Interzone Page 9

  He looks like an advertisement for something, I thought, but that wasn’t exactly what I meant. There was some significance in the young figure leaning over the jukebox that eluded me. Then he turned around, pivoting with a sudden movement. I could hear my own breath suck in with a sharp hiss of air. He didn’t have any face. It was a mass of scar tissue….

  I see the way to solve contradictions, to unite fragmentary, unconnected projects: I will simply transcribe Lee’s impressions of Interzone. The fragmentary quality of the work is inherent in the method and will resolve itself so far as necessary. That is, I include the author, Lee, in the novel, and by so doing separate myself from him so that he becomes another character, central to be sure, occupying a special position, but not myself at all. This could go on in an endless serial arrangement, but I would always be the observer and not the participant by the very act of writing about a figure who represents myself.

  I feel guilty writing this when I should be up to my balls in work. But feller say: “Nothing is lost.”… A horrible vision of suffocating under the accumulated piss and shit and nail clippings and eyelashes and snot excreted by my soul and body, backing up like atomic waste. “Go get lost for Chrissakes!” I already made a novel outa letters. I can always tuck one in somewhere, bung up a hole with it, you know….

  I hear that baneful, unfrocked Lt. Commander prowling about the halls. They took his buttons off and cut his stripes away, but unfortunately neglected to hang him in the morning or at any other time. The reference, in case you are fortunate enough not to know, is to “The Hanging of Danny Deever” by Kipling. For a real bum kick you should hear a decaying, corseted tenor singing “The Hanging of Danny Deever,” followed by “Trees” as an unsolicited encore.

  Like I say, this fucking ex-Commander is casting a spell of silliness over me so that I sometimes come up with these awful, queer double entendres myself. Last night I told him straight, by God I wasn’t going to stand still for any more of his shit: “Don’t you know about Joe Reeves? Why, I hear he likes boys! Did you ever hear of such a thing, Bill? Heh heh heh.” Rolling his eyes at Kells.

  So I really had all I could take. And the typewriter is fucked again. I’m a martyr to this fucking typewriter—a man as basically unmechanical as I am should never buy used machinery—but before I’ll ask help from that Commander I’ll write with blood and a hypodermic needle.

  Loaded on methadone. I bought out Interzone and the south end of Spain on Eukodal. Like I say, loaded, impotent, convulsed with disembodied limitless desire. Appointment with KiKi mañana. I am supposed to be taking the cure again. KiKi has my clothes and money and is doling out ampules—

  I pulled a sneak. Pants borrowed off a clothesline, dégagé in a dirty sweatshirt like returning from tennis or a hike on the mountain, finally managed to cash one of my special traveler’s checks. Even my traveler’s checks are wrong, vaguely disreputable and disturbing. No one thinks they are actually forged or counterfeit, you understand. They just feel something wrong with me.

  A fat blond beast of a desk sergeant throwing himself at the feet of a thin, crippled, red-haired lush worker: sparse red hair, the junky gray felt hat which leaves a line on his forehead when he takes it off—it is that tight. So this cop comes down from the rostrum of his desk and grovels at the feet of this skinny little middle-aged lush worker known as Red from Brooklyn, to distinguish him from another Red, who has no such definite and particularizing place of residence. Red shrinks back, expecting to get worked over.

  “Red!” A horrible sound of defeat, a sordid battle fought and lost in a psyche as bleak as a precinct cell. “Reddie Boy!” He makes a kissing bite for Red’s shoe. Red retreats again.

  “Now, Lieutenant! I didn’t so much as put my hand out.”

  The sergeant jumps up like a great albino toad. He reaches out and grabs the trembling lush worker by the coat lapels.

  “Lieutenant! Listen to me. I didn’t.”

  “Reddie Boy!” He throws his fat but powerful arms around Red, pinioning both of Red’s arms. He runs one hand up behind Red’s neck, kisses him brutally, repeatedly.

