Need

by Nik Cohn

  How had it all gone so wrong? He’d come to the Zoo on such a high. Nervous, yes, but full of hopes. Thinking Love, even though it made no sense. Resigned in his mind to surrender. Let himself be taken over, swept away; let the fat bitch have her way, if that was what she needed, Willie D would not fight back.

  And she had pissed on him. She’d taken the good faith he offered, and turned it to puke. Instead of giving him solace, she’d looked at him like the devil incarnate. So the knife had slipped from his grasp, and he had stabbed his own boot.

  You couldn’t call it fair play. Nobody could claim that was playing the game. The plain truth was, the woman had taken advantage. Like the Deacon was always telling him, Willie had been too soft with her, and she’d played him for a sucker. Too trusting, too big in heart.

  Ivana all over again.

  It just went to prove the thought that kept running and running like the Times Square tickertape through his head: I am not my self. If he had been, he would never have stood still for this jive. He would have marched her straight back to the target, handed her one of her own Camels for a last cigarette, even offered her a blindfold if she liked; then he wouldn’t have stopped throwing till the lights went out. Not until he had pleased himself.

  Please myself, and pleasure her—Mouse Williams had said that. Instead of which, he had raised his face the same way a boxer does when he’s all through and secretly wants to be knocked out, he had abandoned ship.

  But no more. Don’t get too complicated, Eddie. When a man gets complicated, he gets unhappy. No more twisting in the wind, no more puzzling and theorizing, racking his brains for explanations that didn’t exist. And when he gets unhappy, he runs out of luck. Sweaty armpits meant shame.

  And the man with jaundice; JoJo, the dog-faced boy. How could he have allowed a freak like that go trampling on his patch? Giving him horns by candlelight? For a moment after he pulled the knife quivering from his stabbed boot, and Kate Root had pushed him out in the passageway, Willie thought he heard the fucker moving upstairs, messing with Anna Fucking Crow, and never mind the language, fucking Man of Power be fucked, if he’d got his hands on that fuck the fucker would have been fucking dogfood right then.

  But JoJo had been too tricky. By the time Willie got up the stairs in his crippled boot the man had already gone out the window or over the wall, whatever, and Anna was on her own.

  Naturally, she acted innocent. Like she couldn’t guess why he was there. Gave him that look dumb and dazed, shell-shocked almost, as if cum wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and the next thing he knew, he didn’t know a thing.

  What had brought him round? The windowpane. He’d heard a blind, trapped sound like a bird makes when it blunders into glass, and he opened his eyes to see stars. Someone must have set off a skyrocket or maybe a Roman candle. It burst above the rooftops, shooting out flares of silver and gold, then tailed away in a shower of sparks, and as it faded, it darkened. Deep molten red, it turned to smoke, and the smoke turned to wisps. Within thirty seconds, the only traces left were three snaky plumes, faintly pink. They looked like uncut hairs.

  More red than pink, on second look.

  So there was no end to it. And never would be, it seemed. He was stuck with this disease till the fat lady sang. Sickness or possession or love, the terminology didn’t matter. Bottom line, his number was up, and that number was 223: DEATHBED: if you witness your own death, you will experience melancholy.

  In a way he was almost relieved. Knowing the worst, he could at least stop his struggling. No point in going back to Tia Guadalupe for another offering to Osain, or Sly Sy Stein for another blade. The cards were finally face-up, his position was plain. There was only one move left for him to make, and that was to take back his life; get equalized.

  A stillness came over him then, a backhanded sense of peace. When he looked around him and noted that he was in bed with Anna Crow, he felt nothing but weariness. There were so many traps, the flimflams never ended. All these bimbos in limbo. But they no longer bothered him. Let her use him while she could. Milk him and drain him, haul his ashes, if it helped. Even play with his hair.

  His hair!

  Full recall returned at that, the whole nine yards. The barbershop and the knives and the toilet seat, the light from the spinning pole, that look in Kate Root’s eye.

