Pick-Up

by Charles Willeford

“Mansfield. It’s between Oceanside and San Diego. It’s a rather conservative little school. There isn’t much money in the endowment and the regents wouldn’t accept state aid. There were about a hundred and thirty students and most of them were working their way through. It wasn’t accredited under the G.I. Bill.”

  “How did you like teaching?”

  “Painting can’t be taught, Doctor. Either a man can paint or he can’t. I felt that most of the students were being duped, cheated out of their money. It’s one thing to study art with money furnished by a grateful government, but it’s something else to pay out of your own pocket for something you aren’t getting. And every day I was more convinced that I wasn’t a painter and never would be one. After a while I quit painting altogether. But I hung onto my job at Mansfield because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. Without art as an emotional outlet I turned to drinking as a substitute and I’ve been drinking ever since.”

  “Why did you leave Mansfield then?”

  “I was fired. After I started to drink I missed a lot of classes. And I never offered any excuses when I didn’t show up. In my spare time I talked to some of the more inept students and persuaded them to quit painting and go into something else. Somehow, the school didn’t like that. But I was only being honest. I was merely balancing the praise I gave to the students who were good.”

  “After you were fired, did you come directly to San Francisco?”

  “Not directly. It kind of took me by surprise, getting fired, I mean. They thought they had every reason to fire me, but I didn’t expect it. I was one of the most popular teachers at the school, that is, with the students. But I suppose drinking had dulled my rational mind to the situation.”

  “And you felt persecuted?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. After I got my terminal pay I thought things out. I wanted to get away from the city and things connected with culture, back to the land. Well, not back to it, because I’d never been a farmer or field hand, always in cities, you know. But at the time I felt if I could work in the open, using my muscles, doing really hard labor, I’d be able to sleep again. So that’s what I did. I picked grapes in Fresno, and around Merced. I hit the sugar beet harvests in Chico, drifted in season, over to Utah, and I spent an entire summer in the Soledad lettuce fields.”

  “Were you happier doing that type of work?”

  “I was completely miserable. All my life I had only wanted to paint. There isn’t any substitute for painting. Coming to a sudden, brutal stop left me without anything to look forward to. I had nothing. I drank more and more and finally I couldn’t hold a field hand’s job, not even in the lettuce fields. That’s when I came to San Francisco. It was a city and it was close. In a city a man can always live.”

  “And you’ve been here ever since?”

  “That’s right. I’ve gone from job to job, drinking when I’ve had the money, working for more when I ran out.”

  I dropped my head and sat quietly, my hands inert in my lap. I was drained. What possible good did it do the doctor to know these things about me? How could this refugee from Aachen analyze my actions for the drifting into nothingness when I didn’t know myself? I was bored with my dull life. I didn’t want to remember anything; all I wanted was peace and quiet. The silence that Death brings, an all-enveloping white cloak of everlasting darkness. By my withdrawal from the world I had made my own little niche and it was a dreary little place I didn’t want to live in or tell about. But so was Doctor Fischbach’s and his world was worse than mine. I wouldn’t have traded places with him for anything. He sat across from me silently, fiddling with his idiotic beard, his dark eyes on the ceiling, evaluating my story, probing with his trained mind. I pitied him. The poor bastard thought he was a god.

  Did I? This nasty thought hit me below the belt. How else could I have taken Helen’s life if I didn’t think so? What other justification was there for my brutal murder? I had no right or reason to take her with me into my nothingness. Harry Jordan had played the part of God too. It didn’t matter that she had wanted to go with me. I still didn’t have the right to kill her. But I had killed her and I had done it as though it was my right, merely because I loved her. Well, it was done now. No use brooding about it. At least I had done it unconsciously and I had been under the influence of gin. Doctor Fischbach was a different case. He was playing god deliberately. This strange, bearded individual had gone to medical school for years, deliberately studied psychiatry for another couple of years. He had been psychoanalyzed himself by some other foreigner who thought he was a god—and now satisfied, with an ego as large as Canada, he sat behind a desk digging for filth into other people’s minds. What a miserable bastard he must be behind his implacable beard and face!

