When this aghast reaction of mine was clear, Ida got into more of a rage than anything else could have put her in. The luster went out of her skin. She turned into a fiery sick cat, bedraggled and humped. “Why didn’t you let me alone? All right, we played house nicely and you found out you couldn’t care less for the likes of me, I was beneath contempt; so why didn’t you leave me alone? Why did you leave it up to me? It was so peaceful without you, I was getting along perfectly. But no, you wanted me on the string for the times when you hadn’t anyone better. You revolt me, my friend. I don’t want your baby. You figure out how to get rid of it. I haven’t the energy to spare for you—I need what I have for my son.” And, indeed, her efforts were all to shield him and keep up his routines.
• • •
Darwin puttered or pounded throughout the day in either his guinea pig room or his “juice” room, while Lafayette Street grew still grislier. Bums are straight out of a comic strip anyway, with their charcoal-smeared faces, their staccato-gapped teeth and gallows bird postures that look like they’ve already been hung. When I watched a man chased down the street by a man with a knife, it was slapstick, like the comics, not TV realism. In the first place, the knife was outsized, and the man in front completely the wrong shape for running, and the man following him, though less bloated, ran like his feet were in boxes, plus the outlandish pursuers who were trying their best not to catch up. Real street fights were broken up into whirring fragments with baby-like waaahs, and bums fought with wood slats like Punch and Judy—the outcries, the shadow-show fury—till, after a long inaudible speech, the winner would take a few theater bows. My troubles at home didn’t help remove me. On the contrary, I lost my perspective, I could see only the suffering. When I was pipetting something, I’d distinguish a child’s shrieks under the rush of the cars and look out the window and see one being whipped on the legs for minutes on end by her father. What could you do? To step in directly would make it worse for the child—the mother already was doing her best to distract him—and to call the police would be more drastic yet, once the guy talked his way out of it and got the girl home. The only weapon was simply to watch—to watch, so that the fellow knew. Long after the family had left, I would be jumping up from my desk to lean out with cramps in my chest as if it were still going on.
In the army I’d worried about being “dehumanized,” although in fact the army had softened me, but here was a vastly more brutal environment. The truck drivers shouted Giddyap at the bums pulling pushcarts. Even the street was caving in because some foundations had been misdug, and it threatened to block up the subway. I was just high enough to be out of throwing range if I shouted at people. When I was outside, myself, though, I quickly got expert at looking away. Either you watched pointedly or, for safety’s sake, you looked away. One time a troop of housewives and I followed four or five friends who were beating the wife of one of them, stopping and pulling her into doorways, until our staring, our numbers, dislodged them.
Ida was shifting furniture to cause a miscarriage and doing hot baths. Going by on the stairs, I heard the brass ring to her voice, on the phone calling friends. After a minute she’d tap at my room to tell me the latest, since it was me in her body budding. Steaming with fear, she went up to Central Park and leapt off the boulders. My hair stood stiff to hear about it. I hugged her, begged, and yet finally had nothing to say, realizing how little the difference was between jumping off boulders and going to the doctors that Darwin knew. She was petrified; she said that her life was a wreckage; she felt hot to the hand as if she were running a temperature and could hardly put two words together, afraid that they might take Tony away, and frightening the daylights out of me. All of a sudden, however, worried that it was some cruel piece of egotism, I would look at her and be tremendously pleased at the pregnancy, sexually excited, and go over her with my hands. She felt the same way immediately. We made the most tender, delicious love, with her stomach the center of it, never so sexy.
Darwin considered me some sort of link to the rest of the world, and joked about “raping girls” and other misconstrued normalcies, though disarmingly gentle about it. He told World War II stories, sitting across from me at his aluminum table and wiping his ribs with a towel if he wore no shirt. He liked to keep to a schedule, to overwork, which wasn’t easy in a lab such as ours, and occasionally to take time off for an indulgent talk with me.
