Tours of the Black Clock (8 page)

The small thing that happens is one day someone comes running up to Jerry with news that his wife has had a stroke and been taken to the hospital. Jerry’s frantic. “I’ll watch things for you if you want, Jerry,” I say, and maybe if he’d been thinking straight he’d have just closed up the stand and I’d have just wandered off to another corner, and the rest of my life would have been different, and the world and the Twentieth Century would have been different. But he isn’t thinking straight and these are times when closing up work just for a day constitutes a sacrifice, and so my proposal that seemed nuts ten seconds ago is quickly evolving into a hopeful longshot. He breathes deeply and runs back into the stand and collects most of the money, leaves me some change and gives me a nod. Then he just runs off to his wife in the hospital without a word about when he’ll be back or what to do if he doesn’t come back. Maybe he’s thinking it doesn’t matter, the odds are I’m going to steal him blind anyway, and if he comes back later and anything of his life is still salvageable at all, he’ll be lucky. As it happens he’ll be luckier than even that. His wife will pull through and I don’t have any plans at all to steal him blind, I don’t even care much what he pays me, I just want to read one of those magazines and anything behind the top half of the first page of a newspaper, like this Philly paper I’m reading that has this story back around page eleven about how in Pennsylvania they’re looking for this crazed kid who killed one brother, crippled the other, paralyzed the father, terrorized the mother and burned down the house. He sounds like one insane son of a bitch to me. Then I get to the part where they say his name and it’s only then it occurs to me who they’re talking about.

I
’M WORKING AT THE
stand three days, never leaving but sleeping behind the counter, before Jerry comes back. He couldn’t be more amazed to find me and the money still there. “How’s the wife,” I say, and he answers she’s doing better but he’s going to have to stay with her awhile. “So you want this job for a time?” he asks and I say all right. I have the job a couple of weeks and I don’t mind it. Mostly I read the magazines.

One of the customers who rolls by in his Packard every day is John “Doggie” Hanks, who runs a big part of uptown Manhattan all the way to Harlem. He was a gangster up until a year ago when Prohibition ended and gangsters were either legalized out of business or frozen into legitimacy. Hanks is legitimate now more or less, or at least as legitimate as he can stand to be. He wears a nice suit and sits in the back seat of the car while someone else drives. In his early forties he has curly blond hair and a face shaved as smooth as a swimmer’s legs except for the pockmarks around his temples. His driver has hair that stands up like a brush and a nose that points like a compass, except his brain tilts in the south direction as far as I can tell. “What happened to Jerry?” Hanks asks the first day, and I tell him his wife’s sick. He gives me some money for her. “I hear Jerry didn’t get it,” he says, “and I’ll come looking for you. You don’t look so difficult to locate either.” I give the money to Jerry the next time he comes by. As with a lot of people, Jerry’s feelings about someone like Doggie Hanks tend to be a bit confused. He’s too awestruck and terrified to be purely grateful. “You tell Mr. Hanks,” he instructs me very carefully, “that I say thank you very, very much. You got that?”

“Sure,” I answer.

“Thank you very,
very
—”

“All right, all right.” It’s disgusting. Hanks comes by later that day. “Jerry says to tell you ‘Thank you very, very much.’”

“OK,” he says, taking his paper through the car window.

“You got the correct tone of that?” I ask. “‘Very, very much.’ Solicitous as hell.”

“‘Solicitous’?” Hanks looks at his driver. “Billy, the kid says ‘solicitous.’”

“Yes sir, Mr. Hanks,” says the driver with the beak.

“What do you think of it,” says Hanks.

“It’s somethin’ all right,” Billy says tersely.

Hanks laughs. He points at Billy and says to me, “Billy says it’s somethin’. He’s got a way with words just like you.” He stops laughing after a bit. “How old are you?”

“Twenty,” I say.

