Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 Page 9

  '' Yevahsatonanybuddy sfuckinhead?'' Preston jerked upright, his hands before him to ward off a blow. "What? What?"

  “I say, yevahsatonanybuddy sfuckinhead?"

  There was a monster at the door, framed in the dim light from the corridor.

  "What?”

  "What the fuck this 'what' shit?" A foot kicked out and slammed the door. A hand brushed a wall switch and turned on an overhead light.

  He was six feet tall or more, dark as an old and lovingly tended saddle, perfectly bald. He wore jeans, high-top black sneakers and a white T-shirt. He looked like he was made of whips, for all his sinews stood out in relief against his skin. His eyeballs were the color of rose wine. Beads of sweat clung to his head like droplets of rain on a waxed car.

  "I say one more time, nice and slow: Has you yes or has you no ever sat on anybody's fuckin' head?”

  "Wha—? No!"

  "Well, you gon' have to sit on my fuckin' head lickety-split, 'cause I'm on a bad fuckin' jones." He shivered.

  "A what?" Wake up! Lord, let this be Act Two of the dream!

  "Whaffor you keeping whattin' me? You don't know 'bout jones?"

  "No!" Preston clutched the sheet to his chest. He wondered if he could make it out the window before this maniac killed him.

  "God damn!'' He kicked the wall. "I told them motherfuckers not to put me in with some fuckin' rummy." He kicked the empty bed, jamming it against Preston's. He took a step toward Preston, stabbing a finger at him. His pink eyes were wide, and a rivulet of drool ran down his chin. "Listen up, sumbitch ..."

  Preston dropped the sheet, put a foot onto the floor, guessed that he could make the window in two steps. If he shoved his bed back against the monster's knees . . .

  "You get me a junkie in here now, else . . ." He stopped and his eyes rolled back and he moaned and grabbed his stomach and began to shake. He tottered, stumbled against the wall, whirled and fell face-forward onto the empty bed.

  Preston leaped up, sprinted across the room and yanked open the door. The corridor was empty. He ran into the dark common room. “Help!" he shouted. *'Somebody help!"

  Somewhere in the building Bruce Springsteen was singing. Preston followed the song to a little office in the back of a dark cul-de-sac he hadn't known was there.

  A pudgy young woman with a pockmarked face, wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and a name tag and safari shorts with more pockets than a pool table, was sitting at a desk and making notes in the margins of a ratty copy of Erich Fromm's Beyond the Chains of Illusion. She looked up as Preston rounded the door.

  “I need a junkie!" he gasped.

  She smiled. "Are those underpants or a bathing suit?"

  Preston looked down, and as he moved, the fly of his boxer shorts opened and the head of his pecker peeked out.

  "Underpants," she said.

  He covered his crotch. "I need a junkie."

  "You've found one." She extended her right arm and pointed to a ladder of scars on the inside of the elbow. "What can I do for you?"

  "There's this . . . this person . . . who keeps telling me I have to sit on his head because he's got a problem with somebody named Jones."

  She laughed and reached across the desk and pulled a clipboard toward her. She ran her finger down a list of names. "You're Scott Preston."

  "He's hallucinating!"

  "No, he's not. He's just on a bad jones. Let's see . . . Hassan. Khalil Ali Hassan, aka Twist." She pushed the clipboard away. "You don't know about jones?"

  "That's what he said. Then he kicked the bed. Then he fell down."

  "Heroin withdrawal. There's good jones, when you just sort of feel like shit for a while, and bad jones, when you get the shakes and the shivers and the sweats and the pukes and cramps like you can't believe. He won't bother you."

  "He wants me to sit on his head!"

  "Don't do it. It's a free country."

  "He'll kill me!"

  "Tell him to fuck off. He gets pushy, smack him in the chops. Shape he's in, one good whack and he'll fold."

  Here we go again. The certainty. The cool. The omniscience. He wanted to scream at the woman, to grab her by the throat and force her to dial 911. To do something.

