Firmin Read online

  After dropping all the dishes in the sink—kavoom—he took his jacket and went out and was gone a long time, and when he came back it was so late the city was almost quiet except for now and then a siren or car horn and the loud throbbing in my leg, and he went to bed without turning on the light again. He smelled like Mama. I could hear him sleeping, slow and heavy, and heard him laugh in a dream, and in the morning I saw that he was still in his clothes.

  And that was how I began my life with Jerry Magoon, the second human I ever loved. I was not able to move around much for a few days, and the pain would not let me sleep. I lay quietly in my box and named things. The table, which was always loaded down with stuff, I named the Camel. I called my box the Hotel. The window became La Fontaine Lumineuse, and I named the leather armchair Stanley. I named things and I watched Jerry. I followed with my eyes everything he did in the daytime, and in the night I listened to his breathing.

  He had folded my towel in such a way that it said VELT on top, and when I lay down with one eye shut and the other pressed close to the towel and sighted across the rolling hills of its nappy surface, I could see a vast savanna stretching away before me, from the huge T in the foreground like a great leafless baobab, to the little V standing for “vanishing” in the distance. During those first days, whenever Jerry went out, I would lie quietly and watch the gazelles leaping over and over the E and the giraffes scratching their knobby heads on the L. I could do this for hours. And when, finally, I would hear Jerry’s key rattle in the latch and lift my head from the towel, the poor frightened animals would fly off like birds, their muffled cries receding over the grassy plain. It was so sad and beautiful. I thought that in the end I would prefer being a gazelle leaping and floating over E to being human and that I would rather have long legs than a chin.

  My leg healed fairly quickly, and by the end of a week I was able to put weight on it again. And after a few more days it hurt scarcely at all, though it stayed crooked, and I have hobbled ever since. Hobble is a nice word. It does what it says. I was never a sportive type, and I did not really mind being crippled. If anything, I felt it lent me a distinguished look. I would have liked to add a little cane and sunglasses. I have always felt close to the words panache and debonair. I would have liked to be able to grow a small black goatee.

  Jerry called me Chief for a while, which I did not much like, then he tried out Gustav and Ben, and finally settled on Ernie. The importance of being Ernest. Ernest Hemingway. Ernie. He gave me all the peanut butter and milk I wanted, and he offered me bits of toast for breakfast and anything he was having that he thought I might enjoy, like rice, which he cooked, or creamed corn, which he got out of a can. We found out rats don’t care for pickles.

  He was away a lot, sometimes in the day and sometimes at night, sometimes to the public library in Copley Square and sometimes to Flood’s Bar on the corner, but most of the time to places unknown. He always wore a dark blue suit when he went out. He had two suits just alike. He washed them himself in the sink and dried them on the fire escape or on the radiator, but he never ironed them. And he always wore a necktie, too, which he did not draw up tight. He never untied it—just slipped it on over his head and let it hang around his neck like a noose. He always looked as if he had just come off a binge, and if I had to summarize his appearance in a word it would be rumpled.

  When I was able to climb out of the Hotel and limp around the room, Jerry did not object. He was a terrible housekeeper, and he did not object to anything I did, even pulling the stuffing out of Stanley, which I enjoyed doing, and getting down inside the springs, though I never tested him by snooping in his personal things while he was around. Once back on my feet, I took advantage of his long absences to sniff out every inch of the place, starting with the bookcase. I have never been in any other person’s home, so I don’t know how many books are usually in one. After Pembroke Books, of course, almost any number would seem small. I guess Jerry had about two hundred. I was happy to see Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, though the Great Book was sadly missing—sadly, because I have never been able to recover the pages that Flo tore up and that I unwittingly ate. In addition to the books, the bottom shelf held a long row of notebooks of the kind Jerry did his writing in. Nosy as I normally am, I still did not feel it was right to snoop in these, though the temptation was awful. I did read his regular books, however—quite a number were new to me. I started at the bottom left and worked my way up, and it wasn’t long before he caught me at it.

