No Beast So Fierce (22 page)

A robbery in the immediate vicinity was impractical. Today the streets were empty, but when the stores were open the streets would be jammed. For at least six blocks in every direction there were nothing but businesses, which meant traffic lights, office buildings. It would take too long to cover any distance.

I telephoned for another taxi and waited in a Standard gas station, and while I waited I checked the Yellow Pages Directory under “Diamonds”, and “Jewelers—Retail”. I could tell the approximate location of many addresses. One caught my eye: Gregory's. The name was as familiar as Van Cleef & Arpels, and the address was on Wilshire—but the number indicated it was east of the main section. On a hunch, I had the taxi drive down Wilshire and I looked out.

Gregory's had a private building, low and gleaming white, semicolonial in design. I'd passed it countless times without ever previously noticing it. A brass signplate, brightly polished, was fastened beside the door. Gregory's, Fine Jewelers, it said, and nothing more. Across Wilshire was still the business district, but behind the jeweler's were streets of elegant apartment buildings and nice homes. Trees jutted over the sidewalks.

What I saw made me decide to come back and look further when I had the time. I leaned back in the taxi and fired a cigar. The evening still loomed empty. It was just getting dark. I decided to see Manny and soothe his ruffled feathers.

9

T
HE
club had the usual Sunday evening slowness. Manny January was leaning against a cigarette machine in the back near the short corridor to the office, a flesh-colored Band-Aid pasted beside his right eye. When I came through the front door, he watched me apprehensively. Had I suddenly reached into a pocket he would have bolted in panic. Sight of his fear aroused a mild exultation, for if one has no other identity the ability to instill fear in others can satisfy a need.

It took ten minutes of assurances that I intended him no harm to get him to leave. We went for a ride in his automobile. When someone is terrified, the best way to allay that terror is to get in a position where you have the power to do them harm and, instead, treat them considerately. When Manny got the message, we were riding through dark residential streets. Only then did he show his smoldering resentment at being knocked down and made to crawl. This indignation was what I wanted expressed—for I didn't want it to become abscessed, growing larger and poisoning his mind. Fear, hate, resentment, none of these mattered if the person harboring them was at a safe distance. But Manny was within my circle, and secret venom could be a threat. A dime dropped in a pay telephone and a few whispered words to the police would get him full revenge.

Once he'd expressed his hurt feelings, I treated him as a child who's been naughty and punished, but who is still loved. I showed him where he'd failed to maintain his responsibilities, that he'd been wrong. I apologized for losing my temper, and yet made him understand where it was his own fault.

We stopped by his apartment, picked up a dozen joints and twice that many bennies. On the way back to the club, both of us high, he talked about his hopes, doubts, problems. I let him talk uninterruptedly, and when we got out and went in where the music played, he was more enamored of me than ever.

Somewhat later in the evening, perhaps near midnight, I found myself stoned on pot and pills and booze, in a booth with Abe, Manny, Angie, and two broads I'd never seen before. All Manny knew of the women was that they'd come separately to the club, and both had been there before during recent weeks. One girl was glitter without substance, hard and brittle and growing old. She seemed—from the haze of my intoxication—the kind to whom old age would be a special curse, for she lacked any reservoirs to sustain her when beauty was gone.

The other girl, Allison, sat across from me. Her pale blonde hair seemed colorless against the lacquered sheen of Angie and the other. On first glance she was just an average pretty girl in her mid-twenties, less flashy than most who frequented these places. On closer scrutiny I saw she required no flashy setting—she had high cheekbones and skin as smooth as a dove's breast, requiring no makeup to hide imperfections. Her eyes were colored somewhere between hazel and violet, and they looked directly into my stare without fluster. Except for the drugs in my system, I would have looked away, for to stare longer would have created a silent game of wills.

