The Man Who Cried I Am (27 page)

“An old problem, really. I couldn't, I couldn't—” and Shea's voice rose in muted anguish above the sound of the steadily falling rain. “Goddamn
it!
” he said, stomping his foot on the rug. “I couldn't get it up, Max. We'd be there and, I'll be a sonofabitch, I'd want to so much it was killing me, and I couldn't get it up until I told her I couldn't get it up and then it was all right. For months, it was the same, and with every girl I've ever known. Once I tell them, it's all right, but it's like I have to tell them every time I see them.”

Max looked at the floor. Goddamn. He's going to hate me tomorrow. Maybe he hates me
now
. It won't ever be the same. There'll be nothing at
Pace
now. No man should make a revelation like that to another man,
especially
if they are supposed to be friends. “Maybe you were trying too hard,” Max said. “That can be murder. Too much hooch is bad, too.”

“It wasn't either one,” Shea said sadly. “I just couldn't get it up.”

Max thought, Didn't he have anyone else to tell this to? Is he so bankrupt of friends that I'm his best friend? Maybe because he knows I don't move in his circle; I'm certainly not going to tell his friends, because I don't know them. He did not look at Shea. He thought of Mildred, her laughter, the white sports car. What had she thought the instant her eyes widened in recognition? Gone now, tearing through the middle of Manhattan. She had been sitting on the rider's side. Who was the driver?

“You ever had any trouble like that?” Shea asked.

Kill him, Max thought,
kill
'im. Tell him
never
, not once in your life. Max studied his man, measured him. Should he decline the role of God or accept it? Shea worked hard to be honest and to do that you had to ask shallow questions, not questions at all, but make statements about yourself. If he suspected that Max and Regina had been lovers and Max had not had the problem getting it up, then Shea was going to hate him not only for hearing the confession but for having a harder cock. Harder and up longer. “Doesn't everybody?” Max said, tossing down his drink.

“Really?”

“Come on. You know it.”

Shea brightened a bit. “I thought that might be the case … ah, Max, I'm screwed up and you know it and I know it.”

Max shrugged. He felt bone weary now. Something very old was starting all over again. After the operation he was staying out of complications, and he wasn't going to make any. Jesus, two operations on a man's ass. “Look, man,” he said to Shea, “You're going to be all right. Talk to a headshrinker, maybe. But I'll lay ten to one that you're going to wind up with one of the stiffest pricks in the city, maybe the whole Eastern seaboard. You won't be able to get enough pussy; your reputation will spread from here south to Washington and from here north to Boston. You are going to wear chicks out. You are going to tear trim up. When you walk down Madison Avenue, the guys in the Look Building are going to say, “There's goes a
cock
sman's cocksman!”

The series on Jackie Robinson completed, Zutkin's articles finished, Max checked into the hospital so he could be out in time for Christmas, give in to the season, the celebration of the impossible occasion, the rich man's chance to dissipate the image of Scrooge; celebrate the lie and in consequence celebrate the massacre of the babes (while one escaped, that one—with his mother, Miriamne, made Mary by the
goyim
, secret bride to Antipater—victim of his father's wrath for striving for his father's throne through Herodian power and the Hebrew law of succession through Mother; and Joseph and an ass. Lies again.) Celebrate the named and unnamed wars, the heroes and cowards in them, the cruelties of them, drink to the civilizations brought crashing together in hate and being civilized no more, toast the miseries of the naked, starving, illiterate poor; pay homage to the squadrons of cherubic young faces wrapped in swaddling collars, loosing soprano Christmas chords upon the world; celebrate the millions upon millions of acres of trees ripped screaming from the skin of the earth to molder in corners under costumes of glass and metal junk; and, sadly, celebrate Handel and Bach, the sopranos, tenors and
basso profundos
who sing the lie as though they believed it, and in fact, make it believable; celebrate the unsmiling jingle of hard coins and the surreptitious rustle of dollar notes; celebrate the choruses of the Reginas shrieking in depthless anguish; drink to the unloved who haunt the high places and galloping winds with only water or asphalt below, or drink to the pill-takers who leave electric lights and radios and television sets on to ease their going. Yes, all of that, but he wanted to be home for Christmas.

