Pick-Up

by Charles Willeford

  “I couldn’t do it, Harry!” She shook her head emphatically. “If you did it for me I could shut my eyes and—”

  “No!” I said sharply. “You’ll have to do it yourself. If I cut your wrists, well, then it would be murder. That’s what it would be.”

  “Not if I asked you to.”

  “No. We’ll have to do it together.”

  When we finished our cigarettes I put the ashtray back on the table. I was serious about committing suicide and determined to go through with it. There wasn’t any fight left in me. As far as I was concerned the world we existed on was an overly-large, stinking cinder, a spinning, useless clinker. I didn’t want any part of it. My life meant nothing to me and I wanted to go to sleep forever and forget about it. I got my shaving kit down from the shelf above the sink and took the package of razor blades out of it. I unwrapped the waxed paper from two shiny single-edged blades and laid them on the table. Helen joined me at the table and held out her left arm dramatically.

  “Go ahead,” she said tearfully. “Cut it!”

  Her eyes were tightly squeezed shut and she was breathing rapidly. I took her hand in mine and looked at her thin little wrist. I almost broke down and it was an effort to fight back the tears.

  “No, sweetheart,” I said to her gently, “you’ll have to do it yourself. I can’t do it for you.”

  “Which one is mine?” she asked nervously.

  “Either one. It doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Are you going to give a signal?” She picked up a blade awkwardly.

  “I’ll count to three.” I picked up the remaining blade.

  “I’m ready!” she said bravely, raising her chin.

  “One. Two. Three!”

  We didn’t do anything. We just stood there, looking at each other.

  “It’s no use, Harry. I can’t do it to myself.” She threw the blade down angrily on the table and turned away. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Her back shook convulsively.

  “Do you want me to do it?” I asked her.

  She nodded her head almost imperceptibly, but she didn’t say anything. I jerked her left hand away from her face and with one quick decisive motion I cut blindly into her wrist. She screamed sharply, then compressed her lips, and held out her other arm. I cut it quickly, close to the heel of her hand, picked her up and carried her to the bed. I arranged a pillow under her head.

  “Do they hurt much?”

  She shook her head. “They burn a little bit. That’s all.” Her eyes were closed, but she was still crying noiselessly. The bright blood gushed from her wrists, making crimson pools on the white sheets. I retrieved the bloody blade from the table where I’d dropped it, returned to the bed and sat down. It was much more difficult to cut my own wrists. The skin was tougher, somehow, and I had to saw with the blade to cut through. My heart was beating so loud I could feel it throb through my body. I was afraid to go through with it and afraid not to go through with it. The blood frothed, finally, out of my left wrist and I transferred the blade to my other hand. It was easier to cut my right wrist, even though I was right-handed. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as I had expected it to, but there was a searing, burning sensation, as though I had inadvertently touched my wrists to a hot poker. I threw the blade to the floor and got into bed beside Helen. She kissed me passionately. I could feel the life running out of my wrists and it made me happy and excited.

  “Harry?”

  “Yes?”

  “As a woman, I’d like to have the last word. Is it all right?” “Sure it’s all right.”

  “I. Love. You.”

  It was the first time she had said the word since we had been living together. I kissed each of her closed eyes tenderly, then buried my face in her neck. I was overwhelmed with emotion and exhaustion.

  SEVEN

  Return to Life

  MY HEAD was like a huge bubble perched on top of my shoulders, and ready for instant flight. I was afraid to move my head or open my eyes for fear it would float away into nothingness. Gradually, as I lay there fearfully, a feeling of solidity returned to my head and I opened my eyes. My arms were entwined around Helen, and she was lying on her side, facing me, her breathing soft and regular, in deep, restful sleep—but she was breathing! We were still alive, very much so! I disentangled my arms and raised my wrists so that I could see them. The blood was coagulated into little black ridges along the lengths of the shallow cuts. The bleeding had completely stopped. Oddly enough, I felt highly exhilarated and happy to be alive. It was as though I was experiencing a “cheap” drunk; I felt the way I had when I had taken a lower lip full of snuff many years before. My head was light and I was a trifle dizzy even though I was still in bed. I awakened Helen by kissing her partly open mouth. For a moment her eyes were startled and then they brightened into alertness the way they always did when she first awakened. She smiled shyly.

