20

by John Edgar Wideman

  1995

  DANGEROUS MEN

  Geoffrey Becker

  Calvin, a drummer from Long Island who lived down the hall from us, wore jeans and tight, white T-shirts, smoked Lucky Strikes, and had eyes that nervously avoided contact. He was nineteen and skinny, but in a muscular way that reminded me of a greyhound. It was the summer of 1974, and my friend Ed and I shared a dorm room in what had once been a cheap hotel, but was now part of the Berklee College of Music. One Saturday night, Calvin came to our room and laid out ten little purple pills.

  “Eat ’em up, gentlemen,” he said.

  I looked over at Ed, who was laboring to get his hair into a rubber band. Ed hadn't had a haircut in three years, and from behind, since he was short, you'd swear he was a girl.

  “What are they?” Ed asked.

  “Magic beans,” Calvin said, punching my arm. “I traded the old lady's cow for them.”

  I picked one up, then placed it carefully back down. A little color came off on my fingertips.

  “UFO,” he went on. “Got ’em off a sax player I met on the elevator. Cat worked with Buddy Rich Calvin had a thing about Buddy Rich.

  “So?”

  I glanced over at my homework. I'd been trying to write out a horn arrangement for “Satin Doll.” After nearly two hours' work, I was still on the third measure, and I was pretty sure my trumpet part had wandered below the instrument's range anyway. Lili Arnot, the girl I loved, smiled down happily from where I'd taped her photo above my desk, tanned and lovely against the unhealthy green of the cracked plaster wall.

  They were more like little barrels than tablets. Ed and I each had two, Calvin six. I watched with amazement as he placed them one after another into his mouth. They tasted bitter, no matter how fast you got them down.

  ————

  It was the kind of night where your skin itches and the heat seems to sweat the street life right out of the city's pores. I gave a drunk with an English accent fifty cents and he croaked his thanks, but I sensed it might be a mistake in the long run, because the other drunks glowered at me, memorizing my face. Calvin led us past a trio of sullen hookers and over to TK's, a bar across the street where we could get served. Ed and I were both underage.

  We ordered a pitcher of Black Label and listened to him.

  “Let me tell you guys something,” Calvin said. “I am dying here. At home, I get laid four times a day, I'm serious.”

  Ed nodded. He had a steady girlfriend back in New Jersey, Deborah, whose sexual appetite was enormous. I'd convinced him to come with me to Boston and do this summer program, and though we didn't talk about it much, we both knew what he'd given up. What he might, in fact, have given up permanently, given Deborah's obvious and immediate needs.

  “You guys want to see a picture of my girl?” Calvin pulled out his wallet and unfolded a piece of paper that looked suspiciously as if it had been cut from a magazine. Ed looked at it first, then handed it to me.

  “Nice,” I said. It was a photo of a redhead, kneeling on a handwoven carpet, wearing an Indian headband and nothing else. I had to admit, if you were going to pick a girl to have delusions about, this was the one. Her eyes looked right out at you from the picture, not in a cheap way, or even a sexy one. It was more like she was studying you, as if she were seriously interested in who this person holding her in the flat of his hand might be.

  When Calvin went to the bathroom, I asked Ed what he thought.

  “I think that is one fucked-up individual, is what I think.”

  “He ate six,” I said.

  “We think he ate them. How can we be sure?”

  “You think he tricked us?” The pills had begun to kick in, and whatever they were, they were cut with speed. I could feel myself tensing up. “Why would he trick us?”

  “I don't know, man. The guy falls in love with magazine pictures.”

  “Maybe we're just paranoid.”

  “We're definitely paranoid. That doesn't mean we're wrong. Sometimes it's smart to be paranoid.”

  “We could just go,” I said. “Go see a movie or something. He'd probably be OK by himself.”

  Ed stroked his chin. He'd taken his hair down again, and already he was turning into something gnomelike and medieval, a strangely proportioned face peering out from behind curtains. “The thing is, if he really did take six, we can't leave him alone. It wouldn't be right. Look at us. Now multiply this by three. Plus, the dude's a couple eggs short of a dozen as it is.”

