Stern

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  “I don't know what that is,” Stern said.

  “See the dingus? See the wang-wang?”

  “What do you mean?” Stern asked.

  “You know. It's sexeroo. Screwerino.”

  Stern looked at the shadows again and, as the man manipulated his fingers, Stern thought he could make out a rough picture of a pair of sexual organs in contact.

  “That's pretty good,” Stern said.

  “Check these,” the man said, pulling a medallion out of his T-shirt and beckoning Stern closer. Stern looked at it, a carving of a lion and a deer, which turned into a pair of male and female genitals when tilted at an angle.

  “See the dingus? Can you see the wang-wang? You want to hold it and fool around with it awhile?”

  Stern actually wanted to get a better look at it, but he said, “No, thanks. I'm just getting in here and I want to take it easy. I'm going to just lie down and not do anything for a while.”

  “I got that last set from a guy carved them in prison. Listen, do you want me to do another one on the wall? I can do blowing.”

  “I just want to lie down here,” said Stern, “and take it easy the first night. I have some things on my mind.”

  Stern got down on the bed and thought again about the man down the street. He imagined coming home and finding out that the man had moved away, unable to make his mortgage payments. Or that he had developed a lower-back injury, so that the least motion would cause him agony. Stern saw himself running over with extended hand and showing the man that he would not take advantage of him, that he would not fight him in his weakened condition, that Jews forgive. He wanted opportunities to demonstrate that Jews are magnanimous, that Jews are sweet and hold no grudges. He pictured the man's boy falling down a well, and Stern, with sleeves rolled up, being the first to volunteer to work day and night digging adjacent holes to get him out. Or the man's child being stricken with a rare disease and Stern anonymously sending checks to pay the medical bills but somehow letting the man know it was really Stern. And then he saw himself and the man becoming fast friends from that point on, Stern inviting him in to the city to meet Belavista, showing the man he didn't mind his work clothes. But mostly he wanted the back injury, and clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes hard, as though just by straining he could make it happen. If only there was a way, he thought, that he could pay to make it happen—even a large figure like $8,000, which he would work off at $10 a week.

  His room-mate asked, “Do you mind any farting?” And Stern said, “I don't have any views on that.”

  “I cut loose a few,” said the man, “but I wanted to ask, because I know a lot of the younger ones object.”

  The room was thick with the smell of merchant marine sheets, and Stern sat up, touching his stomach to see whether it had gotten any better since he had come to the home.

  “I've got something in here and I wonder how long I'm going to have to take to get it out of here,” Stern said.

  “I've got the weakness is all that's wrong with me,” said the man. “I've had it ever since I left the circuit. I did comedy vignettes. I used to get fifty-two straight weeks in those days, but snappers killed me off and I can't work any more. You see, I never used many snappers, maybe three a night. What I'd do is work around m'crowd, futz them along a little, nurse them, slowly giving them the business, and then, maybe after twenty minutes, I'd come in with m'snapper. I'd use maybe three a night, four tops. Nowadays the new ducks throw them out a mile a minute, no futzing in between, just one after another. Anyone who books you wants you to shoot out a million snappers before he'll even consider you. Well, I just couldn't change my style, and now I've got the weakness.”

  “I don't know what to say to any of that,” Stern said. “I'm just here to get rid of something I've got in here.”

  “Suck what?” said the man.

  “What do you mean?” asked Stern.

  “That's one of them. One of my old snappers. I'd ask a Saturday night bunch if they had any special song requests, and when they hollered out a few, I'd take my time, do a little business with m'feet, and then say to them, ‘Suck what?'”

  The room seemed to have gotten narrower, and Stern was afraid that someone would seal him in with the merchant marine sheets and the old actor.

  “I'm just going to go out and get the feel of the place,” Stern said, getting up from the bed.

  Stern walked outside in the hall and got his first look at the half man. Starting with his neck and going all the way down his body, about half had been cut away. In the shadows, with a handkerchief around his neck and a violin in his hand, he made a beseeching sound at Stern. His voice seemed to come from some place a foot away from him and sounded like a radio turned on a little too loud and tuned in to a small, dying station in New Jersey. Stern walked ahead, his face frozen, as though he did not see the man, and on the way down the steps he heard an off-key violin melody played with sorrow and no skill, muffled by a closed door. Stern wondered whether at some future date, when halves started to be taken out of him, he too would be farmed off to a home to sit unloved in the shadows and play a tortured violin.

