Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned (11 page)

seventeen

Despite the emotional turmoil I was experiencing concerning Clyde's relationship with Fox and my relationships with them, I was not at all prepared for what took place the following night at the Old Armory. I don't know what it was I'd expected actually. Maybe a soup-kitchen kind of thing where normal Americans like myself, with the help of Donald Trump's credit card, of course, served dinner to the homeless. Whatever I'd expected, I'd been wrong in at least two principal areas: I'd underestimated Clyde and Fox's abilities to pursue their "little" hobbies, and, like most well-intentioned but severely sheltered people, I'd underestimated the true nature of the plight of the homeless. Having mentioned these two caveats, these lapses in my knowledge of the human condition, I can truthfully say that a good time was had by all, if only for a night.

If you've never been to a homeless shelter, maybe you should go. Or maybe you shouldn't. It is not likely to be the kind of thing you will ever be liable to forget. Possibly it was the contrast between the place itself and the events that took
place
there that has created, even after all this time, such an indelible impression upon my mind. (It is quite a challenge for any author to convey in mere words the squalor and the nobility of the race of man. In a sense, the author's work is rather simple: ordering and reordering phrases and sentences; pushing words around like a seriously ill Scrabble player; transfiguring people and events and emotions onto the feckless page in such a manner that the reader, having read, will become so involved in the illusion of life itself that he will forget, for all practical purposes, that he is, indeed, reading a book. That is the author's sacred task and it is one I do not for a moment casually embrace. But simply willing a powerful effect upon the reader does not make it so. It requires a talent that is almost effortless, virtually invisible, and that is the rarest talent of all. Every author worth reading must do his best even as he struggles with success, as if he's typing with his toes or merely paying the rent, to not inflict his own life upon the lives of his characters. The reader must observe the book's greatness almost peripherally, as the author, in the dark of the night, repositions his little words and phrases like chess pieces until he makes life appear so real that he dies trying. When all is said and done, as an author, all you can really ever do is pray to the gods to give you one good line. Then all you can do is pray for another one after that and another one after that.)

The night before the "event" at the Old Armory, a limo was sent to pick me up at my apartment. I was looking out my window when it arrived and it was so long and so black that it practically obliterated the rather pathetic, periscopic view the basement window provided. Clyde had called earlier to tell me, in hurried, businesslike tones, that tonight would be sort of a "scouting party" to check the place out before the real party on the following night.

"I think it might be a good idea," she'd said, "for you to acclimate yourself to the place before the big night."

"Okay," I'd said, "but—"

"In the history of Western civilization," she'd continued, "you may be the first person to ever arrive at this particular address in a black stretch limo. Fox and I regard you very highly, Walter."

"Okay," I'd said, "but is the limo really necessary?"

"Is homelessness really necessary?" she'd replied. Then she'd hung up.

Now I was in the limo heading over to the armory on Sixty-seventh Street, on the east side. Blocks and blocks of nighttime

Manhattan slipped almost soundlessly past my window. People on the sidewalks were still going nowhere quickly. Some of them noticed my black stretch limo but most of them were too busy going nowhere. At least I had a destination and a means, if somewhat lavish, of getting there. This limo, I realized, was just a part of another one of Clyde's little hobbies. And wherever I was going was merely the next amusement for her and her dear friend Fox, who'd been in and out of prisons and mental hospitals and homeless shelters and had recently imparted the information to me that Clyde had been a heroin addict.

And why should her past disturb me? Nobody's proud of being a heroin addict so she'd just concocted some ridiculous story about meeting Fox when the carnival left town. It had a better ring to it than telling someone that you'd met your roommate at a heroin rehab program in Arizona. And again I wondered, as I watched Manhattan slipping by like somebody else's sordid dream, why should it bother me? Had I been secretly imagining white picket fences safely surrounding Clyde and myself? Had I been subconsciously scheming to make an honest woman of her? Would the fact that she might be a psychopathic liar and a heroin addict get in the way of my plans? Or could love conquer all? It never had yet, I reflected grimly. I did not much like these backseat-of-limo ruminations. It was a good thing, I thought, that I didn't employ this mode of transportation often. It was a smooth ride but it tended to be a bit hard on your dreams.

