Thrill Kids

by Packer, Vin

  “Sure. I listen to them late at night when I’m in — my room.”

  “I don’t have a radio in mine.”

  “I got a lot of records, too. Millions. All the old ones. They’re the best.”

  She raised her arms high in the air and stretched. He could see her breasts swell up, and through the V of her halter he could see the white oozing of flesh that was lighter than the skin that had been tanned by the summer sun.

  He said, “You know something, Lynn? You and me aren’t such kids any more.”

  “I know it. Remember when we were? You used to run away from me whenever I wanted to play.”

  “I was always like that,” he said.

  She laughed, leaning back against the wall. “You were so scared of girls. It was funny.”

  “Maybe I still am.” Johnny’s face got hot. “Not of me.”

  “Not of any girl, really. Cripes! What’s there to be scared of?”

  “Did you ever — kiss a girl, Johnny? To see what it’s like?”

  “That’s a dumb question!” he said angrily. “That’s a dumb thing to ask a guy!”

  “I’m sorry.

  She looked sad and hurt, and she pushed herself away from the wall and walked a step away. His face was sullen and petulant. Neither said anything. She stood with her back to him, her arms folded, her hands rubbing her arms. Johnny looked at her hair. It was so long and soft. It could cover his face.

  He said finally, “You don’t ask guys things like that.”

  “I’m sorry, Johnny.”

  He said, “Aren’t you cold with your bare back hanging out like that?” He sounded disgusted. “It’s hot,” she said. “I’m hot!” “Lynn?” “What?” “You mad?” “Uh-uh.”

  “You got your back to me and stuff.” She turned to face him. He looked at her eyes, at her halter, and at her eyes again. “Lynn?” “W-what?”

  “Can I kiss you?” His voice was husky, his words thick. “I — don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s like.”

  He walked to her until he stood before her. She was not smiling, and neither was he. In the street a fire engine sounded, but they did not hear it. It had grown darker, but it was still light.

  He said, “Please?”

  “Johnny,” she said. “Johnny, you’re — trembling.”

  His arms were full of her, and as he kissed her he was surprised, and afraid, and glad of how much there was to her. He had never held a girl in his arms before, so he held her too tightly, as though his strength were necessary to keep her from falling, and his mouth on hers pressed hard. He heard her breathing and his own with a certain awe, and he felt her hair tickle his cheek, and he smelled her with excitement that was growing in him in a way he did not want it to. Then his hand happened suddenly on her breast, before he knew he had touched her there, and when she gave a fast little cry, he withdrew his hand, the fingers still curved from the roundness. She pulled away from him, and they stood apart. Immediately he realized that he had to go. He could not stand there like that.

  He started to say something, but he did not know what, so he simply left her there, unsure of the look on her face, because her head was bent. He walked to the roof door, opened it, and went down the stairs.

  • • •

  “Is that you, Johnny?” his father’s voice called out when he entered the apartment, “ ’S’ me.

  “Where’ve you been?” “No place,” he said. “Come in here, John.” “In a minute!” Johnny snapped. “You march yourself in here right now, young man!” “Can’t you wait a minute, for cripes sake? I got to go to the head.”

  There was no answer, and Johnny went down the hall and into the bathroom. When he finally emerged and entered the living room, Richard Wylie looked sternly at him. Jill Wylie was mending a pair of Johnny’s khaki pants, sitting on the low-slung gray couch under the goose-necked lamp. The room was very modern, all the walls lined with bookcases. In the places where there were not books, there were small marble statues of headless goddesses or thin-necked ceramic vases.

  Richard Wylie tamped the dottle out of his pipe and regarded his son thoughtfully.

  “When you came in just now, Johnny, I asked you where you had been.”

  “I was up on the roof, Dad,” Johnny said. “It wasn’t an unreasonable question, was it?” “No.”

  “And unless my questions are unreasonable, I expect a civil answer.”

  Johnny said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Did you glance through those college catalogues today?” “Some.”

  “You have absolutely no enthusiasm about college, have you, Johnny?”

