by Hob Broun
Noisily, he dragged bulging bags across the floor to the kilo press, an apparatus made of planks, pipe, a spring or two, and an automobile jack. The herb would be weighed out on a delicatessen scale, jammed in the mold and formed into bricks to be wrapped in lightly waxed yolk-yellow paper and sealed with gummed labels of Looie’s own design: La Cometa Azul Imported under License to Phillip II of Spain.
Next to the kilo press was a letterpress with which Looie turned out a monthly poetry magazine containing his own punning and shaggy dog works, and those of a varying roster of friends. The May issue’s table of contents listed contributions by Mercedes Triumph, Looie’s ex-singing teacher; by Feral Hix, a Zen cab driver with a heavy jones for flower imagery; and by a spade kid named John Alonzo (Looie had only seen him once, darting around the corner in white canvas high-tops) whose Koranic pensées scrawled on spiral notebook paper would appear every so often, inside of a magazine or catalogue jammed in the mail slot. It had been years since Looie’d known money worries, and in fact he oversaw, without professional guidance, a small but diversified securities portfolio. But on Sundays, by the fountain across from the Plaza Hotel, Looie peddled his homemade editions at fifty cents per copy, a gesture to the indigent boho past he’d never had.
He flirted rather clumsily now with Tildy as they picked over the cheese remnants. Each had detected the other’s lust and their little corner of the room became a vivarium of its own, crowded with hot pinpoint lights and liquid radii flowing between them, while Christo toted his bales, fine-tuned the scale.
Looie told a story: dabbing a professor’s tuxedo with an extraordinarily potent moth lure so that when he arrived for the Alumni Banquet, his lapels were a quivering, powdery gray.
Tildy told a story: secretly, while her father slept, listening to Cajun boogie music on the radio—Clint Boudreau and his Zydeco Nightriders.
And when at last Christo looked up from his toils, some thistly remark at the end of his tongue, their chairs were empty. Cracker crumbs, whorls of cheese rind, were on the table, bubbling dregs in two wine glasses—an amateur’s tawdry still life, but the message was there. Out of darkness at the back of the room came rustlings, thuds on the wooden platform bed.
Tildy knelt on the mattress, crossed arms pulling the shirt over her head. Confused, flushed by the boldness of it all, Looie watched her and felt, oh my, pressing against him a sleek warm thigh that awaited his kiss. He saw in profile her sharp peewee breasts and something flipflopped inside him like the snap and release of taut elastic…. How very young she is, a small bird in the snow.
“It’s like an ostrich egg,” she whispered tentatively. “Could I do something?”
“Anything.”
“Could I, well, sort of run my tongue all over your skull?”
Christo used the fire stairs. He grabbed an evening paper and headed uptown. It was good to be back on the subway again.
Pierce Milbank’s Claremont Avenue duplex (which had once belonged to the great blind historian, Duncan Gateshead, when he was a visiting lecturer at Columbia) had three fireplaces, two kitchens and a Jacuzzi. In the front hallway, softly lit by a chandelier, he had hung a framed photograph of himself taken several Easters ago at his late grandmother’s home in Connecticut. In a vested tweed suit, the jacket draped over his shoulders à la Sinatra, he stood in front of a cluster of white birches, the last snows of spring withdrawing to sullen patches on the lawn. The only thing missing was a brace of freshly bagged grouse splayed at his feet.
Sure, it was all there, buried somewhere in the faint, granular background of the black and white print. The legendary Boston period, running black opium out of a quiche shop on Mass. Ave., then up to the majors, the fast track: drug casseroles, high-stakes badminton, the tumbling act in his sports car, charcoaling a steak in a men’s room sink at the New York Stock Exchange. Levels upon levels of carefully plotted can-you-top-this outrageousness.
Christo lifted the picture off its hook and carried it into the living room where the light was better.
“Like it?” Pierce entered clutching a black gym bag. “My publicity still. Can’t you just see it on the cover of the Times Book Review?” He pulled the bag’s zipper back and showed Christo what was inside.