In the hospital, smelling of wax and starched sheets and rubbing alcohol, they took his temperature, pulse and blood pressure. Up from the lab a cutie with pipette and tube for the complete blood count. The intern asked him questions in his most bored bedside manner. They did not feed him. The next day they gave him pills and shaved his buttocks. And after, through the swinging door, they rolled a stretcher. For him. Then he was on an elevator filled with sweet-smelling nurses, young, and even the starched rustle of their uniforms made them somehow more alluring. The whiteness, the purity of white did it. It made him want to scatter some dirty old semen all over it, the whiteness, make it more human. OR. Lights overhead, faces darting in over him. I am not going to die from shock or some jerk's stupidity, he told himself. Gently they held his arm, pushed the needle into the big vein and slipped in the sodium pentothal. Max went over the precipice.

He was depressed. People whittling gleefully away at your flesh. Did they flush it away to join the shit and cloudy condoms floating in the rivers? Did fish nibble at it, a delicacy?
Look, man, here's a piece of Max Reddick! Have a taste!
Just what did they do with the flesh? It was a little bit of dying, already,
faster
. Even with their clean sheets, drugs, voluptuous nurses, flowers, diets, stainless steel tools, you were dying. But you knew that—piece of flesh, massed calcium, hunk of gristle, haphazard bit of matter, product of warm, ancient seas, still steaming lands wracked by unimaginable diastrophisms; the dark, dark memories of that time (and the puzzle—reptile and fowl related—love them birds, have snake fever????) contained where, in the blood, the very atoms of the bone? Why remember more than most the vast laboring distance so filled with internecine horror and commonplace death, the gift of that raving bitch, evolution, nature, now made gentle with the title, Mother, and keep crying I Am?

You am whut, Max Reddick, you piece of crap? Turd, Lost a small hunk of asshole. Big deal. You am whut?

The end of the line, as far as it's come
.

Whut fuckin' line?

Man
.

Man? You tougher than rats, bedbugs, roaches; angleworms, bluebottles, houseflies?

Yes. I kill them all
.

Tee, hee, yeah, but you don't breed as fast, and whut you breed, man, sometimes, I just don't know
.

That is not the same and you know it; an insect or a rodent can never be a king. I am. I am a man. I am a king
.

A
whut?!

A king
.

You am a fool. Look around you. You ain't related to these other fools?

Yes, and we are kings
.

O, Max, whut a king look like with maggots crawling out his eye sockets?

I don't mean then. I mean now. Nobody counts then. It's all over
.

It's all over now. It was over when you were
born.
Youse a fool. Got chick nor child. Whut you king of or over or under?

I told you. The line as far as it's come
.

Youse ain't no king. Know whut youse is? Wanna know? Youse a stone blackass nigger. Hee, hee, hee. Say sumpin'. I'm right, ain't I? Tongue fell off, nigger?

Your momma's a nigger
.

Oops! The dozens, is it? I made you salty, eh? Now you slip me in the dozens, just like that. I told you, you was a nigger
.

Your mother's a nigger
.

Hee, hee, well, your mother don't wear no drawers
.

How could she, when she was giving birth to you
—
my son
.

Ha! So you know your mother don't wear no drawers. How's that? Youse a motherfuckin' motherfucker, Oedipus Rex. Thass how come you knows so much
.

I know so much because I'm your daddy
.

Lissen to old king crap
.

I am. I am a king
.

Youse an ass. This ain't nuthin'; this ain't shit and needer is you
.

I
Am,
I told you, damn it, I
Am.

Fresh flowers surrounded him and their scent filled the room. Granville Bryant, sitting in a chair, smiled at him. Beside him was another boy, a very pretty one, with violet eyes and flaxen hair and the tan of a youth always in the sun.

Granville said, “Well now, Max, how are you feeling?”

Max nodded his head slowly.

