Need

by Nik Cohn

  “We took a ride,” said Da. “Two men, two men.”

  “In his bare feet,” said Bernadette.

  “He had my robe. He knew no cold,” Kid Ojeah said, a laughing man. But his wife, with her long nails unsheathed, raked her hand across his cheek, made him bleed.

  “You stupid damn gorilla. You ignorant ape,” she said, and threw John Joe in the bath.

  The water was so hot, the shock made him cry. Submerged all at once, he struggled and thrashed to rise up but his mother held him pinned, refused to let him surface. Only when he submitted did she leave him go free. Her hands in lazy circles soaped his chest. “Shut your eyes,” she said, and he shut his eyes. “You’re safe,” his mother said, and he flooded the bath with piss.

  Da was gone when he got out.

  All that was left was the flat and his mother’s room, her radio playing, her warm morning bed. There was something wrong with his chest, something weak that made him struggle for breath. His mother blamed Tiny Doyle, and kept John Joe home from school. In a tight square of brightness by her window she read him stories, taught him words by rote. “Amber. Amble. Ambulance,” she said. Together they danced foxtrots and slow waltzes, they danced Irish jigs. On the wall by his mother’s bed, next to the crucifix, were coloured pictures of cocker spaniels and toy poodles, red setters, terriers. “Ambush. Amen,” she said. At her dressing table she brushed out her blue-black hair, a hundred strokes with the left hand, a hundred strokes with the right. She drank vodka and orange, she chewed peppermints; she sprayed her flesh with Almond Temptation Plus. Secret Unguents of the Orient, the plastic bottle read. Tame dogs on leashes walked in the green gardens below. “I want one,” said John Joe.

  “Amends.”

  “A brindle bitch.”

  “Amity. Amour,” his mother said. “Amuck.”

  On his birthday, instead of a dog, his presents were a picture book called Saints: Adventures in Courage, a snowglobe showing Calvary, and a pair of rabbit slippers. After dark he lay in his mother’s bed and watched her dress up.

  She clothed herself for a ballroom: peachblossom-pink silk drawers with matching uplift bra, starched white petticoats, a backless gown of alice blue. When she twirled on stiletto heels, the petticoat and gown flared out in a fan, displaying her legs to the hip. “Not so bad for an old maid,” she said. Bending low across the unmade bed, she kissed John Joe’s eyes and throat and hair. Her bare shoulder against his cheek felt sleepy warm like fur. “Dance with me,” she said.

  “I will not,” said Da.

  He stood in the doorway, black on black, with a ringtailed monkey perched on his shoulder. It wore a red velvet jacket trimmed in gold, it shivered with cold, its face was grey and wizened like an old man’s. “I fought in Leamington Spa, eight rounds with Houston McBee,” said Kid Ojeah. “I was invincible.”

  “Out of my house,” said Bernadette.

  “Still they rob me blind, the referee is a highwayman, I haul back in my dressing room for quittance. But Tiny Doyle, ace manager, will trade no money to me. Not a shilling, not a pence, not one tin farthing for hire. All he harvest me is this worthless monkey. For honour, he claim. For shame, say I.”

  “I’ll call the police.”

  “You will not.”

  When Da came close, his face was whittled and slashed like razor-stropped leather, his swollen eyes were red crescent moons. “You’re drunk,” said Bernadette.

  “I am,” said Da. “Drunk as a pale horse, drunk as a drunk cock. Drunk as any father may be.”

  Outside in the street where rain slanted against the high lamps, he covered them, all three, with a black rain-slicker, a night watchman’s cape. The monkey, shut up in darkness, began to whimper and riot. It stank of rot and urine, some stale sickness; it nipped at John Joe with sharp teeth. “Free we be,” said Da, removing the cape, and then they were inside a clothing store, a basement lit orange and blue, where a man in a skullcap sat reading True Detective, The picture on the cover showed a half-naked blonde in terror, a hand with a blood-dripping knife. “My own son requires apparel,” said Da. “Same size like myself will suffice.”

  The song he whistled next was Walk on By. The melody line spun and flickered, the monkey’s teeth chattered, John Joe walked sloshing through puddles in shoes seven sizes too large. Heavy wedges of newspaper bound his feet, and all his clothes were held up by safety pins, yet he was shaped like a scaled-down man; a warrior.

