About Harry Towns

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  Harry Towns planned on taking a long drive to someplace he hadn't been so he could be alone and sort things out, but he got whisked off to California on a job he felt he couldn't turn down. He told himself the work would be good for him. Just before he left, he ran into the cookie nurse at a singles place and asked her if she had ever gone in and fooled around with his father. She said she had but her eyes told him she hadn't. Cunt. No wonder he hadn't moved in on her. It wasn't that she was living with his friend. The guy wasn't that close a friend. It was this kind of behavior. She would tell you that she would go in and screw around with your father and then she wouldn't.

  He polished off the California work in about a week; whenever it sagged a little, he would say, “Hey, listen, I just lost both my parents, back to back.” It burned him up when people advanced the theory that his father died because he couldn't live without his wife. He heard a lot of that and he didn't buy any of it. Towns hadn't been married to anyone for fifty years the way his father had and it didn't look as if there was going to be time to squeeze someone in for half a century. But he just couldn't afford to think that if you loved someone very much and they died, you had to hop right into the grave with them. He preferred to think that you mourned for them and then went about your business.

  He went on an erratic crying schedule. The first burst came at the Los Angeles airport, on the way for a quick stopover in Vegas. He was really smoking with the late-night check-in stewardess at the L. A. airport, a small girl with a huge chest and an angel's face. He almost had her talked into going to Vegas with him. One extra shove and she would have been on the seat next to him. He did it right in front of the Air West pilots, too, and they didn't appreciate it much. On the other hand, two hookers saw the whole thing and got a big kick out of it. Then he got on the plane and cried all the way to Caesar's Palace. The hookers saw that one, too, and must have wondered if he were crazy. He had just finished hustling a stewardess. He might just as well have been Cary Grant back there at the airport. What was he doing all that crying for? Back East, he gave himself the job of copying over his address book. Halfway along, he came to his father's name and business number. He really went that time. For a period there, he didn't think he was ever going to stop. It was having to make that particular decision. What do you do, carry your dead father over into the new address book? Or drop him from the rolls, no more father, no more phone number, and you pick up that extra space for some new piece of ass?

  He never did get to take that drive. The one in which he was going to go to a strange place and sort things out. The awful part is that he never seemed to get any huge lessons out of the things that happened to him. He was brimming over with small nuggets of information he had gathered for his work. For example, when frisking a homicide suspect in a stabbing case, the first thing detectives check for is a dry-cleaning ticket. On the theory that the suspect is going to ship his bloodstained clothing right off to the cleaner's. When shot at, cops are taught to jump to their left since most gunmen are right-handed and will either fire wide of the mark or, at worst, nick your shoulder. He knew there was no such thing as a second wind in running. If you got one, it meant you had not been “red-lining it,” that is, running full out. He kept his young son enthralled for hours with this kind of information. But he didn't own any real wisdom and this bothered him. Instead, he borrowed other people's. Never sleep with a woman who has more problems than you do. Nelson Algren. Don't look over your shoulder because someone might be gaining on you. Satchel Paige. People behave well only because they lack the character to behave poorly. La Rochefoucauld. Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God. Some British guy. Stuff like that. Wasn't it time for him to be coming up with a few of his own? Pressed to the wall, he would probably produce this list:

  1. Be very lucky.

  2. Watch your ass.

  Because if they could get your father's pulse to stop—considering the way he looked, the way he bounced along, his smile, and the fifteen years, minimum, that Harry Towns had scripted up for him—if they could keep him out of that paid-for apartment on lower Park, and on top of everything, get him to die back to back with Towns's mom, the two of them stowed underground in the Jersey Flats, why then all bets were off and anything was possible. Anything you could dream up. You name it. Any fucking thing in the world.

  They weren't married. They weren't officially separated. They weren't much of anything. The way it worked is that each Sunday, Harry Towns's boy would be shipped into the city with a package of bills and Towns would take care of them; he saw it not so much in terms of paying them as whittling down the stacks as they arrived. At the time they broke up, he owned a massive wardrobe, mostly because he rarely threw away clothing and still had sweat shirts that dated twenty years back, ones he had bought at college. He left most of his clothing behind, although, admittedly, he took along his key outfits, four leather sport jackets and four pairs of his top slacks, in combinations that he could keep switching around so that he came across as being well dressed. A dapper newscaster who had never been seen twice in the same outfit stopped Harry Towns on several occasions and said, “Jesus, where do you get your stuff?,” a tribute to Towns's nimble footwork as a switcher of outfits. And a girl who worked in costume design once said to him, “I understand you're not afraid of clothing.” He left his tax records behind, along with his Army uniform and a ton of books; in this latter category, he skimmed off the cream, fifty winners—books like Henry Esmond and Middlemarch, ones he had read but wanted to take a second and more mature shot at. He left several suitcases with his wife, taking with him one that was expensive and also professionally battered; it was that way when he bought it and might have belonged to an Italian film director, one whose career had been uneven. The suitcase looked fine, but it weighed a ton— before you put anything into it. He had always had a lot of trouble picking out just the right suitcase; he knew, almost the second he bought this one, that it would soon be on its way out. He left with what he saw as a lean and mean assortment of items, and as far as he knew, his wife had not thrown out the rest of his possessions. They met for dinner once in a while, and if she had unloaded his old sweat shirts, he felt he would have sensed it—but he never asked her. He had gone to see a divorce lawyer once, and they wound up talking about Ethel Merman. And he had received a vague exploratory call from a lawyer of hers. It stayed vague and finally petered out. None of this added up to much of an arrangement, except that built into it—and the reason they probably kept it going that way—was the unspoken notion that at one point or another they would give it Another Try. It was a possibility that kept floating around on the edge of his life; Towns liked to think it was the morning he woke up and heard about the Tom Eagleton Vice-Presidential nomination that he decided to make his move.