  “During your employment as a field hand, Jordan, did you have any periods when you felt highly elated, followed by acute depression?”

  “No,” I said sullenly.

  “Did you ever hear voices in the night, a voice talking to you?”

  “No.”

  “As you go about the city, have you ever had the feeling you were being followed?”

  “Only once. A man followed me with a gun in his hand, but he didn’t shoot me.”

  “You saw this man with the gun?”

  “That’s right, but when I looked over my shoulder he was gone.”

  He made some rapid, scribbling notes on his pad.

  “Did you ever see him again?”

  “No.”

  “So far, you’ve been reluctant to tell me about your sexual relations with Mrs. Meredith. I need this information. It’s important that I know about it.”

  “Not to me it isn’t.”

  “I can’t see why you object to telling me about it.”

  “Naturally, you can’t. You think you’re above human relationship. To tell you about my intimate life with Helen is indecent. She’s dead now, and I have too much respect for her.”

  “Suppose we talk then about other women in your life. Your wife, for instance. You don’t seem to have any attachment for her, of any great strength. Did you enjoy a normal marital relationship?”

  “I always enjoy it, but not half as much as you do second-hand.”

  “How do you mean that?”

  I got to my feet. “I’d like to go back to my cell, Doctor,” I said, forcing the words through my compressed lips. “I don’t feel like talking any more.”

  “Very well, Jordan. We’ll talk some more tomorrow.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like to waste the time. I’m not crazy and you know it as well, as I do. And I resent your vicarious enjoyment of my life’s history and your dirty probing mind.”

  “You don’t really think I enjoy this, Jordan?” he said with surprise.

  “You must. If you didn’t you’d go into some other kind of work. I can’t believe anybody would sink so low just for money. I’ve gone down the ladder myself, but I haven’t hit your level yet.”

  “I’m trying to help you, Jordan.”

  “You can help somebody that needs it then. I don’t want your help.” I turned abruptly and left his office Hank got up from the bench outside the door and accompanied me to my cell.

  My cell didn’t frighten me any longer. It was a haven, an escape from Dr. Fischbach. I liked its bareness, the hard mattress on the floor. It no longer mattered that I didn’t have a chair to sit down upon. After a while I forced my churning mind into pleasant, happier channels. I wondered what they would have for supper.

  I was hungry as hell.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Big Fixation

  WHEN I was about seven or eight years old, somebody gave me a map of the United States that was cut up into a jigsaw puzzle. Whether I could read or not at the time I don’t remember, but I had sense enough to start with the water surrounding the United States. These were the pieces with the square edges and I realized if I got the outline all around I could build toward th
e center a state at a time. This is the way I worked it and when I came to Kansas it was the last piece and it fitted into the center in the last remaining space. This was using my native intelligence and it was the logical method to put a jigsaw puzzle together. Evidently, Doctor Fischbach did not possess my native intelligence. He skipped around with his questions as he daily dug for more revelations from my past and he reminded me of a door-to-door salesman avoiding the houses with the BEWARE OF THE DOG signs. Having started with my relationship with Helen, dropping back to my art school days, returning to my childhood, then back to Helen, we were back to my childhood again. I no longer looked him in the eyes as we talked together, but focused my eyes on my hands or on the floor. I didn’t want to let him see the hate in my eyes.

  “Did your mother love you?” he asked me. “Did you feel that you got all of the attention you had coming to you?”

  “Considering the fact that I had two brothers and five sisters I got my share. More than I deserved anyway, and I’m not counting two other brothers that were stillborn.”

  “Did you feel left out in any way?”

  “Left out of what?”

  “Outside of the family. Were you always fairly treated?”

