Sometimes they blend indiscriminately and the father who has been selling matches all day with tubercular frenzy finds himself eating the mattress. Among the poor only that which takes hours to prepare is served. The gourmet loves to eat in a restaurant which is odorous; the poor man gets sick to the stomach when he climbs the stairs and gets a whiff of what's coming to him. The rich man loves to walk the dog around the block—to work up a mild appetite. The poor man looks at the sick bitch lying under the tubs and feels that it would be an act of mercy to kick it in the guts. Nothing gives him an appetite. He is hungry, perpetually hungry for the things he craves. Even a breath of fresh air is a luxury. But then he's not a dog, and so nobody takes him out for an airing, alas and alack. I've seen the poor blighters leaning out of the window on their elbows, their heads hanging in their hands like Jack-o'-Lanterns: it doesn't take a mind-reader to know what they're thinking about. Now and then a row of tenements is demolished in order to open up ventilating holes. Passing these blank areas, spaced like missing teeth, I've often imagined the poor, bleeding blighters to be still hanging there on the window-sills, the houses torn down but they themselves suspended in mid-air, propped up by their own grief and misery, like torpid blimps defying the law of gravitation. Who notices these airy spectres? Who gives a fuck whether they're suspended in the air or buried six feet deep? The show is the thing, as Shakespeare says. Twice a day, Sundays included, the show goes on. If it's short of provender you are, why stew a pair of old socks. The Minsky Brothers are dedicated to giving entertainment. Hershey Almond Bars are always on tap, good before or after you jerk off. A new show every week —with the same about old cast and the same old jokes. What would really be a catastrophe for the Minsky gents would be for Cleo to be stricken with a double hernia. Or to get pregnant. Hard to say which would be worse. She could have lockjaw or enteritis or claustrophobia, and it wouldn't matter a damn. She could even survive the menopause. Or rather, the Minskys could. But hernia, that would be like death—
What went on in Ned's mind during this brief intermission I could only conjecture. «Pretty horrible, isn't it?» he remarked, chiming in with some observation I had made. He said it with a detachment that would have done credit to a scion of Park Avenue. Nothing anyone could do about it, is what he meant. At twenty-five he had been the art director in an advertising concern; that was five or six years ago. Since then he had been on the rocks, but adversity had in no way altered his views about life. It had merely confirmed his basic notion that poverty was something to be avoided. With a good break he would once again be on top, dictating to those whom he was now fawning upon.
He was telling me about a proposition he had up his sleeve, another «unique» idea for an advertising campaign. (How to make people smoke more— without injuring their health.) The trouble was, now that he was on the other side of the fence nobody would listen to him. Had he still been art director everybody would have accepted the idea immediately as a brilliant one. Ned saw the irony of the situation, nothing more. He thought it had something to do with his front—perhaps he didn't look as confident as he used to. If he had a better wardrobe, if he could lay off the booze for a while, if he could work up the right enthusiasm.... and so on. Marcelle worried him. She was taking it out of him. With every fuck he gave her he felt that another brilliant idea had been slaughtered. He wanted to be alone for a while so that he could think things out. If Marcelle were on tap only when he needed her and not turn up at odd hours—just when he was in the middle of something—it would be ducky.
«You want a bottle opener, not a woman,» I said.
He laughed, as though he were slightly embarrassed.
«Well, you know how it is,» he said. «Jesus, I like her all right... she's fine. Another girl would have ditched me long ago. But—.»
«Yes, I know. The trouble is she sticks.»
«It sounds rotten, doesn't it?»
«It is rotten,» said I. «Listen, did it ever occur to you that you may never again be an art director, that you had your chance and you muffed it? Now you've got another chance—and you're muffing it again. You could get married and become... well, I don't know what... any damned thing... what difference does it make? You have a chance to lead a normal, happy life—on a modest plane. It doesn't seem possible to you, I suppose, that you might be better off driving a milk wagon? That's too dull for you, isn't it? Too bad! I'd have more respect for you as ditch digger than as president of the Palm Olive Soap Company. You're not burning up with original ideas, as you imagine, you're simply trying to retrieve something that's lost. It's pride that's goading you, not ambition. If you had any originality you'd be more flexible: you'd prove it in a hundred different ways. What gripes you is that you failed. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to you. But you don't know how to exploit your misfortunes. You were probably cut out for something entirely different, but you won't give yourself a chance to find out what. You revolve your obsession like a rat in a trap. If you ask me, it's pretty horrible... more horrible than the sight of these poor doomed bastards hanging out of the windows. They're willing to tackle anything; you're not willing to lift your little finger. You want to go back to your throne and be the king of the advertising world. And if you can't have that you're going to make everybody around you miserable. You're going to castrate yourself and then say that somebody cut your balls off....»
