FOLDING a copy of Playboy in his left hand while holding his pants up with his right, the old man slipper-sloppered through the old flat dark and narrow—
Don’t throw bouquets at me—he cajoled a world that had long dishonored him—
Don’t laugh at my jokes too much—he asked a world that had never thought him a comic—
People will think we’re in love—although he’d always found people detestable and people had found him a horror.
Coughing, hawking, phlegming, one shoulder higher than the other from working with penitentiary rubber, he lurched lopsidedly with one suspender dragging. Through rooms appointed with fixtures of another day.
There were many doors to pass in Dingdong-Daddyland before one reached the kitchen: a kitchen which served as a forge—or a forge that served as a kitchen. Where a pair of sexless wrecks—two long-ruined heroin-heads—were drying contraceptives on a shoe-rack hung above a gas stove.
Odors of paint, paint-cleaner, turpentine and glue, mixed with that of gas flames burning too evenly. And a reddish dust lay over everything.
Attended by two ancient junkified finks, this kitchen-forge was the capital of a curious kingdom which rose, a long decade past, four stories above the blaze and clang of West Congress Street. And endured, through one whole summer, fall, winter, and spring: then jackhammers began breaking stone a mile away.
Kitchen and kingdom, forge and finks, fell in a single night.
That summer was one of such steady heat that the heroin-heads dried the Dingdong Daddies on the back-porch clothesline.
“How much cost your little sausages up there?” a neighbor-woman once called up from the alley. The innocence of the question had made it the family joke of Daddyland.
“How much your little sausages?” the old man now greeted his serfs to ask how they were feeling. “How much your little sausages?” he retorted dryly when Vivi-V tried pumping him about where he hid the heroin with which he paid them.
And, sometimes, when Vivi-V asked it, it meant, “What difference does anything make?”
Through a flashflood spring, when pipes backed up, this head—the one who wore specs—threatened the old man with exposure if he didn’t increase her morning fixes: then bickered with the other head over who was to put the feathers on the Ticklish Tessies. Yet she poured the rubber to fit the forms, stretched the latex and brushed it with glue; painted the casings and hung them with care.
And dreamed of a huge cache of H hidden somewhere in the walls of the old dark-walled flat.
They hung Barney Googles and Cupid’s Arrows. They worked with rubber and gas and glue. They soldered bright tufts upon Feathered Friends. They painted the casings and burned the culls.
Yet neither went dancing down below.
This curious commune, whose Sovereign Lord was the crazed ex-con calling himself Dingdong Daddy—
I’m a dingdong daddy from Duma
’N you oughta see me do my stuff
—was a single-crop country. The sexless wrecks packaged latex fantasies like cornflakes. While he boxed blue films in his bedroom. And shipped the lot in cartons labelled Educational Matter.
Don’t-Care girls and Won’t-Care girls, Can’t-Care girls and Why-Care girls; girls so fresh the dew still lay upon them; others so hardened they looked retreaded; girls from small towns looking flattered and girls from the city looking wronged—all, all had been trapped flagrante delicto. To show the world what Dingdong meant when he said: “I know what women do. What they really do.”
In Daddyland there was no jazz. There was no music cool or hot. No Diners’ Cards nor income-tax hangups. No one spoke of money and no one spoke of love. Its currency was a fine white dust; and the fine white dust was its one love. Nor did it matter, in Daddyland, whether the world went with a bang or a whimper. The sooner the better was how all Dingdong-Daddylanders felt.
For though Beulah seemed content enough with just enough heroin to keep from getting sick, that Vivi-V was a regular little pig about the stuff. If Beulah let her scrape a couple grains of dust off her own deck, that wasn’t enough for Vivi-V. No, she wanted to cook herself up a soup-ladle fix that could kill a milkman’s horse. (What would kill a horse would never kill Vivi-V.)
Beulah would have liked to find out, too. But she let Vivi-V do the searching.
The old man himself had no habit at all. Unless you care to call cartooning an addiction. For, while working with rubber had become his craft, cartooning had become his obsession. A chaplain had given him a child’s drawing-book in which he had worked with crayons. Then he had begun tracing comic-strip characters—Barney Google, Moon Mullins, Captain Katzenjammer, and Little Orphan Annie. He’d stuck to it as if he got something out of his crude imitations.
The stuff was brought to him by the Mumbling Man, a piece of psychotic refuse dressed in a dark brown suit a size too large. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he never spoke to anyone but Dingdong—and that only in a side-of-the-mouth mumble. Dingdong would take him into the bedroom and shut the door. A few minutes later the Mumbling Man would shuffle out. Then the women knew they’d have enough H to keep them from getting sick another week.
