A Diet of Treacle

by Lawrence Block

“Solid. Where to? Want to fall up to 42nd Street and catch a movie?”

  On this Thursday afternoon a hot sun shone high in the sky. Anita and Joe were home by themselves. Some two weeks had passed since Shank had cruelly assaulted the girl, and she had said nothing to Joe about it.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Anita said.

  “No?”

  “I mean move out,” Anita said. “Out of here.”

  “The apartment?”

  “Let’s get an apartment of our own,” she said. “Just the two of us. Away from Shank.”

  He thought that one over. “Got any idea what we would use for bread?”

  “I could get a job.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You mean I could get a job. That’s the bit, isn’t it? Go out and work, Joey. Go support me, Joey.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you meant it. You didn’t have to say it, baby. You meant it.”

  She started to deny it but stopped. She had not meant it, not just then, but saying so would only be begging the question. The idea that he could certainly put in a few hours a day working had been in the back of her mind for quite a while. After all, it wasn’t as though he did anything else. Some people could use writing or painting as an excuse. But not Joe. He did nothing, nothing at all.

  “You want me to work,” he said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “It wouldn’t kill you.”

  He sighed. “You remember what you said once? About being a leopard and you couldn’t change your spots?”

  She remembered.

  “You hit it, girl. Oh, you hit it on the top. Those spots of yours are permanent features, all right. You’re the same little girl I found in The Palermo. You know that? The same little girl who lived in Harlem with Grandma and went out with that engineering wop Ray Somebody. You want the same damned thing you always wanted. You want security and heavy furniture and charge accounts. You want—”

  “Did I say that? All I said was I wanted an apartment where we could be by ourselves! I said I’d get a job. Not you! I—”

  A bitter laugh. “Uh-huh. Now it’s an apartment. Then it’ll be, Joe, honey, we’re living together so why don’t we get married, it’ll make things easier, why not. The whole routine with a lot of yapping until you wind up with a ring on your finger. Then you’ll want a kid, and then a house, a little split-level paradise out in the suburbs, and—”

  “Stop that!”

  He stopped.

  Her eyes blazed. “Now you listen to me,” Anita said. “Now you just turn it off for a minute and listen to me. All I want is for us to be alone. A-l-o-n-e. Alone, just us, no wedding ring, no house in hell, no nothing, no kid, no nothing, damn you to hell!” Her voice got louder and louder until, when she hit the last word, she was screaming. He stared at her, not believing what he was seeing or hearing.

  “You listen,” she went on. “You just shut that mouth of yours and you listen. Nobody’s trying to run you. Nobody wants to own you. Own you! I wouldn’t take you in marriage if you crawled. I’ll live with you, I’m no good, you’re no good, I’m a slut and you’re a pig and I live with you. But marriage? You should live so long. You should positively live so long.”

  Joe had never seen her like this before. He was lost. It made no sense.

  “Just to be alone,” she said. “So we can live like people instead of animals. Not luxury. I wouldn’t care if the place were worse than this. How that could happen I don’t know, this place is for pigs, but it wouldn’t matter. Just so we could live alone without the rest of the world in our living room, without that rat friend of yours here, without—”

  She stopped. She took a breath. She found a cigarette and lit it and inhaled deeply.

  “You think it over, Joe. You think about it. Because it doesn’t have to be that way. I can get the same job either way, Joe. Either if we get our own apartment or if I get my own apartment, and don’t think I won’t. You think I’m trying to own you? I’ll walk right out on you, Joe. I can do it. It’s up to you. I leave with you or without you but I will be damned if I’ll go on living here.”

  She walked to the door. “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she said. “You make up your mind.”

  And she stormed out and slammed the door. He sat there, his eyes on the door, and he thought about everything she had said and the way she had said it. He was still sitting there when Shank came in.

  “Shank,” Joe said. “Got to talk to you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got a problem, Shank.”

  “Bread?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

  “So talk.”

