By the time I got the food in front of him, Flo was back.
“Hello, my love,” she said, “how you doing?”
“Just fine,” he said, “don’t you have any catsup?”
I walked out, got in my car and drove down to the beach.
Well, the barker had another devil in there. I paid my quarter and went in. This devil really wasn’t much. The red paint sprayed on him was killing him and he was drinking to keep from going crazy. He was a big guy but he didn’t have any qualities at all. I was one of the few customers in there. There were more flies in there than there were people.
The barker walked up to me. “I’m starving to death since you stole the real thing from me. I suppose you got a show of your own going?”
“Listen,” I said, “I’d give anything to give him back to you. I was just trying to be a good guy.”
“You know what happens to good guys in this world, don’t you?”
“Yeah, they end up standing down at 7th and Broadway selling copies of the Watchtower.”
“My name’s Ernie Jamestown,” he said, “tell me all about it. We got a room in the back.”
I walked to the room in the back with Ernie. His wife was sitting at the table drinking whiskey. She looked up.
“Listen, Ernie, if this bastard is gonna be our new devil, forget it. We might just as well stage a triple suicide.”
“Take it easy,” said Ernie, “and pass the bottle.”
I told Ernie everything that had happened. He listened carefully and then said, “I can take him off your hands. He has two weaknesses—drink and women. And there’s one other thing. I don’t know why it happens but when he’s confined, like he was in the drunk tank or in that cage out there, he loses his supernatural powers. All right, we take it from there.”
Ernie went to the closet and dragged out a mass of chains and padlocks. Then he went to the phone and asked for an Edna Hemlock. Edna Hemlock was to meet us in twenty minutes at the corner outside Woody’s Bar. Ernie and I got in my car, stopped for two fifths at the liquor store, met Edna, picked her up, and drove to my place.
They were still in the kitchen. They were necking like mad. But as soon as he saw Edna the devil forgot all about my old lady. He dropped her like a pair of stained panties. Edna had it all. They’d made no mistakes when they put her together.
“Why don’t you two drink up and get acquainted?” said Ernie. Ernie put a large glass of whiskey in front of each of them.
The devil looked at Ernie. “Hey, mother, you’re the guy who put me in that cage, ain’t ya?”
“Forget it,” said Ernie, “let’s let bygones be bygones.”
“Like hell!” He pointed a finger and the line of flame ran up to Ernie and he was no longer there.
Edna smiled and lifted her whiskey. The devil grinned, lifted his and gulped it down.
“Fine stuff!” he said. “Who bought it?”
“That man who just left the room a moment ago,” I said.
“Oh.”
He and Edna had another drink and began eyeballing each other. Then my old lady spoke to him:
“Take your eyes off that tramp!”
“What tramp?”
“Her!”
“Just drink your drink and shut up!”
He pointed his finger at my old lady, there was a small crackling sound and she was gone. Then he looked at me:
“And what have you got to say?”
“Oh, I’m the guy who brought the wire-cutters, remember? I’m here to run little errands, bring in towels, so forth…”
“It sure feels good to have my supernatural powers again.”
“They do come in handy,” I said, “we got an overpopulation problem anyhow.”
He was eyeballing Edna. Their eyes were so locked that I was able to lift one of the fifths of whiskey. I took the fifth and got in my car with it and drove back to the beach again.
Ernie’s wife was still sitting in the back room. She was glad to see the new fifth and I poured two drinks.
“Who’s the kid you got locked in the cage?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s a third-string quarterback from one of the local colleges. He’s trying to pick up a little spare change.”
“You sure have nice breasts,” I said.
“You think so? Ernie never says anything about my breasts.”
“Drink up. This is good stuff.”
I slid over next to her. She had nice fat thighs. When I kissed her, she didn’t resist.
“I get so tired of this life,” she said, “Ernie’s always been a cheap hustler. You got a good job?”
“Oh yeah. I’m head shipping clerk at Drombo-Western.”
“Kiss me again,” she said.
I rolled off and wiped myself with the sheet.
“If Ernie finds out he’ll kill us both,” she said.
“Ernie isn’t going to find out. Don’t worry about it.”
“You make great love,” she said, “but why me?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I mean, really, what made you do it?”
“Oh, I said, “the devil made me do it.”
Then I lit a cigarette, laid back, inhaled, and blew a perfect smoke ring. She got up and went to the bathroom. In a minute I heard the toilet flush.
GUTS
Like anybody can tell you, I am not a very nice man. I don’t know the word. I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions. I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces. I’m more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don’t like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don’t like to be shaped by society.
I was drinking with Marty, the ex-con, up in my room one night. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t want a job. I just wanted to sit around with my shoes off and drink wine and talk, and laugh if possible. Marty was a little dull, but he had workingman’s hands, a broken nose, mole’s eyes, nothing much to him but he’d been through it.
