Need

by Nik Cohn

  He was so deep in shock, he couldn’t remember the name of his drink of choice, or even how it tasted. Something dark and sweet and sticky, that was the most he could conjure up, so he wound up drinking cognac with Welch’s grape juice, which tasted good, not as good as the drink he’d forgot the name of, but what did it matter now? When the gash had got his cash, and gone.

  He thought it in numbness, not rage. Then he heard that he’d said it out loud. Which was an embarrassment. Even blindsided and whiplashed, he wasn’t so scrambled that he wanted his business made public. Deacon Landry and them would rotissomat his ass. All in fun, of course, and the spirit of good fellowship. Still, he’d rather not, thanks but no thanks. So he kept his mouth filled with grape juice, and left her hand to do the talking, stroking and stirring down south, though what did it win her tonight? Not a ripple. Not a twitch.

  The way she clung on him then, you’d think it was her house had burned, not his. Her make-up where she’d sweated had formed rills and eddies, a cocoa-washed sandbank at the pit of her throat, it looked like Rockaway Beach at low tide. “I thought you were never coming. I thought you wouldn’t come,” she said. “Why such a tragic face?”

  “Death in the family.”

  Anna asked nothing more, just drank down her brandy, then placed his hand with spread fingers over her heart. “How much do you love me?” Willie asked her, nuzzling her ear.

  “How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky?”

  “Fifty bucks?”

  “Say forty, and go fuck yourself.”

  No breath of air stirred in the street, the smoke rose up straight. Where the Spyder sat parked, a man was shouting through a megaphone, he looked like a corn-fed college boy from Iowa or Idaho, one of those places that you never thought really existed till it jumped up flapping in your face. “For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?” he cried.

  Willie D wouldn’t dignify him with an answer.

  Driving back across the East River to Brooklyn he punched up one of Regina’s self-help tapes. Water Thoughts it was called, some New Age Muzak symphonette. As a rule he couldn’t stand that faggot puke, but this was no night for as a rule. The quiet lapping of the synthesizer, its ceaseless circular spinning, he felt as if he was floating weightless in a vat of maple syrup. There was no damage here, and no appetite. Nothing as rude as hurt.

  Maybe she was a dyke.

  That would explain a lot. Well, of course. The way she’d fallen apart after Maria took off, all her zap and pizzazz run to seed, not a sign of that first spark he’d seen in her. Just laying around the apartment all day scratching and yawning, no wonder her Johns took a hike, and he’d had to move her out of Manhattan, stick her away in Brighton Beach with the Russians, who didn’t know any better.

  A clit-nuzzler.

  He hadn’t stood a chance. Nobody would have, not even Deacon Landry. No power on earth could have kept her in line, or stopped her from ripping him off. It was no weakness on his part. Flipflop, in fact. The more man he was, the worse she was bound to betray him. That was the nature of the beast.

  Just write it down as an Act of God. Or a work-related injury, better yet. A badge of honour. But who would have thought it? The girl kept a picture of Jon Bon Jovi in her closet, she even took it with her when she ran. Go figure skate, as Anna Crow said. The Muzak oozing from the floor speakers kept licking at his feet, creeping slowly up his legs, warm and sticky. When he looked down, his new shoes, his brand new armadillos, were looking up. It ain’t beauty till the blind man smile. That was one true statement.

  He knew Coney Island from way back. The summer he was rising ten, it was the season that Billy Martin came back one more time as Yankee manager, the Eurythmies cut Sweet Dreams, and Angie Crane, her father ran numbers, took him down in the boiler room. She wore panties sewed with purple hearts, there was a mole on her hip that looked like a tadpole, she smelled of melting tar, and his Uncle Sanchez died.

  They were never close or anything, Willie was just living in his house and he was an old man sinking, a rattle-sack who spoke no word of English, only sucked his gums and remembered back in his village, the dances and weddings and wakes. He used to sit propped up in an overstuffed armchair with broken springs and blown blue roses for a pattern, reading El Diario and half-smoking, half-chewing on Rob Roy cigars till they were pulp. The most revolting thing you ever saw. Dog-slobber and mush, and that’s how he died, halfway through the box-scores. Laid down the paper, gave one cough, and he croaked.

  When his mouth fell open, the cigar fell out, he’d hardly begun to work on it, and it rolled underneath the piano, where Willie sat and watched.

