Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  And what is this malarkey about the light of day? Are they all supposed to be independently wealthy? No nine-to-five working stiffs? It’s like the nonsense about the cross. And wouldn’t a stake through the heart do in just about anybody? I mean, come on. Think about it. Not at all afraid of rats, mind you; but afraid of garlic, daylight, and crosses. Who came up with this stuff?

  I really get a kick out of the fangs. Hell, between Sandrine and the next of the four witches’ Sabbaths, May Eve—yes, I’ve observed only pagan holy days, from Christmas and Easter to the four Sabbaths, for a long, long time—I had nine teeth pulled on a single day, and another had worked itself out of the gum on a day soon thereafter. As I had already lost a bunch of teeth before these ten, I was left practically toothless, with a loose, unsure contraption of plastic and wire to make do in my mouth.

  How those guys on Bedford Street, on Sullivan Street, on Thompson Street shook their heads and laughed low and down at those Mafia pictures. A ban on dope dealing, mother love, a code of honor. Same thing. Garlic, light, crosses, and fangs.

  It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. Nowhere but in truth will you find the truth.

  WHEN I BIT INTO SANDRINE’S THIGH WITH MY mouthful of plastic, wire, and the few real teeth that still cut, her moan turned to a jagged scream that slashed the night, and her scream turned to a wild sigh that was deep as the sea.

  I tasted her blood in my mouth. It could not have been more than a few drops, a thin trickle, but it was as if I suckled on her very soul and the inmost mystery of her. That taste and the sweet taste of her flesh, soft and young, in my mouth were one; and the sound, which seemed to come from a distance, dreamlike and timbrous, of her surrender and her giving was a beckoning to enter more deeply into the strange black forest of lust on the edge of which we trembled.

  She was mine, I was hers. We seemed to merge, I into her, she into me. I clung, quenching my tongue in the sweat and blood of her thigh. Sustenance, moisture, deliverance. I was lost, beautifully lost, breathing and feeling as I had never felt before.

  I opened her lips with mine and had her taste what I had tasted, the taste of what she had given me, of what I had taken. We kissed gently. I collapsed, falling into a sleep without dreams, a sleep without hauntings, aware of nothing but a vague and comforting sense of enchantment.

  This sublime feeling lingered when I woke. We did not talk about what transpired. Her presence was with me long after she left. I went more than a week without drinking. Then I returned to the bar where we had met. She was not there. I asked Lee if he had seen her. He told me that he had never seen her before and he had not seen her since.

  I went home alone that night, not really drunk but feeling the old loneliness welling up in me.

  She returned there a few nights later. I brought her home with me, but it was not the same. She seemed to regard me as a danger, as one who knew something unutterable about her, and it was as if the possibility that I might utter the unutterable put her on edge and made her ill at ease. I was not with the girl who surrendered and gave, the girl who had gone to heaven and hell when I broke her skin. No. I was with the girl who liked to be raped after bathing in warm water and milk and brushing out her hair. It was then that I knew her to be troubled. It was then that I knew her mind was not right. In the morning, when I walked her to the door and kissed her good-bye, she lowered her head and turned away and began to silently weep.

  She had surrendered and given the heart of her youth to something far worse than I, who had taken her but for a single earthly night. She had chosen hell over heaven long before that night, and that night had not cured her.

  We were to meet again.

  IT IS ALWAYS EASIER TO SEE IN ANOTHER WHAT WE ARE uncomfortable with in ourselves. A few days after my second encounter with Sandrine, it struck me that when I felt that I was looking into her heart I was really looking into my own.

  The blonde whose cuffs matched her collar had been the first woman with whom I’d had old-fashioned, missionary-style sex in a very long time. It had been years. I had grown jaded. My sex drive had evanesced and with it my virility. I looked like a man but I was not.

