The Children of Hamelin (3 page)

“We’d like to hear your feelings,” Harvey said in that other voice of his, the dentist’s voice. And reality flipped over again for me: I looked at Harvey and saw the schmoo-mask. But behind it lurked the other reality: it
was
a mask, for wasn’t I standing in a room full of people who were being sucked dry by what looked like a nonentity? Maybe he
was
just a dirty little quack, maybe it
was
just money to him—but that didn’t matter, he was pushing death and they were buying. Some pushers are on the stuff and some wouldn’t touch it. It doesn’t matter to the clientele.

“Can’t you see it?” I said “Are you all deaf? Didn’t you hear the man? He’s telling you to groove behind death—”

Blank, vacant stares. Ted and Doris, my oldest, closest friends, and they didn’t really hear a word I was saying—they were hooked like all the rest.

I was just making a public asshole out of myself. You can’t argue with junkies, not about their junk you can’t.

“You see?” Harvey said. “That’s a very typical reaction. Your ego won’t accept the necessity for its own annihilation. But your hostility is actually a healthy sign—you’ve seen the truth and accepted it on a deep level and so you’re afraid. That’s the first step. Let me help you take the next one. Ask yourself: ‘Is my reaction that of a happy, tranquil man? Don’t I want peace? Real peace....’”

“Shut up! Shut up! I told you, I’ve seen you a thousand times in—”

Christ, I thought, I’m starting to gibber! I’ve got to get out of here or... or... A terrible fear came over me: that knowing what Harvey was, knowing what lurked in his therapy sessions and mutual assassination groups, I would still be unable to turn my back on it; the fear of the ex-junkie that he can never really turn his back on junk.

I looked down at Ted, at Doris. Glazed junkie-eyes looked back.

“I’m getting out of here,” I told them. “Now. Come with me.”

“Tom...” Ted said, his voice full of genuine soothing concern, “take it easy man—”

I looked around the room; empty eyes stared back with a loathsome pity. I looked at Linda Kahn; she looked away. I felt alone, terribly, finally alone. I turned, stepped over their bodies, making for the door and the long hallway back to reality. As I stepped into the relative darkness of the hallway, I heard Harvey’s voice behind me: “Don’t worry, Ted, it’s a natural reaction. I think he’ll be back—”

Alone in the hallway, it was an effort not to break into a run.

Outside, it was cold and it was raining. I shivered. I felt the dank rain soaking my hair. I was cold and alone in the middle of the night.

And up there, in the warmth, were people who shared something I was not a part of, who had something to believe in—and who wanted me. I really believed that: they truly wanted me.

So had Anne.

Chilled to the bone, I began walking downtown in the rain, wondering what would happen if I met a pusher.

The roach-end of New York: Second Avenue between the beginnings of the classy East Side in the upper Thirties and the outskirts of the East Village at Fourteenth Street after twelve on a November night in the rain. Gray and lifeless as an IND Subway tunnel—an open air Subway-street, one-way downtown. With the staggered lights, the traffic in the gutter shoots past you in a blur like the A-Train Express and the sidewalks are almost as desolate as an empty Subway station—hulking gray tenements, silent lightless groceries and fruit stores, garbage decaying in puddles along the curb—and the few people you do see are super-uptight, because who’s walking on a street like this except a mugger or a pervert or some kinda dope-fiend?

So why was I walking downtown in the rain with eleven bucks in my pocket on one of the easiest streets in town to get a cab on and with the Second Avenue bus running all the way to St. Mark’s? Guess old Harv would call it a masochistic scene. Screw old Harv! What it really was was a playback of one of my old junkie numbers. (Junkies always feel they’re doing everything for at least the second time and usually they’re right.) How many times had I walked this street or a street like it (with or without Anne), having missed a connection for one reason or another with exactly the necessary $3.00 (usually in dimes and quarters) for a minimal bag in my pocket and afraid to blow a lousy 20 cents on the bus because I just
might
run into a dealer somehow in which case the difference between $3.00 and $2.80 would be all the difference in the world and you can never tell, I
might
run into a dealer, has been known to happen, better not take the chance.