  The night of the wake, the kitchen was stuffed full of people with greasy hands and greasy mouths eating pastellilos and arroz con grandules, they looked like one body with forty heads, and he took shelter in the front parlour where Uncle Sanchez was laid out in a pine coffin ringed by scented candles and screw the Health Codes, he was safe home in Banos de Coamo by now.

  It was Willie’s first stiff, the stench of calla lilies and incense mixed with embalming fluid almost made him throw up, but he raised up on tiptoes instead, and draped himself jack-knifed over the coffin’s edge. Only Uncle Sanchez wasn’t inside; some stranger was in his place. A man made of yellow wax with dyed black hair brushed across his bald skull; blood-red lips like Dracula’s, curled back from a set of store-bought pearly-whites never stained by cigar smoke; and no eyes.

  Or his eyes were covered by silver dollars. And Willie needed to see underneath. When he reached down to explore, the silver dollars felt lukewarm, a little slimy, against the ball of his thumb, but the eyelids beneath felt cool and dry, something like the texture of black grapeskins.

  Just a sliver of eyeball showed, cloudy yellow, at the lower rim of the socket, and if you wanted to see the pupil whole, you had to peel back the lid like peeling a raw shrimp. A creature that Willie could never tolerate. So he hung there on the coffin, the silver dollars curled in his palm. Some drunk was singing Dias y Noches Perdidas in the kitchen, then a man’s voice spoke behind his back, “How about them Yankees?” it said.

  His Cousin Humberto. The biggest man that Willie had ever been in one room with. A hardcore bodybuilder, baked bright orange by the tanning lamp, with wild horses tattoed on his shoulders and arms, and every time he flexed, the horses swished their tails, started running.

  He had a pocket radio with him, and he sat himself down in Uncle Sanchez’ armchair to listen to the ballgame. The springs twanged and popped, the candles flickered but didn’t go out. It was the bottom of the eight, and the Orioles were leading 3–2, with the Yankees coming to bat. But Cousin Humberto was no way dismayed. “They don’t die. Every time you think they’re nailed, that’s when they rise up ripping,” he said, dragging on a cigar, and Willie lit up his own, the mangled stub he’d picked up underneath the piano, they smoked together in silence.

  Not a word, just Humberto cracking his knuckles and the far murmur of the ballgame, with the yellow wax stretched in his box and the reek of embalming fluid in Willie’s eyes, on his hands, underneath his nails, the two silver dollars tucked safe in his cuff, and Nettles homered to right, an upper-deck shot, scoring Randolph and Don Baylor, Righetti took the win, Goose Gossage got the save.

  So he was a man then, and three days later, when Aunt Sanchez had her dispersal sale, Cousin Humberto took him for the summer, brought him to Coney Island where Humberto worked as a whip on the Wall of Death and lived with his girlfriend Oceana on Surf Avenue, third-floor front in a fall-down apartment house filled with mutations: a lizardskin boy; a red-bearded lady; a goat-hoofed man; twins with X-ray eyes.

  All of these and many others were the property of Mr. Sy Stein, who ran a chain of sideshows called Stein’s Amazements on the boardwalk and in the alleys. A man got up like Buffalo Bill in cavalry boots with silver spurs, deerskin fringe jacket, a goatee and waxed moustaches and shoulder-length silver hair. And outsize black shad
es as well. Because the man was blind.

  From his window Willie could see the whole carnival laid out, the Big Dipper and the Tilter Whirl, the shooting galleries and girlie shows, the gypsy fortune-tellers, the Tunnel of Love, the House of Mirth, Bluebeard’s Castle, all the lights and colours and flashing neon, and they were glamour in his mind. But he wasn’t allowed to go walking, he had to stay cooped up all summer in Mr. Stein’s building with Bones the living skeleton and Stretcho the human pretzel; and Marvin Dobbs whose face was carved down the middle as if with an axe, leaving him two foreheads, two noses, two mouths; and Abigail Alicia, the World’s Most Illustrated Woman, who was covered every inch in biblical scenes, Noah’s Ark marching two by two up her spine, Lazarus rising on one thigh and the walls of Jericho tumbling on the other, Lucifer cast out of her navel, Moses sermonizing above her mount. Between her breasts the tattoo read My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, but over the cleft of her ass when she turned her back to scratch it said: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, we remembered Zion.

