Wake Up, Sir!: A Novel

by Jonathan Ames

  But no police or vengeful gangs pursued me. I safely reached the Adler, and with my last bit of strength, I dashed up the concrete steps. The front door was open. Thank God, the old lady had left it open for m; how could I have rung the bell and let her see my face?

  I tiptoed through the dark lobby and then went quickly up the staircase to my room, through the door, past the mezuzah.

  “Jeeves! Jeeves!” I cried.

  CHAPTER 10

  Jeeves to the rescueThings look bad for my jacket and worse for meA few hours' sleep, some would call it passing outA discussion of my flawsA last look and then a departure

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Jeeves! I've been mortally wounded!”

  “It appears, sir, that you've had some type of accident.”

  “Accident? A piece of bone from my nose may have entered my brain! I was in a fight to the death with a member of the Hells Angels and I'm wanted by the police. Oh, Jeeves, what are we going to do? I really screwed up this time.”

  “May I suggest, sir, that you lie down and I will take care of your injuries.”

  “Am I disfigured, Jeeves?”

  But before he could answer, I went to the bathroom to look in the mirror. With a washcloth, I carefully dabbed off some of the dirt I had smeared my face with.

  Well, I'd always had a bony nose, with a prominent bump at the top, very similar to George Washington's nose, should you happen to have a quarter in your pocket and want to take a look, and now that bump, as I had determined earlier, was way over on the right.

  This made sense since the fellow I'd tangled with had struck me with his right-hand toaster, which had sent my nose, like an English sentence, from the left to the right. The nostrils, stubbornly, were still in the middle. The skin over the bump was cut open. The blood had dried, but the wound was lumpy with granules of earth. The whole nose was frightfully and eerily swollen, and the nostrils were filled with thick, stopped blood, and there was dried blood all over my chin.

  “I've wrecked myself, Jeeves … I'm mutilated.” I tried to touch my nose, but the feel of it repelled me.

  I held back tears.

  “Please lie down, sir.”

  Jeeves was showing a great deal of sangfroid at the sight of my dried sang, and his calmness had a hypnotic effect on me. Like a tiny boy, I held out my arms to him and he began to remove my clothes—the lapels of my favorite blue linen sport coat were bloody, but maybe the jacket wasn't ruined. One always hears that blood can't be washed out, but it often is. This business then about permanent bloodstains on clothing must be a rumor to keep people from attacking one another, though it's not a very effective rumor since a good deal of attacking still goes on.

  Anyway, I lay on the bed and Jeeves gently bathed my face. Then he applied a damp washcloth to my nose, in lieu of ice.

  Undone by it all, I passed out.

  Around six-thirty in the morning there was a harsh banging on the door. I was shot into consciousness. But not just consciousness. Full coherent panic. My God, it's the police, I thought.

  Jeeves was by my side, holding a wet compress. “Jeeves, it must be the sheriff,” I whispered. “Should we climb out the window?”

  “There's no fire escape, sir.”

  The banging continued, then speech. “In there—you want shvitz bath?” It was the old lady.

  “Yes … of course … very good … thank you…. I'll come down in twenty minutes. That all right?”

  “We heat the water. Come in thirty minutes,” said the old lady through the door.

  “All right,” I said. There was silence. She had left.

  “I'm only stalling her, Jeeves. We have to flee at once. I'm sure to be traced here to the Adler. I told everyone at the bar I was staying here and the cashier at the gas station knows—I asked him for directions.”

  I went to the bathroom to start getting ready and regarded myself in the mirror. I looked worse than I had a few hours before. The swelling had really set in. I looked like I was wearing the mask of a boxer. A boxer who wasn't very good. The space between my eyes, at the top of my nose, which was normally an indentation—in fact, most people have an indentation there unless you are a horse or a member of the horse family, like a zebra or a burro—was puffy, bloated.

