The Plant (10 page)

He pulled over to the curb and ordered us out. I was willing, but Roger sat tight.

“My friend,” he said, “I would get out if I could walk. Since I cannot, you must convey us hence.”

“I want you out my caib, good sah.”

“So far I have done you the courtesy of vomiting out the window,”

Roger said with that same nonchalant and rather pleasant expression on his face. “It hasn’t been easy because of the angle, but I have done it. I think in another few seconds I am going to vomit again. If you don’t convey us hence, I am going to do it in your ashtray.”

At Roger’s building I assisted him into the lobby and saw him into the elevator with his apartment key in his hand. Then I wove my way back to the c a b .

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“You git annoder cab, mon,” the driver said. “You just pay me and git annoder. I don’t want to no mo convey you hence.”

“It’s just down to Soho,” I said, “and I’ll give you a hell of a tip. Also, I don’t feel like puking.” This was a bit of a lie, I’m afraid.

He took me, and from the look of my wallet the next day I did indeed give him a hell of a tip. And I actually managed to make it upstairs before throwing up. Although once I started I didn’t stop for quite awhile.

I didn’t go in the next day—it was all I could do to get out of bed. My head felt monstrous, bloated. I called in around three and got Bill Gelb, who told me Roger hadn’t shown, either.

Since then I have done a lot of crying and have had mostly sleepless nights, but perhaps Roger wasn’t so wrong—the only hours that I feel even halfway myself are the ones spent on the 9th floor at 490 Park. Riddley has just about had to sweep me out the door along with his red sawdust the last two nights. Maybe there is something to that old “he threw himself into his work” crap after all. Even this diary idea feels right...although it may only be the relief of finally being done with my dreadful pastoral novel.

Maybe I’ll stay on after all. Onward and upward...if there is any upward left for me. Man, I still can’t believe she’s gone.

And I still haven’t lost hope that she may change her mind.

76

March 21, 1981

Mr. John “Poop-Shit” Kenton

Zenith House Publishers, Home of the Pus-Bags

490 Kaka Avenue South

New York, New York 10017

Dear Poop-Shit,

Did you think I had forgotten you? My plans for revenge will go forward no matter WHAT! happens to me! You and all your fellow “
Pus-Bags
” will soon feel theWRATH!

of CARLOS!!

I have covened the powers of Hell,

Carlos Detweiller

In Transit, U.S.A.

P S—Smell anything “
green
” yet, Mr. Poop-Shit Kenton?

77

From John Kenton’s diary.

March 22, 1981

Had a letter from Carlos today. I laughed until I shrieked. Herb Porter came on the run, wanted to know if I was dying or what. I showed it to him. He read it and only frowned. He wanted to know what I was laughing about—

didn’t I take this Detweiller fellow seriously?

“Oh, I take him seriously...sort of,” I said.

“Then why in hell are you laughing?”

“I guess I just must be a warped plank in the great floor of the universe,”

I said, and then went off into even madder gales of laughter.

Fr ow ning so deeply now that the lines in his face had become crevasses, Herb laid the letter on the corner of my desk and then backed into the doorway, as if whatever I had might be catching. “I don’t know why you’re so weird lately,” he said, “but I’ll give you some good advice anyway. Get yourself some personal protection. And if you need psychiatric help, John—”

I just kept laughing—by then I’d worked myself into a semi-hysterical frenzy. Herb stared at me a moment longer, then slammed the door and walked away. Just as well, really, as I finished by crying.

I expect to speak to Ruth tonight. By exercising all of my willpower I have managed to hold off on calling her, expecting each day that she must call me. Maddening images of her and the odious Toby Anderson cavorting together—the locale which keeps recurring is a hot-tub. So I’ll call her. So much for willpower.

If I had a return address for Carlos Detweiller I think I’d drop him a postcard: “Dear Carlos—I know all about covening the powers of Hell. Your Ob’d Servant, Poop-Shit Kenton.”

Why I bother to write all this crud down, or why I keep plowing through the stacks of old unreturned manuscripts in the mailroom next to Riddley’s janitorial closet, are both mysteries to me.

