Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (31 page)

But as I walked the street seeking a breakfast counter, I saw a man walking toward me. As we neared each other, I recognized him as Al Wilson. I stopped. He came straight up to me, as though he'd known I would be there, and had hurried to meet me. There was no preamble, no greetings between two people who hadn't seen each other in years. He merely came in close, looked straight at me with those faintly protruberant eyes, and said in an undertone, "When you see Stan Skirvin, tell him to examine pages 476 to 495 in T. E. Lawrence's SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM."

Then he walked past me and was gone.

I have read those pages in every hardcover and paperback edition of Lawrence of Arabia's book ever printed; I have never found the slightest clue to what mystery may be hidden there.

But I'll tell you this: Al Wilson walked out of a chill Philadelphia morning in 1953 to tell me that, and I'll be damned if I don't believe that if I can ever unravel what he meant, I'll be rich, Willy Loman, rich as Croseus!

And that's the story of how I was a hired gun.

Honest.

--Los Angeles, 1973

In a summer heavy with sunshine and promises, I came to New York. It was the end of the confused times for me--and in many ways the beginning of even more confusion.

College had confused me with its confounding regimentation and inability to provide realities, answers; my family had exposed itself for the inelastic failure I had always known it to be, unconsciously; love had been a high-flown word whose meaning had changed with every pretty smile; I was, simply enough, a seeker.

New York magically held all my answers. On streets of purest gold I would seek my fortune, find it, and mold a life of meaning, achievement and satisfaction.

I took a room uptown across from Columbia University, in what had once been (thirty years before) a fashionable hotel. I paid ten dollars a week for a room with an unobstructed view of the air shaft, and cooking privileges I shared with two spinster schoolteachers, three college students, two Chinese exchange students and a constantly drunken Puerto Rican day-laborer. It was a quiet place, whose walls retained the odor of Cantonese cooking, Gallo Wine and that never-to-be-forgotten smell of disinfectant mixed with urine. I had my radio, my books, my typewriter and a good bed.

If there had ever been happiness, this was it, languishing in a simplicity of bodily functions that I had thought long since lost and forgotten.

At first the writing came slowly, amateurishly, but in my fervor to write, and say what I had to say--to hell with the fact that others had said it all before me, far better; I had to write--I stayed behind the machine, working far into the nights, sleeping most of the mornings, then making the editorial rounds in the afternoon.

Again, it was the good life. Except for the loneliness.

There were friends, of course: Billy and Stella Soles who had come from California and subsisted on kidney bean soup, the publication of an amateur science fiction journal and endless bed-bouts; Aggie Vinson, a selling writer with a cool manner and a brotherly affection for my stumbling attempts at writing; Pernell Morris and his sister Beth, who ran a newsstand on Broadway and invited me over perhaps twice a week for a kosher meal; others.

But there was still the feeling I was walking alone, that I had no human goal toward which to work. That I was out there swinging by myself, and if it were to end tomorrow no one could really be troubled. The ripples would roll out and disappear, the water would close over and silence would replace me.

Perhaps that is the essence of loneliness: to feel that silence will replace you.

So when my money ran out, and I landed the job selling books and souvenirs in the Times Square bookshop (seven P.M. to three in the morning) I decided to throw a small blast. God knows my room wasn't large enough for the full Elsa Maxwell treatment, but nonetheless I invited everyone I had even remotely grown to know, and urged them to bring friends. It was the perfectly ordinary sort of thing one does when the loneliness gets too oppressive, too obstinately endless.

It was an ordinary thing, and when I think back on it I want to cry. It brings on those dream fantasies about going back in time five minutes before the event, and just not doing it. How I've wished for those five minutes to live over again. Would it have saved her--I think not.

But it might have saved me.

They started arriving early, and the first ones were the Columbia students who wanted to souse-up their dates, lay them and get them back before Barnard curfew. They came with eighty-nine-cent bottles of Chianti and with routines borrowed from comedians' LPs. They were pretty much an empty lot, all sound and not a helluva lot of fury, but they made good background noise and as bookends they eminently served the purpose of decoration.

At about nine o'clock Aggie arrived carrying a brown paper sack with a bottle of Pernod in it, and he flashed both the label and a secret smile as he retreated to a far corner. The label was the come-on and the secret smile said, The dishwater booze is for the tourists, podnuh, but the goodies is for us.