Once, when Vivi-V had tried to get more out of Dingdong Daddy by getting too sick to work, he had cut her off altogether.
“No work no stuff,” was how he’d put it; and had let her go blind, throwing her arms about and drooling saliva, before he’d bring her back to the world of the living.
“That’s the last time she’ll try that, ” he’d assured Beulah, and it had been the last.
Of these three sixty-year-old juvenile delinquents, the old man alone had had no love life. None at all. Both women had been hookers in their day. But he’d been a virginal youth when he’d become a number; and had come out over the hill.
Those passions, which in his youth had burned, though now hardened by rubber and made fast by glue, had yet flickered like smudgefires for four iron decades: and had not yet turned to ash when his parole had come through at last.
He brought out with him a facility for working with rubber, a copy of Playboy; and a terrible deprivation of the heart.
Moreover, he brought his walls with him: he could not go down to the street. The years behind bars were done; yet unseen bars remained.
Playboy, to the old man, was the most erotic magazine he’d ever read. No wet sex dream of his adolescence had ever been so sexy nor so wet as the dream this magazine aroused in him. The pages of his ancient copy were warped and stained by the prison hours in which he’d fingered and thumbed them.
Yet the foldout child in the middle was untouched. His eyeballs glanced off nudes. He’d never finished a Playboy story. But ah—those ads for color TV, those watches in oyster cases carved out of 18-karat gold—“If you were racing here tomorrow you’d wear a Rolex”; “Creative Playthings—something wonderful stays with your child”; “Are you a member of the Jaeger Club?”; “Days of sun, salt-air, sea-nights beneath the Southern Cross”; “The Escape Game as Played Only on a 27-Day Carnival-in-Rio Cruise”; “Waiting for your Footprints in the Sands of Kauai Surf”; “What if someone calls you in the middle of the music?” Pause selectors, automatic turntables, Polaroid cameras, projectors guaranteed against focus-drift with both remote and automatic slide-changing—“Sit anywhere near Zenith’s unique circle of sounds with exciting Fm/Am/Stereo!”
Oh, to acquire, to get, to accumulate, to have everything—that was it: two-door refrigerators, meerschaum pipes, and watches that told the date as well as the hour—merchandise—that was what aroused lust in a man! Ashen passions, chilled by the lovelessness of his iron years, were rekindled in dreams of commodities.
For the heart knows its deprivation; and takes its own measures.
“Not a number in the joint but wasn’t there on some woman’s trickery,” Dingdong now accounted for all convictions, federal, state, or municipal. “I know what women do. I know what they really do.”
How else could the old man think? If women were, actually, man’s great blessing—but no—it had all been too hard to believe that. It had all been too long.
Dingdong was one of those extremely rare long-termers capable of making a penitentiary passion come true. His was a latex fantasy of liverish yellow tipped with firehouse red; then tufted by a feather soft as down. In purple, gold, or beige. That sold for a dollar each.
And had honored himself by naming it the Dingdong Daddy.
Since the world had done him no honor at all.
For he himself had devised the mold whereon Earth’s first Dingdong Daddy had been forged. Ticklish Tessies, Feathered Friends, Cupid’s Arrows, and Barney Googles were merely variations on the master’s grand theme: The Condom of Tomorrow.
* * *
In air made thick by paint, paint thinner, and turpentine, Beulah perfected the piecework; while Vivi-V had to stir the rubber. Because Beulah had seniority.
And, since stirring rubber was no more difficult than stirring oatmeal, and no more interesting, Vivi-V watched Beulah’s artistic touch with an envious eye. And Beulah, sensing she was being envied, would take exquisite pains in painting a bulbous nose on a Barney Google.
She would step back from her work, her finely-tufted brush in hand, cock her head and measure perspectives until Vivi-V could scarcely bear it.
“A condom’s a condom,” she would comment, “it don’t matter whose face you paint on it.”
Beulah wouldn’t so much as glance at her lest she lose perspective.
“I just don’t know why I’m so creative,” she would marvel aloud, “I suppose it’s because I’m a natural-born specialist. The layman, of course, doesn’t understand these things.”
“Specialist my careworn ass,” Vivi-V snapped, “as though sticking a feather onto a condom can be considered in the same class as being a vocalist.”