“I’ll tell you, lead your own life. Nobody has any business with you. They won’t understand what you want to do. They’ll laugh at you out of ignorance. So you don’t ask permission from anybody when you pick out something you want to do, you just go ahead, and then you won’t have any problems,” he said, the brief phrases to add pithiness. But this successful man’s manner was rendered incongruous by the misfit’s tone, the schoolboy solemnity he gave everything. It was in his mouse room that he could seem to be bluff the most briskly. The hundreds of rustling creatures did seem like employees, another twill factory in operation. He inspected them with overseeing interest, or picking them up, injected their stomachs, their poor little pots, with that undeniable affection which experimenters, seeing them always as plural, have for their animals as a group.
Our peppiest moments came when a bold bum would wander in wanting his heart listened to. Darwin got shouty, but if the guy didn’t run out of the office or wasn’t insulted he usually would change around. He wrapped his stethoscope affably into his hand like the doctor he’d wanted to be. He’d sit on the edge of the desk and chat like a boy with a younger boy, wreathed in smiles, not so puffy-faced now. These were his cheeriest periods of all, as if he realized that he could still be a part of the world. The bum inevitably blossomed out too, thought he was awfully skillful to get so much free attention—blood pressure taken—and even forgot his worries about his health. The loudest voices are the voices of bums. The final survival energies, drawn if necessary from everywhere else, seem to go to their throats. We had several memorable specimens, stuffed into their clothes like badly made puppets, the clothes brown and gray and all torn—stains, a scrap of a beard. They were bodiless heads. They were so badly off the only reason they still could walk was that they had wasted away to nothing. But the voice mushroomed, as strange as the lush, unnatural plants which grow out of dead things. Or sometimes the only piece left of a bum was his laugh.
“Wherever I happen to be I’ll come in for a checkup every few months, just to be on the safe side. I’ll look-see if I can’t see a fairly intelligent-looking doctor some place pretty close around. I don’t like to walk too far away for it. That way you don’t have to worry, you know nothing is sneaking up on you, and if you do what the fellow tells you to do you’re gonna be okay until the next time—little heart murmur or something, it’s gonna be all right. Oh I can take the cold, I’m very good on that. I know the techniques. They trained us with that. I was up on the DEW Line three years you know. I was up in the Arctic. A lot of these bums wouldn’t last a day. Three years of that and you’ll take the cold fine; you can take anything. Yeah, you’ll see some snow up there, you’ll see some dandy cold.”
He was like a boy who was shining shoes, this one, with his pert line of gab and the patronizing smiles we gave him. He had hands like a turtle’s skin, and strips of newspaper inside his socks, a red toucan nose, a white and red face like a ham bone, and he shook like a soaked sourdough from his illnesses. His ragged coat flapped in the wind like a flag when we watched him leave. Right away he begged from a car at the light, not to lose the boost to his confidence: he put his hands carefully behind him and stooped like a bon vivant to speak to the driver.
We also watched the fences at the garage. I laughed but Darwin was bitter like any respectable citizen under siege. It was hard to tell what was going on because they also worked at regular mechanical jobs. They filled up the station with cars and sweated all day, with a reputation for piddling cheating. But then these cryptic vans would pull in, Pong’s Produce, Old Reliable Pipe and Joint—ten-yea
r-old trucks which had been painted over a dozen times. They’d move the whole garageful in order to stick the truck in the back, getting very excited and busy.
There is nothing likeable about criminals. They’re sneering creatures, ready to turn vicious in an instant, and it was an exacerbation to have them placed opposite us. Of course it made little difference to them when I waggled my finger. They’d grab up tire irons and chase a man. If a Negro drove in for gas, they gave him a Queen Isabella bow and had him wait, pretending to be just about to come, in order to see how long they could keep him. “You goddam bow-and-arrow, get outa here!” They worked, they threatened, in absolute incoherence—a shrug, a lunge at the breastbone. They couldn’t talk without jabbing their hands at the person, the mark of respect being not quite to touch him. My stomach got turgid and hot as I’d watch an incident develop. For some reason I went back to the screw-you signal of my boyhood and pointed with that, trying to make myself heard. I shook in confusion for the next half hour whether I’d stayed to watch the scene out or whether I’d ducked away like Darwin. They robbed their own pay phone when they needed change, and the Puerto Ricans hated them too and used to write “warps,” “gunnies,” on the wall at night after the place closed. One Sunday Darwin watched a car which they hadn’t been able to fit inside completely stripped, down to the axles, by three Negroes. He was delighted. It yawned there Monday, while the men fumed.
