A Diet of Treacle Read online

  Two years in Korea had happened to you, Joe would answer—two years in Korea shooting at people and having the bastards shoot back at you. You had stumbled around, freezing, mud up to your neck and bullets all over the damned place. And then you had had a year in college on the GI bill, the professors throwing things at you that had neither made sense nor mattered a hell of a lot, and there had been nothing to do and no place to go and nobody to be with.

  That’s what happened to you, Joe would decide. You had been a good kid and they had sent you to Korea to make the world safe for Syngman Rhee, who had been nothing but a fascist bastard to begin with and who was finished now anyway and the Koreans behind half-a-dozen eight balls. They had sent you over there and when they had brought you back there had been nothing stateside for you. Nothing had mattered any more, nothing had fit any more, and when you had gone home to Rochester there had been nobody to talk to. The same people had been there, the same guys—even if they had aged a year or two they had only gotten deader from the neck up. Your folks had been there but it hadn’t been the same with them, and the girls had been there and it hadn’t been the same with them, either, and all in all Rochester hadn’t been worth a damn and New York University had been worth less of a damn and the whole world had gotten dead set on driving you out of your alleged mind.

  Sure, Joe thought.

  Or, his mood alternating, he would accuse himself: You’re just a no-good bastard and you’ve screwed up everything you’ve ever touched. Yeah, you had been a happy enough guy in high school. You had never had a thought in your life and you had never done anything except swing bats at baseballs and bang silly little girls in back seats. So you had gone through basic training and had started shaking when they sent live ammo ten feet over your head. So you had shipped to Korea and had aimed your gun at the sky most of the time because you had been too scared to kill anybody. You hadn’t had enough guts to have been a conscientious objector or enough guts to have been a soldier—but you had had an anonymous enough body to have been stuck in the middle, a gun in your hand and a hole in your head.

  And you had found a woman in Japan, little Michiko, flat-faced Mickey, the sweetest and warmest woman in the world, Mickey of the saffron arms and legs and thighs and breasts and belly, a girl named Mickey who had loved you. And, you gutless no-good wop son of a bitch, you hadn’t had the guts to make a Sayonara scene. You had left her there.

  Joe Gutless. You had dropped out of NYU because you hadn’t been able to knuckle down and study. You had left Rochester because it had been too tough for you to adjust, and you hadn’t wanted to do anything unless it was real easy. No guts, no push, no drive, no interest in anything or anybody. You were a faceless wop named Joe Gutless Milani who deserved whatever you got.

  And now you did nothing. Now you were Hip or Beat or whatever word they were calling it this month. You had been spending years doing nothing at all. That was the hell of it.

  You didn’t work. Getting a gig as a messenger boy for a week at a clip wasn’t working. Bussing tables at the Automat for a day or two at a time wasn’t working. Bumming off Shank, bumming from the women you crawled into an occasional bed with, bumming off anybody who happened to have bread or food or an empty bed or a lonesome gland wasn’t working.

  You floated.

  For the time being you padded down with Shank, as lousy a guy as you were, who pushed pot in an extremely small-time way, who carried a knife and would one day or another stick somebody with it if he hadn’t already.

  You floated. You pushed pot and chewed peyote.

  You drifted. You were impotent with half the women you slept with and you didn’t muscle much of a kick out of the other half.

  You stank.

  Joe rolled off the bed and eased himself into the chair. Since the joint of marijuana was still in his pocket, he thought for a moment about smoking it, but then decided to hold on to it for a while. Next morning would be time enough. He would wake up and reach for the little cylinder of pot and blow off the top of his head before he opened his eyes-that would be nice. Instead of the joint he fished a regular cigarette from his other pocket and lit it.

  He drew smoke into his lungs, thinking it would be much more satisfying to draw another kind of smoke into his lungs, and wondering how long it would be before he started playing interesting games with a needle. Not that pot led you to the hard stuff, it didn’t. It was just that eventually you yourself would wind up trying the hard stuff even if most pot smokers never did. You, Joe Milani, would, because it was there for you and it was a new kick and there were not nearly enough kicks in the world.

