Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (17 page)

“Proust?” asked Heff.

“He’s asthmatic, digs being alone. Has a weak bladder. Don’t get too close.”

Not a chance, sweetheart, came the thought, Gnossos clutching his groin to hex away the dangers of the underworld.

“We turn him on,” whispered Heap, snapping his fingers leisurely, picking up the rhythm he’d abandoned the day before. “But only by stages, slow degrees. He’s beautiful, baby, you really can’t touch his head with the mixture any more. Digs lysergic shit, you ever make that? Mix it with a little banana purée, never know the difference. Eats horse for breakfast, sprinkles it over his Kix, so to speak. Can’t sniff it though, bad for the bronchial tubes. Next week we shoot him up.” Leaning closer, lowering his whisper, “He’s gonna get a flash, let me tell you.” The glass eye looking directly through Gnossos’ head.

“He likes it all right?” asked Heff seriously, staring at Heap, whom he’d never seen before that moment.

“Little shit never hurt nobody,” said the teenager, his good eye drooping, snapping his fingers extra loudly for emphasis. “Specially Proust, man.”

Gnossos pulled up on his scrotum one last time for cosmic insurance. He edged away from the wall, trying to widen the distance between himself and the monkey, then smiled idiotically at one of the vampires who looked back at his groin-clutching hand. He put it quickly into his pocket, checking all the walls and shadows for possible mandrills. One never seems to know, does one?

In a dark corner Jack was prone on a couple of pallets. Gnossos checked to see whether Heff had found her, but Heff was still staring at Heap, trying to figure out what he was. Jack, on the other hand, was somewhat out of her mind, eyes glazed over, a matchstick-thin joint burning down in her fingers. She wore brine-shrunk Levis, a man’s yellow Oxford shirt, and loafers. Her Joan of Arc hair was messed and her hand lay casually on another’s girl’s thigh.

It was the girl in the green knee-socks.

“Proust,” said Jack, picking the word up from Heap, who had just whispered the name again. She started to giggle. So stoned, man, old euphoria
factory. Selective ears, the sounds of certain words shifting senses, becoming delicious, rolling, tumbling through the Eustacian tube, tapping at the pharynx, pronunciation palatable.

But the girl in the green knee-socks.

Beware the monkey-demon, came the entirely undesired thought.

“Pppprrroust,” said Jack again, blubbering the
P
’s, holding the giggle deep within her chest, pulling for the resonance. Swing, sweetie-pie, you’re the only one who knows.

“P-p-p-proooooooooooooss . . .  t.”

The spider monkey was dangling upside down by the tail, hanging from an iron rod sunk into the brick wall, playing with itself, rolling its eyes, lifting its thick upper lip high above the gum line.

As it turned out, the girl in the green knee-socks had also seen. She had been clasping her throat gently, shielding it, seemingly, from razors or teeth. But when the monkey again turned its back and curled into a harmless ball, she let the hand fall delicately between her legs, in a position of repose. It was a dancer’s gesture.

She looked directly at Gnossos and said, “It does the same to you, I can tell. It’s evil, you know.”

He nodded, staring. I wouldn’t exactly call it a cherub, either.

Jack took a last puff from the roach and laid it carefully on top of an unopened Red Cap at her side, letting the fingers of her free hand trail over the girl’s thigh. Detached look, no sex in it, feeling for the texture alone, making touch a separate thing. A raga was playing through the huge speaker, people were trying to dance to it, keep the rubbing going, but Jack listened only to the tabla:

dum . . .  budoom . . .  duuooum . . .  bum-douym-dooom . . .  scscscsciiiinnnng.

“Mmmmm,” she said, forsaking the thigh, transferring the beat to her pallet.

Satisfied that she was no longer the object of this other attention, the girl in the green knee-socks stood up, looked once at Jack’s drumming fingers, and wandered over, just like that.

“Hey, what’s up with Jack?” asked Heff, suddenly between them, hands in his pockets.

“Stoned, it looks like.”

“Oh
shit
, Paps, what the hell for?”

“How would I know, man? You tell me.”

“She didn’t mean to,” said the girl, a glass of white wine going to her lips. “She got impatient waiting for you.”

“Oh wow, you see? What the hell did I say? We should’ve hitched a ride.”

Looking at me over the rim. Could it be?

“Hey, Jack,” said Heff, stroking her brow. “Jackie baby?”

“Ooooo,” came the answer.

