The Children of Hamelin Read online

  Dirk leaned back, seemed to suck his neck into his shirt like a turtle. “Bullshit,” he said evenly. “I’m not talking about money and you know it. Money is just a convenient way of keeping score. I’m talking about who is Tom Hollander ten years from now. Picture yourself as a fee-reader pushing forty.”

  I stared at Dirk, staring at me. A cold empty feeling in my gut. Forty. Christ, forty! Forty living in a pad in the East Village knocking down an easy hundred a week balling Robin blowing pot—ugh! But what else was there? You stinking son of a bitch!

  “To tell you the truth,” I said softly, “I can’t see myself pushing forty, period.”

  Dirk hunched forward and again rested his fingertips on the edge of the desk. “Of course you can’t,” he said. “You can’t see yourself at forty the way you are now and you can’t see yourself as a forty-year-old Dickie Lee with your own little office and your name on the door either.”

  Job or no job, I had had about enough of this crap. That lousy hundred bucks a week didn’t buy Dirk the right to talk about me like my goddamn father!

  “Come on Dirk,” I said, “what the hell is all this about?”

  Dirk rose up on his fingertips and ass. He gave me the coldest look I had ever seen. “I’m telling you the facts of life, Tom,” he said. “You’re the kind of guy who’ll reach forty in only one of two conditions: with a game of your own or out in the gutter. You’re just not a company man.”

  “So?” I snarled. Who the fuck did he think he was, reading me the dirty-hippy riot-act?

  But I couldn’t even get a rise out of him by acting antsy. He was still old, unflappable Dirk Robinson. Instead of getting uptight, he sank back in his chair and gave me his clever plastic imitation of a warm smile.

  “So I’m going to give you a chance to get started playing your own game,” he said. “Dickie’s told you about Slick. They need a slush-pile reader, and confidentially, they’ll take anyone I recommend. Say the word and the job is yours.”

  I’ve got to admit I was touched. Sure it was just a dumb job in LA and something I had no eyes for, but from where Dirk sat, he was really doing me a favor, saving me from myself, acting fatherly. Maybe he saw in me a young Dirk in danger of ending up someplace he had once feared he would end up. Who knows? But on his terms, he was doing me a real favor, and I would be a shit to treat it otherwise.

  “How much does it pay?” I asked, feeling I had to at least make a show of considering it.

  “A hundred a week.”

  “A hundred a week? That’s what I’m getting here! Why the hell should I drag my ass to LA to make the same bread reading crud for a lousy stiffener that I’m making here?”

  “Because LA is the boondocks in the publishing industry,” Dirk said. “To be honest, magazines like Slick are staffed mostly by middle-aged editorial derelicts who couldn’t make it in New York. Lushes. Queers. Unsuccessful crooks.”

  “You’re a great salesman for the job, Dirk.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Dirk said. “There’s a tremendous turnover in an outfit like that. A young guy with something on the ball could start as slush-pile reader and be editor of the magazine in a couple of years.”

  “I don’t see myself as the forty-year-old editor of some crummy West Coast stiffener either.”

  Dirk smiled; his eyes seemed to sparkle; suddenly I saw this seemingly phony room for what it was: the lair of one hell of a predator. Dirk did his own thing, and did it all the way.

  “You’re starting to think the right way,” Dirk said. “The editor of something like Slick is either an old has-been who really never was or a hungry young kid on the way up. Get the point?”

  “On my way up to what?”

  Dirk shrugged. “If you were the kind of guy who’d let me tell you that, I’d rather keep you on my team.”

  Which reminded me of what Dickie has said about the Slick job—the payoff Dirk would expect for the favor.

  “As long as we’re being so man-to-man, Dirk,” I said, “just what’s in it for you? I never made you for an altruist.”

  Dirk laughed a real laugh. “I’ve been called a lot of things,” he said, “but never an altruist. Still, I can be an altruist when altruism is good business. I’ve been in this business for eighteen years. Hundreds of guys have passed through this office. A couple dozen have used it as a stepping stone to jobs at magazines or publishing houses. Most of them owe me for getting them started. Some are senior editors now. Some are personal friends. That’s why this is the biggest agency around—I’ve got my people all over the publishing industry.”

