“Piss off, Gillespie. I mean it.”
Captain MacManus clutched the banister of the third floor landing, kicking the apartment door closed behind him. He swallowed hard as the faded, grime-crusted walls of the ancient tenement swayed before him. He took a deep breath, grimacing as the stale stink of mildew and cat piss filled his lungs. Bad as it was, the stench was nothing compared to what he’d just escaped; it was a spring-fresh morning in the woods compared to that.
“C’mon Captain, gimme a break,” Gillespie leered, checking the focus on the larger of the two Nikons that swung from thick straps around his neck. “What’s going in there?”
Christ on toast, thought MacManus, of all the pain-in-the-ass ambulance chasers that the Times could have sent down here, it had to be Gillespie.
“People got a right to know, Cap,” the reporter continued, taking another step closer to the narrow landing and the two dingy apartment doors that now sat behind bright yellow lines of police tape.
MacManus shook his head, as the cold, wet lump in his belly rolled over again. He’d seen some bad nights in thirty years of working the Burroughs, but this…
“You take one more step toward that door, Gillespie,” the police Captain growled, ramming a thick finger into the reporters chest, “and I’m gonna shove that fancy camera right up your—”
Gillespie hesitated, uncertain, then retreated a step, trying to size up the seriousness of the situation. Casual indifference, sarcasm, maybe even a little name-calling, that was the usual play-by-play with the NYPD at a fresh crime scene. When New York’s finest started poking you in the chest and making threats, there was a big story, maybe a Pulitzer story, for the right guy with the right gear. You just had to know how to deal with these cops.
“Look Captain,” the reporter smiled his friendliest, “maybe we can…”
Whatever deal that Danny Gillespie was about to offer was cut short as the door to apartment 213 was ripped open from the inside and a blue-suited officer with vomit spraying from between his clenched fingers, splattering both the Captain and the hapless reporter who stood between him and the railing, lunged through the warning tape to puke noisily over the banister and down three flights of stairs to the concrete sidewalk below.
“Son of a bitch!” the Captain hollered, grabbing the retching patrolman before he overbalanced himself and added to the considerable mess below. The flash of a camera lit the hallway. He cursed again and turned on Gillespie as the younger man refocused to get a shot through the half-open doorway.
Then Captain Stephen MacManus did something that he hadn’t done in three decades of police work. Almost without thinking, he thumbed the snap on the leather holster at his hip and drew his .38, leveling the iron sights on the forehead of the reporter who stood less than a yard away.
“Put the camera down and walk away.”
Gillespie hesitated, thoughts of the Pulitzer Prize, or even just a healthy raise evaporating as his vision narrowed on the cannon-like maw of the service revolver.
The sound of ratcheting metal echoed deafeningly through the small corridor as MacManus thumbed the hammer back.
“Don’t push me tonight, Gillespie. I’m not playing.”
Daniel Gillespie, who would never win the Pulitzer Prize, dropped the camera onto the vomit-splattered carpet and fled.
They’re looking at me again, I can feel it.
Clutching their little clipboards tight in the sweaty armpits of their starched white jackets, peering through the dirty square window in my door. I don’t care. Maybe I should, but I don’t. I have my book, my little golden book with the big yellow egg on the cover, and for the moment I’m not even a little bit sleepy.
Right here, right now, friend, that’s all that matters.
Charlie, that’s Charlie Marks, and I grew up together on the west side in a neighborhood affectionately known as Hell’s Kitchen. Sure, you’ve heard of it. Everyone has. There’s been no end of gangster flicks, low budget black-and-whites from the fifties that based their hood with a heart-o-gold stories in the Kitchen, but I’ll tell you this: in 1979 the place was the unwashed armpit of the New York. Thirtieth to West Fifty-Ninth Street, Eighth Avenue to theHudson, it ain’t nothing more that a long, hot ghetto of rat-infested tenements and aging brownstones, a festering violent place, covered in the bright aerosol cryptograms of gang graffiti.
Toss in a bunch of porn shops, strip joints, peep shows and adult theaters, and you got yourself Hell’s Kitchen.
We’d shared a room on the second floor of a dingy seven-story tenement for almost a year, both of us just nineteen and thinking that, despite the screaming battles of our Hispanic neighbors, anything was better than living at home. They had some real belly-busters upstairs, punctuated with shrieking Spanish profanities and the not-so-odd shattering of window glass as the occasional piece of furniture came flying though. Once we had found the headless remains of the Blessed Virgin lying in a puddle of plaster on the sidewalk out front, and I told Charlie that I wouldn’t want to be the sorry s.o.b. who had to stand at the pearlies and explain to the Big J why I’d chucked his momma out the third story window. Charlie had laughed until a fine mist of soda sprayed from his nostrils.