“She’s beautiful,” from Heap, materializing with one of the Egyptian-eye-makeup vampires, “leave her be.”

The vampire played with the zipper on Gnossos’ wet parka and asked, “Who’re you?”

“Ravi Shankar,” he said.

“Hey,” from Heap. He had a stained forefinger on the shoulder of the girl in the green socks. “You feel like dancing, maybe fool around a little?”

She looked at Gnossos while she spoke an unmodified “No.”

“I dig foreigners,” said the vampire. “What kind of name is that? Ravi. So exotic.”

“Armenian,” answered the girl.

“I was talking to Ravi,” said the vampire.

“Oooooooooo,” said Jack, coming around, looking into Heff’s concerned face. She giggled, threw back her head, and pulled him over so he crashed on top of her.

“She’s a real groove, baby,” said Heap, abandoning the girl momentarily, tapping Heff on the back, referring to Jack. “You wanna make it somewhere else, go someplace quiet?”

“Let’s dance,” said the vampire to Gnossos, toying with his collar. “Maybe fool around a little.”

“Look—” he started.

“There’s another room,” she said.

“Hey, Jack,” yelled Heff, squirming, imprisoned, “for Jesus Christ’s sake!”

“I like it in here,” said Gnossos, looking at the girl, openly this time, from top to bottom, letting her know, covering every inch of it, brown hair bound by a brass clasp, blue denim shirt rolled to the elbows, black skirt, green knee-socks, no shoes for the moment. When he came back up, there was a tolerant smile waiting, head tipped to one side. Too good, much too good.

“
Oh
,” said Judy Lumpers, skipping over in tennis sneakers. “You
fi
nally came. Juan said you were
com
ing and I couldn’t wait to tell you how
real
ly great that night at Guido’s was, I mean
God
, all those radio programs, I’d practically forgotten all about them.”

“Evening,” said Drew Youngblood soberly, his white shirt open at the throat.

“Soon,” said Juan Carlos Rosenbloom, “there will come a revolutiong.”

“There’s another room, baby,” Heap was whispering to the embarrassed Heffalump. “Awful lot happening there.” He was snapping the fingers of his left hand and holding out a joint in his right. Gnossos took it and struck a match without ceremony. Whole thing’s falling to pieces, cool it, liable to be conflicts. Do the Gandhi.

“Listen,” said Judy Lumpers, eyes agog, nudging him, tone confidential, “that’s not what I think it is, is it, that, well,
ci
garette you’re holding?”

“I don’t know, baby, just a little mixture my tobacconist throws together, ha ha.”

“Ha ha.”

“No nicotine,” explained the girl in the green knee-socks, sipping from her wine.

“Ha ha,” continued Judy Lumpers, not going for it at all, lowering her tone, winking, “what does it make you
do?
Does it make you do anything?”

“Beautiful things, baby,” said Heap, abandoning Heffalump, smiling at her, showing his missing tooth. With his good eye drooping, he held out the fattest tapered joint Gnossos had ever seen.

“Oh, I
could
n’t” she said, holding up her hand, looking at Gnossos for the word. Why not?

“Make it,” he told her, winking back. “It’s a gas.” He took a drag from his own, no carburetion, and held it down.

“We’d kind of like to unm, talk with you,” interrupted Youngblood, “before you get too, well—”

“This Panghurts,” said Juan Carlos Rosenbloom. “We smash her, you watching.”

“Should I
really
try it?” asked Lumpers, Heap leading her away to one of the empty foam rubber cushions as she asked, the battle already won, “I mean, can’t it make you do something you don’t
want
to?”

Jack was wrapping her still-clad legs around Heff’s back, pinning him above her. “I wanna get laid,” she said, grinning madly into his bulging eyes. “Lay me.”

Another drag, maybe flee, steal someone’s car.

“Good shit, ain’t it?” asked the vampire.

“Dynamite, baby, but get your paws out of my pocket.”

The monkey uncoiled and leered at them.

What in my hand?

He looked down at his side and found his fingers entwined with others. They belonged to the girl in the green knee-socks, who was looking not at him but at the monkey.

She was actually holding his hand.

Finally she looked at Gnossos and asked in a gentle, but preoccupied tone, “Could you get me out of here a little?”

At the far end of the loft an anonymous couple had just stepped over the body of the hairy little man with the narghile and entered the chamber with the metal door. Again there was the sound of a clacking bolt.

