Sin Hellcat

by Lawrence Block

  “Long time no see,” I muttered vacantly. I poured myself into her room and her arms swallowed me.

  THREE

  I was twenty-two. A lovely age to be; I hadn’t been twenty-two for years. How many years? No, no, that required counting, and counting hurt the head, and there was the dim possibility I would wake up. Voices murmured.

  Back, back, back down into unconsciousness. Where was I? I was twenty-two.

  Yes, that’s it. I was twenty-two, and it was summer. Oh, my God, was it summer! It was summer like the inside of an oven, which one shared with the biggest klieg light of them all. Too hot and too bright, and the humidity was fantastic. The air was about eighty per cent water; one didn’t walk down the street, one did the breaststroke. And that’s the only kind of breaststroke one did; it was much too hot for any other kind, and besides that I was living at the Y.

  That’s it! I was twenty-two, and it was summer, and it was New York, and I was living at the Y. “I’m going to New York after graduation,” I said to everybody. “But I hear it’s awful expensive to live in New York. I don’t know what to do about an apartment.” And everybody said. “Live at the Y. It’s cheap, and it’s clean.” So I lived at the Y.

  And nobody told me I was going to be pawed surreptitiously all the time. And in that heat, too. All these heavy-breathing dark-eyed boys prowling the clean cheap halls at the Y, panting. They were the only things around hotter than the sidewalks.

  And the sidewalks were hot. I walked on them, and the bottoms of my shoes got hot. And then I walked some more, and the bottoms of my feet got hot. And then my feet, which were encased by shoes, got hot. And then my ankles got hot. And then I walked into a bar and sat down at a table, because I couldn’t take my shoes off if I sat on a stool at the bar, and I spent a dime of what was left of my savings on a glass of draft, and I sat holding the cold glass in both hands and wiggling my toes. I was twenty-two, and despite it all it was delicious to be alive.

  A man came over to my table. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, there were only about eight or nine people in the entire bar, and this man came over to my table. He wasn’t one of the ones like at the Y, he was one of the ones like at the bar, gray-suited and somber-faced, with twenty-year-old bodies and thirty-year-old faces and forty-year-old jowls and fifty-year-old appetites for booze.

  This man came over to my table. “You’ve got your shoes off,” he said.

  I was twenty-two and my shoes were off and it was delicious to be alive. “By God, sir,” I said, “you are absolutely right.”

  “I think that’s great,” he said. He wasn’t drunk, but then he wasn’t sober either. He waved a hand that more or less held a glass containing an amber fluid and two clear unfogged ice cubes with holes in their tummies. “I think that’s absolutely great,” he said, expanding on his last remark, and added, “Mind if I sit down?”

  “By all means, sir,” I said. I was twenty-two, and I called everyone over twenty-five ‘sir,’ because that’s the way I was brought up, buddy.

  He sat down, lowered the glass to the black Formica table top, and leaned forward to study me, one might say, piercingly. After too long a time of this activity, he straightened up, leaned forward again, and said, “You married?”

  “Not as yet,” I said, so there would be no misunderstanding.

  “Hah!” he cried, and sloshed drink on the Formica “I knew it,” he announced. “The minute I looked at you, and I saw your shoes was off—were off—I said to myself, ‘There is a free man. That man over there with his shoes off is not married to anybody at all, not even once.’ That’s what I said to myself.”

  “You converse rather well,” I complimented him. God, it was delicious to be alive!

  “Do you want to know something?” he asked me. Accepting my millisecond of silence for consent, he hastened on. “I have been coming into this bar every afternoon,” he announced, adding parenthetically and inaccurately, “at the coffee break, for the last eight years. Summer, winter, hot weather, rainy weather, all of that stuff. And do you want to know something?”

  “Something else?” I asked him.

  “I have never,” he said emphasizing his words by rhythmically sloshing drink in the general neighborhood, “never in all that time seen anyone in here take off his shoes. What do you think of that?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “Exactly!” he cried.

