A Moment of Doubt (11 page)

The thin, effete hoodlum sighed. “But if you don't tell it right, sir, why, he just won't be able to get himself of on it, and by the time you finish a pack of lies, or a short version that leaves out important details, well . . .” Thimbelina threw up his hands. “Well,” he repeated, “I'm afraid he'll just have to take it out on you.” He shook his head. “I won't be able to control him.” He permitted himself a smile. “I might be forced into helping him . . . .”

Windrow could feel the sweat, beading up on his scalp in the interstices of his processed hair . . . .

Now wait a minute. We have the conventions, the mutual agreement between the author and the reader
on certain matters of style, as laid out in the (unwritten) (hexadecimal) Hardboiled Bylaws. These, and the matter of big words. The detective does not have processed hair, o.k.? Get it straight. And never, ever, send your reader to the dictionary. He won't go. Not only that, he'll get pissed offat you because of his lack of knowledge. Moreover, the thought will absolutely not occur to him that it's
his
knowledge that's wanting, rather than your facility with the language. Surely, he will say, you uppity scrivener, there's a word containing fewer letters and syllables, approximately equivalent to ‘interstices'? How does one pronounce that, anyway? It sounds like a brand of seat-belt for a race of spiders . . . .

I've tripped the Fag Flag in the Hard Boiled Bylaws. I forgot about it, or went too far, or no longer care . . . . Something . . . . At any rate, BOOK.SUB knows. When I return to my room the floor will be two feet thick in tractor-feed paper, covered with excoriations written at my own keyboard a scant two years ago . . . . BOOK.SUB will have rejected
Squeam with a Skew
in its entirety. That might have been o.k., but in dumping the book to disk on my computer the printer will fire up and list everything, the manuscript itself, the legal justifications, ticking off the appropriate Hardboiled Bylaws . . . . It'll all be there, waiting for Marlene's fireplace, and, later, the Rewrite and, ultimate bummer, Diminished Returns.

This particular Bylaw is real simple. It says,
Tough guys don't get sodomized
. That's it. And,
in extremis
:
Yea, even may they Pitch, verily they do not Catch
. Now, I wield enough economic power to get around some things. After all, I'm a member of the Mystery Writers of America, who subscribe to these unwritten laws. And, bottom line, I've made some money. But here I've gone a step too far. There's a corollary to the Sodomy Clause, and it's real
simple, too. It says:
And if they do [get sodomized], they don't like it. No way. Ever.

There are notable exceptions. Cain's
Serenade
, for example—although, look out, for here looms large ye Moral Imperative. A contemporary series, for another example, stars a gay detective, although, in fact, so far as I know, he cleaves, ahem, hard by the
extremis
corollary.

But the point is, even though festooned with all these conventions, these unshaven detectives got to look clean, morally, that is: they can be hygienically reprehensible (it's preferable), but their foe has to be morally inferior to them. They're carrying around more eponymous gear than a soldier of fortune . . . .

There he goes again. “Eponymous.” Sounds like a phone booth on a planet of spiders . . . Greek spiders . . . .

So along with that, certain characters got to have ruined throats and cancer in their lives, to lend a certain amount of grit to this hallucination folks like to snuggle into and get thrilled by, while flying coast to coast or waiting on Death Row, like having a certain amount of sand in your salad means it's organic lettuce, or something . . . .

I mean, you've never even questioned Marlene's existence have you? In fact, aren't you just coasting along in here, waiting for me to get back to the house and be raped by Marlene? Or Tiny? Now there's a real guy . . . . That immense cock of his looks like the bowsprit of the
Flying Dutchman
, heaving out of the gloom of the seedy Tenderloin hotel room . . . . You can hear the squish as he strokes the fantastic length and thickness of the far end of his viscera . . . .

Viscera. That's eyewash on the planet of spiders, just hold it up to your face with your pedipalps . . . . Well don't forget the
octoculars
, too, godammit. You know, binoculars
for spiders? Eight eyepieces, eight lens tubes, four focus knobs . . . Jesus Christ . . . .

But to have deliberately given her cancer, then forgotten about it, only to run its course in her helpless body . . . . Had no one thought to get her to a doctor?

