Bogeywoman (16 page)

“Listen. I gotta go in there,” I said, “I promised her I’d come back—with these—” I pulled the oil-spotted bag of coddies out of the bib of my overalls. I’d been lying on them. “I gotta show her. I told her I could get in there anytime and I always could.” I gave O a deep, deep look, all the way to the black bottoms of her black-ringed eyes, sorta trying to hypnotize her to come around. I mean, I fell and was a half-baked person but she fell too and was a dangerous person, and she wasn’t even truly buggy, no more than I was. “I’ll help you,” she said.

And without waiting another second, she did—jumped up
and sleepwalked (
I do a good coma, don’t I?
) in her gold lamé ballet slippers, straight for the doorway of Emily’s room, sticking her arms out in front of her like the night of the living dead and chanting
“High rat a dreambutton flirty eat a job”
or some other line of comic-book buggy. It wouldn’t have convinced a Bug Motel or anyone who really knew her, but the nurses, Hageboom, Roper and Mursch, swooped down on her like buzzards and flapped away with her and I belly-crawled across the hall to Emily’s door and ducked under the curtain with the coddy bag in my teeth.

They grabbed me as soon as I jumped up but I was ready for them and wrapped my arms and legs around the metal bed corner and yelled, “Look, Em, I got it.” But of course as soon as I opened my mouth the coddy bag fell onto Emily with a plump. I can only thank godzilla she didn’t scream when the coddy bag touched her or I’d have died of shame. Why didn’t she scream? She looked so strange, so shiny, such an odd waxed paper color, but what did I expect? She was naked I think but lay in a sort of black rubber wrapper full of foam, like a spittlebug in a leaf, with her little white throat just showing. She must have had plenty of morphine or sumpm. I guess they were getting ready to move her. She looked up dreamily, she was awake, half-awake, she saw me and smiled that queer bug smile on top of her rotten bucked teeth and I’m ashamed to say I cared more about that than if she would live. “It’s me, the Bogeywoman. I was here,” I said, “don’t forget.”

All this while the royals had been pulling on the back of my overalls and now my arms and legs turned gimp and let go of the bed. I slumped down on the floor and bawled. It was too steep a fall. I had barely had time to conceive of myself as a dreambox mechanic before I had as good as killed somebody. Besides,
I loved my see-through princess and was afraid I would never see her again. How much could one little body take? I buried my face in my hands, but in the dark I kept seeing old Emily resolutely igniting the bottom of that cheesy
I
CHOCOLATE
bathrobe, so I opened my eyes again. After a moment I became aware I was looking at sumpm dreadfully familiar. It was my Mr. Peanut cigarette lighter, lying in the wrinkled, venous hand of Doctor Zuk. (Her hands were pretty shockingly decrepit, the one part of her that looked her age.)

She was holding it so only I would see it, but see it I must, since it was all of five inches from my nose. In fact in my first operatic rush of recognition I feared she would set my hair on fire, or singe my face. I knew I deserved it. She towered above me, peering down at me with an undetached queenly rigor that was totally untypical of the average dreambox mechanic at Rohring Rohring, and besides setting off a little alarm in the covert conservatism that’s a part of every mental patient, she was scaring me to death. Her nylons glowed electrically on top of those soccer player’s shins and calves. I had the sensation I was clinging to her chiseled kneecaps, although I was just kneeling there, doing no such thing, and nobody else would have even noticed except—I was convinced—Doctor Zuk—
Madame
Zuk—herself. Her I clearly saw considering whether to kick me off of her ankles into the gutter. “What you think you are doing?” she hissed, and if Emily hadn’t been lying there, I could tell she would be shouting. “What you can mean with this unacceptable behavior that might further injure your friend? Unacceptable! Unacceptable!” she spat. “Please will you be my dreambox mechanic?” I blurted. “I know it’s my fault that Emily lit herself on fire. I don’t care if I live or die, in fact I hope I do die if you won’t be my dreambox mechanic.” She stared down at me. She was not as
tall as she looked, but now she seemed to duck her head to keep from butting the ceiling. “You are thinking to kill yourself? The world will go on without you, you know, Miss Bogeywoman. Now, please to get out immediately,” she said. Her ugly, ringless hand pointed me to the door.

It wasn’t a daring escape. O well, daring would have been wasted on Rohring Rohring, which was as leaky as a kitchen colander. Hypothetically, the lobby guards knew us mental patients by sight and were ready to nab us if we made a run for it. In fact Lopes was watching me as I dashed past his desk but made up his mind—I saw a movement of his lower jaw like someone setting down a grocery bag with a plump—that this was nothing to risk a heart attack for. After all we Bug Motels were always running around wild. We had the liberty of the lobby and the elevators, the cafeteria, gift shop and snack bar, and of the courtyard where we played tennis on the doctors’ courts. And although we were supposed to wait for our pint-sized school bus in the morning and get off it again at night only on that little
yellow-striped island of concrete on Broadway, next to the trolley tracks and across from the ayrabbers’ barn, still Lopes knew we had nobody but wicked Reginald to guide us, out there on the wickedest of wicked streets. And in fact every day we surveyed the whores and pimps, junkies, stewies, smokies and stuffies who treaded by for any new faces, and meanwhile we longed to be the ayrabbers who came jingling out of the barn across the way behind their swayback nags. Small wonder Lopes had given us up for lost.

