I came away from that gallant effort with a handsome shiner. Right eye.
As though I hadn’t found my share of aggravation, the union came around and demanded to see my card. I hedged; I didn’t have one. So they sent around a pair of bully-boys who proceeded to convince me of the merits of joining the janitor’s union. Left eye.
Three young toughs from Gulliver Street caught one of the three ballerinas who lived at 3128 on the front stoop, and gave her a real hard time. When I tried to scare them away they yanked shake-knives on me and I decided cowardice was the better part of living, which cut me off from the three ballerinas.
So it went, through the week, helter-skelter, sort of devil-may-care digging my own grave.
Then came Saturday night, which was always big for parties in the Alley, and Scat Bell, the ex–Mr. Newark who had discovered he had a psyche and had moved into McMurdo Alley to nourish it, decided to import talent. He had heard about a whole colony of Zen-oriented poets from way Uptown, and had convinced them to come over, to read their stuff with a jazz background.
Half a dozen boys from the neighborhood got their instruments together, and we had a pretty fair combo. It promised to be a fine bash, with everybody letting their beards grow, and the chicks dying their hair stringy black to go with the turtlenecks.
Interest was running high, particularly when Scat told us one of the boys coming from way Uptown was The Hooded One.
This made no sense whatever until he informed us this guy was really far out; he wore a hood like an excommunicated Ku Klux Klanner. They said he was the beatest, like he had the word and the word was TRUTH! So we were all looking forward to his showing up and reading the stuff. Hood and all.
Seeing as how it had been a rotten week anyhow, it was no surprise that as I was emptying the trash cans behind 3126, Kroll should emerge from a doorway.
“Hey,” he commanded with a syllable. I set down the can full of beer bottles and muscatel flagons, and walked over to him.
“Fancy meeting you here,” I said. “Am I overdue?”
“Did you find out anything for us yet?”
I spread my hands. “I told you I was no Nero Wolfe.” I regretted having referred to the ¼-ton detective because Kroll did look like Nero Wolfe. He was pretty stout in the rex.
“Any of these characters,” he saluted both buildings in the Alley with a sweeping gesture, “ever go to college to study medicine? None of them have any police record, except Yarbrough.”
He was referring to Pastey Yarbrough, who had a thing about stealing from the five and ten. He’d been picked up so many times, Woolworth’s was thinking of making him a tax exemption.
“I don’t know. I can find out, I suppose,” I said.
“Do it, Snivack,” he said, sliding oozily into the doorway from whence he’d come. “Time’s getting short. The police commissioner is howling for action.”
“This is my concern, your job?” I demanded with outrage.
“You aware of the rap for statutory rape in this state?”
Funny how you can suddenly develop an interest in the affairs of your fellow man. Humanitarianism, that’s what it is, goddam humanitarianism.
I decided the night of the party, Saturday, was the time to find out if anyone had practiced medicine, or if they’d been to college for it. I had a very subtle plan all laid out. Scintillant, it was.
The party was in The Tower Suite, and somehow or other Bernie Katz had persuaded Aggie’s mother to let her attend. I more or less sulked in a corner while the usual crowd had their good time, seeing Aggie was playing the barefoot contessa bit again, on the table with her underwear showing.
The usual crowd consisted of Weep For Me, who was maybe the ugliest girl in the world, who had a lech for Scat Bell, and who made it a point of demonstrating her affection for him at least once every party, by throwing herself under his feet as he walked past. This sometimes proved unfortunate, for if Scat was hammered, as was his usual performance at social gatherings, he would pointedly ignore Weep For Me and stomp across her prostrate body.
Eventually, someone would help her up and either take her to the couch to rub her with Ben Gay, or haul her down to the Lying-In Hospital where she’d be admitted under some pretext or other.
The usual crowd: Enrico Massetti, who was the grocery boy in the neighborhood, and who thought he was the new Caruso. He had had his name legally changed from Buno to Enrico to aid his career. He was pitiful. Whipper and Betty January, either of whom seldom came up for air, and who seemingly waited for parties so they could fall down in a corner and copulate. Someone once suggested they use the bedroom, and Miss January, after breaking the impertinent’s nose, advised him to take his dirty mind elsewhere.
There were about thirty others, of course, all neighborhood regulars who found in the Alley those things so dear to the existence of a liberal-minded, intellectual beat type: stimulating conversation, artistic atmosphere, cultural contacts, cheap booze and chicks.
The party was in full flower when Scat was called to the apartment’s door; he came back with a grin that wasn’t entirely drunkenness plastered across his ruggedly good-looking face. “Hey, like everybody,” he announced, “you know who that was at the slammer? It was our Zen Men and they’re here to wail a while.”
Scat always was impressed by pseudo-hip jargon. We indulge him; he has a wealthy family.
“So …come on in , Zen Men,” he chirped, as though he was the moderator on What’s My Line? And in violent contrast, through the doorway came these three weirdies. Everybody made small applause, and the poets clustered together by the wall. One of them was real short, with a lot of hair. He didn’t have much forehead. The second one was a Negro with a gigantic wart on his cheek, and a patch over his left eye. He had a violent tic in the wartcheek, and he clutched a sheaf of papers to his bosom with ferocity.
The third poet was The Hooded One, and he was about six feet tall, with muscular hands, and a black sack-hood, gathered by a drawstring, around his head. He wore a very sharp low-crown snap-brim with an Alpine feather-pin in the band. Perhaps he wore it to hide the fact that he was masked, on the street.
I could see where it might cause talk.
Scat got up on something (it turned out to be Weep For Me) and, standing there, announced that these three major poets of rebellion were here to impart truth, man, like tous!
He announced the first one as Flo Goldknecht, and the hairy midget came forward with a malevolent smirk on his ratty little countenance.
“My first poem,” he said, in a voice that brought back memories of the grave, from my first incarnation, “is called ’respects to a Shallow Parade’. It’s kinda short, to sort of get you in the mood.”
He pulled a crumpled sheet of paper from his jacket pocket, and smoothed it between his hands. Then his hair — for lack of a forehead — pulled down, and he began to read. This is what he read:
“Roaring through midtown streets,
“Brawling balloons of sound. Smite
“the caustic unawareness of the teletypes.
“Throw from your gray-flanneled
“balconies the arthritic conscience of
“Nervous souls in jeopardy.
“Oh! Sensuality of intent!
“Cascading down, homage for a spent icon.
“Waltzing to earth with false bravado,
“Can you smell my hunger of defeat?”
He was perspiring, because he had read it in a great voice, with much compassion and clenching of hand. His voice had gotten deeper as he read, and if it was a mood he was trying to evoke, he evoked it. I was scared out of my wits. I didn’t stay to hear his second poem, “Puke.”