  But what he did, of course, was lean forward until he could read her name tag and then say, "Miss . . . Sandra ... I have never hit another human being in my life. I would miss, or I would break my hand, or I would drive him into a homicidal fury."

  And what she did, of course, was smile and say, "There's a first time for everything, Scott."

  He took a deep breath, not sure that he wouldn't begin to cry, not much caring if he did. "I beg you," he said. “Come with me. Maybe he needs help. I wouldn't know what to do. Maybe he's dead. Come with me."

  “Sure, Scott." She stood up. "We aim to please."

  As they walked down the corridor, Sandra kept glancing at his shorts. "I've never understood why people wear those underpants," she said. "Doesn't your dick get cold?"

  "It isn't outside that much."

  "I'd think your rocks'd rattle around, too." They arrived at the door to his room. "Anyway, whatever turns you on. . . ."

  Sandra pushed open the door, and Preston followed her inside.

  "See?" she said. "Sleeping like a baby."

  "He's in my bed."

  He was curled up in a fetal ball, the covers pulled over his shoulders. A sweat stain was spreading on the pillow. He was snoring and shaking.

  "Tell you what, Scott. You want to move him, move him. But if I were you, I'd sleep in the other bed."

  "Yes. Right."

  " 'Night, Scott."

  "Thank you."

  At the door, Sandra turned and said, "Just for safety's sake, put your wallet under your pillow. If he wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn't know where he is, he may get frightened and decide to go over the hill. You never know what he'll want to take with him."

  "Right. Good idea. Under the pillow." That way he 'II have to kill me to get my wallet.

  When Sandra had gone, Preston got his wallet from his trousers and tucked it in the waistband of his shorts.

  Then he pulled the mattress off the empty bed and dragged it into the bathroom.

  It fit, mostly, with one end under the sink and the other curled up against the door.

  PART TWO

  VIII

  TWO ON, TWO out.

  Bottom of the third (and last) inning.

  Drunks 2, Junkies 1. And hadn't that caused an uproar, who'd be a Drunk and who a Junkie. There were barely enough players to make up one team, forget two, and Marcia—chooser of sides and coach of both teams-could hardly put her three star junkies on the same team, not when one, Crosby, had been the National League's MVP two years ago; and another, Twist, had played high-school ball, could bat from either side and had the reflexes of a spider; and the third. Hector, had in batting practice demolished one softball and driven a second so far into the desert that no one could find it. So she had assigned Hector and Twist to the Drunks. Hector hadn't cared ("Long as you don't trade me to the Homos, I don't give a shit"), but Twist had rebelled, claiming that to be called a drunk was damaging to his self-esteem ("A drunk got no self-esteem, he slobbers and falls all over hisself, but a junkie, he got plenty 'cause he just takes hisself to a separate world and leave me be"), and that had led to an argument with Marcia about the nature of chemical dependency and the similarity of different addictions ("It doesn't matter what we call ourselves, our problems are all the same"), with historical references made by Twist to great junkies ("Jimi Hendrix and John Belushi, they died like menThey didn't rot away and puke thesselves to death") and Hector countering, "Dead is fuckin' dead and it don't make no difference 'cause either way you don't get no more pussy." Clarence Crosby had offered to give his place on the Junkies to Twist, but Marcia had said no, it was a matter of principle, so Twist had stalked off the field and declared he was "leavin' this fuckin' place 'cause there's discrimination against junkies" and he'd get the cour
t to send him someplace where junkies got a fair shake and didn't have to suck hind tit to a bunch of scumbag drunks. The betting was that Twist would have packed his bag and walked out of the clinic if Preston hadn't come up with the idea that perhaps his roommate might accept the status of "guest star" with the Drunks. Twist had liked the idea, he didn't really want to leave, everybody could see that, but he couldn't give in so easily, so he had said no, he wasn't going to be a star drunk for anybody, so Preston had said how about if he was a "visiting artist" on temporary assignment from the Junkies. That did it. It was probably the "artist" part that appealed to Twist—that and the fact that the compromise had been advanced by Preston, whom Twist had come to revere as the repository of vital and exotic information about things like New York and the stock market and the English language, even though Preston was a weakling and a lush, which didn't matter because Twist had assigned himself the role of Preston's protector and had vowed to rescue him “in case any of these assholes want to make you their girlfriend or something," a circumstance that Preston regarded as about as likely as the Parousia—but, whatever, Twist agreed to pitch for the Drunks. And as Preston took the field—left and center field, to be precise—Marcia had winked at him and patted him on the ass, just like Davey Johnson congratulating Darryl Strawberry.