So that was the place good old Harv had shoved my head back into. Because if I didn’t play that mind-game, I would remember I had $11, would hail a cab, and once I got into it, would I be able to give the cabbie my home address or would I make it back to the Foundation where I knew I could score
something
to get me through the night? Old Harv expected me to come back, and I didn’t want to find out he was right the easy way. Yeah, he had gotten to me with his mind-game: at least he had started me playing evil mind-games with myself again.

Therefore: walking home in the rain on Bummer Avenue. I remembered another mind-game. Once, when I hadn’t been able to score any smack, I had gotten really bombed on some awful combination—Romilar and speed or something equally foul—and had to walk a bummer street to get from
here
to
there,
and I felt I just couldn’t cut the trip between. So somehow (I mean I was
really
stoned) I had turned my mind off in one place, become a mindless walking robot for the duration of the trip, then woken my mind up again at my destination, thus cutting out the experience and the memory-track of the trip between. As far as my head was concerned, it was exactly as if I had teleported like some science fiction superman out of A. E. Van Vogt.

A handy trick, and I tried to make it work now. But I couldn’t. I was all too straight, stuck on Second Avenue, in the cold, in the rain, on a bummer, thinking: “If this is reality, I’ll take vanilla.”

Pissed-off, too. At whatever was wrong with me or the scenes I made that I always ended up defining my sanity in negatives: didn’t stay in the old parental looney-bin so I could finish college; didn’t let myself end up as a terminal junkie with Anne, whatever gutter she was flopping in now; didn’t let myself buy Harvey’s sweet shit; didn’t get into a cab which might’ve taken me back to the Foundation.

What
was
wrong with me? What if I had made the positive decisions? Stuck it out at home. Finished college. Never left that Flatbush never-never land. Never kicked Anne out. Stayed a junkie. Given myself to Harvey and his Total Consciousness. Where would I be now? Living on Long Island married to a plastic virgin from Vassar? O.D.ed in a doorway with Anne? Hooked on Harvey Brustein?

No, the hell of it was that every damned choice I had made had been the right one. And where had all those cagey right choices gotten me?

Soaked and cold walking alone down Second Avenue in the middle of the night.

Nearing Fourteenth Street: to my left, blocks of red brick housing project, a universe of beery Post Office Foremen and their big-assed housefraus and cherubic brats. Yeah, and I saw through that stage-set, too, the way I saw through my parents, saw through college, saw through junk, saw through my silly-ass job, saw through Ted and Doris and their little tin god, saw through every fucking thing, dammit! Just once, I’d like to look out through the eyeholes in my skull and have something greater and wiser and more beautiful than Tom Hollander look back.

Fourteenth Street—border zone. Below, the outskirts of the East Village. To the east, the street was the frontier between the housing project and some world’s champion Puerto Rican slums on the south, all the way to the East River. To the west, Fourteenth Street was Puerto Rican Disneyland: Spanish movie houses, Army-Navy stores, a couple of slimy Chinese restaurants, pawn shops,
cuchifriterias,
cruddy Nedickses, an old movie house converted to a supermarket—“Hamburger 35 cents” sharing billing on the marquee with “Maxwell House Coffee 59 cents lb.”

Standing on the northwest corner, waiting like a good little citizen for the light to change, I played another mind-game with myself: the choice game. I could turn east toward the project and the Road to Levittown, west toward El Bario and the Proletariat, north back to old Harv and Total Consciousness of the Total Void, or south into the East Village and what passed for home. Existential choice, dig?

Sure....

Surprise, surprise, when the light turned green, I took destiny in my hands and opted for the East Village and home.

Still, the scene really
does
change when you cross Fourteenth Street. There are people who say they never go north of Fourteenth and they mean it. Even on a crummy night like this, Second Avenue starts to come alive between Fourteenth and St. Mark’s. The weather kept the street scene down, but on those six blocks, you’ve got the Metro, a cheapo movie house, a library, two all-night candy stores, a brace of head shops, a late-night delicatessen, an Old Polacks’ Home, and assorted floating Villagey shops.

