Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  We went on and on about just about all there was to go on and on about, from rereading Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” to Indian casinos to whether there was a feminine form of the word “Messiah” to the difference between how Bob Dylan played harmonica in the key of G by simply using a G harmonica but the old blues guys played in the key of G by cross-playing a C harmonica in the second position. At one point we landed on my affinity for Valium.

  I was surprised to hear Pete say that he experienced unpleasant aftereffects from Valium, though I had heard this from others. Entering medicine-man mode, we discussed how Valium differed from Xanax. Pete believed that while both drugs were similar, the anxiety-quelling properties of Xanax were greater than those of Valium, which worked more as a muscle relaxant.

  Our pharmacology was good. I trusted it. I figured that, after living with them for so many years, we knew more about our own bodies and brains than any croaker who got his knowledge from book learning.

  I felt good after whiling away the afternoon with Wolf. Our talk was always good medicine. On top of still feeling the effects of my night with Lorna, and looking forward to my night, just hours away, with Melissa, I didn’t need anything to relax my mind or body. I poured myself a glass of cold milk, took nothing with it, closed my eyes, and wandered.

  Lorna. My willowy breeze. My darling sapling. What day was this? I had forgotten Palm Sunday. I had forgotten the full moon. The pear trees across from the bar on Reade Street were lush with white blossoms. Lorna. When was Easter? My willowy breeze, my darling sapling.

  Lorna. I saw her cropping herself, sucking the blood and semen from my fingers. Rod of life and Lamb of God.

  Beautiful hamadryad. The tree must not die, lest the spirit of the nymph die too.

  The barracks. Those long, low two-family dwellings of whitewashed wood and shingled roofing, built after the war in rows on every overgrown, weed-ridden, rat-ridden, debris-ridden vacant lot to provide cheap housing for the doomed, downtrodden victorious of god-knew-what from god-knew-where. At last we had people that we could look down upon. He lives in the barracks, our parents would say. The barracks all looked alike. Though they were newly constructed, by the time the curse of memory came to my childhood, they were all grayed, peeling, rotting, with roof shingles missing or hanging lopsided by single rusty nails.

  The daughter of a family in one of those barracks was as healthy and as happy and as pretty a little thing as you could ever imagine. Her name was Karen and she was the first girl I kissed. We were three or four years old, all bundled up, sitting on a little sled on a snow-covered sidewalk, and for many years I had a photograph of this first kiss, one of those small old black-and-white pictures with the serrated white borders; and this always led me to believe that we were coaxed into this kiss by whoever it was who took the picture.

  But most of the barracks-dwellers were not nice. They were bestial white trash from parts unknown, and they knew they were not wanted in the neighborhood.

  The worst of them were the Fudgies. They lived a few blocks away. Their real name was something like LaForge or LaFurge, some fancy-sounding French shit, but if they were of distant French origin, they must have been some kind of homunculi descended from the first scumbag ever thrown into the Seine. Nobody called them the LaForges or whatever it was. Everybody called them the Fudgies.

  The Fudgie I hated most of all was about twelve or thirteen when I was about four or five. Most of the Fudgies were ragpickers. I guess that with enough of them picking through garbage and selling what of it they could, they managed to put Fudgie food on the table to keep them going. The specialty of this particular Fudgie, the one I hated most, was old newspapers. He’d skulk around dragging this beat-up old red kiddie cart full of bundles of newspapers that always seemed befouled and soggy. Maybe they just seemed that way because they had come to be in the possession of a Fudgie. One day he was standing on the pavement chucking rocks up into the branch of a tree.

  “What you doin’?” I asked him.

  He looked down at me. “What’s it look like I’m doin’?”

  I looked up into the tree toward where he was throwing the stones. I saw a little bird nest.

  “Got it!” he cried.

  A little sparrow egg with a little baby sparrow splattered onto the street.