The first thing was food. Yes, food. I grabbed a taxi and motored to North Beach, thinking all the way over there about how Hemingway, when he had no money, would describe in his nascent novels and stories fantastic meals in wonderful detail, to slake a hunger that ultimately would be satisfied beyond his wildest nightmares. I, possessed of so insignificant a talent, could afford to eat a huge Hu Nan meal at Brandy Ho's. Sweet and sour dumplings in a delicious ginger sauce sprinkled with chopped peppers and garlic, stuffed with a paté of pork and vegetables. Hot and sour beef, with sliced carrots, garlic, and onions, served over steamed rice. Cold noodle salad, with huge bean sprouts, plenty of slivered chicken, slices of raw, fresh cucumber, covered by a peanut sauce of extreme zest. Three Kirin beers. I skipped the smoked ham fried rice, with ropes of scrambled egg and fresh garden peas, likewise the carp, broiled whole and served on a bed of vegetables and rice, and segued directly to ginger ice cream with green tea, and ate the whole meal with my shades on. Absolutely No MSG. Meals with MSG are for when you have a deadline and the nightmares aren't forthcoming. But when you can eat like this, why write about it? Taking a post-prandial stroll up Grant Avenue, I saw many poets. Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso and Kay McDonough with baby Nile, Neeli Cherkovski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Janice Blue all dressed in blue, David Moe, Jack Hirschman and Sara Menefee. While Kaye wasn't listening Corso told me I had no balls. Neeli told me he wasn't getting published. I discreetly refrained
from telling him about BOOK.SUB. Without saying a word, Bob Kaufman said

My radio is teaching my goldfish jujitsu . . . .

Jack Hirschman read me one of the poems he'd written that day.

PEACEDOVE

Of the dove, of the
dove-lands and what they mean,
how it is
to be
a dove, a struggle-dove
the dove that's been born
over and over since
the end of the World War,
and where the dove comes from
and how it stands for
the utter
invincibility of peace
and is always triumphant
as the sincerely innate
inspiration of human beings.

At the time Jack hated electricity, so I knew he'd eschew anything as electrifying as BOOK.SUB. And all I could think about there on the street, with my full stomach, and hungry gentle poetic friends, was that I hadn't killed anybody yet today. But I had seen someone I'd maimed. This did not throw off my digestion. Instead, I got drunk and fell into a pit of nerves, woke up as somebody, somewhere, else. A pseudonym. So now, was the
question, could the Moral Imperative yet seek me out? Of course. This is just a detective novel. I'm going to get mine, right in the kisser, from the sword of the Avenger, whoever she is. Would it be the lady with the ruined throat and tongue? Or would Tiny get to Windrow before he expired from AIDS? Does he really have AIDS, or is Thimbelina just smarter than Windrow? How about that woman who never got skinned in
The Gourmet
? Would somebody be selling pieces of me with Velcro fasteners on Fisherman's Wharf? How would it come? When? Should I get BOOK.SUB's by now not inconsiderable legal DO loop to make out my literary estate to Marlene?

Marlene. Right then, right there, in front of a dive called The Saloon on Grant Street, I resolved that never, ever, would I use the beautiful Marlene in a book. Stay just as you are, baby. Let your life take its natural course. Fuck your tenants as they come and go, collect their rent, forget them when they leave, keep a clean house. I'll never lift you, whole or in part, out of your quiet if somewhat adventurous little life next to Alta Plaza Park, and use you in a detective novel, so help me god. And I weaved down and around the corner, through the milling, frightened tourists, a bum or two, a poet/hooker, a saxophone player, a barker, to Carol Doda's Condor Club, at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. There, on the side of the building, is an ersatz California Historical Marker, commemorating the Condor as the Original Site of the Invention of Topless Dancing, if you care to believe that, and, placing one hand over my heart and the other on the plaque, I knelt on the sidewalk and repeated my solemn oath, aloud.

Someone charitably dropped a handful of coins between me and the wall.

