much grass you smoked. You couldn’t go back again, that was the hell of it. Squares could turn Hip if they were sick enough, but Hips like you, Joe Milani, couldn’t seem to return to Squaresville.
It would be so nice to be square, Joe thought. That was something the squares never got into their heads, that their world was a far more attractive one when you were sitting on the other side of the fence. Was the grass always greener?
Well, no. Because sometimes grass turned brown, especially that Mexican brown that smelled a little different and seemed a little stronger. The joint in his pockets was half regular green and half Mexican brown and it was a good thick bomber, and he fingered it lovingly, his fingers cool and expectant on the brown wheat-straw paper.
No. Joe rejected the temptation.
Not tonight. Tomorrow, he promised himself, but not tonight.
He stood up, wanting a woman suddenly, wanting a woman but not wanting the woman he had just left, the woman he could never possibly make it with. The image in his mind was simply Woman. He paced the room and thought for a minute and decided the right woman for the moment would be Fran, good old Fran, sick little Fran who lived a few blocks away and always had room in her bed for him. She would probably want to get a little high first on something or other, but that was all right when you stopped to think about it.
Why not get high?
Why not ball with Fran? Joe Milani poked at the question.
Why not, indeed?
He left the apartment and hurried down the stairs, head high and arms swinging at his sides. It was cool outside, the sky dark, the streetlights lit.
He walked easily, west on Saint Marks to Third Avenue, down Third to Fran’s big and wonderful pad, a third- floor loft on Cooper Square.
He didn’t ring the bell because none existed, and if there had been one he would not have bothered to ring. At Fran’s place you opened that always unlocked outer door and climbed those grim, unlighted stairs until you reached Fran’s door where you knocked just in case some stud was ahead of you.
Joe paused at the door, undecided whether to knock or to turn around, head down the stairs and out of the building, up Third to Saint Marks and over Saint Marks to his own place—saying to hell with Fran and to hell with Joe Milani and to hell, for that matter, with just about everybody.
He knocked at the door.
Fran Paine answered the door. She was alone, her badly bleached blonde hair hanging down to her waist, her breasts huge in the man’s white dress shirt ill-designed for chests such as hers—alone in a hovel where books, bottles and butts littered the floor.
Fran closed the door behind him and the two sat down on a broken-up couch. They each drank a bottle of cherry-flavored cough syrup containing 2 minims of chloroform and 43 milligrams of codeine, mixed with extracts of squill, ipecac and sanguinaria.
The cough syrup was sweet, a little too sweet. But in a short time it had been consumed and they had their high—not the screamily floating high of pot or the pounding, pacing, madcap high of pep pills, but a soft and gently drowsy and beneficent high, the high of codeine, an opium derivative, that made everything much easier to bear.
Joe took off the man’s white dress shirt, wondering vaguely but without concern what guy had left the shirt at Fran’s pad, the last stud to share Fran’s big double bed.
He took off Fran’s skirt. She wore nothing under the skirt or shirt—she rarely did, complaining that underwear inhibited her.
He removed his own clothes.
Their love-making came down as a long stretch. Opiates such as codeine serve only to lessen a woman’s inhibitions; in a man they encourage impotence. But after a while Joe’s need for love, combined with the insistence of Fran’s practiced hands and the attraction of Fran’s equally practiced body, clutched them together like two hungry, homeless children who strained desperately to find something.
Something long lost.
Afterward, as they were falling asleep, the codeine swiftly bringing on unconsciousness, Joe heard voices, loud and frighteningly real, screaming in his brain. But, finally, he slept, his eyes shut against the world and his face pressed into a pillow. And he dreamed there was blood in the back of his throat, and that he couldn’t cough it out.
When the sun hit Joe in the eyes, his hand began to move. The fingers uncoiled, crept along the edge of the bed, reaching across the table at the side. The fingers fumbled at the clutter on the top of the table—hairpins, curlers, small bottles of cosmetics, the foil wrapper from a prophylactic. The fingers then curled around a pack of cigarettes and shook the pack until one cigarette popped out. Then, the cigarette held loosely between the second and third fingers, the hand returned to the bed.
Cigarette between lips. Hand back to table. Matches. Eyes open, you scratch a match against the striking surface of the matchbook, bring the flame to the end of the cigarette, drag on the cigarette, shake out the match and flip it onto the floor.
You sit up, take another drag on the cigarette. The smoke’s in your lungs, and then you take a breath.
Joe Milani was awake.
He got up from the bed, balancing the cigarette on the edge of the table, and groped around for clothing. Fran was up and gone but his clothes were still on the floor. His clothes were dirty and clung to his body like old friends when he put them on.
Dressed, he reclaimed his cigarette before it could add another burn to the row at the table edge. Walking to the window, he opened it to get a breath of fresh air and find out the time. The sun, still fairly low in the sky, indicated it was about ten-thirty.
Fran had left no note; not particularly surprising. Joe rummaged through the refrigerator and salvaged some milk and the end of a salami. He drank the milk in one swallow and gnawed at the salami, hard and salty, but tasty, so he ate it all.
He left Fran’s place. On the street he felt lost at first, unsure of where to go, not wanting anything and a little off-balance. His feet headed toward his own room but stopped as he realized it was pointless to go home—Shank had probably left by now and Joe had no desire to see Shank, anyway.
Then he remembered the marijuana.
His hand dug at once into his pocket. There was a scrap of paper there and a pack of regular cigarettes, and at first he thought that the joint had disappeared, maybe Fran had taken it or he himself had gone and lost it somewhere. Then, when he found it at the bottom of the pocket, his fingers examined it without removing it. It seemed to be all right and he relaxed.
Joe wandered aimlessly around the East Side, then headed west on Fourth Street. A dollar bill was wrapped around some loose change in one pocket and he thought about getting something to eat but nothing appealed. He passed a delicatessen selling loaves of French bread for fifteen cents and he stood on the sidewalk practically five minutes, unable to decide whether or not to buy a loaf. Finally he decided no and walked on.
Immobility.
He recognized it now, felt it in his bones and skin, felt it creeping up on him and infecting him with a paralysis peculiarly his own, a paralysis the rest of the world never shared with him. It was his, his paralysis, his immobility —his alone, and when it came he could only sit and ponder it or walk and ponder it or lie down and ponder it, because there was absolutely nothing else in the world he could do or want to do. Immobility.
At Washington Square he stared at the statue of Garibaldi, his hand on his sword, and Joe remembered the legend at NYU—a legend which, in one form or another, seemed prevalent on every campus in the world. When Garibaldi drew his sword, the legend said, that meant a virgin had walked by.
As Joe stood contemplating the statue of Garibaldi he decided the legend was all wrong. The old soldier wouldn’t draw that damned sword of his if all the virgins in the western world paraded in front of him. The old wop was made out of stone and he would stand for the rest of eternity with his hand on his sword and his eyes staring ahead vacantly.
In that particular respect, Joe decided, the old wop and the young wop had a lot in common.
Sitting hunched on a bench in the park, Joe pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. After the first puff he let the