It was after ten o'clock by the time the long black limo pulled up like an urban shark in front of a large, old, somehow slightly foreboding structure. The driver got out and opened the door for me. He touched his cap rather a bit too deferentially, I thought. Maybe he hated me.

"Do I owe you a tip?" I asked.

"Oh, no, sir," he replied. "Mr. Trump has hired this limo for the next forty-eight hours. The tip's included."

Mr. Trump, my ass, I thought. Trump didn't get to be Trump by being a chump. How could Clyde think she could possibly get away with this? I was now becoming quite ambivalent about her judgment. She had some balls all right but she'd chosen a pretty big enemy to pick a fight with. When Trump got wind of this credit-card scam, we could all wind up in the calaboose without a sucker like Walter Snow to fork over our bail.

Fox met me on the steps, embracing me warmly, pushing the one-hitter under my nose, seemingly in great spirits. Fox always had an infectious happiness about him, especially when he was happy. He did not need to twist my arm to get me to take a deep hit off the little device.

"Just what you need to brace you up a bit," he said. "Have you ever been inside a large homeless shelter in New York?"

"I'm afraid I haven't," I said.

"Then you're just like most other New Yorkers. They're so absorbed in their own problems that they walk right past hell on earth every day and night and they don't even know it. But you'll be different soon. Nobody walks in here and walks out again the same person, unless, of course, you happen to be homeless. Now tomorrow night you're not even going to recognize this place. But tonight, well, you'll see. Welcome to the armory!"

Fox took me up the steps and through the doors into the big old structure that, he explained, was over a hundred years old and used to be an enormous staging area for training men and horses before World War I. I gazed around at what must have been forty-foot ceilings. It was hard to imagine there being this much space in New York.

"The place is no longer operated by the military," Fox was saying, "but it still preserves all of the old institutional flavor. Maybe more so now. Here, I'll show you."

He opened another door and suddenly an overpowering stench affronted our senses, not unlike what I imagined to be the smell of a mass grave. We entered a long room that was full of row upon row of pathetic little mental-hospital steel cots, barely the width of a normal human body. It looked, indeed, like something out of a fairy tale gone awry, and maybe that's what it was.

"At this time of year," Fox said, "when the weather is cold, there's rarely an empty cot. The building sleeps fifteen hundred to two thousand men, and the cops are bringing more in all the time. They sleep in their clothes, of course. What they have on their bodies is usually about all they have in the world. Lights out is at eleven. As you can see, most of them are already asleep on their little cots."

"Jesus," I said. "They look like rows and rows of little elves."

"That's a very good description, Walter. But then, again, you
are
an author and we've come to expect these kinds of insights from you."

As always, it was difficult to tell whether Fox was complimenting me or patronizing me and I decided for better or worse just to let it go. It was merely one man's observation about another man's observation. It would take two shrinks to get to the bottom of Fox's brand of mental gymnastics and, from what Clyde had told me, many more than two shrinks had already tried.

"You'll notice," Fox was saying, "that just about every man here, while sleeping in his clothes, has taken his shoes off."

"That would be hard to miss," I said.

"I've seen a few more of these places than I'd like to admit, and in all that time I've never gotten used to the smell. That's one way to demarcate the truly homeless from the mere jet-set gypsies like myself. If you notice the smell, there's still a chance for you. If you no longer notice it, you're a true no-hoper."

A true no-hoper, I thought to myself. If ever there was a good phrase to have met an author's eager ear, this was it. There was no question that I would use the phrase and many others of Fox's in the novel. An author or an actor invariably resorts to the ongoing vampirization of his friends, if, indeed, he has any friends, which is not always the case. To an author at work, every friend, acquaintance, lover, and casual stranger is a victim waiting to be raped and pillaged for everything about them of human worth. In this instance, Fox, albeit unwittingly, had delivered a fine phrase to my war chest of words. A true no-hoper, I thought. That was a keeper.