We said nothing to each other, and her few words to the others didn't reveal much about her personality. I noticed the faintest hint of southern accent in her voice. A popular folk singer-poet was mentioned, and she said, “Oh, isn't he good” with a stress on the last syllable that gave feeling to the simple sentence. Occasionally, when the music throbbed over the room, she rocked her head in rhythm. I now remember these things with more clarity than when they happened.

Everyone was going to a party, the girls leaving first. Abe and Manny would show up after the club closed. Abe wanted me to go, but I turned the offer down. I'd slept three hours the previous night and had an appointment to commit a robbery in the morning.

Allison had an automobile, but it was parked on Sunset Boulevard at another club. Manny offered to drive her to pick it up, and then to take me home.

“Just drop me at the Carolina Pines. I'll get a sandwich and catch a cab,” I said.

On the way, Manny brought out some more joints and we smoked them. I still had no opportunity to talk to the girl. If the robbery went right I'd get her phone number from Abe or Manny, if they had it. If not, I'd see her again, maybe.

I got out, watched the car pull away, and walked into the coffee shop, a vast, gleaming establishment of stainless steel and formica. The benzedrine sapped my appetite and I settled for coffee, being unable to get anything else down. It was also apparent that I'd never be able to sleep, much as I wanted to and much as I needed it.

Outside, I stood beneath the overhang of the coffee shop's roof, bathed in the light from the windows, and wondered what to do. Maybe go downtown. The underworld night people would be there, in the dingy Traveler's Café on Temple Street or Dixie's Waffle Shop on Broadway. I might even buy a balloon of heroin. The dope fiend whores would be there too. I could buy half a gram, pick one up and throw an orgy with her—an easy thing to do when one is full of benzedrine and heroin.

And if, by chance, I found no familiar faces, I could go to an all-night movie.

The thing that made me pause was that the downtown area at this postmidnight hour was heavily policed. They might stop me, and though my false identification was good the scene would be risky. Several hundred other fugitives were undoubtedly loose in Los Angeles, yet there was always a chance that some policeman would remember my picture.

A Yellow Cab deposited a customer at the curb. Without having decided my destination, only that I was going somewhere, I hailed it and started forward.

An automobile pulled to the curb beside me; I saw it in my peripheral vision. Reflexively, I looked over. Allison was alone behind the wheel of a sporty pale blue convertible. Its top was down and her hair was windblown; the sight of her sent delight shivering through me. Now that she appeared, I realized that in some chamber of my mind I had been expecting her, or at least hopefully waiting, having gotten some wordless communication to her during the exchange of looks at the club.

Her smile of greeting was whimsical, uncertain—as if she were afraid I'd rebuff her forwardness.

“What happened to the party?” I asked.

“I changed my mind.”

“Uh huh. And you knew I needed a ride home? Right?”

“If that's where you want to go.” She colored slightly, unsure of herself. It made me like her even more. I was standing beside the car, looking down at her exposed thighs; her short skirt had ridden upward as she sat to drive the automobile. They were very white thighs. She knew I was staring.

“Well, get in,” she said.

She put her car in motion, heading toward Hollywood Boulevard.

“Well, what do you want to do?”

“Go fuck,” was what I wanted to say—and yet that wasn't the whole of it. Something told me she was more than a quick lay. It was not the electricity of love, but something milder. She seemed to be someone who could ease the pangs of my loneliness. “We can blow a couple joints, drive around, and see if we really like each other.”

“Groovy.” She smiled with full warmth.

Soon, without being directed, she was driving where I would have gone—along the serpentine curves at the crest of the Hollywood Hills, an area of elegant houses on ledges and leveled hills. On a clear night it was possible to see southward for forty miles and north for thirty more miles—and every inch was city lights.

We parked at a vantage point. Allison turned on the car radio, softly, and we sat and talked. She'd asked Manny about me while they were going for her car. He'd told her that I'd just served ten years in prison. The information fascinated her. She'd never met anyone who'd spent a night in jail, much less a decade. I corrected the two-year error. “Oh,” she said, “I've undoubtedly met someone, but I didn't know it.”