“I like you, Hank,” said Marty, “you’re a real man, you’re one of the few real men I’ve known.”
“Yeh,” I said.
“You got guts.”
“Yeh.”
“I was a hard-rock miner once…”
“Yeh?”
“I got in a fight with this guy. We used ax handles. He broke my left arm with his first swing. I went on to fight him. I beat his goddamned head in. When he came around from that beating, he was out of his head. I’d mashed his brains in. They put him in a madhouse.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
“Listen,” said Marty, “I want to fight you.”
“You get first punch. Go ahead, hit me.”
Marty was sitting in a straight-backed green chair. I was walking to the sink to pour another glass of wine from the bottle. I turned around and smashed him a right to the face. He flipped over backwards in the chair, got up and came toward me. I wasn’t looking for the left. It got me high on the forehead and knocked me down. I reached into a paper sack full of vomit and empties, came out with a bottle, rose to my knees and hurled it. Marty ducked and I came up with the chair behind me. I had it over my head when the door opened. It was our landlady, a good-looking young blonde in her twenties. What she was doing running a place like that I could never figure out. I put the chair down.
“Go to your room, Marty.”
Marty looked ashamed, like a little boy. He walked down the hall to his room, walked in and closed the door.
“Mr. Chinaski,” she said, “I want you to know…”
“I want you to know,” I said, “that it’s no use.”
“What’s no use?”
“You’re not my type. I don’t want to fuck you.”
“Listen,” she sai
d, “I want to tell you something. I saw you pissing in the lot next door last night and if you do that again I’m going to throw you out of here. Somebody’s been pissing in the elevator too. Has that been you?”
“I don’t piss in elevators.”
“Well, I saw you in the lot last night. I was watching. It was you.”
“The hell it was me.”
“You were too drunk to know. Don’t do it again.”
She closed the door and was gone.
I was sitting there quietly drinking wine a few minutes later and trying to remember if I had pissed in the lot, when there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
It was Marty. “I gotta tell you something.”
“Sure. Sit down.”
I poured Marty a glass of port and he sat down.
“I’m in love,” he said.
I didn’t answer. I rolled a cigarette.
“You believe in love?” he asked.
“I have to. It happened to me once.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s gone. Dead.”
“Dead? How?”
“Drink.”
“This one drinks too. It worries me. She’s always drunk. She can’t stop.”
“None of us can.”
“I go to A.A. meetings with her. She’s drunk when she goes. Half of them down there at the A.A. are drunk. You can smell the fumes.”
I didn’t answer.
“God, she’s young. And what a body! I love her, man, really love her!”
“Oh hell, Marty, that’s just sex.”
“No, I love her, Hank, I really feel it.”
“I guess it’s possible.”
“Christ, they’ve got her down in a cellar room. She can’t pay her rent.”
“The cellar?”
“Yeah, they got a room down there with all the boilers and shit.”
“Hard to believe.”
“Yeah, she’s down there. And I love her, man, and I don’t have any money to help her with.”
“That’s sad. I been in the same situation. It hurts.”
“If I can get straight, if I can get on the wagon for ten days and get my health back—I can get a job somewhere, I can help her.”
“Well,” I said, “you’re drinking now. If you love her, you’ll stop drinking. Right now.”
“By god,” he said, “I will! I’ll pour this drink into the sink!”
“Don’t be melodramatic. Just pass that glass over here.”
I took the elevator down to the first floor with the fifth of cheap whiskey I had stolen at Sam’s liquor store a week earlier. Then I took the stairway to the cellar. There was a small light burning down there. I walked along looking for a door. I finally found one. It must have been 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. I knocked. The door opened a notch and here stood a really fine-looking woman in a negligee. I hadn’t expected that. Young, and a strawberry blonde. I stuck my foot in the door, then I pushed my way in, closed the door and looked around. Not a bad place at all.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Get out of here.”
“This is a nice place you got here. I like it better than my own.”
“Get out of here! Get out! Get out!”
I pulled the fifth of whiskey out of the paper bag. She looked at it.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jeanie.”
“Look, Jeanie, where do you keep your drinking glasses?”
She pointed to a wall shelf and I walked over and got two tall water glasses. There was a sink. I put a little water in each, then walked over, set them down, opened the whiskey and mixed it in. We sat on the edge of her bed and drank. She was young, attractive. I couldn’t believe it. I waited for a neurotic explosion, for something psychotic. Jeanie looked normal, even healthy. But she did like her whiskey. She drank right along with me. Having come down there in a rush of eagerness, I no longer felt that eagerness. I mean, if she had had a little pig in her or something indecent or foul (a harelip, anything), I would have felt more like moving in. I remembered a story I had read in the Racing Form once about a high-bred stallion they couldn’t get to mate with the mares. They got the most beautiful mares they could find, but the stallion only shied away. Then somebody, who knew something, got an idea. He smeared mud all over a beautiful mare and the stallion immediately mounted her. The theory was that the stallion felt inferior to all the beauty and when it was muddied-up, fouled, he at least felt equal or maybe even superior. Horses’ minds and men’s minds could be a great deal alike.
