Trick Baby (32 page)

I pulled up in front of the Brass Rail Bar on Forty-seventh Street. Mr. Trick Bag was in there waiting to kick my ass. The sneaky bastard was going to win the war. But I didn't give a damn.

I got out of the car and hobbled across the sidewalk to the door. I
stepped inside and sat in the booth near the front window. I told the waitress to bring me a fifth of Cutty Sark and a glass.

Somehow I drove home after the bar closed. I woke up at dawn the next morning lying beside my bed with my clothes on.

I stared at the rotating ceiling. I tried to move inside a straitjacket of pain. Clammy sweat spewed out of me. I sucked my cracked lips and with a grunt flipped over on my belly and raised myself on my elbows.

I groped a hand out for the top of the nightstand for support to get to my feet. The uncertain hand raked a lamp off that crashed against the bottom of the bed's headboard.

I was panting on my hands and knees when I saw Blue's bare feet on the carpet beside me. He helped me to the bed. I sat on the side of it. He leaned down close to me and frowned.

He said, “Don't tell me. I know what happened. That fabulous and mysterious broad you've been laying had a husband who caught you banging her and beat the crap out of you. Right?”

I winced as he stooped and pulled off my shoe from my right foot. It felt like it was smashed.

I said, “No, Blue, it wasn't like that. I had an accident. The whole thing seems like a nightmare. But I guess it really happened.”

He took off the other shoe and said, “Don't waste your time in silly debate with yourself. It wasn't a nightmare. Your right foot looks like a balloon. Did you wreck the Buick?”

I groaned and said, “It wasn't that kind of accident I mean I wasn't in the Buick when it happened.”

He said, “Folks, you're like a son to me. I've been worried about you lately. You're fidgety and you drag ass like a steel mill chump with—”

I said crossly, “Blue, please save the lecture for some other time. I lost my woman last night. I blew her like a sucker.”

He stood up and pulled my battered suit coat from my aching shoulders. He took it to the closet and hung it up. I lay back on the
pillow and put my arm across my burning eyes to fend off the sharp fingers of morning light pointing into the bedroom.

He sat on the side of the bed and said, “So, you get another broad even finer. You got looks, youth and a gift of gab. For you, broads are like streetcars. You miss one, it's a cinch another will come along. You want to tell pappy what the hell happened?”

I ran the whole Goddess thing down to him from the Club Delisa, where we met, to the tumbling I did on Lake Street. I also told him why I never let him meet her.

To that he said, “I've never met a peckerwood that could resist the Blue Howard charm when I turned it on. I don't care how much that broad thought she hated niggers. She would have been crazy about me.

“She and her father are pure poison for you now, since you blew your top like a mark. You should have stayed cool and figured some con with me to separate that Wherry sonuvabitch from a few grand. The worse hurt you can give an ego-crazy bastard like that is in the pocketbook.

“You should have known that a screwy, top drawer white broad's legs wouldn't open forever for you. She had to wake up down the line that you were a nigger grifter. A broad like her who has flashed her pussy all over the world is fatal to a young fellow like you.

“One of those glorious international pussies could even con you that you'd die without it. You're lucky you blew her before you got the stupid idea that you were in love.

“Stick to young dumb broads that you can bang with no risk to the heart. Take it easy and rest for a few days. Hell, we won't starve if we miss playing the con for a while. Let's get those clothes off. I'll give you a good liniment rubdown and fix you a nice hot toddy. I'll lay you odds that in a week you won't remember what that broad looked like.”

Blue left the house at noon. My body felt better after the rubdown and hot bath. The hot lemonade heavily spiked with scotch made me drowsy. But I couldn't go to sleep.

I couldn't get the Goddess off my mind. I kept hitting the fifth of Scotch that Blue had left on the nightstand. One thought kept pumping tension into my chest until I felt like I'd explode.

Why had I let the dialogue between Brad and Pete trick me, upset me, and set me up to expose myself to the Goddess like a chump? Why did I have to confess to her that I was a nigger? Why had I spat in Mr. Wherry's face? Why did I let those cruel words escape my sucker mouth on Lake Street?