  I was horrified. Growing up in an urban stinkhole, I was mesmerized and thrilled by every glimpse of nature that I came upon. A cocoon, a caterpillar, a monarch butterfly, a big black-winged butterfly, fireflies, a praying mantis, once even a walking stick, a bright red cardinal, a blue jay, a big strange-looking beetle, fat green tomato hornworms that found their way to every tomato plant that every old Italian woman planted in every available patch of earth, dandelions in the cracks of sidewalks and curbs, and every tree in every season. These were the beguiling beloved visitors from an enchanted world, a counter-world that I knew to be out there, that I spent hours lying on my back on pavements looking up at white clouds in blue skies envisioning and dreaming of escaping to. Now that even these little glimpses were no more to be glimpsed, I wondered what city children dreamt of escaping to that was not more dead and dire than where they already were.

  That little splatter of egg and sparrow horrified me, and it angered me. If this Fudgie had not been more than twice my size and twice my age, I would have attacked him with intent to maim or kill. All the cursed lives of all the cursed Fudgies were as nothing compared to the life of the baby sparrow he had taken. I wanted to see a street splattered with Fudgies. They were a blight, and I hoped that they would die and go to hell. Especially this one. Maybe this is when I began to lose belief in God. How could God let the sparrow die and the Fudgie live? God was a Fudgie. Death to the Fudgies, and death to Him.

  So I did not attack the Fudgie, as I should have, as I would have if God had not already poisoned me with fear and cowardice. Most likely I ran to my mother and cried, and tried without succeeding to tell why I was crying.

  Not long after this, there he was again, with that rusted red kiddie wagon filled with newspapers, standing close to the same tree. In his hand was a big dirty butcher knife, with which he was stabbing into the tree with repeated downward thrusts. His face was contorted, which made him even more repulsive-looking than he already was. I saw that he had hacked through the bark and was now hacking with ugly grunts at the softer, milky inner cambium of the tree.

  “What you doin’?” I asked him.

  He looked down at me.

  “I’m killin’ this tree,” he said.

  I looked into the gaping splintered opening he was hacking with those violent downward thrusts of the butcher knife.

  “Why you doin’ that?” I asked him.

  This time he didn’t stop to look down at me.

  “ ’Cause I want to,” he said.

  Twice my size, twice my age, and this time he had a butcher knife, too. Still, I should have attacked him. Still, I should have tried to gather up all that was within me and hack into him with his own stupid knife. But the fear with which that stupid spook-show God had poisoned me, that treacly blood of that sissy little Lamb, that coward Christ, was still in me. I probably ran again to my mother and cried, and tried without succeeding to explain what I was crying about.

  Hubert Selby Jr. used to say that when he was a young man he had no choice but to believe in God, the old anthropomorphic God of his childhood. He had to, he said; and this was because the mad idea of grappling that fucking cocksucker of a God to the ground and fucking Him up the ass while beating Him—the need to do so—was all that was keeping him alive. God and the need to leave him raped and beaten on the ground were one. I loved Selby looking back and telling of this, and I understood what he was saying. But I myself had never felt anything of the kind. It was good enough for me to just turn my back on the whole cheap spook show and walk away. As far as I was concerned God and the Fudgies could go off together and fuck one another up the ass and procreate a new litter of Fudgies and true believers.
They were one and the same. The Fudgies would inherit the earth, of which God was the rotten Jew landlord.

  Years afterward, looking back at my later childhood and adolescence, I saw that most of the few acts of violence I committed were, no matter the victim, really directed at that Fudgie, who by then had vanished from the neighborhood but not from my mind. Maybe they were also directed a bit at that God who had vanished with him. Selby and I had a lot in common. Maybe more than I knew.

  “Killin’ this tree.”

  Beautiful hamadryad. The tree must not die, lest the spirit of the nymph die too.

  Killing this tree.

