Going Down Fast (43 page)

“Now she's married to him,” he muttered. He lay in bed wrapped in all the blankets. He complained of cold but his forehead was burning. “She's done it. Finished it off once and for all. All gone.”

She made tea and he drank it. Then he complained of being hot and threw off the blankets. He got up and she could not make him lie down until he began to shiver. “Nobody gets anything,” he muttered. “Nobody gets anything. Everybody gets nothing.”

Monday afternoon his fever rose to 104.4 and she was afraid. She gave him aspirin and tried Rowley's cold remedy: equal parts strong tea, rum and lemon juice, with enough sugar to get it down. He cursed as he drank it and threw it up.

Leon tossed in bed, his face shining under sweat. He was simmering with fever. Restlessly he turned in the nest of rumpled covers. His breath came harshly, his chest rattled.

“Leon, I think I better call a doctor.”

He made a gesture of disgust. But when she started turning the yellow pages, he said, “Call my cousin Murray. He's a fat jerk but he knows what he's doing. Murray Lederman. Burt's oldest kid. Call him, say I got a bad cold and arrange with him so you go to a drugstore and he calls in the prescription.” Then he grinned, facing half into the pillow. “And pick up the newspapers, okay? I want to see the newspapers.”

Cousin Murray was busy. After she explained, the nurse said Dr. Lederman would phone her back. In the meantime she called the office to explain she would not be in for the staff meeting. Then she tried plain tea to sweat his fever down. She fiddled with the stove and succeeded by constant effort in keeping the bedroom moderately warm.

Leon turned his swollen head back and forth heavily. His orange hair was plastered to his scalp. She was ashamed to realize she did not like to touch him.

“So she's married,” he muttered. “I'm going to get my lawyer to fix it so I can see Jimmy. She's running around with some dentist. Ought to be able to pin something on. He's my kid, right?”

When she touched the pillows they were wet. She changed the cases. It was dark before his cousin returned the call. At first he was suspicious of what kind of prescription she was trying to get. When she mentioned Leon's temperature, he said he would come. He let her know how much out of the way it was. When he called her Joye, she did not bother to correct him.

She fed Leon hot bouillon and changed his pajamas. Quickly she tidied, hiding her traces. When the doctor finally arrived, she realized she need not have troubled: he was wading into the unseemly and could not be relied upon to discriminate between scrubbed and unscrubbed bare boards. He would not at first take off his coat: a short stout pigeony man whose scarce brown hair had only orange lights, although he retained the sad family nose and brow ridges. A weak chin: his head gave up. He knew by now she was not Joye and called her “Miss” though Leon introduced them gruffly. He bustled around Leon, clucking. Before he examined Leon he ordered her out of the bedroom, while Leon kidded him hoarsely and without energy.

“Ashamed to have anyone see how you treat me, you quack? How's your mother?”

When the door opened, Cousin Murray was obviously angry. Ignoring her he went to the phone and dialed, misdialing, quit and dialed again. “Hello, Fern? Yes, well he has pneumonia. No, of course not. How am I supposed to know? Gross neglect. No use upsetting yourself. What are you talking about? No, I didn't see it. I don't have time to read newspapers. Into the hospital, I'll arrange it. Always glad to. Yes, why don't you, I think that would be the best thing.”

She went in. Leon was lying with the pillows pushed up and his eyes closed. “He says you have pneumonia.”

“Fancy name for a bad cold. I'm not going to the hospital.”

She kept silent, not wanting him to go either. She was afraid of hospitals. Leon would be taken and fitted into a white frame. Her fear made her guilty. She had to say, “If you're that sick maybe you better.”

His eyes opened, the pupils large, the irises only rims of blue skim milk. “Eager to get rid of me?”

“No,” She touched his hot hand. Gritty feeling.

“Better off here.” He patted the bed. “You're not a bad nurse. You get a bang out of it.”

“Not much. I like you better cool and healthy.”

“Am I ever healthy?” His head lolled on one shoulder. “Born with a sick eye. See a gray world, color of ash. See you gray too.”

“I'm not gray! I don't see you gray.”

“Wash your eyes out.” He said then in fitful eagerness, “Tell Caroline I'm sick. She'll get over her mad. She'll figure I've been out of my head with fever. Who's that?”

