An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

  Shago looked at me from the ground and said, “Up your ass.”

  I almost kicked in his head. Close as that. Instead I picked him up, opened the door, manhandled him to the hall. There he put up resistance, and when I got a whiff of his odor which had something of defeat in it, and a smell of full nearness as if we’d been in bed for an hour—well, it was too close: I threw him down the stairs. Some hard-lodged boulder of fear I had always felt with Negroes was in the bumping, elbow-busting and crash of sound as he went barreling down, my terror going with him in the long deliberate equivalent of the event which takes place in an automobile just before a collision—and into the smash itself. The banister quivered as he hit, he looked up at me from the bottom, his face bleeding from cuts, welts springing out, his head near to misshapen like the Negro I saw in the precinct, and said, “You shit-ass,” and started trying to climb the stairs on his hands and knees which released still another core of rage in me as if it were doubly intolerable that his will would not break—I knew this was how children came to kill little cats—and I met him on the fourth stair from the bottom and ran into one weak punch he threw which caught me a glint of pain on the chin (and was bleeding later from the mark of his ring) and then rushed him across the landing and down another flight of stairs, back another landing, down another flight of stairs, the eyes of the Puerto Ricans on us from the crack of every door, me holding him with two grips on his gray conservative suit as if he were a bag of potatoes I could bump along, and when on the last flight of stairs he tried to bite me, I threw him down the run again, and waited while he lay still.

  “You had it?” I called down, like some whiskey-flushed Episcopalian minister of doom.

  “Shit on your mother,” he said, getting to his hands and knees.

  “Shago, I’m going to kill you,” I said.

  “No, man. You kill women,” he said. It was a speech, but he said it so slowly that my breath flowed back and forth five, six, eight, ten times. “Why, shit,” said Shago, “you just killed the little woman in me.” Then he made an attempt to climb the stairs, but his leg buckled, he sat down on the floor, he vomited from the pain. I stood where I was, waiting for him to finish. “All right,” he said at last, “I’m going.”

  “Shago, can I get you a cab?”

  He laughed like a fiend. “Well, buddy, I fear that’s your problem.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Crazy.”

  “Good night, Shago.”

  “Say, dad,” he said, “I’d rather they eat me outside than that you get me a cab.”

  “Okay.”

  Now he smiled. “Rojack?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell you something, man. I don’t hate. Never. That’s it.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Tell Cherry, her and you, I wish you luck.”

  “You do?”

  “I swear. Yes, I swear. Luck, man.”

  “Thank you, Shago.”

  “Sayonara.” He got up from the floor and put together a series of moves to get through the door to the street, progressing like a fly without wings and three legs torn off.

  I could hear a child crying. Through the crack of the door, her mother glared at me. But I came up the stairs to a titter of appreciation from the Puerto Ricans. Suddenly I realized I was wearing nothing but my bathrobe. Yes, I would have made a champion sight getting him a cab. I swayed once, feeling a bout of misery again. There was the kind of panic which comes from a dream where one is killing cockroaches. They were about me, literally; I saw several run off in jagged directions to follow their mysterious trail—that line of pure anxiety—which one sees in the path made by a car driving over a lake of ice. But who was the driver in the cockroach? And the dread I had escaped since I returned from the police station and Cherry had been there to open the door, now flew in silent as the shadow of a bat, and my body was like a cavern where deaths are stored. Deborah’s lone green eye stared up at me. It had all gone wrong again. I could feel the break in the heavens. If I could have taken some of it back, I would have returned to that moment when I began to beat Shago to the floor and he dared me to let him go.

  It looked as if Cherry had not moved from the bed. She was lying on her back, and she did not stir when I came in. Her face had gone too pale, and although she had not been crying, her lids were red, her eyes had a washed-out look. I reached to touch her hand; a mistake—her skin gave back no life.

  I sat down to have a drink, and finished it in three nips. Perhaps ninety seconds went by before a new drink was in the glass. This one went more slowly, but I was on whiskey again. I was on the habit when whiskey felt equal to blood.

  “Like a drink?” I asked her.

  She did not reply. I took my next nip with the idea of leaving. It was close to midnight, I was due soon at Barney Kelly’s, and I would find no fortification for that event sitting here.

  But she looked up and said, “I don’t feel right.”

  “You don’t look well.”

  “Well,” she said, “you look about as good as you looked when I met you on the street.”

  “Thank you,” I said. She looked no more and no less than a tired nightclub singer. I got up from my drink, and spent the next five minutes getting dressed.

  “I guess you’re good at one-night stands,” Cherry said at the end of this.

  “Sometimes I am,” I said.

  “You feel good, don’t you?”

