“What yeah?”
“I say, a lot goes on in a motel room that you and I wouldn’t know about. Or that I wouldn’t. You must see it all though. I mean, if you could only talk I bet you could tell some stories.” She had walked back into the room and started to make up the bed. Ben followed. “Could you use some help? I don’t claim to be much of a hand at making beds, but — uh, a little lady like you, I mean, well, if both of us…” She moved very quickly, so short she barely had to stoop to tuck in the sheets. Ben watched as, inverting the pillowcase and aligning one end of the pillow with it while holding the four edges, two of pillow and two of pillowcase, she flipped the pillow into its case. “That’s good,” Ben said. “I’m going to watch you closely on the next one. That’s a real time-saver.” She seemed unaware that he was in the room. “That’s really something,” he said when she had done it again with a second pillow. “That’s one of the tricks of the trade, I guess, what you pick up over the years. Yep yeah?” She had covered the bed with its spread. Ben took a deep breath. “I can’t get over how fast…I’ll bet you could muss up a bed and make it again with the same sheets without the housekeeper ever…Let me ask you something up front. Do you know what the hell I’m talking about?”
“No yeah.”
“All right. We’ll put it this way: You must get all kinds in a place like this. You must even get kinds like me.”
“Yes yeah? You yeah?”
“Lonely.”
That was not it, of course. He was not lonely. He was coated with the need to use himself. Ben Flesh, the restored Bourbon, the found Louis, the exile returned and looking for ways, literally, to feel and make himself felt. He did not so much want to screw — he had screwed in the last three years; he had not run out of god-cousins; there was the “Looks-Like Lady,” the “Way to Make a Million Dollars Lady,” there were others, some even who were not his godcousins — as to touch another human being, to hold someone, to feel their two lives, his, the other’s, like sparks arcing between two rods, to catch a pulse — this morning, lying on the bed after his shower, he had taken his own pulse, able to feel for the first time in years in the tips of his fingers the rhythm of his blood — his hands like heat-seeking devices, holding the life signs and interior parameters of another human, to feel her tremble, to hold her and feel her sweat, to know her body temperature and search out beneath her skin the muscles and bones, to feel hair and know it from flesh and flesh from cosmetics and with his eyes closed trace the calluses on her fingers and distinguish the fine down on her arms. His disease had deadened others as well as himself, had turned whole populations to wood and stone and given them the dead, neutral texture of plastic. It needn’t even be a woman. A child would do. He would have pinched cheeks and held their small heads, or dandled babies on his lap, and the squirmier the better. Oh yes. And been arrested. The curious fact of his civilization was that all intimacies save the ultimate were out of the question. You could fuck but not touch. He wanted nothing more now than to stand beside this small woman and close with her, feel her breath on his hand, or even, just to shake hands with her. But it was impossible, finally, to ask. She would have to know his life. From the beginning to this moment. Then, the most curious thing of all, she would yield, lending him her humanity as eagerly as if he had been her child. They would lie beside each other and he could touch her wherever he wished. She would run her finger across his palm. He would let down her hair. Everything would be permitted, nothing withheld. But it was impossible. There were no words save those of proposition and he could humiliate neither himself nor her any longer. “Thank you,” he said, “for the soap. You’re very kind.”
And a few minutes later — he was on the way to Cinema I and II, the hell with what his manager might think — he saw something which made him stop his car. He looked about desperately for a place to park, a vacant meter. Someone was pulling out a dozen yards down the street. He moved quickly to protect the parking space. He had no change for the meter and only about five minutes of parking time remained on it. To hell with it, let them give him a ticket, let them tow.
He walked inside.
“You’re next, mister.”
“The works,” Flesh said, and climbed into the barber chair.
“Shine?” a black man asked.
“Yes, yes, please,” Flesh said. He whispered to the barber.
“Dorothy,” the barber said, “the gentleman wants a manicure.”
“Get the cuticles,” Ben said, “don’t forget the cuticles.”
The girl brought her tray and stool up to Ben’s chair. “The cuticles are part of the treatment,” she said.
“Yes,” Ben said, “of course.” She held his right hand powerfully and began to file his nails. “Yes,” he said, “that’s good. That’s very good. And a soak?”
“It’s all part of the treatment,” she said.
“Part of the treatment, yes,” he said, and surrendered his hand to the warm soapy water and his face to the hot towel and his feet to the vigorous movements of the black man’s hands, the wonderful tickling sensation when he ran the polish-dipped toothbrush around the base of Ben’s shoes. And to the tears under the towel that came from his connection to these three people, and even to the sobs, the huge heavy heavings of his cured chest that they would see under even the great loose barber’s sheet that covered him.
The Franchiser goes to his movie.
My movie is wonderfully splendid. The white stone building looks something like a naval officer’s hat. I know only approximately what a parabola is, but my movie is paraboloid, I think. It isn’t rectangular, it isn’t flat; the rear wall — where the screens are, the cyclorama, I believe — is higher than the front or side walls. A naval officer’s hat, a pilot’s, something pinched and rakish, like, given distance, low furniture. The entrance is boulder and Thermopane, the boulders tan as Hush Puppies, broken ovals and oblongs of stone, snugged in their mortar mounting like facets. In daylight the tall, thick Thermopane is faintly green, pale as martini or bath water. Outside, along an angled, projecting corridor of bouldered wall are the movie’s locked framed glass cases — I have a key to these displays, I carry it on my Prince Gardner, top-grain cowhide key holder — where my movie’s beautiful posters are sealed beneath the permanent rubric: Now Playing. (And the posters are beautiful, so much better than the stagy, glossy stills of the old days with their look, even if the picture was actually in Technicolor, of having been tinted, cosmetized, rouge on the actors’ cheeks, eye shadow visible as birthmark above their eyes, stills like tableaux in a wax museum, like the mortician’s finagling. The posters are much better. Art work. Line drawings. Spare and promising. Logotypes even the shut-in — the big weekend ads in the Friday and Sunday papers — has by heart. As much a part of the film’s image as its theme music. No, but I saw the poster.)
Inside the lobby — more later — to the side, the movie’s twin ticket booths like tellers’ cages, the stainless chrome panels like a double sink, which spit out my movie’s lovely oversize tickets, wide as 35-millimeter film, yellow with a narrow blue edge like a soundtrack, and capable — depending who springs, how large the party — of producing a string of tickets long as a yardstick, longer.
The movie’s glass candy cases as big around as a boy’s bedroom. With their gorgeous tiers of cellophane-wrapped, cardboard candy boxes with their miniatures — their individually sheathed Heaths and Peter Paul’s Mounds and Almond Joys and Milky Ways and Mars. Milk Duds and jujubes like boxes of marbles. No bars any more. Oh, the immense dark Hershey’s of course, yellow Butterfingers long as a ruler (seventy-five cents some of them, practically nothing under forty-five cents). And popcorn in cylinders large as Quaker Oats boxes, with dollops of my movie’s drawn butter and high drifts of buff popcorn in the greased glass case like a spell of cockeyed weather. (We have done away with the hot dogs, slow rolling in grilled place like logs in a river.) And my movie’s juices, its carefully sized grape drinks and orange, its Pepsi and Fresca and Seven-Up. My movie’s immense carats of crushed ice, its napkin dispensers and straws.