The Dissertation, page 15
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
Next he became a beggar. Work, after all, always confers some dignity no matter what the task. Granted, during those years thousands of more enterprising men than León panhandled too, but León neither looked for work nor would have taken it if it were offered. He didn’t even work at begging, which, as a performing art, might have enjoined his talents. He did not, for example, wait by the traffic light in Union Square or trudge the inching lines of cars on Second Avenue to wipe the sleet from windshields—a performance which dirties the glass but makes the driver feel both warm and prosperous. He lacked the English for sad tales of woe, but it is clear he’d not have told them if he could have, since he neglected to put on such mimings-out of loneliness and famine as might have touched a tender-hearted housewife. Nor did he wield his ugliness to give the squeamish chills, to fright a coin from that paunched, velvet-collared advocate by conjuring forth the fellow’s dread of revolution, to nauseate (by an adroit manipulation of his stink) a bill from one of those two window-shopping dowagers, short-sellers’ widows, maybe, in their Persian lamb coats, their snug fur hats and muffs, or the beneficiaries of a pair of broking partners, richly-insured reliable bread-winners who, having tossed their own and all their customers’ money in the bear market’s maw, had tossed themselves off the Singer Building five years back. León would play no roles—and not because of pride either. He simply didn’t give himself the trouble. He shambled the avenues and sat in vacant doorways with a meek cupped palm, and if a nickel dropped, he clutched.
He was dependent, therefore, on such poorly compensated patrons60 as could make their own diversions from him: on Mrs. Esther Tunafish of 219 Amboy Street, Brooklyn, who was about to treat her son Larry, aged eight years, to a movie at the Roxy when the latter commented on how “dat bum deah” wore the Daily Forward as a muffler and who, mistaking León for a fellow yid, dropped him a dime; on Finnegan, the novelist and storywright, gloomed at that time in the dead waste and middle of his soul’s dark night, who was writing little and selling less, suffering much and drinking more, who was just back from his disastrous trip to Norway and about to leave on his disastrous pilgrimage to Hollywood, and who, as he emerged from luncheon at the Plaza (supported by his publisher, Mr. George Jaggers, and by his literary agent, a Mr. Cannon), spied León slumped against the famous fountain—famed in good part by one of Finnegan’s own legendary revels—and, feeling much better at the sight of one worse off than he, crossed the square under his own power, split a crisp five from the hundred dollars Jaggers had just loaned him, and pressed it in León’s paw; on the Honourable Miss Diana-Anne Withers and Mr. Richard Abrhams-Hoof, both British subjects (she was on tour with Mother, he enrolled at Berkeley), both nineteen years old, both terribly in love (Richard with Anne and with his own emotions, Anne with her own emotions, with her fiancé in England, and with Richard too), who had met first in San Francisco, then shortly afterward in Sacramento (Richard had glimpsed a page of Lady Withers’s Thomas Cook itinerary), then in Los Angeles (Anne had let drop the name of their hotel), and, finally, here in New York (with unsuspecting Lady Withers embarked for home on the Queen Mary and Anne permitted to stay on a week “alone”), who, being booked (in separate bedrooms) at the Dorset, had semiconsummated their romance in an Eden of dry humping, and who, both sad yet both a bit relieved to have come through unscathed, spent their last twilight in a stroll along Central Park South, until, breaking from an embrace, they were confronted by a ragged, pestilential beggarman shuffling sideways with his left palm cupped, his right arm drooped, his rheumed eyes pulled to slits, and thereby blessed with such a firm presentiment of death, and decay that they at once dumped to him all their change and then dashed back to their hotel, stripped themselves naked, and made forthright, procreative love all the night long; on Beulah Jane Nell Dosby, chocolate-skinned granddaughter of household slaves, who had lost her (common-law) husband to the First World War and her baby to the 1919 influenza epidemic, who since then had earned her keep mothering other people’s children, and who, when her Tuesday-night-off companion Jimmy Blue kicked León savagely out of the servants’ entrance of the town house where Beulah worked, hollering, “Get out my way, white trash!” felt her forever-close-to-hand maternal instinct roused, cussed Jimmy for a “mean nigger if there ever was one,” and gave León a quarter; on Mr. Barney Ross, Welter Weight Boxing Champion of the World, who was helping a brace of Harlow-style platinum blondes out of a cab in front of the Stork Club when he saw León stumble by, received a futuregram, wordless but woeful clear, to the effect that he, B. Ross, would soon be on the skids himself, and ordered his manager, who was paying the taxi tab, to “Give the bum a buck”; and, of course, on many others.
