had labeled The Whole Sick Crew. They lived half their time in a bar on the lower West Side called the Rusty Spoon. He thought of the Sailor's Grave and could not see much difference. 'Benny.' She had never cried, never that he could remember. It worried him. But she might be faking. 'Ciao,' she said. That phony, Greenwich Village way to avoid saying good-bye. He hung up. 'There's a nice fight on,' Dewey Gland said, sullen and redeyed. 'Old Ploy is so juiced he went and bit a Marine on the ass.' If you look from the side at a planet swinging around in its orbit, split the sun with a mirror and imagine a string, it all looks like a yo-yo. The point furthest from the sun is called aphelion. The point furthest from the yo-yo hand is called, by analogy, apocheir. Profane and Paola left for New York that night. Dewey Gland went back to the ship and Profane never saw him again. Pig had taken off on the Harley, destination unknown. On the Greyhound were one young couple who would, come sleep for the other passengers, make it in a rear seat; one pencil-sharpener salesman who had seen every territory in the country and could give you interesting information on any city, no matter which one you happened to be heading for; and four infants, each with an incompetent mother, scattered at strategic locations throughout the bus, who babbled, cooed, vomited, practiced self-asphyxia, drooled. At least one managed to be screaming all through the twelve-hour trip. About the time they hit Maryland, Profane decided to get it over with. 'Not that I'm trying to get rid of you,' handing her a ticket envelope with Rachel's address on it in pencil, 'but I don't know how long I'll be in the city.' He didn't. She nodded. 'Are you in love, then.' 'She's a good woman. She'll put you on to a job, find you a place to stay. Don't ask me if we're in love. The word doesn't mean anything. Here's her address. You can take the West Side IRT right up there.' 'What are you afraid of.' 'Go to sleep.' She did, on Profane's shoulder. At the 34th Street station, in New York, he gave her a brief salute. 'I may be around. But I hope not. It's complicated.' 'Shall I tell her . . .' 'She'll know. That's the trouble. There's nothing you - I - can tell her she doesn't know.' 'Call me, Ben. Please. Maybe.' 'Right,' he told her. 'Maybe.' V So in January 1956 Benny Profane showed up again in New York. He came into town at the tag-end of a spell of false spring, found a mattress at a downtown flophouse called Our Home, and a newspaper at an uptown kiosk; roar around the streets late that night studying the classified streetlight. As usual nobody wanted him in particular. If anybody had been around to remember him they would have noticed right off that Profane hadn't changed. Still great amoebalike boy, soft and fat, hair cropped close and growing in patches, eyes small like a pig's and set too far apart. Road work had done nothing to improve the outward Profane, or the inward one either. Though the street by now claimed a big fraction of Profane's age, it and he remained strangers in every way. Streets (roads, circles, square places, prospects) had taught him nothing: he couldn't work a transit, crane, payloader, couldn't lay bricks, stretch a tape right, hold an elevation rod still, hadn't even learned to drive a car. He walked; walked, he thought sometimes, the aisles of a bright, gigantic supermarket, his only function to want. One morning Profane woke up early, couldn't get back sleep and decided on a whim to spend the day like a yo-yo, shuttling on the subway back and forth underneath 42nd Street, from Times Square to Grand Central and vice versa. He made his way to the washroom of Our Home, tripping over two empty mattresses on route. Cut himself shaving, had trouble extracting the blade and gashed a finger. He took a shower to get rid of the blood. The handles wouldn't turn. When he finally found a shower that worked, the water came out hot and cold in random patterns. He danced around, yowling and shivering, slipped on a bar of soap and nearly broke his neck. Drying off, he ripped a frayed towel in half, rendering it useless. He put on his skivvy shirt backwards, took ten minutes getting his fly zipped and other fifteen repairing a shoelace which had broken as he was tying it. All the rest of his morning songs were silent cuss words. It wasn't that he was tired or even notably uncoordinated. Only something that, being a schlemiel he'd known for years: inanimate objects and he could not live in peace. Profane took a Lexington Avenue local up to Grand Central. As it happened, the subway car he got into was filled with all manner of ravishingly gorgeous knockouts: secretaries on route to work and jailbait to school. It was too much, too much. Profane hung on the handgrip, weak. He was visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves of horniness, whereby all women within a certain age group and figure envelope became immediately and impossibly desirable. He emerged from these spells with eyeballs still oscillating and a wish that his neck could rotate through the full 360 degrees. The shuttle after morning rush hour is near empty, like a littered beach after tourists have all gone home. In the hours between nine and noon the permanent residents come creeping back up their strand, shy and tentative. Since sunup all manner of affluent have filled the limits of that world with a sense of summer and life; now sleeping bums and old ladies on relief, who have been there all along unnoticed, re-establish a kind of property right, and the coming on of a falling season. On his eleventh or twelfth transit Profane fell asleep and dreamed. He was awakened close to noon by three Puerto Rican kids named Tolito, Jose and Kook, short for Cucarachito. They had this act, which was for money even though they knew that the subway on weekday mornings, no es bueno for dancing and bongos. Jose carried around a coffee can which upside down served to rattle off their raving merengues or baions on, and hollow side up to receive from an appreciative audience pennies, transit tokens, chewing gum, spit. Profane blinked awake and watched them, jazzing around, doing handsprings, aping courtship. They swung from the handle-grips, shimmied up the poles; Tolito tossing Kook the seven-year-old about the car like a beanbag, and behind it all, clobbering polyrhythmic to the racketing of the shuttle, Jose on his tin drum, forearms and hands vibrating out beyond the persistence of vision, and a tireless smile across his teeth wide as the West Side.
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