At the corner of St. Mark’s and Second, I felt almost like a human being again. South, the lights of Ratner’s and the appetizing stores frequented by a weird mixture of ethnic old ladies and epicurean heads. To the east was home, and to the west the St. Mark’s MacDougal Street East: head shops, funky little greasy spoons, marginal bookstores, button-and-poster shops, the Electric Circus, a flux of borderline discotheques and coffee houses, and a rash of tourist-trap boutiques. And quite a street scene on better nights than this.

I could go home, grab something at Rappaport’s, see if Roy Ellem and that crowd of his were at the Dom, make the rounds, or even make it further east to the hard-core ethnic head scene and maybe cop some pot from Tash or something like that. But all those scenes, I suddenly realized, had been bringing me down for the past couple of months; my mind had started to drift through those crowds like a ghost, or vice versa. Still, I did sometimes make them and probably would again, so when I crossed Second Avenue and decided to call it a night, I had at least the illusion of free choice—which seemed to be my hang-up at the moment.

Ah, but all this is illusion, for on the other side of Second Avenue, standing in the doorway of a closed drugstore (somehow prophetic) I met The Girl in the Rain.

A set-piece, like something out of a Hollywood fake of a New Wave film: a slim chick in an old peacoat ten sizes too big and black plastic zippered boots. A patina of dew on her pale skin, overflow from her long, wild, rain-soaked black hair. No more than nineteen. No make-up. Huge, dark doe-eyes. And a smile that would’ve melted an Eighth Street fag turned on me like a spotlight, telling me in no uncertain terms that I was in her stage-center.

“Hello,” she said, in a sweet little dirty-girl voice. “Don’t you know who I am?”

Awkward pause; then she laughed, cooling my embarrassment,
just so.

“Haven’t you ever met a girl in the rain before?” she said.

I wanted to cry; I wanted so much to be wherever she was at but I couldn’t find the words to cut in. It didn’t seem to matter; her smile never wavered.

“That’s who I am,” she said. “Your Girl in the Rain.” And she executed an incredible little bow.

But I mean, she made me
believe.
A number like that from a chick like that with even a hint of sarcasm for my paranoia to wedge into, and I would’ve been off into the galloping nasties. But whatever else this girl was, she radiated sincerity; she was offering herself and she made me believe it. And it was like slow pot suddenly hitting—I found myself going with the moment and to hell with the unreality. She made me believe I was a groovy cat who deserved to be sent a Girl in the Rain.

So I took her hand and instead of snuggling up to me or something else slightly off, she just took my other hand and we drank up each other’s eyes at double arm’s length. Every move was...
just so.
She had eyes you wanted to dive into and float around in forever. Magic! Yeah, magic on a bummer November night in the rain....

I smiled like a kid on Christmas morning, finally managed to say: “What have I done to deserve this?”

“No one gets a Girl in the Rain because he deserves one,” she said with a weird fragile solemnity. “A Girl in the Rain happens because you need her to happen.”

“And how did you know I needed you?”

“I saw it in your eyes. Trust me. I trust you. Haven’t you been waiting for a Girl in the Rain to happen to you?”

“I suppose I have,” I said. “And you’ve been standing here all night just waiting for me?”

“No. I’ve been waiting here for the right someone to happen to. I just feel like happening to someone tonight. I’m the Girl in the Rain and you’re my Man in the Rain, and if you ask any more questions, I’ll turn back into a pumpkin.”

I just smiled. “Tom,” I said.

“Robin.”

Unwillingly, I found myself remembering something Ted had once said: “Robin is a name girls give themselves.”
Retro me, satanis!

“Is there someplace we can go? Rain is beautiful for meeting, but not for making love.”

“Two blocks down.”

Suddenly she was ten years old. She bounced up and down. “Let’s run!” she bubbled, and she yanked me forward into an all-out sprint. And we ran down St. Mark’s, two kids laughing and panting hand in hand through the falling rain.

Although my apartment was on the fifth floor, it was still the best pad I had ever had, and I must admit I was kind of sneakily houseproud. The bathtub was in the bathroom and even had a shower; bedroom, living room and kitchen all had neat paint jobs and the furnishings were Salvation-Army-class.

So I gave thanks to the $100 a week I was knocking down at the good old Dirk Robinson Literary Agency as I raced Robin up the stairs, grateful that the magic of this moment was not about to be exorcised by the kind of seedy mess I used to inhabit in the Bad Old Days.