  A frozen calm wrapped him, the same neutrality he’d felt once in a car wreck, flipping over the median barrier on the BQE, hanging upside down and barely moving, meanwhile thinking with perfect composure I am going to die. Deacon Landry can have my shoes; and as the car hit the wall broadside, slewing back against the traffic, These Blazers have lousy shocks, and finally, coming to rest, The wing-tip Oxfords would look better on Sandman Ames.

  Same thing now. In freefall, his thoughts were She got me. I’m done for. But he would have his revenge. Take the A Train, then change to the D at 125. He would fix his hair, he would walk in new boots. If it killed him, he would be freed.

  Get out at Tremont Avenue, walk across to Crotona, and he made it to Littles Fernando’s. Fernando Littles, his name had been when he was playing shortstop for the Piscataway Pirates and Bombo Garcia was in rightfield. Now he was a certified hair artiste, the self-styled Michelangelo of Heads, whose sculpted designs graced some of the def skulls in New York. Bobby Bo wore his Manhattan skyline, Frankie Knuckles his fire-breathing dragon. “What you got for a man on a mission?” Willie asked.

  “The gryphon be boss,” Littles Fernando told him. So a gryphon it was. The razor sliced him, the tongs singed him, then the scissors remade him. The body and wings of an eagle, the head of a lion, etched black on olive like a woodcut: “That’ll be forty bucks,” Littles Fernando said.

  “Take a hundred,” said Willie. “Just give me your shoes.”

  Fernando’s loafers were old and scuffed, down at heel, but at least they didn’t have a knife in their ribs, they were not bleeding to death. Willie gave them a quick fix of plastic surgery. Amputated their tassels, fleshed out their instep with foam for a sleeker line, camouflaged their cracks and wrinkles with mascara. Then he turned his feet to the city again.

  Even the sight of Ivana could not deflect him for long. He had thought he would drop in on Deacon Landry, share a cup of news, but when he reached the Deacon’s apartment, the girl was strutting the front steps, head-to-toe in black leather, hot ice on every finger and a heart-shaped diamond stud in a brand-new nose. “Hot-sour soup. Get your good soup here,” she said, daring him to hit her. But he would not grant her the honour. Why sully himself? All his force and will were reserved for one thing alone. Willie D’s Last Stand.

  By the time he reached Chez Stadium, and ordered his first apricot schnapps, he felt like the Man with No Name. He who rides alone, who trusts no man or woman born. Who needs nothing but need itself.

  Mouse Williams and Warren White and Sandman Ames were drinking together in the corner booth, there was room for one more, but he chose not to join them, it would not be smart. One thing he’d learned, you could not change your act. Whatever it was you did in life, don’t stop. You could either be possessed, or you could possess, but you could never switch hit, your public would not permit it.

  Better wait till he’d finished his business, and his mind was back in its proper place. Physician, heal thyself. Anna Crow said that. Mortician, embalm thyself, she said that, too. Both were equally apropos, you’d hate to have to choose. What he wanted right now was a mix of the two, and he would be dead to rights.

  Finish his drink, then make his move. Wait till Kate Root would have shut up the Zoo and retired to her bedroom. Wait until there was no waiting left within him, only act. The deed itself.

  Tilting his glass back to drain it, Willie glanced at the nylon butterflies dangling from the ceiling. The glitterdust was almost gone from their spread wings, he could see their plastic skeletons underneath. So he raised his empty glass to the ruins, and that was the moment the bomb went off.

  It sounded like a bomb, a
nyway. A deep boom and shudder underground, you’d have said a mine caving in, except there were no mines around here. Willie’s glass trembled on its coaster, and the last of the glitterdust came down in a dandruff cloud. But that was all. No breakage, no blood. “Barry White burped,” somebody said, it might have been Warren White, and everybody started laughing, the way people did after false alarms. Mouse Williams called for a fresh round of drinks, and Willie started over to join the corner booth. Never mind his soiled shirt, forget his pits. Suddenly, he felt in the mood to celebrate.

  Then the lights went dead.