  “You expect payoffs?”

  Dirk leaned forward, gave me a little smile, seemed to be acknowledging that in a weird way, our minds worked on the same wavelengths. “Nothing as crude as all that,” he said. “The whole thing runs on gratitude. Genuine gratitude. I don’t ask for a thing—which is why I get more than I could possible get on a quid pro quo basis.”

  “What about ingrates?”

  Dirk looked me straight in the eye; it was like looking into the eye of a camera or a one-way mirror: he saw everything. I saw a shiny glass surface. Dirk was a monomaniacal genius, I realized, a selfforged weapon; the Big Game was Dirk.

  “I’ve come as far as I have,” he said, “with only one basic talent: I know what people will do in given circumstances. Once you know that, all you have to do is create the particular circumstances that will make people do what you want them to do because they want to do it. I can smell out an ingrate a mile away. You’re no team player, Tom, but you’re no ingrate either. And for the same reason: your only loyalty is to your own sense of honor.”

  “You dig honor?” I blurted out, thinking of the whole slimy fee-operation.

  Dirk seemed to choose his words with mathematical precision: “I understand how honor functions,” he said. “Well, what about it?”

  For some reason I found myself saying: “How long do I have to decide?” And as I said it, I understood why: Dirk and I had gone past some point of no return. If I didn’t take the Slick job, my days as a fee-reader were numbered anyway. I mean, I had no intention of getting involved in Dirk’s machinations, but the longer I could stretch it out, the more hundred dollar checks I could collect before the shit hit the fan.

  Nevertheless, I had the unpleasant flash that Dirk understood all this and saw something behind it that I didn’t see as he smiled with phony indifference, said: “It’s a big move and a big decision. I can give you maybe a month. After that—” He shrugged. I could read anything into that shrug that I wanted to. And of course Dirk knew that, too.

  “I’ll think it over,” I lied.

  Dirk swiveled his chair back to face his typewriter. That was it; I was dismissed. Back to the salt mines.

  Shit, where would I be at forty? Even the question seemed totally unreal. And for some reason, it reminded me that I was supposed to go to some kind of Foundation meeting tonight.

  And that put me even more uptight. Out of the mind-game frying pan into the mindfucker fire. Now there would be a contest! Harvey Brustein vs. Dirk Robinson for the Heavyweight Mindfucking Championship of the World.

  Or would it? Naw, I’d have to put my money on Dirk. Harvey did his thing well enough with mental cripples and therapy-junkies, but Dirk’s game was to take on the world. No contest.

  Somehow that made me feel better. Dirk’s head was as different from mine as mine was from Harvey’s, but the thing was I knew Dirk would react to Harvey the same way I did. And could cut him to pieces without raising a sweat. And would expect anyone he respected to be able to do likewise. And Dirk respected me. Therefore....

  Having made the twin mistakes of killing a couple of beers with Bruce after work and then eating at a nice little Japanese restaurant on 43rd Street, I blew the chance to change out of my one decent office suit before going downtown and so eight pm found me squatting on the dusty gray carpeting of the Foundation living room trying pretty unsuccessfully to keep the suit in a co
ndition to wear to work the next day.

  As a result, my legs were cramped, and so even before Harvey got there (late as usual by design, natch) I was in a reasonably poisonous mood. The big room was packed—the row of folding chairs against the rear wall had been filled up long before I arrived, and except for the little raised dais with Harvey’s folding-chair throne on it, the entire floor area was covered with wall-to-wall Foundation creeps, sprawled out, squatting, hunkering, and generally milling about and lowing like cattle in the pens outside the slaughterhouse. At least forty people crowded together in the dimly-lit, hot, stuffy room and many of them definitely unwashed types. A lot like being on the D Train during rush-hour stuck between stations and waiting for the damned thing to move. To make the evening complete, Arlene—my only real reason for being there—had not shown up yet. Ted and Doris, sprawled on the floor to my right, were discussing Ted’s last group in which he had admitted to homosexual fantasies or some such bibble. To my left, Rhoda-something-or-other, a middle-aged Park Avenue therapy-connoisseur drenched in perfume which smelled worse than the armpit-stench it was meant to hide, was smoking a cigarette and constantly blowing smoke in my eyes. In front of me, Bonnie Elbert, a Slum Goddess from Scarsdale, was brushing her long black hair. She had dandruff. Charming. Fuckin’ charming.