  “I guess I didn’t cut deep enough,” I said ruefully. “I must have missed the arteries altogether.”

  “How do you feel, Harry?” Helen asked me. “I feel kind of wonderful, sort of giddy.”

  “I feel a little foolish. And at the same time I feel better than I have in months. I’m light-headed as hell and I feel drunk. Not gin-drunk, but drunk with life.”

  “I feel the same way. I’ve never been as drunk as I am now and I haven’t had a drink. I never expected to wake up at all—not here, anyway.”

  “Neither did I,” I said quietly.

  “Are you sorry, Harry?”

  “No. I’m not exactly sorry. It’s too easy to quit and yet it took me a long time to reach the point when I was ready. But now that I’ve tried it once I guess I can face things again. It’s still a lousy world, but maybe we owe it something.”

  “Light us a cigarette, Harry.”

  I got out of bed carefully and staggered dizzily to the table. I picked up the package of cigarettes and a folder of book matches and then noticed the bloody razor blade on the floor. It was unreal and cruel-looking and somehow offended me. I scooped it off the floor with the edge of the cardboard match folder and dropped it into the paper sack where we kept our trash and garbage. I couldn’t bear to touch it with my hands. I was so giddy by this time it was difficult to keep my feet. Tumbling back onto the bed I lit Helen’s cigarette, then mine.

  “You’ve got a surprise coming when you try to walk,” I said.

  “You were actually staggering,” Helen said, dragging the smoke deeply into her lungs.

  “This bed is certainly a mess. Take a look at it.”

  “We’d better burn these sheets. I don’t think the laundry would take them like this.” Helen giggled.

  “That is, if we could afford to take them to the laundry.”

  Both of us were in a strange mood, caused mostly by the blood we had lost. It wasn’t a gay mood, not exactly, but it wasn’t depressed either. All of our problems were still with us, but for a brief moment, out of mind. There was still no money, no job, no liquor and no prospects. I was still a bit light-headed and it was hard for me to think about our many problems. I wished, vaguely, that I had a religion or a God of some sort. It would have been so wonderful and easy to have gone to a priest or a minister and let him solve our problems for us. We could have gone anyway, religious or not, but without faith, any advice we listened to would have been worthless. The pat, standard homilies dished out by the boys in black were easy to predict.

  Accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour and you are saved!

  Any premise which bases its salvation on blind belief alone is bound to be wrong, I felt. It isn’t fair to those who find it impossible to believe, those who have to be convinced, shown, who believe in nothing but the truth. But, all the same, suppose we did go to a church somewhere? What could we lose?

  I rejected that false line of reasoning in a hurry.

  “Let’s bandage each other’s wrists,” I said quickly to Helen. It would at least be something to do. I left the b
ed and sat down for a moment in the straight chair by the easel.

  “I suppose we’d better,” Helen agreed, “before they get infected. If we’re going to burn these sheets anyway, why don’t you tear a few strips from the edge? They’ll make fine bandages.” Helen got out of bed wearily, and walked in tight circles, trying her legs. “Boy, am I dizzy!” she exclaimed, sat down on the foot of the bed.

  I tore several strips of sheeting from the top sheet. Helen did some more circles and then sat down in a chair and fanned herself with her hands. I patted her bare shoulder reassuringly on my way to the dresser. My giddiness had all but disappeared but my feeling of exhilaration remained. I had to dig through every drawer in the dresser before I could find the package of band-aids.

  “Hold out your arms,” I told Helen. The gashes in her wrists hurt me to look at them. They were much deeper than my own and the tiny blue veins in her thin wrists were closer to the surface than they had been before. I was deeply ashamed, and bound her wrists rapidly with the sheeting. I used the band-aids to hold the improvised bandages in place and then we changed places. She bandaged my wrists while I sat in the chair, but did a much neater job of it.