  “Right,” I said. “What do we do with him?”

  “I don't know,” said Ed. “Have some fun. Go out. What do we usually do?”

  ————

  We drank another pitcher, then headed out into the evening. Ed and I wanted to see Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, which was rated X and in 3-D. Calvin told us he had something else in mind.

  “There's this park not far away,” he said. “Fags go there. I heard about it from one of the kitchen staff. They go and hang around in the bushes until some other fag comes along and then pair off.”

  This was a new concept to me. I knew there were homosexuals in the world, but I hadn't imagined them lurking about in bushes at night like zombies.

  “What do you say we go kick some faggot butt?” asked Calvin.

  We were standing in the shadow of a tall building smoking cigarettes, buzzing with the UFO, though some of that edge had been taken off nicely by the beer. It was cooler than it had been all day and my energy was high. I made a gallant attempt to run straight up the side of the building, but only ended up landing a good kick to the stone.

  “Yeah,” said Ed. “That sounds good.”

  I'd never really been in any fights, and I didn't know how I'd react. I'd never met a faggot, at least not to my knowledge, though there were some guys at school we had our doubts about. Beating them up had never crossed my mind. But Ed and Calvin seemed to have bonded on the issue. I figured I could just go along, see what happened.

  We wandered through streets that seemed mirror images of themselves, angled and dark, the tall, brown faces of the row houses looking out at us with the calmness of age and location. The pavement was swollen and soft and the metal of the closely parked cars ticked with the day's heat. Stopping to admire a GTO, Calvin asked us which we'd rather have, a Goat or a T-bird, and when Ed said T-bird, Calvin told him he was full of shit.

  “Goats go,” he said, as if the sound of the words were themselves somehow proof.

  For a while, I forgot about our purpose and tried to organize the arrhythmic thops of Ed's and Calvin's boots against the stone slabs of the sidewalk while I floated along behind, silent as a balloon. I could still see the blank staves of my music tablet, and now various rhythmic figures deported themselves for me, grouping and regrouping like children at a dance recital. Rhythm was my big weakness; I just couldn't translate what I heard to paper. That spring, I'd found a book in my parents' bedroom about people who'd made miraculous breakthroughs on LSD—an electrical engineer who'd suddenly understood how to solve a problem he'd been working on for ten years, a schizophrenic who'd managed to rid herself of the voices that had plagued her all her life—and now I wondered if I couldn't make a similar leap. As we walked, I experimented by plugging in time signatures: 4/4, 9/8 5/8. With each change the dots would all shift. Though I doubted the accuracy of what I was seeing, I was definitely seeing something, and I was proud of my brain for being able to conjure answers so quickly, right or wrong. The more I thought about it, though, the more artificial the whole idea seemed. The world didn't divide up neatly, it fragmented in strange and unusual ways. It was only our need to make sense of it that made us believe in things like time signatures, or minutes and hours for that matter. Or days of the week, cities, states. Even countries.

  We'd stopped moving and were waiting to cross a street. “The problem is limits,” I said.

  Calvin looked hard at me. “The problem is faggots.”

  Embarrassed, I bummed a cigarette from Ed, who was
smoking Kools that summer, tearing the packs open at the bottom corner the way the black kids at our school did. I thought it was pretty affected, but I hadn't said anything to him about it. I was hoping he'd come around on his own.

  “So where is this park?” It seemed to have grown a lot darker out. I didn't think I was having fun.

  Calvin's face puckered with irritation. “Don't worry about it. We're close.”

  It occurred to me that probably, there was no park. There were no faggots. These things were as imaginary as the girl in his wallet.

  In the distance, the CITGO sign hung in the air like a single, luminous eye, opening and closing with reptilian removal. Also there was, quite suddenly, music.

  “We're near the water,” said Ed.

  ————

  On the grass by the Hatch shell, a festival was in progress. People beat on drums and blew saxophones and danced. Someone was shooting off medium-sized fireworks, and every few minutes there would be a whoosh followed by an explosion overhead, as red, green, silver, and gold flowers bloomed in the night sky. A woman with her face painted white wearing a clown wig and a Mr. Donut apron hurled handfuls of miniature glazed donuts up into the air. I asked her what was going on.