  He blew out the smoke and took another drag on the cigarette, a longer drag that burned up maybe a third of the cigarette in one long pull, and he coughed on the cloud of smoke.

  Joe closed his eyes.

  Anita Carbone. Right now he couldn’t be sure if he hated the world, or Joe Milani, or both; but one thing he was relatively certain of: if it weren’t for the fundamental inadequacies in Joe Milani, or the world, or both, Joe Milani and Anita Carbone might have a future of some sort. Maybe not a white-gown-and-wedding-bells-and-rice type of scene, but a future one way or the other.

  Because Anita, by all the rules, answered to the perfect girl. She was a good girl, Joe knew, an Italian girl, and a virgin who obviously didn’t owe her virginity to the fact nobody had bothered to ask her. A bright girl, too, her intelligence compounded of Harlem intuition and Hunter education. She was damned attractive physically, he told himself, and damned pleasant company. Clean and fresh without being so square the two of you couldn’t talk to each other. Although he had been high when he had picked her up, and had been deeply attracted to her then, he had liked her even more, later, as a low had started to come on. It was a shame he would never see her again.

  The part of him that hated Joe Milani said: What does a chick like that need with a bastard like you? What are you going to do for her: turn her on? take her to bed? drive her as nutty as you are?

  The part of Joe Milani that hated the world said: She’s just not your type of chick, man. She’s just not for you, and she’s never gonna be, no matter what you try to do about it. The two of you are living in different worlds, and if you think it was a long way from Japan to the States, it’s miles more from Hip to Square.

  And Joe Milani listened to both voices, listened to them with both ears, and decided that both voices were entirely correct.

  So why see her again, he asked himself. And why make a pass at her when the result had to be one of two things—either she would throw the pass right back in your face, or the pair of you would wind up in bed. Both eventualities, in the final analysis, would be equally unpleasant.

  Damn, it was wrong! Joe cursed silently. You were supposed to go to high school and then college, the army cutting in before or after. Then you married a good Italian girl and settled down and bought one of those new houses in the suburbs and snagged a job with your old man or sold insurance or found something else you didn’t have to kill yourself doing and at which you could make a fairly decent living. That was what you were supposed to do.

  But what you were supposed to do was also impossible, inconceivable, and couldn’t work out no matter how much grass you smoked. You couldn’t go back again, that was the hell of it. Squares could turn Hip if they were sick enough, but Hips like you, Joe Milani, couldn’t seem to return to Squaresville.

  It would be so nice to be square, Joe thought. That was something the squares never got into their heads, that their world was a far more attractive one when you were sitting on the other side of the fence. Was the grass always greener?

  Well, no. Because sometimes grass turned brown, especially that Mexican brown that smelled a little different and seemed a little stronger. The joint in his pockets was half regular green and half Mexican brown and it was a good thick bomber, and he fingered it lovingly, his fingers cool and expectant on the brown wheat-straw paper.

  No. Joe rejected the temptatio
n.

  Not tonight. Tomorrow, he promised himself, but not tonight.

  He stood up, wanting a woman suddenly, wanting a woman but not wanting the woman he had just left, the woman he could never possibly make it with. The image in his mind was simply Woman. He paced the room and thought for a minute and decided the right woman for the moment would be Fran, good old Fran, sick little Fran who lived a few blocks away and always had room in her bed for him. She would probably want to get a little high first on something or other, but that was all right when you stopped to think about it.

  Why not get high?

  Why not ball with Fran? Joe Milani poked at the question.

  Why not, indeed?

  He left the apartment and hurried down the stairs, head high and arms swinging at his sides. It was cool outside, the sky dark, the streetlights lit.

  He walked easily, west on Saint Marks to Third Avenue, down Third to Fran’s big and wonderful pad, a third-floor loft on Cooper Square.