The four were related, I got the impression, except for a muscle-bound fellow who seemed the most decent. The dominant guy was a blast of straight vigor. He worked a twelve-hour day in his shirt sleeves into December, never ceasing to bluster and shout. He ate with his left hand and worked with his right, talking over his shoulder to the hired, muscle-bound one and yelling ahead to his fat husky brother. The brother, with an unpleasant face, kept up with his share of the jobs but sourly. He had the children who played nearby, attractive twins. The fourth man, who was maybe a cousin, was nervous natured and thin and tall. He had lithe, precise hips that pumped when he walked. He was the most unpredictable and independent and had an oddly chic wife who came and sat in their car every few days while he worked. She looked nice; she was a softening influence, very much gentling him. A snide scowl snuck over him when he got the snow shovel and ran for a bum (they’d let the guy go in a corner and start to pee first). The two children did not have a dampening effect, but when his wife was around none of this happened. He resented me—he was the one who stared back. If I passed on the street he usually quit working sarcastically, though we never spoke.
Virgil Grissom and Hubert Humphrey were driven through on their way up from City Hall. We had a vegetable wagon clatter by daily that serviced the luncheonette downstairs. I looked down at the part in the horse’s mane. The Hoodoos fought with the Roman Emperors in the next block. And we had Light and Gas men. They were trying to pump out a manhole before doing some job, except that it filled up again every night. In the morning they strung tapes around the hole, hung warning flags, and set the pump going, and smoked and Coked the day away until the last hour, when they took everything down again. And a mailman made constant pickups—it has to be seen to be believed how many are made.
By the garage was a liquor store owned by a man with a villainous voice and a face shaped like smoke, gray as smoke, who flapped one hand smartly behind when he zipped along on a delivery. He parked in the station and was friends with the bunch, although he considered himself a cut above them. Ours was the civilized side of the street. Right below me was a classical tailor, who suffered like a sunfish in a pail; and, next door to him, a womanly printer whose window display had not been changed for fifteen years and whose mouth was as large as his stomach, the better to laugh with, presumably. He cut the ads for his son-in-law’s business out of the paper and carried them around like snapshots. Then his cobbler friend, as skeptical and as seamed as a jockey. He hammered so neatly it was like a stage set: stroke, stroke, the sole was fast; and the nails in his mouth for comic relief. He had a comedian’s mouth anyway, and he’d go out and pet the vegetable horse. Two Puerto Ricans ran the luncheonette in eager immigrant fashion. The best thing about them was how they walked off at six o’clock, rolling like seamen, relaxing so hard. They were agreeable and got along fine until the slap-dash cooking cut into their business. They responded by cooking more hastily still and by stinginess with the portions and reducing the menu, so that it was another sad story.
We had plenty of people around and yet we had nobody. When something happened and I would go down I would be on an empty street. In my way, I was expert at preserving my own skin. I never “closed” with anyone, just put myself close at hand. When a car jerked out of the traffic one time with screams from inside, I opened the door on the girlfriend’s side to help her get out, not the man’s, and retreated as he came after me. “Oh you better run—he’ll kill you!” she shrieked. I could see Darwin’s pale face above me, and the jockey squinted behind his window as if he were watching a dangerous jump. Darwin believed he had a sixth sense, which made him especially fearful. By now he was sure I’d get clobbered. He told oodles of war stories, remembering more as he went along, and displayed the scars of a beating he had received from some young homosexuals in an earlier phase. They’d tattooed the star on his hand, which alone would have made it impossible for him to return to a more normal life, he claimed. Breakdowns and other new chapters were revealed. An old anxiety about robberies returned. He stopped inviting his Spanish friends up because they might see the equipment and be tempted. He checked the door to the roof twice a day. “That’s where they come, off the roof.” While he was scared to sleep in the lab, he was even more afraid to leave it unguarded. He used army phrases, shaking his head and gritting his teeth. He even quit leaving our leftovers outside the old lady’s door down the hall in case she broke in some night after more.
