The Children of Hamelin (18 page)

“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 condition 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 New 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—”

“Yeah, San Francisco!” Ted shouted, up on his haunches again. “That’s a groovy town.”

“You’ve been to San Francisco, Ted?” Harvey said. “Yes, it is more relaxed and... But I think it’s more interesting to see how it struck a New Yorker.” The rank odor of fish suddenly filled the air. Harvey had pounced pretty quick on San Francisco. There was definitely some kind of mindgame being played here...

“Well, it’s the most beautiful city in the country,” Ted said. “I mean, beautiful the way a city is beautiful, not a mess like LA. It’s as much a city as New York, except it’s smaller, cleaner and it’s... you know, part of the land. All those great hills, and you can see the Bay from most parts of town if you climb the nearest hill. I dunno... it seems... slower, more relaxed, less uptight. Funky, y’know? The houses have
character.
And from what I saw, living is more... possible.”