Me and the Devil: A Novel (25 page)

I whispered those words again as sleep overtook me in my bed, but I did not know to whom or to what I whispered them.

T
HE CROAKER WHO RELUCTANTLY GAVE ME THE BACLOFEN
had given me a prescription for forty-five ten-milligram pills. The prescription, which could be refilled only twice, stated that I was to take half a tablet three times a day for thirty days. And that is what I had been doing.

Dr. Ameisen had called from Paris some days ago and left a message for me saying that he was calling only to see how I was doing with the baclofen. His compassion impressed me greatly. I knew how busy he was, and while there was not a penny to be made from me, he showed more concern for me than the doctors who were shaking me down without barely bothering to know me. I had meant to call him back, but it was always too late in the day when I thought of doing so, and with the six-hour time difference, I didn’t want to bother him at night. It was early afternoon when I dialed his number, and I heard his voice.

“I’ve been taking the baclofen for about two weeks now, maybe a little longer,” I told him.

“And how do you feel?”

I told him that I felt no different.

“You still experience desires to drink? You don’t feel less anxiety?”

“I feel no difference,” I repeated. I was not about to tell him of the increasing sense of well-being that my new life was bringing me. I was not about to talk about this with any doctor. Though
I knew of no reason not to, I felt that there might be a reason of which I was not aware, or that a reason for regretting my honesty might arise in the future. So I remained guarded. I answered Olivier’s questions only so far as they related to my alcoholism and my yearning to be rid of it.

“How much are you taking?”

“Five milligrams three times a day. Fifteen milligrams a day.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “That is what you’re supposed to take for only the first day or so. Fifteen milligrams a day can have no effect on anyone. As I explained in my book, you should have increased the dose to thirty milligrams a day after the first day or so. And if thirty doesn’t work, you increase again.”

He went on to express exasperated disappointment that my doctor had not read or prescribed according to the case studies, medical papers, and abstracts reproduced in his book’s appendix.

I told him that I would immediately stop splitting pills and increase the dosage from five to ten milligrams three times a day, but each of the two refills of forty-five tablets would then last me only fifteen days, or altogether only a month, even if I did not need to increase the dosage again; and I had doubts that the doctor would give me more plentiful prescriptions with more plentiful refills.

“Ask him to cite one single incidence of reported side effects from baclofen at higher dosages. He will not be able to do so, because there is none.”

“But what if he refuses to increase the prescription? How will I get what I need without going through a lot of trouble?”

“If you were in Paris, I could treat you. A lot of doctors here could. The amount of baclofen being prescribed has risen greatly in Europe and it continues to rise. But in America there is ignorance and resistance.”

The hydra of addiction was big business, big money. Baclofen was not.

“I’ll start taking the ten milligrams three times a day,” I said. “If this doctor won’t give me what I need, I’ll get new doctors.”

“Increase the dosage,” he said, “then in a few days let me know how you feel.”

Again he impressed me. If other doctors even bothered to ask you about the effects of a medication that you had recently begun taking, they waited until your next paying visit.

I made up my mind to visit the nearby storefront Hindoo croaker, let him stick his finger up my ass, and see how he sat with giving me the sort of baclofen prescription I needed, as well as the Valium. And I would take a stroll through Chinatown to see how I fared with the doctors there.

And, yeah, I would schedule that colonoscopy with my internist. That would be a good opportunity to get things settled with him, one way or the other.

What, really, was this thing with the Valium anyway? The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. I was convinced that I felt no different, no better and no worse, with it or without it, before or after taking it. Wouldn’t the glass of cold milk, without the Valium, suffice as ritual enough?

My friend Peter Wolf had pulled into town from Boston for a few days, and we rendezvoused at the bar on Reade Street. I had my container of coffee, he had a cup of tea. It struck me that, though neither of us was drinking, our talk was no different than if we had swilled so much jive-ass small-batch whiskey that we could no longer tell the difference between it and Old Crow and were still at it hard and heavy.

We went on and on about just about all there was to go on and on about, from rereading Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” to Indian casinos to whether there was a feminine form of the word “Messiah” to the difference between how Bob Dylan played harmonica in the key of G by simply using a G harmonica but the old
blues guys played in the key of G by cross-playing a C harmonica in the second position. At one point we landed on my affinity for Valium.

I was surprised to hear Pete say that he experienced unpleasant aftereffects from Valium, though I had heard this from others. Entering medicine-man mode, we discussed how Valium differed from Xanax. Pete believed that while both drugs were similar, the anxiety-quelling properties of Xanax were greater than those of Valium, which worked more as a muscle relaxant.

Our pharmacology was good. I trusted it. I figured that, after living with them for so many years, we knew more about our own bodies and brains than any croaker who got his knowledge from book learning.

I felt good after whiling away the afternoon with Wolf. Our talk was always good medicine. On top of still feeling the effects of my night with Lorna, and looking forward to my night, just hours away, with Melissa, I didn’t need anything to relax my mind or body. I poured myself a glass of cold milk, took nothing with it, closed my eyes, and wandered.

Lorna. My willowy breeze. My darling sapling. What day was this? I had forgotten Palm Sunday. I had forgotten the full moon. The pear trees across from the bar on Reade Street were lush with white blossoms. Lorna. When was Easter? My willowy breeze, my darling sapling.

Lorna. I saw her cropping herself, sucking the blood and semen from my fingers. Rod of life and Lamb of God.

Beautiful hamadryad. The tree must not die, lest the spirit of the nymph die too.

