He went through quite a few of these dealers. They tended to live in lofts and to have young, sluggish girlfriends; each was trying to “get something going” in the record business. The coke, according to them, was just a sideline. After Towns got his coke, he would be asked to listen to one of their tape decks. Not once did he like what he heard, even taking into account that he was not in a musical mood when he made these visits and just wanted to get the coke and get the hell out of there. It was his view that each of these fellows was going to fare much better as a coke dealer than as a musician. Towns's favorite dealer was a tall, agreeable chap who had once worked at the Mayo Clinic as a counselor. He had a healing, therapeutic style of selling the coke; after each buy, Towns would flirt with the idea of sticking around for a little counseling, although he never followed through. One day, the fellow announced that in order to kick his own coke habit, which was becoming punishingly expensive, he was making his first visit to London. That struck Towns as being on the naïve side. How could you get away from coke in London? Some faraway island would seem to be more the ticket, but the fellow had his mind made up on the British Isles and there was no stopping him. Towns was convinced they would have him picked off as a user the second he stepped off the plane and be ready and waiting to sell him some.
Dealers brushed in and out of Towns's life, and he could not imagine wanting some coke and not being able to come up with it. Yet that would happen on occasion, even though he started out early in the evening trying to drum some up. He had always told himself that all he had to do in that situation was have a few drinks and he would be fine. But he wasn't that fine. He would sit around at one of his spots and drum his fingers on the bar, uneasy and unhappy. Was he hooked? He had heard that when a famed racketeer was buried, friends of his, for old time's sake, had stuck a few spoons of first-grade coke in there with him, since the racket man had been a user. Once, high and dry at four in the morning, Towns actually found himself wondering if it would be possible to dig up the fellow and get at the coke. It all depended on whether it was in the coffin with him or on the topsoil somewhere. Towns wasn't sure of the details. If he knew for sure it was in the topsoil, he might have found a shovel somewhere in the city, driven out to the cemetery and taken a try at it. That's how badly he wanted it sometimes.
One day Towns got word that his mother had died. It did not come around behind him and hit him on the head, since the death had been going on for a long time and it was just a matter of waiting for the phone call. It had always been his notion that when he got this particular news, he would drive up to a summer resort his mother used to take him to each September and hang out there for a weekend, sitting at the bar, tracing her presence, thinking through the fine times they had spent together. That would be his style of mourning. But now that he had the news, he didn't feel much like doing that. Maybe he would later. Instead, he sat in his apartment, thirty floors over the city, and tried to cry, but he could not drum up any tears. He was sure they would come later, in some oblique way, so he didn't worry too much about it. He knew himself and knew that he only cried when things sneaked up on him. Then he could cry with the best of them.
His mother was going to be put in a temporary coffin while the real one was being set up. And she would be lying in the chapel from six to eight that evening, with the family receiving close friends; the following day she would be buried. It presented a bit of a conflict for Towns. At six o'clock, he also had an appointment to meet Ramos, an old friend who had come in from California the night before. Formerly an advertising man, Ramos had now gone over entirely to an Old-West style. Long-faced, sleepy-eyed, he turned up in the city looking as though he had ridden for days through the Funeral Mountains on a burro, seeking cowpoke work. He had taken Towns into the coatroom of the bar at which they met, pulled out a leather pouch that might have contained gold dust, and given Towns a sniff of some of the purest coke he had ever run across. It rocketed back and flicked against a distant section in the back of his head that may never have been touched before. Now Harry Towns had a new story to tell his friends about Western coke, the wildest and most rambunctious of all. And he wanted that place in the back of his head to be flicked at again. So they made an appointment for six o'clock the following evening to go and get some more. Except that now Towns had to be at the chapel with his dead mother. He wondered, soon after he heard about the loss, if he would keep the appointment with Ramos, and even as he wondered, he knew he would. He didn't even have to turn it over in his mind. After all, it wasn't the funeral. That would make it an entirely different story. It was just a kind of chapel reception and if he turned up half an hour late, it would not be any great crime. And he would have the coke.