I could have changed her mind in time about black people, because I knew she had been in love with me. I remembered how happy she had been when she thought she had my baby inside of her. I remembered my contentment with my head resting on her warm satin bosom. She'd croon and baby talk to me.

Blue was all wrong. I had to have her back. I couldn't do without the torture of her, the glory of her, the thrill of her.

She was the beautiful thing that had made my life glamorous, and classy. I was just a Nigger hustler from a sewer on Thirty-ninth Street without her.

I pulled the phone into bed. I rang her for five minutes. There was no answer. I rang Cordelia. No answer.

I finished the bottle of Scotch and lay there twisting in half-sleep, half-delirium on the fiery bed. And all the while that ruthless, awful question hammered my fevered brain. Why did you let them trick you into exposing yourself as a nigger?

T
he phone rang. Dreamily, I picked up the receiver. It was the contralto voice of the Goddess. My heart tried to leap up my throat. All was forgiven. She was at Cordelia's apartment. There was a most unusual party in session.

“Bodies beautiful unadorned is the theme,” she said. Would I rush right over? Or was I too shy for that kind of thing? If so, then perhaps some other time I could come to a more commonplace party.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I'll be right over. I wanted to see you anyway about last night.”

I dressed and floated to the Buick. Then, quick as a wink almost, I was ringing Cordelia's doorbell. I thought as I stood there, Cordelia's bell doesn't sound like it used to.

A new maid opened the door. She led me to a walk-in closet. I took my clothes off. I stepped from the closet naked. I followed the maid to the living room's double doors.

The maid smiled oddly, and swung them open to pitch blackness. I stepped inside. Then suddenly the brightest light I had ever seen burst on. I cringed and held my palms against my eyes.

An explosion of laughter rocked my eardrums. I peeped around the palms. The room was crowded with elegantly dressed white people in tuxedos and glittering evening gowns.

All of their mouths were wide with wild glee. Then the Goddess stepped forward and clapped her hands for silence. I stood there trembling. All became quiet.

She looked up at me with a sneer and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is with ineffable pleasure that I give you Coon O'Brien, who will give you his inimitable live imitation of Marcel Duchamp's famous painting, ‘Nude Descending a Staircase.'

“Unfortunately, his performance is sans the staircase. But I can assure you that he will be as fractured as the nude in the canvas version.”

The crowd's blasting laughter seemed to blow me to pieces as I stood there. I saw and felt sections of myself falling away. The crowd brayed and hee-hawed.

I screamed from the pile of tortured rubble on the carpet that had once been me, “You rotten dirty jackass bastards! You rotten dirty jackass bastards!”

I felt something jerking me, shaking me violently. I grabbed at it. My eyes strained to see it through a dark shimmery mist.

A friendly fat-lipped, flat-nosed face poked through it. It was Blue. I was sitting up stiffly on the bed in a welter of sweat.

I hugged Blue and blubbered, “Oh, Blue, I'm so glad to see you. I'm so glad it was just a nightmare. I'm so glad it wasn't real. If it had been for real, I would have lost my mind. I'm so glad to see you, Blue.”

He said, “Folks, I don't give a damn whether you want to or not, but a croaker is going to see you tomorrow. You need something for your nerves and that hard lushing you've been doing.

“You should have seen yourself coming out of that nightmare. You looked like some poor chump frying in the hot seat. You're not going to con me anymore that you don't need help. I'm really worried about you now. Don't get out of that goddamn bed until we go to the croaker tomorrow. I'm going to broil you a steak.” He turned to go.

I said, “Blue, I can't eat. Bring me a good stiff drink instead.”

He looked down at the empty bottle on the nightstand. He shook his head sadly and walked down the hall.

I thought, “I've got to straighten myself out. I can't stand that look of pity in Blue's eyes. I don't want to be a bum like the chumps on Madison Street. After I get the Goddess back, I'll go back on the two-pint a day plan for a starter. Goddamn, it's funny about that crack the Goddess made in the nightmare.”

