A heavy drinker. Sometimes a self-accusatory, weeping drinker. I owe him one small favor for that. I was newly enlisted in the army, still in basic training at Camp Gordon, Georgia, miserably homesick, when he died of cirrhosis of the liver and I was given a few blessed days leave to attend the funeral.
Unfertile.
Yes he was. This man of muscle, this mighty hunter before the Lord – at least each fall, with scarlet jacket and shiny rifle and shotgun – could not produce a child of his own.
That hurt him terribly, my mother confided to me near her own end. He drank because of that.
Did he?
No, he didn’t.
He drank because he was a sot.
And, unable to produce a little Kirwan of his own, he did me the glorious honor of legally adopting me. Of making me his own little Kirwan on ray tenth birthday. I had no voice in this. My grandfather’s protesting voice was not listened to.
Did I feel stange about my new identity?
Yes. But I think at ten you feel strange about everything. This was just one more thing to feel strange about. And I was an amiable child. Kept my nose clean, my thoughts to myself, and did as I was told.
However
However, this tenth birthday gift of mine, which was announced to me by my mother with much smiling and petting, was nothing as compared to the really great event of my childhood exactly one week later.
The completion of 409 Witter Street. The first apartment house on the block. The very first. Daniel Kirwan’s project. Daniel Kirwan’s dearest dream come true.
The go-getter had gone and gotten.
The one-time foreman of Witter and Son’s stockrooms could now claim ownership – at least his name was below my grandfather’s on the mortgage – of a magnificent apartment building. Magnificent especially in the way it bulked over everything in sight, seemed to devour the block, distorted its perspective, made a strange new world of it.
What tune did the British fifes tootle as Cornwallis surrendered the old world to the Yankee upstarts at Yorktown?
The World Turned Upside Down.
And that memorable day a week after I became Charles Witter Kirwan we had music on our block too. Music. Lights strung overhead. Tables – planks on sawhorses – heaped with food and drink. A brass band right there in the middle of the roadway. Barricades against motor traffic at each end of the block, courtesy of our local police precinct. A block party.
Music and dancing and bright-colored balloons. And plenty of surreptitious boozing – remember Prohibition? – in the garage of 407. Everybody came, the neighborhood came, the architects and bricklayers of the new wonder came.
My grandfather came out of good manners. Wheedled, cajoled, bullied, pushed beyond endurance to invest a large share of his diminishing wealth into this future, he must have carried to his dying day the memory of that spacious lawn with its oaks and maples and cherry trees that 409 had engulfed.
But the Good Steward cannot hide his money in his mattress. Nor can he invest it only in repairing and preserving his own fine home. He must also invest it in the profitable destruction of his world. Must, in the end, bow to the go-getter who knows a good thing when he smells it and leaves as his inheritance the destruction.
Oh yes.
The new wonder rented well. Very well.
And having demonstrated its success, it was followed by facsimiles which sprang up along this block as if sown from dragon’s teeth.
And not only fine old trees went crashing down now to make room for them but fine old homes. The spacious homes of the clean and quiet and civilized. Why not? With their paradise defiled why should the civilized remain in it?
It was go-getter time, and the banner of Daniel Kirwan flew high above all others.
Listen. Listen closely.
Destruction need not be wreaked by explosion. It can come about in much more insidious form. Infiltration. Infiltration by waves of the less clean and quiet and civilized. Less and less, each wave. For Witter Street? A wave of Hibernians came and receded. A wave of Italians. A wave of Jews. Oh yes, the Children of Israel knew they had again found their Land of Canaan.
And in the darkness of the night, the campfires of the waiting Bulanga twinkled all around the margins of this land.
The brave Israelites fled like rabbits at the sight of the first Bulanga invader.
The end.
It was over that quickly. Our city of New York made the rules to assure it would be over that quickly.
The final wave.
Ooze and muck.
