by Robert Ward
The day is cool and there are spaces between the floorboards. Therefore, my chest and shoulders get cold and my cough worse. Soon I am half knocked out, and feel as though I am still in the speeding car, next to Phantom. In my head I see his teeth, and bad skin, and behind it is an intense orange light. I begin to think of the Phantom as some sort of con man saint, the kind I have read about in sentimental books about roguish heroes. If Phantom were not hideous, he could be Errol Flynn. Whatever he is, I am glad he is with me, for without him I would now be in bad shape. Not that I am in good shape. We are in Saint Louis, me sick, both of us flat broke.
I lie on the cot for a while, half awake, my body alternating between fever and chills. In the other room there is some kind of party going on. Occasionally I hear Phantom’s voice rise above the crowd:
“Yeah, ah, I tink we could do dat ting fo you, man….
“Sure, he’s very bad. Killed a cop in New York for layin’ a parkin’ ticket on him.”
I wonder who Phantom is referring to, and decide it is just one of the many revolutionary people he knows throughout the country. “Revolution.” A beautiful word. Yes, I’m on the move, never looking back, side by side with Phantom, I am the revolution.
“Now if you’ll jes lay the bread on us, me and my partner could, ah, cop the keys for you and meet you back here tomorrow.”
Suddenly I realize that Phantom is attempting to make some kind of deal for us. In a few minutes he comes loping into the bedroom, parading around my bed like some old vaudeville hoofer.
“So beautiful, baby. Jes like I said, God takes care of the strong. The weak, man, gonna fend for themselves.”
“What’s up, Phantom?” I say, feeling like the sidekick in any old Western you’d want to name.
“Well, out here in the other room, baby, is this cat from some school, Saint Louis University or somewheres, and he wants to cop some grass, you dig. Well, I got him going through such changes you wouldn’t believe, you would not believe.”
Phantom runs over to the mirror and stares at himself. He pouts out his lips like Mick Jagger and nods menacingly.
“Yep, it’s here,” he says. “It’s officially here.”
“The revolution?” I say, propping myself on one arm.
“The revolution,” he says.
The next morning Phantom wakes me with the news that I am on my own until two-thirty. Then I am to meet him back at the house. I ask him to explain what is going to happen, but he only smiles and slams me on the back.
“You’ll see then, man. Go somewhere. Meet a chick. Just be here at two-thirty.”
“I won’t hang you up,” I say, glad I can use a hip phrase.
“Oh, and here, take this.”
Phantom hands me a bottle of pink liquid with the name Robitussin—AC on the label. He tells me not to pay any attention whatsoever to the instructions but to drink half the bottle.
“Half?” I say.
“Not enough?” he asks. “Then drink the whole bottle.”
Then Phantom and Sally are running out to her car, and I am left alone with my cough syrup. For a second I hesitate, but then I picture Baba Looie shooting up heroin and feel absurd.
“Hell, I’ve got a bad cough anyway,” I say, drinking the entire bottle.
About an hour later I am sitting in Gaslight Square. My entire body is flashing happiness. Though I have lost all motor coordination, it makes very little difference. I feel wonderful.
“Now I’m really into some good shit,” I mumble.
Soon a girl with long brown hair, a lean wolflike face and a fantastic body sits down across from me. I immediately tell her my philosophy of Doorways, which I just figured out.
“Hey, baby,” I say, sounding exactly like the Phantom. “You wanna know where something’s at? Well, it’s like alleys, see….” I pause here as I receive another incredible rush from the codeine. “Anyways, there are these doors … and, ah, like some people open the doors and some stand on the other side, just staring at the knocker, always terrified to leave the room they’re in, ‘cause maybe …” I pause again here, because my mouth is so dry I can barely articulate. “Well, so, chickee, ah … maybe the room these people are in is like filled with TV sets and bottles of Scotch, so they are afraid to leave … but finally …”
After I go on in this revolutionary vein for several minutes, I lose track of what I am talking about. My hands are so numb that when I move them I fear they will jerk spasmodically. I am completely wasted.
