“Then I better jump.”
“What’s happening?”
“I got a few things going.”
Joe leaned back on the bed and watched Shank go out the door and slam it behind him. The younger boy’s footsteps sounded on the stairway, then stopped. The front door banged.
Joe stretched out on the bed, rested his head on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling whose cracked plaster had fallen away in jagged patches. The floor was bare and dirty and the furniture was quietly falling into ruin, the stuffing leaking from the one chair, and broken bedsprings digging down at crazy angles. Joe alternated between feeling sorry for himself and despising himself, usually was in one mood or the other except for the times a fix lifted him into another mental sphere. In a straight sense, without the realization of marijuana or the stimulation of benzedrine or the sogginess of alcohol or the diffusion of mescalin to eliminate moodiness, he either hated Joe Milani or loathed the world so unnecessarily cruel to him.
You had always been a good enough kid, Joe would tell himself on occasion. Your folks had loved you and you had loved your folks and Rochester hadn’t been a bad place to live in. You had run around with a decent bunch of kids and you had done okay in high school and had never gotten into any trouble. Everybody had liked you then. What in the hell had happened to you?
Two years in Korea had happened to you, Joe would answer—two years in Korea shooting at people and having the bastards shoot back at you. You had stumbled around, freezing, mud up to your neck and bullets all over the damned place. And then you had had a year in college on the GI bill, the professors throwing things at you that had neither made sense nor mattered a hell of a lot, and there had been nothing to do and no place to go and nobody to be with.
That’s what happened to you, Joe would decide. You had been a good kid and they had sent you to Korea to make the world safe for Syngman Rhee, who had been nothing but a fascist bastard to begin with and who was finished now anyway and the Koreans behind half-a-dozen eight balls. They had sent you over there and when they had brought you back there had been nothing stateside for you. Nothing had mattered any more, nothing had fit any more, and when you had gone home to Rochester there had been nobody to talk to. The same people had been there, the same guys—even if they had aged a year or two they had only gotten deader from the neck up. Your folks had been there but it hadn’t been the same with them, and the girls had been there and it hadn’t been the same with them, either, and all in all Rochester hadn’t been worth a damn and New York University had been worth less of a damn and the whole world had gotten dead set on driving you out of your alleged mind.
Sure, Joe thought.
Or, his mood alternating, he would accuse himself: You’re just a no-good bastard and you’ve screwed up everything you’ve ever touched. Yeah, you had been a happy enough guy in high school. You had never had a thought in your life and you had never done anything except swing bats at baseballs and bang silly little girls in back seats. So you had gone through basic training and had started shaking when they sent live ammo ten feet over your head. So you had shipped to Korea and had aimed your gun at the sky most of the time because you had been too scared to kill anybody. You hadn’t had enough guts to have been a conscientious objector or enough guts to have been a soldier—but you had had an anonymous enough body to have been stuck in the middle, a gun in your hand and a hole in your head.
And you had found a woman in Japan, little Michiko, flat-faced Mickey, the sweetest and warmest woman in the world, Mickey of the saffron arms and legs and thighs and breasts and belly, a girl named Mickey who had loved you. And, you gutless no-good wop son of a bitch, you hadn’t had the guts to make a Sayonara scene. You had left her there.
Joe Gutless. You had dropped out of NYU because you hadn’t been able to knuckle down and study. You had left Rochester because it had been too tough for you to adjust, and you hadn’t wanted to do anything unless it was real easy. No guts, no push, no drive, no interest in anything or anybody. You were a faceless wop named Joe Gutless Milani who deserved whatever you got.
And now you did nothing. Now you were Hip or Beat or whatever word they were calling it this month. You had been spending years doing nothing at all. That was the hell of it.
You didn’t work. Getting a gig as a messenger boy for a week at a clip wasn’t working. Bussing tables at the Automat for a day or two at a time wasn’t working. Bumming off Shank, bumming from the women you crawled into an occasional bed with, bumming off anybody who happened to have bread or food or an empty bed or a lonesome gland wasn’t working.
You floated.
For the time being you padded down with Shank, as lousy a guy as you were, who pushed pot in an extremely small-time way, who carried a knife and would one day or another stick somebody with it if he hadn’t already.
You floated. You pushed pot and chewed peyote.
You drifted. You were impotent with half the women you slept with and you didn’t muscle much of a kick out of the other half.
You stank.
Joe rolled off the bed and eased himself into the chair. Since the joint of marijuana was still in his pocket, he thought for a moment about smoking it, but then decided to hold on to it for a while. Next morning would be time enough. He would wake up and reach for the little cylinder of pot and blow off the top of his head before he opened his eyes-that would be nice. Instead of the joint he fished a regular cigarette from his other pocket and lit it.
He drew smoke into his lungs, thinking it would be much more satisfying to draw another kind of smoke into his lungs, and wondering how long it would be before he started playing interesting games with a needle. Not that pot led you to the hard stuff, it didn’t. It was just that eventually you yourself would wind up trying the hard stuff even if most pot smokers never did. You, Joe Milani, would, because it was there for you and it was a new kick and there were not nearly enough kicks in the world.
He blew out the smoke and took another drag on the cigarette, a longer drag that burned up maybe a third of the cigarette in one long pull, and he coughed on the cloud of smoke.
Joe closed his eyes.
Anita Carbone. Right now he couldn’t be sure if he hated the world, or Joe Milani, or both; but one thing he was relatively certain of: if it weren’t for the fundamental inadequacies in Joe Milani, or the world, or both, Joe Milani and Anita Carbone might have a future of some sort. Maybe not a white-gown-and-wedding-bells-and-rice type of scene, but a future one way or the other.
Because Anita, by all the rules, answered to the perfect girl. She was a good girl, Joe knew, an Italian girl, and a virgin who obviously didn’t owe her virginity to the fact nobody had bothered to ask her. A bright girl, too, her intelligence compounded of Harlem intuition and Hunter education. She was damned attractive physically, he told himself, and damned pleasant company. Clean and fresh without being so square the two of you couldn’t talk to each other. Although he had been high when he had picked her up, and had been deeply attracted to her then, he had liked her even more, later, as a low had started to come on. It was a shame he would never see her again.
The part of him that hated Joe Milani said: What does a chick like that need with a bastard like you? What are you going to do for her: turn her on? take her to bed? drive her as nutty as you are?
The part of Joe Milani that hated the world said: She’s just not your type of chick, man. She’s just not for you, and she’s never gonna be, no matter what you try to do about it. The two of you are living in different worlds, and if you think it was a long way from Japan to the States, it’s miles more from Hip to Square.
And Joe Milani listened to both voices, listened to them with both ears, and decided that both voices were entirely correct.
So why see her again, he asked himself. And why make a pass at her when the result had to be one of two things—either she would throw the pass right back in your face, or the pair of you would wind up in bed. Both eventualities, in the final analysis, would be equally unpleasant.
Damn, it was wrong! Joe cursed silently. You were supposed to go to high school and then college, the army cutting in before or after. Then you married a good Italian girl and settled down and bought one of those new houses in the suburbs and snagged a job with your old man or sold insurance or found something else you didn’t have to kill yourself doing and at which you could make a fairly decent living. That was what you were supposed to do.
But what you were supposed to do was also impossible, inconceivable, and couldn’t work out no matter how
