“Everybody’s got the right to go to hell in his own way, Eney,” the pusher said. “Nobody ruins anybody else. They only open doors. No one forces them through: that’s each man’s decision, whether to walk through the door or not.”
“You open doors for too many people, Porky.”
The pusher shrugged. He was a businessman. The ethics of the thing didn’t enter. He turned and left the alley. Tómas stirred feebly as Norman Eney lifted him under the shoulders, carried him back into Denny’s.
The rat continued feeding. There was hunger, and a way to assuage that hunger. Traffic moved. So did the night.
They came for Porky in his apartment.
The pusher’s apartment was uptown, and insulated from the world in which he conducted his business affairs by sight and sound and frame of mind. With the door closed New York was a mythical kingdom, far away. A Babylon not to be confused with realities, as this apartment was a reality. With the door closed, and the draperies pulled, with the air conditioning making an atmosphere all his own, and the stereo handling its Scarlatti, its Bach, its Orff — he was where he wanted to be. In a world not of that other world, in a world he made for himself, with no taints or remembrances from beyond. The sanctity of Porky’s world was a matter of custom-fitted bookshelves, well-stocked larders, and full turntables.
The sanctity was shattered by the ringing of the doorbell. Four-thirty A.M. The jazz joints were closed, the cops in the subways slipped their pennies into the candy machines and received their coated peanuts for the long beat, up and down the platform, looking for mashers, smokers. The cabbies lounged against steering wheels reading the finals. Somewhere the Pulmotor squad raced, siren-screaming, through the night streets. Gutter-cleaning machines with massive brushes churning marched up the cross streets. It was too late for visitors, here in the private universe of Porky’s.
He opened the peephole and stared out.
Norman Eney stood there, sweat-white pearls of hope and need and want on his face. He had come to the Man for his junk. Porky was annoyed; this was the first time — though his address was no great secret — one of his customers had come here to make a connection. He was annoyed —
But the loss of the expected revenue from Tómas had made him fall behind in receipts this week, so he opened.
Norman Eney was not alone.
Out of sight on either side of the apartment door, below the peephole level, they hung at ready. When the door swung inward, they leaped. There were five and Eney. They slammed the door behind themselves, and Porky was afraid, quickly.
But they made no move to hurt him. He knew them: all were junkies, all were customers. What was happening? Who …?
“Get your soul together, Porky,” one of them said. He was a thin-lipped pianist, hooked through the bag and out the other end with a need and a monkey so big it played King Kong to an SRO audience. He knew them all. They were all jazzmen. Some the good, others the screamhorn, but all played that sound. He knew them, knew they could not afford to hurt him. There were other Men on the turf, but none so steady, none so honest, none so businesslike as Porky. He knew they would not hurt him.
“I don’t keep my cache here, boys,” he assured them. “I’m not taking a fall for holding. So if it’s need you got, you’ll have to wait till business hours tomorrow.” He tried to usher up a smile, but it wouldn’t leave where it cowered, down there inside him.
“Let’s do that thing, man,” said Orville Grande, who played piano at the Concourse Inn. “You need a hat?” It was rhetoricaclass="underline" mid-August, hot, Porky was a nonhatter. They moved him (the center of that group) out the door, closing it softly behind, and down the back stairs to a car. Ralph Shetland (trumpet, The Jazz Lab) drove, and they took Porky back downtown, to the street.
Denny’s was a dark waiting place. Chairs lay up on the tables like so many dead animals, feet rigor mortis in the air. The still-moist hush of dead smoke, weak booze, loud voices, bad jazz. It was still there, a million smells and sounds and scrabbling touches imbedded in the what color? walls. Porky was apprehensive, not frightened, merely apprehensive:
(I’m not a crook. I’m a businessman. I only take care of a need. If they didn’t want it, I wouldn’t push it. Take away the bottom of the pyramid of hungers and the top collapses. I’m a link, not a totem. There’s no need for violence here … )
(Can you hear me?)
But he was silent, and they were silent. Even when they pulled the slat-back chair off the bandstand and tied him to it with their belts and silk repp ties. Even then they were nothing but silent. So cool.
It was not important before, but it is now. This is what Porky seemed to be, looking from the outside. He was short, perhaps five six and, except for the roll of baby fat about his middle, not particularly porcine. His face however, was that peculiar combination of stubble and sallowness that melded with pudge and pinpoint eye, immediately conjuring the impression of a hog. Hence, Porky. His hair was short, thinned across the temples and forehead, and the nose pugged back revealing two hair-overgrown nostrils. Despite this, he was not an unpleasant-looking man. He was clean, almost to a fault, and carried himself very straight. In other circumstances in some other walk of life, he might easily have been thought of as a credit and a caller. It was not important what Porky seemed to be, before, but it was now. The change was in the offing.
Norman Eney was the first to reach the bandstand. The others followed him, and from the darkness came three more. Nine jazzmen. All in a row. See how they blow. Go!
Porky watched, and tried to devise a rationale. There was a theme here, a statement, a meaning, they were trying to do, say, convince, something. What it was … well, perhaps there would be an explanation. Porky was phlegmatic, and his worldview contained the unquenchable belief that whether or not the questions get asked (how many neon bulbs, flickering on Times Square, to make the riddle high enough and bright enough for the right people to see it?), the answers are always given.
“Do you know what you do, Porky?” Norman Eney asked. “Do you know what you’re killing? Every time you let us feed ourselves, you take something. You take it and you bury it, man, and not only we miss it, because it’s us, but everybody, all of them, they lose it. We’re going to let you know. Tonight.”
Porky grasped for a handle. “Why tonight?”
Orville Grande, the pianist, turned on the stooclass="underline" “Tómas got busted by the fuzz tonight. He was trying to hold up the deli on the corner so he could buy his stock from you.” He paused and saw something in the darkness, something nothing, then went on, “He was so sick, man, he tried to split, and they burned him down.”
A sax man — a customer named Eli — added, “He’s got the last sign on him, man. He’s got that big toe tag in the morgue.”
“So we’re going to show you, Porky,” Eney explained. “All these years you been living at the mountains of blindness, not knowing, not caring, just selling, man. Now we’re going to show you what you take from us, what we’ve got.”
And they played.
What did they play? They made their sounds in the dark moist cavern of the jazz club, and some of it said things and some of it didn’t, but it was them. All of them, from the shallowest part to the deepest niche, and the wail was first lonely then blaring and demanding, driven on a pastel breeze from a corner of the universe where the ones-who-hear-things-always lived. Porky listened, and knew he had better listen, because this was a credo for him, there was a test coming and notes should be taken, because this was the final exam. He was not a punk, nor was he a stupid man … he had thought himself a businessman, and his morality, his living, was a separateness, not to be confused with what he sold these damned ones. But it now seemed he was wrong. They wailed, they blew, these creatures who had drawn themselves on elbows and knees into his light-life. Now he could not ignore them. He had been thrust into Bedlam with them, and to survive, to ken their meanings, he must pay close attention.