  “Reddie Boy! How I’ve wanted you all these years! I remember the first time you came in, with Dolan from the Fifteenth. Only it wasn’t the Fifteenth then, it was the Ninth….”

  Red gives a horrible, sickly, cautious smile. The fuzz has flipped. I gotta play it cool … cool….

  “Many’s the night I’ve cried for you like this, Reddie Boy.”

  “Jeez, not that way, Sarge. I got piles.”

  “You haven’t been a naughty boy with someone else, have you? Wonder if we could use this floor wax?” This last sentence in his hard, practical cop voice.

  Someone just died in the hospital downstairs. I can hear them chanting something, and women crying. It’s the old Jew who was annoying me with his groans…. Well, get this stiff outa here. It’s a bringdown for the other patients. This isn’t a funeral parlor.

  What levels and time shifts involved in transcribing these notes: reconstruction of the past, the immediate present—which conditions selection of the material—the emergent future, all hitting me at once, sitting here junk-sick because I got some cut ampules of methadone last night and this morning.

  I just went down to the head and passed the dead man’s room. Sheet pulled up over his face, two women sniffling. I saw him several times, in fact this morning an hour before he died. An ugly little man with a potbelly and scraggly, dirty beard, always groaning. How bleak and sordid and meaningless his death!

  God grant I never die in a fucking hospital! Let me die in some louche bistro, a knife in my liver, my skull split with a beer bottle, a pistol bullet through the spine, my head in spit and blood and beer, or half in the urinal so the last thing I know is the sharp ammonia odor of piss— I recall in Peru a drunk passed out in the urinal. He lay there on the floor, his hair soaked with piss. The urinal leaked, like all South American pissoirs, and there was half an inch of piss on the floor— Or let me die in an Indian hut, on a sandbank, in jail, or alone in a furnished room, on the ground someplace or in an alley, on street or subway platform, in a wrecked car or plane, my steaming guts splattered over torn pieces of metal…. Anyplace, but not in a hospital, not in bed …

  This is really a prayer. “If you have prayed, the thing may chance.” Certainly I would be atypical of my generation if I didn’t die with my boots on. Dave Kammerer stabbed by his boy with a scout knife, Tiger Terry killed by an African lion in a border-town nightclub, Joan Burroughs shot in the forehead by a drunken idiot—myself—doing a William Tell, trying to shoot a highball glass off her head, Cannastra killed climbing out of a moving subway for one more drink— His last words were “Pull me back!” His friends tried to pull him back inside, but his coat ripped in their hands and then he hit a post— Marvie dead from an overdose of horse—

  I see Marvie in a cheap furnished room on Jane Street, where I used to serve him—sounds kinda dirty, don’t it?—I mean sell him caps of H, figuring it was better to deliver to his room than meet him someplace, he is such a ratty-looking citizen, with his black shoes and no socks in December. Once I delivered him his cap, and he tied up. I was looking out the window—it is nerve-racking to watch someone look for a vein. When I turned around he had passed out, and the blood had run back into the dropper, it was hanging onto his arm full of blood, like a glass leech— So I see him there on the bed in a furnished room, slowly turning blue around the lips, the dropper full of blood clinging to his arm. Outside it is getting dark. A neon sign flashes off and on, off and on, each flash picking out his face in a hideous red-purple glow—“Use Gimpie’s H. It’s the greatest!” Marvie won’t have to hustle tomorrow. He has scored for the Big Fix.

  —Leif the Dane drowned with all hands in the North Sea—he was a drag anyhoo. Roy went wrong and hanged himself in the Tombs—he always used to say: “I don’t see how a pigeon can live with himself.” And P. Holt, the closest friend of my childhood, cut his jugular vein
on a broken windshield … dead before they got him out of the car. A few of them died in hospitals or first-aid stations, but they had already had it someplace else. Foster, one of my anthropology friends in Mexico, died of bulbar polio. “He was dead when he walked in the door,” the doctor at the hospital said later. “I felt like telling him, ‘Why don’t you check straight into a funeral parlor, pick your coffin and climb into it? You’ve got just about time.’ ”

  I’ve had trouble with this Spanish methadone before. Often I have bought boxes with one or two empty ampules. Accident? Spanish sloppiness? Ixnay. These Spanish factories are flooding Southern Europe with methadone.

