Autumn strollers eased along the park’s evening paths. A Nipponese couple paused to spend affection on Bill; in a way they went out of their minds, tugging his twisted tail, hugging him—I could understand it because Bill, with his indented face and Quasimodo legs, his intricately contorted physique, was an object as appealing to an Oriental sense of the aesthetic as bonsai trees and dwarf deer and goldfish bred to weigh five pounds. However, I myself am not Oriental, and when Bill, after luring me onto the grass and under a tree, suddenly again sexually attacked me, I was not appreciative.
Being no match for so determined a rapist, it was expedient just to lie back on the grass and let him have his way—even encourage him: “That’s it, baby. Give it to me good. Get your rocks off.” We had an audience—human faces bobbed in the distance beyond my frolicking lover’s bulging passion-doped eyes. Some woman harshly said: “You filthy degenerate! Stop abusing that animal! Why doesn’t anybody call a policeman?” Another woman said: “Albert, I want to go back to Utica. Tonight.” With slobbering gasps, Bill crossed his chest.
My drenched Robert Hall trousers were not Bill’s only offense against me ere the eve was o’er. When I returned him to the Plaza and entered the foyer of the suite, I stepped into a big pile of wet shit, Bill’s shit, and skidded and fell flat on my face—into a second pile of shit. All I said to Mr. Wallace was: “Do you mind if I take a shower?” He said: “I always insist on that.”
However, as Miss Self had suggested, Mr. Wallace, like Denny Fouts, was more conversationalist than sensualist. “You’re a good kid,” he advised me. “Oh, I know you’re no kid. I’m not that drunk. I can see you got mileage on you. But never mind, you’re a good kid; it’s in your eyes. Wounded eyes. Injured and insulted. Read Dostoevski? Well, I guess that’s not your racket. But you’re one of his people. Insulted and injured. Me too; that’s why I feel safe with you.” He rolled his eyes around the lamplit bedroom like an espionage agent; the room looked as if a Kansas twister had just gone through—messy laundry everywhere, dog shit all over the place, and drying puddles of dog piss marking the rugs.
Bill was asleep at the foot of the bed, his snores exuding postcoital melancholy. At least he allowed his master and his master’s guest to share the bed a bit, the guest naked but the master fully dressed, down to black shoes and a vest with pencils in the pocket and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. In one hand Mr. Wallace gripped a toothpaste glass brimming with undiluted Scotch and in the other a cigar that kept accumulating trembling lengths of ash. Occasionally he reached to stroke me, and once the hot ash singed my navel; I thought it was on purpose, but decided perhaps not.
“As safe as a hunted man can feel. A man with murderers on his trail. I’m liable to die very suddenly. And if I do, it won’t be a natural death. They’ll try to make it look like heart failure. Or an accident. But promise me you won’t believe that. Promise me you’ll write a letter to the Times and tell them it was murder.”
With drunks and madmen, always be logical. “But if you think you’re in danger, why don’t you call the cops?”
He said: “I’m no squealer”; then he added: “I’m a dying man, anyway. Dying of cancer.”
“What kind of cancer is it?”
“Blood. Throat. Lungs. Tongue. Stomach. Brain. Asshole.” Alcoholics really despise the taste of alcohol; he shivered as he bolted half the Scotch in his glass. “It all started seven years ago when the critics turned on me. Every writer has his tricks, and sooner or later the critics catch them. That’s all right; they love you as long as they’ve got you identified. My mistake was I got sick of my old tricks and learned some new ones.
Critics won’t put up with that; they hate versatility—they don’t like to see a writer grow or change in any way. So that’s when the cancer came. When the critics started saying the old tricks were ‘the stuff of pure poetic power’ and the new tricks were ‘shabby pretensions.’ Six failures in a row, four on Broadway and two off. They’re killing me out of envy and ignorance. And without shame or remorse. What do they care that cancer’s eating my brain!” Then, quite complacently, he said: “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I can’t believe in seven years of galloping cancer. That’s impossible.”