  At that moment, a waiter came by. I could tell he was a waiter by the filthy apron wrapped round his middle. Everything else in the bar, including the bartender, the customers, the glasses, the tables and the floor, all were clean, except this dour-faced man in his rape-of-Troy apron. “You can’t have your shoes off in here,” is what he said to me.

  I had just about decided that my shoes were getting a lot more attention than they deserved. They were just a cheap pair of old black shoes. I’d worn them for three years now, practically all the way through college. Not to bed, of course, but almost always else.

  The man opposite me said, “Never mind,” to the waiter.

  The waiter looked at him, and then looked questioningly at the bartender over there, and the bartender shook his head in a leave-them-alone gesture, and I knew at once that I was talking to an Important Man, and I thought of all the success stories I knew which opened in bars, but practically all of them were sexual, so I dropped that line of thought. I was living in the Y, and it had been five weeks since I had last seen Jodi, and there was little likelihood I would ever see her again, and I hadn’t yet found a job so that I could have an apartment and meet girls and start all over again with someone else, so I did my level best not to even think about sex. The heat helped, that way.

  The Important Man then said, “What’s your line, my friend?

  “I don’t have one yet,” I admitted. “I came to New York three weeks ago,” I explained, “armed with my brand-new sheepskin, and I’ve been prowling the streets, turning down management-trainee jobs, ever since.”

  “Good,” he said. “What kind of college? You an engineer or something? Or what?”

  Did I look like an engineer? “It was a Liberal Arts College,” I said, rather stiffly, “and quite a good one at that, where I obtained a Bachelor of Arts, with a major in English, primarily American and British Literature.”

  “Now, what the hell,” he said. He looked at me, frowning, puzzled, obviously ready and willing to learn something. “Now what the hell did you do that for?” he asked me.

  I blinked. I’m sure I did. “What the hell did I do what for?” I parried.

  “Get your degree,” he explained patiently, “in English. Now, you could of got your degree in anything you wanted, history or science or even philosophy, and you could of been adapted into American industry, some way or another. But English? Let me tell you something, my friend. By the way, the name’s Tom Stanton.”

  “Harvey Christopher,” I told him, and we solemnly shook hands. His hand was wet. From the drink. I surreptitiously dried my hand on my trousers.

  “Let me tell you something, Harv,” he said, for which I never forgave him. After all, I had been calling him ‘sir.’ “It’s this way,” he went on, ignoring my reaction. “American industry, now, distrusts the English major. And for very good reasons, too. The English major is very liable to be a guy who thinks like mad, all the time, but what he’s thinking about is very rarely much use to American industry. You see what I mean? What, do you figure to be—a writer?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing like that. I would simply like to get a job in American industry. But not, frankly, any of the management trainee positions I’ve been offered in the last few weeks. They look very much like dead-end streets to me.”

  “You’re right there,” he said at once. “There, you are one hundred per cent right. Tell me something, Harv? What do you think about advertising?”

  “Advertising? I don’t suppose I’ve ever thought much about it at all,” I admitted, “except when a particularly horrendous sing
ing commercial comes on the radio.”

  “Sure,” he said. “But what about advertising men? You know, the scapegoats, the ones the people all the time make the funny remarks about. What about them?”

  “What about them?” I asked him right back.

  “Have you ever thought of being one?”

  I hadn’t. I said so, adding, “Though now that you mention it, it sounds like a good idea. After all, an English major—”

  He shook his head. “English majors,” he said somberly, “come to advertising agencies only long enough to soak up the atmosphere. Then they go write a nasty book. Either that, or they stay around forever and have guilt feelings, and they keep missing work and coming in the next day with a note from their psychiatrist. That’s the way it is with English majors in advertising.”

  I considered the problem, wriggling my toes beneath the table, After due consideration, I said, “I don’t think I’d be that way.”

  “Neither do I,” he said at once. “I think you’re the exception to the rule. There’s an exception to every rule, you know.”