Then he gave up begging, which, after all, brought in some little money no matter how desultorily he practiced it. He ceased to venture from the Bowery—trash-heap of garbaged lives on which the after-images of used-up men scuttle like phantom rodents. No begging there—well, no professional begging. A passer-by might sometimes spare a dime, but passers-by were few while bums abounded, and León never saw another fin again to buy him a full month of sheltered flop. He slept outdoors, in pawnshop entrance ways, under the dinged marquees of closed-down burlesque theaters, against tenement walls, beside crate fires built in empty lots. He wore newsprint underwear beneath his now-disintegrating clothes and over them a 1918 U.S. Army blanket which he’d peeled from a dead bum. He groped his grub out of the offal pails of unswept hash houses and was, both to himself and to any observer, just another lump of refuse, a well-squeezed orange rind in which the counterman has ground his cigarette, or the end product of a Bleeker Street abortion swaddled up oozy in the Evening Sun and tucked in someone’s ashcan.
Though cold and inanition numbed his brain, here and there—beneath the spark-fretted firmament of the Third Avenue el, in the vast antres under Brooklyn Bridge—he yet recalled a León who had battled hostile circumstance and won, provided for himself, protected others; as well as other Leóns later on who’d been lauded and loved. But those identities seemed giant’s robes for such a dwarf as he was in his spirit. León, garbage, fitted much better. Despite his compost of encrusted filth, the wheeze of phlegm-choked lungs, the feeble, agued twitch of his bent shoulders, now and then—as, for example, when a burly bum elbowed him cringing from a spot beside a fire, or the night when he lay too weak to move under the pelting of a pitiless storm—he could remember when his body bad been healthy, clean, and strong. But since his soul was sick, wasted and soiled, pest-ridden, vermin-swarmed, infected, illness and frozen slime became him more. As death would perfectly. Death by starvation. Death by cold. Death by disease. Or death by violence—yes! Killed for his greasy blanket. Stuffed down a manhole, Drowned in a sewer.
He would have died, no doubt, except he had an accident. One midnight he lurched off the Bowery sidewalk after what looked to him like a stray dime (and was in fact a lamp-gleamed gob of spittle), into a passing car. Now, it happened that this car—a twin-six Packard limousine with swooping swan radiator cap and fender-mounted spare wheels—was piloted by one Seamus Grodiham, pre-Great War racing colleague of E. Rickenbacker’s, Western Front ambulance driver, now private chauffeur, who knew the perils of the Bowery route to the Manhattan Bridge and was proceeding with great caution, and who had the wit and self-control not to stomp on the brake when he saw León lunge out toward the slushy street but rather nudged the Packard’s flank against the forged steel stanchion of the elevated railway, doing a frightful deal of noisy scraping to the car but cutting its speed. This car, furthermore, chanced to be owned and occupied by Dr. Felix Heilanstalt 61 one of the great surgeons of his time and the most arrogant, a man who believed in neither God nor Satan, who, acknowledging no agency higher than his own skill, could never be resigned to losing patients no matter what smashed-up, run-down, or otherwise unhappy shape he found them in, and who, besides his wealth and culture, had enough New York savvy to have made many unbilled attentions to the police. Thus the impact and injury to León were less violent than they might have been. Thus, scarcely had he cannoned through the air, bounced on the pavement, slid, and come to rest against the curb, when he was in the care of a brilliant practitioner, who not only ministered first aid and diagnosed a wealth of trouble beyond shock and broken bones and a concussion, but who actually looked forward with great joy not to saving a clearly worthless life but, as a point of pride, to curing a tough case. And thus, also, León was not afflicted with the kind of bureaucratic bumf that has killed healthier victims of less serious accidents, for when a cop who’d heard the noise steamed up, looked from the Packard to its grubby victim, decided (rightly, but for wrong reasons) it was the dumb bum’s fault, touched his cap to minked and sobbing Mrs. Heilanstalt, growled at the clutch of derelicts bunched in the headlamps’ stare, mushed to where Dr. Heilanstalt knelt tuxedo-trousered in the gutter bandaging León’s head with his silk scarf, tapped him upon the shoulder, and reached ponderously for pencil and notebook, the doctor had but to flash his wallet with the miniature gold badges—gifts of commissioners and precinct captains—pinned inside, and all red tape was sliced.
