Why?
But it had already been repeated. Why remember it again? Look, there’s Audie Murphy, here’s the part where he beats the hell out of the rotten crooked sheriff, watch it now-
I gave up and sat back and closed my eyes and turned off the movie and let myself remember.
It had, tritely, been a day like any other day. Outside, as inside, I had come to learn the safety and security of pattern, of habit I had learned not to rush things but to let them come as they would, living my own life in a neat and orderly fashion that would supply a counterfeit purpose when none in fact existed. I lived frugally, in my two ill- furnished rooms on East Ninth Street. I ate out of cans or took meals at a cafeteria around the corner. I shaved each morning, and I wore clean clothing every day, and I made myself busy although I had nothing to be busy about. I walked to Tompkins Square Park and played chess with some of the elderly pensioners who sunned themselves there. I wandered to the public library and read all manner of books and magazines. Frequently, but not invariably, I bought the
In the beginning I had actually answered some of those ads, but I learned quickly that this was a futile occupation. For the time being I had several thousand dollars of savings set aside, and the way I was living it would last quite awhile. When it ran out I would find a way to avoid starvation, some sort of day labor job, something anonymous.
There had been one job offer, Turk’s suggestion that I might help him cut heroin with sugar and quinine and package it for sale to his various outlets. “You want to make it on the outside,” he argued, “you got to get something sweet going. A cat like you or me, once he been inside, ain’t nobody going to make him president of U.S. Steel. You need to find a hustle.”
And Doug MacEwan’s suggestion, while geared more along socially acceptable lines, made much the same point. He thought I ought to go into business for myself, as small businessmen do not need to provide backgrounds and references for an employer’s satisfaction. I had almost as much difficulty seeing myself as the proprietor of a candy store as I did picturing myself in business with Turk. The best I could do was consider a mail-order business, something that would at least keep me away from my fellow man, and now and then I’d muddle through a library book on mail-order techniques. But as long as I had money, you see, I daydreamed of teaching again, and as long as the dream remained even vaguely alive, however impossible I might realize it to be, I could not take any other sort of career too seriously. When the money ran out it would be a different matter.
But I digress. What I remembered, sitting in the balcony, what I willed myself to remember, was not the course of the average day, the course of several months worth of days, but the course of one particular day.
I awoke. I showered, I shaved, I dressed. I breakfasted in my apartment; a glass of reconstituted orange juice, a cup of instant coffee, two slices of toast-
Details. Immaterial, forget them.
After breakfast I left the apartment I was dressed then in the same clothes I had later found, blood-covered, in room 402 at the Hotel Maxfield. I went-where? To the library? To the park?
No. No, I went up to Times Square. It was a good day, a beautiful not too hot and not too cold day, the air clearer than New York air usually is, and I walked to Times Square. It was a very long walk, and I covered the distance slowly. And I had slept late that morning. I must have reached Times Square around noon, perhaps a bit past noon.
And then what?
I certainly hadn’t begun drinking right away. Why couldn’t I remember it all? What was wrong?
Ah, yes.
I had wandered Forty-second Street-the shooting gallery, the Fascination parlor, the bookstores, the cafeterias, the whole tawdry stretch of the street from Broadway to Eighth Avenue and back again. I remembered it now as an aimless, pointless ramble. And yet, had I been sufficiently introspective at the time, I would have recognized the point of it all. For I was no stranger to Forty-second Street It had always been the starting point of my rambles, the embarkation point for bouts of drinking and whoring in those dim days before I murdered Evangeline Grant.
In a bookstore, a brightly lit bookstore stocked with nudist magazines and paperbound novels entitled Sin
I had not made love to a woman since Evangeline Grant, whom, as you may recall, I subsequently killed. I had not made love to a woman in over four years, in nearly four and one-half years, and I honestly thought I had lost all desire. I had since seen many pictures of girls, both clothed and nude. I had looked at them with admiration, with enthusiasm, but never with lust I had grown to feel that this was no longer a part of my life, that I had killed it when I killed Evangeline Grant.
And now one picture among many, a photograph which I would now be quite incapable of distinguishing from its bin-mates, had proved me wrong.
Yes. I remembered it now. Reeling out of there, stunned, honestly stunned, embarrassed beyond belief by the insistent and undeniable physical manifestation of this reaction, walking hunched oddly forward in ineffectual camouflage, certain that everyone was staring at me, scampering foolishly out of the dreary little shop. And automatically blindly stupidly following my erection down the street and around the corner to the nearest bar, where I promptly proved and discovered beyond any shadow of a doubt that I had not lost my taste for liquor, either.
I remembered the bar. It was one of those no-nonsense places where the price of every drink is posted on massive cardboard signs over the bar, with triple shots offered at special bargain rates. A drinking man’s bar, with no frills or unnecessary embellishments. “Its not fancy but it’s good.” An alcoholic’s Horn & Hardart.
I remembered taking out my wallet and extracting a dollar bill, and looking at it and putting it back, and taking out instead a ten-dollar bill and putting that on top of the bar. Proof that I knew, before the first drink, that I would be having a good deal more drinks than a single dollar would pay for.
I had not had a woman in over four years. I had not had a drink in over four years. I had the drink-I could even remember the brand, a cheap blended whiskey. I tossed it down, and coughed, and set the shot glass on top of the bar and motioned for a refill I remembered all of that. I remembered it vividly.
The Audie Murphy picture ended without my paying any attention to it. I lit a cigarette. The Randolph Scott picture started again. I looked at the clock a few yards to the left of the screen, blue hands, blue numerals. It was almost five o’clock. By now they knew. By now the alarm was probably out and in a few hours the early editions of the
I stayed where I was. For a while I watched the movie, and it was utterly unfamiliar to me, as if I had not already seen it from start to finish once that day. Neither the visual images nor the dialogue seemed even remotely familiar. How curious the mind is.
No one knows very much about blackouts, the how and why of them, all of that. Some heavy drinkers never have them. Some heavy drinkers always have them. And the great run of drinkers have tiny stretches of blankness; they lose the last half hour or so before bedtime, or have little hazy spots for the periods of intense drunkenness.
Often you can recapture bits of the memory that has been lost. You rarely get the whole thing, but you can dredge up bits and pieces, scraps and shreds. One memory is a clue, a handle to another chunk of memory, and while the jigsaw puzzle is never quite complete, a man can often put together enough of the pieces to get a good idea of the over-all design.
It was thus with Evangeline Grant. I remembered picking her up. I did not remember taking her to the hotel- one rather like the Maxfield, and no more than three blocks away. I remembered entering the room with her. I
