About Harry Towns

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  That first night, he walked her back to her small ranch house, which was hair-raisingly neat, and found another missing piece, except that it was a terrific one. She had a little girl who was an exact replica of herself, with a Latin overlay that gave the New England style some seasoning. “She's awful,” said her mother, as she hopped right up on Harry Towns's lap. “She goes around all day with no pants.” As if Harry Towns had to be told that. He knew that the second she hopped up there, even though he wasn't used to little girls. He did freight train imitations and coin tricks, quickly exhausting his repertoire but she stayed on his lap anyway. She would have stayed on there for a few weeks if her mother hadn't pried her off. The Latin seasoning came from her father, a product of Rio nobility, who had sworn he was coming to get her, using bribes and guns if necessary. For about a week, Harry Towns forgot all about his past and his roots and got right into the middle of this situation, seeing himself as a fellow whose obligation it was to stand between the two females and the South-of-the-Border nobleman who had beaten them both up, causing them to flee Rio and hide in Brawley. That father was banned from the States for poor moral character; but if he ever bribed his way ashore and made his way inland, tracking his old family down, Harry Towns felt confident he would know how to deal with him. In the event that he brought along Rio guns, there was always Harmon to help out. He sympathized with the Latin for wanting to have his daughter back, but there was no excuse for him slamming the two of them around. Harry Towns gave his new friend seven hundred dollars as a step toward putting some legal distance between herself and the Rio man. She protested an awful lot about accepting the money, but he got her to take it anyway. He was never in any doubt that she would. And it was money he needed.

  The yellow-haired New England girl was a bit like a high-keyed filly; each night he stroked her and made love to her, often just to calm her down. They made love on a rug in front of a fireplace, even though it was much too hot for that in Brawley. It was because she was romantically inclined that she felt she had to bring the fireplace into play. After one of her secretarial pauses, instead of plunging on to the next lovemaking sequence, she jumped up and decided they all ought to sweep off to Bali. Only she wasn't kidding. Before the Rio nobleman had developed a poor moral character and started smacking her in the head, they used to do things like that—sweep off to Bali or Villefranche. The whole fun of it was to do it on impulse. Harry Towns was charmed by her jumping up and down naked, saying, “Let's do it, let's do it,” but he wasn't one of those people. He was more deliberate.

  She suggested that they both refer to his cock as “Pepe,” and that's another move he didn't much care for. “It's just part of my body,” he said. “There's no need to give it a name.” He really disappointed her on that one; she made many efforts to get the name to stick, which he fended off. Greeting him at the door, she would ask, “How's Pepe today?” To which he would say, “Look, I'm willing to go with you on a lot of things, but I'm just not buying Pepe.” He would have bet anything that the Rio man went in for that. That's probably where the idea originated. The Rio man probably wouldn't dream of going around the corner unless he had at least three names festooned on his dick.

  Another thing he wouldn't do was stay over at her place, although he was unable to explain why. Even if it was four in the morning, he went back to his Brawley hotel, and not because his room was quaint. Brawley was a town without quaintness. All he could come up with to support his position was the behavior of the late Lenny Bruce, who had hundreds of affairs but never stayed over at a girl's house. He had a feeling the New England girl would not take comfort in that so he didn't bother telling her about the great stand-up comic's predilections.

