An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  Still I forced myself to study the room. There were detectives talking to people at four or five of the desks. An old woman in a shabby coat was busy weeping at the nearest table, and a very bored detective kept tapping his pencil and waiting for her to cease. Further down a big Negro with a badly beaten face was shaking his head in the negative to every question asked him. In the far corner behind a half partition I thought I could hear Ruta’s voice.

  And then across the room I saw a head with long blonde hair. It was Cherry. She was with Uncle and Tony, and her friends were arguing with Lieutenant Leznicki and two detectives I had not seen before. I had been in this room for a quarter of an hour, and had been looking at nothing but the expression in Roberts’ face. Now I was suddenly aware that there was as much sound as one might find in the dark night ward of a hospital, there was all but a chorus of protests and imprecations, and the leathery pistol-shot insistence of the policemen’s voices, I could almost have allowed myself to slip into the anteroom of a dream where we were all swimming about in a sea of mud, calling to each other under the crack of rifles and a dark moon. Voices picked up from one another, the old woman wept louder as our Uncle across the room began to talk in his whining stammering voice, and then Ruta, still out of sight behind the partition, picked up something shrill in tone from the old woman’s weeping and the Negro with the smashed-in face was talking faster, nodding his head in rhythm to some beat he had extracted from the sounds. I wondered if I were in fever, for I had the impression now that I was letting go of some grip on my memory of the past, that now I was giving up my loyalty to every good moment I had had with Deborah and surrendering the hard compacted anger of every hour when she had spoiled my need, I felt as if I were even saying goodbye to that night on the hill in Italy with my four Germans under the moon, yes, I felt just as some creature locked by fear to the border between earth and water (its grip the accumulated experience of a thousand generations) might feel on that second when its claw took hold, its body climbed up from the sea, and its impulse took a leap over the edge of mutation so that now and at last it was something new, something better or worse, but never again what it had been on the other side of the instant. I felt as if I had crossed a chasm of time and was some new breed of man. What a fever I must have been in.

  A face was looking at me.

  “Why’d you kill her?” asked Leznicki.

  “I didn’t.”

  But Leznicki seemed happier now. His narrow face was relaxed and the stale clam color of his eyes had a hint of life. “Hey, buddy,” he said with an open grin, “you’re giving us a hard time.”

  “All I want is a cup of coffee.”

  “You think you’re kidding. Listen,” and he turned a wooden chair around, sitting with its back against his chest, and leaned his face toward me so that I caught the iron fatigue of his breath and his bad teeth, he doing this with no embarrassment the way a race track tout will feed you the good news about the horse with the bad news which rides on the smell of his breath, “listen, do you remember Henry Steels?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Sure you do. We cracked the case right in this precinct, right at that desk over there,” and he pointed to a desk which looked to me exactly like all the others. “That poor guy, Steels. Twenty-three years in Dannemora, and when they let him out, he shacks up with a fat broad in Queens. Six weeks later he kills her with a poker. You remember now? By the time we pick him up two weeks later, he’s knocked off three queers and two more fat ladies. But we don’t know. We just got him for the first job. A patrolman sees him in a hallway in a tenement on Third Avenue, rolls him over, recognizes him, brings him here, and we’re just giving him a little cursory questioning to wake him up prior to turning him over to Queens, when he says, ‘Give me a pack of Camels, and a pint of sherry, and I’ll tell you all about it.’ We give him the sherry and he knocks us on our ass. He produces six murders. Fills in half the Unsolveds we had in New York for that two-week period. Phenomenal. Ill never get over it. Just an old con, neat in his habits.” Leznicki sucked on a tooth. “So, if you want to talk, I’ll give you a bottle of champagne. Maybe you’ll give us six murders, too.”

  We laughed together. I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that all women were killers, but now I was deciding that all men were out of their mind. I liked Leznicki enormously—it was part of the fever.

  “Why didn’t you tell us,” he went on, “that you had a Distinguished Service Cross?”

  “I was afraid you’d take it away.”