It was a hole of an apartment, a tiny, humid oven that smelled like feet and shower mildew in the summer, but it was ours. No more harping Jew mother, sweating gin and screaming at me to pick up my socks and for the love of God close the fridge door, did I think she was made of money?
I can still see her face, a sweaty mask of thick blue eye shadow and pale doughy rolls of flesh—a great thoughtless moon-face, spellbound by the flickering monochrome of her daily soaps. At least there was no father around to give me hell, or beat on me like Charlie’s old man did. Coming home at two in the morning, his nose headed east or west from the fight down at Gustav’s bar, itching to finish the brawl with the heavy, buckled end of his thick leather cop belt. Charlie, doomed to be the only child in the Marks’ little corner of the Kitchen, usually ended up being the one to make his daddy feel like a man, though sometimes security guard Neil Marks wasn’t above a whack or two across the skinny backside of his rat-faced wife, just for good measure.
So we saved up a few bucks, squirreled away from our folks of course, and one day we just up and moved. Neither of us owned a lot. There wasn’t much to buy in the Kitchen and no one had the green to buy uptown. We hauled a couple of Winco bags full of clean underwear and dirty magazines the mile and a half up Ninth Avenue, past the bus station to the Windemere building on Fifty-seventh. Once a collection of high-class French flats, the Windemere was two years shy of its hundredth birthday and, much like my poor old ma, she hadn’t aged well, now several levels down the tenement scale from the brownstones we’d just fled from. There, trying to ignore the screaming neighbors and occasional early morning fistfights in the hallway, we scraped along by selling dime bags of cheap Mexican reef, sometimes dealing a little smack, and flipping a few burgers in Times Square when things really got tight. It wasn’t too bad. We saved up and bought a used stereo. The apartment had even come furnished (though we covered everything with secondhand blankets from the Goodwill just in case). Yeah, life was bopping along pretty smooth for a couple of PS-51 dropouts. Smooth, that is, until the morning that Charlie’s screaming woke me up.
I was sleeping on the couch next to the front window. I remember that the bedroom was just too damn hot. The old sofa was actually pretty comfortable, once we’d sprayed a couple of cans of Lysol over it to cover the pee smell. It must have been about ten in the morning, and the summer sun had angled through the dirty, flyspecked window and across my face. His scream brought me straight up, my heart pounding beneath my dingy tank top and my face drenched in sweat. I licked my lips and could feel the thick white coating of my tongue, the remnant of a lost number of beers the night before. I was probably blowing breath like at hot outhouse, but right at that moment I couldn’t have cared less. I ran a shaky hand through my hair, grimacing at a mother-bear of a hangover and the spiky, crusted feeling of dirt and sweat. Probably time to take a shower, I mused, trying to figure out what the hell had woke me up with my heart tripping along like a jackhammer against my ribs.
Then the scream came again, high and shocking, piercing my suffering brain like a long, sharp icicle, and I heard Charlie’s shrieking my name.
“Johnny?” he cried, his voice terror-filled. “Johnny— Jesus…Get in here!”
I was crossing the narrow floor of the living room before I realized I was up, kicking over pyramids of Old Milwaukee empties as I ran. I hit the door of the bathroom and found it locked.
“Charlie?” I hollered, holding my pounding head in both hands, “Charlie, the door’s locked. What the hell, man…”
I heard a weird sound—I thought something like nails being scattered on a tile floor. That wasn’t quite right, but hell, my head was about to explode, and it was the best I could think of.. Then I heard Charlie fumbling with the lock and opening the door. Charlie, who always locked the bathroom door, and couldn’t squirt a drop in a public toilet, stood there, his face white as a milkman’s ass and sheened in sweat, his stained green sweatpants a twisted heap at his ankles. I looked away fast.
“Damn man,” I muttered. “Your pants…”
Charlie didn’t notice or didn’t care that he was showing off his religion; he just stared at me, his big fish eyes bulging and his mouth opening and closing soundlessly.
My head hurt, bad, and I began to wonder if I might have started mixing a little something with my beer those last few rounds. I couldn’t remember. Either way, I had been sleeping nice and deep, despite the sun, and now I was standing in the doorway of our not-so-clean bathroom, trying not to look at my half-naked roommate while my pounding head threatened to split it seams and redecorate the hallway (a lovely paisley in grays and reds). I closed my eyes, working hard not to sound pissed, and tried again.