  Once upon a time I had known the heat of passion every day and every night. The combustions of sensuality consumed me. Now there were only passing moments of lukewarm velleity. The prospect of being close to a woman, to anyone, repelled me. I could no longer bear a human touch without recoiling. Maybe this is what disturbed and haunted me about the prophecy of those dead monkeys. They had foretold not only my fate but my escape from it as well: an escape that involved the closeness to another of which I was ever more incapable. They had seemed to present a choice, unclear and unknown, between one terror and another. The terror had increased through recent years, as I grew more bound to the loneliness and desperation of my descending darkness and at the same time more loath to caress or be caressed by another.

  I had embraced the blonde in my drunkenness. It had always been this way. Alcohol enabled me to do what I otherwise could not. The many lovers, remembered and forgotten, I had known in younger years were as much a part of my drinking life as of my love life. At times those lives seemed inseparable.

  Why were they attracted to me? Not the women of my past. The blonde and Sandrine. What had possibly moved them? They were young and it was a young man’s world. I was a toothless wraith of a man that once had been. It was not what they saw, I concluded, it was what they sensed. Was it a certain world-weariness that I evinced? The unrevealing nuances of a perverse vestigial cupidity? The hint of what they had never experienced? All of these, none of these? What beguiled them? Was the answer as elusive and ultimately unknowable as the parts of their souls that lay hidden to themselves?

  Maybe I was different after all. They—the great royal they, who spoke from on high—had told me throughout my life that I was different. Maybe I had always been different. Not better. Maybe even worse. But different.

  It mattered only that they were drawn to me. As empty and forlorn as I had been left by my night with the blonde, it brought back to me, I later realized, something of old, forsaken confidence, even of old, forsaken courage. Were it not for the blonde, there would not have been my night with Sandrine. Were it not for Sandrine, I would not have had my first lovely taste of what, as I clung to her and drew her into me, felt like deliverance. I had judged her to be a troubled soul. I would have judged Saint Teresa in her ecstasy to be the same.

  Troubled souls or divine. Who was I to judge, and what did it matter? It mattered only, I told myself again, that they were drawn to me. And as they had been drawn, I now had no doubt, there would be others. Lost souls or holy intercessors, there would be others. All I had to do was lead them, go together with them, to where no one could go alone.

  It was not sex that I sought, not as it was commonly conceived. I sought communion, sacrament, transubstantiation, the blood that brought redemption.

  Sandrine had placed magic in my hand, in my mouth. It was the magic of herself, and it was mine. It felt good to be awakened, to be thrilled once again, like a child experiencing his first inkling of the illimitable.

  The monkeys no longer anguished me. They became instead an inner sophia, an image of perception and veneration painted in indelible hues in my mind. They are sacred to me. They brought me to new life.

  I would go headlong into the promise of this new life. This was not a conscious decision. There was no thought or deliberation. The momentum of exhilaration simply took me.

  THE PART OF DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN WHERE I LIVE WAS once the quietest, least traveled, and most sparsely occupied area in town. Its stately old brick buildings, many of them dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, were from an era when buildings were built to last. The stonework of window arches and the loading platforms of warehouses, the narrow cobblestone streets and small shops evoked the atmosphere of a bygone New York. It was a place of lovely days and enticing hushed nights. The balmy summer breezes and brisk winter
winds that wound through it from the Hudson were like familiar spirits that caused leaves, panes, and shadows to tremble in the lush silence. It was easy to imagine the elderly Thomas Paine idling here amid others to witness the hanging of a murderer, on the corner of Leonard Street and Broadway, as he did one day in the spring of 1804. Easy to imagine butter and egg traders still bustling within the old red-brick Mercantile Exchange, as they did a century ago and more, near to a Bayer heroin warehouse on Harrison Street. The bar I haunted occupied the ground floor of a three-story building that had been put up in 1852.

  It was a wonderful neighborhood, a neighborhood of seclusion and friendly encounters and whispers, welcoming byways and odd purchases, peace and quiet, cosseting charm, and open skies above gables, chimneys, and trees.