The cop chugged for his corner call box. The doctor asked his wife to move up front. He and his chauffeur bundled León in the velvet car robe and bore him gingerly into the Packard’s stern. Doors slammed. The V-12 engine roared. From off away on Centre Street came the siren wail of the police motorcycle escort which was to meet the doctor on Manhattan Bridge. The Packard churned ahead, its fantail slewing, its right rear wheel flinging a curtain of grey glop on an abandoned pair of fur-lined pigskin gloves, toward which the derelicts converged in feeble scrum and which, after much vaporpanted cursing and some swaying motions more like dance than battle, emerged divorced and departed, one uptown, its ex west along Prince Street, on the hands of different bums.
Five months later León Fuertes emerged from Dr. Heilanstalt’s deluxe private hospital, cured in body and convinced in mind that passive modes of self-degradation were inadequate. From then on no sloth attended his career in defilement and dishonor. By dint of will he drove himself ever lower.
During his sojourn in the hospital León was sullen. His body was reluctant to respond. Though first and last a surgeon, Dr. Heilanstalt had enough interest in mental influences upon disease to have named one of his sons after S. Freud, and he remarked León’s thanatotic urge and welcomed it as yet another challenging complication. More, he liked his charity cases to provide some entertainment or instruction, so as soon as he had dragged León off the critical list, he saved some time each evening to drop by and try (in French, their only common tongue) to draw him into conversation, thereby to learn who León was, what made him tick, how he’d descended to skid row, and why he seemed unwilling to be cured. Failing in this—for León at the best answered in grudging monosyllables and wouldn’t say a word about his past—the doctor set about cajoling him toward a desire to live, said he was young and tough, bright too, as far as one could see, promised to put him on his feet once he was cured, give him some cash, find him a job, arrange his passage home, told him that he, Dr. F. Heilanstalt, had known hard times himself, had started out with nothing but his brain, his steady nerves, and his ambition. Then, when he realized León’s problem wasn’t lack of cash or lack of work or homesickness or dejection at being down and out, that León simply didn’t enjoy living, Dr. Heilanstalt offered to send him off to Spain, where there was a cracking good war in progress and a demand for corpses in potentia. This was a particularly exciting subject for the doctor, who had a strong if secret urge to join that war. He’d never been to war, having arrived in France with the old AEF at the very hour of the Armistice. He’d never have gone into surgery, he knew, but that he had a taste for blood and chopping up live bodies, and while surgery, like war, offered a means to slake this taste with honor, war, unlike surgery, gave one a chance to risk one’s own life, not just someone else’s. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t just a mite afraid to lose his marvelous life, which was filled up with honors and affection and respect, with money and the love of women, with fame and the grand kick of saving otherwise doomed people. The possibility that he might have some fear only intensified his urge to go to war, to risk his life and therein test himself, and he controlled this urge only with difficulty by thinking of his wife and family, his hospital and patients. In the end he lost control of it. He joined the U.S. Army on the morning following Pearl Harbor and three years later found his ordeal and his Valhalla when, as a brigadier of Medical Corps, he went forward to inspect field hospitals and was engulfed into the Battle of the Bulge. But at the time of León’s injury Spain had the only decent war-in-progress, and, yes, León should go off to Spain and fight. For either side; the doctor didn’t care. He was partial to the Loyalists but, in the end, it was the war that mattered, not its occasion or who won or lost. There León might discover joy of life—or, if he didn’t, fling his life away in a more picturesque and thrilling manner than he could do down on the Bowery. León listened to all this with a great, sullen weariness, an attitude that to an eavesdropper might have suggested that he was a psychoanalyst engaged in therapizing Dr. Heilanstalt. Meanwhile he went about his business of autodestruction by making himself a morphine addict.