Are you listening closely? If you’re consumed with curiosity about how I came to design the grand event – to execute it against all odds – you must be.
I am vengeance.
Futile vengeance?
Yes. I admit that. I admit it.
But I am what vengeance there is or will ever be.
My own salvation. I feel acute physical pain now. But this is the salvation: That I feel pain as if it were being suffered by someone else. Cold remote pain dimmed by heated triumph. An anesthesia that comes from not merely reading the future but of shaping it.
As for the past
That is, the episode of Friday afternoon involving Lorena Bailey.
Wait.
I must first reiterate here a vital instruction included with the sealed will I placed in the hands of my executor. My estate’s executor. That is, nothing in all these tapes – absolutely nothing – is to be in any way deleted or censored when this material is published as a book.
Not a word.
Allowance is made for necessary deletions when it comes to magazine and newspaper publication. I bow to that necessity. Magazines and newspapers face the problem of limited space. They must also tone down explicit descriptions of sexual activity. The danger there is that portions of an original, meaningful text may thus be reduced to mere titillation, but I accept this unpleasant possibility. I can only hope that the reader will then be moved to buy the original book itself and read the work in its entirety.
Incidentally, reproduction and sale of these tapes themselves – as tapes – is absolutely forbidden. The pirating of printed matter is unusual. The pirating of tapes however, as I have learned, is now an industry in itself, not a penny in royalties going to the rightful proprietor of them. Or his estate.
Fair warning. The Hendrick Witter Foundation is not to be cheated this way.
So.
The events of late Friday afternoon.
By three o’clock Friday afternoon I had planted the first charge of high explosive in 409. A dirty and exhausting job. I emerged from it at what I thought was my physical nadir. Emotionally high though, drunk with a sense of achievement.
I dragged myself home, and no sooner was I inside the house than Lorena Bailey presented herself there. I opened the door to her, and the way she looked at me made me aware of my filthy and disheveled appearance. I explained that I had been repairing the boiler at 409. I was also on the verge of adding that I didn’t feel well enough for company, that we’d have to put off this session until Monday.
On the verge. But I didn’t say it. I was exhausted enough to drop to the floor as I stood there, but I was in a wildly exhilarated mood. Celebratory. Obviously, the mind does not always respond directly to the body’s signals.
Nothing new in that. I know because I have lived with sexual fantasies all my life from puberty. Muddled at first – the romantic and sadistic and masochistic all muddled together – but more and more I learned to organize them properly, seek a theme for a little one-act play, time its performance so that its climax came simultaneously with the spurt of semen from an engorged penis.
In high school, wisdom was provided by helpful agencies. The friend whose father owned the works of Havelock Ellis. Impotent, pseudo-scientific Havelock Ellis, whose italicized little case histories were each a heated little one-act play.
And the schoolmate who came into the possession of those few raggedy, grossly pornographic, marvel
ous pages of The Story of Josephine Mutzenbacher by Felix Salten.
Felix Salten? No, it can’t be the same Felix Salten who wrote that virginal classic Bambi. Never.
But it is. The very same.
Fantasies.
All in the mind. A distortion of the body’s signals that the time has come, that there are females available, that the reality of them will be better than any dreams.
I was a virgin until at Camp Gordon I was led by some platoon mates – forcibly steered – into bed with a stout, bucktoothed, businesslike Georgia belle whose home on weekends served as a makeshift brothel.
My sexual adventures through all the years following until my marriage could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and you’d still have two fingers to spare.
The body signalled for action. The panicky mind settled for yet more lurid fantasy.
Variations of it were later woven into my marriage. Through the act itself, with my patient, awkwardly accommodating, unimaginative wife. Born middle-aged, dear soul. Never liked to be called Flo. A Flo might have been tempted to enjoy playtime in bed. Not a Florence. Not even wise enough to pretend enjoyment.