  To spell it out accurately, he did not wake up. It was ten in the morning, and he had never been asleep. He heard about Eagleton at a time when he was not only wide but outrageously awake, staring at the ceiling and flailing out for sleep as though it were a fish he had a chance of holding if he could just grab it. Inside his chest, an involuntary muscle snapped away like a tiny whip. This took place a little too far over to the left to be a heart attack, so he decided for the moment to sweep that possibility under the rug, though there was no way to rule it out entirely. It might have been fascinating to lie there and watch this snapping phenomenon take place in his own body, except that, at the moment, Harry Towns was in no mood to be fascinated. He had gotten himself into this by-now familiar condition by violating a basic cocaine rule: if you have any thought of falling asleep at night or accomplishing something when the sun comes up, you don't get under way by inhaling great vacuuming blasts of the drug at four in the morning. Which is what he had done. And in the past several months, he had piled up a dangerous number of violations. What happened is that for each transgression, in addition to the snapping, you lost an entire day. This was fine if you were a failed romantic poet and were supposed to touch b
ottom a few times, knock off a couple of sonnets, and check out at age thirty-three. But Harry Towns was a screenwriter in his forties, and each of those lost snapper days made it that much tougher to whittle down the pile of bills his son carried in on the train each Sunday. He knew that if he got up on one elbow, he could see a mound of them piled high on an end table. So he stayed as flat as he could.

  The only reason he switched on the news was so he could tell himself he hadn't wasted the whole day. It was a little like nourishment. He would take some news into his system. This would enrich him and make him a slightly better person. And you never knew. A stray item about a union dispute or India's parliament might feed its way into a screenplay one day. So Harry Towns told himself he wasn't really staring at the ceiling, flailing out for sleep. An entire day was not being thrown over to lying around being shaky. He was working, soaking up information, doing a little research for future projects. It was bullshit, but it was all he had.

  The actual sound of the news was not soothing to him. Music would have been better, even experimental-rock sounds. Best of all would have been a tomblike silence. Instead he had the crackle of the news and the traffic outside; even though he was thirty stories up, each car seemed to be headed into his mouth. It wasn't that difficult to see why Towns made the connection between himself and Eagleton. He and the Senator were the same age. And he came from a state in the Midwest right next to the one in which Towns had gone to college. They were in the same football conference. Eagleton was a family man, just like Towns, except that Eagleton had kept his family together, while Towns had let his own fall to pieces. He had that great name: Eagleton. It sounded just like the country. If America hadn't been named America, it could have been called Eagleton, and no one would have known the difference. Russia would never fool around with Eagleton, the Number One power. If you don't like Eagleton, leave it! So Harry Towns identified with this terrific new fellow who turned up out of nowhere and was going to get a try at the Vice-Presidency. Towns loved people who came out of nowhere. In the one speech he had ever made, he told a group of high-school students that America was good because it kept coming up with people like that. The country had an endless supply. They came galloping out of nowhere just when you needed them. This was probably true about Finland, too, but Harry Towns didn't say that in his speech. Usually, you found out these “new” people had spent years building a foundation. A bit later, when Harry Towns got a look at the New York Times background profile, he found out that Eagleton was no exception.