  “You don't know?”

  “No, I don't.”

  “The president resigned,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Nixon! Isn't it great?” She gave me a couple of donuts and I returned to my friends. Ed was doing push-ups, while Calvin tossed a small knife in the air, catching it each time by the blade end.

  “It's Nixon,” I reported. “He resigned.”

  Ed got to his feet, grinning, and slapped me five. It was like our team had won the Superbowl. I hadn't followed the specifics carefully, but I had watched with fascination the haggard images of the man that had appeared on TV over the past few months. There was no doubt in my mind the president had lost it, had become Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, hollow eyed, intent on discovering who'd eaten his strawberries. I had only the vaguest memories of the Kennedy assassination. I'd been in summer camp for the moon landing, 150 of us squinting at one snowy TV screen that had been set up in the dining hall. Here was something I'd remember.

  “Are you guys with me, or what?” Calvin asked. He didn't even look at the knife, just flipped it. He never missed, but even so, I kept thinking at any moment he was liable to lose a finger or two.

  “What about the movie?” I suggested. In the flickering river-light, Calvin had become something of an old newsreel himself.

  “Movie?” He toed the earth, kicking a small hunk of dirt to the side. “I want to kick some ass.”

  “You don't know where they are,” I reminded him. “What have we been doing for the last hour?”

  “I know where they are.”

  “Here,” I said, distributing the donuts. Ed popped his in his mouth whole. Calvin slit his into pieces with his knife, dropping the sections to the ground.

  “So, where are they?” I asked.

  “What are you saying?”

  I told him I wasn't saying anything. His eyes, I thought, had a peculiarly dead look to them, as if they'd been replaced with lug nuts.

  “You think I'm shitting you? You think they aren't out there? This whole town is crawling with faggots.” He looked around, as if some might be listening at this very moment.

  “But where?” I asked. “This is all I want to know. Where are we going? You say we're going somewhere, and then we walk and walk, and we don't get there.”

  Calvin scratched at the side of his nose with his middle finger. He'd begun to glow a little, like something irradiated.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I don't need you guys. I'll do this alone.”

  “Hey,” said Ed. “We're coming.”

  ————

  We hadn't gone far when I saw that Ed was holding something. Calvin walked a few paces ahead of us, leading us back into the city; away from the water. It was a kitten.

  “Where'd she come from?” I asked.

  “In the park,” he said. “I'm naming her Ella.”

  “What if she belongs to someone?”

  “She belongs to me. She's a stray.”

  “But how do you know that? Maybe someone was just out playing with their kitten and she wandered off. Maybe they're out looking for her right now.”

  “Relax, man,” said Ed. “You worry too much.”

  “I'm just saying it might not be a stray.”

  “It might not be a cat, either. They look like kittens, so we take them into our homes, then they tear us open while we're asleep, climb inside, and assume our bodies.”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “But she's going to be your responsibility. Don't expect your father and me to feed her and change her litter box.”

  There was a screech of brakes up ahead, followed by a kind of thump sound, and I saw Calvin get tossed a few feet into the air backward, then fall hard to the ground. Ed and I ran to him. He was just lying there on his side. The guy driving the car was already out and on his knees.

  “He walked right out in front of me,” the guy said. “I think I killed him. Oh, lord, I think he's dead.”

  I knew he wasn't dead because I could see him breathing. “Calvin,” I said. “Are you all right?” There was no answer.

  “We ought to get the cops,” said Ed.

  “Maybe we could bypass that,” said the man, uneasily. “I mean, I don't see that the cops are necessary here. Why don't we just get an ambulance?”

  “Yeah,” I said, remembering the hash pipe tucked in my pocket. “Let's bypass the cops.”

  “Out of nowhere,” the guy was saying. He was older, a black guy, dressed in a suit, and while I was worried about Calvin, I felt bad for him, too. His car was a Cadillac, a new one. He'd just been minding his business, trying to get someplace. He didn't deserve us.