  Downstairs on the front porch a scattering of people talked beneath a great insect-covered bulb. An old man, gray-haired, draped over a wooden banister like a blanket, winked deeply and called Stern forward. In the weeks to come, Stern was to see him clinging insect-like against poles, draped over rails, propped up against walls, but never really standing. Whenever the people at Griggs moved somewhere as a unit, to meals or to the outdoor stadium, the strongest would always carry Rooney, who weighed very little, and see that he was perched or propped up or laid comfortably against something. His main concern was the amount of money great people had or earned, and his remarks were waspish on this subject. He poked Stern in the ribs and said, “Hey, the President don't make much dough, does he? I mean, he really has to hustle to scrape up cigarette money .” He chuckled deeply and, poking Stern again, said, “You know who else is starving to death? Xavier Cugat. I mean, he really don't know where his next cuppa coffee's comin' from.” He became convulsed with laughter. “He goes to one of them pay toilets, he's got all holy hell to scare up a dime. Jesus,” he said, choking with laughter and poking Stern, “we wouldn't want to be in his shoes, would we? We sure are lucky not to be Cugie.” He started to slip off the rail and Stern caught him and propped him up again. “Thanks, kid,” said Rooney. “All them guys are starving, you know.”

  A tall, nervous, erupting teen-age boy was on the porch, pushing back and forth in a wheelchair a Greek youth who Stern learned had had a leg freshly cut off in a street fight. A blond nurse with flowering hips passed by and the Greek boy said, “The last day I'm going to jazz that broad. They're going to let me out, see. That's when I tear-ass up the steps and catch her on the second floor and jazz her good. I going to jazz her so she stays jazzed.”

  “Where are you tear-assin'?” said the tall boy. He combed his blond hair nervously with one hand as he pushed the wheelchair. “You got one leg gone.”

  “Shut up, tithead,” said the Greek boy, concentrating hard. “I jazz her. Then they come after me and I cut out to Harlem. I cut out so they never find me.”

  “Where you cuttin'?” asked the tall, nervous boy. “You can't cut nowhere.”

  “You're a tithead,” said the boy in the wheelchair.

  Stern approached the pair and the tall, blond boy said, “How are you, fat ass? Jesus,” he said to the boy in the wheelchair, “you ever see such a fat ass?”

  Stern smiled thinly, as though this were a great joke and not an insult.

  “I've put on a little weight because of something I've got inside me,” he said. “It certainly is a lovely night.”

  The tall boy erupted in violence. “You trying to be smart or something?”

  “What do you mean?” said Stern in panic.

  “Talking like that. You trying to make fun of us?”

  “Of course not,” Stern said.

 
“What did you say lovely for? We're just a bunch of guys. The way I see it, you think maybe you're better than the rest of us.”

  “It's just a way to say something, is all,” said Stern.

  The boy was a strange mixture, exploding with rage one minute and lapsing into a mood of great gentleness the next. The latter quality took over now, and he began to pour out his thoughts, as though he might never have another chance to talk to someone so smart he used “lovely” and wasn't even showing off. It was as though the occasion called for conversation only on the highest level.

  “I've got bad blood,” he said, the violence gone. “I couldn't get into the Army with it. I work on high wires, you know. I'm the only one who don't use a safety harness. You know, I'll just swing from one wire to another. The guys see me, they flip out. I'm not afraid of anything. You get killed; so what? Then my blood gets lousy and I have to stay in bed three months, six months, I don't care. I just like to have freedom. A bunch of us guys was sitting around at Coney Island eating a plate of kraut and the man comes over and says it's time to close and takes away my plate of kraut. He didn't say it nice or anything. Right away he's stepping on our head. So we really give it to him and run the hell out of there. I hit him with the whole table.

