The Children of Hamelin Page 13

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all week,” I said, and meant it in a weird way.

  She laughed, snuggled close to me on the couch and leaned her head on my shoulder, pressing her soft check against mine. I stroked her long silky hair. She touched me lightly on the thigh, and I put my arm around her. She lifted her face to me, parted her lips, and we kissed.

  Feeling the clean hardness of her teeth against mine, the soft wet world-filling reality of our tongues touching, I felt a great weight lifting off my soul. I felt my mind, hang-ups, worries, fears, reservations, past, all that sorry bullshit, melting into the pure animal reality of tongues and teeth and spit and skin.

  Short blond hair (long and black)—lighting the surge of a needle in my vein—open bag of smack on red Con Ed spool table—”You’d be a great dealer,” she said. “Let’s go down to Snook’s and collect some quarters”—streets are full of narcs—hit them with police-lock bar—three-to-five for this for sure—”Come on, you can’t just stop”—“You’re a beautiful cat”—living room full of pot-smack in all the sugar bowls—Tiger O.D.ed last night—cut with oregano—dirty spike—I was awake. I was awake with Anne naked in the bed beside me dead to the world.

  No... no... I shook myself mentally. Robin, not Anne. Just a dream. This is reality—now, Robin, pot, not smack.

  Now I was wide awake, I realized that I was straight, and, realizing that, I realized how stoned I had been.

  Ten nickel bags sitting on my living room table—reality.

  Jesus, Robin had cut up two ounces of pot in my pad, and I had been too stoned to even bitch about it; all I could think of was some damn stupid thing about oregano!

  Waves of paranoia washed over me—not bust paranoia, no I didn’t seriously believe that the cops were about to break in and find those damn ten nickel bags all cut up and ready to peddle to high school kids on street-corners. No, it was the existence of those ten nickel bags in my pad and the dream of Anne melting into Robin pot melting into smack me melting into... into something used again... too much dope in the apartment... games being played with my head... just a connection... never been a dealer technically... tell it to the judge...

  Robin turned over in her sleep. Her face was relaxed and peaceful; her lips pouted around a baby’s smile.

  Get ahold of yourself, man! You’re getting paranoid over nothing; a bad dream, is all. The chick digs you, is all. Don’t blow it. Don’t be square. Don’t get paranoid.

  I let out a deep breath and closed my eyes. What, after all, was there to be uptight about? I wasn’t uptight about smoking pot with her; why should those ten nickel bags put me on a bummer? Don’t be a hypocritical shit, man!

  Yeah, sure I would be cool in the morning.

  But I would damn well make sure she took the stuff with her tomorrow and didn’t try to stash it here. I wouldn’t blow what I had going with her by getting righteous over her thing. But I wouldn’t let myself get eaten by it again, either.

  Thing to do was maintain, man, maintain!

  9 - The Unmoved Mover

  “Dear Mr. Casey:

  Thanks very much for your hard-hitting article, ‘The Man Who Turned Off the World.’ With drugs so much in the news today, one would think that such an article on J. Harry Anslinger, the man most responsible for the prohibition of marijuana in the United States, would find a ready market. Indeed your piece has much to recommend it in the way of literary skill, exhaustive research, and particularly passion...”

  “You look like you’re gonna puke, man,” Bruce Day said. It was 2:30 Wednesday afternoon, the exact center of the Dirk Robinson work week, when five o’clock Friday is just as far away as nine o’clock Monday and the week seems like it has gone on forever and will probably never end.

  I looked up from my letter to Mr. George Casey, waved the manuscript in Bruce’s face and said: “It’s things like this that make this job disgusting.”

  “Another sickie?” Bruce asked.

  “I wish that’s all it was,” I said. “I’m getting that old Miss Lonelyhearts feeling again.”

  “And this, too, shall pass away, or so they tell me,” Berkowitz grunted without bothering to look up from his typewriter.

  I ignored him. “This thing,” I told Bruce, “Is the Dirk Robinson cherry of one George Casey, a nineteen-year-old kid living on Avenue D. According to his letter, he’s just finishing out a year’s probation, having been busted for pot at the tender age of eighteen.”