  “Anita and I are going to split.”

  “Leaving town?”

  He shook his head. “Not that. To a pad of our own. She wants to. You know how chicks get. They need privacy.”

  “I get it.”

  “Which means I’ll need money. I don’t know how I’m going to swing it. Like, you’ve been paying the tab for a long time. Now I’ve got to pick up my own end of it. Anita says she’ll get a job but that’s no good. We couldn’t make it that way. Which means, I’ll have to find a gig.”

  “You think so?” Shank said flatly.

  Joe shrugged. “Why not? Maybe something around the area, you know, because I have no eyes to put on a suit every morning. Clerking in a Village shop, waiting tables in a coffee house, something like that. I ought to be able to find a gig without sweating.”

  “Finding is easy. Holding is harder.”

  “I don’t read you, man.”

  Shank lit a cigarette and talked through the smoke.

  “You really think you could hold a job? You think you could get up every morning and go to work no matter how dragged you felt?” Joe was silent.

  “Work,” Shank said. “A nice draggy routine, one day after the other. You could ball it up on the weekend, man. No work for two whole days. And a hot dollar an hour would give you forty bucks to play around with. Man, you could really move on that sort of bread.”

  “What else is there?” Joe turned away. “That’s just it, man. Either way I lose. I ought to be able to hold a job. I mean, there’s a lot of pretty stupid cats working their eight hours a day with no trouble. So—”

  “Maybe that’s what makes them stupid.”

  Joe looked up.

  “You want a job?” Shank grinned. “I’ll give you a job, baby. Sales work. You pick your own hours and you make all the bread you want. Get dragged and you take the day off. Get hungry and you work overtime. No sweat, not anywhere up or down the line. I’ll give you a job if you’re hungry. But don’t go square on me. Don’t clerk in a shop or wait tables in a coffee joint. If you want to work you might as well make it pay.”

  “You mean selling.”

  “What else?”

  “Selling pot,” Joe said. “I would have asked you. I didn’t think you had enough trade to pass around.”

  Shank’s smile spread.

  “Selling pot,” Joe repeated. “That’s one easy circuit. Anita might not go for it. She’s funny about that. But she’ll learn. It’s good bread and it’s easy. You sure you’ll cut me in on it?”

  “Sure. But you’re not clear on it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s not pot.”

  “No? You branching out? Selling peyote, bennies, that type of stuff? I didn’t know there was that kind of bread in it. Peyote and bennies are almost legal.”

  “Not peyote,” Shank said. “Not benzedrine, not goof balls, not dexies. Something else.”

  He took Joe by the arm. “Come here,” he said, leading him to the dresser. He pulled open the drawer, took out a small cardboard box, opened it.

  Joe stared.

  “Heroin,” Shank said.

  “That’s evil stuff, Shank. I don’t want to fool around with it.”

  “Who fools? I don’t fool, man. I sell. A king-size difference. My customers like me. Everybody likes me.
No sweat and no bother. You know the mark-up on this stuff? Fifty, seventy-five percent. Nice big margin. Can’t lose, man.”

  “You can go to jail.”

  “They give tickets for jaywalking, baby. I still cross in the middle of the block. You can’t swing with all the laws, Joe. You got to play it the way it has to be played. It’s the only way.”

  Shank pursed his lips. It amazed him the way he always felt years older than Joe although chronologically it was the other way around. Now, I’m hiring Joe as a salesman after having ceremoniously raped Joe’s woman not too long ago. Shank was getting a special kick.

  “I can understand it,” Shank said. “I been selling hard stuff since the Mau-Mau took his fall. My new connection put me wise to it. I was bugged at first. Nervous. Everybody on the street looked like law to me, every shadow a detective with a big gold badge and a cannon in his holster. You get used to it. The money is very tall and the customers come to you instead of the other way around. You get used to it and you get to like it. A man has a pocket load of horse and he never starves, Joe. Money in the bank. Think about it.”

