A Diet of Treacle

by Lawrence Block

  After that he habitually carried the paring knife in an improvised sheath. When he was fourteen he threw the paring knife into a sewer—he had purchased a switchblade, a well-made stiletto whose six-inch blade of keenly honed steel sprang instantly into position at the touch of the proper button.

  Shank could not seem to stay out of trouble, and his stepfather, Bradley Galton, was constantly fishing him out. Shank committed shoplifting, vandalism, smoking in school—anything minor or major. After the boy’s second arrest for stealing, from which he was released once again into Bradley Galton’s custody, the judge recommended psychiatric treatment.

  Bradley Galton thought that an excellent idea. So did Lucy. A psychiatrist was consulted and an appointment set up for Shank.

  Shank ridiculed the whole idea. He never kept the appointment.

  A month before his sixteenth birthday Shank met the first people he found he could like. There were about twenty of them, slum kids, members of a gang called the Royal Ramblers. And they liked Shank. They provided him with his name, a name he could get a lot more high on than Leon. They named him Shank because of the knife he always carried and the way he dug it. After the Royal Ramblers gave him the name, he refused to answer to Leon.

  They also provided him with his first woman. A broken-down, feeble-minded thing the Royal Ramblers kept around for utility, but she had a passable face, a willing body and she knew how to knock off the one thing she was good for. Shank took her on a mattress on the Ramblers’ clubhouse floor, a vacant basement room on San Pedro Street, while four other boys waited their turns.

  Shank enjoyed the girl. Sex had been a mystery and one to which he had not paid too much attention. There had been no friends to talk with or tell dirty jokes to. He had waited, and now he knew what sex was all about.

  Naturally, other girls followed. What Shank lacked in handsomeness was made up for by his startling black hair and eyes in brilliant contrast to skin white as death, and his catlike walk enhanced the general hypnotic quality. He was usually successful with the girls who hung out with the Ramblers, and if a girl had any reservations all he had to do was show her the knife. He would take it from his pocket, snap the button and the girl’s eyes would fasten on the long blade of cold steel.

  He never actually had to use the knife on a girl. He never had to play things the least bit rough, for that matter, because the combination of his cold, black eyes in a cold, white face coupled with his showing of six inches of cold steel was enough to warm any of the girls he met. And he liked the way they responded after he showed them the knife. Sometimes he would display the knife to a girl already willing to yield to him.

  Friendship, a name, sex and marijuana—these were the gifts of the Ramblers. They were the gifts Shank wanted, too, and he indulged himself for the next two-and-a-half years. He dropped out of high school as soon as he passed the compulsory education age limit and he lived on the streets with his friends. His home was a place to eat breakfast at mid-morning and to sleep at night. He ate the rest of his meals at lunch counters on Fifth Street and spent the rest of his time doing next to nothing.

  Shank was nineteen when his girl announced she was pregnant.

  She wasn’t simply a nice roll in the hay, this girl. She was two years younger than Shank, a virgin when he’d met her, a pretty half-Mexican of almond-shaped eyes and a full-blown figure. She slept with him when he wanted her and spent time with him when he tolerated her presence.

  At no time did she expect Shank to marry her; she knew better. Neither did she want to have a baby, so she asked him to give her money for an abortion. There was this doctor a friend of hers knew, she explained, and he would perform an abortion for two hundred dollars.

  Shank considered the matter quite carefully. An abortion cost two hundred dollars, but a plane ticket to New York City cost less than half that sum. Simple economics, and a long-present desire to live in New York, influenced Shank to board a plane three days later as he wondered how long it would be before his mother missed the hundred and fifty dollars he had stolen from her.

  He never left New York thereafter. A day after his arrival he settled in a single room on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side, a roach-infested cell without a sink and featuring one sagging bed for furniture. The condition of the room could not repel Shank as long as it rented at four dollars a week.

  Still, money threatened to be a problem. The thought of a job occurred to him and he went so far as to buy a paper to glance through the classified section. He noted the jobs he thought he might be able to obtain, their hours, pay and type of work, and he promptly rolled up the paper and flipped it out the window. That was the last he thought about jobs.

  A day or so later he drifted west to Greenwich Village and wandered around. He met a girl who managed to deploy him into a conversation. She was several years older than he, and a little overweight. She thought Shank interesting. He thought her stupid.

  But before night sank into morning he had borrowed ten dollars from her, bought half an ounce of marijuana, taken her back to his room and made hectic love to her. Then she hurried back to the Bronx where she lived with her mother and father. When she returned the next afternoon he threw her out. She tried a second time, so he showed her the knife and explained in a confidential tone if she ever annoyed him again he would stick the knife in her stomach. As he pointed out the risk, his eyes were half-closed and his lips slightly curved. The plump girl tried to laugh, but it emerged as a hiccup.

  He never saw her again.

  At first Shank missed the Royal Ramblers. He made vague overtures to the neighborhood gang but they were Puerto Ricans, so he made no supreme efforts to work his way in. Besides, he was older than they were.