  He didn’t ring the bell because none existed, and if there had been one he would not have bothered to ring. At Fran’s place you opened that always unlocked outer door and climbed those grim, unlighted stairs until you reached Fran’s door where you knocked just in case some stud was ahead of you.

  Joe paused at the door, undecided whether to knock or to turn around, head down the stairs and out of the building, up Third to Saint Marks and over Saint Marks to his own place—saying to hell with Fran and to hell with Joe Milani and to hell, for that matter, with just about everybody.

  He knocked at the door.

  Fran Paine answered the door. She was alone, her badly bleached blonde hair hanging down to her waist, her breasts huge in the man’s white dress shirt ill-designed for chests such as hers—alone in a hovel where books, bottles and butts littered the floor.

  Fran closed the door behind him and the two sat down on a broken-up couch. They each drank a bottle of cherry-flavored cough syrup containing 2 minims of chloroform and 43 milligrams of codeine, mixed with extracts of squill, ipecac and sanguinaria.

  The cough syrup was sweet, a little too sweet. But in a short time it had been consumed and they had their high—not the screamily floating high of pot or the pounding, pacing, madcap high of pep pills, but a soft and gently drowsy and beneficent high, the high of codeine, an opium derivative, that made everything much easier to bear.

  Joe took off the man’s white dress shirt, wondering vaguely but without concern what guy had left the shirt at Fran’s pad, the last stud to share Fran’s big double bed.

  He took off Fran’s skirt. She wore nothing under the skirt or shirt—she rarely did, complaining that underwear inhibited her.

  He removed his own clothes.

  Their love-making came down as a long stretch. Opiates such as codeine serve only to lessen a woman’s inhibitions; in a man they encourage impotence. But after a while Joe’s need for love, combined with the insistence of Fran’s practiced hands and the attraction of Fran’s equally practiced body, clutched them together like two hungry, homeless children who strained desperately to find something.

  Something long lost.

  Afterward, as they were falling asleep, the codeine swiftly bringing on unconsciousness, Joe heard voices, loud and frighteningly real, screaming in his brain. But, finally, he slept, his eyes shut against the world and his face pressed into a pillow. And he dreamed there was blood in the back of his throat, and that he couldn’t cough it out.

  When the sun hit Joe in the eyes, his hand began to move. The fingers uncoiled, crept along the edge of the bed, reaching across the table at the side. The fingers fumbled at the clutter on the top of the table—hairpins, curlers, small bottles of cosmetics, the foil wrapper from a prophylactic. The fingers then curled around a pack of cigarettes and shook the pack until one cigarette popped out. Then, the cigarette held loosely between the second and third fingers, the hand returned to the bed.

  Cigarette between lips. Hand back to table. Matches. Eyes open, you scratch a match against the striking surface of the matchbook, bring the flame to the end of the cigarette, drag on the cigarette, shake out the match and flip it onto the floor.

  You sit up, take another drag on the cigarette. The smoke’s in your lungs, and then you take a breath.

  Joe Milani was awake.

  He got up from the bed, balancing the cigarette on the edge of the table, and groped around for clothing. Fran was up and gone but his clothes were still on the floor. His clothes were dirty and clung to his body like old friends when he put them on.

  Dressed, he reclaimed his cigarette before it could add another burn to the row at the table edge. Walking to the window, he opened it to get a breath of fresh air and find out the time. The sun, still fairly low in the sky, indicated it was about ten-thirty.

  Fran had left no note; not particularly surprising. Joe rummaged through the refrigerator and salvaged some milk and the end of a salami. He drank the milk in one swallow and gnawed at the salami, hard and salty, but tasty, so he ate it all.

  He left Fran’s place. On the street he felt lost at first, unsure of where to go, not wanting anything and a little off-balance. His feet headed toward his own room but stopped as he realized it was pointless to go home—Shank had probably left by now and Joe had no desire to see Shank, anyway.

