A Fan's Notes (39 page)

“
I
’
m sure,
”
I said.

On gaining admittance to the house, the first thing Seedy did was open the red carpet and begin rolling it down the middle of the living room for the closer (i.e., the
“
Massa
”
) to make his grandiose entrance on.

“
A carpet?
”
I shrieked in delight.
“
Didn
’
t that offend the customer? I mean, mightn
’
t she think your factory man thought he was too good to walk on her carpet? Or something?
”

No. No. No. Mr. Blue was impatient with my levity. In those happy days all the closers had been
“
psychologists
”
; if they sensed they were causing offense, they simply explained they knew how hard the woman toiled and hadn
’
t wanted to dirty up her home.
“
Yeah,
”
Mr. Blue said.
“
There was one closer, Sally DiMidio, if you got him into a house, you automatically had five hundred bucks. Three hundred for Sally, a hundred and a half for me, and half a yard for Seedy.
”

Mr. Blue was still concerned about my lack of response to his racial sympathies.
“
Oh, don
’
t worry about that,
”
he assured me.
“
We took real good care of Seedy. That black bastard always had a roll as big as his dong, and every high-yellow broad in Jersey City laid down her golden ass for him!
”
Mr. Blue shook his head nostalgically and sighed. Heavily. When Mr. Blue sighed, it was immeasurably sad, like high winds blowing through leafless autumn trees. When Mr. Blue sighed, he had an unnerving habit of obliquely studying one to see if one sensed the depth of his sadness. When Mr. Blue sighed, I always pursed my lips in the most commiserating way and did my best, to little avail, to form great-sized tears in my
eyes.

Was Mr. Blue full of shit? Somehow I couldn
’
t be sure, but his tales, under the harsh weight of reflection, seemed glaringly preposterous. Whenever, for example, I envisioned the timid housewife, expecting the Brooks Brothers type
“
Alcoa
”
man and opening her door to the six-feet-six Seedy, smiling a roomy smile to expose his great glittering teeth, the only vision I got was of her swooning dead away. So whenever Mr. Blue told me these stories—and Mr. Blue told me these stories all the time—I found that I had to repress a terrible urge to interrupt him, employing the dramatic pauses and gravity of Mr. Blue himself, and say,
“
Mr. Blue, you know something? … You
’
re full of shit!
”

Talking shop was with Mr. Blue a one-man oratorio. He did the recitative, performed the aria, acted a plaintiff chorus. His voice rose and fluttered with excitement. He chanted explanations. Reverently, he emoted with the nostalgia of poetry. The young men of today, he wailed, wouldn
’
t deign to use some of the methods he had employed for gaining admittance to a house. Mr. Blue had rung doorbells and immediately had backed off the porch and walked to the middle of the yard. When the owner had answered the bell
’
s jangling summons, he had found an exasperated Mr. Blue, hands jammed furiously down on his hips, rocking impatiently on the balls of his feet, standing in the middle of the lawn and staring in mock-horrified disgust at the man
’
s house.
“
What is it?
”
the man would ask.
“
Yes?
”
Pivoting slowly, ever so dramatically, Mr. Blue would suddenly start screaming at the man. Save that no words came.

In imitation Mr. Blue made his mouth go for me, mouthing his voiceless anger, disgust, disappointment. He did it superbly. His great blue eyes widened in rage, his rubbery mouth opened and closed with desperate sincerity, even his aging, hairy ears seemed in fury to distend perceptibly from the sides of his snowy head. Still—no words came. He was like that superb double-talker who appeared in the cinema comedies of the thirties and forties; no matter how often one heard him, one always strained, sweated, tilted one
’
s head, and gasped painfully attempting to decipher the indecipherable. Standing but a few feet from my prone figure on the davenport, Mr. Blue had me convinced that an impenetrable curtain had suddenly and insidiously descended over my ears. Laughing wildly, I paid Mr. Blue the homage his artistry deserved.

Cupping his hand over his ear and actually listing toward me, Mr. Blue now became the distraught customer.
“
Huh?
”
“
What
’
s that?
”
“
How
’
s that you say?
”
—as he was being drawn slowly, presumably unconsciously, down his steps and across his lawn to the magnetic and fatal Mr. Blue. When Mr. Blue had the man next to him, it was, one guessed, all but over. Placing his arm about the man
’
s waist, and theatrically flourishing his arm in the direction of the man
’
s house, Mr. Blue, using his voice for the first time, wanted to know of the man whether he wasn
’
t ashamed of having a house in such sorry repair, whether he didn
’
t think his home a blight and an eye sore on the entire neighborhood. Mr. Blue
’
s tone was now one of earnest solicitation. He liked the man. He wanted to help him.

Mr. Blue stared at me. Was he getting through to me? Apparently not. Asking me to rise from the davenport so that he might demonstrate, he pulled me into snug contact with his thin and muscular torso. While he talked soothingly to me, as father to son, his hand alternated between clutching me vice-like and opening to pat me tenderly on the layer of fat above my waistline. Again sweeping his free arm in the direction of what was supposed to be my shack but which was only the apartment
’
s bare beige walls, he earnestly, and with just a touch of melancholy, asked whether I wasn
’
t embarrassed by what I beheld. When I made no answer, still not grasping my role, Mr. Blue demanded,
“
What would you say?
”
—meaning, I guess, if I were the luckless homeowner in the wiry little grasp of Mr. Blue
’
s fanaticism. Smiling sheepishly, I stutteringly agreed that my house was indeed a cyclopean atrocity.
“
Naturally that
’
s what you
’
d say,
”
Mr. Blue said, releasing me from his fierce grip and allowing his chest to expand with the pride of his craft.