  “But you see what I mean?” he said with an overwhelming tenderness, as though Stern were his first link with civilization and he wanted Stern to interpret his position before the world. “A guy has to have freedom. The whole trouble with everything is that there's always somebody stepping on your head when you're eating a bowl of kraut.”

  “Sounds pretty reasonable,” said Stern.

  “Are you sure you're not trying to show us up?” the boy said, erupting again and taking Stern by the collar.

  “No,” Stern said, imagining the boy hitting him with a table.

  “You're all right,” the boy said, the gentleness returning. “I'll bet the only reason you have a fat ass is because you're sick, right?”

  “That's why,” said Stern.

  “Maybe one night—George, you, and me—we all go downtown to get some beers.”

  By sliding and slipping from railings to banisters, Rooney had attached himself to a pole close to the trio. “You know who don't have a pot to piss in?” he said. “The guys who run this place. They don't eat good at all, do they?” he said, chuckling deeply and clinging to the pole like a many-legged insect.

  The little staff room inside the front door lit up now, and from within, behind a counter, the Negro attendant said, “Line up for bandage and pill. Staff quarters are not to be entered.”

  The porch people lined up outside the staff room, Rooney sliding and clinging along as the line moved. The old actor had come downstairs and was standing alongside a dark-haired woman with sticklike legs and a thin mustache. Her head was covered with a kerchief and she tittered shyly as the old actor whispered things into her ear. He was very courtly toward her, making deep, gallant bows, and Stern wondered whether he had shown her any medallions. Stern stood at the end of the line next to a paunchy, middle-aged man who introduced himself as Feldner. “You're an intestinal, I hear,” the man said. “I had what you had, only now I'm in here worrying about something else. You're a pretty smart boy. I heard you say lovely to those kids. What do you do?”

  “I write labels for products,” said Stern.

  “I worked the casinos all my life,” said the man. “All over Europe, lately the Caribbean. But I was always betting on the wrong rejyme. I'd put my money on a rejyme, see, and then I'd be working a table, making my three clams a week, when bingo, a plane flies over, drops a bomb, and we got no more casino. Once again Feldner's got his money on the wrong rejyme. One rejyme in South America give me an ulcer, what you got. But now I'm worrying about something else. How'd you like to write a book about a guy who always bet his money on the wrong rejyme?”

  When Stern's turn came, he saw that the Negro, inside the staff room, had taken off his intern's jacket. He had great turbulent shoulder muscles, and Stern wondered what his legs looked like, all fitted up in their contraptions.

  “Bullet got me in the high ass region,” he said, his back to Stern, preparing Stern's medication. “Pacific. It pinched off a nerve and caused my legs not to move.”

  Stern welcomed the sudden intimacy and said, “You get around fine. I never saw anyone handle things so smoothly. When I was a kid, I used to go up to the Apollo on Amateur Night in Harlem. You'd see some really fine acts there. That's where Lena started, and Billy Eckstine.” He put his foot inside the door and the Negro turned swiftly, jaw muscles pumped up with rage, and said, “There is not to be any entering of the staff room.”

  Stern said, “All right.” He was the last one in line, and when he had swallowed his medicine, the Negro lowered the staff-room light and Stern went upstairs. On the top step the half man was waiting for him, a bandage around his neck. As Stern approached, he flung open his bathrobe in the shadows and said, “Look what they did to me,” his voice coming from a static-filled car radio on a rainy night. Stern pushed by him, making himself thin so as not to touch him, closing his eyes so as not to see him, not daring to breathe for fear he would have to smell the neck bandage. He got into his narrow room and shut the door tight and wondered whether the half man would wait outside the door until he was sleeping and then slip into bed beside him, enclosing the two of them in his bathrobe. The old actor was wheezing deeply and Stern got between the damp merchant marine sheets, wondering whether Fabiola hadn't made a mistake in sending him to this place where he had to look at half men, as though to get a preview of horrors in store for him. He touched his middle and, disappointed that the great globe of pain still existed, began to pat it and knead it down, as though to hurry along the treatment. As always, his last thoughts before dropping off to a nightmare of sleep were of the man down the street. It struck him as unfair that no matter how many pills he put inside his stomach, no matter how gently he rubbed and patted it, no matter how healthy he got at the Grove Rest Home, he would still have to go home and drive past the man's house twice a day. The man would still be there to start Stern's belly swelling again. How unfair it was. Couldn't bodies of medical people be dispatched to tell the man that Stern was receiving treatment, was getting better, and he was to leave him alone and not bother his wife and child, otherwise Stern would crack with pain once more? Bodies of medical people with enforcement powers. Couldn't Grove send a group of envoys of this nature on ahead of him before he got home, so the man would know?