  Recalling his butcher knife, I thought of my own new magic-handled butcher knife: the gleam of its blade, the beauty of the petrified blue maple of its grip, imbued and imbrued with all the shades of all the skies of all the days and all the nights that ever were. A world apart, those butcher knives. A world apart.

  I did not feel like getting up, but I did. I went into the kitchen, unfastened and opened the black case that lay on the counter, and stared awhile in the afternoon light at the magic handle and the gleaming blade.

  Killing this tree.

  Because I feel like it.

  A world apart.

  Killing this tree.

  I nodded off, sitting upright on the couch. I dreamt that Lorna had a baby. A darling little baby girl that grew quickly into a darling little toddler. I cut her little throat and drank from her all her blood as she lay cradled silently in my arms. I was wakened by the doorbell.

  Playing that night with some wide black silk ribbons that were in a box of gift wrapping I came across in a closet, Melissa and I discovered that we could control the flow of blood from her legs, increasing and decreasing it, by tying off one or two or more places on her thighs with these encircling ribbons, and could control it further and more subtly by tightening or loosening the ribbons in a variety of ways and to various degrees. A black-ribboned faucet-works of bloodletting.

  We delighted for hours in our blood-play.

  I untied all the ribbons and drank my fill, licking at her flesh between long, deep draughts. Warm and luscious, all of it: the soft, girlish flesh; the blood so fresh. My goddess lay beneath me and washed the blood from my lips with her tongue.

  “But sweeter to live for ever; sweeter to live ever youthful like the Gods, who have ichor in their veins; ichor which gives life and youth and joy…”

  Oh, so very, very much sweeter. So endlessly sweeter.

  Casting aside a pillow and kneeling beside her, I wrapped my cock in her ponytail and began to slowly move my hand. I sensed her own hand in the dark between her legs. I clenched the fistful of her soft hair round my cock. I could now hear the motions of her hand on herself. The flounces of her body grew more intense, and I accelerated the thrusts of fists, hair, and cock until the tugging of her ponytail caused her head to jerk with the force of those thrusts; and her body arched in one great trembling, and we groaned with release together.

  We lay there, close, like spent animal mates in a cave where the winds of the wild did not enter.

  “I’m your whore,” she whispered happily through lips that barely moved, “your dirty little whore.”

  Then something like the beginning of a faint laugh became and ended as a breath of sleep.

  “No,” I whispered, not knowing if her ears could hear me. “You’re my goddess.” A sound of contentment seemed to issue from her. “You’re my beloved.”

  “Jst,” I thought I heard her say, or try to say. But it was the exhalation of her breath alone that spoke. “Jst.”

  I was more than sated. I was glutted. My eyes were closed. I could not and I cared not to open them. And then I was fast asleep. If I dreamt, I remembered nothing. It was as if in the sheltering cave where we lay, so safely and so close, even dreams could not enter.

  Sabled night became day. Melissa was already awake, showered, dressed, and drinking coffee when I woke, feeling like a great cat softly, slowly roused from rest by the fingers of the sun. Melissa was standing by the desk, holding her cup of coffee in two hands, looking down at the sheets of paper that lay there. I went to the kitchen and set some water to boil for my own coffee. She was still standing there, looking down. I kissed her neck. She did not respond.

  “Where’d this come from?” she asked. Her voice was without its usual brightness.

  I glanced down at the now familiar scrawled words—

  Before that stirring I was a woman who spoke another tongue.

  I was a leopard awaiting glance in bowering shade.

  —and all the rest, without reading them. I don’t even know why I glanced. Probably just to be sure which of the pieces of paper she was talking about.

  “I wrote it,” I said.

  My voice possessed the brightness that was usually hers, the brightness hers now lacked. That spirit writing had no effect on me now. I felt only the effect of renewed life. I was sanguine and serene, at one with the morning and all that was good; vibrant with exuberance and strength.

  “I don’t remember writing it,” I told her. “But I must have written it. I just found it there one morning. It’s my handwriting. I just don’t remember writing it. And I don’t know what it means. It was very strange. One morning, there it was.”