“I’m sure you sang very well in your day, dear,” Beulah assured her, “you could hardly have been sounding like a baby buffalo with an arrow through its lung all your life.”
“Let me know when you’re having an exhibition,” Vivi-V asked dryly.
“There’s a trick to my work,” Beulah bragged.
“If there’s a trick to it you’re the party to turn it,” Vivi-V observed.
A faint flush pleasured Beulah’s flesh. Like a touch of pink on broken calcimine.
“That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years,” she thanked Vivi-V without irony.
Suddenly Vivi-V remembered something: “Once I used to eat bennies like popcorn when you let me hold the bag. Blue-heavens, red-birds, yellow-jackets—I was a barbiturate cat. Nembutal, Luminol, Amytal, Trional, Try-’Em-All. I was a goof-ball cat. Then I hit the real thing.”
“I could have been a typist,” Beulah assured herself aloud, “but my fingernails were too long.”
“I thought morphine sulphate was the real thing because it had that big smash—like your head was coming apart.” Vivi-V stopped bobbing her pink bow over the liquid rubber for a moment. “It wasn’t the really real thing. Not at all.”
“I could of been somebody’s secretary,” Beulah reflected, “but I had all the wrong clothes. I could have been a copper’s old lady one time. But I just can’t bear a nab.”
“The real thing was nothing but a low, slow glow,” Vivi-V remembered her own bittersweet sorrow, “like little flowers burning and everyone talking whispery, saying something smooth yet frantic. No bang, no smash, just a leveling off of everything. And when everything is leveled everything is God. Junk makes a place in your heart you can’t ever forget. You know you got to give up everything for it. You know you have to be punished in the end. It must be God—How could anyone find his punishment without it?”
“I could have been an airplane stewardess ’n flown around,” Beulah decided, “except things were geared one way and I was geared another. I could have had a rich, happy life.”
“What good would that have done you,” Vivi-V wanted to know, “if you were dead the whole while?”
“I could have been—” Beulah began again, but Vivi-V interrupted her, “When you start hitting toward fifty,” she bobbed her pink bow so rapidly that she didn’t notice Dingdong standing in the door, “you feel like you want to go down to the graveyard and wait for your Maker beside your stone.”
“Had she gone down there when she was sixty-five,” the old man announced himself by addressing Beulah, “she would have been waiting for her maker for some time now.”
“Goggly-Eye-Owl you!” Vivi-V welcomed him—“you don’t even have a maker! The warden found you in somebody’s pants after they hung him!”
“Never should’ve hung him,” the old man reported, “should’ve hung you instead.”
“Look who’s talkin’,” Vivi-V challenged him directly. “By how far did you miss the rope, Goggly-Eye-Owl?”
The old man merely inspected the rack. Sure enough, he found a Barney Google on the top-most rack, reserved for nothing save Dingdong Daddies. “Bedbugs won’t bite you!” he accused her—and flung it at Vivi-V, who caught it and swung it within an inch of his nose. Beulah stepped between them, took the casing out of Vivi-V’s hand and placed it on its proper rack.
“Don’t you be so hard on her, you hear?” she reproached Dingdong quietly yet firmly. Then, turning on Vivi-V, “And don’t you be so hard on him.”
“Put his mind in a cat,” Vivi-V told herself softly, “and what you got?” And answered herself just as softly, “A crazy cat, that’s what.”
“Bedbugs don’t bite her,” the old man repeated.
It was true: Vivi-V had so much heroin in her, bedbugs fled the beds she lay in.
“You make one more funny move around here,” the old man issued a final warning, “you’re one one-hundred-year-old flapper whose ass is going to be back on the street, ribbon-bow and all!”
“When my ass goes back on the street, Goggly-Eye-Owl you,” Vivi-V retaliated, “back to the joint your ass goes.”
“I don’t have to toss you back on the street,” Dingdong changed his mind at the very thought of doing more time, “I can rough you up right here!”
“You try roughing me up,” Vivi-V challenged him, “you motherless penitentiary toad from Fink Row, you best get your best hold. You’ll never get a second!”
Beulah urged him to the table; where he sat like a huge unclean child with yesterday’s eggstain on his chin.
“Wash off the egg,” she ordered him.
He rose reluctantly and washed at the sink’s single spigot, making the faucet squeal spitefully. Then dried his face on a towel Vivi-V reserved for her own private use. But since neither gesture succeeded in irritating Vivi-V, he began banging his baggedy knees together while crisscrossing his palms on them and croaking—
Why don’t you do-do-do
What you done-done-done before.