“Charlie…” That was all I got out before he grabbed me and dragged me into the bathroom with him. I had one awful moment of vertigo where my thoughts split evenly between wondering if I was going to blow chunks all over my roommate’s naked ass, and the terrible certainty that the guy I’d know all my life was a queer and this whole apartment deal had been a set-up so he could lure me in. Somewhere beyond the deep blue weirdness of the moment, my subconscious laughed at this. Charlie Marks couldn’t take a squat on a gas station toilet, no matter how loud his traffic was honking; gay rape was probably a bit out of his league.
“Look,” he croaked, pushing me against the far wall and pointing into the rust-stained depths of the toilet with a quaking finger, “Look!”
I looked. I blinked and then blinked again, certain that I wasn’t seeing what I thought I was seeing. There, beneath the yellowish liquid contents of bowl, lay what looked like, but couldn’t be, a large twinkling pile of change. I could make out old Georgie Washington’s wooden-jaw profile on a number of shiny quarters. There were nickels and dimes, some fifty cent pieces, and even half of a silver dollar poking out from the bottom of the pile. That must have been a bitch to pass, the snickering voice in my mind murmured. There must have been fifteen or twenty dollars’ worth of coins lying there, slowly marinating in Charlie’s urine.
“Geez-us!” I said, more than a little shocked. If this was a joke, I’d missed the punch line. “What the hell did you do that for?”
Charlie just stared at me with those big frogeyes, his whole body trembling. I could see the rapid beat of his pulse in a throbbing vein beneath his left eye. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.
“Damn, man,” I said, my voice rising, “How are you going to dig all that out of there without getting piss all over your hands? ‘Cause I’m sure as hell not gonna…”
I stopped in mid-sentence, my tongue sticking, thick and gummy, to the roof of my mouth as Charlie’s face clenched in pain, both hands flying to his bared stomach, bending as though a huge cramp was ripping through his belly. To say that he sat back down on the toilet would be an understatement, a huge understatement, something along the lines of saying that Billy Clinton enjoyed a good cigar. My old buddy Charlie Marks flung himself backwards onto that cheap plastic seat like his skinny white ass was shot out of a cannon, hitting the toilet so hard that I swear the whole crapper rocked up off the floor and I was sure that he had busted the damn thing (and how would be explain that to the super? A busted toidy full off loose change, eh? We’d be packing our Winco bags, for sure and for certain!) Then Charlie’s face screwed up in that awful grimace once more and I realized what was about to happen.
“Aw, Christ, Charlie…” I said, my voice thick with disgust as I whirled and headed for the door. Then I heard it. The most beautiful and terrible sound I’ve ever heard in my life. Over my roommate’s muffled groans came not nails on tile, but a tinny waterfall of coins, a cymbal crescendo of bright metal money cascading down onto the ever-growing pile in the toilet bowl.
I turned to look at Charlie and saw tears cascading down his pale cheeks, his body trembling as he clutched the rim of the sink with one white-knuckled hand.
“Wh…what’s happening to me, Johnny?” he asked, his voice frightened and tremulous.
I stared at him; we stared at each other for a long, long moment. I could hear someone shouting far down the hallway, the slam of a cheap hollow door, the inexhaustible serenade of honking taxis down on fifty-seventh.
“I don’t know, bro,” I replied, just as calm as a clam. It was the truth, too; I didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on, what could possibly be making my only friend sit here on this sunny New York morning and crap three cherries’ worth of change into the old privy. I needed a beer.
“I don’t know.” I repeated, “but I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re done.” I stared to close the door behind me, then paused. “And Charlie?” I called back through the entry.
“Yeah,” he answered weakly.
“Don’t flush that toilet.”
“Yeah, ok.”
An hour later we sat, staring at one another across the shaky old dinette and drinking our third beer each, neither of us knowing quite what to say. Charlie wanted to go to a doctor, but I talked him out of that pretty damn quick.
“Look, bro,” I said as patiently as I could, “You go to the doctor, he’s gonna lock you up for sure!”
“Couldn’t I,” Charlie’s lip trembled, “Couldn’t I just…you know…show him?”
“Sure,” I replied with a sigh. “Then he’ll think you either swallowed a bag full of change or that you stuffed it up there a nickel at a time. Either way we’re back to the old rubber condo. Look, does it hurt?”
Charlie paused to think, “No, not really, I mean no worse than…”
“Screw it then!” I said and reaching beneath the sink I pulled out the bright yellow rubber gloves that Charlie used to wash the dishes. I always thought that was kinda weird, you know, but that was Charlie, no subway crappers, no dishpan hands.