  Ed helped Calvin to a sitting position. His eyes were open and he seemed to be able to see. “You blew it big time,” he said to the guy. “My dad's a lawyer. I intend to own that car of yours.”

  “Don't mind him,” said Ed. “He's not right in the head.”

  “Can you breathe?” I asked. “Can you move everything?”

  “Well, I guess I'll be getting along,” said the driver.

  “Don't let him go anywhere,” Calvin directed us. “Hold him.” For a tense second or two, Ed and I looked at each other, waiting to see what the other would do. I didn't feel like grabbing anyone, though I wasn't sure about Ed. I sensed there might actually be a part of him that wanted to beat up strangers. The man edged away from us, got into his car and pulled away in a squealing of tires.

  “Pussies,” said Calvin.

  “You're all right,” I said after we'd all been silent for a little while. “Come on and let's head back to the dorm.”

  I tried to help him to his feet, but he shook off my hand and got up on his own. His jeans were torn down the side of one leg where he'd slid on the asphalt, and his arm was pretty scraped up, too. He brushed himself off and spat a couple of times.

  “Amazing,” said Ed. “You could be dead right now. You probably should be. What happened?”

  “I don't know,” he said. “I don't remember that much about it.” His hands shook uncontrollably as he attempted to light a cigarette. After five matches, he got it going. “Where'd the cat come from?”

  Ed put Ella up on his shoulder. “I found her.”

  Calvin took his cigarette and drew circles in the air in front of the kitten, who was fascinated. The orange ember left visible trails, like pinwheels in the dark.

  ————

  The skinny, acned night desk guy was playing chess by himself and didn't even look up as we came in. The elevator stopped more or less at the fifth floor and we jumped down into the hallway, except for Calvin, who'd been limping slightly. He sat, dangled his legs, then stood. Outside our door we stopped as I hunted for the key. I was hoping Calvin would keep on going—I'd had enough of
him for one night.

  “What are you guys going to do?” he asked.

  “I'm kind of tired,” I lied. I felt as if I'd probably be awake for the next week. This was not a happy, fun drug we'd taken. This was a twist-your-head-up-in-knots drug. I just wanted it to be over.

  “Mind if I hang? I don't like it when that guy goes off.”

  For the past week or so, right around midnight, someone on one of the upper floors had been letting loose with a series of bloodcurdling screams. We called him the Wildman. Legends had begun to appear scrawled in marker on the elevator wall: “Wildman Lives” and “Have you made your Peace?” While we all figured it was just some student with a twisted sense of humor and probably not the Angel of Death, the screams themselves were definitely unnerving.

  I was a little surprised. “You're not scared, are you?”

  “I just don't like it.” Behind him, the dim hallway gaped like a mouth. He was vibrating slightly, possibly out of fear, but it could have been leftover nerves from the accident, or even just a trick of the hall light.

  We let him in. Ed mashed up some saltines with water for Ella and put them in a dish. Calvin sat on the floor and took off his shoe. His ankle was swollen up like a grapefruit and had begun to turn a greenish purple.

  “You walked on that?” Ed asked.

  “I didn't know what it looked like.”

  “But you must have felt something,” I said. “I mean, Jesus, that's ugly.”

  “I felt something, I guess. I don't know.”

  It was a bad moment. I thought he might cry. He kept staring at his ankle and shaking his head. “We should ice it,” I said. Someone needed to take charge here.

  “Where do we get ice at this time of night?” said Ed. He brought over our bottle of Jim Beam and some plastic cups.

  I took the elevator back down to the Pepsi machine, pumped it with all our laundry quarters, got back on with an armful of cold cans.

  Between the third and fourth floors, the elevator stalled. Then the lights flickered and went out. I stood there in total darkness holding five cans of soda, feeling their icy outlines against my ribs. From someplace high above, a person began to scream, making the kind of sounds that might come from someone being turned on a rack, or having their skin slowly peeled from them. I bent my knees and lowered myself to the floor. I decided to separate myself from this. Filtered through the elevator shaft, the sounds had a surreal quality, and I tried to imagine how one might notate them. After a while, I couldn't even tell if my eyes were open or not. I dropped the sodas and put my hands over my ears.