She went out to see Sheldon enter, trailed by Fern and another woman. Sheldon was monolithic and glittering, florid from the cold with a vibrancy of joyful anger coming off him. Quickly he surveyed the room, her with the other furniture, before passing in a wake of cold air into the bedroom. He shut the door but his raised voice came through it. Clucking, Cousin Doctor Murray went after him.

The other woman sat gingerly on the couch. Fern stood in her fur, twisting her hands. “I must pack his things for the hospital, but how can I go in there with Sheldon so upset? Why does Leon do these things?” Fern paced around the apartment, running a finger along a table, giving the refrigerator a peek, peering without recognition at Joye's mobile of bicycle parts. “I told him Friday night to watch his step. Sheldon is furious!”

“He certainly has given you enough concern.” The other woman was plump, corseted, with fat slack cheeks surrounded by blonded hair. She fidgeted with her shuddery hat and tweaked at her gloves. “He'll worry you into a stroke one of these days, what does he care? Trouble for the family. Everything the way he wants. His parents should give and give and he should take and take, a big boy his age.” The woman's eyes scraped over her.

She leaned against the wall by the bedroom door, her arms crossed, incredulous. Amazing grace. The righteous shall forever stick the ungodly with pins and needles and laws and their abominable manner of being in the world. Holy fat wives and mothers, forgive me my body and loves, my hair and clothes, forgive.

Sheldon swept out. He slapped his gloves smartly into his hand and stood a moment frowning. “Didn't you pack for him yet?” he asked Fern. “Get a move on.” His gaze fell then on her. “You can go home.”

“I am home. And you may stay a short while longer.”

The electric cold eyes of Leon's father looked and waited for her gaze to drop. A vain handsome irascible man who loathed her on sight. An efficient enemy who wanted to turn the world into himself. The eyes flicked on. He was too busy to challenge her at length. She perceived the source of Leon's gentleness. Also that puritan streak. He had eaten the father and could not cast him out and must always with part of his mind condemn his own pleasures.

Leon was forced to dress, bundled into his coat, a small bag was packed for him, and the entourage exited. They did not offer to tell her where they were taking him, and she was too proud to ask. After they had gone silence hummed in the rooms.

Leon

Invasion of the Poverty Freaks

Saturday, January 17

He had little trouble getting his people together. There wasn't that much competing in Chicago and they liked him. Old goodwill. Elliott not only agreed to send his current stars but came himself in high drag and full of suggestions. Friday he rented the equipment and bought the film and started collecting the props and garbage they would need. Finally he had taped the words he had written. Saturday when they assembled he played the tape for his actors. He thought it went over pretty well, but he would make decisions on the basis of what happened and the kind of footage he caught. They assembled at his pad, skirted the park, marched under the viaduct and along the embankment; a route where few saw them until they arrived.

Saturday morning at eleven thirty in the new shopping plaza, zenith of local commerce and socialization. The prosperous burghers nudged each other gently in the wide malls. But before the drum Big Thelma (two hundred fifty pounds of ex-anthropologist-whore) beat they fell back. This was handheld camera with a vengeance, because he was jostled and shoved.

THE EXILES'S RETURN

WE ARE ALIVE TOO: WE ARE AS REAL AS
YOU

WE ARE YOUR GARBAGE

YOU DISPOSED OF US

WE ARE BRINGING OUR GARBAGE

BACK TO YOU

He was glad that he had shot the footage of demolition over the past months, especially that summer stuff. The commentary spoke in his mind.
Our tenements crack like rotten eggs before the swinging ball of the wrecking crew. A sidewalk smeared with hopscotch leads to a pit. Gray with dust, a workman sorts bricks where the deaf shoemaker coughed at his oily bench. Feldman's candystore is a nondenominational parking-lot. There … are … no … smells … left
.

A hag in Army surplus overcoat shuffled raggedly, riffling every wastebasket they passed and strewing the contents. Doreen in town for the weekend from Ski U was made up as a tubercular beggar. His old girl Fran toted a sign
NEGRO HUSTLER WITH AGED DEPENDENT DESIRES ROOM
, with her brother and his friends as hoods marching together like a war party. They had magic markers and chalk and cans of spray paint.