  “Believe me, Rojack, I never would have given you that kind of hosing if I’d known. I thought you were just another playboy.”

  “No hard feelings,” I said.

  “Good.” He looked around the room. “You’re on television, right.” I nodded. “Well,” he went on, “you ought to get us on a program some night. Assuming the department would approve, I could tell a story or two. Crime has got a logic. You understand me?”

  “No.”

  He coughed with the long phlegmy hacking sound of a gambler who has lost every part of his body but the wire in his brain which tells him when to bet. “A police station, so help me, is a piece of the action. We’re like Las Vegas. I know when we’re going to have a hot night.” He coughed again. “Sometimes I think there’s a buried maniac who runs the mind of this city. And he sets up the coincidences. Your wife goes out of a window, for instance. Because of cancer, you say, and five cars smack up on the East River Drive because of her. Who’s in one of the cars but little Uncle Ganooch, Eddie Ganucci, you’ve heard of him.”

  “In the Mob, isn’t he?”

  “He’s a prince. One of the biggest in the country. And he falls into our lap. We’ve had a Grand Jury subpoena on him for two years, but he’s out in Las Vegas, in Miami, only once or twice a year does he sneak into town. And tonight we got him. Know why? Cause he’s superstitious. His nephew told him to take a walk, get lost in the crowd. No. He’s not leaving the car. There’s a dead woman on the road, and she’ll curse him if he walks away. He must have had twenty guys killed in his time, he must be worth a hundred million bucks, but he’s afraid of a dead dame’s curse. It’s bad for his cancer, he tells his nephew. Now just look at the connection you could make. Your wife you say had cancer, Uncle Ganooch is swimming in it. There it is.” Leznicki laughed as if in apology for the too-rapid workings of his mind. “See why I leaned on you so hard? You can appreciate that the minute I got word Ganucci was our baby tonight, I didn’t want to waste time with you.”

  “What about the girl? Who’s she?” I asked.

  “A broad. The nephew’s got an after-hours spot, and she sings there. A very sick broad. She makes it with spades.” He named a Negro singer whose records I had listened to for years. “Yeah, Shago Martin, that’s who she makes it with,” said Leznicki. “When a dame dyes her straw, she’s looking for a big black boogie.”

  “Beautiful girl,” I said. Her hair hardly seemed dyed to me. Perhaps it was tinted a bit.

  “I’m getting to like you more and more, Mr. Rojack. I just wish you hadn’t killed your wife.”

  “Well,” I said, “here we go again.”

  “No, look,” he said, “do you think I like to exercise my function on a man who’s won a Distinguished Service Cross? I just wish I didn’t know you did it.”

  “What if I tried to tell you I didn’t.”

  “If they brought the Good Lord Himself to this room …” He stopped. “Nobody ever tells the truth here. It’s impossible. Even the molecules in the air are full of lies.”

  We were silent. The Negro with the beat-up face was the only one talking in the room. “Now, what do I want with that liquor store,” he said, “that liquor store is boss, I mean that store is territory, man. I don’t go near territory.”

  “The arresting officer,” said the detective next to him, “had to subdue you right in that store. You cracked the owner in the face, you emptied the register, and then the patrolman caught you fro
m behind.”

  “Shee-it. You got me mixed up with some other black man. No cop can tell one nigger from another. You got me mixed up with some other nigger you been beating up on.”

  “Let’s go in the back room.”

  “I want some coffee.”

  “You’ll get some coffee when you sign.”

  “Let me think.” And they both were silent.

  Leznicki put a hand on my arm. “It’s beginning to go bad for you,” he said. “That German girl is cracking.”

  “What has she to confess? That I tried to kiss her once in the hall?”

  “Rojack, we got her worried. Right now she’s thinking about herself. She don’t know if you killed your wife, but she admits you could have, that she admitted after we had a matron strip her down. A medical examiner took a smear. That German girl has been in the sack tonight. We can take you out and give you an examination too, and see if you’ve been working on her tonight. Do you want that?”