The total came to $14.85. No pennies. That’s washed, rinsed and washed again for good measure. We ordered a pizza and paid the dude in change.
Charlie was a regular guy, if you get my meaning, and morning and evening would find him doing his fifteen-minute doody-duty, like clockwork. The colander was my idea, and I was pretty damn proud of it. The former tenants had left a colander in one of the roach-infested cupboards and I got the idea of sitting it in the toilet bowl before Charlie did his thing. Then the whole pile (if you’ll pardon the term) could be lifted into the bathroom sink and rinsed there. By the end of the week we had $113.15 in a small silver mountain on the kitchen table.
To celebrate, we went down to Hong’s Buffet, an upscale Chinese joint on 46th street. The place is a little dark and the plastic dragons are a little cheesy, but they make the best damn egg rolls you’ve ever eaten. We ate until we thought we would bust. Chop Suey, sweet and sour pork, fried shrimp, both of us groaning as we climbed onto the bus and headed home. That night Charlie dropped fifty-three dollars and eighty cents, all silver, into the colander, and I started having the dreams.
Life just got better and better. By the end of the summer, Charlie was averaging about a hundred bucks a day. This, when combined with our other money making ventures, was netting enough to move to a nicer apartment. Not a nice apartment, but certainly upscale for the Kitchen.
We bought a TV and some sharp clothes; even had girls over a time or two, professional girls from the 400 block (Hooker Highway). Yes, things were defiantly looking up. We learned a thing or two about Charlie’s gift as well. The more he ate, the more money tinkled into the toilet, but the better the food, the higher the denominations. Pizza and beer would get us a lot of nickels and dimes, maybe a few quarters, but give the boy a nice thick steak, baked potato and a couple of glasses of good, cork-in-bottle wine, and you were certain to find a pile of Kennedy’s and Eisenhower’s the next morning.
Charlie’s diet improved dramatically over those first few months and I become quite the chef. Good restaurants were expensive, and I didn’t see much point in spending everything we were making from Charlie’s belly work on linen napkins and snooty waiters. Soon our little apartment kitchen was putting out prime rib, chicken Marsala, and veal parmagian. I picked up a seafood cookbook and soon Vinny and I were discussing Mahi-Mahi at the Fish Market on 40th. We ate well, and Charlie never gained an ounce. He must have had some slick pipes, old Charlie, cause every bite that went in, came out the other end in sweet, easy money. By September we had three thousand dollars hidden behind the refrigerator.
The dreams however, got worse and worse. They started simple enough, choppy little vignettes starring me and Charlie cruising up Highway 101 in a gleaming silver jag. Beautiful redheads and high-rise hotel rooms with silk sheets and room service. I would wake up in the middle of the night, listening to the now familiar sound of clattering coins from the bathroom, and ache for the things I didn’t have. It wasn’t greed per se, or even lust, although that longing of the flesh comes close; it was more like an addiction, like I had taken some bizarre, materialistic drug and was jonesing for more.
I think it was mid October when Charlie started to notice. I had bought some new dinner plates, big ones the size of a caddie’s hubcap, and I’d pack ‘em just full of food, watching him carefully, motherly, making idle chit-chat until his plate was clean. Then came dessert. There was always a big rich dessert—baked Alaska, cheese cake, whatever, and I’d watch fascinated as he finished every bite, listening with obsessive joy as each mouthful was chewed and swallowed, starting its journey into the lovely money-factory of Charlie’s belly. Occasionally he would declare himself full before even finishing the main course, but the was simple enough to overcome. A little guilt trip about the time and effort I had spent on the dinner and good ol’ Charlie would pick up his fork and spoon and go back to battle. Then it must have been around Halloween (there was, of course a huge bowl of candy in the middle of the table, Charlie’s favorites, Snickers and Reese’s) that Charlie put his foot down.
“Dude,” he said one night, pushing away the remaining third of a whole baked chicken with stuffing, “that’s it, I’m packed.”
I tried my standard slaving over a hot stove song-and-dance, but it fell on unsympathetic ears. It seemed like the more I cajoled, the tighter Charlie’s jaw got until finally, after refusing to even try the caramel torte that I’d baked for dessert, I rose and stormed wordlessly into the kitchen. A moment later I heard him rise and follow me, and I smiled to myself.
“I know what you’re doing.” He said it softly, leaning against the kitchen doorway. “I’ve known for a while now.”