  The power blacked out, cut the jukebox and the ceiling fans, and there wasn’t a sound. Silence so profound Willie thought for a moment the world had simply quit, Planet Earth was a wrap. Then he heard a siren wail outside. Some man started muttering, and a body jarred against his own. Something heavy went crashing, sounded like a table overturned. There was another siren, and another. A wet hand touched his cheek, and he dropped to all fours. Got down on his belly and started crawling. A foot stomped his arm. People were shouting and cursing now, glasses shattered. His hand gripped an ankle. From the fact that it didn’t try to kick he would have guessed Shanda Lear. A shard of glass pierced his thigh, he felt a trickle of blood. “Fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck,” the woman with the ankle was saying. The sirens were wailing non-stop, too many to count. His knuckles bruised against wood, and the wood gave way, it was the door, he was out.

  New York City was pitch-black, except for the cherries flashing on the roofs of the cop cars, but the street was already swarming, the sidewalks massed and spilling over. The surge of the crowd carried him downstream, scrambling along Eighth Avenue towards Port Authority, but when he reached 42nd Street it was like hitting a rubber wall. An unseen barrier bounced him back, and he was spun into the path of those rushing up behind, who flung him back again, and then again, a human pinball, slurping inside these shoes two sizes too big, thrashing out for balance, till at last his hand found something solid. A tube of metal, rising up, it could have been a street lamp, and there he clung, he would not be moved.

  Between the blackout and the stampede, he couldn’t see much. Just a narrow strip of floodlit kerb between two ambulances, and a plain-clothes law with a walkie-talkie. Willie raised himself on tiptoe, and a man started running in and out of his sightline. A raggedy black stringbean with a dark stain on his shirt, could be blood or soot, he was waving his hands and yelling, but you could not make out the words above the sirens’ wail. Shooting, Willie heard, or was it shitting? And something like fire alarm, or it might have been fiery brand. Then a couple of cops got hold of the man, they wrestled him away, he was lost to view. “Hear that?” a woman said, close behind Willie’s head. “They shot Farrakhan.”

  The shouting and the cursing had almost stopped. Along the Deuce, unseen, someone was shouting through a bullhorn, repeating and repeating one short sequence of sounds, and those sounds were probably words, an order of some kind, nobody could be sure. Below the sirens, Willie could hear the herd breathing, hard and ragged at his back. Someone was weeping, saying, Farrakhan, oh, not Farrakhan, and someone else was groaning. All the rest stood still, hung fire.

  Something smelled bad here.

  Not flesh, or fear, but something chemical. A sharp and whippy smell that Willie did not recognize, but didn’t like. His eyes stung suddenly, he put up his hand to wipe them, and then the crowd was running again, everyone was screaming the same words, and he was ripped bodily from his refuge. The street lamp’s warm smoothness slid through his hands, and he was hurtled back where he’d come from, tossed and spun up Eighth. A turd in the maelstrom, Anna Crow said that. His shoulder was rammed into a wall or gate, felt like steel, and the shock of pain made him bite through his lower lip. Blood flushed his mouth, he punched the dark. Something pulpy splattered under his fist, a body went down, that felt good. Don’t get too complicated. Willie D said that.

  Three blocks, maybe four, and the crush began to ease, he could hold his ground. Candles and torches showed inside a few windows now, there was enough light to make out shapes. People were sitting on the kerb, moaning. A few had been caught by the tear gas, the others moaned to moan. A man in a doorway was swinging a metal club. Stepping out, he took two steps along the street and smashed a shop window. Flecks of glass showered Willie’s face and throat, reminding him of his wounded thigh. His pants’ leg was stiff and matted, he could feel stickiness down to his shoes. A man’s stumbling shape brushed past him, bearing something big and square, might be a TV. Willie’s shoulder ached, his whole arm was numb. A block uptown, guns began.

  On the corner of 46th there was a fire in a garbage can, it glowed like a brazier. In this choking heat men gathered round it to warm themselves, chafing their hands. Other men, hurt maybe, lay or huddled nearby.

  The dog-face boy, for one.

  Don’t start me to talking,” she’d said. Her veil was gone, and she was somewhere beneath his hand, and then he was swept past her, she was gone as well. He tried to stop himself, turn back, but there was no chance of that, the force of flesh driving him was too great. The tunnel was blinded by white light, and a woman screamed. The most dreadful sound it was, worse than a boiled kettle.

