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This was my first story for the W.W. Scott crime-fiction magazines, written in June, 1956, probably a week or so after my graduation from Columbia. It has just a touch of autobiographical material in it. During my undergraduate years I had been living in a residential hotel on West 114th St. in Manhattan, a few blocks from the Columbia campus—once a grand apartment house, now carved up into one-room accommodations. The other inhabitants of the hotel included such notable literary figures as Harlan Ellison and Randall Garrett, plus an assortment of Columbia graduate students, a few very ancient widows living on pension checks, and various transient figures of uncertain origins. One day as I was coming home I heard furious shouts coming from the building, and when I reached it I saw that one of those transient figures had evidently reached a parting of the ways with her roommate, because her upper-story window was open and she was hurling his possessions into the courtyard far below. I still remember the sound the radio made as it hit the pavement.
The characters and events of the story had nothing to do with anything I experienced while living at 611 West 114th St.—except for the incident of the defenestration of one of my neighbors’ property. I wrote the story in a couple of hours and Bill Scott paid me $44 for it, which would just about cover lunch for two at Macdonald’s these days, but which would pay four weeks’ rent at the residence hotel where I had lived in my college days (or one week at the splendid new apartment on West End Avenue that a few months hence would become my home for the next five years.) Scottie published it in the March, 1957 issue of Guilty.
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GET OUT AND STAY OUT
“It is my room, not yours,” she said, “so you’ve got to be the one to get out of it.”
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Steve Hamlin leaned on the rooming-house door, pushed it open, and started the long climb to his sixth-floor room. With the better part of a fifth in his belly, it was a stiff uphill fight, but he wanted to get there and he did. He wanted to see if Madge had come back.
He knew damned well she wouldn’t be there—but he wanted to see anyway. Hamlin was like that, always kicking open old wounds, hurting himself just to see what it felt like. Madge had slept out four nights running. She wouldn’t be back.
Hamlin stopped a moment on the fourth-floor landing, hiccupped, wheezed a little, and kept on going. Five, then six, down the long corridor to the front room that was his for ten bucks a week.
He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, drew out his key and managed to get it into the hole. He grinned wryly.
“I’m home, dear,” he said. His voice dripped acid. “All set to cook dinner for hubbie?”
There was no answer. Hamlin nodded bitterly, twisted the key, and shoved the door open.
The room was empty.
The bitch, he thought. The lousy little bitch.
He glanced at the blotchy mirror hanging slantwise on the wall, saw his reflection dimly in its muddy depths. His own face leered back at him, smiling grotesquely. “You knew she wouldn’t be here,” he seemed to be saying.
Yeah. You knew it. But you still hoped. You never stopped hoping.
Hamlin looked around the room, at the rickety bookcase full of Madge’s cheap love pulps, at the bed they’d shared for seven months, its faded pink spread dotted with Madge’s myriad cigarette-burns, at the table littered with her things.
Her things. My room, he thought, and there’s no sign of me in it but the four whiskey bottles in the corner—the four bottles that stood for the last four nights alone.
“Here’s another,” Hamlin said aloud, and drew the half-empty fifth from under his jacket. He stood it next to the four dead men in the corner, fussily arranged it so the labels pointed forward in a neat, even, colorful row. “I’ll finish you off later,” he said.
He looked at his watch. Half past ten. The note he’d left at the restaurant Madge worked at told her to be here at ten sharp—or else. It was ten-thirty now.
I’ll give her till midnight, Hamlin thought. He dropped himself heavily into their one armchair, and sat down to wait.
–
He dozed lightly for about fifteen minutes, then woke with a snap and looked at his watch. It wasn’t eleven yet. Where the hell was she?
The answer came automatically. She ain’t coming.
Hamlin got up and paced around the room. Madge had left her mark on it, all right, in the seven months she’d lived in it. The ashtrays were full of her cigarette butts. Hamlin hadn’t bothered to empty them. Her cosmetics, her clock, her little tiny radio, her pots and pans— that was all he had left of Madge.
She’d picked up and left, apparently. Just the way she’d left the last guy and come to live with him, back in July. Hamlin walked to the dresser and pulled down the snapshot embedded in a corner of the mirror. It was a picture of them at Coney Island, taken in August, when they were still happy, before the fights had started.
She was a good looker, Hamlin thought ruefully, staring at the snapshot. There they were. He was wearing his green brief swimtrunks, the tight ones she said he looked sexy in. She was standing at his side, her long legs apart, her breasts seeming to be about to spill out of the top of her bathing-suit. She had on the blue-and-orange one, the one with the open crosshatching along the sides that exposed tiny white strips of her thighs and hips and the corners of her breasts.
“I’ll bet that one’s still here,” Hamlin said. He bent and pulled open her drawer. Sure, there it was, lying crumpled at the bottom with her summer stuff. He yanked it out, looked at it, saw the crosshatching he had loved so much once long ago, and in a sudden rough motion ripped the suit apart.
Then he found himself dashing to the dirt-stained window, throwing it open, hurling the torn swimsuit out into the night. It would float gently to the ground, he thought, and land in the courtyard.
Again he looked at his watch. Eleven-fifteen.
He tried to remember his note. “Madge—I want to see you tonight. I want to know what the score is. Be at our place by ten sharp—and I mean sharp—or don’t ever show up again.”
That was the way it went. And obviously she wasn’t coming. Hamlin’s eyes wandered toward the open window, and he teetered unsteadily for a second or two, thinking.
She ain’t coming back. So she won’t need this stuff.
–
Calmly, he picked up a heap of her love magazines and heaved them through the window. They hit the courtyard below with a dull thwacking sound. He looked at the empty place in the bookcase and grinned as if he’d wiped out that much of Madge in the one gesture.