Beulah let him finish Charlestoning. Nor did either woman pay him any heed while he clattered his spoon against the rim of his cup.
Neither paid him the slightest heed. So he crumbled dry bread about the table; then brushed the crumbs, as if accidentally, to the floor.
Yet provoked no reproach.
“I am in the happy position,” he announced like a man running for office, “of becoming a living legend in my own time! I have everything I ever wanted! Success in business! Identity as an individual! And the love of many friends.”
Then he spat high against the wall and left them alone at last.
“I’ve cried till I couldn’t cry,” Vivi-V remembered, “I’ve cried till I won’t cry again. But when he says that about bedbugs—”
“He don’t mean everything he says, dear,” Beulah assured her.
“Oh, he means it alright,” Vivi-V felt certain; then added, “I could kill him in the alley. I could kill him in the House of God. I could kill him under a Christmas tree. I could kill him in the street. I could kill him in his sleep.”
‘‘He does have his good side,” Beulah yet defended the old man, “he does give happiness to people. And he’s helping to keep us ahead of the Russians.”
“He hasn’t done a thing for me,” Vivi-V complained. And Beulah forebore reminding her that, when Dingdong had taken her off the street, she’d jumped three bail bonds in a month and had a fugitive warrant pursuing her.
As she also forebore reminding the old man that either Vivi-V or herself could put him back in the pen by testifying in court against him.
What deterred her wasn’t distaste for playing a treacherous part: treachery was Beulah’s trade. “But where would you go then, poor thing?” she’d asked herself more than once. “Where would you score for enough stuff to keep yourself from getting dead-sick on the open street?”
And as for Vivi-V, she was such a little pig about the stuff that she wouldn’t make it till midnight on the street though she slept all day.
Were they his prisoners or was he theirs?
The lives of all three were in the hands of each.
One dead of winter dawn Vivi-V dreamed she was standing trial in a courtroom in another town.
“What in God’s name is she on?” His Honor asked someone unseen.
“Your Honor,” she’d heard Beulah’s voice defending her, “nobody knows what this woman is on.”
“What are you on, Sis?” the Judge had then asked her gently. That his features were those of a white teacher whom she’d had, briefly, as a grade-school child, she did not wonder about.
“I’m not allowed to say in open court, Your Honor,” she’d answered.
“Come into chambers,” the Judge decided. And now she’d found herself standing in a spacious chamber lit by a great gas-burning chandelier casting a curious blue-green light.
“Now, young woman,” he had demanded sternly, “what is this stuff? Liquid cocaine?’ ’
“Greater than cocaine, Your Honor,” she had answered.
“Morphine sulphate?”
“Greater than morphine sulphate, Your Honor.”
“Heroin?”
“Greater, Your Honor.”
“Come around here, Sis.” The Judge had instructed her to come around to his side of the desk, and had opened a drawer: she’d seen a hundred different kinds of powders and pills; and a set of sixteen-gauge hypodermic needles.
“Any of these, Sis?”
“None of these, Your Honor,” she’d tried to explain. “What I’m on is the Daddy of them All.” Then the blue-green light of the great chandelier went down; and came up again in a dark red glow.
So she came to her red-lit wakening. The red nightbulb of the narrow hall was casting shadows across her wall.
After such a dream, Vivi-V would lie talking softly to herself; or would sing very low so as not to waken the house:
All the good times are past ’n gone
All the good times are o’er
Her memory was a spiral stairwell whereon disasters came tumbling like sorrowing clowns. How long had it been since she’d sung—a slender Sixty-third street chick with hair and fingernails dyed platinum blonde—in front of a microphone raised like a chromium cross.
Good morning heartache
Here we go again —
above a soiled bar? How long had it been since she’d been billed as “a girl who was popular when she was here once before—I give you the Inimitable Vivienne Vincent.”
The Inimitable Vivi-V. Who’d refused to sing like Sarah Vaughan; nor even like Her Nibs Miss Georgia Gibbs. Who’d let Miss Patti Page go her own way while she went her own, proudly belting lyrics out in night-blue dives till dawn. And belting each so inimitably that once a barfly had lifted his head and told a bartender, “I never heard anything like it”; and had put his head back on his hands.
Half-memories mixed with flash notions in her mind; remembering the same old soiled lyrics and the same old soiled bars. Little lacey fancies came, like kerchiefs on a line; turned and moved and wandered through her wandering mind. Small and silken fancies about singing for a living far beneath the traffic’s cries.