As he always did, Mr. Blue now jammed his hands down into the pockets of his suit coat and strutted, peacock proud and pensive, about the living room, giving his timeworn and hard-won lore time to seep through to me. Smiling, I imagined that now Seedy and Sally DiMidio would slither up to the curb in the mile-long Cadillac, disembark, and the three of them, with the six-foot-six, dear-toothed, jet-black, and

carpet-bearing Seedy leading the way, would descend on the house for the slaughter.

Seldom during those three weeks did I ever cease laughing —drifting between outright roaring and an exhausted giggling —with Mr. Blue. And though I was enjoying his visits immensely, I had no idea exactly who Mr. Blue was and what he wanted of me. Whenever I questioned him about his relationship with the Counselor, he became moody and silent, for which reason I suspected that he had retained the Counselor in a criminal matter, probably, I surmised, something to do with his rather shady vocation, perhaps an illegal contract? One of the things that led to this suspicion was that of all the characters who crept in and out of the apartment, it was Mr. Blue with whom the Counselor was least friendly. To be sure, passing from the front door to the bedroom, the Counselor came after a time to acknowledge Mr. Blue by mock-ordering, after the manner of a Marine sergeant,
“
Give us fifty, Mr. Blue
”
; but as often as not, laughing, he passed on before the mildly red-faced and popeyed Mr. Blue had reached his twentieth push-up, a slight which never deterred Mr. Blue
’
s finishing the push-ups for my admiration. And so, though I did not for some time learn Mr. Blue
’
s mysterious relationship with the Counselor, he one day told me what he had in mind for me: he was, he said, in the manner of one making a marriage proposal which he knows will be disesteemed, seeking a new canvasser, one with class, and he had, after giving it no little thought, decided that that canvasser and I were one.

By that time I had again fallen prone to the dreamer
’
s abysmal ways and again for days at a time lay unshaven on the davenport. Thick scales of ugly dandruff clung to my scalp, coffee stains as big as silver dollars patterned my fragrant ivory sweatshirt, and sitting all about me on the floor, like a scale model of some ominous and ghastly city of the future, were Budweiser beer cans, empty and half-empty, through whose can-opener apertures I had stuffed my scarcely smoked cigarettes. That behind this grimy front Mr. Blue could envision an I
’
m-working-my-way-through-college type moved me to near-hysteria and I ended, to Mr. Blue
’
s chagrin, by rolling all about the floor, toppling the
“
towers
”
of my nightmare city and spilling the contents of stale beer and irriguous cigarette butts onto the carpeting.

But Mr. Blue was a tough closer and hence proved an oppressively pertinacious suitor. He had some deranged notion of the typical housewife slinking about all day in a reeky housecoat, chain-smoking, scratching her
“
hairy ass,
”
and undesistingly yearning for oral stimulation of her labia.
“
That
’
s all they think about!
”
Mr. Blue said.
“
It
’
s a thing with them!
”
Moreover, he had come to believe that there was about me an aura of abandonment (an Ivy League one?) which intimated I had spent a good part of my near-thirty years with my cheeks flanked by luxurious and crushing thighs. Contrary protests did no good. The more stridently I objected, the more Mr. Blue smiled knowingly, letting me know that it was perfectly okay with him if I were blighted, so much the better as
“
broads can spot lappers
”
and doors would open for me like so, and here Mr. Blue snapped his fingers so startlingly that goose-pimples played a tune on my spine. Often I became angry.
“
Jesus, Mr. Blue! Would you get that notion about me out of your head!
”
But my ire, of course, only reinforced what he already
“
knew,
”
and ultimately, exhausted, nearly tearful and laughing simultaneously, I shouted petulantly,
“
I give in! Goddammit, I give up!
”

Ordering me to rise and seal the partnership with a solemn handshake, Mr. Blue then celebrated the ritual with two front flips and a fantastically frantic little fandango, danced on his
lunatic, elevated, alligator shoes. Further directing me to
shower and shave, Mr. Blue gave me the money to get my
seersucker jacket from the cleaner
’
s and took me downtown to visit
“
his
”
barber. In the four days I canvassed for Mr. Blue, I got him into one house, that of a young woman who was in fact deaf. Though she had smooth, well-made legs, melon-like, inmate
’
s dreams of breasts, and a charmingly languorous glow (about none of which was she overly conscious), as Mr. Blue had so sibyllinely claimed she would be, she was dressed in a sleazy housecoat and was voraciously wolfing the evil weed. Unable to understand me, she asked me into her kitchen, sat me at an indigo-enameled table, and gave me a pad and pencil with which to express my wants. After I did so, she gave me a piece of cinnamon toast and a glass of milk; and while I ate and drank these, she told me about her deafness. While explaining it, she sometimes talked, which she did perfectly well; at other times, she usurped the pad and wrote things down, as though, unable to hear herself, she at times doubted my capacity to do so. She said her deafness was at first thought to have been caused by a childhood illness; but as the specialists could find no physical damage to the ear, they were now suggesting the cause was psychosomatic. She smiled a self-disparaging smile and good-naturedly asked if I thought she was nuts. Taking my maxim from the Counselor, I wrote on the pad:
“
We
’
re all a little of that.
”
Talking, we both laughed a lot, and as easily as the intimacy of those melon-like breasts displayed above the V of her housecoat allowed. Despite the easiness, it was obvious that the deafness was the event of her life, the happening which had lifted her from the deathlike drudgery of house work, and as she talked of it her eyes assumed the lambency of passion.