  After a few weeks in Brawley, he started to get a little lonely, even though he wasn't sure what he was lonely for. He missed his son, but he knew the boy was all right, so he didn't miss him that much. Did he miss his new apartment, the one that was in the middle of regally carpeted hotels? How could he miss his mother and father back East, when they were underground? Did he miss his father's pocket watch and the picture of both his folks, which for some reason he didn't frame but kept tucked inside an Italian sportshirt? Was he lonely for the bodyguards and stewardesses? Maybe it was Brawley that was getting to him, a place that was built for driving through but definitely not for staying in. Each little wave of loneliness got the girl more keyed up; she had terrifically keen antennae for loneliness. Whenever a wave of it broke against Harry Towns, she popped her fragrant little daughter onto his lap and the child clung to Harry Towns's neck. One night, when he was lying in the blonde girl's bed, she slipped her sleeping little daughter under the covers with him and said she was going out to get some fried chicken breasts. They were a favorite of his and they weren't bad in Brawley. While she was gone, Harry Towns hugged the little girl, who was sucking her thumb, and gave her quite a few licks between her legs. It was only later that he considered the possible consequences, that instantly upon hitting her teens, she would take on the entire male and female population of St. Tropez, including dogs and pet ocelots, in pursuit of those mysterious comatose primal licks. Still, at the moment, it would have taken a squadron of highly motivated commandos to hold him back. She pressed herself toward him, and seemed to keep on sleeping. After he had done this, he knew he would have no need ever to do it again. He wasn't going to be one of those fellows who gets rounded up every time there is a local sex crime. The experience just wasn't apocalyptical. But he had to work it in once and get it out of the way. When her mother came back with the fried chicken breasts, Harry Towns said, “All I did was hug her.” The mother's smile had a mischievous wrinkle to it as she scooped up the little girl and slipped her back in her own bed. “I'll just bet,” she said. At the moment, he felt the Rio nobleman ought to be greeted at the docks with a brass band and Harry Towns shipped out of the country. But he also saw that he had been set up. It would have been different if he had tiptoed over to the girl's cot in the dead of night and leaned in for some furtive licks. But her own mother had slipped her in there with him. She could only have been giving Harry Towns a sneak preview of what it could be like if he stayed with the two of them. As the mother declined, which had to be quite a ways off, her daughter would be ripening in the sun, blonde, fragrant, Continentally seasoned, ready to go on stage in her mother's place.

  Still, he backed off. One night, a wave of sadness, bigger and more serious than the previous ones, washed over Harry Towns.

  “Can't you see that you're unhappy?” she said.

  “I know that,” he said.

  “And you're depressed.”

  “I know that. Do you think that's what makes unhappy people happy? Telling them that they're not happy?”

  “But you're so miserable.”

  She was a lovely woman, with many fine qualities, but dealing out insightful therapy was not her strong suit. He felt a sudden flash of kinship with the high-born Rio man. He didn't know quite how to leave, so one night, in order to indicate to her that their relationship had reached a shaky stage, he drove his fist through the mantel. It was a cheaply constructed Brawley-designed structure, so his fist went through easily, skinning his knuckles but not breaking them. It began as a gesture, but it turned into a genuine rage that didn't subside as he drove back East. Waiting for him was a series of letters from the girl, setting forth painstaking analyses of the precise quality of her love for him. One of them said she had once been in love with him, but now she just loved him. In the second letter, she told him to forget the first one. What she really meant was that it was impossible to love and not be loved, so her love had shifted to a different plateau, not higher or lower, but more or less off to the side, although not beyond reach. He didn't read the third letter, because he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about. And he was having dreams about rugged substantial-looking men with an arm or a leg missing. As far as he could recall, these were his first severed-limb dreams, and he was all in favor of canceling the
series.

  For lack of a better plan, he reverted to his old style, getting involved with a black, thickly gummed new form of cocaine and a nest of girls who went in and out of drug rehabilitation centers. Each one was in her early twenties, going on forty-five, but temporarily pretty. He had to wait for them to sign out on passes in order to get at them. At least they weren't Pepe girls. He developed a small lesion on his penis, which he let slide; shortly thereafter, two of the girls phoned and reported raging brush-fire infections in their bodily orifices. A friend of his, who ran into one, said, “What did you do to Holly? She looks as if she spent two years in the Mekong Delta.” They had a chuckle about this, although when Harry Towns walked off, he thought to himself that he must be some sonofabitch for doing that to Holly.

  Going back into cocaine, especially black gummed coke, after a long time away, was like diving into a pool without checking the water level. Harry Towns cracked his head on the bottom. One night, in his loft with a freshly healed rehabilitation girl, he went into a deep coma, which was oddly pleasant until he realized he was not going to have an easy time climbing out of it. The drug-center girl brought him a great soup bowl of coffee which helped Harry Towns get to his feet and over to the new doctor he had switched to. This man took care of people in the communications field and had once smacked a Secretary of State and gotten away with it. Towns liked knowing that about him. The new man said he had an illness of the blood which would keep him exhausted for months. Harry Towns had been living in fear of big-league diseases; he grabbed the blood problem and ran like a thief. But it was big league enough. He felt as if his bones had turned to sponge. Now he knew what Harmon went through, although at least the Brawley man had the Border Patrol to distract him. It was all Harry Towns could do to answer the phone, so he didn't answer it. He named himself Sergeant Spongecake, although he was careful not to say that to anyone. If the little girl from the Southwest ever visited him, he might say it to her. His wife wanted to run over with nourishing stews, but that would have started up some machinery he wanted to keep idle so he held her off.