  They walked by side streets and mews through Notting Hill, behind Paddington. At a pub called Bonaparte’s Retreat, where John Joe ate crisps, Da drank bitter. “King Napoleon died in Elba, Kid Ojeah deceased in Leamington Spa,” he said. “No more punching bag for peanuts. No more ape monkeys for honour. No more.”

  Down in the depths of the watchman’s cape was a whisky flask, which he suckled and passed to John Joe, but John Joe would not drink. Then his father was enraged. “You take for your sick mother. You don’t glean one true thing,” he said. “How you make me waste for shame.”

  Later they came into a neighbourhood of railway sidings, looming sheds, idled carriages and freight cars. Halfway across a bridge, high above the Paddington tracks, Da stopped short and scooped John Joe in his arms, bear-hugged him close and fierce.

  “You don’t take my drink, take my monkey,” he said.

  “It smells.”

  “All things smell. That is the game.”

  Down below, invisible for the wet, goods trains shunted, coupled, broke apart. Drawing the monkey from its shelter, Da placed it on the bridge’s iron parapet. Its fur was drenched, its velvet jacket ripped and fouled. Its old man’s grey face peered up questioning, then a sudden squall made it scream. Scrabbling for purchase, it went skittering across the slick iron, teetered on the brink. “Honour,” said Da, and gave it a push.

  But that had been another land. Here in New York, in this new world, hot pincers pulled hairs out of John Joe’s nostrils, a lemon-scented spray splashed his cheeks. Barnabas, the monkey was called. “Dirty-minded perverts,” said Miss Root. “All they’re good for is jerking off.”

  “Barney for short,” said John Joe.

  “I wouldn’t sully my shop.”

  When the steam towel was peeled from his face, John Joe felt dispossessed. He was not a manner of man who trusted much to remembering, especially the past, but under cover of darkness it had seemed no harm. The moment he was stripped and thrown back in the light, though, everything felt wrong. The spinning stripes of the barber’s pole dizzied him, the worn red-leather seat itched his nates, the enamel arms were slimy and cringing under his palms. When he reached up to feel his face, its planes and bones sat strangely to his touch. “One shave, ten bucks, plus tax, plus tip, let’s say twenty and call it quits,” he heard Miss Root muttering, and he tried to get up, but his legs were no use.

  Three days with no compass—the long journey from Scath to Manhattan, bus and train and plane, and Juice Shovlin in a tight white collar, no sleep, no food that would stay down, this heat, and his bed swarmed by strangers at the YMCA—the entire parcel rose up at him swirling, hit him one left hook to the solar plexus, and he fell down out of his standing.

  Miss Root’s freckles when she bent close were a shifting field of sandflies. A single strand of tobacco had lodged in the gap between her front teeth. She kept trying to suck it free but it wouldn’t budge. “Bed,” she said.

  “I have to go.”

  “You can have poor Godwin’s room.”

  “Juice Shovlin’s expecting me.”

  “I hope you don’t mind stained sheets.”

  Grains of birdseed stuck to her hair, and the beads of sweat on her upper lip were fat and full as raindrops on a wire. “Mind your step, there’s a loose runner here somewhere,” she said. Her slippers on the stairs flapped at every step, her housecoat hung shapelessly as sacking. From below she looked like an old woman toiling. But when she turned her head, and John Joe saw the green cat’s eyes, the strand of tobacco still stuck in the ga
pped front teeth, the face belonged to a schoolgirl. Then he was in a square room with no furnishings, just a mattress on a bedstead by another barred window. Miss Root switched on the light, but the bulb blew out. “Never mind,” she said. “It is an evil generation that asks for a sign.” And she shut him in the dark.

  SECOND

  Drowning not waving, Stevie Smith wrote that, and wasn’t it the truth? Splash, splash, glug, glug. Only this morning Verse-o-Gram had called her about a gig down in the Washington meat market doing Sylvia Plath and Lesbos for a sisterhood bond-in at the Clit Club, and Anna was thrilled, she reverenced that woman, always had done since her days at Shalimar after Chase had had his accident and that nice Dr. Bone, instead of asking about her father, used to read her the Ariel poems. But what to wear? Verse-o-Gram’s wardrobe for London in the Sixties was strictly miniskirts and white Courrège boots à la Twiggy, which hardly seemed the thing, but then again, what was? The only snaps she’d ever seen of Sylvia were black-and-whites, bundled up against the English weather in somebody’s back garden, all nerves and wool. So miniskirt and Mod boots it was, and a mousy fringe wig that felt like Fuller brushes, never mind, the sisterhood seemed to lap it up, Now I am silent, hate up to my neck, thick, thick and O vase of acid, it is love you are full of, nobody said Boo.