  “I’d heard rumors,” I admitted.

  “The minute I looked at you,” he said, starting off on that again, “and saw you sitting there with your shoes off, I said to myself, ‘There’s an exception to the rule.’ And I think I was right. You want a job?”

  There were a million possible things to say. I said, “What?”

  There were a million possible things he could have said, too. He said, “A job.”

  My keen analytical mind flashed hither and yon over our preceding conversation, correlating, comparing, combining implications, grouping subject matters, following the thin threads of cortical reasoning, and in less than a second I had the whole knotty problem doped out. “You mean,” I said, “a job in advertising.”

  “You have,” he said indistinctly, “a keen analytical mind. A job in advertising is exactly what I mean.”

  “Well,” I said. “Gosh. I hadn’t exactly thought much about it.”

  “Harv,” he said with the disgusting familiarity that is so prevalent in certain otherwise-genteel sections of this city, “I’ll tell you who I am. Ever heard of MGSR&S?”

  I allowed as how I hadn’t.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m S sub-two.”

  My keen analytical mind couldn’t quite analytic that one. Apparently my mental floundering showed on my face, because he returned to English. “MGSR&S,” he told me, “is Manning, Greenville, Silverstein, Rorschach and Stanton. Stanton is me.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I see.”

  He looked at his watch. “Coffee break’s over,” he said, and engulfed the liquid in the glass. He spared the ice cubes. “Come on over to the office,” he suggested, rising with surprising steadiness to his feet, “and we’ll talk it over “

  “Why, thank you,” I said. I stood, and we started toward the door. We’d gone no more than five paces when he looked at me oddly, and said, “Don’t you want your shoes?”

  “Oh, yes!” I exclaimed. “My shoes!”

  I went back to the table, feeling like a fool, and fished around among the crumpled cigarette packages until I found my shoes. Shod, I returned to Stanton, S sub-two. He was surveying me somewhat oddly.

  I felt called upon to defend myself, albeit timidly. “It’s the first time I ever forgot them,” I said. It was a weak defense.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “Come along.” A bit of doubt had come into his voice. Perhaps he was growing more sober, and the prospect of hiring a man solely on the basis of him having his shoes off no longer seemed so enjoyable to him.

  But I was twenty-two, and it was summer, and I was newly in New York, and the unreality of this man’s conversation and job offer was of such a high level that I wasn’t a bit confused or worried or nervous during the following employment interview, and I got the job.

  And so I learned about advertising.

  Do you know about advertising? When an otherwise-desirable young lady appears on your television screen and, to a Neanderthalic melody, sings, “Winky dinky hinky rink, Goolash beer is the beer to drink,” do you have the idea that it all came out of her own little head in just a second or two? Well, you’re wrong. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in less time than it took a whole staff of people at MGSR&S to write those eleven words. Of course, Shakespeare had the edge. He just used English; he didn’t have to make up exciting new words, like ‘winky.’

  I won’t go into the entire hierarchy and nomenclature of an advertising agency, of the little bitsy contribution of every member of that crowd to the epic quoted above. I am not avoiding this naming of parts out of a fear of boring the reader, I am doing so out of a fear of boring me. Twelve years, let me tell you, can be a long long time.

  I will tell you however, out of an obvious bid for sympathy, what my contribution to that Cro-Magnon couplet was. I made it rhyme. When it came to me, the meter had already been established—though the melody hadn’t yet surged out of our symphonic department—and the first line read (do you mind?), “Goulash beer is hotsy tots.” I changed ‘hotsy tots’ to ‘hinky dink.’ Someone else changed the first half of the line, and altered my contribution to hinky rink. Whether one man added winky and one man added dinky or one man doubted up and added both words I don’t know. Having contributed of my talents already, I slept through the rest of the conferences. And, at those rare conferential moments when I was awake, I wiled the time away drawing nonsensical pictures on my notepad.