The musicians were tuning up; we had to scoot back to our seats. Mona and Marcelle were already seated, buried in a deep conversation. Suddenly there was a full blare from the orchestra pit, like a snarl of prussic acid over a tight tarpaulin. The red-haired fellow at the piano was all limp and boneless, his fingers falling like stalactites on the keyboard. People were still streaming back from the lavatories. The music got more and more frenetic, with the brass and the percussion instruments getting the upper hand. Here and there a switch of lights blinked, as if there were a string of electrified owls opening and closing their eyes. In front of us a young lad was holding a lighted match to the back of a post-card, expecting to discover the whore of Babylon—or the Siamese twins rolling in a double-jointed orgasm.
As the curtain went up the Egyptian beauties from the purlieus of Rivington Street began to unlimber: they flung themselves about like flounders just released from the hook. A scrawny contortionist did the pin-wheel, then folded up like a jack-knife and, after a few flips and flops, tried to kiss her own ass. The music grew soupy, alternating from one rhythm to another and getting nowhere. Just when everything seemed on the verge of collapse the floundering chorines did a fade-out, the contortionist picked herself up and limped away like a leper, and out limped away like a leper, and out came a pair of incongruous buffoons pretending to be full-blown lechers. The back curtain drops and there they are standing in the middle of a street in the city of Irkutsk. One of them wants a woman so bad his tongue is hanging out. The other one is a connoisseur of horse flesh. He has a little apparatus, a sort of Open Sesame, which he will sell to his friend for 964 dollars and 32 cents. They compromise on a dollar and a half. Fine. A woman comes walking down the street. She's from Avenue A. He talks French to her, the fellow who bought the apparatus. She answers in Volapuk. All he has to do is turn on the juice and she flings her arms around him. This goes on in ninety-two variations, just as it did last week and the week before—as far back as the days Bob Fitzimmons, in fact. The curtain drops and a bright young man with a microphone steps out of the wings and croons a romantic ditty about the aeroplane delivering a letter to his sweatheart in Caledonia.
Now the flounders are out again, this time disguised as Navajos. They reel about the electric camp-fire. The music switches from «Pony Boy» to the «Kashmiri Song» and then to «Rain in the Face». A Latvian girl with a feather in her hair stands like Hiawatha, looking towards the land of the setting sun. She has to stand on tip-toe until Bing Crosby Junior finishes fourteen quatrains of Amerindian folklore written by a cow-puncher from Hester Street. Then a pistol shot is fired, the chorines whoop it up, the American flag is unfurled, the contortionist somersaults through the block-house, Hiawatha does a fandango, and the orchestra becomes apoplectic. When the lights go out the white-haired mother from the lavatory is standing by the electric chair waiting to see her son burn. This heart-rending scene is accompanied by a falsetto rendition of «Silver Threads Among the Gold». The victim of justice is one of the clowns who will be out in a moment with a piss-pot in his hand. He will have to measure the leading lady for a bathing suit. She will bend over obligingly and spread her ass so that he can get the measurements absolutely correct. When that's over she will be the nurse in the lunatic asylum, armed with a syringe full of water which she will squirt down his pants. Then there will be two leading ladies attired in negligee. They sit in a cosy furnished flat waiting for their boy friends to call. The boys call and in a few moments they start taking their pants off. Then the husband returns and the boys hop around in B. V. D's, like crippled sparrows.
Everything is calculated to the minute. By the time 10:23 strikes Cleo is ready to do her second and final number. She will have just about eight and a half minutes to spare, according to the terms of the contract. Then she will have to stand in the wings for another twelve minutes and take her place with the rest of the cast for the finale. Those twelve minutes burn her up. They are precious minutes which are completely wasted. She can't even get into her street clothes; she must show herself in all her glory and give just one little squirm or two as the