  Cash on the barrelhead, quick curtsey out the door, I say I may be back. You know what lies are for, and afterwards she had gone walking in the meat market. It was just finishing for the day, the trucks rolling out on Little West 12th beneath the disused El, the men in their bloodstained white coats heaving the last sides of beef across the cracked sidewalks, the steel shutters crashing down like scrims on Green Turtle Products and Royale Veal, Spartan Meats and Adolph Kusy’s Pork Specials that had the best slogan, We have the Meat and the Motion, just the best, and the smells of sawdust, pickling brine, frozen slaughter everywhere, it made her feel sort of dreamy, coming so soon after Sylvia and that night the moon dragged its blood bag, it made her want her bed.

  So she was standing on the corner across from the Liberty Inn where all the transvestite hookers took their Johns, still in her miniskirt and boots trying to flag down a taxi, when up walked this gentleman of colour, two hundred pounds if he was an ounce, in midnight-blue hotpants and a matching wig, a love-charm bracelet dangling from one ankle, who spoke to her in a little-girl lisp. “You got my pitch, bitch,” he said.

  Another time and another place she might have laughed it off, What an amusing misunderstanding! How frightfully delicious!, but in the mouth of this man on this corner at this certain moment with the Clit Club and all those dead cows on meathooks behind her back it paralysed her almost. “I don’t want to hurt you. I can hurt you,” the man said, and what was the most galling thing, he didn’t even sound hostile, only airing an infomercial, as one impersonator to another.

  Praise the Lord, a gypsy cab pulled up in a cloud of dust and whisked her away before she could get herself in deeper, but changing scenes didn’t change the film. Even when she was back home at the Zoo inside her room where she paid to stay safe there was still the mirror like fucking George Washington who could not tell a fucking lie, a man that don’t lie got nothing to say, Waycross Martin used to say, but that was not the point, where was she? Oh, where was she?

  In front of the mirror, mother-naked except for her Sylvia wig flopping in her eyes like a dead rabbit, Cape Cadaveral with bangs at thirty-three and the fruits of too many fasts, too many diet pills, too many IVs and stomach pumps, too many dance classes and not enough dance, a plucked chicken saying, “I don’t want to hurt you, I can hurt you,” but it sounded real weak, to be perfectly brutally frank, it sounded like nothing on earth.

  Don’t start her to talking, she might tell everything she knew. In bed, chafing and fretting under the off-white sheet, she took a look out the window across the roofs towards the Hudson River and saw a shower of sparks, but she was not in the mood; in fact she wasn’t even there but back at Shalimar where she’d hardly felt a thing, sedated from asshole to eyeball the way she was, in that clean white room and those clean white corridors, and on her balcony at night with the frogs all croaking in chorus, the cicadas likewise, a night-choir, while she memorized the poems that nice Dr. Bone had given her, Henry Vaughan and John Clare, Elizabeth Bishop, and Hopkins of course, O let them be left, wildness and wet, and The Ballad of Rudolph Reed, how did that go, I am not hungry for berries, I am not hungry for bread, that’s right, But hungry hungry for a house Where at night a man in bed, at Shalimar she had slept so good, May never hear the plaster Stir as if in pain, yes, May never hear the roaches Falling like fat rain, at Shalimar she had slept.

  When she woke it was darkness, she felt like a dead cow herself, and when she glanced through the window her voice of its own accord said Uh-oh, just like that, uh-oh. Then she was up and out across the landing, blundering in at poor Godwin’s door, forgetting in her hurry that Godwin was long gone, not even startled to find another man’s body in his place, only hoping it was breathing or at least not stiff. “Excuse, please,” Anna said. “I don’t like to intrude, honestly I don’t, but I was sleeping, well, not really sleeping, more drowsing, sort of dreaming, you know the way you do, when I chanced to look up at Kate Root’s Japanese garden, at least that’s what she calls it, a waste of space if you ask me, she’d be better off quilting or knitting some baby a nice pair of socks, anyway I looked up and of course I might be wrong, I often am, but I think the roof’s on fire.”

