The girl applauded still more wildly.
“I wish I knew what in the world it means,” Lee Revzin said, more to himself than to the world. “It has to mean something. It really has to.”
The girl said nothing. She was busy unzipping him, stimulated beyond imagination by the force of his poetry.
Shank, meanwhile, was bored.
That was surprising. Judy Obershain’s parties had never bored him in the past. The people had interested him and the activities had appealed.
Now, however, he was bored.
The boredom, he decided, had a number of causes. For one thing, the thrill of smoking marijuana by way of being part of a group function no longer served to send him into the stratosphere. Pot was a part of his daily life—he bought it, he sold it, he smoked it. He found it no more delightful to smoke in public than in private. And the spectacle of twenty or more idiots blowing their brains out so thoroughly that they lost control of themselves was humorous no longer.
Another factor was his discovery that, although he was one of the youngest present at the party, the others seemed incredibly immature to him. He attributed this feeling partly to a change in his status. He was selling hard goods now; in fact he had made his first sale just a few hours ago. Basil could talk his head off about the similarity on the legal plane of marijuana and heroin. But Shank’s eyes were not those of the law, and for him a radical difference existed between the two drugs, so that he felt immeasurably superior to the idiots balling all over Judy Obershain’s apartment. Pot was fine, you could take it or leave it, Shank thought; smoke it on Madison Avenue or the Upper East Side or the Village. But junk was serious business—and pot was for kiddies. Now he was a businessman. You didn’t sell junk for the hell of it, Shank ruminated. You sold it for a profit, a good profit. Moreover, the stuff had a quick turnover and, as Basil had described it, a captive audience. You could make three, four, five bills a week if you were cool about it. And this potential for enormous profits further contributed to raising him above the level of the rest of the party-goers.
Even the sex was dull. Shank gave a mental shrug. He just plain wasn’t in the mood and there was no way to force it. The party was dragging him, the people were dragging him, the whole aura of child-play, love-play, sex-play was dragging him.
So he got up, carrying a good load from the pot he had smoked but carrying it easily, understanding it, able to master it with ease. Unlike Anita, who had just tried it for the first time and now was fornicating like a rabbit in the middle of the living-room floor. Shank walked to the door after stepping over a pair of errant lovers, and left the apartment.
The building elevator was the self-service type. But instead of pushing the button for the ground floor, he pressed for the floor below, the third, and headed for the apartment directly below that of Judy Obershain’s. He rang the bell. Rang it once, waited, then leaned on it.
The people were not home.
He opened the door with a key that fitted a surprising number of doors. He walked in, shut the door and began looking around for something to steal. Then, all at once, he decided there was no point to burglarizing the place. He was making enough money. He didn’t need any more.
Instead, he used the phone to call Bradley Galton, his stepfather, long distance. When Brad Galton answered, Shank waited for a second or two and then unleashed a stream of the wildest profanity he could think of. He did not pause for breath until the line went dead.
Then, smiling, Shank replaced the receiver and quit the apartment. He hoped the phone call to the coast would come as a great surprise to the people who would be billed for it.
He caught the elevator again, rode it to the first floor, ambled out into the night and hunted for a bar where he ordered a glass of draft beer and drank it down. He walked all the way home, looking around for anybody he might know. He saw a few people but nobody he wanted to talk to. So he wound up going straight back to the apartment on Saint Marks Place. But he felt too alert to sleep. He checked the cache of heroin, of which fourteen capsules remained. He checked the marijuana. He had sold Judy Obershain an ounce and had taken one hundred dollars for it, which meant he had two ounces of marijuana left and fourteen caps of horse and was already ahead by more than fifty dollars. A profitable day, he congratulated himself.
His mind returned to Anita.
Something was going to happen, Shank decided. There was more than enough for Joe there. The girl was appealing, and scared, and Shank was going to help himself to a little. Just a little. Not right away, but fairly soon. When he was ready he would simply take what he wanted. If she would not want to give it to him that would be just too damn bad. He would take it anyway. He undressed and stretched out on his bed. In his mind he concocted pleasant fantasies involving Anita. In one, her ankles were tied together, and her hands bound behind her back. She was shrieking in agony. He went to sleep and dreamed of pain.
Chapter 8
They sat on a bench in Washington Square. Looking at her through the smoke from his cigarette, Joe was amazed at the change time had worked in the girl beside him. Before, Anita had worn a little lipstick; now she dispensed with it altogether and made up for it by wearing too much eye-shadow. Tight and faded dungarees encased belly and hips and legs. A loose black sweater covered her arms and chest. Her hair fell free, loose.
But the outer trappings were the least of the change. Any girl could replace lipstick with eye-shadow, could switch from skirt and sweater to dungarees and sweater, could unpin her hair and let her mouth go slack and her eyes droopy. Such could be accomplished overnight, and frequently was—generally by freshman girls from Brooklyn College making the perfunctory pilgrimage to Greenwich Village before they went home to marry dentists. Exchange students from Kew Gardens, Lee Revzin called them. Kiddie-beats.
Anita was different. More important than the outer wrapper was the girl inside. And there had been a change in that girl of direction, of attitude and mind. The words of Hip colored her speech now and sounded right coming from her mouth. The exchange students from Kew Gardens, when they used those words, made them sound like English from the lips of a Sudanese. She walked Hip and thought Hip and spoke Hip. Harlem and Long Island had drained away from her and the beat mystique had quickly replaced them. She accompanied Joe when he wanted her company; other times she remained at the apartment or wandered around the Village and the East Side by herself. She smoked marijuana with Joe, and had tried both codeine cough syrup and mescalin, neither of which had made much of an impression upon her. The cough syrup had merely drugged her for a while until she had unceremoniously thrown it up in the toilet bowl. The mescalin had given a weak high which she had found unpleasant and a bit frightening. But marijuana had seemed valuable, somehow, and she continued to smoke it whenever he did.
Joe looked at her now, his eyes all-seeing, and he thought perhaps he had done something radically wrong. The metamorphosis from Square to Hip was, he knew full well, far from complete. He knew she worried, and he knew she was firmly convinced that much of what she was doing was intrinsically wrong. He remembered her as she had been, fresh and eager and searching for something beyond her comprehension. And he was not at all sure that what she had become was an improvement on the original.
He recalled the first time she had smoked—at Judy’s Obershain’s party. He remembered their love-making on the floor, more or less center-stage, and he remembered how she had been when the effects of the marijuana had worn off. Scared, sick, frightened—and very much ashamed of herself. Then at last the shame had slipped away and the fear had claimed her altogether. And she was still not a girl who could make love in the middle of the floor in the middle of a party without there being something wrong about it for her, without some guilt that had to be buried beneath the rugged exterior of the perennial cool.
Bad, Joe thought.
“I hate this park,” she said now.
“Huh?”
“It drags me,” she said. “It really does. I sit here and all these people walk by. It used to be a kick. I mean, I didn’t know any of the people. They were strangers. And now either I know them or I’ve seen them so many times it’s like they’re relatives or like that. I want something to happen. God, I want something to happen.”
