Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  Why would a sober man, a man who intended to remain sober, be making exorbitant purchases of uncommon booze? I could tell myself that it was the collector in me. I could tell myself that I was making investments. There were, in fact, in my closet bottles of great-vintage Margaux and pre-ban absinthe, even a bottle of 1811 Cognac Napoléon Grande Fine Champagne Reserve, all of which had remained sealed and undrunk through numerous mad and mindless benders. But the three little vials of rarest booze I had ordered, as well as several wine futures I had bought, were not purchased, like the bottles in my closet, when the idea of sobriety was nothing more than an occasional fancy. These, the little vials and the futures, were bought in what I felt to be the full and never to be sundered embrace of sobriety. The snake in the alky’s skull. The self-deceit so consummate. Was I methodically, meticulously planning, as if in somnambulance, a bender to end all benders? In a few days I would be seeing the doctor, and was glad that I might likely be leaving his office with a prescription for baclofen. If it was not in my pocket when I left, I would go to one or another of those walk-up doctors’ offices in Chinatown and get a prescription there.

  I relished a smoke and the hot strong brew lightened with half-and-half of my petit-déjeuner mexicain. I relished looking forward to spending the night with my sweet Melissa. I relished the little quiver of boyish excitement the prospect of her “surprise” presented. I relished the slow serene progress of drifting from this morning to this night that lay ahead of me, each breath of it a relishing to come. I relished the eidetic image of Lorna stretched and gagged in ecstasy on her Saint Andrew’s cross in the dim red whorehouse light of the poky black-curtained sanctum of her Hell’s Kitchen flat. I relished the sense of strength and renewed life and peace that ran through me like a soft current of spring brook water, reflecting the glistening twinkling light of godliness. I relished the very relishing of it all, and the growing sense of the all within me.

  I placed a pair of old Ray-Ban sunglasses—more than thirty years old, in fact, in a style no longer made—on the kitchen counter beside the plastic cup that held my fake teeth. Two things now, instead of one thing, to which to attend before venturing out into the day: one to put in, the other to put on. I wondered idly if the color wheels of my irises were any more noticeable to passing observers than the fake teeth in my mouth. No one, after all, had commented other than Lorna, in her talk of “that look.” What if on Friday morning my doctor should cast the ray of his penlight into my eyes? What would he see and what would he say? Would it matter? Would it mean anything? There were biochemical “laws” that supposedly governed and explained muscle tissue growth. But none of them applied to the recent growth, the recent resurgence of my muscle tissue. And regardless of what might be seen in the narrow beam of a penlight, I knew my eyesight to be sharper and more acute than it had been in years. Was I outstripping the bounds of accepted medical science, which, for all its advancements and its posturings of understanding what it did not, remained not so far removed from its medieval antecedents?

  Paeon, the physician to the gods, carried no stethoscope or disposable wooden tongue depressors.

  There is a large black jagged rock that juts from the sea close to a secluded cove on Levanzo, an island off the western coast of Sicily, in the ocean waters off Trapani. The natives have a name for this eternal large black jagged sea-presence: Faraglione. In warm seasons of many years, I used to lie naked on the solitary little stony shore looking at it from early morning to sunset, immersing myself in the tossing blue waves between me and it, watching the sun turn from gold to fiery red, increasing in size as it did so and descended. It was easy to see how this great perfect circle of the red sun descending was a god to those who once dwelled in the caves in the high rock above where I lay; easy to see that while theologies and religions die, true gods do not. Since I felt cured of everything when I left that place and walked the long distance back over the hills to the island’s little hamlet, Cala Dogana, in the chill of nightfall, I had my own name for Faraglione. I called it il dottore, the Doctor.

  I don’t think I knew about Paeon then. I had likely read of him in Homer without either awareness or memory. No, I did not know of him, but I felt his being there, nameless and unknown to me, all the same, whispering into the wind to me, or through the voices of the birds that flew overhead: “Someday, you who see and long for and worship what is right. Someday.” Paeon. Il dottore. The Doctor. It was when I stopped pilgriming to him and lying naked all day before him in the sun that my darkness fell and claimed me. Paeon. Il dottore. The Doctor. He was ready to see me now, by name, and I him. I felt him to be with me. I felt him everywhere. The only true value of his lessers lay in their prescription pads.