  Without warning Helen rushed into my arms and began to sob uncontrollably. Her slender back was racked with violent, shuddering sobs and her hot flush of tears burned on my bare chest. I tried my best to comfort her.

  “There, there, old girl,” I said crooningly, “this won’t do at all. Don’t cry, baby, everything’s going to be all right. There, there . . .”

  She continued to sob piteously for a long time and all I could do was hold her. I was helpless, confused. It wasn’t like Helen to cry about anything. At last she calmed down, smiled weakly, and wiped her streaming eyes with her fingers, like a little girl.

  “I know it’s childish of me, Harry, to cry like that, but I couldn’t help it. The thought exploded inside my head and caught me when I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “What did, honey?”

  “Well, suppose you had died and I hadn’t? And I woke up, and there you were—dead, and there I’d be, alone, still alive, without you, without anything . . .” Her tears started to flow again, but with better restraint. I held her on my lap like a frightened child; her face against my shoulder. I made no attempts to prevent her silent crying. I just patted her gently on her bare back, letting her cry it out. I knew precisely how she felt, because my feelings were exactly the same. Within a few minutes she was calm again and smiling her secret, tragic smile.

  “If you’d kept up much longer, I’d have joined you,” I said, attempting a smile.

  “Do you know what’s the matter with us, Harry?”

  “Everything. Just name it.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “We’ve lost our perspective. What we need is help, psychiatric help.”

  “At fifty bucks an hour, we can’t afford one second of help.”

  “We can go to a hospital.”

  “That costs even more.”

  “Not a public hospital.”

  “Well, there’s Saint Paul’s, but I’m leery of it.”

  “Why? Is it free?” she asked eagerly.

  “Sure, it’s free all right, but what if they decide we’re nuts and lock us up in a state institution for a few years? You in a woman’s ward, me in a men’s ward?”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t do that, Harry. We aren’t crazy. This wholesale depression we’re experiencing is caused strictly by alcohol. If we can get a few drugs and a little conversation from a psychiatrist, we’ll be just fine again. I’ll bet they wouldn’t keep us more than a week at the longest.”

  “That isn’t the way it works, baby,” I told her. “A psychiatrist isn’t a witch doctor with a speedy cure for driving out the devils. It’s a long process, as I understand it, and the patient really cures himself. All the psychiatrist can do is help him along by guiding the thinking a little bit. He listens and says nothing. He doesn’t even give the patient any sympathy. All he does is listen.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “But that’s the way it works.”

  “Well . . .” She thought for a few moments. “They could get us off the liquor couldn’t they?”

  “If we didn’t have any, and couldn’t get any, yes. But even there, you have to have a genuine desire to quit drinking.”

  “I don’t want to drink anymore, Harry. Let’s take a chance on it, to see what happens. We can’t lose anything, and I know they aren’t going to lock us up anywhere, because it costs the state too much money for that. Both of us need some kind of help right now, and you know it!”

  I caught some of Helen’s enthusiasm, but for a different reason. The prospect of a good rest, a chance to sleep at night, some proper food in my stomach appealed to me. It was a place to start from . . .

  “A week wouldn’t be so bad at that,” I said. “I could get straightened around some, maybe do a little thinking. I might come up with an idea.”

  “I could too, Harry. There are lots of things we could do together! You know all about art. Why, I’ll bet we could start an art gallery and make a fortune right here in San Francisco! Did you ever get your G.I. loan?”

  “No.”

  “A veteran can borrow all kinds of money! I think they loan as high as four thousand dollars.”

  “Maybe so, but an art gallery isn’t any good. The dealers are all starving to death, even the well-established ones. People don’t buy decent pictures for their homes any more. They buy pictures in the same place they get their new furniture. If the frame matches the davenport, they buy the picture, no matter what it is. No art gallery for me.”