Harry Towns was at the midtown bar to meet Ramos at six on the dot, hoping to make a quick score and then hotfoot it over to the chapel. But Ramos loped in some twenty minutes late, squinty-eyed, muttering something about the sun having crossed him up on the time. He had never even heard of the sun when he was in advertising. He sat down, stretched his legs, and tried to get Towns into a talk about the essential dignity of man, even man as he existed in the big city. Towns felt he had to cut him off on that. People were already pouring into the chapel. At the same time, he didn't want to be rude to Ramos and risk blowing the transaction. He told Ramos about his mother, and the man from the West said he understood, no problem, except that he himself did not have the coke. It was just up the street a few blocks at a divorced girl's house. They would just have one drink and get going.
The divorced girl lived in a richly furnished high-rise apartment with animal skins on the floor. Towns had to walk carefully to keep from sticking his feet in their jaws. She had racks of fake bookshelves, too, suspense-novel types that whirled around when you pressed a button and had coke concealed on the other side. He was certain she was going to turn out to be his favorite dealer. Long-legged, freshly divorced, she hugged Ramos, Towns wondering how they knew each other. The animal skins may have been some sort of bridge between them. More likely, they were teammates dating back to Ramos's advertising days. She also seemed interested in Towns, handing him a powder box filled with coke, something he had always dreamed of. He got the idea that this wasn't even the coke he would be buying. It was a kind of guest coke, a getting-acquainted supply. An hors d'oeuvre. That's what he called falling into something. But what a time to be falling into it. She told him to dig in, help himself, and they could take care of their business a bit later. The girl had legs that went on and on and wouldn't quit. Why had anyone divorced her? She went over to fiddle with some elaborate stereo equipment and Towns put the powder box on his lap and took a deep snort as instructed.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, pressing the palm of one hand to the side of her head, “what in the hell are you doing?”
“You told me to dig in,” he said.
“Yes, but I didn't know we had a piggy here.”
“Don't tell someone to dig in if you don't mean it.”
Now Towns really felt foolish. There was no way to proceed from the piggy insult, which bit deep, to buying half an ounce of the drug. So he had blown at least half the chapel service and he wasn't even going to get the coke. He vowed then and there to deal only with the tape-deck boys in their lofts. Ramos tried to smooth things over by telling her, “He's a true man,” but she was breathing hard and there seemed no way to calm her down. “What a toke,” she said. “I've seen people take tokes, but this one, wow.”
“My mother just died,” said Towns. As he said it, he knew he was going to regret that remark for a long time, if not for the rest of his life. He had once seen a fellow get down on his knees to lick a few grains of coke from the bottom of a urinal. That fellow was a king compared to Harry Towns—using his mother's dead body to out of a jam. And it got him out, too. “Oh God,” said the girl, putting a comforting arm around Towns's shoulder, “I don't know how to handle death.” Towns just couldn't wait any longer. He gave Ramos the money, told him to buy som
e coke from the girl and he would meet him later, after the chapel service. Then he got into a cab and told the driver to please get him across town as fast as possible. It was an emergency. You could travel only so fast in city traffic, and Towns got it arranged in his mind that it was the cabbie's fault he was getting there so late. He arrived at a quarter to eight, with only fifteen minutes left to the service. Some remnants of his family were there, and a few scattered friends. Also his mother, off to one side, in the temporary coffin. Towns's aunt and his older brother were relieved to see him, but they didn't bawl him out. He would always appreciate that. They said they thought he might have been hurt and left it at that. What seemed to concern them most was the presence of a woman Towns's mother hadn't cared for. They couldn't get over how ironic it was that the disliked woman had turned up at the chapel. The few surviving members of Towns's family were very short and for the hundredth time, he wondered how he had gotten to be so tall. He chatted with some neighborhood friends of his mother, keeping a wary eye on the woman she hadn't liked. If Towns hadn't felt so low about showing up late, he might very well have chucked her out of there. A chapel official said the family's time was up. He gave out a few details about the funeral that was coming up the next day. The family filed out, and just as Towns was the last one to arrive, he was the last to leave, stopping for a moment at his mother's temporary coffin. He never should have worried about crying. Once he started, he cried like a sonofabitch. He probably set a chapel record. He cried from the tension, he cried from grief, he cried from the cab ride, from his coke habit, from the piggy insult, from his mother having to be cramped up in a temporary coffin and then shifted over to a real one when it was ready. They had a hard time getting him out of there.
