“What’s wrong?”
“Everything. You know Dave?”
“Dave Schwerner?”
“That’s the one. I’ve been living with him.”
“I’m hip.”
“Well, he’s been playing needle games,” she complained.
Joe shook his head. “Bad,” he said. “Horse?”
“Uh-huh. Just skin-popping. That’s all, he says. Just skin-popping. He can take it or leave it. Funny, you know. Because he can take it or leave it but he never leaves it. Isn’t that funny?”
Joe said nothing.
“So we’re always broke,” she went on. “But very broke. I don’t make much here, you know that. A buck an hour plus a tip now and then. And he spends long bread on the needle. Nobody goes through money like a junkie.”
“Hold on,” Joe said. “He’s not a junkie.”
“Then Dave’s faking it. So he’s not hooked. He’s still using a little too regularly to make me happy. And we’re always broke. And you know what comes next.”
“He wants you to try a needleful?”
“Not that. Not yet. I suppose that’s next on the agenda but he can go to hell for himself before I punch needle-holes in myself. No, another brainstorm. We’re sitting around, wondering how to pay for the next cap of heroin, and he mentions a way we could be rolling in bread.”
“Oh.”
“You got it,” she said. “The same old story. I was thinking, honey, Dave says. You know, all you would have to do is turn one little trick a day and we’d be living in style. An extra fifteen bucks a day. Pay for the horse and money left over to live on. Not that you would be professional or anything. I wouldn’t want that. Just one little trick a day.”
Joe kept silent.
“And then he’s using more horse,” Eileen went on, “and then it’s two little tricks a day, and then all of a sudden he’s mainlining with thirty or forty pounds worth of monkey, and then I’m on it myself because otherwise it’s too much to stand by myself, and there we are, a pair of junkies, and I’m spreading my legs for the world to keep us both alive. Just one little trick a day, Dave says. Sure.”
“That’s bad, Eileen. That’s like ugly.”
“It gets uglier. Because I don’t know what to do, baby. I really don’t. I ought to leave him. Somebody hits the needle and you have to forget he’s alive. But he needs me, Joe. And I don’t know what to do. He needs me. It’s a funny feeling, when somebody needs you. And one of these days I’m going to turn that one little trick. And I don’t want to. I really don’t want to.” Joe started to say something but then suddenly knew comment to be hopeless.
Eileen heaved a sigh and stood up. “Problems,” she said. “Everybody’s got them. If we didn’t have them we wouldn’t be here. Stay good, Joe. I’m going to pour coffee for the savages. Later.”
He watched her go. He thought about Eileen turning tricks to feed Dave’s habit and he felt very sad. It was ugly. But so were lots of things. The world was growing very ugly. Problems? He had problems of his own.
Funny problems.
Anita problems.
You had a woman now, Joe brooded. And when you had a woman you had problems. Things were most assuredly not the same. There were strings all over the place. There were things you couldn’t do.
You couldn’t hit on another chick. You couldn’t stay out all night. You couldn’t get quite as stoned as you used to and you couldn’t live quite as completely within yourself.
Not that you necessarily wanted to hit on another chick, to find another bed to warm. Anita was fine in that department, alive and exciting, enough for any man. But the simple fact that you couldn’t if you wanted to, was enough to annoy the hell out of you.
The big headache was that Anita just didn’t fit in. It was not her scene, not at all. She was too sane for it, maybe. Not sick enough to throw herself headlong into the hysteria of hipdom. Maybe she should have stayed in Harlem and married her split-level engineer. Because a cold-water hole on Saint Marks Place was not her speed.
What was her speed? Joe frowned.
And where was the whole bit headed? Where in the world were Anita and you going, and what in the world would you do when you got there?
Joe sipped his coffee. After a while Lee Revzin came in carrying a chess set. The poet sat down without a word. He took a white pawn in one hand, a black pawn in the other. He mixed them up, then extended both closed fists to Joe. Joe tapped one and got white.
They set up the pieces and began to play.
They played for three hours. In the course of the several games Lee said only two words, “Check,” when Joe’s king was in check, and “Mate,” when he won a game. When Lee had something to say he could talk non-stop for hours. One time he had exploded in spontaneous poetry for an hour and a half, talking in perfect heroic couplets and hitting some astonishingly successful and vivid images. At other times he would go for days without uttering a syllable.
Joe matched the poet’s silence with his own. He played chess and drank coffee and let his mind live a life by itself.
Basil was hard to find.
A check of available coffee pots in the area yielded nothing. Shank was having a hard time. He was also beginning to feel thoroughly annoyed.
The Kitchen was a fairly dismal slum but this failed to dismay Shank. Nor did the slum’s inhabitants—Irish, Italian, and a sprinkling of Puerto Ricans—affect Shank either. But the juveniles of the area were another story. He was close enough to them in age to be a possible member of an alien gang. At one point two teenagers approached him, their eyes wary. He was on their turf, and that might to them mean an invasion. Shank remembered the protocol of the Royal Ramblers and now the routine struck him as ridiculous. But Shank knew the language and he was ready.
“Who are you, man?” He looked the taller of the two in the eyes. “I’m looking for Basil,” he said. “You know him?”
Shank read the expression. They knew Basil. But they were too small to deal with him. Basil was big and they were little. They bought what they used, if they used, from someone not nearly so tall as Basil. Someone like Shank, perhaps.
“You got business with him?” the taller one said.
“I buy,” Shank said. “I sell.”
“You swing with a gang?”
“Years ago but no more.”
It was satisfactory. They let him alone because they knew he was not in their way. But they did not know Basil’s whereabouts.
Nobody did. The mystery was becoming a drag. Finally Shank entered the coffee pot where, by all the rules, Basil should have been. Shank sauntered to the counter and studied the girl behind it. He asked for Basil and her eyes informed him she knew both the name and the man.
“I don’t know him,” the girl said.
“Call him.” Shank said. “Tell him somebody wants to see him.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Crap,” Shank said. “You pour me a cup of coffee. Cream and sugar. Then you get your butt over to the phone and you call him. Fast.”
“I don’t know you,” she said. “Maybe you’re law.”
“I look like law?”
She shrugged.
But for the girl and Shank, the diner was empty. Shank walked around the counter and moved in on the girl.
