Chapter 13
I went through my half-dozen Agnes-women in two weeks. It was a wild, frenetic time. Just before I started on Grace I moved to a small, dingy furnished room on the Upper West Side. It was nothing but a storage place for ah my files of evidence, a dropping place for my dirty clothes, and a crash-pad to which I fled after every new triumph. What I'd done to Grace and Harold would have torn me apart if I hadn't had another "case" to start on right away. As it was, the scene of Grace spreading her messy cunt to me and asking, "Does that satisfy you?" with her husband vomiting in the background festered in my unconscious for weeks. When I was done with the 17-year-old girl who'd had the abortion it rose up and haunted me with a vengeance. I'd taken to smoking a lot of pot and hash that I copped-at some risk-from street pushers around 96th and Broadway, or further downtown around Needle Park, and now to quash the effects of my terrible self-persecution I started getting morphine and eventually heroin from the same sources. I tried to be careful with the stuff but soon I was taking it three, four, five times a week, and I knew I was getting hooked. I couldn't pay my rent and I couldn't eat. I got evicted from my room, thrown out on the street with my suitcase and my trunk. I was a ragged, hungry, unshaven, dirty mess, and I knew I'd be dead in six months if I didn't break the habit. There was still time. So I put the blackmail-hooks to my main pusher, a small-time junkie-whore with straggly bleach-blonde hair, vacant rat-brown eyes, and a body three times as emaciated as Shirley's. I threatened to turn her in to the cops one time when her old man was out of town pushing some shit in Pennsylvania. I knew I was taking my life in my hands for a piece of her sordid pussy, but she was too dumb and wiped-out to resist, and I knew I had to get back on the cunt-trail again or I'd be a goner. What I mostly did was to burn my bridges behind me.
I moved downtown to a Bowery flop-house and spent my days panhandling or picking up odd jobs now and then. I substituted cheap wine for opiates. Once I knew I'd never take another shot of horse again I started to watch out for the alcohol-skids.
Then I got a break. I wandered into one of those places that try to save Bowery bums by pumping them full of a lot of religion and a little food, by getting them jobs, and so on. By that time I looked almost as bad as the guys you see sleeping in gutters and doorways, but right away the people saw there was something left of my brain, that maybe they could make something out of me. I still had my references from Angie and Agnes.
They got me another short-order cook job in the Wall Street area. As soon as I got a load of the sexy-looking secretaries that piled into the place every noontime for lunch my life did a sharp about-face. I kicked the drinking habit, got myself another cheap apartment, and started to look out for victims again. Deep down I knew that my conscience would come back as soon as I made another hit, and I'd get into the frenetic cycles trying to escape from it again; that the chances were that I'd end up on the skids again within six months. But as I started to eat and sleep right my sexual desires came back with all their irresistible compulsions, and at least I felt alive again.
But before I could bring down another bird, strange things started to happen.
It began when I came to work one morning and my boss told me, "There was a guy in just after you left yesterday. Asked if you were the same Jim Northrup that used to work for Agnes somebody, and before that at Hardy's in the West Village. I said yeah, you had references from those places. Said he was an old friend of yours. Heavy-set guy with a scar on his cheek. About forty. Talked with a kind of Brooklyn-type accent."
I'd never had a friend like that. I started to get worried. After all the girls I'd blackmailed, I had no idea which one might have hired a thug to get revenge for her, and if anybody had traced me back as far as Hardy's, they knew my game, and they knew I'd have no idea who'd made up their mind to get me. Harold was the most-likely suspect but the junkie-whore's man was also in the running and so was everybody else. I couldn't afford to quit my job yet. I didn't have a penny saved. I made up my mind to hang on for a couple of weeks and be careful. "Look," I told the boss, "he's no friend of mine. There are people I owe money to, and people who have beefs with me over women-there's nothing I can do about that. But if the guy comes back, tell him I quit. Don't let him back into the kitchen, and let me know right away. He didn't ask where I lived, did he?"