  The man in the dark said nothing, only wrestled down the front of his white shirt to cover his underpants with one hand while reaching for his jeans with the other. “Of course by rights I should tell Crouch, it’s his responsibility after all, but what would be the use, he wouldn’t lift a finger, couldn’t give a flying fuck, drunk again if not worse, so I took the liberty, though I hate to wake any man, still it’s better than burning alive, the name is Crow, Anna Crow, and who may I ask are you?”

  “John Joe Maguire of Scaith-na-Tairbhe.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Three miles and a half from Croaghnaleaba, almost five from Lergynascaragh,” said John Joe. By the hall light his legs looked bony and inadequate, skimbleshanks, as he struggled with his jeans, and midway down his left thigh was a dark raised weal more or less in the shape of a bird with outspread wings and its throat upflung. “Lordamercy, what’s that?” Anna said.

  “A birthmark only. I’ve had it my whole life.”

  “Looks like a duck, no, a swan.”

  “What about the roof’s on fire?”

  “A black swan,” Anna said. Squatting by the bedside she scratched at the weal with her black nails, making sure that it didn’t come off, while her bottled red hair in the dimness glinted chestnut and roan, cinnabar, hellebore. “The mark of the beast,” she said. “Just fancy that.”

  Outside on the landing there was a ladder to the attic, where a man rolled up in a blanket lay mumbling, a man the colour of baked clay. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, seeing Anna, and put in his teeth.

  “God curse you and castrate you, we could all have been pot roast in our beds by now and you still up here pig-happy, dreaming of free lunch.”

  “I thank you kindly,” said Crouch.

  In one corner was a sculpture of Marilyn Monroe with her dress raised to show her panties, and beyond a window looking onto the roof garden littered with dwarf pines, concrete deer, pots of lobelia and portulaca, a papier-mâché pagoda, and a wrought-iron brazier belching flames.

  From inside Crouch’s attic these flames seemed to leap high and wild against the night sky, but when John Joe clambered out for a closer look there was only cardboard, scrap paper, a charred pair of sneakers, one dead sparrow.

  “So piss on it, why don’t you?” Anna said.

  When the fire had sputtered and turned to smoke, she led him back down the ladder inside her own room, which looked more like a junkshop than any lady’s boudoir, stuffed to overflowing as it was with ge
wgaws and bibelots, old postcards and stuffed animals, Burmese scarves, Chinese slippers, ivory spice-pots from Nagaland, Claddagh rings, fin de siècle shoe-lasts for Parisian courtesans, gilt mirrors, vetivert-scented candles, Venetian fans, and many, many pictures of Anna Crow—as a cheerleader, as a Playboy bunny, in G-string and panties, in cherry-pink voile, in harem pants and veil, and almost lifesize in Swan Lake, languidly expiring at Mrs. Sweetwater’s. “Just turned seventeen, a slip of a girl, a Georgia peach, a royal pain, Vain as the leaf upon the stream and fickle as a changeful dream, Sir Walter Scott, that stale fart, I never could abide him,” she said. “But still and all, seventeen.”

  In this room the light was murky but strong enough for her to see John Joe whole—a sulphurous-looking party somewhere in his thirties, scant and spindling, with his hair cropped convict-short, dabs of toilet paper stuck all over his chops, he must have butchered himself shaving. And something wrong with his right eye. The lid drooped half-shut, the muscles of the cheek were rigid, and the skin around the eye itself looked raw. “Heavens to Betsy,” Anna said. “What happened to your peeper?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Of course it was.” As always in confusion, she assumed the position, her left foot angled out, knees braced, sway-backed. “Besides, you can hardly see it, you’d never hardly notice,” she said. “Almost hardly at all.”

  “I had this frog.”

  “No need to explain, no need at all, me and my big mouth with the foot in it, but it was the black swan, you see, it threw me for a loop. Not of course that that’s an excuse, only still.”

  “I used to jump him for pennies.”

  “Good for you,” Anna said. And she meant it, she really did. Though she’d scarcely met this man, he might be an axe murderer or some brain-dead New Ager for all she knew, there was something about him that soothed her. The pink circle around his eye made him look like a panda, well, no, not a panda exactly, more of a mongrel, a mutt. Which she’d always had a weakness for, a soft spot, and why the fuck not? Mutts didn’t snap and bite every time you moved, they had manners, they were grateful for scraps, they knew how to shut up and adore. “You seem a nice boy, harmless,” she said. “Did you ever tend bar?”