I froze. This wasn’t a voice I recognized. This wasn’t good old Charlie who always assumed that Johnnie knew what was best and was happy enough to go along. This was a hard voice, bitter and full of accusation; worse, this was a voice that had made a decision.
“What are you talking about, bro?” I didn’t turn and face him, I didn’t want him to see my eyes.
“You know,” the hard voice replied, “you know exactly what I’m talking about, Johnny, so don’t give me that bro bullshit.”
Now I did turn. Guilt wasn’t going to cut it here; this was going to call for stronger measures. “No, Charlie, I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me.”
“You’re fattening me up,” he said, his voice trembling with rage, “The food you feed me, good God, Johnny, I used to eat less in a week that what you put on my plate tonight. It’s the money, isn’t it? The more food you can stuff down my throat, the more money comes out the other end. Isn’t that right, you greedy asshole?”
I didn’t mean to hit him, but hearing him talk to me, hearing Charlie talk to me in that disdainful tone, like I was something disgusting on the sidewalk, was more than I could take. I smashed him a good one right in the chops and he went down like a side of beef, his face hitting the cream-colored wall and leaving a wide slug-track of blood as he slipped to the floor. Suddenly I was in two places. I could feel the cool tile of the kitchen floor beneath my bare feet, hear the whisper of the ceiling fan and the muffled snort as Charlie tried to breath through his broken nose. The other part of me, that Dream Johnny, was standing alongside a highway overlooking a wide blue-gray stretch of the Pacific Ocean. My feet hurt and a frigid, wind-driven sleet cut through my thin shirt. I had my thumb out as the headlights of a fast-moving car washed over me and I caught a glimpse, just a momentary snapshot, of Charlie, his head back and laughing as he piloted the silver jag along the highway, one arm thrown casually over the bare shoulder of a beautiful redhead. In that split second as the roaring sports car came even with me, Charlie’s eyes caught mine and he smirked, his hand tightening on the creamy bare shoulder of the girl beside him. Then they were gone and there was nothing but the distant flicker of their fading taillights and the storm.
I stopped hitting him almost as soon as I realized that I was back in the kitchen.
Panting, I stood over him, sweating, my knuckles raw and oozing, and the familiar tick, tick, tick, of the off-centered ceiling fan filling the room. Charlie was going to leave. Suddenly I knew that like I had never known anything in my life. He was going to stand up, blood covering the lower half of his face and his eyes already starting to turn purple, he was going to give me one long look, full of hurt and anger, and then he was going to walk out, and I wouldn’t see him again, not ever. I couldn’t let that happen. I mean I couldn’t, could I?
Charlie may have looked like his old self (except his recently tenderized mug, of course), but I’m here to tell you, buckos, he had defiantly put on some pounds in the last few months and I grunted and wheezed as I drug him into the bedroom. He mumbled incoherently through his busted lips, and I knew I had to hurry. I’d hit him hard, but not that hard. Sweating and straining, I heaved his dead weight up onto the bed, and then stopped to think for a moment.
I realize now, looking back at it from so many years, that it all came down to Charlie’s bed. If it hadn’t been for that bed, everything that followed might not have. Charlie had seen the bed in some catalog and gone bonkers for it. The twin frame and headboard were all one piece, jointed together from rough, untreated pine logs. Two five-foot-high posts, each a foot around, made up the sides of the headboard, a matching log squaring it off top and bottom. Between these were five log rails, like wooden bars across the middle. The foot of the bed had matching posts, these about three feet high and solid pine. He called it his Flintstone’s bed, never failing to laugh at his own joke. It was a hell of a nice bed, but if Charlie had stuck with his plain old mattress and box springs, he might have been happier in the end.
As it was, duct-taping his wrists and ankles to the posts was a piece of cake. I figured that the tape would hold until I could find something more permanent. An old sock taped across his mouth would keep him from drawing any unnecessary attention. It was a good thing that I thought of that sock, because it wasn’t ten minutes later that Charlie’s eyes opened, blinked a couple of times to clear the fog from my little bongo on his shnoz, and focused on me. In my dreams, this had been where Charlie started to cry and beg for mercy with those big googily, terror filled eyes. Just goes to show you that nobody’s perfect. Charlie felt the bands of tape holding his wrists and ankles against those cold pine posts and, let me tell you neighbors, the boy went full gonzo ape-shit! He was bucking and twisting like a wild animal, muffled outraged grunts coming from beneath the dirty crew sock and big blue veins standing out on his plummy forehead. I was sure that some of those grunts were less-than-complimentary references to me, but I didn’t mind. I walked across the hall into my room and by the time I got back, Charlie had worn himself out. He lay there panting and sweating, a thick rope of blood oozing from his left nostril, another from beneath the tape over his lower lip. His eyes went wide with terror when he saw what I carried in my hand.