“Ha ha,” says Hanks. He says to Billy, “He’s got a way with numbers too, huh? Eighteen
maybe
.” He waves, still laughing, and they drive off. Every day after that, when he comes to get his paper in the backseat of his car, he says to me, “So how about a ten dollar word today,” and I give him one off the top of my head. This goes on for a week and a half. Sometimes he’ll say, “How old are we today?” and I get a little tired of it. “Today I’m fucking retirement age, Mr. Hanks,” I say, “today I’m moving to Florida to live with the grandkids.” Hanks loves it. “Hear that, Billy?” he laughs, and Billy says, “Punk’s got a mouth if you ask me, Mr. Hanks.” Hanks just laughs more. “Billy’s not too happy with you,” he explains, “I’d
never
let him smartass me like that.” Finally one day Hanks makes his offer. It’s the middle of the afternoon and he’s just bought some cigars. “I have a club on the upper west side,” he tells me. He gives me a card that reads
Top Dog
, and there’s an address. “I can use a doorman who’s big as a damn wall and smarter than he looks. You come tonight around seven if you want it. Needless to say, you’re twenty-one if you take it. It’s a step up from peddling cigars, huh?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just gives me a small salute as though to say it’s understood I’ll be there, and I have half a mind not to show up because of it. But that’s silly. I pick a guy out from among the drifters hanging around the corner like I was doing not too long ago and give him my job; today I’m retirement age, like I said. I roll up an issue of the pulp I’m reading called
Savage Nights
and stuff it in my coat pocket.

H
ANKS’ CLUB, THE TOP
Dog, takes up the second-to-the-top floor of a brownstone on the West Sixties, between Columbus and the park; the only floor above it comprises Hanks’ various offices. The club has heavy crushed velvet curtains and an oak bar, European paintings and glass separating the booths, chiseled in each corner with the design of a rose. The women smoke from small ivory-and-silver cigarette holders and a guy in a dinner jacket begins playing the piano in the corner around nine. The veranda stammers with light. Sometimes standing before the windows I’ll remember when I could see the span of my life’s time from such windows. In these windows I don’t see any such thing. I see New York City.

L
EONA CHECKS THE COATS
at the Top Dog. She’s dark and dimpled, not one of the really beautiful women of the club but not plain either. The first time I see her, which is about five minutes after the first time I walk through the door, I know I’ll have her, I know she’ll be my first woman. I may have to work at it, but not that hard. She stares at me the whole night.

This begins my career as the doorman for Doggie Hanks. I wouldn’t make too much of it, it’ll only last about fourteen months and not once in that time do I see anything particularly interesting. “Just how shady is this?” I ask him one night, and he says, “Prohibition’s legal now, kid,” a non sequitur but I know what he means. The clientele is a mix of the completely respectable and the faintly dubious, none necessarily any more suspicious than the clearly underage doorman. I’m never called upon to escort anyone out, though a couple of times Doggie does suggest I sort of shift my attention in the direction of someone who risks getting out of hand. I guess the mere sight of me is always enough, which is the way Doggie likes it. “And he’s
smart
too,” he’ll say to this person or that. “So let’s see him do something smart,” the other person will say, and Doggie retorts, “He doesn’t have to do anything smart. You can just take my word for it.”

I have Leona my second week, one night after the club has closed. We’re back among the coats that got left behind by people too inebriated to remember them. Because it’s my first time I’m a little nervous, it’s probably not the most impressive performance. Still, Leona screams like she’s being impaled; when I begin to stop she croaks in my ear, “Don’t you dare, don’t you
dare
.” She wants the light off but I have to leave it on because in the dark I see these things I don’t want to see, the faces of Indian women, and I hear these things I don’t want to hear, voices from the dark of a doorway; so the light stays on.

Leona wants me to go home with her afterhours but that isn’t what I have in mind. For a month or two I sleep at the club on a couch in one of the offices upstairs until I get some money together for a room. I begin to do what I’ve been waiting to do. For a while I do it on a table in the cloakroom and later when I get my own room about seven blocks from the club, a room all of ten feet by twelve, with a bed and small dresser for my clothes and a table by the window, I do it there. Then I work up the courage to borrow the typewriter in Hanks’ own office and in the early mornings around six or seven o’clock I teach myself how to use it, one slow finger at a time, until I’ve finished with what I’ve already written out by hand. When Doggie catches me in his office he’s not very pleased about it; for the first time he scares me. Billy the driver happens to be there and is extremely amused. “Sorry,” I can only say, “didn’t mean anything.” Hanks is smoking mad. “Didn’t mean anything,” I keep muttering, “sorry,” over and over. Hanks nods to Billy. “Solicitous as hell,” he says. Billy guffaws.

