So now we wake up a new man. John Young. Johnny Young. Or how about Jack Young? I kind of like it. Ho hum. Feeling no pain suddenly. Reach out here (whoops) for a cleansing few gulps of … Jesus. Wild Turkey.
Our clothes came at us from all over the room. A shoe like a heavy old bullet thrown out of the shadows, and skillfully caught, off-balance and one-handed; windmilling trousers trapped by the foot and then kicked up onto the leg; that serpent necktie. I got a very bad feeling as we pitched into the bathroom and fumbled for the mouth wash. Then we knelt before the altar of the can—and pulled the handle. The bowl filled with its terrible surprises. Oh, man. We’ve done this once or twice before, as I vividly recall. It seems to me about the most you can ask of the human body. Now we solaced our brow on the porcelain, and emitted a few sour gasps of disgust. And got down to it. The premise for alcohol abuse, one gathers, is that consciousness, or selfhood, or corporeality, is intolerable. But it is intolerable. Certainly when you’re chockful of gangrene. Here it comes again, consciousness, weary, multiform, intolerable.
We went out into New York City and staggered here and there through the Village and drooled it all out in bar after bar. They wouldn’t serve us at the first few joints we tried, which wasn’t surprising, because we came through the door yelling our head off, or trying to, in this faulty new voice of ours. There was, I remember, quite a restful interlude up some alley or other, during which we reclined panting on a heap of cardboard boxes; then two young men jovially gathered us up and escorted us back into the action. Next we went to see what the hell was going on in a couple of places farther down the block. I can understand why John was overexcited by New York, where, at night, life and all its color and reflection is folded out onto the street, and not shut in and huddled, behind the glow of windows. In any event by six o’clock he was in okay shape. Outside the last bar the cab was waiting remorselessly, the driver with his face averted, waiting to take me somewhere I didn’t want to go.
Like the driver I knew where we were going without being told. The fireman’s ladder of Seventh Avenue, climbed on the rungs of the cross streets, uptown, then the swinging rope of Broadway. This must be Nicholas Kreditor, our weatherman, and the Imperial Hotel.
The man, the Reverend, was big, handsome, sad, and powerful. He had the snouty, screen-filling face of a politician. Not that he’d ever get anywhere with it, in the U.S., not these days anyway. The coloring was wrong, the tango-tutor’s mustache was wrong. I thought instantly that there was something pathetic and obscene about his thick burgundy suit, which made you wonder what other kinds of outfit or uniform he’d like to dress up in. His black necktie was steadied by a gold pin the shape of a crucifix. There were other religious accessories around the place and, on the walls, idealized renderings of New Testament scenes. We sat facing him from the customer’s end of a leather-topped desk. Sinisterly, there were two beds in this inner room, twin beds, with identical coverlets and cushion arrangements.
For a while he talked details, addresses, some familiar, some not. Then he said, “I just want to make clear that I pay you every correcti-tude for what you were involved in over there.”
John said gratefully, “All I ever wanted to do was help people.”
“You’ll be able to continue with your fine work. I guarantee it.”
He guaranteed it. With his limp shrug. The Imperial was full of old people. It was an old-people hotel. We had seen and sensed them on our way up, their tentative postures, their unanimity of hesitation. Judging by his office suite, and his strictly localized charisma, I assumed that the old people were partly in Kreditor’s care. I guarantee it. . . . You could imagine him guaranteeing a lot of things, or at least saying he guaranteed things a lot.