  “I Was a Teen-Age Pothead?” Bruce asked.

  “I wish it was,” I sighed. “But what it is is a kind of ultimate poison-pen letter called ‘The Man Who Turned Off the World.’ A meticulously researched put-down of our beloved former Chief Narc J. Harry Anslinger. The kid seems to have read every word of Anslinger’s that ever saw print and everything ever written about him. He takes little pieces out of context and strings them together with his own obsessions and paranoia and proves that Anslinger is responsible for every disaster in the past thirty years, possibly excluding the Second World War.”

  “So what’s your problem?” Bruce asked.

  “I like it.”

  “In your heart, you know he’s right, eh?”

  I nodded. “But in my guts, I know he’s nuts. The kid expects us to sell the thing to either Life or The Reader’s Digest. You know—’The Most Unforgettable Character I Never Met.’”

  Bruce gave me a nasty, pious grin. “Why don’t you pass it on to Dickie?” he said.

  “Are you nuts? Dickie’d just bounce it and get pissed off at me in the bargain.”

  “True,” said Bruce, “but the look on Dickie’s face—”

  “Day, you have no soul!”

  “And then when Dickie bounces it, you can go over his head to the Man himself... the look on Dirk’s face—”

  “As he boots Tom’s ass out the door,” Berkowitz observed without missing a beat on his typewriter.

  “There is that,” Bruce admitted. “But just what is your real problem with the damned thing? You know we’re not going to market it...”

  “Problem is,” I said, “that I know no magazine would touch it with a fork. Not only is it a propaganda piece for the International Dope-Fiend Conspiracy, it’s probably instant libel suit too. What do I tell the cat?”

  “Man, I don’t understand you,” Bruce said. “You tell him what you just told me.”

  I look at Bruce, trying to esp it to him. Bruce was what you might call a “gentleman dealer”: he liked pot but didn’t like to pay for it, so he’d buy a key every few months and deal enough of it to get his bread back and keep the rest to smoke. Bruce would understand why I was identifying with this Casey twitch, why I was hung up over what to tell him, if I told him about last weekend’s scene. But if I told Bruce, I’d also be telling Berkowitz, who I just didn’t make for a connection for even a fellow-traveller of connections, and sooner or later it would get to Dickie. I had the feeling it would only make points for me in a weird way with Dickie—but Richard Lee, Vice President of Dirk Robinson Literary Agency, Inc., in his secret identity as a company fink would be honor bound to report to the Man. That might be interesting, but then again it might be too interesting: it might blow the one thing that kept Dirk from manipulating me the way he manipulated everyone in the office, the fact that I was totally opaque to him. If Dirk knew I was involved with dope, he might can me. Or worse, it might be some kind of key to my head for him, in which case I could easily end up as another pawn in the Big Game. Dirk had made it obliquely clear to me on several occasions that I could have a pro desk if I asked for it. That I knew this, and that he knew I knew, and that I had made no moves in that direction, kept me in the position of playing with his head, instead of vice versa. Which was the way I intended to keep it. Therefore, I had better not run off at the mouth.

  “Thing is,” I said, “that almost any underground newspaper would print it, and that would make the kid happy. But you know what Agency policy is on referring suckers
to nonpaying markets—”

  “More to the point,” Bruce said, “if the kid has a dope record and that thing sees print, it’ll keep the fuzz crawling all over him till they find something to bust him for.”

  Yeah, Bruce was right. It was kindly old Uncle Tom’s (ugly thought right there!) duty to tell the kid to cool it before he ends up on Dry Tortugas. And that was really what was bugging me: less than a week after Robin did her thing in my pad, here I was speaking ex cathedra telling some kid to cool it before he got himself busted.

  “I guess it’s my duty as a member of the New York Literary Establishment to tell him to shit-can it,” I sighed.

  “Now there’s a thought!” Bruce said. “I’ll cherish your image of fee-readers as members of the Establishment every time I get to thinking of us as the Wage Slaves of Fifth Avenue.”