  Joe picked up one of the capsules, held it between his thumb and forefinger. Anita wouldn’t like his handling horse, he was certain. It was nothing they had ever talked about, but it was one of those things she was against, automatically.

  But he also knew Shank was right about a job being no good for Joe. And Anita and he couldn’t move out on Shank unless they had money. And they had to move out or Anita would move on her own.

  Why not let her move and forget it? He wondered about that and couldn’t come up with anything definite. In a number of ways the chick was an utter drag. No doubt about it—she was holding on, hanging on, wanting to change him, to grab him by the neck until he turned into a husband. But that was natural. She was a chick and chicks were like that. It was a question only of who would get there first, whether he could change her before she changed him. She was already very different from the innocent little virgin who had traipsed down to the Village to peer at the funny people.

  And she would change some more.

  But now it was Joe’s turn to make a concession. He and the girl would find an apartment. And he would sell for Shank. He could be cool about it. The police would never catch him.

  “I’m in,” he said finally.

  “Solid. We go out together tomorrow. I’ll hit you with a customer or two. Introduce you. Then you take the junk from me and sell it to them and we work out a split. I figure a straight split of fifty-fifty on the profits is straight enough. How about you?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “You’ll make a few bills a week once you get going. Five or six times what they would pay you for clerking in a shop somewhere. It’s good money. Then you and the chick can take your own apartment. Hell, on that kind of bread you can take a good apartment. Maybe something in the West Village. Or uptown. Anywhere. Furnish it up nice. She would like that.”

  “She probably would.”

  “Women are that way,” Shank said. “You probably worry about her not liking this gig. Well, she won’t. I can tell you that right now.”

  “I know.”

  “But she’ll get used to it. She likes certain things. A nice pad, good furniture, a fridge full of food, a little money to blow on clothes. Give her all that and she’ll forget where the bread comes from. It’s amazing the way a chick can forget what she wants to forget.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Money,” Shank said. “You know what I been doing? Been playing it cool, Joe. Got a bank account. Bank way uptown, another name on the account. The extra money goes there. Every week some more money goes in the account. In a couple of years I get out. Empty the account, put the dough in a money belt and disappear. I wind up in another town in another part of the country. Good clothes, lots of money. A stranger with plenty of money and a lot on the ball. I find my own place. Buy a club, maybe. Something like that. A fresh start with no questions and nobody who knows who I am. A new name and a new world. All ready to roll for me.”

  “I didn’t know that. I thought you spent everything.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  “You got all the angles working for you,” Joe said. “I don’t know if I’ll do it that way. Just make the money and spend it. Take it easy.”

  “You make your own life,” Shank said thoughtfully.

  “It’s up to you. People get what they want. That’s how it goes, nine times out of ten.”

  Anita was up in Harlem. She had taken the train there when she had left Joe; for perhaps an hour she had walked familiar streets and had seen familiar people. She had talked to some, for a moment or two, until there had been the mutual feeling of estrangement.

  Now, sadly, Anita returned to the subway station. Harlem was another world now, the girl could not escape concluding. She no longer knew the people living there. She had become a part and parcel of Saint Marks Place. She lived with Joe and Shank. And you could never go back, she ruefully reflected. Not in a million years. You couldn’t reset the clock. Back on the train, back to Saint Marks Place, back to Joe. But certain things would have to change, Anita determined. She and Joe would have to secure an apartment of their own. Either that or, by God, she would move to a furnished room and live her own life. She wanted Joe, needed Joe, maybe loved Joe. But enough was enough and she had definitely, certainly, positively had more than enough. Enough of Shank, enough of the apartment on Saint Marks Place, enough of aimless living. There had to be another way to find yourself. You could find yourself without losing both yourself and the world in the process.

  The train released her and in a few minutes she found herself back in the apartment. Joe and Shank were waiting for her.

  “Something to tell you,” Joe said. “Got a job. We can have our own place now.”