“Don’t you believe in banks?”
“This is just mad money.” Pierce counted out thirty one-hundred-dollar bills. “You’re the last one in on this shipment. I ought to fine you a couple hundred for lateness, but I won’t. Seeing as how you’ve been out of action up till now.”
“Thanks, white man.”
“Where’s the car? Still down at Chemikazi’s?”
“Yeah. Ought to be safe there, don’t you think?”
“No good. Tomorrow you’ll drive it up to Fox Street in the Bronx and leave it there. It’ll be stripped or torched within twenty-four hours.”
“Whatever you say.”
“That’s the spirit.” Pierce zipped the bag shut and tugged slyly at his blond mustache. It was easy to visualize him behind a carved desk at his family’s shipping company, barking memos into a dictaphone. “So where’s your friend from Florida? You could’ve brought her along, that’s no breach of security.”
“She seemed to be having a good time so I left her down with Looie.”
“He’s such a gentleman.” A click of the tongue. “You’re not pressed for time, so why not stick around? I thought I might shake up a few gimlets. Gin or vodka?”
They carried their drinks upstairs to the “conference room,” a cork-lined sanctum filled with books and dominated by a long mahogany table surrounded with leather swivel chairs. Heavy glass ashtrays were distributed around the table and a water pitcher and tumblers sat on a tray in the middle. Black velvet curtains eclipsed the windows.
“What is this? You’ve got stockholders now?”
“You haven’t been up here since I renovated, have you? My hermitage. I shut off the phone, come up here to read and think.”
“You’re in clover, Pierce. What’s to think about?”
“Everything. The past. The future. The book I want to write.”
“Uh-huh.” Christo had heard this bedtime story before. “A little soon for your memoirs, yes?”
“No, no. Something with a broader scope. An extended essay on the ingredients that threaten the most basic structure of our lives: psychiatry, deified technics, the credit economy. I’m calling it Under the Wheels of History.”
“Sounds like a thriller.”
“Be as snide as you like.” Pierce’s top lip bounced on the rim of the sweating gimlet glass; he took tiny sips as though it was medicine. “But in this business you’ve got to have an escape route. You must leave yourself some open space, in the same way that it’s essential to maintain that distance between yourself and the street.”
Christo propped his feet on the table, rolled down his lids. “A little crackerbarrel philosophy?”
“All I’m saying is, stay with the game too long and they grind you up for hamburger. What breaks most guys is their own greed. They go for that one last score and get buried.”
“But that won’t be you, huh? While those other clowns are sinking out of sight, you’ll be dickering movie rights.”
“It may not be easy but it can be done. Boston’s biggest smack dealer from the sixties is now running a three-thousand-acre Christmas tree ranch in Wyoming. And Denny Sunshine—you might remember him as the man who once dropped ten thousand hits of mescaline into the Fenway Park bleachers from a helicopter—well, Denny retired years ago to a vanilla plantation in Guadeloupe where he weaves rugs and makes babies. So I’m not worried. I’ll get clear in time. There’s more discipline and prudence in my genes than either of them could even think about.”
Though the timing wasn’t right, Christo laughed. “Those genes, where would we be without them. And how is Sara? Have you heard from her lately?”
“Holding up pretty well.” Pierce looked down, buffing one section of mahogany with the sleeve of his
shirt. “She lives on a feminist commune outside Austin. They grow grapefruit there, and not bad. She sends me a crate every couple of months. They look after her down there and she’s coming right along. Goes spelunking on the weekends she says—you know, crawling around in caves with a carbide lamp on her head? She was a total claustrophobe when we were kids. Five minutes in a closed car would make her sick and in the dead of winter she slept with all her windows open.”
“Really. I didn’t know that.”
“I haven’t forgotten, jazzbo, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Christo smiled sweetly. “Neither have I.”
It was seven or eight years ago. A judge with a crowded calendar had remanded Christo to a state institution for purposes of “observation.”