The barracks. Those long, low two-family dwellings of whitewashed wood and shingled roofing, built after the war in rows on every overgrown, weed-ridden, rat-ridden, debris-ridden vacant lot to provide cheap housing for the doomed, downtrodden victorious
of god-knew-what from god-knew-where. At last we had people that we could look down upon. He lives in the barracks, our parents would say. The barracks all looked alike. Though they were newly constructed, by the time the curse of memory came to my childhood, they were all grayed, peeling, rotting, with roof shingles missing or hanging lopsided by single rusty nails.

The daughter of a family in one of those barracks was as healthy and as happy and as pretty a little thing as you could ever imagine. Her name was Karen and she was the first girl I kissed. We were three or four years old, all bundled up, sitting on a little sled on a snow-covered sidewalk, and for many years I had a photograph of this first kiss, one of those small old black-and-white pictures with the serrated white borders; and this always led me to believe that we were coaxed into this kiss by whoever it was who took the picture.

But most of the barracks-dwellers were not nice. They were bestial white trash from parts unknown, and they knew they were not wanted in the neighborhood.

The worst of them were the Fudgies. They lived a few blocks away. Their real name was something like LaForge or LaFurge, some fancy-sounding French shit, but if they were of distant French origin, they must have been some kind of homunculi descended from the first scumbag ever thrown into the Seine. Nobody called them the LaForges or whatever it was. Everybody called them the Fudgies.

The Fudgie I hated most of all was about twelve or thirteen when I was about four or five. Most of the Fudgies were ragpickers. I guess that with enough of them picking through garbage and selling what of it they could, they managed to put Fudgie food on the table to keep them going. The specialty of this particular Fudgie, the one I hated most, was old newspapers. He’d skulk around dragging this beat-up old red kiddie cart full of
bundles of newspapers that always seemed befouled and soggy. Maybe they just seemed that way because they had come to be in the possession of a Fudgie. One day he was standing on the pavement chucking rocks up into the branch of a tree.

“What you doin’?” I asked him.

He looked down at me. “What’s it look like I’m doin’?”

I looked up into the tree toward where he was throwing the stones. I saw a little bird nest.

“Got it!” he cried.

A little sparrow egg with a little baby sparrow splattered onto the street.

I was horrified. Growing up in an urban stinkhole, I was mesmerized and thrilled by every glimpse of nature that I came upon. A cocoon, a caterpillar, a monarch butterfly, a big black-winged butterfly, fireflies, a praying mantis, once even a walking stick, a bright red cardinal, a blue jay, a big strange-looking beetle, fat green tomato hornworms that found their way to every tomato plant that every old Italian woman planted in every available patch of earth, dandelions in the cracks of sidewalks and curbs, and every tree in every season. These were the beguiling beloved visitors from an enchanted world, a counter-world that I knew to be out there, that I spent hours lying on my back on pavements looking up at white clouds in blue skies envisioning and dreaming of escaping to. Now that even these little glimpses were no more to be glimpsed, I wondered what city children dreamt of escaping to that was not more dead and dire than where they already were.

That little splatter of egg and sparrow horrified me, and it angered me. If this Fudgie had not been more than twice my size and twice my age, I would have attacked him with intent to maim or kill. All the cursed lives of all the cursed Fudgies were as nothing compared to the life of the baby sparrow he had taken. I wanted to see a street splattered with Fudgies. They were a blight,
and I hoped that they would die and go to hell. Especially this one. Maybe this is when I began to lose belief in God. How could God let the sparrow die and the Fudgie live? God was a Fudgie. Death to the Fudgies, and death to Him.

So I did not attack the Fudgie, as I should have, as I would have if God had not already poisoned me with fear and cowardice. Most likely I ran to my mother and cried, and tried without succeeding to tell why I was crying.

Not long after this, there he was again, with that rusted red kiddie wagon filled with newspapers, standing close to the same tree. In his hand was a big dirty butcher knife, with which he was stabbing into the tree with repeated downward thrusts. His face was contorted, which made him even more repulsive-looking than he already was. I saw that he had hacked through the bark and was now hacking with ugly grunts at the softer, milky inner cambium of the tree.

“What you doin’?” I asked him.

He looked down at me.

“I’m killin’ this tree,” he said.

I looked into the gaping splintered opening he was hacking with those violent downward thrusts of the butcher knife.

“Why you doin’ that?” I asked him.

This time he didn’t stop to look down at me.

“ ’Cause I want to,” he said.

Twice my size, twice my age, and this time he had a butcher knife, too. Still, I should have attacked him. Still, I should have tried to gather up all that was within me and hack into him with his own stupid knife. But the fear with which that stupid spook-show God had poisoned me, that treacly blood of that sissy little Lamb, that coward Christ, was still in me. I probably ran again to my mother and cried, and tried without succeeding to explain what I was crying about.

Hubert Selby Jr. used to say that when he was a young man he had no choice but to believe in God, the old anthropomorphic God of his childhood. He had to, he said; and this was because the mad idea of grappling that fucking cocksucker of a God to the ground and fucking Him up the ass while beating Him—the
need
to do so—was all that was keeping him alive. God and the need to leave him raped and beaten on the ground were one. I loved Selby looking back and telling of this, and I understood what he was saying. But I myself had never felt anything of the kind. It was good enough for me to just turn my back on the whole cheap spook show and walk away. As far as I was concerned God and the Fudgies could go off together and fuck one another up the ass and procreate a new litter of Fudgies and true believers. They were one and the same. The Fudgies would inherit the earth, of which God was the rotten Jew landlord.

Years afterward, looking back at my later childhood and adolescence, I saw that most of the few acts of violence I committed were, no matter the victim, really directed at that Fudgie, who by then had vanished from the neighborhood but not from my mind. Maybe they were also directed a bit at that God who had vanished with him. Selby and I had a lot in common. Maybe more than I knew.