  When John Joe turned towards this scream, he saw Master Maitland framed in Mount Tabor’s doorway, beating at his burning body with clenched fists, his black robes bright with flame. Then the Master rocked back, toppled slowly like a great tree felled, and disappeared from view.

  Beyond the white light lay nothing. Men in uniforms and gas masks stood guard at the border, grabbing up each Black Swan who blundered into range and snapping them into handcuffs. Randall Gurdler’s men, John Joe supposed. Ugly pieces of work they looked, best avoided, but what could he do? The parties shoving at his back were driving him straight into their clutches, he thought his goose was cooked for certain, when suddenly came an almighty bang. The biggest blast you heard or felt in your born life, and every man jack went down in a heap, Swans and guards and all living creatures together, you couldn’t tell them apart.

  At that there was great confusion, and all manner of hasty speech. A hand sharp as a steel claw kept digging at John Joe’s ribs where he lay, trying to rob him he thought, but when he looked down it was only Crouch, hurting him for his own good.

  One kick, a knee and a rabbit punch, then he was freed, and they were running up the tunnel, doubled over against the glare like Schwarzenegger or Stallone or any of those hard men. “Receive not of her plagues,” said Crouch, and the white light went out like a candle snuffed. Dark blackness cloaked them for safekeeping. Or black darkness, rather.

  Crouch, being a caretaker by trade, had a pocket flashlight on his person. The beam it cast was faint and no fatter than a virgin’s finger, but sufficient to lead them out of the main channel, through a chink in the tunnel wall, up a metal ladder to a concrete ledge, far distant from strife. The sounds of battle and pain came to them faintly, without reality. “Don’t mind if I do,” said Crouch, pulling a pint flask from his hip pocket. “I thank you kindly,” he said.

  But how could John Joe rest easy? The moment he ceased to run, his mind returned the feel of something live moving under his foot, and the sight of that gold veil, floating out of reach. “I have to go back,” he said. “My fiancée needs me.”

  “Polk-salad Annie?”

  “She asked me herself. Marry me, you might as well, she said, the very first night we met, and in my heart I answered Yes, I will, yes.”

  “You shit me.”

  “Of course, I know that she has her career and all, her public has the first claim, but the pressures of stardom can be cruel, it’s a lonely life up there, and there’s a B&B for sale in Croaghnacorcragh, I heard, just a hop and a skip from Meenadreen; we could do worse.” But his voice did not sound right to himself. In this black hollow full of echoes, it sounded like the voice of a backslider. “Don’t worry yourself. Crows don’t kill so easy,” said Crouch, tipping the flas
k back easy, but John Joe was already back down the ladder, it was his duty, he was running in mid-air.

  Without the pencil light, he had only his senses to guide him, and they led him straight up the arsehole of nowhere. He tried to head towards the loudest noise of conflict, but whatever direction he turned, the war seemed always at his back. Groping his way by fingers and thumbs along the tunnel walls, he had not even a TV or any watching eyes to steer by, no break of any nature in this blackness like no blackness he had ever known, not sable or soot or raven, not nigger black, not carbon black, but black its very self, without end, black, black.

  He had a desperate want of a bathroom. The strain of holding himself intact forced him to move crabwise, in baby steps, and drove all other thought from his mind. In Mount Tabor was a Port-o-San, there he would find relief. By his calculation, that place was below him now and somewhere to his left, so he travelled counter-clockwise, descending in spirals and loops. Sometimes the tunnel wall vanished and he felt empty space. Other times he missed his footing, stumbled over some dead thing. Certain creatures skittered against his legs, and flying objects that might be bats flurried in his face. The rasp and rattle of his own breathing lurched at every step. When he paused to listen, that breathing was all he could hear.

  At last he found light. Not a radiance, but a glimmering at least. Where the tunnel bent a corner round he found a stalled train full of passengers. Trapped inside the carriages, they were burning matches and cigarette lighters. It looked like a vigil in there, a midnight mass. And I will compass thine altar, O Lord, John Joe remembered. But those eyes staring out at him unseeing were terrible in grief, he could not meet their gaze. A ship of the dead, it might have been. Take not away my soul, O God, he thought, and ran.