  “I dunno,” I muttered, “maybe I’m getting too involved. I keep telling myself ‘fee-writers are shits’ but sometimes I almost don’t believe it.”

  “Any time you start feeling sorry for the cruds,” Berkowitz said, “just contemplate the Mad Dentist and Company, Nathanael West, and have the innocent purity of your cynicism magically restored.”

  He had a point there; my attack of conscience was probably nothing more than the Wednesday afternoon blues. Thus purged of thought-crime, I returned to my letter to old George Casey:

  “Frankly, Mr. Casey, the finest writer in the world could not do a piece like this in a manner that would render it salable to a national magazine. The obvious legal question of libel aside, no major magazine is as yet ready to publish an article which unequivocally advocates the use of marijuana as a positive good—”

  Was I getting through? Could he tell that I was telling him I was on his side? Shit, if only I could say what I wanted to say for once!

  “There are so-called ‘underground’ publications which might publish the piece, but since they pay little or nothing for material and since 10% of nothing is very little indeed, no reputable literary agent can afford to deal with them.”

  A neat piece of double-talk: I had given him the Dirk Robinson party-line while really telling him where he could get the thing published. But I had to tell him what the consequences could be or I’d be nothing better than a pimp for the narcs....

  “Moreover, if I may, I’d like to warn you against submitting the piece to these markets on your own; in view of your conviction for a narcotics violation, publication of this article might very well serve to focus the attention of certain governmental agencies whose interest you might find less than desirable upon your person to your general detriment and to the detriment of your promising career as a writer...”

  A word to the wise, kiddo. I had done as much good deed for the week as I was going to; from here on in, it was strictly The Word according to St. Robinson:

  “...Nevertheless, this article does demonstrate a powerful and well-controlled writing talent at work, and when you apply that talent to a less commercially-limited subject in your next submission—”

  “The Man craves your presence in his inner sanctum.”

  Huh? I looked up: it was Dickie who had appeared in front of my desk in a puff of ectoplasm while I was hung-up with my conscience. A moment of idiot panic—had Dirk somehow picked up my brainwaves? Was he calling me on the carpet before I had even finished the offending letter? Talk about paranoia!

  “Who me?” I said.

  “None other.”

  “Into the Valley of the Shadow...” said Berkowitz.

  “Ah, fuck off!” I rejoined brilliantly over my shoulder as I followed Dickie through the boiler room to his office. (The main entrance to Dirk’s office was strictly for Big Name Writers and other VIPs; we peons entered the Holy of Holies through the airlock of Dickie’s little private cubicle.)

  “Who did I kill?” I asked Dickie when we were inside his office (a large closet containing a window, a door to Dirk’s office, a shelf of books Dickie had had a hand in, and a desk overflowing with correspondence, books, manuscripts and used paper coffee-cups).

  Dickie grinned at me as he opened the door to Dirk’s office. “Fear not, Tom me lad,” he said. “Fame and fortune await within.” And in I went, and Dickie closed the door behind me with a doorman’s flourish.

  Dirk’s office was set up as a movie set of Dirk Robinson’s office. A monstrous, Danish-modern walnut desk faced the entrance across about an acre of black wool carpet. The wall behind the desk was festooned with white and gold drapery to hide the fact that the windows overlooked a magnificent view of the seedy office building next door. The wall facing me as I entered from Dickie’s office was given over to bookcases displaying the published works of clients to denote worldly success; the wall behind me to bad paintings done by Dirk himself symbolizing artistic concern. Two uncomfortable modernistic armchairs faced the desk; between them was a large low table which was empty except for a small bronze bust of JFK.

  The huge free-form desk itself was absolutely bare expect for a telephone and a bronze In-Out basket (unlike Dickie, Dirk had a clean desk fetish) but the typing-table joined to the desk at right angles held the latest IBM Selectric and Dirk, in his big clear-plastic swivel-chair, was working at it as I entered.