  “I just don’t want to be a lawyer, Dad. I like music.”

  “Johnny, the interests you have now are going to change — the same way your friends will change as you grow older. Now, there’s nothing wrong about having an interest in music. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a disc jockey. But with a law degree you can do anything — even those things.”

  “You’re always trying to change me — change my friends. What’s wrong with my friends?”

  Jill Wylie said, “By the way, Johnny, where did you meet this Raleigh boy who’s giving the party tonight?”

  “I suppose there’s something wrong with him,” Johnny said.

  “Your mother simply asked where you met him.”

  “Flip and Manny met him at the Club,” Johnny said tiredly. “He went to the store with us after.”

  “Is there something bothering you, John?” his father said. “You’re crabby tonight.”

  “Everyone’s nagging at me, for the love of Pete.” He looked at his watch. “I’m late now. Party began at eight.”

  “Where is it?” Richard Wylie asked.

  Johnny sighed. “On Fifth Avenue, in the Nineties.”

  “Will you sit down with me tomorrow and go over those catalogues, John?”

  “All right, Dad. All right. But I don’t want to be a lawyer!”

  His mother said, “Your father wants to help you. Listen to him.” “I listen!”

  “Then that’s a promise about tomorrow?”

  “If it’s so important to you, Dad.”

  “It’s important to you, young man,” his father answered. “Very well, run off to your party.”

  Johnny walked with heavy steps across the thick gray carpet into the hall, where he took his jacket from a hanger in the closet. He had his hand on the door when his father said, “Johnny?”

  “What now?”

  “Midnight,” his father said. “Do you hear?” “Me and Cinderella,” Johnny muttered. “And Johnny?” “Yes, Dad!”

  “Before you go, you might put that package on the hall table in your room. I passed Doubleday’s on my way to the bus this evening, and I picked up that new Brubeck album for you. That was the one you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  Johnny hesitated before he spoke. Then he said, “Now, why’d you go and do a thing like that, Dad?”

  “It’s strictly a bribe, young man. I want you to get busy with those catalogues.”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal!” Johnny answered. His face relaxed, and he grinned.

  5

  These newspaper guys make me seem like some kind of thug. “Thrill killing”! I didn’t get any kicks out of it. I just didn’t want to be square!

  — From a psychiatric interview with Hans Heine

  FLIP HELD HIS JAW where the old man had hit him. He stood by the kitchen table, shaking, his face colored with rage and shame, his eyes tearful.

  “Look at it!” his father commanded in German. “Turn the pages and look!”

  “Pa, God, lay off! I don’t want to look.”

  “You look! Look and leave the Lord out of it!”

  Slowly Hans Heine’s hand touched the paper-covered volume of Night of Horror. He turned a page. There was a picture of a woman with her clothes half ripped off her voluptuous body. Her bare back was striped with bloody whip lashes. She lay on a floor with her arms wrapped a
round a man’s trousered leg, and he looked down at her, grinning, whip in hand. She was kissing his feet passionately. He was promising, “You’ll get more, baby. I’m going to give it to you until you can’t move!”

  “Keep on!” Flip’s father barked angrily. “Turn the page!”

  As he did so, Flip looked through eyes that were brimming with tears at illustrations of scantily dressed, sensual women being burned with cigarettes, strangled with wire, kicked down long flights of stairs, tied to wheels, and beaten with wet Turkish towels. His father watched him. He was a large, fat man in his late sixties, with a bald head that was red and shining, round dark eyes that flashed his fury, and a small mouth, which was now tight and tense. When Flip spoke to him, he spoke German. In the Heine household English was seldom used, save when visitors who knew no German were present.

  Flip said, “What does this prove, Pa — making me do this?”

  “It proves you look at this trash. You spend good money to look at this trash! Well, look! Look! Filth!” Again his father struck him across the jaw. “Dirty son! Spend money on filth!”

