Firmin Read online

  He did not always go out at night, and sometimes—more and more frequently as the weeks rolled by and the weather turned cold—we spent the evenings sprawled in the old leather armchair together listening to records, lots of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. He had a real hi-fi with speakers on both sides, and we drank the red wine that he brought home in jugs from Dawson’s Beer and Ale on Cambridge Street. I did not have my own glass, so I sipped from his. I usually sat on the chair arm, and sometimes I got so drunk I fell off and landed in his lap. He laughed, and even though I was not able to laugh I felt good and it was the same as laughing. I had always liked jazz, because of Fred Astaire, and now I grew fond of modern stuff too. We played an L.P. called No Sun in Venice over and over, it was so cool and sad, with Milt Jackson on vibes. The vibraphone sounded to me like a lonely rat walking down an empty street in a city made of glass, his paws chiming on the pavement, a clear, high lonely sound that echoed off the buildings.

  Sometimes late at night, lying in my box in the dark, on the towel from the Roosevelt Hotel (invisible now beneath the cotton I had pulled out of Stanley), I could still hear the music in my head. I would let it play. I would open my eyes in the dark and think about the Lovelies. I would rub my thoughts against the velvet of their skin, root in the shadowy warmth of their crevices. The longing was so intense—it was a long, hot line running the length of my body. I was never able to fathom how Jerry could bear it, trudging alone through a womanless world, mumbling to himself, big head wagging. Had I been human I would have descended to the streets, accosted the first attractive young one I met, my black eyes glittering above a chinless smile, and I would have beguiled, bought, or ravished. But Jerry just shuffled along in arctic solitude, so lonely he would talk to a rat.

  Still, during those good times, at breakfast with the paper or listening to music in the big chair at night, I sometimes experienced a new kind of happiness. It was not like the brilliant gaiety of the old days in the bookstore. It was softer and warmer and almost brown.

  Sometimes we let ourselves get carried away and played Bird as loud as it would go, with Jerry doing the drums on the chair arms and me pounding the piano and the whole joint, as they say, jumping. We were so loud that twice the man who lived in the next room—his name was Cyril and he had hair growing out of his nose and sometimes at night we could hear him sobbing—came and beat on the door with the flat of his fat hand and shouted at us to turn it down. And those two times, plus the visit from the fire marshal, were the three times we ever got knocks on our door.

  Jerry taught me a lot about jazz, about improvisation and playing the changes and things like that, and later on I worked these into my own music. Sometimes I played while Jerry talked. I wore a white shirt with blue stripes and a garter on my sleeve just like the one Hoagy Carmichael has on in To Have and Have Not, and I carried on a kind of soft musical doodle in the background the way he does in the movie, while Jerry sipped his wine and reminisced about his childhood, which was now very far away in Wilson, North Carolina, and about the time he was in the army. He had joined up right at the beginning of the war, the Second World War. When they found out he was a farm boy they assigned him to the Remount Corps and shipped him off to train mules in Texas, where one day a huge gray one named Peter kicked him in the head. The blow knocked his left eye off to one side, where it stayed. Besides recurrent headaches and double vision, Peter’s kick brought with it a little check in the mail every month. “So you see, Ernie, that fucking mule did me a real favor.” One of the great things about Jerry was the way he could always see the big picture.

  And he told me about when he used to live in Los Angeles before the war and had a walk-on part in a movie called Canyon Riders. He talked a lot about books too, and the literary scene. He said nobody ever wrote better than Hemingway except Fitzgerald, and he only did it once. And he told me about the exciting things that were happening on “the Coast”—he meant the West Coast—and he said Boston was a dying city.

  I loved it when he talked about the revolution, too, about Joe Hill, Peter Kropotkin, and the Paterson strike. One of his favorite phrases was “after the revolution.” When people bought his books, he would apologize for taking their money and tell them that books were going to be free after the revolution, a public service like streetlights. He also said Jesus was a Communist, which caused some of the people to get worked up.