Billy and Stella blew in noisily, with a bowl of clam dip plastic-covered, and a box of stiff potato chips for dipping. Of all the horrors of the civilized world, I had decided clam, oyster and bleu cheese dips were the worst, and of the worst, Stella Soles's dips were the dippiest.

I beamed and thanked them. It smelled like decaying bodies.

Stella and Billy snuggled down on the sofabed and began pawing each other immediately. It was very much like the hippo and the dik-dik bird. Stella was perhaps six feet, three inches and big... really big, across the chest, across the shoulders, in the hips ... a big woman. Billy was a gnat. He was barely five four, and wore his hair in a style reminiscent of Farmer Al Falfa. When he went at her, it was like watching a dwarf storm the Bastille. But they loved each other almost outrageously, and the whining sound of Stella calling, "Bill-ee ... Billll-ee!" was a familiar sound in our building.

The mating call of the great musk ox.

The party was both dying and phoenixly rising when the knock came at the door. I went over without difficulty--for it was one of those parties where everyone settles down in an orderly, out-of-the-way manner--and opened the door.

She had come with three fags, each dressed entirely in black, and next to their lean, hard-muscled litheness her tiny white-swathed figure was a shock.

Her face was so clear and direct, the features arranged as they might have been by a simpering cameo-carver who saw perfection in the face of disorder, I was truly startled. I had no idea who she was, but I instantly related to her, instantly desired her, instantly saw her image of me rise up and be greeted with attention. The three homosexuals with her distressed me, for I was very nearly pathological in my abhorrence for those of the gay set--but the girl was so arresting I let them pass.

She came into my single room, smiling like a street gamine, and found a place for herself and her retinue by the far window. It was too much; my eyes followed her as though I'd lost all volition or personal desire except to be near her, even if it was only by sight.

I followed them and started making introductions ... for the first time in the evening they went badly. Inevitably they were set straight and she said her name was Stephie Cook, her friends were Blank, Blank and Blank Blank. Who the hell listened, who the hell cared what marcelled titles they had given themselves. That she was a queen of the fag set did not seem to offend me. Before, when I had run into a seemingly normal girl surrounded and attended by queers, I had drawn my own conclusions as to the girl's personality and sex habits. But with Stephie, somehow, it was entirely different. She was straight, I knew it, I could feel it, she was interested in me from the first, and I--by that weird alchemical nature of attraction--was completely in her power.

As the evening wore down, we gravitated toward one another on imbecile pretext: would you like a glass of Pernod? Do you work? Have you really read all these books? Where do you live?

The homosexuals seemed not to mind, smiling like indulgent dueñas at Stephie as she nuzzled closer to me in a dim corner by the record player.

Sometime during the decaying last moments of the party, without either of us saying it aloud, we knew she would stay with me that night.

Aggie seemed to know, too. Perhaps it was that he knew me so well, took such a bemused view of my goings-on, and wished me well or perhaps he knew because he was also a writer who felt he had to know people to write honestly.

As he left, he raised the empty Pernod bottle in a pseudo-centurion salute, mumbled, "Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc," and grinned his way out of the room. Billy and Stella left soon after. They had been the last--the coeds and their spatula-handed paramours having checked out hours before, the three gay boys long since departed to their contorted repose--and when the door shut after them, we stared at each other from our seats without moving.

"Would you like a pair of my pajamas?" I asked. She nodded and gave me a look that was half-affection and half-trust. It was quite unlike anything I'd ever seen in a woman's face before.

I found my last laundry return had included only one pair of pajamas, so I offered her the tops. She took them, went down the hall to the bathroom and changed while I did the same in the room, and she returned as I was crawling into bed.

Wearing my oversized pajama tops, the sleeves rolled well above the wrists, the tails hanging down past her thighs, she was a Dresden doll figurine, come to life. It was an entirely commonplace, entirely believable and trite situation; I knew it had happened to a million other guys with a million other girls, but for me, it was the most astounding, the most hypnotizing experience of my life. In a matter of hours my loneliness had been ended.

She came to bed and we lay there talking for hours. We did not make love that night; we slept soundly, holding each other.

