A Quietroom of One’s Own
East Five was the mirror image of East Six, with one big difference: it was uninhabited. Or so it looked on its steely face. O there were loonies there all right, maybe on the average loonier loons than any of the Bug Motels, but they were hidden behind locked doors most of the time, just like me. The rooms were quietrooms. No ping-pong balls flew.
Now that I had lost the society of the better-than-nothing Bug Motels, I noticed, sister Margaret, how cleanly you had deserted me. And for that blueblack-mustachioed horse trainer, yet!-Tod Novio, Boyfriend Death, the scary hustler with torn silk shirts and English boots, rugged neck and squeaky voice, face like a charming rake in a Classic Comic. I radioed you, for want of other conversation. Hey Margaret, here’s the latest: The lamebrain dreambox mechanics think I tried to off myself and now look where I am, in a quietroom on Semi-Suicidal Observation. Or is it Suicidal Semi-Observation? Either way the fun has gone out of this place, and where the hump are you when I need you Margaret, I radioed you via the radio crystal in my posterior nose bulb. Come get me get me get me outa here, forget that fuddy libertine and get me outa here Margaret. When the medications cart rolled by me and my keeper Gloria, I palmed a little pleated dixie cup with a green pill in it. The green pill I let bounce off across the floor, and back in my quietroom I tried to cry into my paper cup, no luck. Finally I spit and spit in it until it was full, and in the exact center of the padded floor I poured a slimy libation. Come to me come to me get me outa here. Margaret! You were always easy to radio-but now who knew? That fuddy racetrack tout had captured your tower.
Anyhow for me, for now, the dinky old school bus was over-o well it was summer anyway-and likewise I was missing the latest caper of the Bug Motels, which, I reflected sadly, was going to be its best ever. We were starting up a Rohring Rohring rock band with one hundred percent medical instruments, I mean we were about to execute the real, original mission of the Bug Motels-to play bughouse music. We weren’t going to dress in matching sequined uniforms, either, even supposing we could get em in this dump. Though of course we practiced kicking together like the Four Tops, we saw a band as a loose confederation of eternally solo flirters with dementia. In that, we were before our time. The first stage, already under way, was junking around the hospital for anything loose. Next we would whip up five sonorous contraptions of medical parts and work on our numbers, each one starring a different Bug Motel. Then one of these days we’d give a bughouse concert.
But a bughouse band never stays the same or it rots: now one Bug Motel was in the burn unit swathed head to foot in whatever miracle wrap they roll you in after you try to barbecue yourself. And another Bug Motel was on ice in a quietroom-stuck in Suicidal Semi-Observation. The Bug Motels still had their mastermind Bertie, and Dion, and O. But how far could they get without the Bogeywoman for muscle? or Emily loyal-to-the-death-by-starvation for guts?
So here I found myself and was it queer or what, to pace the exact same layout that was in a warped sort of way home to me, only deserted, as though every other member of the Bug Motels had died and gone to a worse place. For that’s what I did for exercise and pastime, whenever they let me-paced the green linoleum halls, past rows of green steel doors, day and night. I had a sort of itch: just keep moving it said and I did. At first I had to have a nurse’s aide with me all the time. Gloria dragged behind, grumbled about her feet, twisted her fingers in the back of my hospital gown and rode me like a hand puppet. She was short and slow, with the build of a sumo wrestler. “I ain’t took this job so I can wear my stems to stumps,” she panted, “hold up, ants-in-you-pants, this ain’t the infantry.” “I can walk by myself,” I told her, “what am I going to do? tear down the walls with my fingernails?”-because the halls were gleaming nude, no furniture, no pictures, no knobs rails hooks sticking out, no nothing. Even the nurses’ station was wrapped in chicken wire, the chicken wire in turn sealed up in (probably) bulletproof glass, everything slick as the glass mountain. “You mine your bidniss, I mine mine,” Gloria huffed and puffed and kept up with me as near as she could, or yanked me backwards when she couldn’t take it anymore.