"Yeah, but I told him I didn't know. I've been around a while, and I didn't like his looks much. He was a little too nosy."
After that I dyed my hair a redder color and started to grow a moustache. I wore shades and got some cheap, loud, flashy clothes. I'd come in to work through the back door as much as an hour early and leave up to two hours late. I'd take crazy routes home, doing things like going into the subway and hopping on and off trains at the last minute. Naturally I couldn't so much as look out at the customers, let alone try to get a line on any new victims. I went to a few strip shows and movies, but for two weeks I spent virtually all my time at work, locked in my apartment, or going back and forth between them.
It didn't do any good.
The hit came from out of the blue. I'd just left work, dodging between buildings, climbing over garbage piles and slipping through holes in fences. I came out into a back alley just wide enough for a truck to pass through and looked up and down. There was an old blue Chewy with its engine idling, its door open, and nobody in it pulled up behind a warehouse. The warehouse door was open and I figured the driver had gone inside. It was to my right, the direction I wanted to go in. It looked innocent enough so I took a few steps.
A heavy-set, scarred face popped up behind the windshield and the engine roared. The open door slammed as the car charged toward me. I didn't get half turned around before the left front fender smashed my thigh and slammed me up against the warehouse wall like a rag doll.
I woke up three days later in a hospital room drugged, dazed, and confused. My head was heavy with bandages. My left arm and shoulder were in a cast that reached down to my wrist and my right leg was in another cast that came up nearly to my crotch. There wasn't a nurse in sight. My bed was next to a window that looked out on a brick wall. In another bed next to the door an old man with bottles hanging over him and tubes running all over the place snored noisily. The scene of the alley and the car and the head popping up and the car surging toward me with a snarl of raw vengeance returned, and then the stunning black-out impact. There was a buzzer near my right hand. I winced with pain as I reached out and pressed it.
Ah the bones in my right leg had been fractured. So had the upper bone in my left arm, which had been smashed from its socket when I'd hit the wall. My head had abrasions and contusions and my left ear had been ripped, but miraculously my skull had stayed intact with only a mild concussion. That was well enough now that they'd already started giving me morphine. The nurse said that the night before I'd screamed in my sleep. "Morphine?" I said. "I don't want that shit. Give me something else." They gave me Demerol, which I guess is just some weaker kind of morphine. It killed the pain fine and I wasn't as afraid of it. Then the nurse said, "Do you have somebody we can contact?"
I started to give her my boss's name but something stopped me and I said, "Let me think." There was a phone by my bedside. "Can I just call myself when I think of somebody?" She said that was all right, but that I'd better find some place to go because I'd be discharged in a few days and she didn't know what Medicaid would pay for. They'd automatically charged me up to that when I'd been admitted with $12 in my wallet and a checkbook showing a $27 balance. When I said that was all I had she gave me a lot of forms to fill out. It was simple stuff but it took me hours to fill out, what with the Demerol messing my mind and wearing off to horrendous pain and then the Demerol coming around again. For the whole next day images and memories and hopes and fears tossed like a lot of wind-blown bits of paper in my mind. Who was I? A blackmailer. Why? Because that was the only way I could get a piece of ass. What had it done for me? I jerked off under the covers remembering some of the things when I was really high and feeling no pain. I cringed and my stomach went queasy when I remembered others. In the end it had almost killed me.
Would I go back to it? Would I go back to it? Would I go back to it? That was the question that played like a stuck record in my mind, gave me the chills and made me sweat. How could I decide?
I couldn't. It would just happen to me, one way or the other. Either I'd be too scared, and-what would happen to me then? If I had to go back to my old, conventional, impotent frustration . . . I'd rather kill myself. Or-have myself castrated.
That horrible thought was not so horrible to me. To be rid of those urges completely . . . it might open up a whole new life. It might make me far calmer. It might let me walk down the street admiring architecture, go into a restaurant and savor the food, read a book and appreciate its literary value, without always searching for sex, sex, sex. Take away an appetite and you couldn't starve it any more. But.. . take away sex and you'd removed the greatest chance for human pleasure along with one of the greatest sources of human misery.