  “Well, Doctor, money was always short during the depression, naturally, what with the large family and all, but I always got my share. More, if anything. My father showed partiality to me; I know that now. He thought I was more gifted than my brothers and sisters.”

  “How did your father support the family? What type of work did he do? Was he a professional man?”

  “No. He didn’t have a profession, not even a trade. He contributed little, if anything, to our support. He worked once in a while, but never steady. He always said that his boss, whoever it happened to be at the time, was giving him the dirty end of the stick. He had a very strong sense of justice and he’d quit his job at the first sign of what he termed unfairness or prejudice. Even though the unfairness happened to someone else, he’d quit in protest.”

  “How about drinking? Did your father drink?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please try to remember. There might be some incidents. Surely you know whether he drank or not.”

  “Listen, Doctor, it was still prohibition when he was alive. I don’t remember ever seeing him take a drink. And when he went out at night I was too small to go with him. So if he drank I don’t know about it.”

  “If he didn’t support your family, who did?”

  “Mother. She was a beauty operator and she must have been a good one, because she always had a job. Ever since I can remember. She had some kind of a new system, and women used to come to our house on Sundays, her off-day, for treatments. It seemed to me that she never had any free time.”

  “What are your brothers and sisters doing now?”

  “I suppose they’re working. Father died first and then about a year later my mother died. From that time on we were on our own.”

  “How old were you then, when your mother died?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Weren’t there any relatives to take you in with them?”

  “We had relatives, yes. My mother’s brother, Uncle Ralph, gathered us all together in his house about a week after her funeral. He had the insurance money by that time and it was divided equally between us. My share was two hundred and fifty dollars, which was quite a fortune in the depression. My uncle and aunt took my smallest sister to live with them, probably to get her two-fifty, but the rest of us were on our own. I got a room on the South Side, a part time job, and finished high school. I entered the Art Institute as soon as I finished high school. Luckily, I was able to snag a razor-blade-and-condom concession and this supported me and paid my tuition. I studied at the institute until I was drafted, and I’ve told you about my experiences in the army already.”

  “Sketchily.”

  “I told you all I could remember. I wasn’t a hero. I was an ordinary soldier like all the draftees. I had a pretty good break, yes, but that was only because I had the skill to paint and also because the army gave me the opportunity to use my skill. Many other soldiers, a hell of a lot more talented than I was, were never given the same breaks.”

  “Do you have any desire to see your brothers and sisters again?”

  “They all live in Chicago, Doctor. We used to have a saying when we were students in L.A.—‘A lousy artist doesn’t go to heaven or hell when he dies; his soul goes to Chicago.’ If that saying turns out to be true, I’ll be seeing them soon enough.”

  “How about sex experiences? Did you ever engage in sex-play with your brothers and sisters?” His well-trained words marched like slugs into the cemetery of my brain. He asked this monstrous question as casually as he asked them all. Appalled, I stared at him unbelievingly.

  “You must have a hell of a lot of guts to ask me a filthy question like that!” I said angrily. “What kind of a person do you think I am, anyway? I’ve confessed to a brutal murder—I’m guilty—I’ve said I was guilty! Why don’t you kill me? Why can’t I go to the gas chamber? What you’ve been doing to me can be classified as cruel and inhuman treatment, and as a citizen I don’t have to take it! How much do you think I can stand?” I was on my feet by this time and pounding the doctor’s desk with my fists. “You’ve got everything out of me you’re going to get!” I finished decisively. “From now on I’ll tell you nothing!”

  “What is it you don’t want to tell me, Jordan?” he asked quietly, as he calmly twisted the point of his beard.

  “Nothing. I’ve told you everything that ever happened to me. Not once, but time and time again. Why do you insist on asking the same things over and over?”

  “Please sit down, Jordan.” I sat down. “The reason I ask you these questions is because I haven’t much time. I have to return you to the jail tomorrow—”

  “Thank God for small favors!” I cut him off.