  “Just what are we sitting on this floor for?” I asked Ted, trying to find a better way of passing the time than digging all the uglies.

  “Because there are no seats,” Ted answered reasonably.

  “Jerk,” I said (in no mood for reason), “I mean just what are these meetings all about?”

  Doris leaned across Ted, said: “Nothing in particular. If someone has something to say to start it off, they say it. Otherwise Harvey starts things going. Either way, we just let the meeting go where it seems to want to go.”

  Not bothering to tell them where I’d like the meeting to go, I asked: “Where the hell’s Arlene?”

  “I think she had a late class today,” Ted said. “Don’t worry man, the chick’ll show up.” He gave me one of those old Ted-smiles of his (or a plastic imitation of one). “How you doin’ there?” He attempted a leer which didn’t quite come off.

  “Does Macy’s tell Gimbel’s?” I said. That sounded pretty hollow, too. In the old days, wife or no wife, my chick or not my chick, Ted had to be considered at least a possible rival for any decent-looking girl. It really pissed me off then—especially since Ted was more competition than I could handle and we both knew it—but now I was pissed off by Ted’s essential harmlessness. You can get nostalgic for some pretty freaky things.

  Suddenly I got a flash of Ted at forty—or rather I thought of a forty-year-old Ted. But there wasn’t any image attached to the idea. I couldn’t picture Ted at forty any more than I could picture me at forty. Or maybe deep down I could picture Ted at forty and it was just too ugly to look at. Dirk had really hit a nerve. Was this why Ted was always leaping from Answer to Answer? Was he afraid of finding himself out in the middle-aged cold with nothing but the ghosts of his youth to keep him warm?

  Looking around the room, I was pretty sure that this was where a lot of Foundation-heads were at. Ida, the Ancient Virgin. George Blum, a CCNY undergraduate pushing thirty. Even the housefrau types like Rhoda-in-front-of-me, and Ida’s friend Frieda. And a couple of the Village types: Tod Spain, a very old promising young actor and his chick; Rich Rossi. Yeah, and old Charles... People with their futures all behind them deluding themselves that they could change their presents by playing mind-games with their pasts. What the hell was I doing in this garbage-heap of broken dreamers? Playing that old Savior game again... or... had Dirk really hit me in the core of my being...?

  Oh, yes, I was in a fine nasty mood indeed—

  Then a commotion at the entrance, and in walked Harvey dressed in his usual grubby white shirt and baggy gray pants but this time also decked out in the most godawful Madras sports jacket this side of a Miami Beach skid row. Nodding to the faithful, Harvey threaded his way through their bodies like a man walking down the Bowery taking care not to step in the dogshit, vomit or bodies littering the sidewalk. Reaching the dais, he sat down on the folding chair, lit a cigarette, exhaled more smog into the already-carcinogenic air and said: “Did you ever really think about New York?”

  He took another drag, exhaled more smoke. All the smoke in the air (a lot of tobacco-heads in the old Foundation) was starting to get to my throat, and so I did really think about New York, about how New York is a Winter Sinus-Cold Festival.

  “Did you ever think about how living in New York affects your consciousness?” Harvey said. Did he have sinus trouble? Why else would he be on this kick? Old Harv did have a point: a sinus cold is definitely consciousness-contracting.

  Harvey leaned forward. “After all, New York is a pretty overwhelming environment,” he said. “So overwhelming that if you’ve grown up in it, you don’t even notice how your mental style is molded by it. For instance, you’d think that something like the Foundation, which deals with internals, wouldn’t be very much influenced by the external environment. But here we are sitting in a room in a converted industrial loft. Why? Because in New York, it’s the only kind of place that’s big enough for our purposes that’s cheap enough to rent. In Los Angeles, we might have a whole house, but we certainly can’t have anything like that in Manhattan. Now since most of you are New Yorkers, you’re probably thinking: ‘So what?’ Well, look around... go ahead, look around.”