  I've overheard discussion of a certain arrangement of features known as a unibrow; well, I had a uniface. I was all snout, and to the left and right of this grotesque snout were already two black eyes. And beneath the snout was my Fairbanks Jr. mustache. But no pimples! The blows I received had done something to my pimples. Knocked them into submission! How innocent—how vain! how foolish!—I had been just one day before when my greatest concern was two spots on my upper lip.

  Seeing my face took something out of me and I wasn't quite ready to flee. Fleeing, most will agree, requires a good deal of energy. So instead, I sat on the edge of the bed to inspect the rest of my person. There was a black mark on my stomach—some kind of horrible blood bruise—and two blue-red bruises on my hip and shoulder respectively. Also, my right wrist and hand were tender from the punch I had thrown, and both palms were scraped from when I had fought the curbing before fighting the Hill. I experienced pity for my body, like it was something separate from me, something that should be valued, but had instead been vandalized.

  I was about to cry and leaned forward to hold my face in my hands, but blood rushed into my nose, such that I thought my head might explode. I lay back, to drain the blood elsewhere. I was also hungover. Hungover and bludgeoned! I couldn't cry, after all. It hurt too much.

  Jeeves cleared his throat.

  “What is it, Jeeves?” I whimpered.

  “If I may inquire, sir, you were hysterical last night and I didn't want to further upset you with an interrogation, but I am curious to know how you came to blows with a Hells Angel and why you are wanted by the police.”

  “There's no point in explaining things, Jeeves. I should just be shot.”

  “Perhaps, sir, if you tell me what happened, I can provide some counsel.”

  “I'm too wiped out.”

  “I only require the headlines, sir. A brief summary.”

  “All right,” I said.

  It wasn't fair to keep the fellow in the dark, so I related the tragedy to Jeeves, confessing all. He absorbed my tale like some kind of magus and then he spoke with great sobriety and sanity. First of all, the message in the phone book, Jeeves hypothesized, was some kind of prank perpetrated on the femme fatale in question, not authored by Debbie herself, and so I was in the wrong for having made the phone call. But it was his feeling that we weren't in great danger of the law, that such a fellow as I had fought with was unlikely to seek out the police, and if he did, there was the old fallback of self-defense. The woman, though, might have cause for action, but the whole thing was so absurd that the local constabulary would probably be baffled as to what to do.

  He did think we should leave for Saratoga Springs this morning, since as a keen observer of my psyche, he knew that I would feel too anxious to remain in town. We could get a hotel room in Saratoga and then report to the Rose Colony the next day, as expected. I could explain my injuries by telling them that I had been in a minor car accident.

  Time would take care of the body was his overall opinion, and I was not to touch any more alcohol. Jeeves was rather stern on this point—“I really do think, sir, that you show every sign of being alcoholic, floridly evident in last night's episode, and so the only recourse, I can see, is abstention”—whereas in the past he had simply looked the other way while the young master gargled the crushed grape.

  I humbly accepted his prescription of temperance, but wondered if there wasn't more I could do. “Do you think I should write a letter of apology to the woman and to the man?” I asked Jeeves. “Perhaps from her phone number there's a way to get her address.”

  “Your intention is good, sir, but I think a letter would not have the desired effect. Anything having to do with you would most likely cause more
pain, and a letter, I'm afraid, would be misunderstood by the parties in question. I do understand your willingness to make amends, but it's probably best to see your injuries as your form of apology. Your burden, as it were.”

  “Yes, Jeeves,” I said. What a mess I had made, but I had to pull myself together.

  We gathered our few things and slipped out of the Adler. The old lady must have been in the basement tending to my bath. I felt bad leaving her without explanation, but I had paid for two nights and so my conscience was more or less clear.

  We got into the Caprice and I started the engine. Through blackened eyes, I took a last look at the tall, leaning Adler. Mist was coming off the morning grass and so the foundation of the hotel was lost in a cloud hovering close to earth, and it was all rather lovely and eerie, but this wasn't the time to meditate on beauty, and so I put the car in reverse and then aimed it for Saratoga Springs and the Rose Colony.