  All over the house there were women hungry to feed him. Some gave him cookies, some candies, some cake. Even Oceana gave him Snickers and let him watch her in her bath, the woman had nipples like baby’s thumbs.

  The room where Oceana lived with his Cousin Humberto was set up like a gym with barbells and exercise machines, and when Humberto came home from whipping on the Wall of Death, he lifted weights in bikini shorts, his shaved body all oiled and greased, the Yankees on the radio, and the wild horses rearing and plunging, careening out of control. Some nights he’d gentle them and stroke their manes, let them nuzzle his hand, and others he’d ride them straight into walls, it all depended on what pills he’d took, and how Reggie Jackson did.

  After he was gone a snail’s trail of suntan lotion marked every place he’d passed, and Oceana sat drinking tea in an old bathrobe, sewing sequins on padded bathing suits for the Traverse Triplets, while Abel Bonder threw knives at the wall.

  This man had a withered right hand. According to Oceana he had been a star years back, one of the biggest names in the business, but he’d had an accident or something, anyway his hand was ruined, and now he had to relearn his trade, teach himself to throw lefty. A squit of a man always in a fresh-pressed black suit and black tie, black shoes shined to mirrors, he looked like a mortician, and all day long he threw knives in different patterns, a fan, a pyramid, sometimes a heart. But the blades never seemed to fly right. Instead of hitting the target solid, they fluttered and scrabbled, dying quails, with the radio tuned to Make-Believe Ballroom, all these sappy old songs like one great sigh, Mona Lisa and Deep Purple and Stardust, and Willie sitting in the window, stuck.

  On the table next to him was a bottle of Spanish brandy with a picture of a courtyard in old Seville, a red lantern in an orange tree, a young gypsy girl with a fan and combs in her hair sipping from a crystal goblet, and a masked caballero in a swirling cape leaning over her, proffering a blood-red rose.

  There must have been a gimmick or maybe fluorescent paint in the label, some trick like that. At any rate, when Oceana got to drinking and the liquor level fell, the whole courtyard lit up, the lantern glowed, the gypsy’s fan seemed to flicker and dance, the red rose turned to flame.

  And Able Bonder handed Willie his knives. Showed him how to hold them, how to sight and aim. A natural, Abel Bonder called him. Then the man went out for a walk and didn’t come back alive. The knives were orphaned.

  By rights they should have been Willie’s, that’s what the deceased would have wished, but Mr. Stein took them in lieu of rent. Just because he was the man he was. A blinded jackdaw who hoarded every souvenir he could lay hands on, the bearded lady’s shavings, flakes and scabs from the lizardskin boy, he plain couldn’t bear to be parted. So he garnished Abel Bonder’s blades, and locked them in his safe, and soon the season ended.

  Marvin Dobbs and Abigail Alicia transferred to Florida, Oceana took a job at Nathan’s. Then nobody drank from the Spanish brandy, the courtyard didn’t light up, the red rose didn’t turn to flame. Left alone, Willie sat at a window smeared and blurred with suntan oil, looking down at the abandoned rides, the rows of steel-shuttered sideshows. Thinking of Abel Bonder, and of Abel Bonder’s knives, the knives that should have been his. Till his Aunt Rosario came to fetch him, and Coney Island ended.

  He’d hardly been back since. Just driven past on his way to Brighton Beach, hurtling through the war zones. But this night he parked, and burrowed into the few alleys that were still active. Murals of Madonna and Snoop Doggy Dogg were surrounded by boarded windows, the scrunch of broken glass underfoot, and the sign on the chained door of Stein’s Amazements read TWO-HEADED MAN CLOSED FOR RENOVATION.

  Mr. Stein himself sat drinking peppermint schnapps in the bar next door, still dressed as Buffalo Bill except for the cavalry boots. His feet, grotesquely swollen, were now housed in bedroom slippers with the toes cut out, and stray drops of schnapps clung to the goatee, the waxed moustaches.

  The view down the bar onto the Boardwalk was framed like an oversize TV screen. As Willie watched, an unending stream of musclemen in bodysuits drifted past, and old shuffling Jews with yarmulkes, and girls in their summer skins, Italian men in Bermuda shorts and socks, Russian women in tents, Kate Root in white tights and corsets, Ivana dyke-naked, duck hunters with green eyepatches.