Anyhow, Jeanie poured the next drink and asked me my name and where I roomed. I told her that I was upstairs somewhere and I just wanted to drink with somebody.
“I saw you at the Clamber-In one night about a week ago,” she said, “you were very funny, you had everybody laughing, you bought everybody drinks.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I remember. You like my negligee?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you take off your pants and get more comfortable?” I did and sat back on the bed with her. It moved very slowly. I remember telling her that she had nice breasts and then I was sucking on one of them. Next I knew we were at it. I was on top. But something didn’t work. I rolled off.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right,” she said, “I still like you.”
We sat there talking vaguely and finishing the whiskey.
Then she got up and turned off the lights. I felt very sad and climbed into bed and lay against her back. Jeanie was warm, full, and I could feel her breathing, and I could feel her hair against my face. My penis begain to rise and I poked it against her. I felt her reach down and guide it in.
“Now,” she said, “now, that’s it…”
It was good that way, long and good, and then we were finished and then we slept.
When I woke up she was still asleep and I got up to get dressed. I was fully clothed when she turned and looked at me: “One more time before you go.”
“All right.”
I undressed again and got in with her. She turned her back to me and we did it again, the same way. After I climaxed she lay with her back to me.
“Will you come see me again?” she asked.
“Of course.”
“You live upstairs?”
“Yes. 309. I can come see you or you can come see me.”
“I’d rather you came to see me,” she said.
“All right,” I said. I got dressed, opened the door, closed the door, walked up the stairway, got in the elevator, and hit the 3 button.
It was about a week later, one night, I was drinking wine with Marty. We talked about various things of no importance and then he said, “Christ, I feel awful.”
“What again?”
“Yeah. My girl, Jeanie. I told you about her.”
“Yes. The one who lives in the cellar. You’re in love with her.”
“Yeh. They kicked her out of the cellar. She couldn’t even make the cellar rent.”
“Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know. She’s gone. I heard they kicked her out. Nobody knows what she did, where she went. I went to the A.A. meeting. She wasn’t there. I’m sick, Hank, I’m really sick. I loved her. I’m about out of my head.”
I didn’t answer.
“What can I do, man? I’m really torn apart…”
“Let’s drink to her luck, Marty, to her good luck.”
We had a good long one to her.
“She was all right, Hank, you gotta believe me, she was all right.”
“I believe you Marty.”
A week later Marty got kicked out for not paying his rent and I got a job in a meat packing plant and there were a couple of Mexican bars across the street. I liked those Mexican bars. After work, I smelled of blood, but nobody seemed to mind. It wasn’t until I got on the bus to go back to my room that those noses started raising and I got the dirty looks, and I began feel
ing mean again. That helped.
HIT MAN
Ronnie was to meet the two men at the German bar in the Silver-lake district. It was 7:15 p.m. He sat there drinking the dark beer at the table by himself. The barmaid was blond, fine ass, and her breasts looked as if they were going to fall out of her blouse.
Ronnie liked blondes. It was like iceskating and rollerskating. The blondes were iceskating, the rest were rollerskating. The blondes even smelled different. But women meant trouble, and for him the trouble often outweighed the joy. In other words, the price was too high.
Yet a man needed a woman now and then, if for no other reason than to prove he could get one. The sex was secondary. It wasn’t a lover’s world, it never would be.
7:20. He waved her over for another beer. She came smiling, carrying the beer out in front of her breasts. You couldn’t help liking her like that.
“You like working here?” he asked her.
“Oh yes, I meet a lot of men.”
“Nice men?”
“Nice men and the other kind.”
“How can you tell them apart?”
“I can tell by looking.”
“What kind of man am I?”
“Oh,” she laughed, “nice, of course.”
“You’ve earned your tip,” said Ronnie.
7:25. They’d said 7. Then he looked up. It was Curt. Curt had the guy with him. They came over and sat down. Curt waved for a pitcher.
“The Rams ain’t worth shit,” said Curt, “I’ve lost an even $500 on them this season.”
“You think Prothro’s finished?”
“Yeah, it’s over for him,” said Curt. “Oh, this is Bill. Bill, this is Ronnie.”
They shook hands. The barmaid arrived with the pitcher.
“Gentlemen,” said Ronnie, “this is Kathy.”
“Oh,” said Bill.
“Oh, yes,” said Curt.
The barmaid laughed and wiggled off.
“It’s good beer,” said Ronnie. “I’ve been here since 7:00, waiting. I ought to know.”
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