As for these horses, even if they were the world’s ugliest, with feet like laundry irons and drooping underlips as hairy as catfish, still they were horses and even to the seen-it-all Bug Motels, such an ancient career as horse and wagon and a load of vegetables seemed a romantic occupation, even movie starry—where else but the movies did you see a horse and wagon nowadays? The ayrabbers’ horses clopped up one street and down another with the frail rigidity of elderly mental patients. They knew the way. If the way changed, say, the street was torn away down to its brick sewer line, old Broomstick wouldn’t pull the wagon straight into the hole—he wasn’t blind—but he would stand there till tomorrow. Till he starved. Till somebody saved him, led him home to his bucket of oats and flake of hay. We could tell the horses were low beasts and the ayrabbers the lowest of the low, lower even than mental patients—dusty black wretches with caved-in chests and a few mossy crooked tombstones for teeth, even the young ones.

All the same we Bug Motels put ayrabbers, not that we knew any poisonally, up there with movie stars—in a way one end of the social ladder was as good as the other. The important thing was to live at the far end, where one more step and you fell off into nothing. Like the ayrabbers’ nags, we Bug Motels knew the
way. We saw that yawning hole, the grownup world of work we weren’t ready for. For all our separate frenzies we were standing at the edge of it staring in, until we starved.

And funny how the Bug Motels, city slickers one and all, each dreamed themselves into movies of some kinda golden days gone by. Sometimes Dion got sick of Nino, his tailor, running his life and he said: “Who I really wanna be is the wild man of Druid Hill Park, hide in the bushes all day and let the lions and monkeys out of their cages at night and run around wit em.” “Ya mean naked?” “Nuttin but my hairy legs and froggies, man.” Emily was a saint in some Dark Ages nunnery living on communion wafers and dew, Bertie loved hashish because he wanted to wander around in humble disguise all night like the Caliph of Baghdad and his trusty wazir whassizname in
The Arabian Nights
, O was the beautiful slave girl who walked upside down on the golden daggers in her hands. And I always had this pipe dream of trekking with Broomstick, my nag, up the grassy median strip of the New Jersey Turnpike. Not that I wished to show off in my buckskins to the millions who travel that road. No, it was the only way I knew to get to New York City, which in turn was the only way I more or less knew to get to Camp Chunkagunk. I figured I could sleep over at Grandma Schapiro’s and tie Broomstick up in Central Park. After that I wasn’t so sure of the road.

I had probably killed my see-through princess, and Doctor Zuk,
Madame
Zuk, had bawled out my monster carelessness from high up on her horse—snorting greengold sparks from her nostrils, bareback, spume of silvery hair, spangled brassiere. And had refused to be my dreambox mechanic—would not even look down my rabbit hole, though I had clung to her ankles and begged. And now I would never have her or be her. My face hot
as a frying pan for shame, swearing never to return, I bolted out the main entrance of Rohring Rohring, right under the bored nose of Lopes, the
PM
guard, and—maybe I was dreaming of Broomstick—ran across six lanes of traffic and four silver staves of trolley tracks, to the wide-open doors of the ayrabbers’ barn.

It was cool, dark and dusty inside, the dust dancing in great blocks in front of the open doors, and the perfume of horse manure lifting the air like a leaven, rich and tingling. Still halfblind from sunlight I walked in deeper and peered into the stalls one after the other. I was looking for Broomstick, for a nose to stroke, for some dumb creature to love me, but the cubicles were all empty though they reeked of horse piss that never dried. The straw bedding, what little there was of it on the wet cement, clung to itself in sweaty cowlicks. When I stuck my head over each gate, no Broomstick but a sharp slap of ammonia—tears sprang into my eyes. The water buckets were oily swamps of whatever had fallen in them. They stank.

Well it ain’t the Rohring Rohring of horse hospitals, I mumbled to myself—more like some horror behind the workhouse in a Dickens novel. To think old Broomstick shlepped all day, up street down street, to come home to this. The workhouse loomed blackly in front of me as it often had, the world of grownups: Doing what you didn’t like from one end of the day to the other, then shoving some unappetizing thing in your mouth, then falling exhausted into the sack. This made grownups mean and ugly before they got old, and they took it out on the young, except for Merlin of course and the rare other escapee like madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse. I knew I would not escape. I might as well weep on the neck of some pitiful nag, some circus reject like myself. Or I might become an ayrabber. If I were an ayrabber, a movie star yet the lowest of the low, I’d be good to my
Broomstick, we’d be a legendary pair, known the length and breadth of Monument Street if not the New Jersey Turnpike. So where was Broomstick when I needed him? Didn’t these beasts get a day or a week off, to say nothing of a year seven months eight days, when they were sick or lame? No—one stumble and straight to the knacker. Of course you could hardly say with some of these fruit-wagon horses what was walking and what was stumbling. With some you would have said, to look at them and their eyes full of flies, they had died in their traces.

It was sumpm like being a
Unbeknownst To Everybody all your life: was it life if you didn’t notice when you died, and went right on shlepping? I was a higher being: I could know my own misery, ergo I could off myself.