  I could still faintly taste the traces of Lorna’s dark blood as the hot coffee going down liquefied them and drew them into its brew, to which they added an exotic enticing hint of something like angelica or dandelion root. It was delicious.

  Looking out the window to gauge the weather by seeing how passers-by on the street below were dressed proved fruitless. A few women wore heavy winter coats, but it was impossible to tell if they wore them against the cold or only to flaunt their luxury. A few young fools wore T-shirts, certainly not because they were warm in them but to flaunt their biceps or present a show of self-imagined toughness to the elements. There was even someone with a raised and open umbrella, though it was clearly not raining at all. This umbrella at least served from my vantage as a decent wind indicator.

  I put on an old heavy leather Schott jacket whose zip-in lining had been lost for about the past twenty years, and which I still expected to somehow reappear. I put in my teeth. I put on my shades, I ventured out.

  It was not that bad out whenever the wind eased. The sun was high and the breaks in the rolling grayish-white clouds came often. I walked south, intending to pick up another coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and then stroll back to the Reade Street Pub and, if it wasn’t crowded, occupy a barstool while I drank it. The chill was still such that enjoying the coffee on one of the benches outside the bar was not an open choice. I did notice, however, that the fruitless pear tree across the street from the bar was beginning to bud. I took this to be a sign that warmer fresh air—as fresh as it ever got, anyway—might be soon coming to narrow, shaded Reade Street. And with it, as we cigarette-smoking malingerers and over-the-hill roués called it, good bench weather.

  But after leaving Dunkin’ Donuts with my container of coffee, I decided to wander instead over to Uncle Mike’s bar on Murray Street. The barmaids there would be scantily clad. Instead of shooting the shit with Mike Hickey, the bartender, and random members of the usual cast of idling miscreants, barflies, and good-hearted buddies at Reade Street, I would whet my appetite for this evening’s pleasures. As always it was dark in Uncle Mike’s. I removed my shades. No one there was going to be looking at my eyes, not with those bartenders in those baby-doll negligees and come-hither smiles.

  I didn’t know either of the girls working that day, so I put down a sawbuck next to my container of coffee and slid it toward the gutter of the bar so that they knew it was a tip for the privilege of taking up space while I drank the senior-discount buck-seventy-five coffee that I had brought in with me.

  I was drawn to one of the girls, a plain grisette type who exuded an uncaring sensuality. I stared at her breasts, her ass, especially her thighs. She was fleshy, but not buxom. I imagined biting into those breasts, that ass, especially those thighs. What sort of sounds might she make as I drew her blood into my mouth through the broken skin of that flesh? She seemed blasé. Maybe she might make no sounds at all. What a delicious imagining. I would never know. But it did inspire me to the imaging of something else. An imagining that could be realized. Would Melissa play dead for me? The thought thrilled me.

  I finished my coffee, gave a parting glance to those fleshy thighs, rose, and left, hearing her thank me as I did so. I slipped my shades back on and walked to Korin, the Japanese knife store around th
e block, on Warren Street. For some time I had been enticed by a one-of-a-kind hand-finished Togiharu gyuto knife, about nine or ten inches long, with a handle crafted from mammoth tusk. At about two grand, it was a steep price to pay for a kitchen knife. But every time I looked down at it through the glass of its display case, and the times I had asked for it to be removed from the case and held it, I became more enamored of it. Maybe it was the gleaming heavy steel beauty of the blade. Maybe it was the brown-streaked rocklike heft and beauty of the prehistoric fossilized bone handle. Probably it was both. Every time I hesitated, I knew that the day was drawing nearer when this unique knife would be gone, and that there would never be another quite like it. Tomorrow, I told myself, tomorrow, as I told myself whenever I looked at it. Maybe that’s what I subconsciously hoped for: that it would one day be gone, and that I could then no longer desire it, for it could then no longer ever be mine. For I never fully understood the hold of its beauty on me. I never fully understood why I so wanted it.