  By the end of the first week New York began to bore him. He took what marijuana he had left, cut it with a sack of Bull Durham, rolled the result and peddled it at half-a-buck a cigarette. This gave him a little more capital, but money remained tight. The upshot was that he went down to the draft board to enlist. He could never determine just why he tried to join the army. In any case, he was rejected because the psychiatrist decided Shank was psychopathic, naturally withholding the information. At the time, the army appealed to Shank, perhaps because he felt a little lonely and out of place. But then he discovered there were others like himself, and he was glad the army had turned him down.

  There weren’t that many—of the others. You could walk all over the Village and never notice them, not unless you were one yourself and consequently knew what to look for. They varied in age, appearance and dress, but a boy like Shank knew how to spot them.

  They were lost people, bored people, tired people, angry young people, zen people, beat people. They were tagged with more labels than you could shake a stick of pot at, but the people themselves scorned the labels and spent little time worrying about them. Shank himself shrugged at labels. He knew there were two classes of people in the world—the ones he liked and the ones he didn’t.

  The ones he didn’t could go in a body to hell, as far as he was concerned. The ones he liked were going to hell, too, but he happened to be going on the same boat they were—and that made the difference. The people he gravitated to smoked marijuana or gobbled benzedrine or drank cough syrup or chewed peyote. They talked with each other, walked with each other, sat with each other and slept with each other. They listened to jazz, deep and grinding hard bop, and they spoke their own language, the inner language of Hip.

  There was Lee Revzin, an anemic-looking young man whose hair was forever falling into his eyes, sandy blond hair he neither cut nor combed. Lee wrote poetry, weird stuff Shank found impossible to understand, but he knew the poetry had Soul and if that was Lee’s scene it was okay with him.

  There was Judy Obershain of the china-doll face, a small, cute, nervous girl who talked and moved like a Disney cartoon. She had experienced sexual relations with forty-seven men, but although the carnal in its many forms attracted Judy, the idea of pain she was convinced wa
s associated with the loss of virginity was the one prospect that terrified her. Shank took her to his room one night but left her virginity where he found it, practically untouched. He thought she was a little nuts, but if that was her scene it was okay with him. Because she was one of Shank’s people.

  And there were many others. The ones who lived in the Village or on the lower East Side. The ones who lived uptown or in Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens or even Jersey and who came to the Village to meet the rest. The ones who blew in from Chicago or the coast, the ones who left and the ones who came back. People who wrote or painted or who did nothing at all. Negroes who slept with whites in the frantic shift to change the color of their skins; and whites who slept with Negroes for the opposite shift.

  And Joe, of course. Joe Milani, Shank’s friend, older than most of the others, who once had been to Korea and to college and who now had no scene at all—who just floated, never wanting anything, never needing anything, just drifting and tasting and touching and seeing and smelling and hearing, drifting around and digging everything, going nowhere and doing nothing. He and Joe lived together now on Saint Marks Place near Avenue A, and the two of them were very tight. Joe was older, seven years older, but his age did not matter. Joe was a wop, but there was a world of difference between Joe and the dago bastards who owned everything in the Village. Joe was a little nuts in some ways, but Shank did not sit in judgment.

  That was Joe’s scene, and Shank let it go at that.

  The man Shank was expecting sat down next to him. The man wore a white shirt open at the neck and a pair of grey gabardine trousers. The man was nervous.

  “Are you Shank?” he said.

  Shank nodded.

  “Are you holding?”

  “I never hold, man.”

  The man hesitated. “Phil told me—”

  “Phil?”

  “Phil Carroway. Short guy with a goatee.”

  Shank nodded again, remembering Phil Carroway.

  “He said—”

  “I never hold,” Shank said. “I’ve got some stuff back at my pad, if you’ve got the time.”

  “Where do you live?”

  Shank told him.

  “I’d like to get some.”

  Shank turned and studied the man out of the corner of his eye. Well-dressed, clean-shaven, eager as a sixteen-year-old at a whorehouse for the first time. A Madison Avenue type trying to be hip, looking for a kick and ready to pay for it. Square as they come, but his wallet was full and he would pay good money for a few joints.

  Shank stood up. The man hesitated, then rose and stood next to him awkwardly. “Let’s make it,” Shank said. “It’s a long walk.”

  “We can take a cab,” the man said. “I’ll pay for it.”

  Shank nodded shortly and they walked over to Fifth where the man flagged a taxi. The man held the door for him and Shank hopped in, sinking heavily into the seat.

  The square had bread, heavy bread, if he was ready to lay out cab fare just to make a buy, Shank decided. The square was going to be profitable, he decided.

  3

  Shank held the cigarette paper between the thumb and index finger of his left hand. He poured marijuana into the paper from a small brown envelope. When the paper held a sufficient quantity, he rolled it expertly, wetting the gummed edge by a flick of his tongue, then twisting the ends so the marijuana would not dribble out.

  Then he took the cigarette once again between the thumb and the index finger of his left hand and examined it thoughtfully. He held it to the light, checking for possible punctures in the paper. Putting it to his lips, Shank drew on it experimentally to make sure it would smoke properly.

  Then he tossed it across the room to Joe Milani, who caught it one-handed, studied it momentarily, and dropped it into his pocket.