  “When?” she asked.

  “When what?” I was thinking about the water on the stove. I was thinking about how exquisite that cup of coffee would be.

  “When did you write it?” There was an impatient urgency in her voice now. “When did you find it here?”

  “I don’t remember. A few months ago, something like that. Like I said, I just found it there one morning. It wasn’t there and then it was. I must have written it in the middle of the night, then I must have forgotten about it; and then there it was.”

  “A few months ago?”

  It was not impatient urgency that I heard in her voice. It was fear.

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Before we met? After we met?”

  “Right around then. Maybe a little before we met. Yeah. Maybe right before then. Why? What does it matter?”

  Leaving her with my questions, I went into the kitchen and made my coffee. I sat down on the couch with it and lit a smoke. She had not moved from where she stood.

  “And it doesn’t mean anything to you? You don’t know what it means?”

  She spoke with her back to me. She looked great in her blue jeans.

  “No, not really. Just crazy talk. Maybe it meant something to me when I wrote it. If it did, I forgot what it was, because it didn’t mean anything by the time I found it there.” I drank some coffee, drew some smoke. “Why?” I repeated. “What’s the big deal?”

  I looked out the window. Strange. It was getting dark. More rain? No. Very strange. It was dark as night.

  I was shaken to see her turn. She was a leopard. On the floor, down on all fours, big and menacing. She opened her mouth wide, baring great sharp teeth, and with a deafening roar and claws extended, she leaped suddenly upon me and—it was all in a single fluid, terrifying instant, from her standing there to the wild killing weight upon me—I felt the claws and teeth sink into me and knew it was the end: the end of this single fluid, terrifying instant; the end of everything; and I screamed into the black of night but had no voice; and—

  With a jolt, I woke in a cold sweat. I lay there, my eyes wide open, as my heartbeat settled.

  I remembered nothing of what had horrified me so. I felt only good fortune and thanks that it had not been real. Then I felt only good. Yes, I was good. All was good. I could smell very clearly the scent of coffee.

  Melissa was standing by the desk, a cup of coffee in two hands, looking down at the sheets of paper that lay there. I went to the kitchen and set some water to boil for my own coffee. She was still standing there, looking down. I kissed her neck. She did not respond.

  “Where’d this come from?” she asked. Her voice was without its usual brightness.
>
  I glanced down at the now familiar scrawled words—

  Before that stirring I was a woman who spoke another tongue.

  I was a leopard awaiting glance in bowering shade.

  —and all the rest, without reading them. Yeah, yeah, enough already. I don’t even know why I glanced. Probably just to be sure which of the pieces of paper she was talking about.

  “I wrote it,” I said.

  My voice possessed the brightness that was usually hers, the brightness hers now lacked. That spirit writing had no effect on me now. I felt only the effect of renewed life. I was sanguine and serene, at one with the morning and all that was good; vibrant with exuberance and strength.

  “I don’t remember writing it,” I told her. “But I must have written it. I just found it there one morning. It’s my handwriting. I just don’t remember writing it. And I don’t know what it means. It was very strange. One morning, there it was.”

  This piece of paper, the words on it, which once frightened me, no longer did. Not now, not this morning.

  “When?” she asked.

  “When what?” I was thinking about the water on the stove. I was thinking about how exquisite that cup of coffee would be.

  “When did you write it?” There was an impatient urgency in her voice now. “When did you find it here?”

  “I don’t remember. A few months ago, something like that. Like I said, I just found it there one morning. It wasn’t there and then it was. I must have written it in the middle of the night, then I must have forgotten about it; and then there it was.”

  “A few months ago?”

  It was not impatient urgency that I heard in her voice. It was fear.

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “Before we met? After we met?”

  “Right around then. Maybe a little before we met. Yeah. Maybe right before then. Why? What does it matter?”