78

March 23, 1981

My call to Ruth was an utter disaster. Why I should be sitting here and writing about it when I don’t even want to think about it defies reason. Perversity upon perversity. Actually, I do know—I have some dim idea that if I write it down it will lose some of its power over me...so let me by all means confess, but the less said, the better.

Have I written here that I cry very easily? I think so, but I haven’t the heart to actually look back and see. Well, I cried. Maybe that says it all. Or maybe it doesn’t. I guess it doesn’t. I had spent the day—the last two or three days, actually—telling myself that I would not a . ) c r y, or b. ) beg her to come back. I ended up doi ng c . ) both. I’ve had a lot of gruff locker room chats with myself over the last couple of days (and mostly sleepless nights) on the subject of Pride. As in, “Even after everything else is gone, a man’s got his Pride.” I would draw some lonely comfort from this thought and fantasize myself as Paul Newman—that scene in Cool Hand Luke where he sits in his cell after his mother’s death, playing his banjo and crying soundlessly.

Heart-rending, but cool, definitely cool.

Well, my cool lasted just about four minutes after hearing her voice and having a sudden total remembrance of Ruth—something like an imagistic tattoo. What I’m saying is that I didn’t know how gone she was until I heard her say “Hello? John?”—just those two words—and had this searing 360

degree memory of Ruth—God, how here she was when she was here!

Even after everything else is gone, a man’s got his Pride? Samson might have had similar sentiments about his hair.

A n y w a y, I cried and I begged and after a little while she cried and in the end she had to hang up to get rid of me. Or maybe the odious Toby—I never heard him but am somehow sure he was in the room with her; I could almost smell his Brut cologne—picked the phone out of her hand and did her hanging up for her. So they could discuss his lovering, or their June wedding, or perhaps so he could mingle his tears with hers. Bitter—bitter—I know. But I’ve discovered that even after Pride has gone, a man’s got his Bitterness.

79

Did I discover anything else this evening? Yes, I think so. That it is over—genuinely and completely over. Will this stop me from calling her again and debasing myself even further (if that is possible)? I don’t know. I hope so—God, I do. And there’s always the possibility that she’ll change her phone number. In fact, I think that’s even a probability, given tonight’s fes-tivities.

So what is there for me now? Work, I guess—work, work, and more work. I’m tunneling my way steadily into the logjam of manuscripts in the mailroom—unsolicited scripts which were never returned, for one reason or another (after all, it says right in the boiler-plate that we accept no responsibility for such orphan children). I don’t really expect to find the next Flowers in the Attic in there, or a budding John Saul or Rosemary Rogers, but if Roger was wrong about that, he was sublimely right about something much more important—the work is keeping me sane.

Pride...then Bitterness...then Work.

Oh, fuck it. I’m going to go out, buy myself a bottle of bourbon, and get shitty-ass drunk. This is John Kenton, signing off and going for the long bomb.

80

From the journals of Riddley Walker

3/25/81

After what seems like ten weeks of unadulterated excitement—all of it the unhealthiest variety—things at Zenith House seem to have finally settled back into their accustomed drone. Porter sneaks into Jackson’s office and sniffs the seat of her office chair during the five-minute period which comes every morning between ten and ten-thirty when the seat is vacant (it is during this half-hour each morning that Ms. Jackson removes herself and a copy of either Vogue or Better Homes and Gardens to the ladies’

bog, where she has her daily dump); Gelb has resumed his surreptitious visits to the Riddley Walker Casino and after a rash double-or-nothing proposal earlier this week now owes me $192.50; Herb Porter, after his brief fugue, has once again mounted into the seat of the great political locomotive which he imagines only himself, of all the earth’s billions, really capable of driving; and I have resumed these pages after a three-week hiatus in which I have peacefully swept dirt by day and spread narrative by night—and if that is not pomposity masquerading as eloquence, then nothing is.

But the accustomed drone is not quite the same as before, is it?

There are two principal reasons for this. One is down the hall and one is right here in my little janitorial cubby...or perhaps it’s only in my head. I would give a great deal to know which, and please believe me that my tongue is nowhere near my cheek when I say so. The change down the hall is, of course, John Kenton. The change in here (or in my head) is Zenith the Common Ivy.

81

Herb Porter doesn’t realize that anything at all is wrong with Kenton.