It was while waiting in the hallway for his preliminary hearing on a charge of attempting to redeem stolen traveler’s checks that Christo realized he could go somewhere other than prison. In this particular round of The State v. No Fixed Address they had him backed into a corner, but there was no reason why he couldn’t take the punches on his arms and shoulders. In the time it took to walk to the water fountain and back, he worked out his maneuvers.
When the Hon. J. Roccia banged the gavel to start things off, Christo grasped his head and dropped to the floor. Before the bailiff could reach him, though, he was back on his feet and circling left behind a straight jab, explaining to the court that the colony of soldier ants inside his skull was often upset by loud noises. Judge Roccia reminded him that it was within his power to order physical restraints. Christo replied that if proof was needed, he would try to coax one of his little guests out the front entrance (defendant here indicated his nose) for cross-examination. He could try for one of the colonels, Christo said, but he was a lot closer to the enlisted men. The Hon. suggested that Christo’s attorney make some effort to control his client; at which point Christo, throwing looping hooks as he bulled his way toward the bench, confided that this court-appointed scumbag had made sexual advances to him. The public defender, a young busy-bee only a few months past his bar exam, experienced a jolt of paranoia that caused him to believe a single drunken episode with his wife’s older brother was now about to bring an oh-so-promising career down in flames. As he rose to stammer his indignation, Christo backpedaled and began to lead an entire ant battalion in a double-time march across the defense table.
And that was all. Citing the fact that defendant had no previous convictions (That you know of, Christo murmured to himself), the Hon. Roccia stated his intention, pending agreement of counsel, of rendering Mr. Christo into the custody of qualified professionals who could determine his mental competency. Whenever that might be.
Plumdale was in several respects an unusual institution. One of its inmates, before amputating his son’s penis with a bread knife, had been head chef at Galatoire’s in New Orleans and, since he spent all his free time in the hospital kitchen, the food that came out of there was nearly good. The chief administrator of Plumdale actually lived on the premises. He was a 72-year-old Alsatian widower who believed that tobacco was a tranquilizing agent and that the last event that could be truly marked as progress for mankind was the invention of the pop-up toaster. Under his aegis, hydrotherapy, a curative method first codified in the mid-seventeenth century was still practiced on a regular basis at Plumdale.
Subbasement A, two levels below ground, was a huge vaulted room of pastel green tile, fitted with shower stalls and canvas-covered tubs, called the “soup tank.” There was a heavily chlorinated wading pool in which the water was piss-warm. There was a sauna that only the staff was allowed to use. Intransigent patients were sometimes strapped into chairs under small-bore pipes from which water poured directly onto their heads. Flow and temperature were controlled from a panel of valves and wheel cocks in an adjoining room that had a long, shatterproof window.
Long a watersports enthusiast, Christo visited the soup tank frequently. Also, this was one of a very few unsegregated activities and afforded the best contact with female inmates. There was one in particular who interested him, an emaciated girl with a white streak in her hair. She was always there, silently cross-legged in one of the shower stalls with her leotard full of holes. He imagined her to have once worn fashionable clothes and French cologne, to have made witty conversation in ritzy cafés where domestic champagne was never served. It took hours of cajolery to elicit the single fact that her name was Sara.
Christo brought her sourballs and pictures he’d cut out of magazines, which she accepted with a small and wordless smile. But it was not until he slipped on the wet tiles and fell, ripping open his hand on a screwhead not quite flush, that he won her. Sara knelt beside him and applied a shred of her drenched leotard to the wound. She cried as she licked the blood off her fingers. She permitted him to towel her off and comb the knots out of her hair. And she spoke.
More than two years ago, she said, her parents had arrived one night unannounced at the tenement apartment she shared with her lover, a 34-year-old body builder and part-time bouncer. For months they had been bombarding her with letters and phone calls, berating her for the aimless and degenerate life she was leading. But they seemed calmer now, conciliatory. Let’s go for a drive, they said. We’ll stop somewhere for coffee and a nice long talk. They had a friend waiting downstairs, a member of their tennis club, named Dr. Soberin. After a ten-minute interview in the back seat of the car as they drove to the hospital amid shouted abuse from Dad, waterworks from Mom, he signed Sara’s commitment papers. Dr. Soberin listed such symptoms as: sexual acting out, masculine role playing (she was wearing cowboy boots and a denim jacket that night) and refusal to accept responsibility for her actions.