  “A part of me feels good. I won a fight. I can’t help that. I always feel good when I win a fight.” Then I almost laughed at the ease with which I said it. The dread had begun to be muted in the whiskey, but it would be back, it would certainly be back.

  “Don’t forget,” I said, “he had a knife and I didn’t.”

  “That’s true.”

  “I thought of turning him loose, but there was the knife.” I could hear something false in my voice.

  “In a real fight, Shago wouldn’t have used it.”

  “He wouldn’t?”

  “There’s something clean about Shago,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  She began to cry silently. I knew what it was. I had sealed the past in a vault—but if I ever opened the doors … the memory of Deborah pregnant came floating up. I could not mourn Deborah. I could not begin to mourn Deborah or my mind would ride off with me. There was nothing so delicate in all the world as one’s last touch of control. “I’m sorry you and Shago didn’t make it,” I said to Cherry.

  She was silent. After a long silence, I finished my second drink and started on a third. “There’s something I could tell you,” she said. But she didn’t have to. I felt the thought rise in her and drift over to me. They had looked very good standing next to one another—she did not have to explain a thing. “Yes, I know,” I said. It was rare to be in love, but to believe that you could not find a better purpose in your life—that was rarest of all. “Yes, I know,” I said, “you used to think the whole country depended on you and Shago.”

  “It was a crazy idea but I used to think something would get better if Shago and I could make it.” She looked unhappy again. “I don’t know, Steve, it’s not good to think too much—at least the way I do. Cause I always end up with something like the idea that God is weaker because I didn’t turn out well.”

  “You don’t believe everything is known before it happens?”

  “Oh, no. Then there’s no decent explanation for evil. I believe God is just doing His best to learn from what happens to some of us. Sometimes I think He knows less than the Devil because we’re not good enough to reach Him. So the Devil gets most of the best messages we think we’re sending up.”

  “When did you begin to have ideas like this?”

  “Oh, I got them in places like Houston and Vegas, reading books and waiting for Barney Kelly to come back. Why?”

  “Sometimes I think in the same way.”

  We were silent again.

  “Stephen,” she said at last, �
�we can’t leave it here. I’m not in love with Shago any more.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Shago killed the most beautiful idea I ever had about myself. Shago killed that idea. Sometimes I felt I wasn’t living with a man but with a creature. And the Devil had a pipeline into that creature and took all the hate in the country and piped it into him. Remember when he was talking about the Freedom Rider bit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he went down South for some organization. And he took his abuse with the others and had his picture in the paper, and spent two days in jail. The only thing—all that non-violence made those boys violent. When they got back to New York they had a party, and one of them flipped out, I fear, and told Shago he was a headline-hunter and had no heart in the movement cause he went around with me. Well, the fight was stopped before they got outside. But Shago was afraid and his friends saw it. He started putting everything down. Everything was bad, and I was bad, and well, he lost his dignity. I had been faithful to him for two years but he was so evil that when I decided to start with Tony, I’m afraid I offered a considerable first night.”

  Now I could know again why women never told the truth about sex. It was too abominable when they did.

  “Do you have to tell me?”

  “Yes, I have to tell you. It’s either that, or go back to my shrink.”

  I thought of Ruta. “All right,” I said, “I’m listening.”

  “Well, I thought I was in love with Tony. I had to think that. And Shago popped up as he did tonight.”

  “Here?”

  “No. You’re the only man besides Shago I’ve taken here.” She lit a cigarette. “No, Shago came in on Tony and me in the other place. Shago had connections in Harlem and Tony was afraid of those connections because Uncle Ganucci had arrangements pending with them. So Tony faded. Just puke, honey. It’s a dull story. And I felt like puke. Because Shago got something back by seeing Tony was afraid of him, but it was a rotten recovery. He made me so filthy these last two months that when you were with him in the hall, I had a thought. It was: throw that nigger down the stairs.”

  “Yes.”

  “Throw that nigger down the stairs! Shago was the only man I ever knew who could make something in me turn over when he came into a room. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that again. I think you get that only with one man.”

  “Yes,” I said. Would I be good enough to take every last truth she had to offer? “Yes,” I said, “I know what you mean. I had something like that with Deborah. Still,” I said flatly, “we have something else.”

  “Yes. Yes we do.… Oh, honey, here we are.”

  “Too late to save the country.”

  “Stephen, I want to become a lady.”

  “Come on, cup-cake.”

  “No, a real lady. Not the kind who’s on committees or goes shopping. A real lady.”

  “Ladies like to be wicked and wasteful.”