  Then, some years ago, in the closing decade of the last millennium, everything began to change. At first the change was slow and subtle, barely noticeable. By the time it was perceived, it was too late. What had lingered on, so rare and so precious and so different for so long, was gone forever. New, ugly buildings of glass, metal, and cheap fabrication belittled the old structures and obscured the sky. I lived now in a valley of eternal scaffolding. Years before I had slept on my fire escape, rising with the soft light and stirrings of early morning. Now the night was a glare of artificial lighting and a blare of industrial clamor. Through the window that opened to the fire escape where I had slept so soundly, I now saw scaffolding that advertised Warburg Realty, where “Tribeca’s cobblestone streets meet the information highway.” The old and real cobblestone street beneath my window had been torn up and repaved with a new, quainter-looking surface: a stupid project that had brought with it a year of deafening noise. Forget about the sweet open-air sleep on the fire escape outside my bedroom window, back when an old florist had occupied the corner where Warburg now kept its windows brightly lighted all night. I now needed a blackout shade on the window just to sleep in my bed.

  The whispering peace of the place vanished amid the obliterating noises of traffic, construction, demolition, street renovation, and above all and most abhorrent, the crowds that infested the place, blocking the narrow sidewalks with their twin baby carriages and strollers, whining shrilly into mobile telephones, professing a love for what had been as they ran amok and destroyed it.

  Why had they come here? Because they read that it was the place to live. The school was good. Property values were rising. It was safe. It was a good investment. It was the perfect place to raise a family. So they came, and so they overcrowded the school, created a real estate bubble, attracted crime, caused inflation, shoved aside those who had been here before them, and remade the neighborhood in their own image, trumpeting their obstreperous entitlement over the vanishing remains of what had been and was no more.

  Who were they? Emigrants from the Upper East Side. The rich white trash of Europe and Asia. Wall Street thieves. Speculators. Yuppies. The scum of New York and of the earth. I was becoming a racist. I was coming to hate white people. These white people.

  I had seen their spawn grow into adolescent blobs of medicated hyperactive protoplasm. I had seen those blobs of adolescent protoplasm grow into the manic dusk of their teenage years, scorched, undone, and broken apart by privilege, free money, alienation, disorders of the mind, and congenital enfeeblement.

  The doomed soul whom Thomas Paine had watched hang had comported himself tranquilly, attaching the gallows rope around his own neck to the crosspiece above. Not so these uneasy children of the damned, these blood blisters of entitlement and dejection.

  I was surrounded by susceptible, impressionable lost young girls. Surely the magic in my hand and my mouth would not fail to bring longed-for grace to these trembling lambs. Even if they did not know it, they wanted me as I wanted them, needed me as I needed them.

  It was better, however, to hunt elsewhere, was it not? The Lower East Side and other old pockets of character had also fallen, or were falling, to nothingness. Yes, better to hunt elsewhere, away from the eyes and tongues of these girls’ parents and guardians. Such girls, after all, were everywhere in this fallen city, in these fallen days.

  I thought of the girl-child, maybe sixteen, whom I had seen masturbating one morning, her eyes tightly shut, rubbing herself into a frenzy on the narrow arm of a bench in the little park nearby. (I had stopped watching her when two sanitation men, on their way to the bar, paused to watch.) I thought of the girl who offered me money to take her half-finished container of coffee into the bar and have it filled with liquor for her. I thought of the girl, thin and pale and hithering, who wore sheer black hosiery under the hiked-up plaid of her school skirt. I thought of the girl, a wisp older (the bars served her), who sang for me on a sultry late summer night but had never heard of Billie Holiday or the Jaynetts. I thought of the girl who asked me for a cigarette and smelled like freesia and dew when she drew close to the flame of my lighter. I thought of all the errant daughters, in their distress and in their dangerous desire. I thought of the blood like rainy lace on Sandrine’s thigh, transposed to their thighs. I thought of many things.

  IT WAS A TERRIBLE WINTER, THAT WINTER OF TWO YEARS PAST, that winter of my first, tentative steps into the passage of my resurrection. Frigid winds brought a barrage of storms, one fast after another. Icy sleet and rain transformed the deep snows into a treacherous mess of filthy black ice and slush that covered streets, pavements, gutters, garbage. Insalubrious gales of cold, humid air blew and slashed almost relentlessly, making the temperatures, which were most of the time below freezing, seem even worse. It went on for months without respite.