  When I removed my sunglasses to gaze at the knife, I noticed that the elder of the two shopkeepers was looking at my eyes. More than that, he was looking into them.

  Did he see the eyes of one who had grown different? The eyes of one who had become transcendent? The eyes of one whose way of seeing had become rare, even unique? Was he now comprehending at last the attraction of those eyes, and what lay in and beneath them, for the rare deadly beauty of this thing that was also unique? In the past, we had exchanged friendly and easygoing words, and I had learned much from him about the arcane ways of traditional Japanese blade forging. Now he was silent and said nothing as I put on my shades and left. I wondered awhile what his silence meant.

  Back home, I thought to call Lorna to see how she felt. I decided that I should, but not now, not today. It was better to wait and not to rush. If there was an emotional change for the better, and I hoped there was, it would need time to settle in. The years’ ghostly treadling at the loom of darkness could not be braked and stilled so easily.

  Should I begin to write again? Was there a tale left in me to tell? How had Thomas Mann recognized and plucked from the air so that it might germinate in his hand the seed of the sublime, simple, and elegant tragedy that we know in English as The Black Swan? Could the sediment of unused words and rhythms be stirred to rise and dance once again in the distillate dregs of an alembic left so long to gather dust and grime? Of course it could, I told myself. The neglected alembic and the sludge of what years ago had danced and sparkled and sung, they were in me; and I was new, and they too could be as new. I decided that, yes, I should begin to write again.

  I felt strong, and I took from the drawer the piece of paper with those words so strange that I had found on my desk that cold early morning in February. “Somewhere along the line, something went wrong.” Those words so unrecognizable, yet written in my hand, on that piece of paper that seemed to have appeared from nowhere, which had so unsettled me that I had hidden it—words, paper, the whole thing of it—away from myself, in a drawer where I would not see it. Now, holding it in my hand and reading it once again, I realized that I had hidden it from myself, yes, but why, I asked myself, had I not simply got rid of it, this eerie thing that still struck me as some sort of spirit writing, written by an unknown hand, which must have been my own, and left for me by an unknown hand, which must have been my own? What, for all the unease it brought me, had made me want to keep it?

  I placed it down in open sight on the desk. Beside it I placed down what I had written on that equinox day when that leaf had appeared on my sill. I glanced at them. I just left them there, and I made up my mind to leave them there until—until what?

  I shaved, took a long hot bath, changed into fresh clothes, took a Valium, poured a glass of cold milk, put on Arvo Pärt’s Alina, and sat and sipped my milk surrounded by its mystical simplicity. And still the answer to the question I had posed myself—until what?—did not come.

  Instead of an answer, Melissa arrived.

  “That Herman Hesse thing,” she said. “I got the original from the library.”

  “That’s my surprise?”

  “Hold your horses. It’s all connected. Like the Buddhists say. Everything’s connected. So just hold your horses.”

  “I didn’t know the Buddhists talked so much about horses.”

  “Shut up.” She unfolded some photocopied pages and a sheet of handwritten notes. “Do you know any German?”

  “I know enough to know that the name of the guy who wrote that is pronounced Hessay, not Hessuh. And I can say danke schön, and Fräulein, and Gemütlichkeit. And sauerkraut. I can say sauerkraut. And die Betrogene. I can say die Betrogene.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means ‘the black swan,’ ” I said.

  “Quite a vocabulary you’ve got there in German,” she said.

  “And Deutsch. I can say Deutsch.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “That I can say Deutsch?”

  “Oh, come on. About Hessay’s name. Why didn’t you correct me the other night?”

  “Because I didn’t want to be pedantic. Because you were saying it like everybody else says it. You were saying it better than most people. Because that’s the way I always used to say it, and so to correct you would’ve been like being a pompous asshole. Besides, fuck him, he’s dead, call him whatever you want.”

  “You would’ve been sharing your knowledge. That’s not pedantic. Now I can say it right. And everybody will think I’m saying it wrong.”

  “That’s another good reason. And, hey, I checked out those lines, and you edited them. You took them out of context. He was talking about the thigh of a deer, not gal-meat. The sick fuck was in love with a goddamn doe.”