Charlie had never been one for drugs. BBeer was his friend, but not even a single bong-hit for old Charlie. Said it made him unhappy.
“Well, old buddy,” I murmured, the image of fading taillights still bright in my mind, “if that’s the truth, then I’m afraid you’re in for a real bummer.” Then I walked over to the bed and reached for his arm with one hand and, just like in my dreams, holding the plastic syringe of heroin in the other.
“You should have given me a lift, asshole,” I muttered as his pupils narrowed suddenly and then rolled back until only the whites of his eyes showed.
They say that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Well, brothers and sisters, I’m here to tell you that just ain’t so. You can make that old horse up and do the cha-cha if you know how to motivate him. Me and Charlie? We learned all about motivation as the long winter of 1979 crawled through Hell’s Kitchen. The heroin, in small doses, was the key. Those little rides kept Charlie just far enough over the La La border to maintain control. Right after dinner each night and breakfast each morning he got a little jolt of wow juice. That would keep him drooling for the next eight hours or so. It pissed me off that we had to skip lunches—I don’t know how much cash we lost because of that—but we made up for it with the other two meals.
Now, if you’re anything like me, your first reaction is plain old defiance. Well, that was ol’ Charlie’s first reaction as well, but it’s awfully hard to starve yourself when your room is filled with the scent of baked bread and freshly grilled steaks swimming in garlic butter.
However, if you do find it within yourself to overcome the temptations of the flesh, pain, that old reliable, is still a hard gal to turn down. Charlie and I went through this phase, briefly, during the last weeks of December.. The best incentive, however, was the heroin itself. Cheap, clean Dominican smack, Death Wish on the street. Skip one or two dates with Madam Needle and the fun begins. Cramps, and hallucinations, and panic attacks oh my.
By December 25th, Charlie was begging for dinner, stripping half the turkey from the bone and stuffing it, by the handful, into his slobbering, sobbing mouth. After a double helping of pumpkin pie, I gave him his nightcap, and it was goodnight, Irene.
Merry Christmas, Charlie.
Every few days I would find a new bank in Manhattan to cash in my change, amassing quite a roll of green beneath the loose floorboard in my closet. Soon, however, I realized that I was being recognized by the local clerks and ordered a case full of heavy cotton cash bags from a bank supply company in Fresno. I figured that I would fill these, and when I had enough, I’d load up the trunk of a rental car and find some new banks in Brooklyn or the Bronx.
By the way, in case you find yourself flinching, please let me say that no patient has ever found a more careful and concerned nurse than Charlie Marks found in me. Having reached the pinnacle of my gourmet talents, I now found myself becoming a professional in the care of bedsores and friction burns (the duct tape having long since been replaced with mail order handcuffs). Bedpans also became a specialty, although I willingly concede that I looked forward to a full bedpan more that most nurses might, and found greater use for the contents therein.
No, no hospital in the world gave the kind of one-on-one service that I did. Breakfast, a dozen eggs benedict, a pound of sweet breakfast sausages, another pound of hash-browns smothered in gravy, and several cups of coffee with sugar and real cream, all spoon-fed with loving care. This gastronomical delight was followed by a deep, comfy, poppy-induced nap, during which your linens are replaced and (if necessary) you’re bathed. You wake to find that dinner is ready: a small beef roast, two or three pounds of broiled new potatoes, four cans of creamed corn, and for dessert, a Boston cream pie (a la Johnnie). After dinner, another little pinch of the good stuff and a blissful night of dreamless sleep. When nature called, your ever-attendant nurse is right there.
.
By the end of January, I had twenty-three thousand dollars in cash and who knows how many cotton bags full of change. Everything might have ticked along for years without a hitch if it hadn’t been for the dreams.
Once Charlie had become more…passive in our partnership, the hitchhiking dream faded as quickly as the red taillights of the Jag had. From then on my sleep was blissfully uninterrupted, except for the occasional girly adventure, and I awoke each morning refreshed, ready to feed the machine. Then, as the long dark days of winter really settled in, I found myself counting and recounting the thick piles of cash and trying to estimate the value of the two dozen or so bags of change that had accumulated since my last drive uptown. Twenty-three grand was a hell of a lot of money, no doubts there—more money that my old lady had seen in a couple-three years, bingo-be-damned. Still, the kind of things that I dreamed of owning, silver Jaguars and high-rise apartments, took real swag, heavy duty cash, and I suddenly realized that I was looking at long years of spoon feeding and sponge baths to amass that kind of dough.