Sara’s mother sent her a book on crewel embroidery that Christmas, but that was the last she’d heard. Chuck, the body builder, sent a few letters promising a visit but never showed.
“I’m dead to them I think,” Sara said, plucking devotedly at her split ends. “I have a brother and he cares about me. But I’m not allowed to see him or even speak to him on the phone.”
“Is that legal?”
“They say he’s a negative influence…. I don’t know, maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life here. Sometimes I think about eloping, but I’m not strong enough. Not yet anyway.”
“Eloping” was the term inmates used to describe a permanent and unauthorized self-removal from the facility.
“I’ve been thinking about that ever since I got here,” Christo said. “We ought to put our heads together.”
Sara fervently agreed but by the following afternoon had retreated into the egregious nullity that was her food and shelter.
Christo moved ahead on his own. He began shining up to a new aide on the ward, a blond smart-mouth he’d instantly pegged as a colleague, a fellow delinquent. The kid had skipped bail in San Diego and the proceeds of a fast drug-store robbery were eaten up on the trip east. Broke, forced to spend his first night in town at a 24-hour laundromat, he’d answered a want ad in the paper.
“Be gone soon as I get a shot at the narcotics closet,” he confided.
In exchange for intelligence on who carried master key sets and their lunch hour routines, he told Christo of a little out-of-the-way office where a set of hospital blueprints was on file. Late that night Christo broke into the office with the aid of a nail file stolen from the nurses’ lounge.
He studied the blueprints for almost an hour and discovered a serviceable escape path through a series of heating ducts to the ground-level parking garage. Facing budget cuts, the chief administrator had instituted an austerity program; the heating system was shut down from one till five in the morning. The parking garage was at the rear of the hospital facing a narrow residential street. There was one security guard at the gate and if he wasn’t asleep, Christo would have to take him out. He’d need a blunt instrument. And clothes. And good breaks.
Early on a Friday morning, when the last portion of the heating system’s off cycle coin
cided with the hour when several of the nurses were wont to gather in a vacant supply room for gossip and cigarettes, Christo slipped down to Sara’s ward on pilfered crepe-soled shoes. He carried with him in a pillowcase two janitor uniforms and a steel support bar it had taken less than two minutes to unscrew from his bed.
Sara was fast asleep. Christo peeled back the covers and gently pinched her behind.
“Time to go, Sara.”
Her only response was to brush once, twice at her cheek as though a fly had landed there. He whispered urgently, prodding her ribs. But Sara slept on, burrowing deeper into the pillows. He cursed her aloud, convinced she would foul him up, but unwilling to leave without her. One of Sara’s roommates sat up in bed, moving her hands in front of her as if she could part the darkness like living room drapes.
“I would like a glass of water, please,” she said.
Christo took Sara in his arms and carried her out the door.
“Taking her away for repainting?” said the roommate. “It’s fine with me.”
Sara came awake as they moved down the hall, kicked feebly and said, “Put me down. I’m sick.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Christo said, propping her against the wall. “It’s all been figured out for you.” He handed her a pair of cracked vinyl slippers he’d found next to her bed. “Here. Put these on…. Come on, come on, we have to move fast.”
Sara’s knees were shaking. With the metal bar, Christo pried off the grate, pointed into the dark mouth of the heating duct.
“I’ll go first and you hold on to my ankles. We’ll take a left and then our second right. It’s a sharp angle so watch out.”
“No.” Sara shook her head hopelessly. “You go on, I can’t. I can’t deal with closed spaces like that. I can only say goodbye.”
As she swayed forward to kiss him, Christo rapped her upside the head, caught her by the shoulders, shook her. “Listen to me, you cunt. You don’t have a choice, understand? I’m taking you. You’re going out of here if I have to strap you to my back like a knapsack.”