Once she was beat she slumped against the wall, and then I could get stuff out of her, I mean about the other bugs hidden in quietrooms behind the green steel doors. Behind O’s door lived a soprano twenty years over the hill with petunia-colored spots of rouge on her baggy cheeks and a queenly arch to her baggy throat, which, I found out, she was trying her best to ruff with a noose. Since she was in O’s place I wanted to worship the ruins of beauty in her, surely her gorgeous air required a fan, but on the few occasions we passed in the corridor, she with her keeper, I with mine, she pretended to speak no English, though Gloria told me she was born in Ellicott City.
Dion’s place was filled by a genuine mountain man from Sumpm Sumpm Gap in Allegany County. Mr. Woofter was as dark red, shriveled and dried out as venison jerky, and the one time he managed to speak to me he whispered only “Silky draws? silky draws?” and showed me an evenly corrugated one-dollar bill that must have been pried out of a very small space-a rotten tooth maybe (he had plenty of those). I think he was trying to buy my underpants, but of course I owned nothing but Camp Chunkagunk white cotton at the time, and in my quietroom I had lost track even of those. Here on East Five it was hospital gowns for everybody, even the diva, though somehow she got the rouge pot too. A salesman type with the shakes, wildly boisterous when not weeping, lived in Bertie’s old room. And in Emily’s was-nothing, no one, just emptiness and shade and a pearly sheen on the padded walls from one high small window.
I paced. “Let’s face it you cramp my style,” I sneered mildly to Gloria over my shoulder, “this is cruel and unusual punishment not to let me go by myself, godzilla knows you can watch my every move from the nurses’ station.” “Maybe you right, maybe it is being cruel-to animals,” Gloria agreed, “cause I hear yall animals push that little bitty Emily down the laundry chute. And then she have to burn herself.” “How is Emily?” I asked, even more mildly. Mildness was my new strategy for getting outa here, but Gloria was too obtuse to notice. She didn’t answer about Emily. “I let you go, next thing I know you sawing away on that arm like a turkey drumstick,” she said. “Ya mean with my teeth?” I argued back, “so what if I did? How far would I get before you were out here whaling on me? Not even an hors d’œuvre…”
Finally I wore her down and not a moment too soon, by now I itched so bad I was galloping, my hospital gown billowing out in back of me like a parachute on a jet plane. Gloria roosted massively on a high stool in the nurses’ station, folded her liver-wurst arms and never took her eyes off me. No way I could inveigle a hand under my gown to scratch the pubic triangle under these conditions. At first I had thought nothing of the itch, it seemed I’d always had it, mildly, subterraneously, a faint munching at the roots in the front yard, itch scratch itch. And it still seemed like I’d always had it, but now it was the starving central fact of a life, the little place marked x for the nail that nailed you, the tooth that gnawed you, the hunger that ate you, the itchy spot that souled everything alive. But if that were so, if I’d always had it, then how had I ever managed to stay in one place for five whole minutes? Now I galloped, up and down, up and down. Gloria squinted at me suspiciously through the glass. Dinner came, did I want it in my quietroom? No thank you, I slapped the slop on the white bread and galloped on, bolting down great half-moons.
But finally Gloria’s shift was done. I never thought I’d be sorry to see her linebacker’s shoulders sway off down the hall until the night nurse, Miss Kniffin, led me to my quietroom, took away my gown and whanged the steel door home behind me. Wait don’t leave me! Just lemme (Blam. Clank-the outer door guard. Then nothing.) Not that I couldn’t pace in my quietroom, that was one good thing about emptiness, you could pace it off, round and round and round the padded hole. But now I had to face it, live alone with it, stark naked. I did have a social disease, I mean my coochie was not itself, could not be itself although it appeared to be itself, in fact looked exactly like its usual hideous self, scraggy black hair pasted to white skin like swamp grass sucked tight against a clay bank when the water drops.