  Is it safer to put an empty ampule in every ten boxes or so, or to fill all the ampules with adulterated mixture? Hard to say. People are more likely to beef about empties, but it is easier to alibi. Accidents can happen—though they shouldn’t happen in a methadone factory. Not that kind of accident. A beef is less likely with an adulterated mixture, but more serious if it occurs, and somebody who hasn’t been paid off, or who has a political angle, starts making spot analyses of the product. There is no alibi-ing that. And they are getting too greedy. Last night’s shot was plain water. That’s not smart.

  The Man is getting edgy. His boy is squawking for a star sapphire: “Daddy, you wanna get the best for me.” His blonde wants a custom-made Daimler so long it can’t turn corners—only also-rans turn corners. If you got real class to you, you never look sideways. The bang-tails are running offbeat, some citizen unloaded a salted uranium mine on him. (The uranium mine is a new con. You plant a tube of atomic waste in the mine site so the Geiger counter goes wild over it. Or you can use a gimmicked Geiger counter with an electric motor concealed in it so you can speed it up or slow it down.)

  My thoughts have been turning to crime lately. And of all crimes, blackmail seems to me the most artistically satisfying. I mean, the Moment of Truth when you see all his bluff and bluster and front collapse, when you know you’ve got him. His next words—when he can talk—will be: “How much do you want?” That must be real tasty. A man could get his rocks off on a deal like that.

  Like a guy pushed his boy off a balcony and claimed it was an accident, the kid slipped on a gob of K-Y and catapulted over the rail. No witnesses. He seems to be in the clear. Then Willy Lee drops around.

  Lee: “You see, Mr. Throckmorton, I’m broke.”

  Throckmorton: “Broke! I don’t know why you come to me with this revolting disclosure. It’s extremely distasteful. Have you no pride?”

  Lee: “I thought you might want to help a fellow American, and buy this gadget off me.” He shows a German spy camera attached to powerful field glasses for long-range pictures. “It’s worth quite a bit.”

  Throckmorton: “Take it to a pawnshop. I have no interest in photography.”

  Lee: “But this is a very special gadget. Look from that balcony…. Say, isn’t that the balcony that kid fell from?”

  Throckmorton looks at him coldly. Lee stammers, pretends to be embarrassed.

  Lee: “Now I hope I haven’t gone and said the wrong thing. Must have been a terrible shock for you, losing a friend … and such a good friend…. What I wanted to say was from that balcony you can hardly see my trap over on the wrong side of the Medina, but if I took a picture from that balcony it would show my place and how dirty the windows are and how one has a broken pane mended with adhesive tape….”

  Throckmorton (looking at his watch): “I’m not interested. Now if you will excuse me, I have an appointment….”

  Lee: “I’m sorry to take up your time like this…. Like I was saying, you could take a picture that would show my place, or you could take a picture in the other direction—one that would show your place. I’ve taken some pictures of your place, Mr. Throckmorton…. I hope you won’t think me presumptuous.” He pulls out some photos. “I’m a pretty good photographer. Maybe you would want to buy some of these pictures I took of your house and that balcony….”

  Throckmorton: “Will you please leave my house.”

  Lee: “But, Mr. Throckmorton, one of these pictures is really interesting.” He holds the picture three inches in front of Throckmorton’s face. Throckmorton starts back. A cry of anger dies away to a gurgle in his throat. He reaches for a chair and collapses into it, like an old man having a stroke.

  Lee: “Like the song say, Mister Throckmorton, you’re beginning to see the light…. What’s your first name, lover?” He sits on the arm of Throckmorton’s chair and playfully ruffles his hair. “I got like a presentiment we’re going to get to know each other real well … see quite a bit of each other.”