But even as I so swore, my heart froze beneath the palm of my hand, galvanized into arrhythmia by a current that shot between it and the brass plaque. Hadn't I, somewhere, just last year, in
This World Leaks Blood
, or was it
Through a Mandible, Delicately
, or . . . . But hadn't I, just last year, used Marlene's pussy in a particularly grizzly scene? Just her pussy? Yes, I had, but it was in
Heart of Mercury
, a horrible scene, in which a young Oedipal Adonis had received his mother's pussy in the mail. It was sent to him by an insanely jealous rival for his mother's affections who, failing in his advances, had succumbed to the temptation of torturing and killing the woman, in order to deprive the rest of the world of her charm and affection. It was an unfortunate thing, a thing I deeply regretted doing, so deeply that, immediately upon completion of this very arduous piece of writing, so complicated in its ramifications that I sat up all night finishing the book, yet so real to me as I created it that my keyboard and cashmere sweater and chair seat were wringing wet with perspiration long before I was finished, that I immediately availed myself of the consolation of the real thing, even though it was three flights up and four in the morning, to assure myself that, (a) she was still alive and intact, and (b) it was as good as I remembered, and wrote, it. She was and it was and we were all so very young then . . . .

But it had been so necessary, borrowing Marlene's vagina, to the solution of the case. When the son opened the box containing the horrible discovery, there necessarily had to be a detailed description, absolutely lurid and convincing, for verisimilitude. Really, I outdid myself. In the course of things I had to restrain myself from running upstairs to make a detailed inspection, so as to get everything just right. But I knew that would lead to a cul de sac, so far as the novel went, and stuck to the task at hand, only
later paying the visit. And, as the Moral Imperative would have it, this vicious act led to the unraveling of the perpetrator's otherwise unconnected but nonetheless stealthy and heinous butcherings, which had stymied Windrow and half the finest minds of the San Francisco Police Department for nearly two hundred pages . . . .

The words of my oath died on my lips. Would Marlene's vagina go the route of Myra's tongue and larynx? Had I been innocently littering the city with ruined minds and bodies?—Innocently?
Venally
!—And, and what about my own penis? Had I not used my own penis in dozens, if not hundreds of fuck scenes? Had my mercenary practices insured that I contract, sooner if not later, herpes, syphilis, dismemberment, gonorrhea, three or four rapacious strains of venereal disease, as unidentifiable as they were incurable, urethritis, warts, impotency, AIDS itself? Would some sadist with sharpened canines and one eye soon slake his hunger with a grilled penis and cheese sandwich? Still kneeling against the wall I opened my fly and made a careful inspection. Still there, unpoxed. But even as I picked my teeth after dinner, somewhere in the back of my mind I planned to go home and write

The thin man shrugged. “Stretch Windrow's asshole,” he said to Tiny. “And make it last!”

How could I do other than use my own asshole as a model, in a stretch of the imagination? I'm not going to bitch about violence in our society. It's always been here, it's always going to be here. It's the violence in my mind that bothers me.

Then it becomes a matter of an ice pick. Or perhaps an adze. Versus a chair leg or a splitting maul, nine pounds. Asleep in your bed. 3:45 a.m. The house creaks. Moonlight pours through an open window. Shadows move in the stairwell. Was that a whisper? A footstep? A seagull lands on the roof with a distant thump. A raccoon makes its way through the ivy on top of the fence. It's chilly and you curl up in the bedclothes, for warmth. But that leaves your back exposed to the ice pick. Th e ice pick is very thin. It will penetrate the down comforter, the two or three wool blankets, your Tee shirt, your skin, musculature, the organ or perhaps bone beneath. Th e organism, your body, will scream and writhe around the wound before trying to twist away from it. The ice pick makes a very small puncture, so it will be necessary to strike very accurately, or many times. These in turn require absolute cool, or complete frenzy . . . .

What if I'd
had
the MSG?

. . . a fortunate thing for the victim if the first blow misses the vital organ or artery, and lodges in bone, a rib or clavicle. The undoubtedly determined force directing the initial strike ensures that the instrument, once lodged in bone, becomes very diffcult to remove quickly, for the next thrust. Th is the victim can turn to his advantage. Even asleep, one may react. Screaming may help, but the chairleg under the bed is a better idea. Crush the wrist of the assailant, possibly disarming him. Likewise his skull. In any case, if the ice pick remains lodged in the victim, the assailant, disarmed, ironically becomes the target of his own violence. For the victim, stabbed, will not rest until he has pulped his oppressor, and likely will continue to rain blows long after the culprit has died . . . .