  Dirk swiveled his chair to face the armchairs, said: “Sit down, Tom” in that soft, too-even voice of his. I sat down facing Dirk Robinson: a slightly overweight cat of about forty-five in shirtsleeves-and-tie, with a soft, flabby, easily forgettable face except for the small hawk-nose and the bright dark eyes that told anyone with a brain in his head not to be conned by Dirk’s insurance-salesman appearance.

  “How long have you been working here?” Dirk said, leaning forward across the desk at me. He knew how long more precisely than I did and we both knew it. His face was, as always, professionally unreadable. I started to sweat inside. What was going on behind those fox-eyes of his?

  “A little less than a year,” I said.

  Dirk nodded like an emperor over all that gleaming walnut. “A little more than ten months,” he said, scoring some kind of points in a game of his I couldn’t fathom. “How do you like your job?”

  What was he fishing for? Was he going to can me? Or try to maneuver me into asking for a pro desk again? Okay, Dirk baby, so let’s play games.

  “It’s an education,” I said.

  Dirk leaned back in his chair, spread his arms to rest the fingers of each hand on the edge of the desk, smiled. “You don’t want to be a writer,” he said evenly. “We get three basic types on the fee-desks: would-be writers like Mannie Berkowitz, guys who see it as the first step up the ladder, and guys like Bruce Day who aren’t thinking beyond an easy hundred bucks a week. I know you’re not a would-be writer. I get the feeling you’re one of the easy-buck boys.”

  Was this the lead-in to a firing? What the hell else could he be getting at? Well, if he was going to fire me, I wouldn’t make it easy for him.

  “Could be,” I said.

  Dirk hunched forward suddenly, hands still on the edge of the desk; now he looked like a pudgy panther ready to spring. His expression never changed, but his eyes seemed to be laughing at a private joke. “The easy-buck boys last longest at the fee-desk,” he said. “Bruce could be here indefinitely, but I don’t give Mannie Berkowitz another six months.”

  Now I understood the joke—he wasn’t going to fire me, but he had known that was what I would think and he had played one of his mini-mind games. But what was he up to? I decided to relax and ride with it—Dirk had just given me a little reminder that it was pointless to try and think a step ahead of him.

  Dirk subsided into his chair, suddenly an old Dutch Uncle. “The guys that interest me,” he said, “are the ones who see the fee-desk as the first step on the ladder. I think you’re selling yourself short, Tom.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “In the ten months you’ve been here, you’ve sent about forty scripts on to Dickie for marketing. Dickie had to bounce only about a dozen. Abo
ut twenty of the rest eventually sold. That’s pretty impressive.”

  So that was it—now I was supposed to ask for a job handling pro writers and then he’d make me sweat a little before he gave it to me. Now I was a step ahead of Dirk: I knew where he was going and I had no intention of playing his game.

  “To tell you the truth, I never thought about it,” I said.

  Dirk leaned forward slightly, nodded almost imperceptibly, frowned the frown of a man who had heard what he had expected to hear. I saw another unexpected curve-ball coming. “I know,” Dirk said. “Your trouble is just that: you haven’t learned to think far enough ahead. Right now, you’re thinking I’m about to offer you a pro desk, right?”

  “Right,” I said, knowing a second before I said it that it had to be wrong.

  Dirk seemed to know I knew: he smiled and fixed me with a bright rodent-stare that seemed to look into places in me where I didn’t even know I had places. “Wrong,” he said. “You’d be a pretty good pro man, but you’d be more trouble than you’re worth. I don’t want you for a pro desk for the same reason I wouldn’t want me on a pro desk if I walked in the door: I’d be a fool to trust me and I’d be a fool to trust someone like you. A good pro man has to be a team-player like Dickie; he has to get a real charge out of contributing to Dirk Robinson Inc. and getting a private office with his name on the door. That sure wouldn’t be me, if someone else was top dog. And it’s not for you, either.”

  “That’s some kind of compliment?” I asked.

  “Wrong again. Neither of us is cut out to be a pawn in someone else’s game. But that’s as far as it goes. When I was your age I was well on my way to setting up this agency. You’re going nowhere.”

  “They say money can’t buy happiness,” I said.