Downward forever downward had been the route she’d gone; singing Good Morning Heartache to a thousand heartbroken dawns.
Until at last she’d cried out, to someone, toward morning, “I don’t know what I’d do if I thought there wasn’t any bottom”—and there had been no bottom. Only a falling without end.
She hadn’t hit bottom yet.
Sometimes she would rise and begin gathering up soiled clothes, from the front room to the back—sheets, shirts, underclothes, towels, curtains, socks, stockings, drapes, aprons, skirts, brassieres, handkerchiefs—all would go into the old-fashioned bathtub. In a soapified mist Vivi-V would wash, scrub, dry, and hang clothes from the front of the old flat to the back.
“She’s on her laundry kick again,” Beulah would report to Dingdong, “you got any shoelaces you want ironed?”
Even when a clothesline went up over his easy chair in the front room, and underwear began to hang against the windows, Dingdong never interfered with Vivi-V’s compulsion to launder everything in sight.
For one thing, it kept her out of searching the flat for a hidden cache. For another, it got his laundry done.
“She’s going to look for the cache in the gas-meter,” Beulah would fink to the old man while the water was running in the tub. And would wonder, even as she finked, whether the cache actually was in the meter.
Once Beulah had warned him that Vivi-V was planning on breaking into the back of his cuckoo-clock, hanging above his easy chair. He’d never used the clock for a cache. But after he’d discovered that Vivi-V had opened it, and found nothing, he’d kept a cache there for a month. Then he’d tipped off Beulah to the clock; and had taken the heroin to another hiding place.
Sure enough, the clock was broken into that same night.
That was why, as much as the old man and Vivi-V distrusted one another, both distrusted Beulah: Double-Fink, Counter-Counter Agent, Friendly Investigator, Perfidious Confidante, the most of all.
And why Beulah was so aware that, while she was keeping one eye on the old man for Vivi-V, and keeping the other on Vivi-V for him, and both were keeping an eye on each other, that each was keeping one eye on her.
“No one in my family was ever in politics, Emil,” the cop, at the wheel of the car parked in the alley, assured his partner. “I had to break the ice entirely myself.”
“Around five o’clock I begin to get tired,” Emil recalled; for both were dead-weary of cruising.
“Leave the parking lights on, Stan,” Emil suggested. “It looks better that way. Like we’re just laying low for a culprit.”
Stan wondered vaguely whether a culprit was a suspect who’d done time. He’d have to look it up.
“Sometimes I sleep overtime,” he informed Emil; implying it might be best if one of them stayed awake.
“I got caught six times at Navy Pier,” Emil boasted; just to let Stan know he hadn’t yet been decorated for vigilance.
“I had a partner once who never wanted to sleep,” Stan recalled dreamily.
“The fink,” Emil sympathized.
His sympathy was lost. Stan was already snoring lightly. A moment later Emil was on the nod, too.
On the nod in a dead-end alley’s depths; with a cardboard box over the flash. Law and Order was working quietly.
Four stories above them, Dingdong-Daddyland lay like a great refrigerator in which the light had gone out. The three outcasts slept among the broken-handled cups of hopes that had never come true. Their dreams, long dried, yet somehow still cherished, lay among crusts that had once been loaves.
The old con slept. Beulah slept. Only Vivi-V remained awake; waiting until Beulah’s sleep grew deeper.
Then she unwound herself like a shadow from the sheets and moved, like a ghost of a ghost, into the bathroom. She locked herself in and raised the lid of the water-closet, peering in at the water-bulb. On its surface she could see no sign of any mark where the rubber might have been split; so she tried it with her eyes shut, letting her fingers explore the surface of the rubber: the fingers came to a slight indentation and held there. She adjusted her specs with one hand, keeping a finger in the indentation. Then, peering more closely, she saw, sure enough, that a small slit had been made in the rubber and vulcanized. Her fingers found the edge of the patch and pried it off. In her anxiety she tore the slit wide—and there it was: a paper, a full ounce of something.
She sniffed it. It wasn’t heroin. No matter. She melted a few grains in a spoon over the gas flame, took her sixteen-gauge needle out of her pocket, placed the spoon carefully beside a chair, sat down and crossed her ankles. Then she hit herself in an ankle vein with whatever it was.
She sat that way a long minute. Then she began scratching her upper lip; then her stomach, then her ankles. When she had finished scratching, she rose.
Wellsprings of energy began flooding her: she had never felt so well since she’d been born.