“I’m a dying man. But you don’t believe it. You don’t believe I have cancer at all. You think it’s all a problem for the shrinker.” No, what I thought was: here’s a dumpy little guy with a dramatic mind who, like one of his own adrift heroines, seeks attention and sympathy by serving up half-believed lies to total strangers. Strangers because he has no friends, and he has no friends because the only people he pities are his own characters and himself—everyone else is an audience. “But for your information, I’ve been to a shrink. I spent sixty bucks an hour five days a week for two years. All the bastard did was interfere in my personal affairs.”
“Isn’t that what they’re paid to do? Interfere in one’s personal affairs?”
“Don’t get smart with me, old buddy. This is no joke. Dr. Kewie ruined my life. He convinced me I wasn’t a queer and that I didn’t love Fred. He told me I was finished as a writer unless I got rid of Fred. But the truth was Fred was the only good thing in my life. Maybe I didn’t love him. But he loved me. He held my life together. He wasn’t the phony Kewie said he was. Kewie said: Fred doesn’t love you, he loves your money. The one who loves money is Kewie.
Well, I wouldn’t leave Fred, so Kewie calls him secretly and tells him I’m going to die of drink if he doesn’t clear out. Fred packs and disappears, and I can’t understand it until Dr. Kewie, very proud of himself, confesses what he’s done. And I told him: You see, Fred believed you and because he loved me so much he sacrificed himself. But I was wrong about that.
Because when we found Fred, and I hired Pinkertons who found him in Puerto Rico, Fred said all he wanted to do was bust me in the nose. He thought I was the one who had put Kewie up to calling him, that it was all a plot on my part. Still, we made up. A lot of good it did. Fred was operated on at Memorial Hospital June seventeenth, and he died the fourth of July. He was only thirty-six years old. But he wasn’t pretending; he really had cancer. And that’s what comes of shrinkers interfering in your private life. Look at the mess! Imagine having to hire whores to walk Bill.”
“I’m not a whore.” Though I don’t know why I bothered protesting: I am a whore and always have been.
He grunted sarcastically; like all maudlin men, he was cold-hearted. “How about it?” he said, blowing the ash off his cigar. “Roll over and spread those cheeks.”
“Sorry, but I don’t catch. Pitch, yes. Catch, no.”
“Ohhh,” he said, his way-down-yonder voice mushy as sweet-potato pie, “I don’t want to cornhole you, old buddy. I just want to put out my cigar.”
Boy, did I beat it out of there!—hustled my clothes into the bathroom and bolted the door. While dressing, I could hear Mr. Wallace chuckling to himself. “Old buddy?” he said. “You didn’t think I meant it, did you, old buddy? I don’t know. Nobody’s got a sense of humor anymore.” But when I came out, he was snoring slightly, a soft accompaniment to Bill’s robust racket. The cigar still burned between his fingers: probably someday when no one is there to save him, this will be the way Mr. Wallace will go.
HERE AT THE Y A sixty-year-old blind man sleeps in the cell next to mine. He is a masseur and has been employed for several months by the gym downstairs. His name is Bob, and he is a big-bellied guy who smells of baby oil and Sloan’s Liniment. Once I mentioned to him that I had worked as a masseur, and he said he’d like to see what kind of masseur I was, so we traded techniques, and while he was rubbing me with his thick sensitive blind-man’s hands, he told me a bit about himself. He said he’d been a bachelor until he was fifty, when he married a San Diego waitress. “Helen.
She described herself as a gorgeous blond piece-ass thirty-one years old, a divorcée, but I don’t guess she could have been much, else why would she have married me? She had a good figure, though, and with these hands I could get her plenty hot. Well, we bought a Ford pickup and a little aluminum house trailer and moved to Cathedral City—that’s in the California desert near Palm Springs. I figured I could get work at one of the clubs in Palm Springs, and I did. It’s a great place November to June, best climate in the world, hot in the daytime and cold at night, but Jesus the summers, it