It started to keep me up at night, waiting, listening for the lovely clatter of good ol’ Charlie’s poop-shoot letting loose into the stainless steel bedpan, like a one-armed bandit that hits jackpot every spin. I’d lay there waiting for that sound, trying to figure how many nights, how many months and years I’d listen for that trickle of coins before it was enough, and didn’t it sound a little short tonight, didn’t the clatter end awful quick? Couldn’t have dropped more than sixty or eighty bucks. Take a long time to buy a jag at that rate! Finally I’d slip off into troubled dreams of walking up Fifth Avenue with wads of cash, like matching softballs, bulging from the pockets of my jeans. Uet everything I looked at, every leather jacket, every pair of shoes, even a hotdog from the corner stand, cost just a few dollars more that what I had. I’d wake up sweating and gasping, pain clenching at my chest, and only a good hour or two of counting my stacks of cash would calm me down.
It was January 22, 1980 that I had the dream the first time. I was lying in bed and suddenly I realized that Charlie was standing in the doorway, I tried to jump up but my hands and feet were held in thick rolls of gray tape. He stands there, a needle dangling from the bleeding vein of his left arm and a bit of brown gravy on his chin, looking down at me with a cruel, mocking smile.
“Too bad, Johnny,” Charlie whispers, his fingers slowly unbuttoning his shirt. “Too bad you never found the big money, bro!” With this he would pull his shirt open, revealing a long silver zipper running up the middle of his belly, from button to breastbone, his pale hairless flesh bruised and puckered along the seams. In my dream, I watch, unable to move, as Charlie slowly unzips his stomach, the metal teeth making a soft, steely hiss. When the zipper is open maybe two inches down his belly, the first coin slips out and hits the wooden floor with a shocking clang, two more follow, then a flood, sliding out from beneath Charlie’s ribs. These weren’t quarters, or even dollars; these coins piling up around his feet and rolling slowly into the far corners of the bedroom were gold.
The soft light of the overhead bulb gleamed dully off the heavy yellow disks, each stamped with a bright eagle. Gold! This was the big money, this was what Charlie was hording for himself as he passed nickels and dimes for me. This was what that smirk had meant as Charlie had roared past me, leaving me in the cold and dark, smirking as I faded in his rearview mirror. Gold.
How many times did I have the dream between then and the end of March? I couldn’t tell you. It couldn’t have been more than sixty, but it seemed like a thousand, and slowly, every so slowly I began to notice something different about Charlie, something about his face, the set of his lips, like a shadow of a knowing smile. I became convinced that he was playing me; that the heroin wasn’t knocking him out anymore, and he was pulling possum, waiting for me to sleep. I upped the dosage until finally, after Charlie had a bone-cracking seizure early one morning, puking all over himself, the bed and me, I eased it back. I was afraid that any more would kill him.
I hadn’t been out of the apartment in weeks. I was living on take-out Chinese and Charlie’s leftovers, having all the groceries delivered from the market on 43rd. The kid grumbled a bit about being paid in change, but I always gave him a big tip and he always came back.
My hair had grown long and unkempt, hanging in thick, greasy ropes around my face. My face had exploded into a scarlet battlefield of exploding, oozing pimples. My bulging eyes were rimmed in red from smoking the cheap reef that I used to sell (it was the only way I could get to sleep these days), and there was a definite funk about me, a rank, sweaty, unhealthy odor of a body long unwashed and uncared for.
I looked…gray.
“Screw it,” I said, flipping the bird at the filthy scarecrow in the mirror, “I’ll shower when I’m rich!”
I giggled the rest of the day over this, until the Chinese boy that brought my dinner took my change and ran as fast as he could from the building. I laughed and laughed, slurping down handfuls of chow mien noodles as I sat naked on the kitchen floor, surrounded by the rich smell of Charlie’s Beef Bourgeon roasting to perfection in the oven.
The last week it wasn’t even a dream anymore. No matter what room I was in it seemed that I would catch a glimpse of gold from the corner of my eyes, a coin rolling just past my field of vision. I could hear them, too, a high, tinny whine, rolling across the wood floor behind my back, always stopping just as I turned around. I would chase the sound, screaming and cursing from room to room; never quite able to see where those beautiful golden eagles had rolled.
Finally I knew what was happening. I told Charlie, I told that bastard that he could lay there and drool cream sauce on his pillow till Aunt Tilly brought the cows home, but he wasn’t fooling me. He wasn’t fooling me for one damn minute. I knew what he was doing, waiting for my back to turn and then dropping the coins, the beautiful gold coins, one at a time trying to make me lose my mind! Well, I told him, there more than one way to skin the old catfish, more than one way, that’s for sure.