  Preston bent over and socked his glove and shouted, "No batter baby you can do it no batter no batter blow one by him baby no batter ..."

  From his station on the mound Twist turned and glared at Preston. "You off your fuckin' feed, man? No batter? This sucker hit thirty-two home runs las' year. He told me hisself. Four a them off Dwight fuckin' Gooden."

  Preston hadn't bothered to see who the batter was: Clarence Crosby. He shrugged, waved his glove, socked it again, called back, "Yeah, but he hasn't seen your stuff. Sock it to him, give him the old dipsy-do, no batter baby no batter ..."

  "This sucks," said Twist. He appealed to Dan, who stood ten feet behind the plate as catcher for both teams and umpire. "How 'bout you lemme pitch to this man, 'stead of all this underhand sissy stuff?"

  "No way," said Dan. "He's already batting left-handed and cross-handed. He's handicapped."

  "You say," Twist argued. "I seen him bat lefty 'gainst John Tudor one time, blew the man away."

  "Ratshit," said Crosby. "I can't hit dick left-handed."

  "Yeah, well, dick ain't pitchin' today."

  "Play ball," Marcia said from the sidelines. "This is therapy, Twist, not combat."

  "For you maybe. It's my self-esteem at risk here."

  On second base, Priscilla took a little dancing lead, faking a dash for third. She had closed her eyes and swung at a puffball from Twist and had hit a dribbler down the third-base line. Butterball had charged in from third, tripped on the ball and fallen on it. By the time Thad rolled her off the ball and thrown it to Duke at first, Priscilla was safe. The next batter, Cheryl, who was so tiny that it would have taken fiber optics to find the strike zone on her, had walked Priscilla to second.

  Preston saw the glow of perspiration on Priscilla's calves, and he wanted to run his tongue along the curve of her muscle. He imagined the sweet-and-sour blend of smells beneath her shirt—salt and Opium—and he wanted to climb in there and bask in the scent. Stop it! Stop torturing yourself! These thoughts were counterproductive, a waste of time. Worse: They were against the rules. Thou shalt not covet thy fellow patients. Thou art all brothers and sisters in addiction, and it is a sin to desire to park thy roger in thy sister. And no matter how clever he thought he was being, no matter how cool and blase, Marcia—the clinic's one-woman Thought Patrol—always seemed to know what he was thinking. She had warned him twice. Not that anything had happened between him and Priscilla, not that anything was likely to happen—"happen" being the sly euphemism for the commission of the Deed of Darkness—but Marcia had a nose that could sniff out fleurs du mal before they bloomed. And of course she was right.

  "Yo! Gloria!" Twist glowered at her. "You hie your little ass back to the base there. Even think about stealing on me, I be all over you like drool on a baby."

  Priscilla scurried back to the base and stuck her tongue out at him.

  Gloria. Twist had bestowed the name on her after their first hour together in group, after he had returned from a forty-eight-hour detox in the medical unit. They had both been assigned to Dan's section, which annoyed Preston because he was convinced that if he hadn't made a fawning, mooning ass of himself over Priscilla on the night of her arrival, Marcia might have brought Priscilla into her section (with Preston), just for the clinical curiosity of seeing how two rich (by her calculations) WASPs would interact in the caldron of the group dynamic.

  During a three-week stint as a night watchman at a savings-and-loan (one of twenty-seven jobs he had held over the past three years), Twist had seen a TV mini-series called Little Gloria, Happy at Last, about the agonies and travails of Gloria Vanderbilt. For him, it was like watching a story about people from another galaxy.