  Mr. Stein kept his shades turned towards the light, his mouth half-open in a leering blind man’s smile, but at the sound of money, twin twenties slapped on the bar behind him, he swivelled his head. “Who goes there?” he asked, startled, when Willie came close. One long tress of silver hair had worked lose from under his Stetson, dangled across his cheek like an unravelled vine. “Don’t hurt me,” cried Mr. Stein.

  The din, this unending bedlam, how was she supposed to function? Between the birds racketing in the Zoo, and Little Brown Jug booming overhead, Ferdousine’s feet numb-fumbling on the hardwood floor, and that moron in the street with his megaphone announcing the Last Days, And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth, how could she keep her mind on Billie and Bo?

  Worse, the TV was on the blink. A 14-inch Zenith, black-and-white, she’d had it forever, and now it was letting her down. Every time that Billie raised her voice, she turned to snow. And she was raising her voice a lot. Which was only human; her whole future was on the line. Considering all she’d been through, the incest and the drug addiction and the porn films, not to mention getting arrested for Curtis’ murder, it was inspiring how far she’d come already. But were her troubles really done? Would Bo ever get over Hope? Or would there always be this shadow?

  Finding him lounging in Hope’s bra and panties was not a good sign, you couldn’t pretend it was. “Hand the scumbag his hat,” Kate said, and that boy with the shiny red car walked in.

  He came half-strutting, half-gliding, in soot-black, torero pants by Yohji Yamamoto and a shot-silk amethyst shirt, carrying a leather case that he set on the counter next to Pearl where she perched staring at the blizzard on the screen.

  “I heard you know knives,” he said.

  “Anna Crow,” said Kate. “I’ll slaughter that slut.”

  Without the camouflage of his car, the boyfriend looked exactly that, a boy, a sneaking schoolboy. Wilfredo Diliberto, he said his name was, but she could call him Wilfred. His voice, which was soft, almost whispery, lagged a hint behind the beat. This gave it a slyness, a slither of insinuation, as if everything he said concealed a subtext and most of his words meant their opposites. “I never was around knives before, they always seemed so dangerous,” he said. “But maybe you could teach me. Show me a thing, or two.”

  “Nota chance.”

  “A few easy moves, that’s all.”

  His stare as he spoke was sideways, a slanted look of teasing. But when he stood close Kate could see the pulses jump in his throat, a
t his temple, and she saw him crouched in an attic, looking at dirty pictures, it was just disgusting.

  The taste in the back of her throat then was Ollie’s O-Boy Eats—chili corndogs, flapjacks, spoilt milk—and she covered her mouth with Soap Digest.

  “I could pay,” said Wilfred.

  “Don’t,” said Kate. “Please don’t.”

  When Billie soul-kissed Bo, her nose job crinkled and twitched like a hungry rabbit. The trouble with lips like hers, in one shot you looked like a goddess of love, and the next like The Little Engine That Could. “At least let me show you my equipment,” said Wilfred. “That couldn’t hurt; how could it hurt? To sneak a peek at a blade?”

  The leather case on the counter was distressed wine-red morocco, bruised and scuffed at the corners, and the knives inside when he exposed them to light were blotched with rust, their points dulled. But the lush sweep of their curve was lovely still. Lying couched in crushed purple velvet, they looked like church.

  Harvey McBurnettes.

  What could she do? Not a thing. Just pretend she hadn’t noticed, turn away. Climb upon a stool, and busy herself with a bird. “Of course they need shining up, a little spit and polish,” the boy was saying. “A touch of TLC, and they’ll be born again.”

  “Get out of my zoo,” said Kate.

  It came out forcibly but not strident, by no means a shriek. Merely an instruction as she returned to floor level, and pressed one hand against his chest, palm flat, fingers up, a Stop sign. One sustained backwards thrust then, and Kate had shunted him through the door, out into the street.

  Without his box of knives he looked lost, a lost child. “You’ll be sorry,” he said.

  She already was. When she came back to the counter Days of Our Lives had ended she didn’t know where, leaving her adrift, without bearings. Some days she would have consoled herself with Guiding Light or As the World Turns, which came on next, but she had no heart for either one. She couldn’t settle to a thing, not the soaps or the birds’ evening feed, not even a Camel. All she wanted was out of here. But that would have given the boy too much honour. To cut and run in panic, a headless chicken, that would not be becoming.