But apparently Linda Herowitz is impressed. Breathlessly she informs me that she is Jewish and that she goes to Washington University in Saint Louis, which is the Harvard of the Midwest.
“Oh, yeah,” I say, nodding out. “I dig … you go to Harvard.”
“No, silly, not Harvard. Washington U.—the Harvard of the Midwest.”
“Groovy,” I say, spitting on myself.
“Would you like some coffee?”
“Sure, that’s a gas….”
Then she buys me something called Irish coffee, with whipped cream on the top. When I pick it up, the topping falls in my lap. When I make no effort to wipe it off, she comes around the table with a napkin and does it for me.
“You’re just the kind of guy I’ve been looking for,” she says.
“Oh?”
“Yes, you’re strong.”
“Strong.” I realize that mindlessly repeating what she says is not the sharpest way to make a hit, but I am unable to do anything else. My eyelids close and my elbow falls off the table.
“You look tired,” she says. “What you need is a corned beef sandwich.”
“Corned leaf,” I say, rubbing my hands across my forehead.
“Beef … for energy, silly.”
“Beef.”
“You are strong.” She puts her hand on mine.
I would like to comment on this, but suddenly there is corned beef in my mouth and I have forgotten how to swallow. When I open my mouth corned beef falls down my shirt. I grab my collar and stare at her with great seriousness. The corned beef is incredibly irritating.
“I suppose to you, I mean a person with cosmic consciousness, I’m just one more hung-up Jew chick.”
I reach down the front of my shirt in search of the corned beef. The anxiety level is rising, ruining both the taste of the food and my high. I have a great desire to retreat to my imaginary world and take insulin for the rest of my life.
“Next you’ll ask me if I’ve taken acid,” she says. There is a big ball of unchewed corned beef in my mouth, which I am too down to chew.
“Well, I haven’t taken it,” she says miserably. At this moment, I open my shirt and let the first ball of sandwich fall on my shoe. Breathing more easily, I start to nod again.
“I guess I could make up some line about my wanting to expand consciousness through study and discipline, instead of fragmenting it with psychedelic drugs,” she says, a tear in her eye, “but you wouldn’t be taken in by that, would you?”
I decide to throw caution to the winds and put the rest of the sandwich in my mouth. I realize immediately that I have made a grave mistake. Much of the sandwich gets stuck in the back of my throat, impossible to swallow because of the dryness.
“It’s no use trying to kid you,” says Linda, shaking her head and biting her lip.
I gag.
“I could tell the minute I saw you walking in here, with your sweater flung over your shoulder, that you, to use your own terms, had thrown open all the doors.”
I cannot breathe.
She raises her face and looks imploringly into my own.
“Can you teach me how to be free?”
I knew I should never have fooled with drugs.
“I may resist you. But don’t pay any attention to me. Think of me as a deranged person who doesn’t know how to take care of herself.”
“O.K.” The corned beef feels as though it has spikes in it.
“Beat me if it takes that.”
“
O.K., O.K.”
“Would you like to smash me right now to start me off?”
“Yeah, anything … believe me.”
She sticks out her face from her long crane’s neck and I draw back my arm. The violence of the gesture causes the corned beef to pop from my mouth. It lands a soggy mess on Linda’s shoulder.
“Oh, wonderful,” she says after a second’s shock. “It’s the unexpected, like Zen. A living example of my own neurosis. Oh, you are beautiful, beautiful.”
She buys me three more corned beef sandwiches and throws me in her Karmann Ghia. All the way home I eat.
At her apartment I become nauseated, but that does not stop her. Her kisses are like small bothersome suction cups on my neck and lower chest. No sooner has she planted one, than she is off whooshing down another. I push her away and stagger around her bleak rooms. Student furniture, one print—a Paul Klee.
“That’s a nice print,” I say, feeling so nervous I could leap through the window. Someone told me long ago that when you take codeine you should do nothing but lie back. A normally small irritation will become magnified out of all proportion.