Beulah was used to waking to find Vivi-V missing; and then, by listening, to follow her movement about the flat by small creakings and creaks and murmurings beneath the creeper’s feet.
The sounds that wakened her now were not furtive: there was a clanging of pans and kettles and pots from the kitchen, and a high falsetto singing:
Blue Moon
You saw me standing alone
Beulah rose and saw every light in the house ablaze, and Vivi-V wearing not a stitch but a baby-blue apron tied behind her in a flowing bow matching her pink ribbon-bow. That bow looked now like the rainbowed halo of her junkified glow.
Vivi-V, racing near-naked between stove, pantry, and sink, then into the bathroom and back to the stove, forced Beulah to stand back against the kitchen wall to keep from getting knocked down.
“Is there something going on, dear?” Beulah asked.
“Oh, have consideration, do have consideration,” Vivi-V scolded her on the run, “we’re late with the chicken. Late with the roast! Not a clean tablecloth in the house! Somebody stole the best silver!”
“Why?” Beulah asked weakly. “Are we expecting somebody?”
“Oh for Heaven’s sake, you know very well we’re having guests—and there you stand not even offering to lend a hand!”
“I only thought it was early in the day to be making soup,” Beulah explained.
“This isn’t soup as you well know—it’s hot water for the sheets and pillow-cases—oh, have consideration.”
“If you’re going to launder tonight, honey,” Beulah asked calmly, “why heat water on the stove? Why not just turn on the faucets in the tub?”
Vivi-V stopped and thought that over: “Why, of course, how silly of me. Will you turn on the water in the tub for me, there’s a good girl? I have to watch the soup.”
When Beulah had the hot water drawn, she stood by to keep the mad laundress from plunging into the scalding tub herself. For she was piling tablecloths, sheets, pillow-cases, window shades, shoes, spoons, napkins, saltshakers, shirts, and a potted geranium—pot and all—into the tub. Then began stirring it wildly with the old man’s umbrella.
“Can I help in any way?” Beulah asked again. Vivi-V couldn’t hear her because of the roaring of the water. Because of the steam, Beulah could hardly see her.
“Needle and thread on the dresser, dear,” Vivi-V instructed Beulah, “if you really want to help”—and one of Dingdong’s socks came flying and dripping as it flew. Beulah caught it. And began a confused retreat.
Dingdong was sitting before the TV, that was still whirling blindly with sound turned down. Beulah entered quietly. She would say she was looking for needle and thread.
But the old man’s head was sunk on his chest. He was snoring lightly. She watched him with her hand on the brass knob of the old-fashioned bedpost. And heard Vivi-V caroling—
Red sails in the sunset
All day I’ve been blue —
* * *
Emil sat up.
“What’s the matter?” Stan asked.
“I heard someone walkin’.”
“We better start cruising. It might be Task Force Tuf.”
Emil ducked into the rain, took the box off the car’s flash, and in its blood-colored beam he saw a woman seated on the sill, washing a window in a 3 A.M. rain.
“Up there! Up there!” he jabbed a finger toward the wall.
“If you want to go up and find out, I’ll wait here,” Stan told Emil.
“What are people thinking of anyhow,” Emil marveled, “washing windows in the rain?”
Then he observed a puff of dark smoke blowing out the window past the woman on the sill. Well, he could just as easily have not seen that.
That same blood-red swing of light across his window had wakened Dingdong. He brushed his hand across his eyes, shook his great head, and shambled to the window.
He heard the beat of the rain against the pane, and peered down. A squadrol with a cop at the wheel and another cop coming around the end of the car!
He raced to the front room where the blue films were stacked, hauling madly at twine he had knotted too taut. Stumbling into the bathroom, trailing the twine behind him, and didn’t pause because the tub was full of steaming laundry. He heaped the film on top of the clothes, and raced back to the front room for more. Then for matches.
“They’re on the way up! Don’t let them in without a warrant!” he cried warning to Beulah, and hauled her by one arm to the front and shoved her into the bathroom. The film on top of the laundry blazed up.
Beulah began heaping cardboard cartons onto the fire, and the smell of burning rubber made a perfectly terrible stink.
While Vivi-V, enraptured by window washing, went endlessly washing and rewashing the rain-soaked pane.
Dingdong lurched and heaved and coughed and spat and choked and phlegmed from the front room to the back, heaping more cardboard cartons of Dingdong Daddies onto the fire; till smoke darkened the ceiling and made the lights burn like lights in an eclipse of the sun.
