opening an umbrella indoors or placing a hat on a bed were to be avoided more, and held as more dangerous, than any sin that might send one’s soul to hell. There were countless other taboos. And I suspect that the rosary beads and crucifixes were essentially apotropaic charms, like the amulet she wore to avert and protect her from the evil eye.

And I had become quite a superstitionist myself. Though not quite as devout as she was, perhaps because I was not and could not be as well versed in the hermeneutic ideology as she. But while I knew it all to be utter nonsense, I was a practicing superstitionist all the same, down to spilled salt and walking under ladders.

Much of the pleasure of getting old is in outliving one’s enemies. There were two—one was a magazine editor, the other a book editor—whom I wanted to help along. A friend had worked on a movie crew down in the Louisiana bayous. She brought me back three voodoo dolls. Two of them were obviously of the kind foisted off on tourists and other suckers. But the third, oh, the third of them! Fashioned round two cruciform twigs, and menacingly nasty to behold, it had been made by a true believer whose trade lay in the mist between priestess and medicaster.

After deciding which editor I wanted to see go first, I had spent a very long time trying to obtain something—a hair, a used tissue, a discarded Band-Aid, anything—that possessed a trace of the DNA of this particular person. This was now done, and it had been placed in a small black envelope and affixed to the doll with a map pin. The first of the longer, death-inducing needles had now been inserted remordently into the stuffed body of the doll.

So far, I had heard nothing of the editor’s demise, but time
would tell. Look at the multitudes who went to churches and temples. My superstitionism made as much sense as the far more ridiculous twaddle they called religion. At least my gods were real.

Those risings at dawn, those early mornings at the gym. That bench, those lingering autumn breezes that wrought joy through melancholy.

One day, savoring every breath, I strolled home to find that my pantyhose-encasement DVDs had at last arrived. I readied some of Melissa’s hosiery and one of her red-soled high heels, placing them on the cushion next to where I sat. I slipped
Pantyhose Multilayer Fetish Sex
into the player, but, shutting off the machine, did not play it then. I was simply preparing for later, for the dark. Just to imagine it! Not just pantyhose, but layers of it, to further separate one from the flesh under it while at the same time intensifying the sheer salacious seductiveness of lust most thrillsome; and should one care to delve the flesh within, a rending of all that luscious nylon was only a brute ripping or a stroke of a number-nine single-edge razor blade away. My love life was full.

I had it all, motherfucker, I had it all. Yes, my gods were real.

On my way to buy some goat milk and steal a rib eye steak, I sang aloud, plangent and uncaring, the opening lines—the only lines I could remember—of “I Ain’t Got Nobody,” and I grinned like a fool at those who looked at me sideways or were taken aback as I passed.

T
HE APPROACH OF WINTER WAS GENTLE AS THE MOON OF
long nights waned. With my blood flowing warm and well from the gym, with my paper cup of hot coffee and my smokes, my mind yet wandered comfortably as I sat in the mornings on that bench feeling the coming of whatever warmth the day would know.

The fear that I had tried so much to plumb, classify, and understand, I now saw, was but a chimera. What fear there was in me was of that chimera. I had sought its origin in my past, but its origin, like that of the origin of this universe in which I, and everybody else, was but a meaningless, fleeting, passing note of nothingness, was not knowable. Theory was the mother of stupidity. Fearlessness and fear were one. One rid oneself of the chimera; one simply
was.
It did not pay to fear any more than it did to worry. Almost all, if not all, of what we feared, like almost all, if not all, that we worried about, never in our lives came to be. A brave man dies only once, a coward dies a thousand times, sacrificing a piece of himself to feed the chimera every time he does.

The chimera lived on booze, too. Booze was a great fear maker. When I ducked into the bar with my coffee every now and then, to escape a sudden biting chill, I looked around, I listened, and I knew that. I didn’t even need to look around, to listen. The place could just as well have been empty. Merely looking into
myself, seeing myself at the bar with my booze and my beer, I knew it.

Yes, booze was the fear maker, the drainer and destroyer of one’s self and one’s life. I had surrendered these things, my self and my life, to it. I was a fool, a fool more foolish than most. I loved my life now, every breath of it. I enjoyed thieving more than ever before. And the biggest thievery, the stealing back of my own self and life, I enjoyed most of all.

The booze, the blood, the desperation. I’d had my fill. I had survived on the surface of the earth for a long time now. Before long, with good fortune, I would be twice the age that Alexander the Great had reached. He was a character who had always intrigued me, conquering the world so young, going down so young, so fast, with a golden drinking goblet of fear in his hand. I once had wanted to write the story of his last night on this earth that he conquered, this former private student of Aristotle, this young man so wise beyond his years, who would vanquish the world, but whom in the end drink conquered. What did
he
fear? What was his unknown, unknowable chimera?

Suetonius tells of Julius Caesar standing before a statue of Alexander, sighing to reflect that however long he lived, he would be as nothing to the shadow of that man. The next night, he woke shaken and shocked by a dream of raping his own mother. His soothsayers shored him, telling him that this dream augured great things. It meant, they told him, that he would conquer the world.