  I had just discovered Terry Southern, and I had his novel Candy open on the floor. It was one of those glued paperbacks that are always trying to snap shut like clams, and I was holding it down with both forepaws. The story was very stimulating. I had gotten to the place where Candy is having sex with the dwarf, and I was so engrossed in it—seeing, as I could not fail to do, a certain similarity to my own situation—that I didn’t hear Jerry coming up the stairs until it was too late. The door must not have been latched, for suddenly there he was on the threshold, breathing heavily, a bag of groceries in one hand, still holding the room key in the other. He gave me a real start. For his part, he was so surprised he just stood there for a moment without moving, pointing his key at me like a pistol. Since I had, so to speak, been nabbed with the goods, I figured I now had little choice but to try and bluff my way through. So I just turned the page and went on reading. I expected him to be angry at me for dragging the book out onto the floor, but instead he thought it was terribly funny. When he got over his shock, he actually laughed aloud, something he did not do very often, throwing a whole lot of gravel on the roof. After that I did not hesitate to pull out a book whenever I was bored, open it on the floor, and read it through right there in front of him. I don’t think he ever caught on that I really was reading. I think he thought right up to the end that I was just pretending.

  Though a person might not guess it to look at him, Jerry was a very conscientious and parsimonious person when he was sober. He liked to fish old broken things out of the trash and fix them, toasters and record players and the like. Sometimes he could and sometimes he couldn’t. If he couldn’t, he would throw them back out, and if he could, he would jam them in with the rest of the stuff in the closet. He could spend half a day taking some contraption apart on the table, fussing around with pliers and screwdrivers and rolls of black tape, talking to himself the whole time—“Now that wire must go over here, that’s the thermostat, and that’s the spring catch, O.K., and it’s broken right there”—and then putting it all back together. His eyes were so bad he practically had to work with his nose against the table, and what with his bad eyes and his thick fingers he sometimes dropped some of the little parts on the floor. I loved it when he crawled around on all fours looking for them. He reminded me of a bear. I suppose I could have fetched them for him, but I never did. And it was funny too to see him bent over his work with his big walleye staring out to the side. He looked like a child caught doing something naughty. And then whenever he did manage to resuscitate some moribund gadget he was so happy he would bounce around the room chortling and chuckling to himself. Repairing the World: A Mechanic’s Struggle. Seeing him like that made me want to put the word radiance next to him. The happiness just flew off him and filled the room and I could take big breaths of it myself. After he had four or five of these things stacked in the closet and fixed up as good as new, he would load them all up in the red wagon and haul them off somewhere. I later learned he gave them away to people in the streets.

  One day about a month after I came to live with him, Jerry brought home a toy piano he had dug out of the trash. It was white and stood on three little legs and came with a little bench. It was in every way like a real piano except it did not have so many keys, and some of the ones it had did not work. They made no sound at all when he struck them, or only a dull unmusical thunk. After hammering out three or four of those thunks, he sat down at the Camel and took the whole thing apart. He fiddled with it and talked to it for ho
urs, and in the end he got most of the keys to work. Afterward he spent a couple of hours with it on his lap in the armchair, picking out tunes with two fingers, “Streets of Laredo” and “Swanee River.” Then he put it down on the floor and let me play with it. I loved that piano, and he knew it and never did give it away. I played mostly Cole Porter and Gershwin. And sitting on the bench, swaying to the music, I looked exactly like Fred Astaire, and I sang like him too. Sure, I know that this was true only from a certain perspective, and that all Jerry heard was a high ratlike squeak. But he loved it just the same. The first time I played and sang for him he laughed till tears ran down his cheeks. I would have preferred something other than laughter, but I did not really mind.