  “So I’ve taken some unethical short cuts. I know it’s most unfair to you and I’m sorry. Now. Tell me about your sex-play with your brothers and sisters.”

  “My brothers and I all married each other and all my sisters are lesbians. We all slept together in the same bed, including my mother and father and all of us took turns with each other. The relationship was so complicated and the experiences were so varied, all you have to do is attach a medical book of abnormal sex deviations to my file and you’ll have it all. Does that satisfy your morbid curiosity?” This falsehood made me feel ashamed.

  “You’re evading my question. Why? Everything you tell me is strictly confidential. I only ask you these things to enable me to give a correct report—”

  “From now on I’m evading you,” I said. I got up from my chair and opened the door. Hank, as usual, was waiting for me outside, sitting on the bench. As I started briskly, happily, toward my cell, Hank fell in behind me. My mind was relieved, my step was airy, because I never intended to talk to Dr. Fischbach again. I didn’t look back and I’ve never seen the doctor since.

  That afternoon I was so ashamed of myself and so irritable I slammed my fists into the pine wall over and over again. I kept it up until my knuckles hurt me badly enough to get my mind on them instead of the other thoughts that boiled and churned inside my head. After a while, Hank opened the door and looked in on me. There was a wide smile on his lips.

  “There’s a lot of noise in here. What’s going on, Harry?”

  “It’s that damned doctor, Hank,” I said. I smiled in spite of myself. Hank had the most infectious smile I’ve ever seen.

  “Let me tell you something, Harry,” Hank said seriously, and he came as close to not smiling as he was able to do, “you’ve got to keep a cool stool. It don’t go for a man to get emotionally disturbed in a place like this. Speaking for myself, I’ll tell you this much; you’ll be one hell of a lot better off in the gas chamber than you’d ever be in a state institution. Have you ever thought of that?”

  I snorted. “Of course I’ve thought of it. But I�
�m not insane. You know it and so does the doctor.”

  “That’s right, Harry. But besides working here, I’ve worked in three different state institutions. And I’ve seen guys a hell of a lot saner than you in all three of them.” This remark made him laugh.

  “I’m all right,” I told him.

  “The way to prove it is to keep a cool stool.”

  “I guess you’re right. Doctor Fischbach says I go back to jail tomorrow. And if he’s halfway fair he’ll turn in a favorable report on me, Hank. Up till today, anyway, I’ve cooperated with him all the way.”

  “I know you have, Harry. Don’t spoil it. It must be pretty rough, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve never had it any rougher.”

  He winked at me conspiratorily. “How’d you like to have a drink?” He held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

  “Man, I’d love one,” I replied sincerely.

  Hank reached into his hip-pocket and brought out a half-pint of gin. He unscrewed the cap and offered me the bottle. I didn’t take it. Was this some kind of trap? After all, Hank was a hospital employee, when all was said and done. Sure, he had been more than nice to me so far, but maybe there had been a purpose to it, and this might be it. How did I know it was gin in the bottle? It might be some kind of dope, maybe a truth serum of some kind? It might possibly be Fischbach’s way of getting me into some kind of a jam. I knew he didn’t like me.

  “No thanks, Hank,” I said. “Maybe I’d better not.”

  Hank shrugged indifferently. “Suit yourself.” He took a long swig, screwed the cap back on and returned the bottle to his hip pocket. He left my cell and slammed and locked the door. I was sorry I hadn’t taken the drink. It might have made me feel better, and by refusing, I had hurt Hank’s feelings. But it didn’t make any difference. My problems were almost over. Tomorrow I would be back in jail. It would be almost like going home again.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. After twisting and turning on the uncomfortable mattress until eleven, I gave up the battle and banged on the door for the nurse. The night nurse gave me a sleeping pill without any argument, but even then it was a long time before I got to sleep. The next morning Hank brought me my breakfast on a tray. If he was still sore at me he didn’t give any indication of it.