But he was for me, telling me twenty times that he would be my character witness. It was often the police I was battling. In civilian clothes a guy would march off a vagrant, refusing to show him his badge, just whacks. Or when they stormed in in response to a call, arrowing down Lafayette the wrong way, these were the large, lengthy scenes, spreading across the wide street, repetitious but excruciating after you had seen a few. The gold-badges slapped with open hands, as a detective would. The silver-badges poked their clubs like bayonets until a pretext came for swinging down. I bought a camera and drafted letters to the New York Times. I fretted on the outskirts, trying to copy cap numbers, and more than once I only saved myself from being arrested by backing off. The standard ending became to find myself being forced to lay my ID cards across the roof of a police car while all the stuff was written down, to stand there, hands on top of the car, in front of the open door—it functions as a sort of station house—until the decision was made as to whether to arrest me, too, or not.
I got nutty, no question about it—more compelled and susceptible, quick to tear and quick to tremble. My eyes had been rubbed raw. The fire escapes on the garment factories filled up with people if a Negro was involved, and some of them would rush downstairs and fuss alongside me on the edge of the action. My ragged nerves were like theirs. I had seen so much violence by now, so many atrocious injustices, that any beginning carried its whole plain progression for me—I understood Darwin’s sixth sense. The police were the same, for that matter, and so were the gas station toughs. Everybody picked up from the last time. Anger from then, or anguish, whatever it was, piled onto the new occasion. In a flash the despair poured back, and I would be leaning over the patrol car hood again, my teeth practically chattering.
“No, no sir, buddy, you take out your fucking license yourself! I don’t handle nobody’s wallet!”
It was December, that awful Christmas, and we had the procession of Santa Clauses coming out of the subway all day with their locked boxes and Santa Claus bells. Their terminus was a mission nearby on Houston, so we had the entire city’s street Santas, who were really just ordinary bums dressed u
p in red and white, limping along much as usual—they didn’t bother with stomachs for them. We also had Fire Department exercises going on within a couple of blocks. I needed a vacation badly, needed to get to the country; I was irritated simply by humans and human activity by this time. If a bus driver reached the end of his route and wanted to turn around, I argued with him. The signs on a church or a synagogue that said that it closed at 8 p.m. stuck me as pharisaism. At my cheerfulest I typed myself with the bearded, anachronist Jews in shiny black coats, only a very few left, who still hauled their pushcarts through all this madness in the old style, purple with sweat, having no relation whatever to it.
Though the frog tests I did on Ida continued to run negative, she wouldn’t menstruate and the doctor thought that he felt a pregnancy rather than cancer—he said it was something. I would drop in on the way to work, if possible, because of my own shakiness, instead of at night when I would have to stay longer. I gave her money and horrified hugs and pained, gingerly looks which tried to convey affection. It’s hard to reconstruct exactly what she was feeling since I was trying to avoid being aware of it. She “suspected” I didn’t love her, though of course I believed I had never pretended to; and she really thought a good deal of the time that she was going to die or at least be made sterile. She dreamt of water, of babies, of me, of death, and raged against being a woman, while at the same time she was trying to shield me from what she was going through, that is, except for the nights when she heaped her sufferings on me in blinding half-hour explosions, her voice like a flatted cornet. She ate and threw up as if she were pregnant, and looked taut and scrawny with that violin-string attenuation of a cat which drags itself. Then, next morning, what a Liz Taylor opened the door, bellying gay as the clouds! I’d bite her. I had a permanent cold from exhaustion.
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