I threw myself on the soft floor, peered into that darkness between my thighs and everything looked the same in the bad light, no there was some kind of brown trash down there where the whips of hair rooted in skin, I scratched at it with the bitty edge I had left of one fingernail and managed to pry some off and hold it up to the gray twilight-good godzilla! it walked across my fingertip. I saw, just barely, its lacy nippers waving. Crab was no figure of ayrabber speech, then, these were crustaceans of some microscopic universe whose entire Chesapeake shore could fit between my legs. I scrambled to my feet and paced even more wildly, for the yellowed old padding I was lying on looked a lot like the ancient mattress in the ayrabbers’ stall. I had to get rid of these bugs before I infested this place, if I hadn’t already-I couldn’t lie down-no one could know-lemme die first. But what was the cure for crabs if you couldn’t tell a doctor? And even supposing you could find a doc who wouldn’t rat on you to your dreambox adjustor, how were you to collar this expert unless they let you out of here?
I made a wild leap for the quietroom window. It was five feet above the spot where I bounced off the wall, and probably too small for my head, even if I could hold on tight enough to butt a hole in the glass. Still it felt good to bounce off the wall and I did it again, and again. Satisfying noise of my little pieces rearranging themselves, like a sack of potatoes thrown down from a barn loft. Then suddenly I found myself dangling from the padding three feet up-how was I doing this? It must be that superhuman strength of mental patients you hear about: I was four feet up, then five-godzilla knew what my toes and fingers were sticking to, but somehow I stayed up. And six and nine and finally I squinted through the woozy glass.
Seventy feet down, at the bottom of so many fathoms of clear black jelly, streetlights came on like burning heads of hair, and at their feet, the tops of cars bulged silently in and out of view. The ayrabbers’ barn doors were still open; under the jelly of night the hole behind them was lit up like a palace. I pressed my forehead to the cool glass-Lemme outa here I screamed-reared back a little, getting ready to butt it. The door opened behind me and I let go.
“Ow… ow…” Naked and flat on my back. “You are hurt?” “Cheese… what gives you that idea?” “You fall.” “Hump no, I jumped.” “How you get up there? What you are holding on?” That voice dried and cured in the smoke of five hundred thousand Gypsygirl cigarettes was at last a little impressed. “It’s that old, ouch, superhuman strength of the mental patient,” I croaked, and rolled back my head until I could see as far as the door. Could it really be madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse? It was. “What are you doing here!” I growled. Because of the crabs I wasn’t even glad to see her. Thank godzilla there was no more light than the undersea glow from the green linoleum corridor, all the same I bunched myself in a sitting position, pulled my infested thighs discreetly together, threw an arm across my nuzzies. Sumpm hit me softly in the shoulder. A hospital gown. I got up and tied it on. “How come you’re here at night?” I mumbled rudely, not even caring anymore that she never answered a question from a mental peon-and then to my amazement she replied: “I like night duty. I’m not so crazy for sleep like some people. I like to watch sun come up. For a week, maybe two, I will do it…” I hardly dared read the message I could see so clearly between her words, but there it was: Because you are here, Miss Bogeywoman. She’s here because of me. Of me!
“So,” said Doctor Zuk. “Maybe you would like a little to talk?” “Sure,” I said uneasily. I must say the whole thing struck me as highly irregular. Yes there was that furtive conservatism of the mental patient setting in, and then I was in a rotten mood on account of that itch, that itch at the x spot sucking everything down to its level. To think that just last week I’d thrown myself at her feet for this chance, kissed her imaginary ankles, and she’d kicked me into the imaginary gutter. Next she had betrayed me to the fuddies, landed me in a quietroom, I’ll never speak to that Zuk hag again I’d been thinking. And now here she was, inviting me-to talk!