  Flip reeled, regained his stance, and stood crying openly, his shoulders heaving with his sobs. He could hear his mother say, “No, Pete. No. Don’t hit him more. It is enough.” She sat in the parlor beyond the kitchen, in a straight-backed chair, her black shawl wrapped around her even though the night was hot and muggy. She was a little woman, plump and short. Her small face was dominated by bifocals, and her hands were perpetually knitting, in an unceasing, automatic way. The apartment above Die Lotosblume had five rooms that followed one after the other, in a straight line. There were no doors to the rooms, only curtains. Flip and his middle brother, Fritz, shared a bedroom next to the one his older brother, Bob, and his wife slept in. Beyond that one was his parents’ bedroom. His sister and her husband lived a block away, on Eighty-seventh Street, and his third brother lived with his wife and kids in the apartment building next door to the restaurant.

  “You keep out of this!” Pete Heine warned his wife. “You are too soft on this boy. He is a bad boy!”

  Flip blew his nose and rubbed his handkerchief over his wet face.

  “Where did you get this?” his father demanded, pointing to the book.

  “Some guys,” Flip said. “I don’t know.” “At the store? The store you love so?” “No, pa. No!”

  “You go there no more! You stay home. Work more at the place. The devil has your idle hands!”

  “I didn’t get it at the store! Blame the store for everything!”

  “You get a haircut! You don’t look respectable!” “All the guys — ”

  His father struck him a third time. “I say you get a haircut, you get a haircut, Hans!” “Yes, sir.”

  Flip’s nose began to bleed. He held his handkerchief to it to catch the blood.

  “Blood,” his mother muttered from the other room. “Blood, Pete. Please — no more.” She sat knitting, her hands nervous, her own eyes filling. She said, “Hans, Hans, what can become of you?”

  “Now!” his father said. “Go now to the barber!”

  “Yes, sir,” Flip said. “I got to stop the bleeding.”

  “You go now!”

  “I want to wash my face, Pa. Please, I — ” “Now!”

  “Yes,” Flip said, hurrying, holding the handkerchief still to his nose. “Yes.” He went past his mother in the parlor. She reached a hand out and touched his trousers and said his name in a tired, sad way. His father stood, arms akimbo, watching him. Flip opened the apartment door.

  “Hans?”

  “Pa?”

  “When you come back you work tonight! You don’t go anyplace tonight!”

  “Pa, I was invited to — ”

  “I invite you to work! You come back here and you work in the place!” He slapped the paper-bound book to the floor. “Filth! You dirty son!”

  Flip shut the door behind him and started down four flights of rickety wooden stairs. At the landing he reached into his pocket for his comb and ran it through his hair. He stood with his head back, swallowing the blood that came down his throat. When at last he put the handkerchief back in his pocket, he spat on his fingers and touched them to his eyes.

  It was still light in the streets and he looked in the window of a florist shop to see the time. Seven. The barbershop was on the corner, and he went on past it.

  For a long time Flip walked without knowing where he was going. He had an hour to kill before he would go to Bardo’s, and the only thing he was certain of was that he would go there. All week he had thought about it, planned it, even saved out a shirt he wanted to wear. Now he was wearing one with blood on it. He hated his father. Every time he got a chance to climb another rung up the ladder leading out of Yorkville, his father held him back. Their differences always circled around picayune issues that developed with the suddenness of a thunderstorm in August, and lasted far, far longer. It made Flip burn to have the old man raise such a furor over a book like that. Flip had seen plenty worse up at Leemie’s, where he’d got that one; the one he got was nothing.

  When he cut across Ninety-eighth Street going toward Park Avenue, Flip knew he was heading for Leemie’s store. He could get a fresh shirt from Leemie, maybe. Leemie was a creep one, but he had a way of getting things. Some of the things he could get were fantastic — all the dirty books and pictures, and bull whips, and things Flip sometimes didn’t even know what a person did with. He pushed a little, too, Flip thought; not just “pot,” but the real stuff. Leemie had his own monkey on his back. Flip smirked when he remembered the way Leemie sang:

  “I get my kicks from cocaine. Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all …"

  The store was on the bad end of Park Avenue, up in the Hundreds under the New York Central tracks. Flip used to go up to the fruit and vegetable market nearby to buy for the place sometimes, and he got into the habit of stopping off at Leemie’s to listen to records. Leemie sold sheet music and songbooks too, but he never sold very much of anything on display. It was his “front.” Leemie knew all the latest jazz lingo, with some jargon peculiar to dopeys thrown in, and Flip liked to listen to it and memorize it. Even though Leemie was a little squirrily, no one could say he was square.