She made me remember seeing the Duchamp's painting in the art book that was inside the leatherette case that I left in the chili joint on Forty-third Street a long time ago. If I hadn't lost the case, I'd probably still be painting. Duchamp's picture had never made sense to me. It was a chaotic pattern of disjointed lines and angles.

Blue came back with a tall glass filled to the brim with whiskey. He put it on the nightstand and said, “Folks, this is it for tonight. I've locked the juice cabinet. I can't let you loll yourself. Call me if you want anything, except more juice.”

He walked away. I reached over and picked up the glass. The Scotch in my trembling hand sloshed over the rim of the glass onto the bed. I gulped down what was left.

Finally, I heard my heartbeat gentle down. I drifted into a strange, terrible kind of sleep. Raw, razor-edged consciousness sliced out a piece from my brain.

I could clearly see the bedroom furniture about me, the bathroom door. But I knew I was asleep and dreaming, because how could there be a trio of floor-to-ceiling mirrors at the window where the drapes had been?

But how could I be asleep when there I was standing before them naked, looking at myself? And that woman with the insane eyes and the platinum hair looming up behind me.

She hurled something. I couldn't move away. I screamed at the crash of it. I was no more. My image died in the three full-length mirrors. I was on the carpet in a million bloody bits of glass and the room exploded with jackass hee-haws.

Blue came and shook me back to my senses again. For the rest of the night he sat on the side of my bed. He drove me to the old white-haired croaker's office at ten
A.M
.

He examined me from head to toe and said, “I saw you through your draft troubles, so I hope you will take me seriously now. You must rest and eat lots of wholesome food and abstain completely from alcohol in any form.

“I'm going to give you a diet chart. I am also giving you prescription aids toward these necessary goals. Fortunately, you have youth and physical resiliency. Follow my instructions, and my prognosis is that within a matter of weeks, you will be back in the pink.”

Blue and I stopped on the way home and got the prescriptions filled. There were six kinds of pills and liquid medicine.

I forced down some broccoli and carrot juice when we got home. I took two sleeping pills and fell into unmarred sleep. I woke up at seven
P.M
. I struggled from the bed and staggered to the liquor cabinet to see if it was really locked.

It was. And I was desperate for a drink. I peeped into Blue's room. He was gone. Then I thought about the Goddess. I went to my phone and rang her number. No answer. Dizzily, I tried Cordelia.

Her brassy voice said, “Hello,” on the third ring.

I said, “Hello, Cordelia, it's Johnny O'Brien. Is Camille there?”

She didn't answer for a long moment.

Then she said, “No, she isn't here. Why did you have to tell her, Johnny? Why the horrid thing to Brad?”

I said, “Too many things happened that night, I just couldn't help it. Do you know where she is? I want to talk to her.”

She said, “Johnny, the poor girl is devastated. She's gone away. I like you, Johnny, and my friendly advice to you is to forget her. She'll never see you again. I'm her best friend and I know her so well. You don't have the remotest chance with her now.”

I pleaded, “Cordelia, you've got to tell me where I can find her. I know she still loves me. Please tell me.”

I heard her sigh and say softly, “I can't do that. She would never speak to me again.”

I said, heatedly, “You won't tell me because I'm a Nigger, isn't that right? You'd tell a white man, I bet. I guess you're just like your friend. I was a fine guy until you found out the truth about me. I guess all of you are like that.”

She said angrily, “You inexperienced young fool. No members of any group are just alike. What the hell do you know about life, love, women or heartbreak?”

There was a long pause.

Then she said, bitterly, “You think I hate all black people? You think I hate you? You silly jerk. The only man I ever loved on this earth was as black as a patent leather pump. And, oh yes, Camille drove to friends in Cleveland. You can't find her without an address. And that's all I'm telling you, really nothing. Happy wild goose chase, simple Nigger.”

She hung up. Yes, she was right. She hadn't told me anything. I'd never find the Goddess in a big city like Cleveland without an address.

I had to have a drink. I went to Blue's room and searched it. I couldn't find a drop. I tore the rest of the house apart. I'd have to go out to score for a drink. I finally got into a suit and overcoat.