“Come here, Bobby.”
She is pulling me on her like some kind of sick octopus. Her arms circle around my back and neck with a magnetic power, cutting off all oxygen. She starts pumping me like a machine, chomping on my ear like Elsie, the Borden cow. And all I want to do is lie somewhere and nod out. What am I doing here with this clinging-witch fuck?
“Hold on a minute,” I say.
“Don’t tell me. You want to teach me some new positions.”
“No, I just have to go to the bathroom.”
Reluctantly she lets go of my neck, which is burning with pain. I smile at her and look at the tiny hairs sprouting from her chest, dead weeds from Freda’s garden. Inside the bathroom, I feel hot flashes and am weak in the knees. I try to puke but it’s no go. Bored, I sit on the seat and read her old Evergreens. When I peer back into the room, I am happy to see she has fallen asleep, a paperback copy of Erich Fromm lying flat over her thinly haired cunt.
Depressed and feverish, I make my way through bleak Saint Louis back to Sally’s house. When I arrive, there is no one home, and I fall onto the mattress. Before I have rested very long, Phantom is above me.
“Let’s split.”
“Man, I can’t. I’m sick as hell.”
A cruel smile comes over Phantom. It is the smile of Jack Palance before he guns down the poor little rebel cowboy in Shane.
“Oh, yes you can,” he says. “I just know you can.”
I explain to Phantom that I have a serious case of bronchitis, that if I do not rest I will have to go to the hospital. But he does not seem to hear.
“Get up off that bed, partner. We’re gonna make some bread. Both of us.”
When I attempt to ignore Phantom, he kicks me.
“Phantom,” I say, “I thought we were brothers in the revolution.”
“We are. I’m saving you from yourself. Get up.”
At that he kicks me again. It occurs to me that these are the scenes the sentimental books about the laugh-’em-love-’em rogues leave out. Everyone pays the dues for one man’s romantic visions.
“All right, you bastard, I’m coming.”
We are standing in front of the spice counter in the Piggly Wiggly Store, shoveling in box after box of oregano. Phantom is howling with delight, beating his chest like Tarzan.
“Get ‘em all, baby. All of ‘em.”
I place the cart under a whole shelf of oregano and knock the boxes into it.
“Phantom, we got enough.”
And we are racing through the aisles, whipping up to the cashier, a red-haired girl with one black tooth.
“What’s all that oregano, honey?”
“Secret mystification rites,” says Phantom.
In the front seat of his car, we are shoveling the stuff into an overnight bag. Hundreds of boxes of oregano at our feet. I am feeling weaker than ever. Phantom looks at me with disapproval. I realize that he does not think I am enjoying this wacky adventure to the proper degree.
“Do you dig what we’re doing, man? We are selling these Med students eight pounds of seasoning for three hundred dollars. Dig it. Three hundred dollars.”
“Yeah, beautiful.”
But I do not feel beautiful. I feel like a middle-class kid playing at criminal. It worries me that I cannot enter into this affair with the same mystical gusto as Phantom, and for the next ten minutes, as we rip open the boxes, I cut many riffs about how what we are doing is just the beginning, how we are going to live violent ecstatic lives no Wasp middle-aged bulge will screw with us we are the spirit of Rimbaud look out we gonna getcha.
By the time we are ready to drive off to swing the deal, I have managed to convince myself that what I am doing is in the same league with the Great Train Robbery.
Phantom is biting his lips. “You know, man, if they catch us it won’t be no joke.”
It is these words which change my mind for real. What we are doing is shaky. It’s shakier than joining the Aces, shakier than taking on Kirk and Walter. I wonder if all revolutionaries feel a pressure in the top of their skulls.
Then I am parking in a one-way alley. I am hunched over the wheel, so scared I am going to burst. Phantom gets out of the car.
“I meet these dudes one block up, man. I throw the package in to them after they give me the bread. Then I’m going to come tearing down here. Be ready.”
