Bogeywoman

ach-choleria-” She was kicking at my collapsed chair with her soccer player’s legs and silver sandals. Maybe she had not been inviting me to leave as unequivocally as I thought, her mouth was a ragged O and when she finally got by the chair she snatched at the handful of keys but too late, they were already through the crack in the door and I was halfway through behind them. “There was only one gate… sorry…” I explained as I tugged the door closed. She was tugging on her side but that’s where my Bogeywoman strength has always been, in pulling things toward me. “How far you think you get in big city in this thing?” she cried, giving up on the keys and grabbing for one floppy tail of my hospital gown; it ripped and left a big Pepto-Bismol pink flap of itself in the door lock. Which nevertheless turned with a chunk once I got Doctor Zuk’s key in. “Sorry,” I whispered through the keyhole. You’d think she’d be hollering. But I didn’t hear a thing.

By now it must have been midnight and I had a sense of flying down half-lit halls and up the stairs in my half of a hospital gown, barefoot, with a handful of magic keys. In the stairwell I heard rubber soles slapping the stone steps below me, but I clung to the wall and waited and soon they sank away. On the landing, an elevator flew by, pinging. I saw a white face in its square window. I fell to my knees and touched, just touched, the bottom of the ward door to East Six. On the oiliest, most lubricious of hinges it swung open without a squeak. Even in the middle of the night they didn’t lock the thing! Just as I always suspected, any nut could break into this rotten bughouse, even easier than any bugbrain could break out.

On my hands and knees I went by the green-glowing nurses’ station. Down the hall, into O’s room. Crawled by the delicate escarpment of O under white sheeting, snowfield from elbow to hipbone, arm flung over her eyes and, dangling down to the floor beside me, the golden climber’s rope of her hair. Crawled into her bathroom. Pulled the door to.

No locks on these temples of offing yourself of course, with their bloody bathtubs, noosy towel racks and ghostly cabinets of pills. Wedged two Creepy Comix from the back of the toilet under the door. Squeezed on the light to see, since O’s makeup case was the size of a doctor’s bag and stuffed to its froggy hinges. Pawed blind through the tubes and bottles, quarter pound of bobby pins on the bottom, dimes nickels quarters, bottle caps, two bullets of different calibers, tornado-shaped shard of mirror, cannabis-smeared pipecleaner, some scary gadget that looked like a corkscrew but wasn’t and at last, it, the tweezer, two little silver bowlegs encircled with golden garters. I climbed into the gleaming bathtub and went to work.

It took hardly any time at all to open up a little bald spot, but from there on out it was rotten sameness, progress invisible, would it ever end? One by one, out they came, the hairs and the doomed crustaceans at the root of them, and finally they all lay in one big thin eyebrow around the drain at the far end of the tub, to be washed down at the end in one loud burst when I soaped and scrubbed and made my getaway. I had to keep my tracker’s eye on them of course, who knew if the crabs couldn’t smell me, a kind of mother to them, and come trooping back to me over the porcelain? And the longer I looked, the more the skimpy fringe around the drain looked like writing, a sentence in the round, a motto in some kind of letters I couldn’t understand. What could they have to say to me? I eyeballed the secret message around the drain and by and by it was like those crackles in the closet walls of Rohring Rohring where the queen of spades, or Margaret Meat or Karen Honey or Mahalia Chicken or Ruth Beandip, put in their appearances. Or any other dame I wished to summon, so long as she was grande. Suddenly I got this oracle: SHE IS A LEVIATHAN, EVEN HER KISS IS LIKE A HOUSE FELL ON ME. I blinked in the white light.

I was almost done. I mean I was only seventeen, maybe I wasn’t the grizzled she-gorilla I thought I was. By now where black hairs once grew there was only a rather raw pink heart, faintly perforated with tiny red dots. And inside it, that crack I hadn’t seen since I was twelve. Did it hurt? Did and didn’t. Of all pains, after all, the most agreeable is to pluck out a part of the body that offends, thus millions dine on cuticles and fingernails and a Haitian lady on West Four, one Mrs. Yib, had landed in Rohring Rohring after polishing off her own chignon, a whole bowlful, with a fork and Thousand Island dressing. Bored parrots sometimes beak out their green-and-gold breasts feather by feather, and if you aren’t getting any, it must be tempting to hold the starving member to anything that whirls, even a whetstone. Anyhow the more the V between my thighs puffed and pinked, the goner the vermin seemed, and I was almost happy. I eyed the ring around the drain. It said Who knows? She who eats, knows not, but she who plucks the chicken, knows.

HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE

I began to think I might make it back to East Five in time to let out Doctor Zuk before she yelled for help. No sign of a Code Green yet, no little bells pinging and elevators whirring and rubber shoes slapping, though maybe they handled these crises differently in the middle of the night, maybe they were less eager to wake up the tamely snoring mental peons than to give them nightmares in broad day with technicians in beekeeper’s hats thundering by the ward doors. Anyhow there’d been none of those yet, and now that I was cured I imagined getting back to East Five, and me and madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse sitting down to talk. Yes, I was clean as a whistle and ready for philosophy. No one would ever know.

Standing clear I stuffed the hairs in the drain and opened the HOT faucet for one short blast, and was answered by one of those serenades for bass ophicleide the old plumbing was prone to. At such times, the pipes boomed like Judgment Day clear down to Pathology, so that all the stiffs banged their foreheads trying to sit up in their refrigerator drawers. I screwed the HOT faucet off again, but too late. Creepy Comix noodged scratchily along the floor, the door creaked open. There stood O, blinking through her Mary Hartline hair. Those long platinum strands were all she was wearing. She gazed sleepily at my nakedness and suddenly said, “Coooool.” Slowly I understood what she was admiring. The tweezer was still in my fingers.

“Let’s do me too,” she yawned. “Why?” “It looks so mean and nasty.” “Yours won’t look mean and nasty. You gotta be ugly at the bottom for that.” “I don’t care. I wanna see my crack.” Reluctantly, I held out the tweezer to her. “No, you do it,” she said coyly, “I’m chicken.” What was I supposed to say to her?-I have an appointment? “I gotta go,” I said. “Hey, whatcha doing in my bathroom?” she finally woke up and remembered to ask, “ain’t you down on East Five? stuck in a quietroom?” “I ran away,” I said, “that’s why I gotta get back. Before they see I’m gone.” “You escaped and you’re going back? Are you nuts or sumpm?” “I, er, uh, try to be,” I mumbled, thinking of Doctor Zuk. Zuk! Panic tightened on my forehead like plaster. I had left her locked in a broom closet on East Five. I had to get back to her right now.

“What kinda checks you on?” O asked. “Fifteen-minute but mostly they don’t come till twenty.” “Then you’re too late already, it don’t matter, stay with me.” “No I’m not, if I leave right now.” “First pluck me.” “It takes too long and anyhow you don’t need it. Yours is… really really… okay the way it is.” And it was. I dared to look straight at it-an escutcheon of pinkish rosettes, as dainty as the Girl Scout badge for venery. But O was mad. Her eyes pinched to slits and she angrily plunked herself on the toilet seat, folded her arms and peed. The pee boiled in the bowl. Her cotton candy hair vined in and out of her arms. She glared at me. “Who ya going with? Down there on East Five?” “Huh? Nobody. I’m stuck in a quietroom for godzillas sake.” “Who else is there?” “No one. Some old bag opera singer’s in the room under your room, I don’t even know her name.” “You love her, ain’t it, you cheatin jew bulldyke,” she spooky-fluted, sitting all cramped together on the throne like some Old Witch Anti-Birth. “I only even noticed her cause she was in your room,” I said. She softened slightly but softness made her even scarier, squeezed her spooky-flute down to a snaky hiss. Her eyes glowed at the bottom of gratings that were half-erasures of their usual blacking. In a way she had never looked so beautiful. “What’d you come here for?” she wanted to know and I could hardly say To borrow your tweezer, now could I? “I was gonna surprise you,” I mumbled.

She got up and turned to flush the pot and when she turned back around, to my amazement she was wreathed in smiles as well as hair. She draped her long black fingernails about my neck, she could do that of course since I was still standing in the bathtub and therefore half a foot off the floor, otherwise I’d have been no taller than she was-and looked up into my face at its ersatz fuddy altitude and kissed me. “You did,” she said. “So, er, uh, do you like me with a bald coochie like five years old?” She stepped back a little and gazed. “Wooo,” she said. What did that mean? She patted the edge of the bathtub, hinting I should stand up there to get a look at myself (legless, headless) in the mirror over the sink. I climbed up. Well it was terrible, and nuttin like five years old. The halves of the knoll of coochie fit together swollenly, like lips that had been punched, and that once preverbal slit looked deep and dangerous, ready to curse, or spit. “Cheese,” I said, and shuddered. “Now do me,” she commanded.