  When Flip got there, the store was empty except for Leemie. It would be hard to guess Leemie’s age. He was probably over thirty-five, but how many years over was not plain. Medium-sized, with a thin, sallow face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a hook nose, Leemie looked good only when he smiled, and then he looked a little silly too, a little “high.”

  “How come?” he said to Flip, who never came around in the evening to see Leemie.

  “You mean me being here? Or this?” Flip pointed to his shirt.

  Leemie shrugged.

  “Well,” Flip said, “I’m here to get another shirt, if you got one. My old man decided to play house tonight.”

  “Nice,” Leemie said. He tossed a key ring at Flip. “Up one on the left. Two-B. You’ll see the dresser.”

  “When’d these come in, Leem?” Flip’s eyes ran along the counter. There was a cigar box filled with knives, all switchblades.

  “They were never out.”

  “What do you soak?”

  “For you? Two and a quarter.” “Can I charge?”

  “Somehow that doesn’t move me.”

  “Until Monday. I come up on Monday. Pay you then.”

  Leemie thought about it.

  Flip said, “I’ll bring the shirt back then too, and pick up this rag. I’ll pay you, Leem. I got to get a haircut with what I got on me.”

  Leemie said he didn’t mind.

  Flip pulled a few of the knives out of the box and looked them over, then tossed them all back but a black one. He pressed a button on the side of the knife and the blade shot out, sharp and gleaming.

  “Don’t goof with it,” Leemie told him. “They aren’t in favor with the Fridays.”

  “It could kill a person,” Flip said. “Like, lookit how long th
at blade is. Man!”

  “Got some new literature, too. Illustrated from real life.” Leemie laughed. He socked his fist up at his wrist in an obscene gesture. Flip laughed too.

  Leemie said, “In this one they’re giving this girl this enema, see, and at the same time — “

  Leemie told Flip all about it. When he was finished, neither one could stop laughing for a long time.

  “You got time?” Leemie finally asked. “I’ll let you look at some of it.”

  Flip looked up at the clock on the wall of the small store. It was twenty minutes to eight. He was going to be late getting to Bardo’s. He still had to get his hair cut. It was going to be bad enough not to show up for work, but to show up later without his hair cut — murder!

  “I can’t,” Flip said. “I’ll see them Monday. Where’ll I leave my shirt?”

  “Bed. Bring mine back. And the money.”

  “It’s a swell knife, all right.” Flip had been holding it the whole time, pressing the button and watching the blade spring, pushing it in and pressing the button again. He folded it now and put it into his pocket.

  Leemie said, “You didn’t get it from me if you goof.”

  “You kidding?” Flip said indignantly. “Think I’m square?”

  The shirt Flip found in Leemie’s drawer was like no shirt Flip had ever seen before. It was neat; crazy. It was some kind of shiny material ; not silk, but soft like silk, and bright yellow, sun-colored. It had a wing collar, buttons covered with the same material as the shirt was made of, and five buttons on the sleeves. The best thing about it was the breast pocket. It had a heart on it, a big black one.

  Flip studied his reflection in Leemie’s mirror. He knew he looked sharp. He winked at his reflection and as he did so his eye caught one of Leemie’s photographs of naked women. It was a glossy five-by-seven, stuck there in the corner of the glass. Flip went closer and stared at it with a dull, expressionless face. His hand went to his pocket where the knife was, and he drew the knife out fast, the blade bare and pointing. He swung his arm in a half circle until the knife just met the woman in the picture. He waited with it poised there, the tip of it nicking the surface of the photograph. Then he plunged it in. “You move me not at all, baby,” he said, “but I sure kill you!”