“Could we, er, walk and talk?” I proposed, “I got this restlessness.” “Ach, choleria, in these shoes?” She pointed at her silver sandals. She wore no nylons under her dress. It was the middle of summer but this seemed raw to me, even nasty. I stared at the erosion cracks along her heels. There too she looked her age, as old as the hills and crags. “O all right,” I mumbled, and followed her down the hall. We ended up in a converted broom closet where nurse’s aides sometimes played cards. It was the usual Rohring Rohring hole in the wall, cracked plaster, exposed pipes, distant guts gurgling, roaches traversing the woodwork. She twisted a key in the lock behind us and we were alone. The first thing she did was toss her key ring on the rickety tabletop in a heap. When her knee touched it, the table tilted down two inches on its gimpy legs and the keys slid to one edge. I pulled my chair closer. I tried to keep my shifty eyes off those keys. One hand pressed my itchy crotch, hard.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
“So, er, uh, any hope of getting back to East Six? Lemme outa here! I been Quiet long enough,” I blurted, like a common ordinary mental patient. She tilted her spiky head and shrugged. “Why you are telling me this? Don’t get funny idea like I am your dreambox mechanic. You want something? Be grown-up woman. Talk to Dr. Feuffer.” “You kept me busy for the fuddies,” I accused. She smiled a little, as at a charming memory. “Ach, you have beg for it. And your face! How you like it when that iron door gets shut the first time, BOOMS! However, like people say in country where I come from, God he fastens one gate and opens a thousand. Perhaps there is open gate someplace and you don’t see?”
“I might have to push one open with that superhuman strength of the mental patient,” I grumbled. “Is all for your education, my dear,” she said blandly, “you are talented person, a thousand gates, where is the sport? For you, God closes a thousand gates and opens one.”
I was in no mood for the inscrutable god of the East. I eyeballed her keys. I was thinking how most of the people who ever lived probably itched like mad at their x. I wondered if that made it easier to die-a half million soldiers scratching away all night in the trenches, never any peace, or latrine detail in some prison camp, ten females shaved to their skulls, shoveling shit and still scratching. “God doesn’t even know I’m in this bughouse,” I said. “He’s still tryna find the six million Jews he lost, and the one million Gypsies and the five million Poles and the fifteen million Russkis, what does he care about one mental peon in a dump like this…”
Funny how all that itching and death composed me as good as any little red or blue pill. I almost smiled, but Zuk didn’t smile. She was staring at the tabletop, her face hard. I was scared I had bumbled over some line, I mean who knew what she was-a Jew, a Gypsy, a Pole or a Russki, she looked like all of em mixed up together. But then I saw what she was seeing. Never mind the corpses at Auschwitz, she was waiting to see if I’d grab those keys, maybe even-hoping? Possibly… even… suggesting? Finally she got bored, leaned back in her chair, folded her arms and looked me in the eye.
“What you are doing in this hospital, Miss Bogeywoman?” she asked. “You are not so crazy. You know in old country where I come from people don’t run so fast to psychiatrist. Somebody think she has djinn in head, somebody say she is Fatima bride of Mohammed, then maybe yes. Why are you here?” “Whaddaya mean?” I said, feeling my citizenship called in question, “I’m not just in the bughouse, I’m in the bughouse bughouse. And I don’t have a key either, well, now I do,” I added, suddenly plunging a finger through the O of her keyring. Five matching silver keys marked DO NOT DUPLICATE. I played them like a castanet. “Somebody thinks I’m buggy,” I said.
She made no move to snatch them back but pressed her ugly fingertips together. “With you, Miss Bogeywoman, is all game. Is funny hunger for craziness, itch for crazy,” she said, and I almost fainted-dropped her keys and snatched them up again-Charlie Chan gong in the nervous system, the shock of being found out. But then I saw I wasn’t found out. This was accidental telepathy out of the hot-wired air. She knew not what she said. “Don’t worry, I tell no one. You are crazy like hare in March, like weasel in henhouse maybe. You want to be crazy. Is some kind mating dance with you.”