  “I don’t think you have the right.”

  “There’s male body hair in her bed. We can check to see if it’s yours or not. That is, if you’re willing to cooperate. All we have to do is pull a few out with a tweezer. Do you want that?”

  “No.”

  “Then admit you gave the maid a bang this evening.”

  “I don’t see what the maid had to do with this,” I said. “An affair with the maid wouldn’t give me cause to murder my wife.”

  “Forget these petty details,” said Leznicki. “I want to propose something. Get one of the best lawyers in town, and you can be on the street in six months.” At this moment he looked more like an old thief than a Lieutenant of Detectives. Twenty-five years of muggers and dips, safe men and junkies and bookies and cons had passed before him, and each must have charmed some fine little cell. “Rojack, I know a man, an ex-Marine, whose wife told him she went down on all his friends. He beat in her head with a hammer. They kept him under observation until his trial. His lawyer got him off. Temporary Insanity. He’s on the street. And he’s in better shape today than you are with your suicide story. Because even if you get out of this, which you won’t, nobody will believe you didn’t push your wife.”

  “Why don’t you be my lawyer?” I said.

  “Think!” said Leznicki. “I’m going over to visit Little Uncle.”

  I watched him cross the room. The old man stood up to meet him, and they shook hands. Then they put their heads together. One of them must have told a quick joke for they both started to laugh. I saw Cherry look over at me, and on an impulse I waved. She waved back merrily. We could have been Freshmen at a state university catching glimpses of one another at different registration desks.

  A policeman came out with a pot of coffee and poured me a cup. Then the Negro shouted to him, “I want a cup, too.”

  “Keep your voice down,” said the cop. But the detective who was sitting with the Negro gave a signal to come over. “This boogie is dead drunk,” said the detective, “give him a cup.”

  “I don’t want any coffee now,” said the Negro.

  “Sure you do.”

  “No, I don’t. It gives me butterflies.”

  “Take some coffee. Sober up.”

  “I don’t want coffee. I want some tea.”

  The detective groaned. “Come in the back room,” he said.

  “I want to stay here.”

  “Come in the back room and take some coffee.”

  “I don’t need none.”

  The detective whispered in his ear.

  “All right,” said the Negro, “I’ll go in the back room.”

  The woman who had been weeping must have signed some paper for she was gone. There was no one near me now. And I was watching a film of a courtroom. The defense counsel with a dedicated emollient in his voice: “Then, Mr. Rojack, what did your wife say?” “Well, sir, she spoke of her lovers and she said they had made a favorable comparison of her actions in the sexual act with the sexual actions of a plumber—as it is called—in a Mexican brothel.” “And would you, Mr. Rojack, tell the court what a ‘plumber’ is?” “Well, sir, a ‘plumber’ is the lowest prostitute in a house of prostitution and will commit those acts which other prostitutes for reasons of relative delicacy refuse to perform.” “I see, Mr. Rojack. What did you do then?” “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I had warned my wife of my terrible temper. I have been suffering blackouts ever since the War. I had a blackout then.”

  A faint nausea, kin to the depression with which one could wake up every morning for years, drifted through my lungs. If one pleaded Temporary Insanity, Leznicki and I would be brothers, we would be present in spirit at each other’s funeral, we would march in lock-step through Eternity. Yet, I was tempted. For that emptiness in my chest, that sense of void in my stomach were back again. I did not have any certainty at all that I could go on. No, they would question me and they would question me; they would tell truths and they would tell lies; they would be friendly, they would be unfriendly; and all the while I would keep breathing the air of this room with its cigarettes and cigars, its coffee which tasted of dirty urns, its distant hint of lavatories and laundries, of junk yards and morgues, I would see dark green walls and dirty-white ceilings, I would listen to subterranean mutterings, I would open my eyes and close them under the blistering light of the electric bulbs, I would live in a subway, I would live for ten or twenty years in a subway, I would lie in a cell at night with nothing to do but walk a stone square floor. I would die through endless stupors and expired plans.