  “No, a lady. Some day you’ll see what I mean. You bring out the lady in me. I’ve never felt so nice. While you were away at the police station, I had the feeling that something would send you back to me because we could be good so many ways. Then I saw you fight Shago. You had to fight him, I know that—but still—I was sick. ‘Oh, Lordy,’ I thought, ‘it’s the Mafia all over again.’ ”

  “Well, it was,” I said. I was thinking of Tony.

  “Steve, I don’t know if we’re any good,” she said, “or just as low-down and dead as two shits. I want us dead if we turn into that.” The look of a child touched by an angel came back to her. “I want it to be all right.”

  But the memory of the fight lay between us. We had talked forward, we had talked back—there was a hint of that time when we might be married and talk too long for too little, while beneath all surface of the marriage, like the corpse of a memory buried alive, some flaw would continue to rot at the center. “Oh, baby, the fight left a hole,” she said.

  Yes, love was a mountain which was climbed with a good heart and a good breath: one was brave and the other was true. The ascent was not yet begun, and I had been ready to betray. What we had was spoiled in part already; like all love which is spoiled we were now locked together a little more. Because she kissed me then, and the sweet which comes from a rare grape was in her mouth, but then something more, some hint of fever and a sly bitch, a sly wild bitch still years away from her, but coming to me from out in the future and something coming out from the years of her past: there was less of loyalty between us now, and more of the hot hair of the itch.

  I finished my drink. In a minute I would have to go.

  “Will you be all right?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will Shago come back?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Downstairs,” I said, “Shago said to wish you ‘good luck.’ ”

  “He did?” She seemed thoughtful. “Well, if he comes back, he comes back.”

  “Will you let him in?”

  “If he comes, I have to let him in. I’m not going to run from Shago.”

  “I’m not so sure I’m going to see Kelly then.”

  “You have to,” she said, “or we won’t have any idea what is in his mind. I don’t want to wonder about that.”

  “Yes.” In fact, I had a desire to go, half a desire. It might be better to go away for a while. We were beginning to feel good again, but the mood would not last if nothing was gambled.

  “Sugar,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Watch the booze when you’re with Kelly.”

  “ ‘Take your hand off my fly,’ said the Duchess to the Bishop.”

  We laughed. We had come a little of the way back. “Angel,” I said, “do you have any money?”

  “Close to four thou.”

  “Let’s buy a car and go away somewhere.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “We could go to Las Vegas,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you’re going to be a lady and I’m going to be a gentleman, then I have to win your love in every way.”

  She took a quick look, and saw I meant what I had said more than I did not; so she smiled. “Divine,” she said. And held out a finger. “We’ll make a fortune in Las Vegas. I win at the tables.”

  “You do?”

  “Not when I roll,” she said. “You have to restrain me when I roll, cause I lose then. But when the men come up and take the dice, I come close to being a Power. Because I always know who’s going to win and who will lose.”

  “Well, I’m sixteen thousand in debt,” I said, “so you better be good.”

  “Your debts are dissolved,” she said. And she walked me to the door, and gave a soft plump kiss for goodbye, and nipped my lip and promised me with her tongue. Then she saw me looking at Shago’s umbrella, and handed it to me. “Now, you got a stick,” she said.

  I descended the stairs, hearing no echo of my journey down with Shago, but in the hall at the foot of the last landing was the puddle he had left. I wanted to pass; my preference was clearly to ignore it, but instead I laid the umbrella aside and searched in a trash can behind the stairs until I found a few pieces of sodden ill-scented cardboard with which I did my best to scrape that pottage, making several trips back and forth, the while I gagged. The odor of his stomach, certainly no better than mine, was not free of poverty—it had the hint of cheap Negro hash-houses with their frying fat and the gamy near-rot of chitterlings. I did the job slowly; with my fingertips. I had no desire to see Barney Oswald Kelly in less than mint condition, but it was a brutal work no matter how, for I was thinking despite myself of student sit-ins and Negroes shot in the night, and—any nearness to moralizing about the victim on the stairs was shut off by a whiff from the job. So I worked away, scraping slowly and carefully with my damp cardboards, expiating a host of—I no longer knew what. Primitive feathers of thought stirred in my brain. I had some savage notion that spirits might rise from the food we threw bac
k. There had been a time when I thought something exceptional was in my reach—which is to say it would have taken genius to give lucid presentation of what was sometimes near the edge of my thought; now the farthest of my ideas depressed me, for madness was attached to mining them. A scholarly example—here is comedy if you wish it—some sense of the sinister was left as I ended the work, went out to the street, called a cab, and on impulse told him to go first to Central Park and there drive about. For no demons resided in the vomit, only torture and funk, and I had an impulse to go back—if there were demons in Shago, they were in him still, so said my instinct—was it all that routine to leave Cherry alone? But my fear of Kelly whipped up again, and spoiled the choice.