That night, Ramos came by with the coke. Towns didn't weigh it, look at it, measure it. He never did. It seemed like a fat pack and he guessed that the girl had given him a good count because of the death. The main thing was that it was in there. He gave Ramos some of it, which was protocol, and told him he would see him around. “I'll stick with you, man,” said Ramos, but Towns said he would rather be alone. He didn't want people saying “man” to him and telling him he had “a terrific head.” All of which Ramos was capable of. The coke had a perfumed scent to it, a little like the fragrance of the divorcee. Had she rubbed some of it against herself? His guess was that she had. He took a snort of it, got into his bathrobe, and put on some Broadway show music, the kind his mother liked. The music would be the equivalent of driving up to the old summer resort. But it didn't work. It didn't go with the coke. During his mother's illness, he had put her up in his apartment and moved into a hotel, the idea being that she would get to enjoy the steel and glass and the view and the doorman service. But she didn't go with the apartment either, and they both knew it. She stayed there a few weeks, probably for his sake, to ease his mind about not having sent her away on lavish trips, and then she said she wanted to go back to her own home. She left without a trace, except for some sugar packets she had taken from a nearby restaurant and put in his sugar jar. To give him some extra and free sugar. He wondered if he should go over and take a look at the sugar. He was positive that it would start him crying again, but he didn't want to do that just then. He could always look at the sugar. Instead, he switched on some appropriate coke music, took another snort of the drug, and stared out at his view of the city, the glassed-in one that was costing him an arm and a leg each month. His mother had made a tremendous fuss over this view, but once again it was for his sake. She had been very ill and wanted to be in her own apartment. Staying in his had been a last little gift for him, allowing him to do something for her. He kept the tinfoil packet of coke open beside him and he knew that he was going to stay where he was until dawn. He was not a trees-and-sunset man, but he liked to be around for that precise time when the night crumbled and the new day got started. He liked to get ready for that moment by snorting coke, letting the drug drive him a hundred times higher than the thirtieth floor on which he lived. Once or twice, he wondered about the other people who were watching that moment, if there were any. It was probably only a few diplomats and a couple of hookers. Normally, he would take a snort, luxuriate in it, and wait for a noticeable dip in his mood before he took the next one. This time he didn't wait for the dips. Before they started, he headed them off with more snorts. He saw now that his goal was to get rid of the entire half ounce before dawn. Never mind about the problem of coming down. He would take a hot bath, some Valium. He'd punch himself in the jaw if necessary, ram his head against the bathroom tile if he had to. The main thing was to have nothing left by the time it was dawn so he could be starting out clean on the day of the funeral. Then, no matter what he was offered, he would turn it down. He didn't care what it was, Brooklyn coke, Western coke, Peruvian coke rocks, coke out of Central Harlem. If someone gave him stuff that came out of an intensive-care unit, coke that had been used for goddamn brain surgery, he would pass it right by. Because the chapel was one thing. But anyone who stuck so much as a grain of that white shit up his nose on the actual day of his mother's funeral had to be some new and as yet undiscovered breed of sonofabitch. The lowest.
“The thing I like about Harry Towns is that everything astonishes him.”