  “They give business loans too.”

  “They may not take us in at the hospital.” I brought the subject back to the business at hand.

  “If we show them our wrists, I’ll bet they’ll take us in!”

  I knew that Helen was right and yet I was afraid to turn in to Saint Paul’s Hospital. But I could think of nothing better to do. Maybe a few days of peace and quiet were all we needed. I could use a new outlook on life. It was the smart thing to do, and for once in my life, why couldn’t I do the smart thing?

  “All right, Helen. Get dressed. We’ll try it. If they take us in, fine! If they don’t, they can go to hell.”

  After we were dressed, Helen began to roll up the bloody sheets to take them out to the incinerator. “Just a second,” I said, and I tossed my box of oil paints and the rest of my painting equipment into the middle of the pile of sheets. “Burn that junk, too,” I told her.

  “You don’t want to burn your paints!”

  “Just do what I tell you. I know what I’m doing.”

  While Helen took the bundle out to the backyard to burn it in the incinerator, I walked down the hall to Mrs. McQuade’s room and knocked on her door.

  “Mrs. McQuade,” I said, when she answered my insistent rapping. “My wife and I are going out of town for a few days. We’re going to visit her mother down in San Sienna.”

  “How many days will you be gone, Mr. Jordan?” she asked suspiciously.

  “I’m not sure yet. About a week, maybe not that long.”

  “I can’t give you any refund, Mr. Jordan. You didn’t give me any advance notice.”

  “I didn’t ask for a refund, Mrs. McQuade.”

  “I know you didn’t, but I thought it best to mention it.” She fluttered her apron and smiled pleasantly. “Now you go ahead and have a nice time. Your room’ll still be here when you get back.”

  “We will,” I said grimly. “We expect to have a grand old time.”

  I returned to the room. Helen was packing her suitcase with her night things, cold cream, and toothbrush. All I took was my shaving kit. As we left the room she handed me the suitcase and locked the door with her key. At the bottom of the steps, outside in the street, I gave her my leather shaving kit to carry so I could have one hand free.

  “How do you feel, baby?” I asked Helen as we paused
in front of the house.

  “A wee bit dizzy still, but otherwise I’m all right. Why?”

  “We’ve got a long walk ahead of us, that’s why.” I grinned. “We don’t have enough change for carfare.”

  “Oh!” She lifted her chin bravely. “Then let’s get started,” she said resolutely, looking into my eyes.

  I shrugged my shoulders, Helen took my arm, and we started walking up the hill.

  EIGHT

  Hospital Case

  SAN FRANCISCO is an old city with old buildings, and it is built on seven ancient hills. And long before Helen and I reached the grounds of Saint Paul’s Hospital it seemed as though we had climbed every one of them. The narrow, twisted streets, the weathered, brown and crumbling façades of the rotted, huddled buildings frowning upon us as we labored up and down the hills, gave me poignant, bitter memories of my neighborhood in early childhood days: Chicago’s sprawling South Side. There was no particular resemblance between the two cities I could put my finger on, but the feeling of similarity persisted. Pausing at the crest of a long, steep hill for rest and breath, I saw the magnificent panorama of the great harbor spreading below us. Angel Island, Alcatraz, several rusty, vagrant ships, a portion of the Golden Gate, and the land mass of Marin County, San Francisco’s bedroom, were all within my vision at one time. The water of the bay, a dark and Prussian blue, was the only link with Chicago and my past.

  The long walk was good for me. I saw a great many things I had been merely looking at for a long time. It was as though I was seeing the city through new eyes, for the first time.

  The late, slanting, afternoon sun made long, fuzzy shadows; dark, colored shadows that dragged from the tops of the buildings like old-fashioned cloaks.

  Noisy children were playing in the streets, shouting, screaming, laughing; all of them unaware of money and security and death.

  Bright, shiny, new automobiles, chromium-trimmed, two-toned and silent, crept bug-like up and down the steep street. How long had it been since I had owned an automobile? I couldn’t remember.