  “Did you score?” Shank said.

  Joe shook his head.

  “What happened?”

  Joe thought for a minute. Then he shrugged. “I picked her up is all. Picked her up and won the bet.”

  “How come you didn’t ball her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shank said nothing. The guy never pried, Joe thought. He was a clever son of a bitch—he just sat there waiting and pretty soon you told him whatever it was he was waiting to hear. Non-directive as all hell.

  “I don’t know,” Joe said again.

  Shank remained silent.

  There were so many things you didn’t know, Joe thought, and it was such a general pain to bother trying to think things out, especially when there was no point-thinking them out to begin with.

  “Name’s Anita Carbone,” Joe said. “Lives up in wop Harlem with her grandmother.”

  Shank shrugged.

  “College chick,” Joe continued. “Psych major at Hunter, comes downtown once every third blue moon.”

  “Pretty chick.”

  “Yeah.”

  More silence.

  “Look, I didn’t even try to make it with her,” Joe said. “I don’t think I could have if I tried, and it’s like there’s no future in it anyway. She’s a nice square little thing with a good head and a good body and that’s all.”

  “Where did you take her?”

  “Around. We walked around for a while and sort of talked at each other. After a while I let her buy me a hamburger at Riker’s. Then I put her on a subway and she zipped off to Harlem and I came down here. That’s all.”

  “You gonna see her again?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Joe frowned. “What for, man? Like I told you—she’s a nice square little chick and all and we have nothing to talk about and nothing to do. So what for?”

  Shank let it drop. “I worked a deal while you were walking around with her,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I sold some cut-down stuff to a Madison Avenue type for more than it was worth.”

  “What did you get?”

  “Twenty cents for twelve.”

  A cent was a dollar in hip parlance. Twenty cents was twenty dollars, twenty dollars for maybe four or five dollars worth of pot. Joe whistled.

  “He’s happy,” Shank said. “Now he can throw a party for a dozen people who want to feel hip and they can all blow off the tops of their heads. He’ll get high for the first or second time in his life and he’ll turn some square little chick on for the first time and she’ll come across, also for the first time. He’s getting his twenty’s worth out of the bit.”

  “Sure.”

  “Everybody’s smoking now,” Shank said. “A guy like this one thought he was pretty far out a few years ago when he had a martini on an empty stomach. Now he starts reading and talking to people and he decides that juice isn’t far out at all. So he has to reach a little farther.”

  Joe nodded.

  “He’ll dig it,” Shank went on. “It’s a bigger kick than juice. Besides, it’s illegal. He can get a year and a day just for holding and he knows it. That makes it more of a kick. He can feel like all the hippies he reads about.”

  “The gospel according to Saint Jack.”

  “I’m hip, man. He reads Kerouac and he decides to get remote. You shoulda been there, man. You would’ve got a kick out of the way he came on. Like it was all something out of a spy movie, you know? Sitting down next to me and talking out of the side of his mouth and all. And he fell over when he saw the pad, like we were living on the other side of the moon and it was heaven on wheels.”

  “Everybody’s smoking it,” Joe said. “A year or two and they’ll make it legal.”

  “You kidding.”

  “Why? They’ll have to, with everybody turning on right and left. By the time everybody knows it’s harmless and non-habit-forming they won’t be able to keep the law on the books. It—”

  “You’re nuts, man.”

  Joe looked at him, and Shank went on.

  “Things get legal because somebody wants them legal, man. Things don’t get legal because somebody doesn’t want
them legal. You think anybody wants pot legal? You think the Mob wants it legal when they can sell it? You think the liquor lobby wants it legal when nobody would drink juice any more if it was? Hell, you think I want it legal? I pull in close to a bill a week selling it, a hundred pennies per keeping squares high. If it’s legal they’ll sell it in the drugstores, man. Won’t that be a bitch?”

  Joe nodded, and Shank hauled himself to his feet.

  “Gotta go,” he announced. “You got any idea what time it is?”

  “Few minutes after eight.”

  “That late?”

  “Around there.”

  “Then I better jump.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I got a few things going.”

  Joe leaned back on the bed and watched Shank go out the door and slam it behind him. The younger boy’s footsteps sounded on the stairway, then stopped. The front door banged.

  Joe stretched out on the bed, rested his head on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling whose cracked plaster had fallen away in jagged patches. The floor was bare and dirty and the furniture was quietly falling into ruin, the stuffing leaking from the one chair, and broken bedsprings digging down at crazy angles. Joe alternated between feeling sorry for himself and despising himself, usually was in one mood or the other except for the times a fix lifted him into another mental sphere. In a straight sense, without the realization of marijuana or the stimulation of benzedrine or the sogginess of alcohol or the diffusion of mescalin to eliminate moodiness, he either hated Joe Milani or loathed the world so unnecessarily cruel to him.

  You had always been a good enough kid, Joe would tell himself on occasion. Your folks had loved you and you had loved your folks and Rochester hadn’t been a bad place to live in. You had run around with a decent bunch of kids and you had done okay in high school and had never gotten into any trouble. Everybody had liked you then. What in the hell had happened to you?