If only I could believe there was the slightest chance of finding satisfaction some other, some conscionable way. If only for a moment I could doubt that all women were always the way they'd always seemed to me. If only I could have it proved to me that somewhere, sometime, there might be "a woman" for me. Then maybe I'd go hunting for her and leave my guns at home.
But how could that be proved?
If one woman, one time, saw my need and understood me and said, "It's yours. Take it." That would turn my whole life around. The minute I thought it, I knew it was true. Right now, at this particular time, that would do it.
I plunged into despair. Who would do it? Certainly no woman I knew or knew of. Certainly none of the women I'd blackmailed! One of them had put me here with my body broken and my soul in torment. And the rest.. .
I could never be sure which one it had been. The Demerol was wearing off and the pain was coming back again, and with it all the voices that shouted in my ears, "You don't deserve it. You can't expect it. You can't ask for it. Castrate yourself or kill yourself. Kill your manhood or kill your whole body. There's nothing in this life for you."
And then, out of the excruciation, a set of numbers started tossing in my mind, struggling toward the surface like divers out of air. A set of numbers that I'd heard just once and written on my memory "just for the record." 7.4. 1. 0. 6. 3. 2. S-h-i-r-l-e-y. Shirley.
Suddenly, intuitively, deeply, I knew she was my last and only chance. If she'd do just one thing for me, just one little thing, I'd take that as my proof. I'd give up blackmail forever and go hunting without my guns at home. I'd go to another country. I'd start all over again. Why, I knew something about women now! I'd take the understanding that I'd stolen and use it to try to make up for what I'd done. I'd.. . .
But if Shirley refused, that would be it for me. I'd really go to California this time. I'd start my brothel up again, and this time I'd blast so many birds from the sky that the pavements everywhere would be littered with their bodies. Oh, I'd get mine in the end, all right. But they'd get theirs in the beginning.
I knew it was crazy. I knew it was stupid. Resting the whole of my future on the outcome of one phone call to one woman.. . it didn't make any sense. But the rest of my life didn't, either, and it wasn't going to until I had my answer. One way or the other. Shirley's image haunted my mind. I couldn't get it out.
A half a dozen times I picked up the phone, but I couldn't make myself dial. What if she wasn't home? What if she'd moved? What if . . .
But then I knew the time had come. The pain was growing intense but I had to make the call before I got doped up again. "It's just a phone call, stupid," I told myself. "Make it!"
So I did.
Shirley answered on the third ring. "Yes?"
"Shirley, this is Jim Northrup." For a second the pain got me and I reeled in confusion and I couldn't talk. "I know.. . I know I promised that you'd never hear from me again, but, well, I hope you can forgive me."
"I don't know," she said softly. "What do you want?"
"I'm in the hospital. I got hit by a car. I'm banged up pretty bad. There's something that I need. Now . . . I want to tell you that this has nothing to do with . . . with the deal we worked out before. You've got to understand that and believe it or it's no good. I don't have anything to deal with anymore and even if I did I wouldn't use it. We're square, and more than that Okay?"
She laughed. I loved to hear her laugh. She laughed pleasantly, gently, and then she said, "Poor Jim's flat out on a hospital bed and he's all horny. Am I right?"
My silence told her that she was. She paused and thought a minute.
"And you'd like Momma Shirley to pay you a visit and do a little number with the curtains closed?"
I held my breath in dazed suspense.
"How bad are you? What's the matter?"
I told her.
"Well then, you're in no position to fuck." She paused again. "But I'll tell you what, Jim. I kind of like you. To tell the truth, I was a little bit sorry to wake up that morning and find you gone. Not that there could ever be anything big between us. At least not that I can see. But just for old times' sake I'll drop by this evening and treat you to a nice blow-job on the house. Tell me where you are."