An Italian writer friend he loved very much had been overheard making that remark and as far as Harry Towns was concerned it was the most attractive thing anyone had ever said about him. He wasn't sure it suited him exactly. Maybe it applied to the old him. But it did tickle him—the idea of a fellow past forty going around being astonished all the time. On occasion, he would use this description in conversation with friends. It did not slide neatly into the flow of talk. He had to shove it in, but he did, because he liked it so much. “Astonished” was probably too strong a word, but in truth, hardly a day passed that some turn of events did not catch him a little off guard. In football terms, it was called getting hit from the blind side. For example, one night, out of the blue, a girl he thought he knew pretty intimately came up with an extra marriage; she was clearly on record as having had one under her belt, but somehow the early union had slipped her mind. And for good measure, there was an eight-year-old kid in the picture, too, one who was stowed away somewhere in Maine with her first husband's parents. On another occasion, a long-time friend of Towns's showed up unannounced at his apartment with a twin brother, thin, pale, with a little less hair than Towns's buddy, and a vague hint of mental institutions around the eyes; but he was a twin brother, no question about it. So out of nowhere, after ten years, there was not one but two Vinnys and Harry Towns was supposed to absorb the extra one and go about his business. Which he did, except that he had to be thrown a little off stride. It was that kind of thing. Little shockers, almost on a daily basis.
Late one night, the slender Eurasian woman who ran his favorite bar turned to the “gypsies,” an absolute rock-bottom handful of stalwarts who closed the place regularly at four in the morning (and after eight years of working a “straight” job, nine-to-five, how he loved being one of them) and suddenly, erratically, screamed out, “You're all shits,” flinging her cash register through the window. What kind of behavior was that? She was famed for handling difficult situations with subtlety and finesse. Towns tried to grab on to some gross piece of behavior that might have brought on this outburst—the only one of which she had been guilty in anyone's memory. All he could come up with was that one of them had slumped over and fallen asleep with his head on the table. A film dubber had done that, halfway through his dinner. Is that why they were all shits? What's so shitty about that?
If you walked the streets of the city, there was plenty to be astonished about. He supposed that was true if you lived in Taos, New Mexico, but he wasn't convinced of it. One day Towns saw an elderly and distinguished-looking man with homburg and cane hobble off briskly in pursuit of a lovely young girl. She was about twenty feet ahead of him and kept taking terrified looks over her shoulder at him. About that brisk hobbling. It's a
tough one to pull off, but that's exactly what he was doing. She was stumbling along, not handling her high heels too well. Even though she was more or less running and he was doing his hobbling motion, the gap between them wasn't getting any wider. It was a crowded sunny lunchtime with plenty of secretaries floating around. Towns seemed to be the only one on the street who was aware of this rope of urgency between the man and the girl; he caught onto it, falling in step with them. The girl twirled through traffic, caught her heel in a manhole cover, and fell, long legs gaping, flowered skirt above her hips, black magnificent cunt screaming at the sky. The man stopped, leaning on his cane, as though he did not want to press his advantage. Towns stopped, too. She seemed to take an awfully long time getting herself together. Not that there was any studied sensuality to her behavior. The confusion appeared to come out of those early terrified looks over her shoulder. The girl was striking and even aristocratic-looking, that movie kind of Via Veneto aristocracy. Dominique Sanda, if you insist. But there was a young-colt brand of clumsiness in the picture, too. She started to run again and the man in the homburg resumed his inevitable pursuit of her. The girl went through the revolving door of a department store and, after a few beats, the man followed her. That's when Towns decided to call it a day. He could not testify to his source of information, but he would have laid four to one they were going to wind up in the lingerie department. They would get there by escalator. What was Towns going to do up there with them? What was he going to see? The manhole tableau was a tough act to follow, so he decided to take it for what it was, a perfect little erotic cameo that might just as well have been staged for his benefit. It was a gift. He owned it and could play it back any time he wanted to.
About Harry Towns Page 8