  Jerry was the first real writer I had ever known, and I have to confess that despite his kindness I was disappointed at first. As I have said, I was still very bourgeois, and his was not at all what I thought a real writer’s life should be like. For one thing, it was lonelier than I had ever imagined. Well, not lonelier than I had ever imagined, and not lonelier than I had experienced for myself, but it was lonelier than I thought real writers were. Only three times did anyone knock on our door during all the months we were together. I had always imagined that a real writer—and myself writing in my dreams—would spend a lot of time lounging about in cafés having witty conversations with scintillating people and that sometimes he would bring home a beautiful girl with long dark hair and then throw her out the next morning so he could get back to work—“Sorry, doll, I’ve got a book to write.” I imagined him locked in his room for days at a time, drinking quarts of whiskey from a Woolworth tumbler and pounding at his Underwood into the wee hours. He was never clean-shaven and never had a beard, always just a two-day stubble. A certain bitterness lurked in the corners of his mouth, and his sad eyes betrayed an ironic je ne sais quoi. Jerry remotely conformed only to the whiskey part. I didn’t know where he went when he left me at night, but he never brought home any interesting people. All he brought home were matchbooks from Flood’s Bar and Lounge two doors down. And he did not seem to have any friends, even boring ones. Unless, of course, you counted mere acquaintances like Shine and the people who knew him as a character on the street. Everybody in the neighborhood knew Jerry Magoon in that way. In that way he was almost famous.

  He did not spend a lot of time actually writing either, if writing means physically putting words on paper—an hour a day at most. When he did write in the physical way, he sat at the enamel-topped table, the same place he sat to eat and to fix things. It was always piled with stuff—papers, books, dirty dishes, clothing, an umbrella usually, and bits and pieces of things he was taking apart or putting back together—and he would push these aside to clear a space in which to write. He wrote with a pencil in school notebooks, the kind with black-and-white marbled covers and a white rectangle in the middle with lines for Name and Subject. The name on the one he was writing in the whole time I lived with him was The Last Big Deal. It did not have a subject.

  Jerry mumbled and hummed while he wrote. The hum was a high singsong and the mumble was just a mumble or maybe a drone. It sounded like someone saying prayers in a distant room—it carried an aura of meaning and yet it was impossible to make out a single word. He mumbled even when he was not sitting at the table writing. In fact, except when he was actually talking to someone in person, he mumbled all the time. I thought he was probably writing his books in his head the way I do. This was to me an encouraging thought, and it was around that time that I really got serious about my own writing.

  Sometimes Jerry did drink a little too much, and then when he came back home he would bang into the furniture getting into bed and fall asleep in his clothes. I would hear him get up in the night to take them off. He always got up in the night anyway to pee in the sink. And now and then he went on a real knockdown binge. These invariably came at the end of one of his blue periods—down periods that rolled around like clockwork—and they always seemed to do him a lot of good. I didn’t mind the drinking—why should I, after all, given my own history?—but I hated the blue periods. All his buried despair, all the sadness and hopelessness that you found in his books, would float to the surface of his life, bubble up into his eyes and cover his face like a veil. During those periods he just sat in the big leather chair and studied the wall, practically catatonic.

  He even stopped eating and, closer to home, stopped feeding me. That made me feel really apprehensive. And I felt useless too. As you have probably guessed by now, I am a pretty depressive character myself and know all about the seventeen kinds of despair, so even if I had been able to talk I could not have said anything that would have made him feel better. When someone is in despair and tells you how cold and unkind the world is and how much pointless suffering there is in life and how much loneliness, and you just happen to agree with him on every point, it puts you in an awkward position. These spells of his lasted a couple of days usually, and I never gave up trying to snap him out of them. I did all sorts of tricks to amuse him—sang, played boogie-woogie on the piano, pulled funny faces, did my epileptic rat act, everything that in better times would have called forth a pretty big guffaw—but he seemed never to notice. Then, regular as sunrise, after two or three days, he would suddenly get up from his chair, splash cold water on his face, put on his jacket and tie, and without a word walk out the door.