  Or I would spend a year of appeals, spend a last year of my life in an iron cage and walk one morning into a room where ready for nothing, where nothing done, failed, miserable, frightened of what migrations were ready for me, I would go out smashing, jolting, screaming inside, out into the long vertigo of a death which fell down endless stone walls.

  It was then I came very close. I think I would have called Leznicki over and asked him for the name of a lawyer, and stuck my tongue out in some burlesque of him and me and our new contract, and rolled my eyes, and said, “You see, Leznicki, I’m raving mad.” I think I really would have done it then, but I did not feel the strength to call across the room, I had a horror of appearing feeble before that young blonde girl, and so I sat back and waited for Leznicki to return, experiencing for still one more time tonight what it was like to know the exhaustion and the apathy of those who are very old and very ill. I had never understood before why certain old people, sniffing displeasure in the breath of everyone who stared at them, still held with ferocity to the mediocre tasteless continuation of their days, their compact made with some lesser devil of medicine—“Keep me away from God a little longer.” But I understood it now. Because there was a vast cowardice in me which was ready to make any peace at all, ready to pillage in public the memory of that wife I had had for near to nine years, ready to mock the future of my brain by preparing to cry out that I too was insane and my best ideas were poor, warped, distorted, and injurious to others. No, I wanted out, I wanted to get away from this trap I had created for myself, I would have given up if my cowardice had the simple strength to throw my voice across the room. But it didn’t, it could only rivet the cheeks of my buttocks to the chair and order me to wait, as if some power had cast a paralysis upon me.

  Then the Negro started up in the other room. I could not see him but now I could certainly hear him. “I don’t want the coffee,” he cried out, “I want some Seagram’s Seven. That’s what you told me I could have, and that’s what I want.”

  “Drink your coffee, Goddamn you,” shouted the detective, and through the open door was a glimpse of him walking that big Negro back and forth, and there was a patrolman on the other arm, a hard-faced dull young cop with straight black hair and eyes you see in tabloids on the face of young killers who never miss a Mass until the morning after the night they go berserk, and they were both walking the Negro, they were out of sight now, there was the liquid splattering sound of coffee falli
ng in a large splash and the thump of the mug on the floor, and then there was another splattering sound, the sound of a fist on a face, and the dull thump of a knee in the back, and the Negro groaned, but almost agreeably, as if the beating were his predictable sanity. “Now give me the Seagram’s Seven,” he cried out, “and I’ll sign that paper.”

  “Drink coffee,” shouted the detective. “You can’t even see right now.”

  “Shee-it on that coffee,” muttered the Negro, and then came the sound of new beating on him, and all three, all with a stumbling grappling hold on each other went out of view, came into view again, went out again, and more sounds of splattering.

  “Goddamn you,” cried the detective, “you Goddamn stubborn boogie.”

  And a new detective had taken the seat beside me, a younger man, thirty-five perhaps, with an anonymous face and a somewhat gloomy mouth. “Mr. Rojack,” he said, “I just want to tell you that I enjoy your television program very much, and I’m sorry we have to meet under these circumstances.”

  “Unnh,” grunted the Negro, “unnh, unnh, unnh,” as the punches went into him, “that’s the way, daddy, unnh, unnh, keep moving, you’re improving all the time.”

  “Now, why don’t you drink some coffee,” shouted the detective who was beating him.

  I have to confess that at this instant I put my head down and whispered to myself, “Oh, God, give me a sign,” crying it into the deeps of myself as if I possessed all the priorities of a saint, and looked up with conviction and desperation sufficient to command a rainbow, but there was nothing which caught my eye in the room but the long blonde hair of Cherry standing across the floor. She, too, was looking at the room where the beating went on, and there was a clean girl’s look on her face as if she had been watching a horse who had broken his leg and was now simply miserable before the proportions of things. I stood up then and started out with some idea of going to the back room, but the dread lifted even as I stood up and once again I felt a force in my body steering away from that back room, and a voice inside me said, “Go to the girl.”