Bill Gelb has noticed but doesn’t care. It was Sandra Jackson who asked me yesterday if I had any idea why John had suddenly decided to go through every old manuscript in that corner of the mailroom I think of as The Isle of Forgotten Novels.

“No ma’am!” I said. “I sho don’t!”

“Well, I wish he’d stop,” she said. She popped open her compact, peered into it, and began to poke at her hair with an afro comb. “I can’t even go in there anymore without sneezing until I’m just about blue.

Everything’s covered with dust and all that dry creepy stuff that comes out when those cheap padded mailers tear open. You must hate it in there.”

“It sho is pow’ful dusty, Miz Jackson, and that’s a fack!”

“Is he mailing them back?”

“I doan’ know if he is nor not.”

“Well, you take care of the mail, don’t you?” she asked, putting away her compact and producing a tube of lipstick. A twist of her fingers produced something the size an shape of a child’s penis and the color of a hunter’s cap. She began to apply this in great shiny plates. I caught a whiff and immediately understood why Porter sniffs her seat instead of her face.

“Yes ma’am, I sho do!”

“So if you haven’t seen any of them going out, they aren’t going out.

Just as well. If he was sending them out I would have to complain to Roger and perhaps even send a memo on the subject to Mr. Enders.” She gave her lipstick a twist, recapped it, dropped it into the maw of the huge shapeless trunk she calls her purse, and preened for a moment. “None of them were accompanied by return postage. That’s why they’re there. It’s not our business to send them back—most of them or all of them—but he is doing it at his own expense, and it is thus none of La Jackson’s business.

“I wish he’d stop it, even if he’s dumping them down the incinerator,” she said, now producing a plastic canister which, when opened, dis-82

closed dusting powder and a rather discolored puff. Sandra Jackson then proceeded to disappear into a choking pink cloud that had much the same effect on me as the one she claimed Kenton’s office produced on her. “He’s making the rest of us look bad and there’s no goddamned need of it,” she finished from inside the cloud.

“No ma’am,” I said, and sneezed.

“Are you growing marijuana in here, Riddley?” she asked. “It smells funny in here.”

“No ma’am, I sho ain’t!”

“Uh,” she said, and put away the puff. She began to unbutton her blouse just as I’d begun to hope I was going to escape. She doffed it, revealing two small decorous white-lady breasts like uncooked muffins with a cherry poked into each one. She began to unzip her skirt and then paused in the act, giving me another moment of fleeting hope. “What else is wrong with him, Riddley?”

“Ah sho don’t know, Miz Jackson,” I said, but I know, all right, and Roger Wade knows as well—I think it’s almost incredible that Wade somehow persuaded such a total romantic to stay on, but somehow he did. Porter doesn’t know, Gelb doesn’t care, and Jackson’s too self-centered to see what’s right in front of her slightly saggy little white-lady tits: his girl told him that he just dropped off the Top Forty of her life. And Kenton has responded (with a little help from Roger Wade, one must assume) in a way that seems both honorable and courageous to me—a way I like to think I myself would respond: he’s working his fucking ass off.

Her skirt puddled around her feet and she stepped out of it.

“Want to play truckdriver and hitchhiker today, Riddley?” she asked.

“I sho do, Miz Jackson!” I said as her hands went to my belt-buckle and tugged it undone. At moments like this I have about four fantasies to fall back on that never fail. One, I regret to say, is of having my sister Deidre first diaper me and then accommodate me after I have made wee-wee in my didy. Ah, sex is the great comedy, all right. No doubt about that.

83

“Oh Mr. TruckDriver, it is so big and hard!” Jackson exclaimed in a squeaky little-girl voice as she grasped me. And, thanks to Deidre and the diapers, it was.

“That there is my Hearst shifter, little Miz Hitchhikuh!” I growled,

“and right now I’se gwine th’ow it into overdrive!”

“At least ten minutes, Mr. TruckDriver,” she said, lying down. “I want at lest three and you know it takes me...” She sighed contentedly as I sank my drive-shaft into her universal joint. “...awhile to get up to cruis-ing speed.”

Just before leaving (she had given her hair a few more good pokes with the afro comb before dropping it into her purse on top of her panties) she looked around sharply and asked me again if I wasn’t perhaps growing a little cannabis in here.