FAT CITY

YOU SUCK MONEY

GARBAGE OF THE WORLD, REVOLT:

YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE

BUT A TRIP TO THE INCINERATOR

BLACK SUN RISING

MOON GOING DOWN IN BLOOD

YOU STOLE MY BONE

The neighborhood is being facelifted for professional couples who wish nice companions. Gingerly the great crane nibbles the bar where many began and many more never could: the teeth close
. (Zoom shot.)

Ghosts of dislocated alleycats slink at midnight under the fluourescent moons of shopping plaza. Halloween visitants haunt their bulldozed beds
.

Pink and purple and green and gold and black. Tinsel and rags, sequins and burlap. The big cart filled with burned mattresses and twisted springs and broken mirrors and plaster and bricks and doors and cracked toilet bowls was drawn by Elliott's boys with Elliott himself in full thirties drag on the driver's seat. Big Thelma beat a rock rhythm on the drum and his parade came dancing after, clanking strings of tin-cans at their feet, wheeling dollies heaped up with suitcases and boxes, moaning and lurching and weeping and shouting out the slogans on their signs and banners. They came under big emblems of roaches and rats borne above them, some of the kids burning incense. But instead of flowers they tossed garbage. The pillars of the mall dripped red and black. Elliott would hand down a smashed chandelier or a bottomless chair and another actor would place it carefully in front of one of the onlookers or against the window of a store. A boy peddled bright balloons labeled
GRASS, ACID, BENNY, PEYOTE, KIF, OPIUM, HASH, SPEED, HORSE
. A girl dragged a kid's red wagon with a plaster statue of St. Francis wearing beads.

POVERTY = LEPROSY

YOU HAVE TAKEN OUR HOMES: TAKE US INTO YOURS

Into the shopping plaza jiggled the army of unwanted.

His heart rocked in his chest as if he was on a bad trip. He was hot and cold in long woozy spurts. Even through his shades the sun clawed out of the sky and fractured off the expanses of new cement, and he had to take off his shades as soon as he started squinting through the lens. He had not eaten since yesterday, had had nothing but a cup of coffee and a candybar and the glass of water with which he took two antihistamines, yet he was high. On top of his fever, on top of his sickness, he balanced on a bouncing wire. Colors struck on his eyes, cries entered his ears and blood and burned there with a cool rippling ecstasy. He had to fight to see black and white. Normally he hated color: it was anti-image. It was cheap pseudorealism. It encouraged postcard reportage instead of seeing it new.
What is seen, is
. The phonemes of cinema are images. He found himself floating into abstraction. Hold on, hold on. The camera felt heavy. His arm ached already.

WE BREATHE: DON'T BURY US

IN GARBAGE

IN GHETTOS

LOVE US, WE ARE YOUR SHADOWS

WE ARE YOUR GARBAGE

Images would intervene. A fence of doors: exits, invitations, openings, and places where locks are hung. Flash of a doorman barring an entrance. Around them shoppers surged, stopped cold. A hush of horror settled on some. Others yelled. Some tried to interfere and he filmed a couple of fistfights. Some giggled, some frowned, some stared, some turned and hurried away.

I AM BLACK BUT COMELY AND

I WILL NOT MARRY YOUR SON

(NOT EVEN FOR MONEY)

REVOLT OF THE GARBAGE

RETURN OF THE REFUSE

THE WASTE COMES BACKIn the center of the plaza where a small parklike area surrounded a fountain with an original piece of sculpture all brassy and nonevocative (unless it was programmed subliminally to whisper, buy, buy, buy) they began to deposit their gifts. They opened the tattered bags and dirty suitcases and stacked up the bags of garbage around the fountain.

Dream of freaks and razors. Barb your hedges, doublelock your doors, hire men to stand guard outside, put up wire fences, arm your cops with mace and flamethrowers and tanks
.

NOTHING HUMAN

ALIENATES

LIKE COMFORT

The press arrived five minutes before the fuzz. So ended his parallel ceremony.

Rowley

Sunday–Saturday January 18–24

Sam sat on the windowledge, one leg swinging and the other propped up. Her hair hung in a fat glossy braid and she clasped her hands behind her neck looking wise. “I could have told you six months ago you wanted her …”