  Jerry talked and I listened. Gradually I learned more and more about his life, while he, one can safely say, learned less and less about mine. Due to my natural reticence, he had a free hand with my personality. He could pretty much make me into whomever he wanted, and it was soon painfully clear that when he looked at me what he mainly saw was a cute animal, clownish and a little stupid, something like a very small dog with buckteeth. He had no inkling of my true character, that I was in fact grossly cynical, moderately vicious, and a melancholy genius, or that I had read more books than he had. I loved Jerry, but I feared that what he loved in return was not me but a figment of his imagination. I knew all about being in love with figments. And in my heart I always knew, though I liked to pretend otherwise, that during our evenings together, when he would drink and talk, he was really just talking to himself.

  Do I detect a chuckle? You think you have found me out, I suppose. I know, I know what I said earlier—that I confessed, testified, and in my perverse way even boasted of my love of cracks, my near-pathological need to hide, my affection for masks. So why, you ask, do I complain now when presented with a new opportunity for concealment, a golden chance to cower unseen behind the impenetrable guise of cuddly pet? Well, I’ll tell you why: the difference between assuming a mask, which is always an opportunity for freedom, and having it forced upon one, is the difference between a refuge and a prison. I would have been happy to stump through life wrapped in the furry armor of my pet disguise had I been convinced that I could pop it off whenever I wanted, tear away the adorable cuddle face and leap forth as the creature I knew I was. Hi, Jerry, it’s me! I would never have done that, of course, but I liked the idea that I could.

  Though I wore the disguise bravely, it always chafed, and sometimes I could not stop myself from gnawing at its edges. When the mood was on me, I liked to defecate in delicate spots, on Jerry’s plate or his pillow. He did not care for that at all, though he still failed to get it—instead of nasty little beast, I was just good old Firmin messing up. And once when he was idly scratching me between the ears I turned and gave him a really vicious bite. On his fourth digit. I am sorry about that now. A Wanderer in the Garden of Regrets.

  When we left the room it was not always to peddle books on the Common. Once we went to the movies. It was early in September, a heavy, smelly, overcast afternoon. Jerry had been on the verge of going out, had the door already open. I was on the table finishing his lunch and reading yesterday’s Globe. He hesitated, turned, and shot me a look that at the time seemed to say, “Poor old Ernie, left alone.” Thinking back on it now, though, it seemed more quizzical than that, so maybe it was saying something like, “Who is this animal anyway?” I prefer it that way. But whichever it was, he came back into the room and scooped me up. He stuck me in his coat pocket, and off we went to the movies.

  The walk to the Rialto was tremendously interesting in a depressing sort of way. I had never done it in the daytime, and now, peeking out from beneath the pocket flap as we bounced along, I was amazed at how daylight ravages, especially when it is dull and gray and not very different from the light that had leaked through the panes of my basement. And it was not just the light. The world with which I thought I was familiar—dark, mysterious, laced with shadow, romantic even, though fraught with danger—had dwindled horribly. A thick haze had starved it of color. Distant views had lost their depth, collapsing into lusterless panels of gray and brown. Neglected buildings, boarded windows, trash-clogged gutters, pinched gray faces. It was all shriveled, sad, and ugly. I couldn’t let that bother me, though—I was happy to be striding throug
h the streets of Boston in the pocket of one of the best writers in the world. Of course, it was trudging really, but I say “striding” because that captures the feeling of the thing.