So there was Lorena Bailey, ray part-time naked Bulanga nymph, standing before me. No fantasy either. The living descendant of those naked black maidens who stood chained on the slave blocks terrified into mute, wide-eyed obedience. Quivering under the poking and pinching and sampling of the crafty bidder’s hand.
Secretly excited by that hand. Ashamed of the secret.
Bought and paid for. The only difference was that there was no middleman involved here; I was making payment direct.
And
And in a way I was being cheated. Not by her. By myself. Familiarity takes the edge off any experience. What I was buying for my money was the display of that body, and that body – every curve of it – was now too familiar. In this little peep-show arrangement I was no longer getting value for my money.
I think I’ve already said
Yes, I did say it. That while at that moment my body felt as if it had just been lifted off Torquemada’s rack, my mood was triumphant.
Celebratory, that was the word.
So there would be a celebration. Long-planned. A party whose time had come.
Yes.
I said to Lorena, “You can go to work without me. I want to clean myself up first.”
I unlocked the door of the tower room for her. I went to the bathroom down the hall for the necessary cleaning up. Shower and soap, a courtesy to her. Then into a robe. Unglamorous. Terrycloth. But the right costume for this party. In the bedroom I counted out the necessary money and stuffed it into my pocket.
When I entered the study she was sprawled in an armchair still fully clothed. I frowned at that, she frowned at my robe. “You gonna sit aroun’ like that?” she asked warily.
“Any reason why I shouldn’t?”
From her expression she was probably thinking of a few, but after a moment’s hesitation she simply shrugged them away. Harmless broken-down ole voyeuristic whitey, all eyes and nothing else. I sat behind the desk and watched as she kicked off her shoes and then indifferently pulled off her clothing.
By now
Well, a surmise.
But by now she may have found her own interest in this game dulled by familiarity. More often than not she liked to enliven it with what amounted to a clever parody of striptease. Now she was altogether perfunctory.
I took out the wad of money and motioned her toward the desk with it. A little change of routine. Except for our first time around, payment had always closed the proceedings. Distinctly wary now, she moved to the desk, taking her time about it. But money, money, money was an irresistible lure. The look of it spread across the desk. The feel of it each time as she would gather it together, fold it carefully, and thrust it, not into a pocket of those jeans, but under the elastic of her panties, her hand going out of sight as I watched, centering the treasure down there as if shielding those maidenly lips with it.
A sensible hiding place of course. Of course. But what a web of psycho-theory the great Sigmund, the begetter of all wisdom, could weave out of that bit of common sense, couldn’t he?
Yes indeed.
The money.
I slowly laid it out on the desk like a hand of solitaire. One two three four five ten-dollar bills. Then one five-dollar bill in payment for her Stepin Fetchit imitation of a librarian.
Her hand moved toward the desk and I waved it back. She narrowed her eyes as I laid out still another hand of this expensive solitaire.
One hundred and ten dollars altogether. Marguerite’s chest of jewels.
Lorena was no fool. She pointed. “What’s that extra?”
I told her. Incredibly mawkish, the way I put it, I realize that. But the word fellatio would mean nothing to any Bulanga of Witter Street. And while I’m familiar with a couple of the gutter phrases for the act I couldn’t bring myself to speak them, even at that overheated moment. Mawkish it had to be. I said, “I’ll put it very plainly, girl. I want you to make love to me with your mouth.”
She seemed stunned. No performance there. Genuinely stunned. This didn’t give me any qualms. The time was long past when she might announce my depravity to the world.
It took her time to get her wits together. Then she said, “Man, you want me to give you head?”
I indicated the money. “It means double pay each time, Lorena.”
Curious.
Very curious, now that I think of it, but it never entered my mind during this passage that I might be incapable of performance.
If Lorena was willing, I was ready. Rotting lungs? Cancerous everything else? No connection with Priapus.
Incongruously, Lorena stood there stark naked, all parts showing, and made a case for high morality. “Man,” she said, “I don’t eat nobody. I don’t even eat my boy friend. I sure don’t eat you, old man.”
