And you had found a woman in Japan, little Michiko, flat-faced Mickey, the sweetest and warmest woman in the world, Mickey of the saffron arms and legs and thighs and breasts and belly, a girl named Mickey who had loved you. And, you gutless no-good wop son of a bitch, you hadn’t had the guts to make a Sayonara scene. You had left her there.
Joe Gutless. You had dropped out of NYU because you hadn’t been able to knuckle down and study. You had left Rochester because it had been too tough for you to adjust, and you hadn’t wanted to do anything unless it was real easy. No guts, no push, no drive, no interest in anything or anybody. You were a faceless wop named Joe Gutless Milani who deserved whatever you got.
And now you did nothing. Now you were Hip or Beat or whatever word they were calling it this month. You had been spending years doing nothing at all. That was the hell of it.
You didn’t work. Getting a gig as a messenger boy for a week at a clip wasn’t working. Bussing tables at the Automat for a day or two at a time wasn’t working. Bumming off Shank, bumming from the women you crawled into an occasional bed with, bumming off anybody who happened to have bread or food or an empty bed or a lonesome gland wasn’t working.
You floated.
For the time being you padded down with Shank, as lousy a guy as you were, who pushed pot in an extremely small-time way, who carried a knife and would one day or another stick somebody with it if he hadn’t already.
You floated. You pushed pot and chewed peyote.
You drifted. You were impotent with half the women you slept with and you didn’t muscle much of a kick out of the other half.
You stank.
Joe rolled off the bed and eased himself into the chair. Since the joint of marijuana was still in his pocket, he thought for a moment about smoking it, but then decided to hold on to it for a while. Next morning would be time enough. He would wake up and reach for the little cylinder of pot and blow off the top of his head before he opened his eyes-that would be nice. Instead of the joint he fished a regular cigarette from his other pocket and lit it.
He drew smoke into his lungs, thinking it would be much more satisfying to draw another kind of smoke into his lungs, and wondering how long it would be before he started playing interesting games with a needle. Not that pot led you to the hard stuff, it didn’t. It was just that eventually you yourself would wind up trying the hard stuff even if most pot smokers never did. You, Joe Milani, would, because it was there for you and it was a new kick and there were not nearly enough kicks in the world.
He blew out the smoke and took another drag on the cigarette, a longer drag that burned up maybe a third of the cigarette in one long pull, and he coughed on the cloud of smoke.
Joe closed his eyes.
Anita Carbone. Right now he couldn’t be sure if he hated the world, or Joe Milani, or both; but one thing he was relatively certain of: if it weren’t for the fundamental inadequacies in Joe Milani, or the world, or both, Joe Milani and Anita Carbone might have a future of some sort. Maybe not a white-gown-and-wedding-bells-and-rice type of scene, but a future one way or the other.
Because Anita, by all the rules, answered to the perfect girl. She was a good girl, Joe knew, an Italian girl, and a virgin who obviously didn’t owe her virginity to the fact nobody had bothered to ask her. A bright girl, too, her intelligence compounded of Harlem intuition and Hunter education. She was damned attractive physically, he told himself, and damned pleasant company. Clean and fresh without being so square the two of you couldn’t talk to each other. Although he had been high when he had picked her up, and had been deeply attracted to her then, he had liked her even more, later, as a low had started to come on. It was a shame he would never see her again.
The part of him that hated Joe Milani said: What does a chick like that need with a bastard like you? What are you going to do for her: turn her on? take her to bed? drive her as nutty as you are?
The part of Joe Milani that hated the world said: She’s just not your type of chick, man. She’s just not for you, and she’s never gonna be, no matter what you try to do about it. The two of you are living in different worlds, and if you think it was a long way from Japan to the States, it’s miles more from Hip to Square.
And Joe Milani listened to both voices, listened to them with both ears, and decided that both voices were entirely correct.
So why see her again, he asked himself. And why make a pass at her when the result had to be one of two things—either she would throw the pass right back in your face, or the pair of you would wind up in bed. Both eventualities, in the final analysis, would be equally unpleasant.
Damn, it was wrong! Joe cursed silently. You were supposed to go to high school and then college, the army cutting in before or after. Then you married a good Italian girl and settled down and bought one of those new houses in the suburbs and snagged a job with your old man or sold insurance or found something else you didn’t have to kill yourself doing and at which you could make a fairly decent living. That was what you were supposed to do.
But what you were supposed to do was also impossible, inconceivable, and couldn’t work out no matter how much grass you smoked. You couldn’t go back again, that was the hell of it. Squares could turn Hip if they were sick enough, but Hips like you, Joe Milani, couldn’t seem to return to Squaresville.
It would be so nice to be square, Joe thought. That was something the squares never got into their heads, that their world was a far more attractive one when you were sitting on the other side of the fence. Was the grass always greener?
Well, no. Because sometimes grass turned brown, especially that Mexican brown that smelled a little different and seemed a little stronger. The joint in his pockets was half regular green and half Mexican brown and it was a good thick bomber, and he fingered it lovingly, his fingers cool and expectant on the brown wheat-straw paper.
No. Joe rejected the temptation.
Not tonight. Tomorrow, he promised himself, but not tonight.
He stood up, wanting a woman suddenly, wanting a woman but not wanting the woman he had just left, the woman he could never possibly make it with. The image in his mind was simply Woman. He paced the room and thought for a minute and decided the right woman for the moment would be Fran, good old Fran, sick little Fran who lived a few blocks away and always had room in her bed for him. She would probably want to get a little high first on something or other, but that was all right when you stopped to think about it.
Why not get high?
Why not ball with Fran? Joe Milani poked at the question.
Why not, indeed?
He left the apartment and hurried down the stairs, head high and arms swinging at his sides. It was cool outside, the sky dark, the streetlights lit.
He walked easily, west on Saint Marks to Third Avenue, down Third to Fran’s big and wonderful pad, a third-floor loft on Cooper Square.
He didn’t ring the bell because none existed, and if there had been one he would not have bothered to ring. At Fran’s place you opened that always unlocked outer door and climbed those grim, unlighted stairs until you reached Fran’s door where you knocked just in case some stud was ahead of you.
Joe paused at the door, undecided whether to knock or to turn around, head down the stairs and out of the building, up Third to Saint Marks and over Saint Marks to his own place—saying to hell with Fran and to hell with Joe Milani and to hell, for that matter, with just about everybody.