“Oh, say now,” I replied—a non sequitur if ever there was one, but what else was there to say? I was sorry I’d come over, she talked so strangely. As if she was all alone, and crazy.
“I’m not going to divorce him, though,” she went on. “I’d kill myself first, and damn my soul to hell.”
“Don’t talk that way,” I said.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to kill yourself?” she asked, looking at me passionately. “Doesn’t it make you feel like that when people use ‘you badly and then laugh at you? Or did no one ever do it to you? You may say so, but you’ll pardon me if I don’t believe it. Do you know what it feels like to eat and eat and hate yourself for it and then eat more? Do you know what it feels like to kill your own brother because you are fat?” People were turning to look, and the drunks were sniggering again.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I wanted to tell her I was sorry, too. I wanted to tell her… oh, anything at all, I reckon, that would make her feel better. Holler down to where she was, inside all that flab. But I couldn’t think of a single thing.
So I just said, “I have to go. We have to play another set.”
“Of course,” she said softly. “Of course you must… or they’ll start to laugh at you. But why I came was – – will you play ‘Roses of Picardy’? I thought you played it very nicely at the reception. Will you do that?”
“Sure,” I said. “Be glad to.” And we did. But she left halfway through the number, and since it was sort of schmaltzy for a place like Englander’s, we dropped it and swung into a ragtime version of “The Varsity Drag.” That one always tore them up. I drank too much the rest of the evening and by closing I had forgotten all about her. Well, almost.
Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on—that’s what I should have said. That’s what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn’t.
Because maybe that was what she was afraid of.
Of course now everyone knows about Maureen Romano and her husband Rico, who survives her as the taxpayers’ guest in the Illinois State Penitentiary. How she took over Scollay’s two-bit organization and turned it into a Prohibition empire that rivaled Capone’s. How she wiped out two other North Side gang leaders and swallowed their operations. How she had the Greek brought before her and supposedly killed him by sticking a piece of piano wire through his left eye and into his brain as he knelt in front of her, blubbering and pleading for his life. Rico, the bewildered valet, became her first lieutenant, and was responsible for a dozen gangland hits himself.
I followed Maureen’s exploits from the West Coast, where we were making some pretty successful records. Without Billy-Boy, though. He formed a band of his own not long after we left Englander’s, an allblack combination that played Dixieland and ragtime. They did real well down south, and 1 was glad for them.
It was just as well. Lots of places wouldn’t even audition us with a Negro in the group.
But I was telling you about Maureen. She made great news copy, and not just because she was a kind of Ma Barker with brains, although that was part of it. She was awful big and she was awful bad, and Americans from coast to coast felt a strange sort of affection for her. When she died of a heart attack in 1933, some of the papers said she weighed five hundred pounds. 1 doubt it, though. No one gets that big, do they?
Anyway, her funeral made the front pages. It was more than you could say for her brother, who never got past page four in his whole miserable career. It took ten pallbearers to carry her coffin. There was a picture of them toting it in one of the tabloids. It was a horrible picture to look at. Her coffin was the size of a meat locker—which, in a way, I suppose it was.
Rico wasn’t bright enough to hold things together by himself, and he fell for assault with intent to kill the very next year.
I’ve never been able to get her out of my mind, or the agonized, hangdog way Scollay had looked that first night when he talked about her. But I cannot feel too sorry for her, looking back. Fat people can always stop eating. Guys like Billy-Boy Williams can only stop breathing. I still don’t see any way I could have helped either of them, but I do feel sort of bad every now and then. Probably just because I’ve gotten a lot older and don’t sleep as well as I did when I was a kid. That’s all it is, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Paranoid: A Chant
I can’t go out no more.
There’s a man by the door in a raincoat smoking a cigarette.
But I’ve put him in my diary and the mailers are all lined up on the bed, bloody in the glow of the bar sign next door.
He knows that if I die (or even drop out of sight) the diary goes and everyone knows the CIA’s in Virginia.
500 mailers bought from 500 drug counters each one different and 500 notebooks with 500 pages in every one.
I am prepared.
* * *
I can see him from up here.
His cigarette winks from just above his trenchcoat collar and somewhere there’s a man on a subway sitting under a Black Velvet ad thinking my name.
Men have discussed me in back rooms.
If the phone rings there’s only dead breath.
In the bar across the street a snubnose revolver has changed hands in the men’s room.
Each bullet has my name on it.
My name is written in back files and looked up in newspaper morgues.
My mother’s been investigated; thank God she’s dead.
They have writing samples and examine the back loops of pees and the crosses of tees.
My brother’s with them, did I tell you?
His wife is Russian and he keeps asking me to fill out forms.
I have it in my diary.
Listen— Listen do listen: you must listen In the rain, at the bus stop, black crows with black umbrellas pretend to look at their watches, but it’s not raining. Their eyes are silver dollars.
Some are scholars in the pay of the FBI most are the foreigners who pour through our streets. I fooled them got off the bus at 25th and Lex where a cabby watched me over his newspaper.
In the room above me an old woman has put an electric suction cup on her floor.
It sends out rays through my light fixture and now I write in the dark by the bar sign’s glow.
I tell you I know.
They sent me a dog with brown spots and a radio cobweb in its nose.
I drowned it in the sink and wrote it up in folder GAMMA.
I don’t look in the mailbox anymore.
The greeting cards are letter-bombs.
(Step away! Goddam you! Step away, I know tall people! I tell you I know very tall people!)
The luncheonette is laid with talking floors and the waitress says it was salt but I know arsenic when it’s put before me. And the yellow taste of mustard to mask the bitter odor of almonds.
I have seen strange lights in the sky.
Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles of sewer to surface in my toilet, listening for phone calls through the cheap wood with chrome ears.
I tell you, man, I hear.
I saw his muddy handprints on the porcelain.
1 don’t answer the phone now, have I told you that?
They are planning to flood the earth with sludge.
They are planning break-ins.
They have got physicians advocating weird sex positions.
They are making addictive laxatives and suppositories that burn.
They know how to put out the sun with blowguns.
I pack myself in ice—have I told you that?
It obviates their infrascopes.
I know chants and I wear charms.
You may think you have me but I could destroy you any second now.
Any second now.
Any second now.
Would you like some coffee, my love?
Did I tell you I can’t go out no more?
There’s a man by the door in a raincoat.
The Raft
It was forty miles from Horlicks University in Pittsburgh to Cascade Lake, and although dark comes early to that part of the world in October and although they didn’t get going until six o’clock, there was still a little light in the sky when they got there. They had come in Deke’s Camaro. Deke didn’t waste any time when he was sober. After a couple of beers, he made that Camero walk and talk.