  I did not succeed in my pursuit of the young flesh that I craved. Oh, they were young, yes, the girls I brought home those biting winter nights. But they were not virgin temptresses. They were in their twenties, even their thirties, and, on at least one occasion, over forty. It struck me that the younger these women were, the more willing, even eager, they were to indulge me as I descended on them—always gently at first, then letting my hunger lead me—to execute the rite of the dead monkeys, to cling to them, to revel in the taste and feel of their sweet thighs, to break open their skin and dainty tendril-like vessels, and to lovingly exsanguinate with my mouth the drops of their essence.

  Yes, the younger they were, the more willing they were. I would have thought the opposite to be true. I would have ventured that the older and more experienced they were, the more ready they would be to experiment and accept. It was a pleasant revelation, what I learned from my encounters with these six or seven women over the course of that stormy winter.

  I did succeed in finding my path to sobriety. The sense of new life I was beginning to feel, and the exhilaration it brought, were such that I wanted to be sober, I needed to be sober, because I wanted and needed to be fully there for these blessings. There could be no other way. Light now shone in the great cathedral of melancholy. It was as simple as that.

  It wasn’t easy. I recalled my father, lying in a hospital bed, telling me that he had been drunk since he was nineteen and that he was never going to drink again. At the time he was a few years older than I am now. They let him out of the hospital a few days later, and a few hours after that he was back in the bar drinking. I was not him, I told myself. I may have been like him in some ways, but I was not him.

  For three or four days it was pretty bad. There were slight sudden seizures. I did not suffer delirium tremens, which I had in the past during severe spells of alcohol poisoning. But with every breath or abrupt frightened gasp my racing heart, mind, and nerves screamed with urgency for a drink. I put off taking that drink from one moment to the next, then from one hour to the next. Finally I slept. It was a troubled, nightmarish sleep, and I woke from it in a cold sweat. But it was sleep nonetheless. Finally I ate. A couple of runny soft-scrambled eggs, lightly toasted white bread with butter, a glass of milk. But it was food nonetheless. When I no longer feared cutting myself, I shaved. I took vitamin B, washed down Valium with more milk. I drank water.
I drank tea. I ventured outdoors and inhaled deeply. After a week or so, my heart, mind, and nerves no longer screamed. I was weak, sickly, and on edge. My brain was not right. At times I quivered. But I was here, and I was sober. A few mornings later I wakened to a strength, clarity, and calm that had not been mine for a very long time. I made a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and listened to Arvo Pärt’s Litany.

  I tried to banish the self-torment and self-doubt that I had sunk into. Had I not been through this before, and had it not in the end led to nothing? Had I not, again and again, over and over, got myself sober only to get drunk again? Wasn’t this just another suffering on the wheel of suffering? How could I feel so sure that I would succeed where I had countless times and invariably failed?

  But recent events had filled me with belief—belief in a new life, which meant a new world, a new me. This was part of it all. It had to be. I whispered to myself the words from Isaiah that had always made me smile: “Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning that they may follow strong drink.” I was not smiling.

  Alcoholics Anonymous tells us to put our faith in God or a higher power. We are told to relinquish willpower and say, echoing the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will, not mine, be done.” This theist dogma proves an obstacle to many. Such was the case with me until I simply learned to discount it. If the founders of A.A. could not see that it was folly to doubt the human will while at the same time propounding faith in a God that had been willed into being by man—so be it. To me it was the sort of nonsense that obscured the good of A.A. I had witnessed and felt that goodness, but it had never taken root in me. Some might say that my will disallowed it. But it was my will that got me there in the first place. It was their insistence on a “loving God,” so indelibly fundamental to the precepts of A.A., and their Hallmark platitudes and cultish humbug that did the disallowing. Apologists and exegetes have stressed the importance of spirituality over religion in A.A., but that God remains. Not a god, not a godly force, but the God of man’s stupid invention and enduring madness.