  Then he remembered the marijuana.

  His hand dug at once into his pocket. There was a scrap of paper there and a pack of regular cigarettes, and at first he thought that the joint had disappeared, maybe Fran had taken it or he himself had gone and lost it somewhere. Then, when he found it at the bottom of the pocket, his fingers examined it without removing it. It seemed to be all right and he relaxed.

  Joe wandered aimlessly around the East Side, then headed west on Fourth Street. A dollar bill was wrapped around some loose change in one pocket and he thought about getting something to eat but nothing appealed. He passed a delicatessen selling loaves of French bread for fifteen cents and he stood on the sidewalk practically five minutes, unable to decide whether or not to buy a loaf. Finally he decided no and walked on.

  Immobility.

  He recognized it now, felt it in his bones and skin, felt it creeping up on him and infecting him with a paralysis peculiarly his own, a paralysis the rest of the world never shared with him. It was his, his paralysis, his immobility—his alone, and when it came he could only sit and ponder it or walk and ponder it or lie down and ponder it, because there was absolutely nothing else in the world he could do or want to do. Immobility.

  At Washington Square he stared at the statue of Garibaldi, his hand on his sword, and Joe remembered the legend at NYU—a legend which, in one form or another, seemed prevalent on every campus in the world. When Garibaldi drew his sword, the legend said, that meant a virgin had walked by.

  As Joe stood contemplating the statue of Garibaldi he decided the legend was all wrong. The old soldier wouldn’t draw that damned sword of his if all the virgins in the western world paraded in front of him. The old wop was made out of stone and he would stand for the rest of eternity with his hand on his sword and his eyes staring ahead vacantly.

  In that particular respect, Joe decided, the old wop and the young wop had a lot in common.

  Sitting hunched on a bench in the park, Joe pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. After the first puff he let the cigarette remain between his fingers, his eyes on the column of smoke rising perhaps two or three inches into the air before the wind blew it away. When the cigarette burned all the way down he let it drop from his fingers to the asphalt where it continued to burn. It went out before it could burn to the end.

  He lit another cigarette.

  Immobility.

  The Good Humor Man passed, his wagon full of ice cream. Maybe an ice cream would taste good, Joe mused.

  Then again maybe it wouldn’t.

  Go to hell, Good Humor Man.

  Very few things matter and nothing matters very much. Where had Joe heard that? It didn’t
sound like a quote, and yet it had a very familiar ring. Where had he seen it?

  It didn’t matter, he decided. Of course it didn’t matter. That was the whole point of it, anyway. Immobility.

  It was a very beat condition, this immobility, and he found himself wondering why nobody had bothered to describe it in a novel. The beat writers were uniformly lousy, but one of them nevertheless should have managed to get hipped on the notion of transferring that marvelous state of nothingness to paper. Or was the condition unique with Joe? The human condition, the beat condition, the stony stonelike condition.

  Immobility.

  It wasn’t the same as sitting with nothing to do, Joe pondered. There were any number of things he could do, any number of people he could hunt up. He could find a woman or find a friend or run up to Times Square and see a movie or get a hotdog at Grant’s or sit over coffee at Bickford’s or make the coffee-house scene at The Palermo or one of the other spots. Or he could buzz up to the library and bury himself in a book or head back to his place and read something or write something or smoke the stick in his pocket.

  There were many things to do. A veritable myriad of possibilities.

  None of which attracted him.

  Back to immobility, he told himself. Let’s analyze this. Let’s take it apart and see what’s running around inside. Let’s figure out how it’s put together. Let’s peel off the outer wrapper and dig inside it once and for all and figure out why in the hell we are sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park with a cigarette burning to hell and gone between our tobacco-stained fingers with nothing to do and no place to go and the world whirling around and making absolutely no sense at all. Let’s nail it to the floor and throw darts at it. Let’s jump up and down on it and pick the meat off its bones.