Charlie just laid there, that little smirk at the corner of his mouth.
Finally, I knew what I had to do. Slipping the long butcher’s knife from the wooden block, I tested the keen edge with the tip of my tongue, crowing with approval at the pig-iron taste of blood in my mouth. Climbing over the wooden rail at the foot of his bed (”it’s my Flintstone’s bed!”) I crept up the length of it until I reached Charlie’s bare waist. Slowly and carefully I eased the knife in a line from his sternum to his navel, right where I knew the invisible zipper to be. The knife was sharp, very sharp, leaving a think crimson line in its wake.
Charlie must have been nearing the end of his morning trip, because he moaned, lifting his head at the feel of the knife. I had to hurry—before he woke up, before he found out what I was doing and hid the gold someplace else. Still, I sat there for nearly an hour, one agonizing minute after the other trying to force my hand to bring the knife down.
It was Charlie’s fault after all, I spoke to that very far of voice in my head that seemed so upset. It was his fault, not mine. He could have shared the gold; he could have picked me up, given me a ride, but no. Here I had waited on him hand and foot for months, and what thanks did I get? None. Did he think it was fun for me, buying his food and paying his rent? Did he think I was made of money, for God’s sake? Then the tip of the butcher’s knife slipped in beneath the skin, just below Charlie’s navel and his eyes snapped open, looking into my face from inches away, wide with horror.
“Johnny,” he whispered, his voice thick and drugged, “Johnny, please…”
But though I remember it, I didn’t hear him then. I had forgotten that Charlie Marks was even in the room, in fact I’d forgotten the room as well, for there, just below the blade of the knife, from the dark recesses of his belly, shone the unmistakable glint of gold. I heaved the knife deeper and Charlie screamed—or maybe it was me, or both of us, who knows?
My mind swam with the beautiful, tinkling music of coins, bright and gold and deliciously heavy, cascading to the floor all around us.
They took all my money, you know. Even the gold. The police, the lawyers, maybe even the Doctors here at The Buff. They’ll never admit it, but I know the truth. I can see it in their eyes when they think I’m not looking, in that little smirk at the corners of their mouths. Oh yes, I know what that smirk means.
The newspapers said that a neighbor reported a bad smell coming from the apartment below her, and that the cops finally had to break down the door to get it. They found what was left of ol’ Charlie in the bathtub, where he’d been for almost a month. One of the policemen fainted right there on the spot. Another vomited into my bathroom sink. They told the reporters (after a good, green gargle, one should hope) that they found over a hundred cotton bank bags, most stuffed with excrement, the last dozen or so filled with rotting human entrails. Charlie’s, of course. I didn’t argue; what was the point, who would ever believe?
Me? I think they found the gold, in fact I’m sure of it. Those bastards found my gold and kept it, sending me to the Buffalo State Hospital (Buffalo Institution for the Criminally Insane, in a less politically correct period) laughing behind their hands at me the whole time.
But it’s not so bad in here, really. My window looks out past the tall brick towers and onto a wide stretch of green front lawn bordering Forest avenue. Don’t get me wrong—it ain’t a high rise with a redhead, or even a silver jag, but it’s ok. I get three squares that I don’t have to cook for myself (gGod, but I hate to cook; just between you me and the mossy outhouse, I think I’d rather starve then ever lay holy hands on another stove).
There’s a guard here, a big young goombah named Curletto, who likes to yank my chain now and again. He’ll stand outside my door, his big hairy gut hanging down over the top of his white jeans, and pour a fistful of quarters from hand to hand trying to get me going. Greasy little bastard ain’t above a hard jab in the kidneys either, if he thinks the chow line ain’t moving fast enough, but he don’t bother me.
I know the difference, you see. I know what the real thing sounds like.
The only bad part is at night, late, late at night when everything is quiet, and that sound wakes me up, that familiar tinkle of coins hitting porcelain somewhere down the hall. A silver cascade filling the bowl, like someone scattering nails across a tile floor, and that’s when I start screaming, screaming and shaking, clutching my little golden book, as the moon casts the headless shadow of the blessed virgin through the bars of my window, until someone comes with a needle.
A quick, icy pinch and it’s nightie-night, Johnnie, see ya at lunchtime. A little shot of wow juice that makes the jingle of silver and the sound of Charlie Marks’ laughter fades away like…like taillights on a stormy night.