The quarter tones of the sitar rose and fell across the drone of conversation. The spider monkey emitted a sharp, shattering squeal and urinated on the wall.

Judy Lumpers had the joint in her mouth, drawing. She looked up at him, shaking her head to indicate that just yet, nothing much was happening. He touched her brow with a thumb and zipped up his parka.

“If you have a moment—” Youngblood began.

“Maybe later, man.”

The editor looked at the South American, who nodded and said, “We wait.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” he told them. Then to the girl: “C’mon, man,” taking her by the hand, bringing her out into the night.

Mustn’t ever let a chance go by.

At the Black Elks downtown there was nobody else white.

They went there directly from the loft in a stolen Anglia, pausing only for traffic lights and every other stop sign. Test the odds, keep your hand in play. Gnossos had been away for over a year, but they remembered him at the door and made a show of his return. Everybody gave some skin all around and the menace went out of the night like bad-egg fumes through a bleeder valve in a gale-force sea breeze. He gave a little of the Mojo mixture to Fat Fred Faun, who took care of the peephole; a little to Spider Washington, who blew vibes; and a little to Southside, who checked hats whether or not you wore one. Saint Nicholas feeding the pussycats.

“Groovy chic,” he explained in a whisper, “keeps a razor in her brassière.”

“What about you?”

“She digs me, baby, I’m all right.”

And the Elks who didn’t know him knew him soon enough. They came over, saying, “We heard about you, man” and “What’s happening?” And he’d say, “This is Kristin McCleod; she hasn’t been around here before,” giving out the grass as he spoke; and they’d look over her green knee-socks and say it was all right, everything was cool, have a sweet time with Sophocles, their name for Gnossos. But Pooh Bear was what she called him, just the same, ignoring his uneasy protests, not going for the keeper-of-the-flame business, saying no, she wouldn’t have it, vestal virgins fed the fire, and he didn’t get the part. Fat Fred Faun at the peephole, who had once listened to an eighty-minute monologue on membranes, giggled and told her, “You talkin’ to the right head all right, if you talkin’ flame-keepin’ an’ like that to Sophocles.” Gnossos trying to cover it up by asking Spider Washington for Night in Tunisia, being careful how he put it, since Spider had cut the lip off a blonde Deke in a white seersucker suit three years before and still wanted the club black.

“He doesn’t look mean,” Kristin whispered.

“Baby, there’s just no such thing as a bad boy.”

So Spider played it for them and they danced, Gnossos showing her how but coming on no stronger than he had to.

“Not a bad fit,” she said, pressing cautiously against him.

“That’s right,” he answered, trying to do something with his maniacal, toothy grin, feeling better every minute.

And Kristin, who was also grinning, said, “I like your friends. Better than the crowd at the barn, I mean.” She was smoking a straight Philip Morris, keeping her arm around his neck, having to bring her mouth over his shoulder, close to his throat, whenever she wanted a puff. Gnossos had stopped smoking anything but was still high enough for a rolling buzz. “Bad-ass scene, that loft. Monkeys, baby, monkeys and wolves, I’ll tell you all about it sometime.” The clapboard room was dark except for a single neon tube that glowed against the purple ceiling, angular chromatic designs splayed over the fissured surface, reflected there from the crumpled yard of aluminum foil that served as indirect-exposure motif. Twice a train rumbled by the downstairs window, not six feet from the building, Lehigh Valley going nowhere, whistle blasting its ominous discord with the alto sax. The Elks and their women were dressed in narrow suits and pug bowties and high heels and chukka boots and Mother Hubbards and short skirts, and little hats like Fat Fred’s, brims down against the ears, everybody dancing or sitting around taking it easy.

They took a table finally, letting their knees touch beneath it, ordering drinks. Kristin clasped her hand around his forearm, the same hand she had
used at the loft when the vampire had had her hand in his pocket, then tried bringing him closer so she could whisper again. But he went over too quickly and they bumped heads, crashing against the space between each other’s eyes. Fat Fred looked as if he would roll on the floor and Spider Washington lost so much control he had to give away his solo.

“Ouch, man,” came the chuckle.

“Oh, I’m sorry—”

“It’s like an anvil, wow—”

“I didn’t mean—”

Rubbing the spot, “That’s okay, only our heads.”

“Really, are you sure?”

“It’s all right. Dry your tears, can’t bear to see women weep.”