  I have a feeling that my real work I can’t or, on a deep level, won’t begin. What I do is only evasion, sidetrack, notes. I am walking around the shores of a lake, afraid to jump in, but pretending to study the flora and fauna—those two old bags. I must put myself, every fucking cell of me, at the disposal of this work.

  Oh, God! Sounds like posthumous biographical material—Lee’s letters to his beloved friend and agent, who writes back that the work must develop in its own way and reveal as much of itself to me as I am able to interpret and transcribe. I have but to act with straightaheadedness, without fear or holding back.

  “At this time the creative energies of Lee were at lowest ebb. He was subject to acute depressions. ‘At times,’ he writes in a letter to his agent, ‘my breath comes in gasps,’ or again, ‘I have to remember to breathe.’ ”

  But the fragmentary, unconnected quality of my work is inherent in the method, and will resolve itself as far as is necessary. The Tangier novel will consist of Lee’s impressions of Tangier, instead of the outworn novelistic pretense that he is dealing directly with his characters and situations. That is, I include the author in the novel.

  Civilian casualties of those books on combat judo and guerrilla war. Country club cocktail party: A man who had been a great athlete in his youth, still powerful but fattish, a sullen-faced ash blond with droopy lips, stands in front of another man, looking at him with stupid belligerence.

  “Bovard, I could kill you in thirty seconds. No, in ten seconds. I have a book on combat judo…. Like this—” He leaps on Bovard, planting a knee in his back. “I hook my left middle finger into your right eye, meanwhile my knee is in your kidney and I am crushing your Adam’s apple with my right elbow and reaching around to stamp on your instep with …”

  Sharp words with the criada. Half an hour past breakfast time, I ring and ask for breakfast and the silly little bitch comes on sulky and surprised, like I was out of line.

  I say sharply: “Look, señorita” (there is no English equivalent for señorita, which means a young, well-brought-up, unbanged young lady, I mean a virgin; you even call sixty-year-old whores señorita as a politeness—especially if you want something from them, you dig, I shouldn’t take it upon myself to imply she isn’t señorita)—so I say, “Look, señorita, breakfast is at eight. It’s now eight-thirty.”

  I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is what are they in a position to do about it. My affections, being concentrated on a few people, are not spread all over Hell in a vile attempt to placate sulky, worthless shits.

  Of course, they could cut off my junk. That happened once and I beefed loud, long and high up, straight to the head croaker of this crummy trap. (I’m about the only cash customer they got. If I’d claimed to be half-Jewish I would be here for free.) My purpose in beefing was just in case somebody on the premises lifted the ampule and give me a shot of water, though the stuff was probably cut at the factory like Jewish babies, like all babies now. There is a night nurse who looks like junk, but it’s hard for me to be sure with women and Chinese. Anyhoo, she give me a shot of water one night and I don’t want her ministering to me no more—

  Actually I savor like old brandy, rolling it on my tongue, the impotent hat
e of people who cannot, dare not retaliate. That is, you dig, if I am in the right putting them down, if they really have come up lousy. My epitaph on Old Dave the Pusher who died last year in Mexico, D.F.: “He looks like junk as he would catch another user in his strong toils of grace.”

  This place is mad. There are six people in my room now, washing the floor, putting up a mirror, taking the bed out and putting another one in, hanging curtains, fixing the light switch, all falling over each other and yelling in Spanish and Arabic, and the piss-elegant electrician only deigns to speak French—in Interzone it is a sign of class to speak nothing but French. You ask a question in Spanish, they answer in French, which is supposed to put you in your place. Citizens who come on with the “I only speak French” routine are the sorriest shits in the Zone, all pretentious, genteel—with the ghastly English connotation of lower-middle-class phony elegance—and generally don’t have franc one. This electrician looks like a walking character armor with nothing inside it. I can see some Reichian analyst who has succeeded in dislodging the electrician’s character armor. The analyst staggers back, blasted, blighted, a trembling hand covers his eyes: “Put it back! For the love of Christ, put it back!”