  I had seen every movie the Rialto owned, some of them many times, but I was always game to watch one again. When we reached the ticket window, Jerry shoved me down deep in his pocket, so I was not able to see the posters and had no idea what was showing. I stayed hunkered there while he bought a box of popcorn and a Coke, and then we walked all the way down to the front row. There were only a few people besides us in the whole theater. The movie started up almost right away and as luck would have it, it turned out to be the one movie I really hated, even though it was in Technicolor, which I normally considered a plus. It was called The Yearling, and it was a long sentimental saga about a poor boy and his pet deer. I normally don’t like stories with animals in them. Jerry, though, clearly loved it, and I realized that he had brought me along because he thought I would love it too, and that made me sad and lonely, though I put on a good face. Besides the deer and a lot of dogs, the movie features a big bear named Old Slewfoot. When he appeared on the screen, Jerry turned to see my reaction. I really hammed it up for him, opening my mouth wide, throwing my forepaws in the air, and falling over backward. I could see he was pleased with that. The movie goes on and on, one affliction after another, until one day, when the deer has eaten all the poor family’s corn for the third time, the mother whips out the family shotgun and blasts it. I was glad about that, but I could see Jerry wiping away tears.

  We stayed on for the other features. We sat through Trail to San Antone and The Mad Monster, and it was getting on toward midnight. I hoped they would finish off with Ginger Rogers so Jerry could watch the death and transfiguration scene, but it was Charlie Chan instead. When at midnight the great Chinaman flickered out in midsentence, there was the usual coughing and shuffling in the dark. Then the projector rattled back to life and the angelic assumption began. This time it was Man-Crazy Kittens, one of my favorites. Two Lovelies dressed in kitten suits, with adorable little whiskers and ears, were trying to catch a man dressed as a rat, or maybe a mouse. They chased him round and round in a huge house, practically a mansion, but he was too quick for them, vaulting over furniture, climbing drapes, swinging from a chandelier. After a while the kittens tried another tactic. They pretended to give up on the chase. They yawned and stretched and pretended they were going to bed. They started climbing out of their kitten suits, first the shoulders, then one lovely breast. They were so beautiful then. Of course when the big rat sees them naked he can’t resist and goes over and mates with them both, one after another and then both together. I am usually deeply disinclined to contemplate Lovelies being mounted by anything as gross as a human male, and I avert my gaze at those moments, but this film was an exception, for obvious reasons. I was not sure if Jerry was going to like it, though. So when they started climbing out of the kitten suits, I looked over to see his reaction. He was fast asleep, head thrown back and mouth agape. Looking around the theater, I could see a few other old guys in the same attitude, and it occurred to me that if you didn’t know better, you could mistake Jerry for just another hooch hound on the long slide to nowhere.

  In October Jerry started talking about moving to San Francisco. At first I thought he was just talking, until one day he came home with a Greyhound schedule and spent the evening poring over it, deciding which cities we would visit on the way. On the list, I remember, were Buffalo, Chicago, and Billings. So I took the Elevator down to the bookstore and read everything I could find there about San Francisco, which wasn’t much anymore. Jerry was optimistic about Frisco. In fact, I think that was the only time that I ever saw him consistently optimistic about anything, he was such a sad man at heart.

  I knew we had to go soon. The Elevator trips down to the store were getting more difficult every day, and I found myself thinking a lot about death. I wondered what would happen if Jerry came back home one night and found me dead, my poor little body stiff and cold. I think my mouth would be slightly open, showing my yellow teeth. (I am usually careful to keep my upper lip pulled well down over them.) What would he do then? Would he pick me up by the tail and drop me in the metal can? And what else could he do? Bury me in the Public Garden?

  “What ya doing there, buddy?”

  “Just burying a rat, officer.”

  “Burying a what?”

  I hated the idea of being picked up by the tail and put in the trash.

  But even with the melancholy undertow, these were still good times on the whole, and I like to remember them now, and sometimes I play with them and try to get the sadness out, the old age and the loneliness. I make Jerry young again, with the wavy dark hair and the white-toothed smile he had in the photograph. And I carry us out of the room on Cornhill and fly us high over Boston and across the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and set us down in a bar or coffee shop somewhere in San Francisco—we can see the bay flashing in the background—and sometimes I invite other people to join us, Big Ones like Jack London or Stevenson, and then we really go at it.