  He slipped out of the lobby of his apartment building to get the newspaper, looking around to make sure that a normal and pretty girl who lived up the street in a brownstone wasn't out walking her dog. They had flirted around a bit, and in a display of the new female consciousness elevation, she had reached out and pinched his ass in broad daylight. A very pretty girl had done that to him. He did not see himself as having set the world on fire, but wouldn't it be something if it turned out that he had gotten as far as he had because he had a cute ass? And only now were women allowed to let him know about it? That would be some shocker. Harry Towns felt strongly that the fallout from the move that women had made was terrific. For everybody. Or at least it was going to be. A statement he liked to throw out was: “I'm just sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the dust to settle.” In actuality, he wasn't sitting on the sidelines. For example, he could now say to a woman, “Listen, I'm not an easy lay.” The remark tended to back most of them off a bit, but some wound up enjoying it. This particular girl let him neck with her as long as they did it in the lobby of his building and she got to keep one hand on the mailbox and an eye on the street. As far as getting her up to his apartment, it was no dice. There was something charming about this arrangement, and Harry Towns meant to get around to her one day. This would be at some future point, after he had closed down his involvement with hookers and cocktail waitresses, freeing himself for everyday girls. Meanwhile, he didn't want to blow it by letting her see him after a cocaine night, his eyes filmed over and tufts of what was left of his hair shooting out in different directions. Before going out in the evening, he could get his hair to look fairly civilized by shampooing it a certain way and unloading half an aerosol can of thick hair spray on it. The only way to get away with his kind of weirdly tufted hair, au naturel, was to be an atomic physicist, which he wasn't, or to say the hell with it, this is me, which he couldn't. The normal girl was nowhere in sight, so he slipped across the street and bought a quart of Light 'n' Lively milk and the Times, both of which he took back to what he still referred to, only sardonically now, as his tower of steel and glass, high above Manhattan. One plus item in the cocaine column, in fact the only one he could think of at the moment, was that it deadened your appetite and kept you on the skinny side. That made it the world's most expensive diet. He could get the Light ‘n' Lively down, but it would be midnight before he felt the first stirrings of appetite. He would probably want a couple of egg rolls then. Meanwhile, he sipped the milk and read the Times, gliding by the latest developments in SALT and zeroing in on the background Eagleton coverage. He just wasn't up to SALT breakthroughs at the moment. If he had been in love with Eagleton before, he was head over heels after he took a look at the fellow's picture. He looked exactly like his name. Towns loved his profile, and he loved his hairline. He had every one of his hairs and every one was in place. Towns felt that Eagle-ton deserved that hairline, too, after the way he had worked his way up, doing various jobs in the county, any one they threw at him, always performing selflessly and not getting caught in municipal-bond scandals. Just as Towns had suspected, he hadn't really come out of nowhere. They had a picture of his family in there, the one he had made sure to hold together, and they looked terrific, too. Towns had a famous racketeer friend who looked him in the eye one night and said he never trusted a man unless the fellow had “a tight family.” He had his head blown off in a Queens restaurant, but Towns always remembered the remark and felt guilty about not having one himself.

  The reason Harry Towns was so involved with the Vice-Presidential candidate was that, even though they were the same age and had gone to schools that were in the same football conference, Eagleton's life, a slow upward climb, was just coming into blossom, whereas Harry Towns saw himself as being on a downhill slide. Forget about his seeing himself on one. He really was on one. He could not even pass himself off as a fellow who had peaked. If he had, he wished someone had tapped him on the shoulder when he was way up on that peak so he could have taken out a little time to enjoy it. Tom Eagleton wasn't into coke. He sure as hell wasn't shelling out three hundred dollars a week for a quarter of an ounce and slowly easing his way into the half-ounce league; with money that should have been used to whittle down the huge stack of bills on the end table, money he could have turned over to his wife so she could buy a couch and some ottomans and have a complete living room like other people. Was Eagleton seeing his kid once a week, taking him to a monster movie, a Mexican restaurant, and then back to the train? Not on your life. Let's say that perfect family portrait in the Times was a little exaggerated for political purposes and that if you peeled off a layer or two there were a couple of serious problems in the Eagleton family, the kind everybody had. A heart murmur, something like that. At least Eagleton had hung in there and stuck around, so that no matter how badly he felt, his children could see him before they went to bed at night. He wasn't stretched out in any king-sized bed that had been recommended by Playboy magazine, watching a chest muscle snap. And finding traces of the hooker he had had up there with him the night before. (Harry Towns had been lucky with this particular hooker. She was a fresh young one, new on the street, and she didn't have a price list. She didn't say, “Turn over? Are you kidding! That's an extra ten.” And when he unpeeled her, he had gotten a delightful surprise—long pretty legs, a perfect ass, and the name “Tony” tattooed above one nipple. She apologized for the Tony inscription, saying, “It took six bikers to hold me down and do it.”
That's all Towns had to hear. He tore into her and the tattoo, and unless she was the world's greatest actress, he got to her. There was a line around the block of ones he hadn't gotten to, so he felt qualified to know when he had struck paydirt.) None of which altered the fact that Eagleton wasn't spending his time in beds recommended by Playboy magazine, rolling around with tattooed hookers. He wasn't losing entire days sipping Light 'n' Lively, feeling shaky and looking ahead to the high point of his day, a lonely midnight egg roll. You didn't make that firm, steady climb to the nation's second biggest job with that type of behavior. So then the shock-treatment story broke, and under other circumstances, Harry Towns might have permitted himself an ironic chuckle. Except that he was in no condition to do any ironic chuckling. Besides, Towns looked at it this way: even while Eagleton was soaking up shock treatments, the man wasn't busy busting up any families. He probably had a lot of life insurance and wasn't forking over any three hundred dollars a week to coke dealers. He did his work, electrodes or no electrodes. A few blasts and right back to the desk. With no time for tattooed hookers. Unless that was the next big story on the horizon. Even if it was, it had nothing to do with Harry Towns.