“What’s this?” Hanks picks up my old beatup issue of
Savage Nights
next to the typewriter. He shakes his head. “Our fucking doorman’s making with the
words
,” he says to Billy, then he throws the magazine down and sighs deeply. “You want to use the machine it’s OK, kid,” he says, “but not in my office. You can take it down to the cloakroom where you’ve been boinking my check-in girl.” I look at him surprised and he says, “Yeah I know about that, too. Look, don’t get it into your head there are things it’s better for me not to know about. There’s
nothing
that it’s better for me not to know about.” He looks over his shoulder at Billy and turns back to me smiling. “When you’re done with the machine, Billy will bring it back up for you.” All the amusement goes right out of Billy’s face. I want to laugh out loud.

Sometimes when I’m typing in the cloakroom Hanks sits out in the empty club in a booth with a girlfriend, or a business associate; then he comes by and sticks his head in. Or I’ll finish up and while Billy’s carrying the typewriter into the office, pale and fuming, I catch a glimpse through the door into Doggie’s private washroom, and he’s standing there with a razor in his hand and his face white with cream. As he shaves it smooth and rinses the razor he calls out to me and asks how the words are coming. Over the months I make up stories about some of the people who come into the club, once or twice I’m stupid enough to ask Hanks the wrong question as a bit of research. Like if he’s killed many men. I never figured him for a somber man, but he answers somberly, “You’re talking like a little kid now. Who I’ve killed and whether I’ve killed isn’t a joke.” I’m appalled by myself at this moment, but eight years from now it will seem small potatoes, compared to the mortifications to come.

B
UT THEN IN 1942
I’ll come to find myself oblivious to self-mortification. I’ll come to acknowledge it in principle even as I never quite feel it. I don’t guess in 1942 I’m aware of anything except the room in Vienna where I ravish you over and over while the most evil man who ever lived watches us. I don’t suppose anything ever really shakes me until the night I watch my wife and child hurl themselves to oblivion as some kind of price for saving you and me, a woman they never knew and a man the depths of whose soul they never felt the way they deserved. Both of us from a pact which perhaps I chose, perhaps I didn’t.

Damn the consequences of my acts, it’s the consequences of my words I love and loathe. I wrap them like a rope around a man’s neck, or thread them like a string of pearls up through the middle of a woman’s womb.

I don’t know whether I’m supposed to feel bad for Pennsylvania, I only know I don’t. I cleared the decks of that almost instantly, making room for the evil to come. I admit it’s a little appalling that it doesn’t cross my mind hardly ever. Maybe Henry deserved dying, maybe my father and Alice and Oral deserved what they got too, but there’s an odd silence where my conscience should be wrestling with it. It’s like a man atomizing into nothingness hundreds of thousands of men and women and children, maybe in a little city somewhere, maybe Japan, maybe two little cities in Japan, maybe in the name of something righteous, maybe in the name of ending some larger barbarism, but then claiming that he
never
has a moment’s doubt about it, he never loses a moment’s sleep. Never in the dark does he see a face or hear a voice calling him. But then, that happens in
your
Twentieth Century. Not mine.

I’ve come now to see and hear things only when I fuck a woman in the dark or write words on a white page. It doesn’t mean I stop feeling the havoc of my fingers. I write to the music of Henry’s head sloshing when I broke it. My first story, there in the cloakroom at Doggie Hanks’ Top Dog, is about a man who kills his woman on a New York City backway. He kills her at the story’s beginning, but the story isn’t about him, it’s about her. She’s telling the story and goes right on telling it after he’s killed her, and goes on telling us how she longs for him still. When he sleeps at night she strips him on the bed, ties him to the bedrail with his shirt and makes love to him with her mouth. He wakes up and all he can see is that he’s tied naked to his bed and bleeding. His thighs and belly are covered with blood and he cries out in terror at his dying. In fact he isn’t dying at all. In fact the blood isn’t his but hers, she’s still bleeding from the top of her head where he bashed it in. But he can’t see her at all, he only sees the blood that he assumes is his own; and the sight of it, the image of what he believes is his own death, as well as the mysterious inexplicable climax he comes to from a sucking he cannot fathom, literally stops his heart. I also manage to work in some social observations of life in the streets of Manhattan.