“Now you can't get away, can you? You can't avoid lunches or slip away from parties, can you, Max?”

“Cigarette,” Max said.

Bryant made a slight, almost unseen gesture and the youth glided forward, a glittering, golden cigarette case opening in his hand. In the other there appeared, magically, a lighter. After Max had taken a pull on the cigarette, Bryant said, “They tell me that's just like having a baby.” He laughed softly and smiled at his boy. “Never had one of those. One of my friends did though. He was very careful after that. Sailors and writers—oh, they can be so sadistic!” Bryant crossed a leg—elegantly—and leaned back as if preparing to tell Max something important. Or a story.

Once upon a time, and it seemed to Max that just recently he had been having silly dialogues with someone, an object was seen hurtling down from an Eastern sky. When the nearest townspeople arrived, they found the object, curiously, large enough to have contained people, but no one was in it. First, it was thought that Buddha had cast sinners from the heavens and the sinners had evaporated in transit. Many, many years later, centuries, it was thought that the object was a part of the original Black Stone hidden away by the evil Qarmata in the Far East. Then the object was forgotten altogether; it was covered by swells of the earth, the dirt and rock. The truth, however, was that the object was a craft from another planet and the creatures in it, who looked very much like humans, their planet having the same makeup as ours, were stranded here. Looking very much like humans, they mixed with the populace without attracting attention to themselves. Being of superior natures, they soon mastered the skills of the earthmen, then went on to become their betters. These were men who did not know women. By our standards the first group were extraordinarily handsome. On their planet females were used only to keep the population constant. These men knew each other. But, in order to appear as genuine earthmen, they came to know earthwomen, and their handsomeness was altered in their offspring, some of which were like them and some just like other earthmen. They traveled across the earth and across the five seas, the succeeding generations of these men from space, and in due course they became stevedores and bankers, philosophers and hoodlums, musicians and clerks, writers and actors, unskilled laborers and atomic scientists; they became soldiers and sailors, warriors and generals. They were of all conditions, high, low and in between, and they were all colors; no discrimination existed between them. They could tell their own from an arch of the brow, a vocal inflection, a bend of the wrist, the pelvic walk. Slowly, over the centuries, they came to control many of man's efforts on earth, but they did it secretly. They were laughed at, hated, legislated against, harrassed, made vulnerable, all of which made them band together more quickly for protection. They were always aided by the ability of the earth people to rationalize them as persons with an inherently ill nature; earth men traced that nature through legend, literature, art, business and rumor. During this time, the most brilliant made their way into the offices of ministers, kings and presidents with the purpose of serving whatever nation they found themselves in loyally and to the full. Some were found out and dismissed. Others continued on, trying to improve the earth. Slowly, ever so slowly, with the power well within their grasp, they will improve the earth. Women will be defeminized by them, made nude, and the mystery of their bodies will exist no more. Or, if they are clothed, their breasts will be flattened, their hips squared, their mouths and hair painted in outlandish colors. They will, these men from out there and their descendants, design men's clothes, make them more feminine. There will be no other styles available. They will continue to work with the languages. In polite company, few people will say aloud, “gay,” “queer,” “faggot,” “fruit,” “queen”—they will say homosexual or nothing at all and they will make works by homosexuals more and more acceptable. They will seek in the legislatures of the world surcease from police and other social harrassment. However, with all these things against them, they have taken on the burdens of the races of which they are now a part. There are small problems: some who do not belong try to in the most ostentatious fashion. And some who do are always fighting it. Max, I know that secretly I am called the Great White Father because I help young Negro writers get started. I did not help you, Max, so you have no cause to be grateful to me on that score. I don't even want your gratitude for the job; you deserved it. I have told you our story. Be tolerant. We too are outcasts. We have a natural empathy for your people. How well we understand your impatience!

You don't understand
nuthin'!
Max was thinking. He saw that the chair beside his bed was empty. Where the hell is he? Where's that kid? That cigarette! Max floundered in bed looking for it, until he thought to look in the ashtray. There was one cigarette butt in it. Max rang for the nurse.