  But as Twist listened to Priscilla tell her tale—mother descended from British landed aristocracy whose fortune sprang from a fortuitous backing of the right horse in the seventeenth century (James II), genteelly addicted to sherry and various prescription hypnotics, dazzled by the dashing scion of an American shipping family (not-so-genteelly addicted to sour-mash bourbon), young Priscilla sent to British boarding schools till she was twelve, then, when her parents moved to America, shipped off to a Connecticut prep school with an allowance of one thousand dollars a month (grass.

  Quaaludes and Valium available to cope with the pressures of exams), then on to some horseback-riding college with an allowance of five thousand dollars a month (cocaine plentiful to give zip to sex and meaning to the unbearable emptiness of being), charge accounts at every store in the continental United States, a trust fund larger than many municipal budgets, on her own without anybody who gave a damn except to say "How nice, dear,'' and finally latched onto by a squadron of hippies who gave her a family in return for letting them live on her ranch outside San Francisco and funding their catholic tastes, until one day, in a brief interstice between coke storms, she saw a sheep giving birth and underwent some sort of psychic revelation, as a result of which she drove her Range Rover into town and staggered into her family's law firm (twelve partners and sixteen associates who did nothing but tend to her family's affairs) and announced that unless she was put away somewhere, she was going to hire one of her hippies to shoot her, so here she was, despite her parents' conviction that this was a lot of overreaction (not to mention bad taste) and their publicly stated belief (reiterated and reinforced daily over drinks) that she had gone to a spa to "get it together"—as Twist listened to all this, he realized that Little Gloria, Happy at Last wasn't just a load of made-up shit; people from other galaxies did exist and here was one right in the room with him, so, naturally enough, this little girl should be called—no, way—Gloria.

  Priscilla loved the nickname, loved the acceptance it connoted. There was nothing threatening about Twist. He had no carnal ambitions toward her (Hector had once leeringly hinted otherwise and had had to flee for his life across the quadrangle, shrieking loudly that it was all a linguistic mix-up, "I no say nothing about licking her, I say I bet you like her, I’m espanish for crissakes! Help!"), for it would no more have occurred to Twist to introduce Priscilla to Lawrence (as in Lawrence of Arabia, his fond sobriquet for his member) than to try to fuck a canary. He had no idea how teeny tiny people from other galaxies reproduced, but for sure it wasn't by fucking. Twist regarded Priscilla (Gloria) as his pet. To her, he was a dark angel watching over her.

  "Yo baby you're an artist you can do it throw him a masterpiece." Preston socked his glove again.

  "Where did you learn that talk?" Lewis called from his station in right-center field.

  "Made it up. It's easy."

  "For you."

  "No. It's all bullshit. Try."

  "Do I have to say 'baby'?"

  "Say any
thing you want."

  Preston saw Lewis blush as he composed the words.

  "All right, honey, throw him one," Lewis shouted, and he grinned at Preston. "Throw him a hot one."

  Twist spun and took a step toward the outfield. "Who you callin' honey?"

  "Twist!" Dan yelled from behind the plate. "Pitch or I'll call a balk."

  "This is fun," Lewis said when Twist returned to the mound, adding, to be sure it was okay to have fun, "Isn't it?"

  "Yeah," Preston said. "It is." Preston paused, startled to realize that in fact he was having fun. It was as if acknowledging the reality affirmed it. Fun probably wasn't the point of the game. He was sure there was some profound therapeutic purpose to it, like establishing community or encouraging the breakdown of inhibitions. But screw all that. It was fun. "It really is."

  He was enjoying himself, and not only this moment, this afternoon. He felt good, a kind of cleanliness and balance. He had been sober for fourteen days. He was sleeping for seven hours at a stretch—not lying in a coma for four hours and then thrashing around in a sweat for the next three—and was dreaming and now and then actually recalling his dreams. He woke refreshed, confident that he could face the day.