I should have listened to Mutt; she whined, as if warning me. Instead, I let myself be led off to meet Kate McCloud. Kate, for whom I would lie, steal, commit crimes that could have, and still could, put me in prison for life.
A weather change; showers—an enlivening spray dispelling Manhattan's heat-wave stench. Not that anything could ever get rid of the jockstrap and Lysol aromas here at my beloved Y. M. C. A. I slept till noon, then called The Self Service to cancel a six P. M. booking they had made for me with some john staying at the Yale Club. But the sun-kissed bitch, the golden Butch, said: "Are you gaga? This is a C-note gig. A Benjy Franklin with no problems." When I still demurred ("Honest, Butch, I've got a blue-balls headache"), he put Miss Self herself on the phone, and she gave me a real Buchenwald, Ilse Koch castigation ("Ali, so? You want to work? You don't want? Dilettantes we don't need!").
Okay, okay. I showered, shaved, and arrived at the Yale Club with a button-down collar, clipped hair, discreet, not fat, not femme, aged between thirty and forty, fairly well-hung and well-mannered: just what the john had ordered.
He seemed pleased with me; and it was no hassle—a reclining labor, shuttered eyes, occasionally a spurious appreciative grunt as one fantasized toward the obligatory spasm ("Don't hold back. Let me have it").
The "patron," to use Miss Self's terminology, was hearty, balding, hard as a walnut, a man in his middle sixties, married, with five children and eighteen grandchildren. A widower, he had married his secretary, someone twenty years younger, perhaps a decade ago. He was a retired insurance executive who owned a farm near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he bred cattle, and, as a hobby, «unusual» roses. He told me all this while I was dressing. I liked him, and what I liked most was that he didn't ask me a single question about myself. As I was leaving, he gave me his card (unique for the anonymity-aware Self Service clients) and said if I ever felt like dusting the city off my heels to ring him up: I was welcome to vacation at Appleton Farms. His name was Roger W. Appleton, and Mrs. Appleton, he informed me with a pleasant, entirely unvulgar wink, was an understanding woman: "Alice is a fine person. But restless. She reads a lot." By which I understood that he was suggesting a threesome. We shook hands—his handshake was so muscular my knuckles were numb a solid minute—and I promised I'd think about it. Hell, it was something to consider: meandering cattle, green meadows, roses, the absence of…
All this! Snores. Soiled breathings. Asphyxiation. The lugubrious slapslap of searching feet. On my way "home," ha ha, I bought a pint of clearance-sale gin—the kind of raw ambrosia that would gag a slew of skid-row throats. I killed half of it in two gulps, then began to nod, began to remember Denny Fouts and to wish I could dash downstairs and find a bus, the Magic Mushroom Express, a chartered torpedo that would rocket me to the end of the line, zoom me all the way to that halycon discotheque: Father Flanagan's Nigger Queen Kosher Café.
Stop. You're pissed, P. B. You're a loser, an asshole dumb drunk loser, P. B. Jones. So good night. Good night, Walter Winchell—in whatever hell you're baking. Good night, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea—in whatever sea you're sinking. And a very special good night to that wise philosopher Florie Rotondo, age eight. Florie—and I mean this, honey—I hope you never reached the interior of the planet Earth, never discovered uranium, rubies, and Unspoiled Monsters. With all my heart, what there is of it, I hope you moved to the country and lived there happily ever after.
II
KATE McCLOUD
"I may be a black sheep, but my hooves are made of gold"
During the week my sainted employer, Miss Victoria Self, sent me out on seven «dates» within three days, even though I pleaded everything from bronchitis to gonorrhea. And now she's trying to talk me into appearing in a porno film ("P. B. Listen, darling. It's a class production. With a script. I can get you two hundred a day"). But I don't want to go into all that, not just now.
Anyway, last night I felt too ripple-blooded, too restless to sleep; it was impossible, I just couldn't lie awake here in my so-divine Y. M. C. A. cell listening to the midnight farts and nightmare moanings of my Christian brethren.
So I decided to walk over to West 42nd Street, which isn't far from here, and search out a movie at one of those ammonia-scented all-night movie palaces. It was after one when I set out, and the route of my walk carried me along nine blocks of Eighth Avenue. Prostitutes, blacks, Puerto Ricans, a few whites, and indeed all strata of street-people society-the luxurious Latin pimps (one wearing a white mink hat and a diamond bracelet), the heroin-nodders nodding in doorways, the male hustlers, among the boldest of them gypsy boys and Puerto Ricans and runaway hillbilly rednecks no more than fourteen and fifteen years old ("Mister! Ten dollars! Take me home! Fuck me all night!")circled the sidewalks like buzzards above an abattoir. Then the occasional cruising cop car, its passengers uninterested, unseeing@ having seen it all until their eyes are rheumy with the sight.
I passed The Loading Zone, an S & M bar at 40th and Eighth, and there was a gang of laughing, howling, leather-jacketed, leather-helmeted jackals crowded on the sidewalk surrounding a young man, costumed exactly as they were, who, unconscious, was sprawled between the curb and the sidewalk, where all his friends, colleagues, tormentors, whatever the hell you care to call them, were urinating on him, drenching him from head to heel. Nobody noticed; well, noticed, but merely enough to slow their movement slightly; they kept walking-all except a bunch of indignant prostitutes, black, white, and at least half of them transvestites, who kept shouting at the urinators ("Stop that! Oh, stop that! You fairies. You dirty fairies!") and slapping them with their purses-until the leather-boys started hosing them down, laughing the louder, and the "girls," in their stretch pants and surrealist wigs (blueberry, strawberry, vanilla, Afro-gold) ran in flutterbutt flight down the street shrieking, but enjoyably so: "Fags. Fairies. Dirty mean fags."
They hesitated at the street corner to heckle a preacher, or an orator of sorts, who, like an exorcist demolishing demons, was assaulting a shifting, shiftless audience of sailors and hustlers, drug-pushers and beggars, and white-trash farm boys freshly arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal. "Yes! Yes!" screamed the preacher, the flickering lights of a hot-dog stand greening his young, taut, hungry, hysterical face. "The devil is wallowing inside you," he screamed, his Oklahoma voice thorny as barbed wire. "The devil squats there, fat, feeding on your evil. Let the light of the Lord starve him out. Let the light of the Lord lift you to heaven—"
"Oh yeah?" yelled one of the whores. "Ain't no Lord gonna lift nobody heavy as you. You too full of shit."
The preacher's mouth twisted with lunatic resentment. "Scumbags! Filth."
A voice answered him: "Shut up. Don't call them names."
"What?" said the preacher, screaming again.
"I'm no better than they are. And you are no better than I am. We're all the same person." And suddenly I realized the voice was mine, and I thought boyoboy, Jesus, kid, you're losing your marbles, your brains are running out of your ears.
So I hurried right into the first theatre I came to, not bothering to notice what films were on display. In the lobby I bought a chocolate bar and a bag of buttered popcorn-I hadn't eaten since breakfast. Then I found a seat in the balcony, which was an error, for it is in the balconies of these round-the-clock emporiums that the shadows of tireless sex-searchers weave and wander among the rows-wrecked whores, women in their sixties and seventies who want to blow you for a dollar ("Fifty cents?"), and men who offer the same service for nothing, and other men, sometimes rather conservative executive types, who seem to specialize in accosting the numerous slumbering drunks.