What she said startled and entranced me—for it seemed that everybody I knew had been raised in jail.

She wanted to know what it was like—the violence, the absence of women—as if the prison world can be encapsuled in a night's conversation. I told her some truths and some lies, piquing her obvious desire to hear the romantic. Mainly I evaded and turned the conversation back to her, drawing her out, for I have a theory that if you allow anyone to talk about themselves for very long—especially about their feelings and problems—they will become attached to you.

Wryly, Allison described herself as a “swinging divorcee”, though the divorce wasn't quite final. She'd been miserable, had broken free to find herself, to feel life—even its pain. She was the only daughter of a middle-class Kentucky family. Her father published a newspaper in a town of twenty thousand. She'd spent two years in a Baptist women's college. Her life had been dull, though she'd never realized it, never having another frame of reference. What joys she'd found had been in reading, but books had not instilled any desires, at least not conscious desires. A daring night had consisted of drinking beer and driving too fast on a country road, parking and heavy petting, and all of it filled with delicious guilt. She rebelled against Calvinist rectitude without gainsaying its validity.

Her husband was from Baltimore, an engineer fifteen years older than herself. She met him when he was in the army, stationed at a small base near the town. He was soon to be discharged and was going to California, where his training would ensure a career in the aerospace industry. He'd seemed the most sophisticated and worldly man imaginable, and California seemed the promised land, milk and honey and sunshine by the sea. She'd deliberately gotten pregnant and come west with him, a wedding band on her finger and expectations in her heart. She was nineteen.

Five years later she was on her hands and knees, scraping sludge from an oven in a neat tract home in suburbia. She threw down the steel wool and decided it was over. As she'd seen more of life and into herself, she'd grown disillusioned, discouraged, dissatisfied. She'd fought it by joining PTA, women's clubs, self-improvement groups; she'd had an affair and done social work. Dissatisfaction grew. And the man who'd seemed sophisticated in a small town was a slob in the city. She'd found herself watching the clock every afternoon with dread in her heart. All he worried about was that she had food on the table—and afterward he'd sprawl in a chair and stare at television until it was time for bed. Sex was joyless—though he reached for her daily. He went nowhere, wanted to go nowhere, and had read one book since their marriage:
The Carpetbaggers.

She began going out alone at night to prowl the bars, and further despised him for the passive acceptance of her abuse. “He's so goddamned weak,” she said, “and I was terrible for him. I drained what little manhood he had. And when I told him it was all over, he cried and threatened to kill himself. God, I loathed him—and felt like a dirty bitch. Yet I was suffocating. I had to get away, have something different, like my metabolism is geared to a different rhythm.”

The child went with her parents in Kentucky and she'd moved into a hillside apartment and gotten a job in a lawyer's office. For six months she'd been exploring, meeting new people, trying new things. It had been a ball.

“What's the goal? What do you want?”

“I don't know, not yet. Until I shop around, how can I know? Right now I just want to see what's over the horizon. Maybe I just want excitement. I feel more living this way. Every morning when I wake up I wonder what's going to happen, what kind of adventure will come my way.”

“What about love? Where does that stand in your scheme of things?”

“Yes, love … I wonder. It's wonderful to love, if you can—but to try and not be able to crucifies your soul. I think you should question it, make it prove itself. Don't seek it from hunger and delude yourself. What about you?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Do you hate society?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes more than at other times. I hate it more for what it made of me than what it did to me.”

“Do you hate yourself?”

“No. I'm proud—in a way. I'm the freest man you ever met.”

“Do you work?”

“Hell no!”

“What do you do?”

“Young lady, don't ask such questions. You're crossing a line into a prohibited area.”

“I blabbed my soul and you won't say anything.”

“We didn't make a deal—you tell me and I'll tell you.”

“That isn't fair.”

“Nothing is fair.”

It was almost five o'clock. The horizon was brightening. “Want something to eat?” I asked.