But Stan and Emil were merrily wheeling, already miles away; relieved to be out of the jurisdiction of the Chicago Fire Department.
Until Vivi-V finally slipped back into the kitchen, caroling as she came—
I know there’s room for me
Upon your knee
Dingdong, looking out the window, saw that the squadrol was gone. He sank into a chair, blue film dangling from his hands. Beulah sank onto a chair on the other side of the room.
Between them Vivi-V came in; looking done in. She was coming down fast. She looked like she wanted to say something; but the old man waved her off. She turned and went quietly. When Beulah followed her a few minutes after, she found Vivi-V sleeping the sleep of total exhaustion. The old man slept where he sat.
Toward nine he woke. Coughing and phlegming, in air black and odorous, spitting now and then, he moved through the flat assessing the useless damage.
Broken boxes, burned film, clothing and ruined sheets that had been both washed and scorched; a smoldering shoe: a pot of stew that had boiled over into the flooded forging-room—from front to back Daddyland looked like a land struck by a tornado, fire, and flood.
Yet a many-splendored line of Feathered Friends was still festooned above the stove; like a rainbow of hope in the smoldering air.
Would some neighbors report smoke? A fire inspector at the door would be as catastrophic as a policeman. All morning Vivi-V and Ding-dong shared their common dread: kicking a habit cold turkey for her; dying in a cell for him. And in this common fear their feud was forgotten. There was no longer any point in threatening one another with prison; when prison for both was so near.
She opened windows, drove out the smoke, and cleaned up the litter. He helped as best he could.
“Beulah’s sleeping late,” he complained to Vivi-V.
“Let her sleep,” Vivi-V decided.
Toward noon Vivi-V went into the bedroom to wake Beulah. She came out looking so bleak that the old man guessed before she’d said a word.
“Gone?”
“Gone.”
Beulah had crept downstairs in the night like a bug in flight.
Where had she gotten the courage to leave? The old man looked in the bulb of the water-closet. Finding it split and the stuff he’d hidden there gone, he assumed that had been where she’d found the courage. When he checked his bedroom, however, and found she’d missed his big cache, he felt gratified that she’d taken such a minute prize. He never learned that she had gone without taking any drug at all: that she had simply fled in dread of the police. To take her own chances on the street.
Dingdong seemed to accept Beulah’s flight with resignation. But after Vivi-V had cleaned up the kitchen, flushed the last condom down the drain, and the last bit of evidence against the old man’s enterprise had been destroyed, he rose and fumbled about until he found a piece of chalk. He ran a rag across a section of the wall to serve as a blackboard. Then, with his tongue between his teeth, and Vivi-V sleeping, he went to work.
Sometimes on tiptoe and sometimes flatfooted, pausing now and again to spit, scratch himself, or lean back to gain perspective, he completed his letter to the world. Then the chalk dropped from his hand, and he went to his bed; weary to his very bones.
Later, Vivi-V saw a rude caricature of a woman with a neck like a turkey-hen’s, the belly bloated and the knees badly knocked, the breasts lactated like empty hot-water bottles, the whole figure stippled by disfiguring hair; and flies buzzing about the figure everywhere. Below the old man had scrawled his final conviction:
“A once great mind has snapped,” Vivi-V commented aloud—and wiped the figure out with two swipes of a damp cloth.
* * *
Though the lives of all three had been in the hands of each, the balance of power shifted with one of the three gone.
With Beulah at hand, Vivi-V had been the most imperiled of the lot; because the old man could open the gates of a terrible sickness upon her any moment he chose.
Now he had to keep her well. For there was nobody now but her to shop and cook and wash and help him make it from day to day.
The Mumbling Man never came any longer. Yet every morning Vivi-V found a pinch of heroin beside a spoon on his dresser. Every noon there was another pinch. And at night there was another pinch for her to sleep on.
She searched that bedroom high and low—even when she knew he was only feigning sleep. She raised his pillow when he raised his head; there was nothing under his pillow.
When she swept under the bed she examined the bedsprings; nothing was hidden there. She looked behind the mirror; in the light fixture and along the walls. It had to be in his bedroom. He hadn’t been out of it in days. Yet she never found a single pinch.
Meanwhile she shaved him, washed him, humored him; brought him tea and toast and little candies to suck on. She changed his sheets and listened to his rambling accounts of merry penitentiary times.
So it was that, in his final hours, the old man drew some small ironic measure of contentment from a woman at last.
Once, toward evening, he looked up at her as though he had never seen her before.