"Take it," said Fox, with his maddening, not to say frightening, ability to see to the very depths of my being. "It's yours."

We walked in silence for a while down the endless rows of little cots filled with the detritus of the human race, filled with broken American dreams. We came to a point in the middle of the vast room at which Fox signaled me to stop. He put his hand up.

"Listen, Walter," he half whispered. "Do you hear that sound?"

There was the muffled street noise that was always in New York, from the swankiest hotel to the saddest shelter. You had to screen it out and, like not noticing the smell in the armory, if you no longer heard the street noise, you could say you were a true New Yorker. I made my mind listen intently and then I heard it. It sounded like an engine or a motor of some kind coming from no fixed point and from everywhere at the same time. At moments it sounded like a dissonant note and at others the noise appeared to be a not-unattractive layering of harmonic tones. It was, I realized at last, the oddly heartbreaking sound of over a thousand homeless men snoring.

"It's a regular human symphony, isn't it, Walter? The sounds of all these men snoring, coughing, burping, murmuring, calling out some cherished, half-remembered name from long ago, farting. It's a sad symphony, Walter, and very few people ever get a chance to hear it. It's a symphony of the forgotten."

Whatever I'd thought of Fox Harris may have in some unchartable way changed forever at that moment. As so often happens when two men vie for the very same object of affection, neither of us mentioned Clyde. But I could see, possibly clearly for the first time, what Clyde saw in Fox, and, I must confess, even filtered through my own vastly different personal experience, I was quite deeply taken by what I saw.

Before I knew it, Fox had moved perilously close to me and put his arms around me as if we were a couple slow-dancing to a certain celestial music that only we could hear. Maybe it was the effect of the one-hitter. Maybe it was the otherworldly nature of the peaceful, somnolent scene all around us. Maybe it was the knowledge that this person shared an intimacy with a person I'd only loved, only fantasized, only written about from afar. Whatever the reason, I did not push Fox away from me though we stood together very close for some moments in that strange and shabby ballroom of the spirit. One voice inside me told me to go with the flow because it would bring me ever closer to Clyde. But another voice whispered wickedly something equally close to the truth. Do not repulse this person's advances, it said. Don't you understand that he is a man alter your own heart? Probably the embrace lasted only a moment but it would alter always the way I looked at Fox and perhaps even the way I would look at life. He took my hand as if nothing had happened and we walked a little farther down the rows of little men snoring in their little beds.

"Do you see," said Fox, "how most of them have placed one shoe under each front bedpost of their cots?"

It was strange, I thought, that I hadn't noticed it before. Maybe I hadn't noticed a lot of things before. But it was a strange night in a strange world and I could see quite vividly now the images of these men protecting their worn-out, pathetic, common labor shoes, which no one in the city of New York would ever walk a mile in, from being stolen by another no-hoper. It said as much or as little about human beings, I felt, as any of us would ever want to know.

"The cots, of course, will all be moved aside tomorrow night. Clyde is going so ape shit with this thing that for the first time, maybe even Donald Trump may have some trouble keeping up with his credit-card expenditures. It's going to be the party to end all parties, I can tell you. Do you recognize this fine stalwart specimen over here?"

I followed Fox over to a corner where two cots had been pulled together side by side to accommodate the slumbering form of one of the largest black men I'd ever seen before. And, yes, I had seen him before. It was Teddy.

"Tomorrow night is his big night," said Fox, "and he doesn't even know it yet. He's going to be more than merely the guest of honor. Tomorrow night is going to be his coronation! He's going to be crowned, in his head, king of an imaginary African nation! How many of us poor devils will ever get to realize and achieve that lofty a goal in our lives?"

I gazed down at the sleeping form of Teddy and was suddenly taken with how very childlike, how incredibly angelic he, appeared. In the midst of all the sorrow and sadness and squalor and suffering and shabbiness that so invaded and permeated this enormous, god-awful hall slept this giant of a man with a face like a child. The look of peace on that face was the next best thing to being dead, I thought.