  Stern awakened the following morning to a sweetly cool summer morning, and waiting to welcome him was the actor, standing barefooted in a great tentlike pair of old actor's underwear, sequined in places, gathering the folds of it into his stained pants, and rubbing his meager arms.

  “Got to get the pee moving,” he said. “What did you think of my doll? That's good stuff, boy. Gonna get me some of that stuff.”

  Stern said she was very nice and dressed quickly. The old actor, still rubbing his arms, said, “You ought to try this. Nothing like it to get your wang-wang in shape.”

  Downstairs, on the porch, the Griggs people stood around silently in the dewy morning, and when Stern and the actor arrived, they all began a dumb march to the dining room, a broken parade led by the tall, erupting boy with the boneless, insectlike Rooney in his arms. Carrying Rooney was a privilege that went to the strongest of the group. After them came the Greek boy, wheeling along furiously, saying, “Wait up, fuckers,” and then the main body, followed finally by the half man, old-fashioned toothache towel around his neck, radio-croaking to the wind. In the dining room he took a table by himself. Stern sat with Feldner and a small, scowling man who kept invoking the power of his labor union. He tried a roll, found it hard, and said, “I don't have to eat a roll like that.”

  “Why not?” Stern asked.

  “I belong to a powerful union.”

  Later, when his eggs were served, he said, “Union gets you the best eggs in the country.”
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  Stern ordered some cereal. When he took a spoonful, Feldner stopped his hand and said, “You can't eat that.”

  “How come?” Stern said.

  “Not in the condition you're in,” he said. “I had what you got. You're a nice kid, but it would tear you up.”

  “I get to eat cereals,” said Stern. He buttered some bread and Feldner said, “Are you trying to commit suicide? I told you I had what you got. I been all over the world, in every kind of country. You're in no shape to eat that.”

  “I have a different kind of doctor,” Stern said, eating the bread but wondering whether Feldner's doctor wasn't better than Fabiola.

  “There's only one thing you can eat with what you got,” said Feldner.

  “What's that?” Stern asked.

  “Hot stew. The warm is what you need. It warms you up in there and heals everything up. The way you're eating, you're dead in a month.”

  “I have a doctor who says bread and cereal are all right,” Stern said, but the pain ball seemed to blow up suddenly beneath his belt and he wondered whether to call Fabiola and check on stew.

  At the next table, the old actor made courtly, charming nods at the mustached stick woman. When she turned to blow her nose, he stuck a fork up through his legs, poked Rooney, who clung to a chair next to him, and said, “Hey, get this wang-wang.”

  At Stern's table the sullen, scowling man said, “They don't take oddballs in my union. Any crap and out you go.” Finishing his meal, Feldner patted his lips and said, “You better be careful, kid. I know what you got in there You can't go eating shit. You get the hot of a stew in there and you'll see how nice it feels. I know. I'm worrying about something else, but I had what you got.”

  At the meal's end, the half man, who had sat alone, eating swiftly and furtively, got to his feet and began to gather everyone's dirty dishes and stack them in piles.

  “It's always the worst ones who are the nicest,” said the plump dining-room waitress. “It was that way at Mother Francesca's, too.” Stern had been aware of the half man eating alone, had felt his eyes, and at one point had been compelled to go and sit with him, staring right at his neck bandage and saying, “Don't worry. I'll sit with you. In fact, I'll stay with you until the last half is taken away.” He felt that maybe if he sat with the half man, someone would sit with him later, when he himself began losing halves. But on his way out of the dining room, when the half man looked up at him, he ran by frightened, as though he didn't see him.