  These sudden exits terrified me at first. I thought he was probably going to look for a tall building or maybe a bridge over icy water. Sometimes I pretended I was Ginger and went out looking for him. I always found him before it was too late, usually in some wharf-district dive, sitting alone in a booth watching the ice melt in his whiskey. Timidly I would tug at his sleeve. “Come home, Jerry, please.” He would jerk his arm free and angrily turn away. “Please, Jerry, come back home. I need you.” And in the end I always managed to persuade him. I loved the way everybody in the bar looked at me and Jerry and felt sad for us. In reality, of course, I just sat home and worried. He would be gone for one night, maybe two, and then he would come back home again looking really terrible and fall into bed and sleep a long time. And when he woke up, he would be his old self again. Psychologically speaking, drunkenness is a lot more useful than people think.

  One morning a couple of days after I moved in, when I was still confined to the Hotel, I was startled awake by a huge commotion. Poking my nose over the edge of the box, I was surprised to see Jerry with his arms around the big leather armchair. Panting and grunting, he was struggling to shove it through the open window. I thought at first that he was throwing old Stanley out, and I expected a tremendous crash from below. But in fact he was just pushing the chair out onto the metal fire escape, and once it was there he climbed out after it, clutching a cup of coffee in one hand and a Life magazine in the other. On the cover it said “Survive Fallout.” It turned out he often sat out there in fine weather, reading the paper or napping. Sometimes he took his shirt off and sunbathed. He had a mat of gray curly hair on his chest that tapered down in a V to his navel, and on his left bicep he had a tattoo of a red rose with a scroll of pale blue writing beneath it, so faded you could not read it anymore. I think it said “forever,” though it might have been “clever” or “roll over.” He called the fire escape with the chair on it a balcony, just the way I had, but all you could see from his balcony was the backs of some buildings, the alley below, and a lot of very bent-up garbage cans. And the sky, of course. The city had stopped replacing the bulbs in the streetlights and one by one they had gone out until the neighborhood had grown so dark that we could sit out on the balcony at night and see the stars. They were my first stars. Like Jerry’s arm, they said “forever.”

  The armchair on the fire escape was also the cause of the first knock we got on the door. It was the fire people, a small man in a uniform and a big man in an open-collared white shirt. The big one had chest hair like Jerry’s except that his was black. He told Jerry that the armchair was blocking an emergency exit. He c
alled it a “safety hazard.” Jerry argued a while, saying that if there was a fire he could jump over the chair, did they want to see him jump over the chair? They did not, and they were angry that he was arguing, and they told him just to take the fucking chair off the fire escape. So Jerry went and wrestled the chair back in, grumbling and growling like a bear. Two days later he put the chair back out. It was what he called fighting the system.

  When my leg had finally healed I set about exploring in earnest, searching for an exit. Nice as it was, the room was still a kind of prison. And after a few weeks I had started to really miss the bookstore, the hum and bustle of a busy Saturday, even the frightening night journeys into the Square, but above all I missed the Rialto and the Lovelies. Jerry had a couple of issues of a magazine called Peep Show that I liked to look at, with color pictures of Lovelies almost naked, sometimes on all fours, sometimes not. They often had rugs to lie on, but it was not the same as in the movies.

  At first I thought there was no way out of the room, that escape would prove impossible. The crack under the door was too narrow, and though I probably could have gotten down the fire escape, I could never have climbed back up again, and I had no desire to leave for good. Of course I could have just dashed out one day when Jerry opened the door—even with my bad leg I was faster than he was—but that was not what I wanted. I didn’t want to turn on Jerry in that way. I just wanted to know that I could step out whenever I liked, to have that feeling of freedom. And besides, since I had already read all the books in the place at least twice, things could get pretty boring when Jerry was away, a lot of empty afternoons and lonely nights. I had learned from my reading that you can do really awful things when you are bored, things that are bound to make you miserable. In fact you do them in order to become miserable, so you won’t have to be bored anymore.