  “All I was doing was giving you the essence. The essence of what you seem to share with that sick fuck. And I’m probably the sickest one of all. At least the deer didn’t know what she was in for.” Her voice grew softer. “I thought I would make it special for us,” she said.

  Her words made me feel slightly humiliated, humbled, and touched. I let my face relax in the calmed, loving openness I felt. She showed me the lines in their original German:

  Ich wäre der Holden so von Herzen gut,

  Fräße mich tief in ihre zärtlichen Keulen,

  Tränke mich satt an ihrem hellroten Blut,

  Um nachher die ganze Nacht einsam zu heulen.

  “It sounds pretty cool in German. I listened to a recording of it. And see this thing here.” She placed her dainty finger below the ß in the word Fräße and looked at her notes. “That’s called a scharfes s, or an eszett.” There was slow care in her saying of this: “ess-tsett.” Her eyes rose from her notes. “And this one’s for you, smarty-pants. You may know how to pronounce his name, but I bet you don’t know how to spell it. You spell it with one of those things. She pointed to her notes, where she had written large: Heße. That thing, it’s the German double s. It sounds sort of like a snake hissing.

  “But here’s what’s really cool. This word here: Keulen.” She said it, again with care: “Koolen,” with a slight accent on the first syllable. “It means the hip and the fleshy area of the buttock and thigh below it. Is that some kinda word or is that some kinda word? Keulen. And get this. It’s also the real name for the city we call Cologne. The city of the hip and the fleshy area of the buttock and thigh below it.” She grabbed this part of her body with her right hand, and with great mock enthusiasm and pride announced: “Keulen!” Then she looked at me with a mischievous, kittenish grin. “Well, buddy,” she said, “are you ready to go to Cologne?”

  “I certainly am ready to go to Cologne, mein Fräulein. I most certainly am.”

  She rose quickly from the couch and scurried with her bag into the bedroom.

  And where had Hesse got Steppenwolf from? These Krauts were pretty fucking good at grasping seeds from the wind. It was spring now, the season of wind pollination. The pear tree on Reade Street was alread
y budding. Soon it would blossom full and white. I looked at my hand, opening and closing it, then opening it again. I looked over to the sheets of paper on the desk.

  Then I heard the commanding seductive click of those Jimmy Choo stiletto heels, and I looked only at her, and all thoughts vanished, and there was only lust.

  There were moments in recent days when I had begun to take her beauty for granted. But what an extraordinary beauty it was, superlative in itself and enhanced by those touches—the ponytail and the insouciant curl at its end, the demure shapely curvature of her lips, the shimmer in her eyes, the natural glow of her complexion—that made of her the very picture of innocence inviting defilement. Now, as she stood before me, that picture had been raised to salacious perfection by the sort of masterly sable brushstrokes that belonged neither to skill nor to practice but to inspiration alone. She was purity poised for the brutal taking. She was the Virgin Mary casting from her lap into the dusty dirt the burden of that dead diapered thing and opening her chaste mouth to suck the cock of the next bestial passer-by. She was gorgeous. I had told her she was a goddess, and she was.

  The smack of her hand on her hip was as commandingly seductive as had been the slow, louche click-clack of her approach. I was speechless. She wore, fitting her superbly, like a second skin of exquisite sinfulness, a corselet of black batiste lace and silk-satin. It looked as if it had been made for her, painstakingly, exactingly. The rich fabric that cupped her full sweet breasts was not a millimeter too loose, not a millimeter too tight. The garters that extended from the open lace bottom of the corselet were hooked into the welts of pale beige stockings that were so sheer I could not imagine the fineness of their denier. The one thing I did clearly discern, from their gleam, was that they were pure nylon: the real thing, stockings as they were meant to be, stockings as brought forth into the world by DuPont and the gods in the holy year of 1939, antecedent to the holy year of 1959, or A.N., Anno Nailonensis, in the Year of Nylon 20, when pantyhose followed them into this world. The black satin over-the-elbow gloves she wore, her fingers and forearms snug and well defined in them, delivered the finishing touch. I imagined the feel of them around my naked back, those satin fingers caressing my breasts and neck, clutching my cock, stroking it, drawing it to her mouth.