  PART III

  Saratoga Springs, New York

  PART III

  Saratoga Springs, New York

  CHAPTER 11

  Jeeves and I sequester ourselves at the Spa City MotelEmpathy experienced for criminalsI ice my nose and read a little Anthony PowellA black depressionThoughts of suicideJeeves helps me to rally

  It was the beginning of the racing season in Saratoga, but we managed to find a room. Right on Broadway, we checked into a 1950s sort of hostelry: a bright blue paint job, a splashy sign, a bar in the lobby, a pool the shape of a kidney and the size of a kidney—in short, the kind of place where you have a healthy fear of getting lice from the blankets. The Spa City Motel was its nom de guerre.

  “What happened to you?” asked the desk clerk, who was a misshapen little fellow.

  “Car accident,” I said, and the terseness of my tone indicated that no further conversation would be necessary.

  It was a day infested with July sunshine, but when we got into the room, on the second floor, I pulled the curtains. Was feeling rather criminal, you know, still expecting the long arm of the Sharon Springs law to tap me on the shoulder and arrest me for breaking a fellow human being's kneecap and for making a harassing, ill-advised phone call to an innocent female.

  Thus, I peered out the slit of the curtain, glancing at the parking lot below, and I felt a surge of empathy for criminals all across America, many of whom at the precise moment were also no doubt peering nervously out of curtain slits, waiting for other long arms of the law to reach them, which well those long arms should, since I am all for criminals being arrested. You see, I was only empathizing with how nervous criminal behavior makes you feel; in no way was I approving of behaving criminally.

  “Oh, Jeeves,” I said, clutching the curtain, “life is so difficult.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In the parking lot below, I saw a squirrel run from a trash bin to a tree, which it nimbly and efficiently climbed. What an athletic and perfect little creature, I thought. Then I imagined that squirrel running up my leg, noting, as I did, that there's not much difference between a squirrel and a rat, just some fluffy hair on a tail. Then the squirrel leaped majestically from a tree branch to a phone line. I admired him. He knew exactly what to do at all times. You wouldn't see him drinking to excess at the Hen's Roost.

  “Animals don't seem to get into trouble,” I said to Jeeves. “They're much more sane than human beings.”

  “Why don't you lie down, sir,” said Jeeves, clearly not wanting to engage in a discussion on the flaws of man and the perfection of animals. “I will make an ice pack for your nose.”

  This seemed a wise course of action, and I let go of the curtain and lay down on the nearer of the two beds. Jeeves left the room and made quick use of the Spa City Motel ice machine, returning with a bucket of the necessary ingredients for a cold compress.

  So there I was, icing my nose, which also soothed my hangover. I would have liked to sleep, but it was impossible while icing myself, so with my free hand I held open my Anthony Powell novel, forgoing Hammett, thinking that Powell would mix better with my ice pack since his prose is wonderfully chilled, but after just a few minutes I had to stop reading as I felt myself overcome by the blackest of depressions. I took stock of my life:

  I was an alcoholic who had been beaten to a pulp.

  I had no home.

  I had lost, over the years, almost all my friends.

  My parents had both been dead for more than a decade, and what family I did have, an aunt and uncle, I had alienated.

  The closest I had come lately to a girlfriend was literally in my dreams—the blonde girl who'd said, “I love you, Blair.”

  I had published one novel, but that had been seven years before.

  I was thirty years old and a complete failure—I only had money because of a lawsuit.

  Was there anything positive about me? I could only come up with one thing: I had been accepted to a prestigious artist colony, but how was I going to show up there the next day with my face so damaged?

  I was feeling as low as they come. Or as low as I come, anyway. So hungover and broken-nosed, I covetously eyed the plastic bag which lined the small garbage can next to the night table.