I nod and take a deep breath. Phantom walks away from the car. It occurs to me that I love this person, this person I call Phantom, who has no apparent home, no connections. He is living on the edge of annihilation, his ass held over the fire.
Behind me I hear a noise. It’s a car wanting to get through the alley.
“Move it, buddy.”
What will I do? I stare in the rear-view and see a cab driver. If I leave, Phantom is dead. If I don’t, and get into a fight, we are both dead. I decide to leave.
“Get that fucking car outa the road.”
“All right …”
I gun the motor. Then I realize I can pretend the car has stalled.
“Sorry,” I yell back. “It’s just dead as a doornail.”
“Son of a bitch,” he yells, racing from his car. “I know what you’re doing here. Grabbing off my passengers. You scab thieving sons of bitches …”
“No, wait,” I say.
He leaps for my door and I slam it in his face. Up the street I hear a great joyful cry: “I god da money. I god da money.”
“Help, quick,” I yell, as the cab driver leaps to his feet. In a second he is reaching through the window trying to strangle me. Phantom is skipping down the street, holding the money in the air.
“We did it, man. Let’s go.”
“Help,” I say. The cab driver is twisting my left ear and gouging my eye.
Then Phantom is on the man’s back, like a lion gutting his prey.
“Get the car started,” he says.
I do not bother to explain to Phantom that it is difficult to get a motor going when your eye is being gouged.
Finally I manage to get the cab driver off me, and Phantom smashes him with a brick.
“I’m glad we got out of that,” he says.
“Jesus,” I yell. “Look out.”
Running down the street behind us are six very angry men. Two of them are carrying shovels and at least one has a butcher knife.
“Go,” says Phantom.
I press down on the gas, but nothing happens. “It’s dead.”
Phantom smashes the windshield. The howling victims are not ten yards away.
“We’ve had it,” I say. “So long, Phantom.”
I put out my hand to shake good-bye, thinking myself very noble not to have forgotten true sentiment in a time of imminent peril.
“You crazy fucker, drive it.”
I turn the ignition key and the motor turns over. At this moment the cab driver wak
es up and Phantom opens the door on his head. As the door swings closed, an angry student leaps into the front seat. The car shoots out into the traffic at a terrific rate. We have the student in the front seat with us, swinging a club.
“Burn me, will ya?” he says.
Phantom winks at me and makes a fist with his middle knuckle sticking out. With one lightning motion he gives the boy the Royal Nugee. I go into hysterics as we drop him into the street.
XXII.
In Which the Narrator Discovers the Meaning of Art
I am sitting on a grassy hillside overlooking a parking lot in Aspen, Colorado. Three feet away from me is Lily, from Atlanta, Georgia. She is incredibly beautiful, with blue, blue eyes and long blond hair. Her legs are slender and her thighs golden, as golden as those thighs that eluded me down in Ocean City so long ago. We are sipping Dr. Peppers and I am trying to concentrate on what the Phantom told me last night back at the bicycle shop.
“This is it, Bobby. The perfect place for us. The town is loaded with schools for the rich. Writers’ schools, film schools and this art colony. You hustle one of ‘em and I’ll case the others. We get the chicks, cut our riff and burn these bourgeois bastards so easy. Then we make it to the Coast.”
When he said this last night back at the bicycle shop, I stared hard at the old axles, chains and burned-out air pumps, and I knew. I knew that I was no longer Bobby Ward, bumbler and fool, but a new man, daring, cool and strange. I could feel the shells of Glenn and Freda, Walter and Kirk slide from my body, and my head went all electric and real. It was the same feeling I got when the Town of Thatched Rooves was working for me as a kid. It seemed, right then, that my partnership with the Phantom had really been like the opening of a door, a magic door which led me from the catastrophe of the past into some wild and undiscovered garden that grew inside my organs and bloomed behind my eyes. We sat there, in that abandoned grease pit, and shared the Phantom’s grass, and I wanted to leap and dance among those old and useless parts.