  Once again, illness had come to his rescue. It had always pinned him by the shoulders and forced him to give himself a once-over. It did this time, too. The doctor told Harry Towns that this was the kind of illness it was best to ignore. Just hang in there, don't do anything preposterous, and eventually it would peter out. It was a little hard to ignore. Following those instructions would be like living in a tiny apartment with an Irish wolfhound and pretending it wasn't there. But Harry Towns set out to ignore his illness as aggressively as possible. Once in a while, he would get a spasm of energy. During one of them, he stood up and put on a record, not for a stewardess or a drug rehab girl, but just for himself. With no coke to season the music. When was the last time he had done something like that? He read a few Civil War books, and started Middlemarch, giving it a new, more mature reading. He read it to find out what was in it, not to get through it and have a notch on his belt. When he was strong enough to walk, he took another look at the neighborhood. He found out it wasn't all regal hotels and Persian Gulf embassies. Salted in among them was a tiny dry-cleaning store and a delicatessen where you could get corned-beef sandwiches. They were on the regal and slick side, but they were a start. Once the delicatessen fellows saw that you were a regular, they would make non-menu French toast for you, sneaking it out clandestinely so that the transient utility execs didn't get wind of it. He bought an extension cord in a store that was only nine blocks away. He just hadn't checked the neighborhood thoroughly the first time. Tiny little stores were stuck away in it like raisins in his mother's rice pudding. He used to have to wade through vast sections in order to ferret out the little black treasures. (Why hadn't she put in more raisins? Certainly it wasn't the cost. Perhaps she was teaching him endurance and the joys that came from persistence of effort.) In any case, the neighborhood was like one of his mother's old rice puddings. He knew that if he hopped in a cab, within five minutes he could find anything from Ukrainian dancers to figs from the Negev, but it was important to establish some kind of beachhead right next to his apartment. A home. He couldn't find a stoop that you could sit out on and watch the world go by, but he made friends with his landlord, a distributor of adventurously designed lamps who lived in the apartment above and the one below. The landlord made no bones about his plans to snare on Towns's studio once his lamp business caught fire. Towns disarmed him by handing him an ancient bottle of brandy. He didn't do this for any personal gain, but the startled landlord became drenched with sweat and fired off a year's extension on the lease, presenting it to Harry Towns on the spot. As another present, he confided that he was part Oriental, and on his third marriage, but not to tell anybody.

  When Harry Towns started to feel a little better, he still didn't answer the phone. If a fellow from his old life dropped by, he would arrange himself in a wan position and say, “It's an amazing disease. You think you're making progress and the next day you're back at the starter's gate.” He wasn't making that one up either. He said he felt just like a Victorian girl—in a decline. His underworld friends didn't follow him on that one. The illness was a wonderful protection against his old style, and he worked it for all it was worth. The cocaine fell into some perspective, too. A haggard, drug-consumed friend came by to say a girl he was living with had suddenly pulled up stakes and, with no warning, lit out for Oklahoma. Towns's friend dealt with this blow by getting himself an ounce of “girl,” the latest name for coke, and taking it to bed with him, staying there with it for three days. It sounded awful to Towns, the loneliest story he could remember hearing. He had handled things that way himself and didn't want to handle them that way anymore. He would not sign an affidavit on this point—it was a terribly alluring force—but he felt he had put cocaine behind him. No doctor had so much as hinted at this, but somehow he connected it up with his illness. It was a scary kind of disease in that there were no rewards for good behavior. Let's say you slept twelve hours straight; you were liable to wake up feeling you needed a little nap. He Llamed this state of affairs on the coke, whether it was the coke's fault or not. If someone dropped by with a fistful of it, he would be hard pressed not to take a little taste. He had to admit that. But he felt confident he would not be hunting it down anymore.

  One day he helped a girl back from a tiny grocery store with her packages. She came up to his apartment, wriggling and squirming and throwing out her breasts, and said she would like to be Harry Towns's friend, since she was a neighbor and it would be a waste not to be. He said fine, except that she would have to stop doing that with her tits. Otherwise, there would be no basis for a friendship. It would be the same old thing. She seemed relieved to hear this, and let her breasts settle down. And they did become friends, a breakthrough for Harry Towns. He developed a few arrangements like this, girls he wasn't sleeping with, although he did not want this pattern to get out of hand. It was a wrench for him, but he felt he was on the right track. Maybe he would get around to sleeping with them and maybe he wouldn't. There was fun in going either way. And it was a pleasure not to have all that pressure to deal with.