It made him feel good to think he’d erased the part of Madge who lay sprawled on their bed for hours every night in bra and filmy panties, reading those magazines.
The cosmetics went next. He scooped up a greasy pile of open compacts and half-used lipsticks and hand-mirrors and crumpled dirty tissues and powder puffs and sent it all whistling through the window.
“So long, Madge,” he said happily. He paused to kill the fifth, then returned to work.
The little clock that always ran five minutes slow. He held it for a second, then pitched it out. There was a rewarding tinkle from below.
Her radio, her tinny little squawkbox. Out it went. This time there was a real smash, and he could hear tubes rolling crazily over the pavement.
Suddenly, windows flew open all across the courtyard. A light went on opposite him, and Hamlin saw a bald-headed man in an undershirt stick his head out.
“You crazy drunk bastard, what do you think you’re doin’?”
“Shut up,” Hamlin said evenly. He picked up one of Madge’s ashtrays and hurled it across the courtyard, butts and all. It cracked into the side of the building. Glass splattered down, and windows hastily closed.
–
From there it was easy, and fun. He went methodically around the room, collecting anything that might have been Madge’s, and tossing it out into the courtyard. Once he looked out and saw the litter down there. The lipsticks had burst open and great gouts of pale pink and light purple stained the pavement.
Out went her bras and panties, out went her second-best coat (she had taken the other with her), out went her dishes and her knives and forks and her cookbook and the little sack of flour she used for baking. He looked down and saw the courtyard painted a dusty white where the flour-sack had exploded.
At about eleven-thirty, he was through. He sat down on the edge of the bed, head between his hands, and wiped away some of the sweat.
Madge was gone now. As if she had never been, she was gone—banished by the simple process of throwing her things out of the window.
Funny, Hamlin thought. By killing her clock and her radio and her lipstick I feel like I killed her.
He sat there, looking around at the now-empty room, thinking how naked it looked without all of Madge’s crap cluttering it up.
Then, about quarter of twelve, a key turned in the door.
Madge.
–
She stepped into the room, wearing her good coat, and under it something that looked like a new dress, low-cut and sharp. It was cut way down, and Hamlin could see the high white swell of her breasts, the breasts that had been his to fondle until Monday.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. Her voice was cold.
“I’m sorry too,” Hamlin said. “You’re too late. I told you I didn’t want to see you if you didn’t show by ten.”
“Sorry,” she said. “But I won’t bother you long. I just came for my things.”
Hamlin chuckled. “Your things? Your things? Christ, Madge, you passed them on the way in!”
She stopped to think, then whitened. “All that crap in the courtyard? That what you mean?” She paused, then: “Oh God, yes! My clock, my radio, my clothes—that was the junk I saw down there.”
She took another step in and saw the emptiness of the room. “What a lousy thing, Steve,” she said. “What a lousy bitchy thing.”
“I told you to get here by ten or not at all,” Hamlin said. “You didn’t show. I evicted you.”
“You evicted me? Listen, buster, who’s been payin’ the rent for you here the last few months? Me, that’s who. While you’ve been drinkin’ yourself green, and expectin’ a good time from me every night.” She laughed harshly. “Pal, this is my room—and you get out!”
–
Hamlin paused a long moment, trying to make sense out of what she was saying. This was her room? So what if she paid the rent? He just didn’t have much cash these days, that’s all. The breaks would come. And now she was throwing him out?
“Where ya been this week, Madge?” he asked dully.
“None of your business. I’ve been away. I decided I’d clear out, and just came back for my things. But I’ve changed my mind, since you took care of my things for me—I’ll take my room instead. Give me the key and get out.”
The bare, flake-walled room seemed to pinwheel around him. Blindly, Hamlin stepped forward, grabbed her by the throat, got one hand in the neckline of her dress, felt the warmth of those firm breasts for the first time in a week, ripped downward. “I’ll show you!” he muttered thickly. His hand came around and cracked into her face once, twice, a third time.
“Charlie!” she yelled. “Charlie!”
The door opened and a man came in. Hamlin looked up and saw him—tall, husky, dignified-looking, with a light mustache and white gloves. Madge’s new boyfriend.
Charlie pushed Hamlin away easily. “This bum giving you trouble?” he asked.
“He broke into my room and threw all my things out the window,” Madge said brokenly, as she held her torn dress together. “The bastard. Everything I owned.”
“We ought to call the cops,” Charlie said smoothly. “Imagine such a thing!”
Hamlin leaped wildly for the big man, cracked up against his rough tweed coat, bounced backward. Then Charlie came for him—Charlie and Madge both.
–
They backed him across the room, across the empty room toward the open window. He looked from one to the other, from Charlie’s cool smiling eyes and heaving breasts. “Christ, Madge, don’t let him do it! Madge! Madge!
“He seems to know you,” Charlie said, taking another step forward.
“Not a chance,” Madge said. “He’s just a bum.”
“Madge!”
He was almost at the window now. He turned, looked out and down, saw the wild jumble of litter lying six stories below.
“Madge, whaddya want? I’m sorry I threw your stuff away, Madge. I’m sorry!”
“Too late for sorry,” Madge said. “You don’t belong here. I want you to get out.”
Hamlin felt the cold night breeze against his back now. He groped for the window-frame, groped for something, anything, to hold on to.
“Hey, watch out!” Charlie said, smiling, as he shoved Hamlin backward. “Watch the window!”
Through a misty haze Hamlin watched his own feet lift, saw himself move upward and outward, then suddenly down. He heard their laughter, and saw the smashed clock and the entrails of the radio getting closer to him.
The last thing he heard was Madge’s shrill voice from somewhere above. “And stay out!” she called, and the window slammed shut.