  I always think everything is going to last forever, but nothing ever does. In fact nothing exists longer than an instant except the things that we hold in memory. I always try to hold on to everything—I would rather die than forget—yet at the same time I was looking forward to San Francisco, to leaving everything behind. And that’s life—you can’t make sense of it at all. I had been with Jerry six months and seven days. The trees in the Common were dropping their leaves, a red and yellow litter on the grass, sad and crisp, and more and more stores were dying in the Square, their windows and doors boarded over. Trash was everywhere, lying in the streets and gutters or picked up and blown by passing trucks in swirls like leaves. The nights were quieter than before, and I could always hear Jerry when he came stumping home, recognize the footfalls on the stairs. His were slower and heavier and sounded wearier than the footsteps of the other tenants, even those of Cyril, who was fat and had asthma and also took a long time climbing.

  One night I was lying awake, half listening for him, the way I usually did, and talking to myself, when I heard the street door open and close, and then the slow familiar steps on the stairs, climbing the first flight and pausing at the landing, the way they always did. Soon, I thought, he will open the door, and if he is not too tanked he will turn on the light and undress and sit on the edge of the bed in his shorts and talk to me a while. He was almost at the top when I heard the noise. I had never heard the sound of someone falling down stairs before, but I knew even while it was still going on that this long tumbling noise was just that sound. Afterward there was no sound at all, just silence settling like a blanket.

  I waited for all the doors in the hall to fly open, for the sounds of confused shouts and running steps. But none of those things happened. The sound of Jerry falling shook buildings in Revere and Belmont, and yet no one heard it. As for me, I had no way of getting out into the hall. Even though I knew it was hopeless, I tried frantically to squeeze my way through the crack under the door, my claws scraping loudly against the floor. Then I forced myself to sit still, take a deep breath, and think. I had to find a way to reach Jerry, though what I could do if I reached him I had no idea. So I took the Elevator down to the dentist’s office and racing from room to room looked for a way into the hall from there. I knew something awful had happened. All my life I have been burdened, practically crippled, by a monstrous imagination, and all the while I was running this way and that I could see Jerry grotesquely sprawled and shattered, and I could feel him dying over and over. Finally, in desperation I slid and tumbled down the Elevator all the way to the basement, crawled out under the door into the alley, and ran around to the front door under ROOMS, not even caring who saw me. I could not get in that way either. On the door it said PAINLESS DENTIST, and somewhere on the other side of those words, Jerry lay in agony or dead.

  So I went back to the bookstore and with great
difficulty—I was bruised all over—climbed up into the Balloon and just waited. Shortly after dawn I heard shouts in the street and then the siren. It came, and in a little while it went away, frightened and wailing, to die somewhere in the city west of the Square.

  When Shine opened up at nine, they all rushed in, and the heads bobbed and nodded around the desk like apples in a drum of rough water. They talked of the accident a while—they all ran their mouths at once, and the only evident fact to float up from the babble was that Jerry Magoon had fallen down the stairs and been taken unconscious to Mass General—and then they went on to other things, to Alvin’s mother’s broken hip and the Red Sox.

  I went back upstairs to the room. It was already as if he had been gone for years. I couldn’t get the top off Skippy. There was a full loaf of Sunshine bread on the table and I gnawed through the plastic and ate some of that. I sat all night in the big chair. To keep my mind off Jerry, I went to Paris to look for the house where Joyce had once lived, but the street signs had melted and I couldn’t find it.

  I was in the Balloon for opening time the next day. The heads filed in and bobbed. Shine had already been to the hospital to ask after Jerry. They had told him he was unhurt by the fall but had suffered a stroke, was unconscious and being fed through a tube, and they did not expect him to recover. He might die tomorrow, he might die in a year.

  “Well,” George said, “at least he’s going to be asleep when he goes. I hope to fuck I die in my sleep, right in the middle of a nice dream.” He was going on to tell about a dream he had had, when Alvin interrupted.