She lived in Brooklyn, and I would come running up out of the subway entrance, gathering speed as I raced down the half block to her building and--Doug Fairbanks-style--would bunch my muscles and leap, catching the railing of the little balcony that faced off her room. I would catch it, pull myself up and throw myself onto the balcony. It had all the demented romantic imagery of a Romeo seeking his Juliet. It was our own personal route to one another. And then the French doors would open into the broom closet that she rented as a room. It was perhaps five feet across and twelve feet long, a narrow coffin of a room whose only advantage was that little balcony. Her bookshelf was on the wall over the racklike bed, and her bureau was shoved into a niche on the opposite wall. Posters of Eglevsky, Maria Tallchief and the Ballet Russe covered that wall opposite the bed; staring at us all through the short nights of muggy passion and unsatisfied demands.

In that room I grew to know Stephie more intimately than I had ever known anyone before. Not merely her body, which she gave rarely, unsatisfactorily, painfully. But her mind, and that commodity I had always thought was folly, her soul. But Stephie had a soul, one that at first confused me and invited attention; one that soon exposed itself for what it was--the soul of a demon.

Her thoughts were dark, strange, troubled.

She dwelled on facets of life that I had never even known existed. One night she sat smoking, her legs folded under her, and said:

"l saw a boy run over a cat today, with his bike."

I looked up from the book of Jackson Pollock prints we had gone in on together, not really hearing what she had said, but suddenly letting it filter through, and catching meaning from her intention to explain. "Oh?" I said.

"Yes," she explained, "he ran over it lengthwise, and the guts came out of its mouth like a pound of raw hamburger; its eyes were bulged and there was a tire track up its back and through the center of the spilled innards. Ants were--"

"Jeezus, Stephie!" I shouted. "For God's sake, what the hell is the matter with you?" I had a strong stomach, but this clinical attention to morbid detail gagged me.

She shrugged, got up and walked out onto the balcony, still smoking. She looked so tiny against the massed darkness of Brooklyn at night.

She was a tiny, delicate girl. Tiny. Delicate. Like a cell of botulism.

How had it happened? How had something so pure and innocent and--the word seems alien to me, but somehow appropriate--charming become so demented, so twisted and destructive? Could it have been me ... could it have been that I had taken Stephie from paths she knew, paths that led deeper into the darkness of her own fears and past torments, and tried to lead her on a new path, out of the darkness? Was it that? Or is it preordained that some men will instinctively seek out those women who are worst for them, women who are good with other men but become evil in the hands of the wrong one? It tormented me, it haunted me, as the days went by and we continued to hurt each other in terrible, unnameable ways. Little ways that would have no meaning taken individually, but collectively painted a haunted canvas by Tchelitchew or Max Ernst.

There, existing in a chilly, tormented half-world of metamorphosed loneliness and vague desires, I sought ways to bedevil myself. I went far out of my way to discover trouble, to cultivate it, to urge its flagellant attentions on myself. Perhaps that was it: perhaps it was the smell of desperation and hopelessness on me that had attracted Stephie. Now, later, thinking on it, I have no doubt that a healthy man, someone not seeking the nit-picking of bits of destruction, would have avoided her.

Stephie was a Typhoid Mary, a plague-bearer, and only someone desiring illness would have rubbed up against her.

One night I had a date with her--it was my single night-off from the bookstore; usually I took the subway during the still hours after work; Times Square at three A.M. is another world, filled with weird types and wanderers who will never find their paths out of the darkness; riding to Brooklyn in that peculiarly No-Doz-chilled world was a surrealistic experience--and I had stopped off to buy her a trinket. It was a silver lavaliere; it had only cost a few dollars, but there was always this intense feeling in me that I might break through her wall of strange and disturbing distantness with a word, a gift, a kiss, a gesture. I never did, of course, but the attempts were constantly being made.

I see them now as adolescent attempts to buy her, but at the time I thought they were unselfish. Was this a refusal on my part really to give of myself? Was it perhaps an attempt to gain without offering myself exposed? Did I sense she had the power to cut and hurt?

With the little silver pendant in its nest of cotton, the box tucked into my pocket, I vaulted to the balcony. The doors were locked.

I waited, sitting against the cold night with my back to the French doors, until early morning. I fell asleep that way, and only chance prevented the beat cop from seeing me there like some fetus-positioned cat-burglar. She didn't come home till almost three that afternoon. By then I was so sunk into a waiting stupor that even when she opened the French doors and I fell sidewise, half into her room, I didn't realize she had come back.