In his first weeks at the hospital León received morphine regularly against the pain of broken bones. He found it the best surrogate for death he’d come upon so far, and he appreciated its potential as a means to self-debasement, so when the dosages began to be diminished, he exaggerated his pain—not by gross screams or wailing but by using all his histrionic talent to portray a man racked by great agony who tries his best to bear it but cannot. There was a nurse assigned to midnight shifts, not a young woman but a greying Irish spinster, whom his performances moved with peculiar force. She had great soccer-ballish bosoms on which a silver crucifix jello’d benignly, a round red face puffed to enforced good cheer, and not a few taut lines about her eyes and mouth which, to a careful judge, argued some secret sadness and much tension. León discovered that if before she made her rounds, he gouged his nails deep in his palms or, better yet, gobbled a fold of cheek between his molars and chewed it so bloody that her tongue depressor would emerge all gulesed, this woman, Nurse Edna Scallop, would, despite the language barrier, appreciate his torment and slip him a fix. And since Dr. Heilanstalt had put him in a private room, he could by gesture get her to stay on a bit, say a “Pater noster” with him or an “Ave Maria.” And of course she would, at his dumbshow request, massage his chest and neck to ease the discomfort of lying pinned in traction all day long. And then one night, as she massaged him so, he put his own hand to her meaty nape, raising a startled yelp, a stare of disbelief, and a hiss of indignation reflexed across the decades from the memory of adolescent pawings that Edna Scallop hadn’t stood for, but then, since he persisted and they were alone, she smiled and closed her eyes and let him touch her for a moment before brushing his hand back with a feigned roughness and saying, “No more of that, my lad.” But of course, the next night there was more. Nothing remotely sexual: he kneaded the tense flesh above her clavicles and palped her nape with the same blend of clinical solicitude and sister-of-mercy charity that she showed him. By the third night she was prepared to give herself up to this kindness for a few minutes. Before long his attentions had traversed her pachydermic back and reached her hips, and she would leave his room at once cased and excited. Then—But there is no need in a work like this to stendhal out a step-by-step account. Let it suffice to say that by the time León had been six weeks in Dr. Heilanstalt’s hospital, the character of his paddlings of Nurse Scallop had entirely changed, and that he had (at two-fifteen of a still Sunday morning, while a shuttered night light jaundiced half his sickroom floor and his freshly-emptied bedpan tottered frenetically atop the pushed-back bed table to the bump of Edna’s butt) manually proportioned to her the first orgasm of her life. From then on morphine was no problem. She was as badly hooked as he. One solace well deserved another. She might as well be damned for a thief as for a lecher. And what could she deny to the dear boy who gave her such joy and peace? León took with him from the hospital a morphine habit the size of Yankee Stadium.
There is a dignity to certain lives of vice. One may feel awe before the priestly dedication of the man who gives his life to booze, or heroin, or gambling. Strange gods, and yet some people live as truly for them as some others live for science, or for Christ, or for their countries. But León Fuertes never worshiped morphine. He sought his purpose in himself, not in external absolutes or causes, nor (saving his lunar month with Rosario) in other people, nor (much less) in groups or institutions. He was a man self-fixated. During the period I am describing his passion was self-hatred, and he strove to sink as single-mindedly as during other times he strove to soar. Morphine was but a means to his defilement. It fouled his brain, warped his metabolism out of balance, and robbed him of control over his life. And of course, it demanded daily propitiation whether one believed in it or not, thereby presenting him with further opportunities for degradation. I suppose León felt properly debased dipping his fingers in the cotton drawers of a kindhearted yet most bloat, repulsive woman, but once he left the hospital he found an even more disgusting way to procure morphine: he became a catamite.