“What I said about bedbugs—you know—” he faltered—“was just in fun.”
“What I told you was in fun, too,” Vivi-V assured him.
The old man’s face flopped about: he was trying to smile.
Vivi-V opened his window every morning; so he could hear the jackhammers breaking stone half a mile away.
Every morning they came nearer. One morning he asked her to open the window wider so that he could hear them. But, when she opened the window, he could not hear them at all.
“It’s Sunday,” she explained. But he didn’t seem to understand why he couldn’t hear jackhammers. Suddenly he asked, “How much your little sausages?”—and asked it urgently.
He died that evening just before the street lamps came on. When she came into his room with tea, he was sitting up; but the glaze was on his eyes. She laid his head back on the pillow: understanding her dream at last.
“The kick greater than H,” she told herself aloud; taking his wrist-watch and ring.
In her final search, all she found was a couple of twenties in his wallet and a few dimes on his dresser.
Yet once, as she looked about the bedroom, her hand rested, where Beulah’s hand had: on the big brass knob of his bed. She had never noticed that the knobs of the bedposts could be unscrewed; nor that the posts were hollow. She never knew that, beneath her hand, was five pounds of pure heroin.
She left the door open behind her. And walked, in a light November rain, to the Desplaines Street station. She came in there looking like a ghost wearing a pink ribbon-bow.
“Vivienne Vincent,” she told the officer at the desk, “there’s a couple warrants out on me.”
Half an hour later Stan and Emil were mounting the stairs. Sure enough, just like that old junkie had said, there was a stiff.
Some stiff. Wasn’t even wearing a watch.
“Maybe the Fire Department was here already,” Emil suggested.
Stan found a pair of pants that fit him, supported by a pair of suspenders with clips that said Police Brace on them. Emil found a woman’s raincoat. A package of dry cereal and a bucket of hardened rubber was all their search for treasure yielded.
The few sticks of furniture weren’t worth hauling down the stairs. The bed was such an old-fashioned heap it wasn’t worth dragging down four flights.
“Besides, the stiff’s still in it,” Emil pointed out.
The dead-wagon came. A woman on her way to the supermarket with a shopping bag, the words VOTE FOR DALEY emblazoned on it in red, white, and blue, stopped to watch the dead-wagon boys lift a corpse into the dead-wagon.
“I’m glad it ain’t me,” she thought; and went her ways.
The Board of Health inspectors didn’t bother cleaning out the flat because the building was coming down anyhow.
The first swing of the wrecking-ball buried the old bed under tons of bricks.
Before the bricks were hauled away, the year’s earliest snow lay lightly above them. Then a contractor, using County Jail labor, hauled them away.
* * *
This was in that time of year when silver-paper bells hang by tinseled cords in the offices of all the loan companies. It was that time when Save-Your-Home-Loans holds Open-House-For-Money in offices lit by an aluminum Christmas Tree: one proudly bearing a shining six-foot papier-maché dollar-sign, hung with brightly-polished quarters, nickels, and dimes; all the while it keeps slowly revolving.
While poorer firms can offer no more than tidings of comfort and joy under a single unmoving star.
Then a winter of a single wind set in. Snow-shadows went tobogganing down the crumpled, yellowed, tattery-torn mattress that the old man had died upon. And at night a street lamp shone upon the bent and dented upside-down bedposts the old man had died between.
The midnight B-train passed overhead. And no one who rode the B-train knew that a hundred thousand dollars worth of fine white dust stayed dry in the deeps of those rusting posts.
All that winter smudgefires burned, both sides of West Congress, after the jackhammers had gone still.
Phantoms of old-time junkies passed and repassed between their wild and flickering flares.
Shadows of long-gone hepsters, phantoms of fools who never could learn, went by like shadows on old walls: forever trying to turn one more trick.
Nobody remembers where Beulah went. Nobody has heard of any woman calling herself The Inimitable Vivi-V. Where the old man is buried nobody knows.
The passion that, in him, had been transformed by fear of women into deep need of something to love safely—a paper doll or a girl wearing a bunny-tail—curiously overlapped that of lives equally barren yet more affluent.
His letter to the world was never mailed. In the world in which he lived there were no postal zones. Had it been read, even by chance, no one would have paid it any heed: the old con’s spelling was so bad.
Yet had he made the connection, for which he was groping, he would have become the living legend that in fancy he felt himself sometimes to be.
For he shared a secret fury with the world: a hatred of all birth that comes from love of man for woman.