  Like the other jerks in the room, I looked around. I saw people sitting on the floor and on folding chairs, faded yellow walls, three windows at the far end of the room looking out on more loft buildings. So?

  Harvey had taken a drag on his cigarette. He exhaled, smiled wanly, said: “I thought so. You don’t see it. Because all your apartments are like this loft. You’ve lived this way all your lives, so you don’t see that the significant thing is what you don’t see: trees, grass, or even hills and valleys. New York has no natural geography; it’s a totally synthetic environment. You don’t have any consciousness of the natural world here. And because of that, all the offices and apartments that you live and work in are inward-oriented, designed to shut out the external world. You don’t even notice it. But do you really think it doesn’t affect your consciousness?”

  “But you’re just talking about living in any city,” A familiar girl’s voice said from the back of the room. I turned; yep, it was Arlene, looking pretty groovy in a green sheath dress, carrying a brown coat and a couple of books under one arm. The evening might not be a total loss after all. I waved to her through the smoke, caught her eye. I motioned for her to come and sit down beside me; she gestured at the solid clot of bodies on the floor blocking her way and shrugged. Oh well....

  “Oh bullshit! Bull-shit!” It was Ted, up on his haunches, eyes intense—I vaguely remembered that Ted used to make some kind of idiot technical point out of his having been born in Ohio and therefore not being a native New Yorker, even though his family had moved here when he was six.

  “Dig, dig,” Ted said, waving his arms wildly like... er... like a New Yorker. “New York’s not like any other city... it’s not even part of the United States....”

  “It’s maybe in Russia?” Frieda Klein shouted in a heavy parody of a Bronx-mama voice. Giggle, giggle.

  Harvey held up his hand a la Chief Shitting Bull. “I’d like to know what Ted means by that,” he said. The natives subsided.

  “Man,” said Ted. “I’ve been all over the country (he had spent a few months bopping around on his bike once) and none of it is like New York. Compared to everywhere else, New Yorkers all seem like they’re on amphetamine. Everybody running around all the time with their shoulders hunched, looking out for muggers. Rest of the country’s scared shitless of New York. They’re afraid to even come here.”

  “Then they’re crazy,” Arlene said, “paranoid about some place they’ve never even seen.” Ole! I gave her the “V” sign. So old Arlene was a Ne
w York patriot...

  “No, no!” Ted shouted. “They’re afraid of New York because they’ve seen New Yorkers. Lousy posture. Pimples. Uptight. Talking a mile a minute. Dig, if you met some Martians in Cleveland and they were all pimply and had nose colds and were out of their minds, y’know you might get the idea that Mars was an unhealthy place.” All the while waving his arms like an Orchard Street peddler.

  “Anti-Semite!” someone yelled.

  “I notice you’re still here, Ted,” Arlene yelled. Two ears and the tail, baby!

  “Yeah... well... I...”

  “That’s the whole point,” said killjoy Harvey to the rescue. “Your environment gets inside you so when you leave it, new environments make you uncomfortable, even if they’re better, because they start to get inside you too, and suddenly you feel strange because you’re not in the environment you’re used to. You feel the new environment starting to change your consciousness and it makes you twitchy because change, even change for the better, feels like a threat unless you know how to deal with it. As the saying goes: ‘If you work in a stable long enough, you can end up missing the smell of horse-manure.’”

  “Aw come on, Harvey,” Rich Rossi said, “you saying New York is horseshit?”

  Harvey smiled a 100% plastic smile. Something about the smile alerted something inside of me: it was a pale imitation of a Dirk Robinson smile, kind of smile Dirk gives you when he’s maneuvering you into something and trying to show you he isn’t maneuvering you. There was something planned behind all this rapping on New York....

  “I’m just saying that New York, like everywhere else, is unique. There are other cities in the United States where things are cleaner, less hectic, more in contact with nature... where people are therefore a little more open, a little healthier. Where you might feel happier and freer if you could get past the shock of change. Los Angeles, for—”

  A great groan went up.

  Harvey smiled that same plastic smile. “I’m not saying Los Angeles is any better than New York,” he said, “just a different environment. So is Boston... New Orleans... San Francisco—”