  A writer I admire, Jerzy Kosinski, used a plastic bag to kill himself, and ever since he pulled that stunt, when I am beyond consolation, I think of putting a plastic bag over my head, which is symbolic of a lower rung of depression and self-pity than when I merely think, “I should be shot.”

  I ran through the fantasy: I pictured the bag over my head, a strange sleep following, and then no more having to put up with myself. But also, I thought, no more suspense, no more wondering if there might yet be a happy ending, or at least a pleasant middle. And then, too, the greatest deterrent came to mind: the pain I would cause the few people—well, maybe one person, Aunt Florence—who loved me.

  There was also Jeeves. I didn't want to presume that he loved me, but if I did kill myself I was sure that it would upset him considerably. Also, if I went the Kosinski route, it certainly wouldn't look good on his résumé. I imagined that the suicide of an employer would be a real blemish for a valet, and I didn't want to do that to Jeeves. So rather than mar his record by killing myself, I sought his counsel.

  “Jeeves,” I said, “I'm running on fumes. Despairing, if you follow me. So I'll put it right to you: Do you think there's anything worthwhile about me?”

  It was a rather bold-faced cry for help and flattery, but I was desperate. His back was to me and he didn't say a word. I waited. I waited some more.

  “Jeeves!” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you hear my question?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I'd like a response. Terrible to leave a fellow hanging. I'm not exactly feeling like Norman Vincent Peale. A combination of Norman Bates and Vincent Price is more my mood at the moment.”

  Again Jeeves was silent. I may have baffled him with my references to the cinema. He's aware of some things, major movie stars like Clark Gable and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Errol Flynn, but the fellow's absorption of modern culture is minimal at best. But I didn't have time to illuminate him on movie arcana and explain myself.

  “Jeeves!” I said. “Please tell me something that's halfway redeeming about myself!”

  “I'm sorry for the delay, sir. There are so many things about you that are worthwhile that it is difficult to choose a single quality.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Enough with the yes, sirs, let a compliment rip. I don't want to tell you what I've been thinking about that plastic bag in the garbage can.”

  “Well, sir, I find you to be a kind person. Tolerant of others.”

  “You really think so, Jeeves?”

  “Quite, sir.”

  “So I look the other way when others have faults?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sort of a noble characteristic, you'd say?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This pleased me
and then I cast the inner eye over some of my recent relationships to see if Jeeves's assessment was correct. I quickly struck upon a possible glaring exception.

  “Was I tolerant and kind to my uncle Irwin, Jeeves?”

  “I would say so, sir. You knew that your society disturbed your uncle and so you did your best to avoid him, which I think, sir, shows a great deal of kindness and respect.”

  I thought Jeeves was missing an essential point: as much as my uncle did not yearn for my society, so I did not yearn for his society. We were equally nonyearning. But, looking at it from Jeeves's perspective, I could see that I hadn't been unkind to the uncle, so I was free to put Jeeves's compliment on the credit side of my ledger.

  “Thank you, Jeeves. I appreciate you being kind to me, and I won't press you for any more compliments, unless you feel like letting one casually slip.”

  “Your mustache, much to my surprise, sir, is coming along rather nicely.”

  “Oh, thank you, Jeeves!”

  “You're welcome, sir.”

  “Your words are like aspirin, Jeeves. Very soothing. I've taken two and will call the doctor in the morning.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “Think I'll try to sleep now, Jeeves,” I said. “Gather my strength for reporting tomorrow to the Rose Colony. Those artists are bound to be a terrifying lot, and having a broken face won't make things any easier. Yesterday, it was hard to imagine facing the world with two pimples.”

  “Some rest is a good idea, sir.”

  “Well, thank you for this ice, Jeeves.” I handed him the compress. “We'll let the nose thaw while I nap, and then refreeze it when I wake up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was around 10 A.M., but I slept until late in the afternoon, despite the fact that the Spa City Motel blankets felt dirty and reeked of cigarette smoke. But I was so tired, the soiled bedding was of no consequence.