“Do you know how much money you’re looking at, Lorena? Do you know how much it’ll add up to in just one week? Three days of it?”
She betrayed herself by glancing down at the money. She knew how much it was all right. Then she looked at me, plainly wrestling with temptation.
Writhing under it. Tortured by it.
“Never done it,” she said sulkily. “How’m I s’posed to know what to do?”
I had never done it before either, but I knew what she had to do.
She did it.
On her knees – that view between my splayed legs was enough to send Saint Anthony himself straight to hell – and with lips, salivating mouth, hardworking tongue.
She didn’t like it.
Her hands
She kept her hands away, fingers delicately curled, pink palms showing. Intriguing. Mouth yes, but no hand contact.
She didn’t like it, so I did not discharge in her mouth. Might draw too violent a reaction. When the moment came I pushed her away roughly. Caught her by surprise and she almost went over backward. Even then, semen spattered on her shoulder, on one breast.
Fifty years – fifty-five years of fantasy, all jetted away in one instant.
She looked down at herself, saw what had happened and snarled something intelligible. Scampered to the bathroom. After a long while returned angry. Refused to meet my eyes. Took the money and dressed, face stony and averted.
Then – Bulanga unpredictable – she stopped before the desk on her way out and with one wild motion of the arm swept everything on it to the floor. Telephone, papers, penholder, ancient brass lamp, its bulb shattering as it hit the floor.
She glared at me, challenging me.
A bad moment. Yes. Once, Charles Witter Kirwan would have quailed in the face of that nasty little tempest. Not now. Not the almost dead Charles Witter Kirwan.
I said with absolute calm, “I’ll do you a favor, Lorena, and not take that from your pay. And I’ll see you Monday. The usual time.”
It surprised her, ole whitey’s cool authority. I think it really shoc
ked her.
I believe I will see her Monday at the usual time. Tomorrow. I’m sure of it.
That’s all.
No.
Nature. The natural order in human society
Never mind.
John Milano
GRACIE MACFADDEN’S OCCASIONAL SATURDAY NIGHT BASHES started late and, as far as Milano could ever determine, kept rolling until Monday dawn, just in time for the last of the Hollywood contingent to catch the reverse red-eye back to the Coast for late breakfast there.
Always a big crowd and a hectic one, but the sprawl of rooms on the co-op’s top floor, and the penthouse above, absorbed it easily. Broadway and Beverly Hills predominated, slob-chic was the preferred costume. A cornucopia of mediocre food, oceans of excellent bottled goods, plentiful good quality grass, and even a coke corner hidden away in Gracie’s dressing room. Two resident hosts in attendance: a baggy-eyed, snowy-thatched Colonel Blimp in yachting jacket and ascot, and a considerably younger and more hard-featured Hispanic type. Both were addressed by Gracie in her gracious moods as Mac, in her other moods as MacFadden. Touch on the subject of her relationship to them and she’d tell you it was none of your fucking business.
True.
Disco was the big thing, the naked floor of the penthouse literally made to order for it, but in the deeply carpeted quarters down below, aside from some low visibility sex, poker and backgammon were the featured attractions. Milano, bone-tired and irritable, took a seat among the barracudas at Gracie’s poker table, found himself playing a stupidly reckless game, knew he was doing so, and couldn’t work up the willpower to change tactics and go smart. The nourishment he was getting from slices of tired roast beef rolled in wilted lettuce leaves and washed down by puritanical Perrier and lime, didn’t help either. By sheer wild luck – otherwise flabby hands he held seemed magnetized to the draw that would make them all muscle – he got away with his life. At four a.m. when he cashed in his chips and registered just about even-steven, he had the feeling Gracie was glad to see him go. You can beat smart, as she put it in her farewell, but you can’t beat dumb luck.
The Dark Fantastic Page 11