  Such was my job, but I didn’t begin at that exalted level. Oh, no, one doesn’t simply step into an important job like that. I began in the mailroom.

  (I seem to be waking up. I’d much rather not wake up; if I do my head will explode. People are talking, I can hear the murmur of their conversation distantly, and I don’t imagine I want them to start talking to me. I must go back to sleep. Be twenty-two again, remember back, float back and down, back and down, find something on which to pin my floating psyche and avoid consciousness.)

  Laura Gray.

  Ah, yes, Laura Gray. Her first name wasn’t Laura, it was Natalie. And her last name wasn’t Gray, it was Gregenbaum. Why is it that depressed minorities invariably express agreement with the unflattering opinions of their depressors?

  At any rate I know these horrible secrets about Laura Gray because I snuck into the Personnel offices and looked at her records. I’m not sure why I did that except that I was twenty-two. And I would dearly have loved to have Laura Gray as the replacement for Jodi, and because Laura invariably cut me dead every time she saw me.

  She was a secretary, Laura was. She was from the secretarial pool (I always get a picture of a bunch of laughing nude girls at a round shallow swimming pool with a statue of Cupid in the middle when I hear that phrase, don’t you?) and she sat all day typing revelations granted her by a Dictaphone machine. My mailroom job consisted of distributing in-coming mail all morning and picking up outgoing mail all afternoon, so I saw Laura Gray rather often, and she always cut me dead. After all, I was just a nobody from the mailroom.

  Then I snuck into the Personnel office and found out her name and age and home address and other fascinating information and I went around smirking at her for a few days, and she went on cutting me just as dead as if I didn’t know that she’d changed her name

  Invariably, she irked me. There finally came the day when she had irked me just a little too much, and I no longer even wanted her to replace Jodi. On that fateful day, out of a meanness of spirit that until then I hadn’t known I possessed, I became snide with dear Laura Gray.

  It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I was gathering correspondence from outbaskets all over the place. I paused beside Laura’s desk, looking at her as she typed glaze-eyed the orders being whispered to her by the ubiquitous Dictaphone machine, and waited for her to notice me.

  She did, at last, and raised her foot from the machine pedal, cutting off its dictation. “What do you want?” she demanded, and there was a whole world o
f scorn in those four syllables.

  “I was just wondering,” I said, my voice as sweet as blueberry pie.

  “Wondering what?” she snapped, with Olympian impatience.

  “If it’s true what they say about Jewish girls,” I said.

  She blinked. “What?”

  “You know. About it being sideways.”

  Now, of course there were about ten thousand possible answers to that remark, any one of which would have been enough to get me fired, but I just didn’t care. I was irked. So I stood blandly and waited for her answer.

  Lo and behold! The color fled her face at first, but then rushed right back again, all in the space of a second. And then she smiled! Laura smiled!

  And said, all trace of hostility gone from her voice, “No, silly. That’s Chinese girls.”

  “Oh, go on,” I said. That’s all I could manage, under the circumstances.

  Laura was being very arch all of a sudden, smiling coyly and generally being flirtatious as all get-out. It just goes to show you, you never know the right approach.

  At any rate, we discussed anatomy a little while longer, and before I returned to the mailroom we had made a date for that very night.

  There are many similarities between the young man on Madison Avenue who works in the mailroom and a young man on Madison Avenue who works as, say, an account executive. They dress in precisely the same uniform, they wear precisely the same horn-rimmed glasses, they eat precisely the same lunch in precisely the same luncheonettes, they read precisely the same magazines, and they work precisely the same hours. There is only one difference between them. The account executive earns about five times as much as the mailroom boy.

  Which is simply to say that I did not take Laura Gray to the Ruban Bleu. Nor did I take her to see a Broadway show. I took her to a cheap movie theater in the Village and we saw two depressing flicks from Italy. Then I took her to a cheap coffee house, and I swear the customers were the same people we’d just seen in the movies. And then I took her home. To her home, I mean. I was still living at the Y. Mailroom salaries and all that.