  At first Anita did not believe him. Then the news soaked in and her lips turned up in an automatic smile. Their own place, she exulted. Joe with a job. Their own life, and it could be a good life now, a clean life.

  “What kind of a job?” she asked brightly.

  “Sales work.”

  Something rang false to the girl. “What kind of sales work?” she wanted to know. And at the same time she did not want to know, because she already felt she knew the answer. And it was the wrong answer.

  But Joe told her.

  “Selling what Shank sells,” he said.

  And, when she turned white, not even realizing he was saying, cryptically, he would be selling not pot but heroin, Joe tried to explain.

  “Just for a little while,” he said. “Just until we get our heads above water. It’s safe, baby, it’s safe and it’s easy and it’s good bread. We can get a nice pad in a good neighborhood and live decent. And as soon as we get a little bit ahead I’ll look for a good job, an honest one, and we’ll be moving. I mean it, Anita.”

  Half of her mind realized he was lying. He would keep the easy money, the easy life. But the other half of her mind said she herself would turn his lie into truth, and he would change because of her. And then he would get that good job, that honest job, and it would all have been worth it. Their life would be good.

  “I’ll start tomorrow,” he said. “And tomorrow you go and look for an apartment. A decent one. Go as high as two hundred a month if you want. And unfurnished if you want. We’ll buy furniture. A little at a time, not too expensive, but decent furniture. We’ll fix the place up nice and we’ll live in it.”

  A good apartment, Anita listened to her racing thoughts. That would be nice. A good apartment with good furniture in a good neighborhood. More than she had expected. And for two hundred dollars a month they could afford a nice place.

  “Then we’ll start to roll,” he said, getting carried away now, half believing it himself. “We’ll get money ahead and I’ll get a good job. Maybe with a publishing house or an advertising agency. Something a little creative so I don’t go out of my mind. And we’ll live good, honey. Really live go
od. We don’t have to be rich. Just so we aren’t starving and we don’t live like pigs.”

  His words intoxicated her and her head began to swim. The vision was perfect, so she put her arms around him, ashamed of herself for having walked out on him before, ashamed for having yelled at him and ashamed for having come so close to hating him. She kissed him.

  Shank abruptly left without being asked. And then Joe stripped the girl while her skin tingled in anticipation. And then he touched her, curve for curve, swell for swell, till they tumbled to the bed and their bodies hounded each other.

  It was very good.

  The sun and the moon and the stars. The earth trembling,rocking, jolting.

  They moved frantically until they trapped each other in a sweaty fever-lock.

  Good.

  Very good.

  And, when the world exploded, Anita knew—with earth-shaking certainty—that at last everything was going to be all right.

  But she was wrong.

  The next day developed according to plan. Shank arose early to go to his bank on Fifth Avenue where he deposited money in his savings account. Then he returned to the apartment and woke Joe.

  In the course of the day Shank took Joe to three of the former’s customers. “This is Joe,” he told each one. “He’s my man. From now on you cop from him.” And the customers digested this information and filed it away in junkie minds.

  Anita spent the day hunting a suitable apartment. She bought the New York Times and checked out the ads. Two apartments she examined were suitable. One, located in the Village, a two-room, second-floor apartment on Bank Street, rented for a hundred and sixty. The other rented for one-forty, a two-room, first-floor place on East 19th Street near Gramercy Park. The building was immaculate, the apartment rent-controlled, and Anita preferred it.

  But she did not rent either apartment. Instead, she decided to discuss the matter with Joe. Maybe he would prefer one location to another, or one apartment to another. After all, he had a right to participate in the decision since they were renting the apartment together.

  She trotted back to Saint Marks Place and started dinner. Shank and Joe appeared a few minutes before dinner was ready. They talked about what they had done that afternoon and Anita thought hysterically of this insane domestic scene. Her man had a new job. He sold marijuana. And now she was cooking for him and his—his boss, for the love of God.