What cheek! “Ahem, more like an anti-mating dance,” I replied truthfully, but she ploughed ahead. “You work at crazy. You are artist of crazy. It comes natural for you but you are not damage by this like the others. I think you are fanfaron of crazy, actor of comedy of crazy, and most of all you do not like if they send you away from here. You like this ugly hotel.”
“I hate this place.” I jangled her keys in her face. “Where else you would go?” she mocked. I said nothing. “Hah! you see? You are stuck. Stuck.” “That’s what you think.” I jumped to my feet, so my chair sorta fell over behind me (it didn’t have room to fall all the way down in this hole), and stumbled to the door, where I kneaded tremulously through the ring for the master key. “What! this is not funny joke, Miss Bogey…” “I guess you know you’ll have to stay here awhile,” I panted, “sorry about that part…” “What! Return me those keys immed-ach-choleria-” She was kicking at my collapsed chair with her soccer player’s legs and silver sandals. Maybe she had not been inviting me to leave as unequivocally as I thought, her mouth was a ragged O and when she finally got by the chair she snatched at the handful of keys but too late, they were already through the crack in the door and I was halfway through behind them. “There was only one gate… sorry…” I explained as I tugged the door closed. She was tugging on her side but that’s where my Bogeywoman strength has always been, in pulling things toward me. “How far you think you get in big city in this thing?” she cried, giving up on the keys and grabbing for one floppy tail of my hospital gown; it ripped and left a big Pepto-Bismol pink flap of itself in the door lock. Which nevertheless turned with a chunk once I got Doctor Zuk’s key in. “Sorry,” I whispered through the keyhole. You’d think she’d be hollering. But I didn’t hear a thing.
By now it must have been midnight and I had a sense of flying down half-lit halls and up the stairs in my half of a hospital gown, barefoot, with a handful of magic keys. In the stairwell I heard rubber soles slapping the stone steps below me, but I clung to the wall and waited and soon they sank away. On the landing, an elevator flew by, pinging. I saw a white face in its square window. I fell to my knees and touched, just touched, the bottom of the ward door to East Six. On the oiliest, most lubricious of hinges it swung open without a squeak. Even in the middle of the night they didn’t lock the thing! Just as I always suspected, any nut could break into this rotten bughouse, even easier than any bugbrain could break out.
On my hands and knees I went by the green-glowing nurses’ station. Down the hall, into O’s room. Crawled by the delicate escarpment of O under white sheeting, snowfield from elbow to hipbone, arm flung over her eyes and, dangling down to the floor beside me, the golden climber’s rope of her hair. Crawled into her bathroom. Pulled the door to.
No locks on these temples of offing yourself of course, with their bloody bathtubs, noosy towel racks and ghostly cabinets of pills. Wedged two Creepy Comix from the back of the toilet under the door. Squeezed on the light to see, since O’s makeup case was the size of a doctor’s bag and stuffed to its froggy hinges. Pawed blind through the tubes and bottles, quarter pound of bobby pins on the bottom, dimes nickels quarters, bottle caps, two bullets of different calibers, tornado-shaped shard of mirror, cannabis-smeared pipecleaner, some scary gadget that looked like a corkscrew but wasn’t and at last, it, the tweezer, two little silver bowlegs encircled with golden garters. I climbed into the gleaming bathtub and went to work.
It took hardly any time at all to open up a little bald spot, but from there on out it was rotten sameness, progress invisible, would it ever end? One by one, out they came, the hairs and the doomed crustaceans at the root of them, and finally they all lay in one big thin eyebrow around the drain at the far end of the tub, to be washed down at the end in one loud burst when I soaped and scrubbed and made my getaway. I had to keep my tracker’s eye on them of course, who knew if the crabs couldn’t smell me, a kind of mother to them, and come trooping back to me over the porcelain? And the longer I looked, the more the skimpy fringe around the drain looked like writing, a sentence in the round, a motto in some kind of letters I couldn’t understand. What could they have to say to me? I eyeballed the secret message around the drain and by and by it was like those crackles in the closet walls of Rohring Rohring where the queen of spades, or Margaret Meat or Karen Honey or Mahalia Chicken or Ruth Beandip, put in their appearances. Or any other dame I wished to summon, so long as she was grande. Suddenly I got this oracle: SHE IS A LEVIATHAN, EVEN HER KISS IS LIKE A HOUSE FELL ON ME. I blinked in the white light.
