All around me were little groups of guys pooling the change they’d saved from their bracing operations of the day before so they could make a crock. There’s two kinds of winos on the Bowery. One kind tries to hold on to enough change overnight so they can get in a morning pool that’s trying to make a crock to pass around. The other kind buys their pint or fifth the night before and tries to hang on to it till morning. I’m the second kind. I got something wrong with my throat and I can’t take big swallows. Usually you only get one swallow at a crock when you’re in a pool, so I always get gypped. Also, some of these pools buy Sweet Lucy, which is port, and I go for Sneaky Pete, which is sherry or muscatel. Not that it makes much difference. When I feel like I felt that morning, I’ll drink anything, including kerosene.
I shuffled into the Palace and I walked right into murder, although I didn’t know it then and I was too fogged to think about murder or anything else, anyway. I said to the bartender, “Suds, some mother-loving bastard ripped my jeans and stole my life insurance, a whole pint of it. Suds, I got the heaves and jerks and I’m going off into the rams if I don’t get one quick. You give me just one big-boy on the cuff, Suds, and I’ll be in shape to brace a stake and pay you inside half an hour. I spent a lot in here last night. Almost three bucks, Suds.”
Suds just laughed like that was funny. He said, “You been around long enough to know better than ask for a cuff in Grogan’s trap. Grogan wouldn’t cuff his sweet old drunken grandmother. Fall down in the gutter and drool a little and maybe Kerrigan, the cop, will take you up to Bellevue. They got some stuff there called paraldehyde makes your eyeballs pop like the buttons on a fat man’s vest.”
I was really shaking now and the sweat was rolling off me so hard it bounced on the bar. A guy at the bar was looking at me. He was just another Skid Row grifter, dirty as I was, needing a shave. But he had a kind of air about him like he’d seen better days. He had a big, fat purple goblet of vino in front of him that made my tongue hang out a foot, and he had a dog. It was the damned ugliest dog I ever saw in all my life. A kind of mongrel bull, I guess. It was so old it could hardly walk. It had nasty-looking sores and a swelling in its belly like a tumor. Its eyes were two big milky moonstones. Cataracts. The old dog was blind.
The dog’s owner had evidently been belting himself with the Pete for quite a spell because he was beginning to glow like a wino does when the stuff gets in his bloodstream. His cheeks were pink in his dirty-gray face. He kind of smiled at me and showed a set of jagged teeth stained purple-brown by wine. He waved a fan of dirty fingers at me and said to Suds, “This man is sick. I was a doctor once and I know. Alcohol is a strange element. It’s the only poison that serves as its own antidote.”
Suds said, “So what you want that I should do? Give every sick creep that crawls through the door a shot of bonded bourbon on the house?”
The man put money on the bar. He gulped the whole goblet of wine, then he said, “Refill my glass. Give our friend a blockbuster on me. He requires strong medicine.”
I almost started to laugh and cry at the same time. If you’d given me a choice between a million cash or the most beautiful broad in the world with all her clothes except her stockings off or a blockbuster, right then, I’d have taken the blockbuster. A blockbuster is a beer goblet full of sherry with a shot of cheap rye poured right into it. If that don’t fix you up, it’s time for the embalming needle.
The guy who saved my life was a wino himself and he was smart enough not to talk any more until I got the blockbuster down. It took a little while because like I say I got something wrong with my throat and I got to kind of sip, but I held that goblet in two hands and I kept on sipping and didn’t put it down till it was empty. I could feel the stuff flowing through me nice and warm every inch of the way. Down the hatch, into the lungs, out into the arms and hands, into the belly and right down to the groin and the legs and the numb feet. In thirty seconds by the clock my hands that had been fluttering like the tassels on a strip-dancer’s brassiere were steady.
The man tugged at his old dog and dragged him up the bar toward me. The blind dog walked stiff like a zombie in one of those horror films they show at the all-night picture houses.
“Feel better?” the man asked.
I nodded. “Mister,” I said, “you ought to get the medal they hand out for lifesaving.”
He chuckled, or kind of cackled rather. He waved his dirty paw at the bartender, put money on the bar, said, “A bird can’t fly on one wing. What’s your name, son?”
“Jack,” I told him. Nobody ever gives their right name on Skid Row and that was what they called me when they called me anything. As Suds filled up the glasses, I said, “You must have just come into an inheritance.”
“Not yet,” he said, “but I’m about to do so. Today, I think. A friend of mine is very ill. High blood-pressure. Heart disease. Partial paralysis. And it’s all complicated by old age and chronic alcoholism. I’ve been watching her closely. I’m a doctor, you know, even though they took my license. The slightest shock will carry her off. I don’t expect her to last the day.” He gulped at his wine and looked happy.
A thousand guys you meet on Skid Row expect to inherit a fortune any given minute. I didn’t take this character seriously. But I was hurting and he was buying, so I was willing to let him talk.
“She leaving you her money?” I asked.
He thought it over. “Well, not exactly,” he said. “She hasn’t any money. I’ve kept her alive for a long while now. I’m a doctor, even if they took my license. I let people impose on me, you see. So now I live on city charity and an occasional handout from my brother. I never could refuse poor, suffering people who wanted prescriptions for sedatives — goof balls, you know. One girl killed herself with an overdose. And another girl talked me into performing an illegal operation. I almost went to jail. I was too softhearted to practice medicine. We may as well have another one. I just cashed my relief check. And if the old lady dies today I’ll have plenty.”
Suds filled them up. The man said, “You can call me Doc, Jack. Doc Trevor, that’s my name. This old woman’s name is Marge. Marge Lorraine. It was a famous name once, but you wouldn’t remember, you’re too young. She was an actress. Booze and age and sickness got her. When she was still young enough she became a street-walker to get her booze. Then she hit Skid Row and the lousy bums would make her dance and kick her heels up so they could laugh at her. That’s the only way she could get booze. And she was old then, Jack. Old enough to be a grandmother. To think that she’d been a fine actress once, with her name up there in lights.”
He couldn’t stand the thought of it and drank down the wine in his goblet.
“I used to see her in the joints, kicking her heels up for the stinking bums so she could get a drink to stop the hurting. I couldn’t stand it. She was old enough to be my mother. I remembered how I used to worship her up there behind the footlights when I was a kid. One night I took her home with me to the coldwater flat I’ve got in a tenement on Hester Street. She’s been there ever since, a couple of years now. I was interested in her complication of diseases. It’s a miracle she’s alive at all. I don’t have money for the drugs she needs, but a little booze, a little food, what medicines I can buy, they’ve kept her alive. The main thing that’s kept her alive, though, is this old dog here. His name is Pasteur. I found him when he was a pup. He was homeless, like the old woman was, so I took him to my flat. That was seventeen years ago. Most dogs don’t live seventeen years. Pasteur’s like the old woman. Old and sick and useless. Everything the matter with him but he keeps on living somehow. He gives the old woman courage. She figures so long as the dog can live, the shape he’s in, she can live, too.”