  He fixed up his apartment. He did not stock it with priceless art treasures of the world, but he made sure that everything he picked out was something he liked. If he saw that a napkin holder was not going to give him any pleasure, he kept hunting for one that would. He threw out his glass and mirrored wall decorations. In some wild and circuitous turn of logic that had once made sense to him, he had felt they would be an aid in getting stewardesses to whip off their clothes. A friend had once described his old apartment as looking like an airport lounge. Maybe that was the connection. He bought some plants and took terrific care of them, pleased when they didn't die right off and loving it each time a new little shoot appeared. Once in a while, he would stand back and take a look at his apartment and wonder if it threw off the impression that an interesting fellow lived in it. He thought it probably did, but he couldn't tell for sur
e. He bought things like Swiss cheese and noodle soup and Crisco, and even weighed in one day with a head of lettuce. Each and every item was nonseductive. And all of this made him feel less rudderless.

  He began to feel a faint shiver of the possibilities that were now open to him. He might meet a sweet and easygoing girl he wanted to be with, and if he did, he would even close an eye if she wanted to call his cock “Pepe.” She could call it “Arturo” if he felt comfortable with her, although the kind of girl he had in mind wouldn't. In any case, there was no rush on that. He could now go to places like Sofia, although he was seasoned enough to know that such trips were not going to do the trick for him. The main thing was he could go there without having to report in to anyone. For the first time in his life, the only one he had to check in with was Harry Towns. (And there really was a reason to go to Sofia. What good was the city if you didn't go to it? It was a waste of thousands of years of civilization and an extremely complex culture. A wasted city.) Or how about doing ten years of hard work? What was wrong with that plan? Non-bodyguard friends, no coke, girls he was friends with, girls he slept with, girls he did both with, and, on occasion, no girls. Or all of the above. Was there any flaw in that attack?

  Before he got too ambitious, he had to get his health back. He was not about to recommend it to friends, but he had come up with a remarkable illness and had to admire its ingenious turns. Between spells of weakness, he would suddenly be filled with great foaming cascades of energy, during which he would construct myths, fables, encyclopedic films and novels—what seemed at the time to be ground-breaking theories of time and existence. He took a few notes glancing at them when he got weak again. Some held up. During the wild periods, he would feel frustrated that there weren't typewriters that could keep pace with his output, that a hundred people weren't at his disposal to dispatch his work to the outside world, that he didn't have twenty lives in which to get all of it done. He was no judge, of course, but he didn't feel deranged. He just had all this energy and his mind kept swirling. These bursts took a physical turn, too. One day he snapped a handgrip together one hundred and seventy-five times, besting his old record of ninety. He made a breakthrough in running, seven nonstop miles, the full circumference of the nearby park, and seriously considered taking off after Frank Shorter, a man known to relatively few but considered by Harry Towns to be the world's most remarkable athlete. His feat amounted to having run twenty-six five-minute miles, a physiological impossibility, Shorter himself conceding that the body did not store enough caloric energy for the last six miles, which had to be done on Zen. Marathon running was considered an “old man's sport,” most champions being men over thirty. Shorter was all the more remarkable for having smashed the record at twenty-five. The great athlete trained twice a day. What if Towns were to do the same and sneak in an extra midnight session? If Shorter did the last six miles on meditation, Towns would go into a trance for the final twelve. Then Towns dropped the idea. He could see that he was being carried away. And besides, is that what he really wanted to do with his life? He switched over to the idea of a publicized jog through the city's highest crime area. Mayoralty candidates could join him if they dared. He would take his last few dollars and announce this jog in a daily newspaper. It was his city. He had grown up in it. It was incomprehensible to him that he couldn't take a stroll down certain streets. So he would jog through a series of blocks known as “Homicide Row” at midnight, unprotected, giving every crazy person in the city a clean shot at him. He would do this out of love. But who would believe him? No matter how you sliced it, it came out sounding like a publicity stunt. Although what was he publicizing? His new apartment? His soft bones? Harry Towns, the scenarist, a writer, for the most part, of turkeys? He dropped that idea, too. Part of the reason for his abandonment of the notion was that he was scared shitless.