I was almost done. I mean I was only seventeen, maybe I wasn’t the grizzled she-gorilla I thought I was. By now where black hairs once grew there was only a rather raw pink heart, faintly perforated with tiny red dots. And inside it, that crack I hadn’t seen since I was twelve. Did it hurt? Did and didn’t. Of all pains, after all, the most agreeable is to pluck out a part of the body that offends, thus millions dine on cuticles and fingernails and a Haitian lady on West Four, one Mrs. Yib, had landed in Rohring Rohring after polishing off her own chignon, a whole bowlful, with a fork and Thousand Island dressing. Bored parrots sometimes beak out their green-and-gold breasts feather by feather, and if you aren’t getting any, it must be tempting to hold the starving member to anything that whirls, even a whetstone. Anyhow the more the V between my thighs puffed and pinked, the goner the vermin seemed, and I was almost happy. I eyed the ring around the drain. It said Who knows? She who eats, knows not, but she who plucks the chicken, knows.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
I began to think I might make it back to East Five in time to let out Doctor Zuk before she yelled for help. No sign of a Code Green yet, no little bells pinging and elevators whirring and rubber shoes slapping, though maybe they handled these crises differently in the middle of the night, maybe they were less eager to wake up the tamely snoring mental peons than to give them nightmares in broad day with technicians in beekeeper’s hats thundering by the ward doors. Anyhow there’d been none of those yet, and now that I was cured I imagined getting back to East Five, and me and madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse sitting down to talk. Yes, I was clean as a whistle and ready for philosophy. No one would ever know.
Standing clear I stuffed the hairs in the drain and opened the HOT faucet for one short blast, and was answered by one of those serenades for bass ophicleide the old plumbing was prone to. At such times, the pipes boomed like Judgment Day clear down to Pathology, so that all the stiffs banged their foreheads trying to sit up in their refrigerator drawers. I screwed the HOT faucet off again, but too late. Creepy Comix noodged scratchily along the floor, the door creaked open. There stood O, blinking through her Mary Hartline hair. Those long platinum strands were all she was wearing. She gazed sleepily at my nakedness and suddenly said, “Coooool.” Slowly I understood what she was admiring. The tweezer was still in my fingers.
“Let’s do me too,” she yawned. “Why?” “It looks so mean and nasty.” “Yours won’t look mean and nasty. You gotta be ugly at the bottom for that.” “I don’t care. I wanna see my crack.” Reluctantly, I held out the tweezer to her. “No, you do it,” she said coyly, “I’m chicken.” What was I supposed to say to her?-I have an appointment? “I gotta go,” I said. “Hey, whatcha doing in my bathroom?” she finally woke up and remembered to ask, “ain’t you down on East Five? stuck in a quietroom?” “I ran away,” I said, “that’s why I gotta get back. Before they see I’m gone.” “You escaped and you’re going back? Are you nuts or sumpm?” “I, er, uh, try to be,” I mumbled, thinking of Doctor Zuk. Zuk! Panic tightened on my forehead like plaster. I had left her locked in a broom closet on East Five. I had to get back to her right now.
“What kinda checks you on?” O asked. “Fifteen-minute but mostly they don’t come till twenty.” “Then you’re too late already, it don’t matter, stay with me.” “No I’m not, if I leave right now.” “First pluck me.” “It takes too long and anyhow you don’t need it. Yours is… really really… okay the way it is.” And it was. I dared to look straight at it-an escutcheon of pinkish rosettes, as dainty as the Girl Scout badge for venery. But O was mad. Her eyes pinched to slits and she angrily plunked herself on the toilet seat, folded her arms and peed. The pee boiled in the bowl. Her cotton candy hair vined in and out of her arms. She glared at me. “Who ya going with? Down there on East Five?” “Huh? Nobody. I’m stuck in a quietroom for godzillas sake.” “Who else is there?” “No one. Some old bag opera singer’s in the room under your room, I don’t even know her name.” “You love her, ain’t it, you cheatin jew bulldyke,” she spooky-fluted, sitting all cramped together on the throne like some Old Witch Anti-Birth. “I only even noticed her cause she was in your room,” I said. She softened slightly but softness made her even scarier, squeezed her spooky-flute down to a snaky hiss. Her eyes glowed at the bottom of gratings that were half-erasures of their usual blacking. In a way she had never looked so beautiful. “What’d you come here for?” she wanted to know and I could hardly say To borrow your tweezer, now could I? “I was gonna surprise you,” I mumbled.
She got up and turned to flush the pot and when she turned back around, to my amazement she was wreathed in smiles as well as hair. She draped her long black fingernails about my neck, she could do that of course since I was still standing in the bathtub and therefore half a foot off the floor, otherwise I’d have been no taller than she was-and looked up into my face at its ersatz fuddy altitude and kissed me. “You did,” she said. “So, er, uh, do you like me with a bald coochie like five years old?” She stepped back a little and gazed. “Wooo,” she said. What did that mean? She patted the edge of the bathtub, hinting I should stand up there to get a look at myself (legless, headless) in the mirror over the sink. I climbed up. Well it was terrible, and nuttin like five years old. The halves of the knoll of coochie fit together swollenly, like lips that had been punched, and that once preverbal slit looked deep and dangerous, ready to curse, or spit. “Cheese,” I said, and shuddered. “Now do me,” she commanded.
I got down on my knees, tweezer shaking between my fingers, but she pulled me back up. Led me to her bed and spread herself out on the edge of it, with one bare foot on the floor. I began. I began with a sense of ruin, of pulling apart some secret of nature like a birdsnest that no human could build or rebuild, but soon I got into it, nibbling my tweezer along the border, making the shield perfectly symmetrical, dexter like sinister, the raw cooked. All the same my hand shook. It was her coochie after all. I tried not to look at the curtained, bubblegum-pink tunnel at the center of it. Neatly I heaped the questionmarky hairs to one side on the hospital sheet. Stepped back to view my work. “It looks like a perfect little keyhole-sumpm from a lady’s writing desk. Lemme leave it like that.” “No, all of it.” “I’m the artiste in this salon and I refuse.” “Sufferin cheeses.” She scrambled up on the side of the bathtub, craned her neck at herself and sniffed: “Take the rest.” And she rearranged herself on the bed.
But now when I knelt to the work I saw a sort of candle glint in the pink tumblers and before I could think she pressed my hand against the wetness there. Somehow I got rid of the tweezer and finally, finally, sank a finger into the dark center of some beauty, felt along the satin muscle banks to her blind end and felt her burst around me. Implode, shudder, dissolve. Her skinny arms flew around my neck and wrenched me to her nuzzies but when I opened my mouth to taste them, she shoved me mightily away. “I ain’t no bull dagger,” she panted, and at last I deduced what this must mean. “I know,” I politicly replied. I rolled away from her, closed my eyes, only now the darkness organized itself around the wet pink jewel of
“Finish me,” she whispered in my ear. She was pressing the tweezer into my fingers but I made a fist against it. “Don’t wanna,” I said, staring into the black, half expecting one of her knives in the gut. “Come on,” she spooky-fluted. “Don’t wanna and anyhow you don’t need it. You’re too pretty down there already.” “Pretty? Cheeses.” To my surprise her hand folded around my hand. Her thumb made lazy circles on my palm. I felt the quick length of her against me, soft swellings and concavities, fluted bones. “I got a joke for you,” she breathed in my ear. “This guy’s walking down the avenue, right? Joe. On the corner he runs into his old friend. Joe, what’s wrong, you look awful. I do? Well I feel good, Joe says, and he keeps going and sees this other old friend. Are you sick, Joe, the other friend says, cheese, you look bad! Well I feel good, Joe says, and walks on and soon he comes across his third old friend. Joe, what happened to you, this one says, you look terrible. But I feel good, says Joe, and he decides he better see a doctor. Doc examines him and shakes his head and says, I don’t know, Joe, I never seen a case like this. He opens this big black book and runs his finger down the column, Hmmm, looks good and feels good, that’s not you, Joe. Looks terrible, feels terrible, that’s not you either. Wait a minute, here it is, looks terrible and feels good. Say, Joe, you’re a vagina!” We snickered, helplessly.
The city glowed at the window bars and its glow pooled on the bed. I dared to look in O’s face. She was unearthly beautiful in that light. She was crude and bloodthirsty, and under her icy billows of hair and fake calm she had turned out to be one of those menstrual fantod types strung tight as a toy violin, but I kind of loved her. “Guess who told me,” she whispered. “Reggie.” “How’d you know?” “Who else?” We laughed into each other’s hair. “I can’t figure out if the Regicide likes girls or hates girls,” I said. O sighed. “What’s the difference? He’s the best we got in here, I mean think of the dreambox mechanics, what a buncha nuttins.”
I did. I sat up like one of those stiffs in their refrigerator drawers, bonk. “I gotta go,” I said. “You better not leave me now,” O spooky-fluted, sinking her black nails into my hand. “I gotta. I told you.” “How come,” she said, “for who?” She peered at me and I bit down hard to heat up the fat between my ears, tried to fry away Zuk, knowing O could see right through my headbone when she got in this state. “For who?” “I gotta get off East Five,” I said, “I’m going buggy up there.” That much was the truth. “I gotta make em think I’m getting better.” “Sufferin cheeses, you left more’n an hour ago. Don’t you think they found out by now? They’ll throw you in leg irons or sumpm.” “I gotta go.” “Don’t go,” she sing-sang warningly, “you can hide in my closet.” “I gotta.” I stood on my feet. “You two-timing jew oink, I hate you.” At this I lifted her up by her skinny shoulders and shook her a bit, so that her dark nuzzies trembled. Now that we knew each other down to our coneyholes, I wasn’t going to stand for this kind of talk. “You can call me Jew if you want, that’s not even a cuss word ya know, but if you call me a this jew or a that jew anymore I’ll punch you right in your popey nose. It’s not ladylike.”
Naturally I wouldn’t have done anything to her unless completely necessary, but I was way stronger than she was and people from her side of town understand that kind of thing. She lay there blinking up at me and I took the opportunity to run. On my way I snatched a fuzzy robe from the hook on her bathroom door. I knew that first she would puzzle on that queer pheenom, a Hebrew toughgirl, and next she would come looking for me, maybe throwing knives and maybe not.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
No I did not forget the keys and a very good thing I didn’t. By now the ward doors on East Six and East Five were locked inside and out, and this change of policy, which had rolled over in a single midnight hour, was not a good sign. They had found me out. They were upping the security in my wake. Outside East Five I hunched down below the little porthole, thumbed through the keys and tried them one after the other. Finally a key worked and there I was, back on that gleaming green hall of glassed-in chicken wire and locked steel doors.
Only the broom closet was slightly ajar. I peered into its darkness. No one. Nothing. Crawled by the nurse’s station to my quietroom, unlocked it and left it open just a crack. Hands and knees back to the broom closet, set the lock to lock, and lost the keys and fuzzy robe inside. Then back to my quietroom. Took a deep breath. Okay, I was a grown-up woman, starting right now. It wasn’t going to be easy to shut myself into that void stark naked, without even the diversion of an itch, but then I saw a little white thing flickering from the exact center of the padded floor. There on the x spot of libations was a torn-off corner of paper. I ran to it in time to see it had a phone number written on it. Then the door closed.