Memoir From Antproof Case (11 page)

Miss Mayevska happened not to drink it, which was pure luck. But maybe, had she drunk it, she would have stopped—she, of all the people in the world—for she really loved me.

Constance drank, at first in secret. And Marlise.... Although of course Marlise would not drink at home, she drinks every day, several times—expresso, cappuccino, mocha, and God knows what else. She thinks it's perfectly normal and innocent, and has been drinking coffee since she was four. She does it as easily as breathing. That gorgeous body, that I have never been able to resist, has coffee flowing through its interior channels in total hideous corruption, and you would never know it. By the time we kiss, I can't even taste it. But it's there, it's working, it's horrible.

All over the world, people drink it, blindly, by the million, by the hundreds of millions, by the
billion.
And they must have it, they think they cannot do without it, and yet it is not a food, or water, or oxygen. No one would ever give it up for me, or for anyone else. It is more powerful than love.

The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to expresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself. Even the voodoo priest consumed his many cups of coffee each day after I had been ignominiously wheeled into the hall.

At mealtimes the stench was appalling. People cannot even eat without it. They cannot wake without it. Many cannot sleep without it. They refer to it as
my. "My
coffee." On at least one occasion I have assaulted a waitress who approached me, asking, "Would you like your coffee now?"

"Madam!" I say, "it's not automatic! You assume too much! Just because you and most other people in the world are fiends and addicts does not mean that I am!"

Though I have made a thousand attempts at resistance and though I have as my model the French Underground, which ultimately was successful, I have not a single ally, not a single friend, and am doomed to fail. The gentle world has been enslaved by the drug and lubricant of the synchronous, the conforming, the coordinated, the collective, and the congruent.

My one strength, my one victory, is memory, for in memory I purify, in memory I am alone, in memory I appear before the highest judge, far above the static and the clouds, as if in the sunlit clearings of the garden in Niterói, where all is tranquil and the world below is cool, windy, and blue.

I sank back on my pillows in defeat, remembering my first mortal combat, which in many ways set the tone of my life. It was a melancholy thing brought to me so suddenly and unexpectedly that I have always equated it with an electric shock, something I came to know well soon after the defense of my existence was deemed to have been a sin.

Perhaps I should begin by telling you, if you don't already know, that cities—and the city of New York is the city I know best, the city of my birth—have a voice. I am not furthering some useless metaphor invented as the engine of a crackpot academic paper that stretches for pages and pages without ever coming to rest upon a concrete noun, or a color, or the story of something that really happened (or might have).

No. The city has a voice, and a song, that change over its history and can actually be heard. In 1950, when Manhattan had virtually no air conditioners, when office windows opened, and there were elevated trains, the white sound that lifted off the streets was very different from that of a quarter of a century later, when, as in São Paulo, the buildings no longer baffled sound, and millions of air conditioners were humming at a high pitch.

The presence or absence of automobiles, and then the variations in their number, the marked changes in engines and exhaust systems, horns, radios, the way doors sound when they are shut, etc., etc., all determine the symphony of the city. By 1950 most of the animals had disappeared from the street: no longer could you hear a hundred thousand horseshoes clomping on the macadam. I remember the sounds of crowds walking on leather soles, muffled and shuffling, that then turned into a billion dancing crickets with the advent of metal heel taps for men and high heeled shoes for women, and then these great choruses quietly stood down as if in awe of synthetic rubber.

I could probably write a book about these sounds—the ferry whistles; the changing jackhammers; the bus engines and pneumatic bus doors that over the years were as complicated as a piece by Debussy; the evolving howl as the dampening spiderwork of fire escapes disappeared and tall buildings became colossal whistles in the winter wind; the coming and going of hurdy-gurdies, sound systems, and trees—for, once, even in Manhattan, you could hear the trees. In winter they clicked against the windows with their skeletal twigs. In spring the soft new leaves hushed the city's other sounds to an adagio. In summer they received sudden rainstorms, as if to mimic the heavy surf or a waterfall. In autumn they rattled and jangled, as if to prepare for Christmas. And in three seasons they held the birds. Even if you see a bird in Manhattan now, I've been told you can hardly hear it. You wonder about your hearing, or if you have fallen into a silent movie, or if the bird is a deaf-mute who is going to walk up to you and hand you a little printed card.

As the million sounds of the city change over the years they do so with such slowness that the only way to hear them is in memory. In 1918, when I was fourteen years of age, the music of the city was played by horse's hooves, ferry whistles, steam trains, open windows, the wind in grilles and ladders, leather shoes upon the pavement, tapping canes, the cry of the junk men and food sellers, an occasional sputtering engine, and hundreds of thousands of trees that knit the streets back into the fabric of forest and field.

I lived with my uncle and my aunt, thirty-three miles to the north of Grand Central Station, in the town of Ossining. I stayed in the carriage house so as to escape the twice-daily stench of brewing coffee. Both my uncle and aunt were users, and had been so for many years, at times trying to prepare and drink coffee in my very presence.

Though I lived at a healthy remove, sometimes the wind would blow injudiciously and I would end up on the floor, convulsed, retching, struggling to breathe. Sometimes I would pass garbage cans and catch the smell of coffee grounds, which led to my first encounter with ambulances, which in those days were drawn by horses. Now I make wide diversions around garbage cans.

The summer of 1918 was the summer of Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Cantigny, and the Second Battle of the Marne. Although the American victories that marked the turning point of the war were attributed to a commander in chief we called "Pinchy-face," everyone knew that they were really the distant thunder of Theodore Roosevelt, whose presidency and character had shaped the American fighting man forever. For four years the Europeans had been doing a bloody isometric exercise, and then we came in, and as soon as we got going, everything started to move.

Some older boys that I knew had already enlisted, and some were actually serving. I was waiting my turn, hoping that America would drive to Berlin by autumn, and that the war would last three more years so I could do my part. (Perhaps I thought the investiture of the enemy capital might be very time-consuming.)

Whenever I could I ranged through the fields and woods with my Springfield rifle. As I had been doing this since the age of six, I was a keen shot, and I could move about noiselessly, always aware of everything around me. My preparation for war was not just childish fantasy. I had some idea, at least, of the reality. For reasons that I cannot easily relate, I understood that this was not a game. On the other hand, I was a boy of fourteen.

When school ended that year, as it did, almost always, on the 12th of June, I began, as I had from a very early age, to work. Only this time, as would befit a world changed by war, I milked no cows, picked no beans, spread no manure, and gutted no fish. Through the good offices of my uncle, I had obtained the job of runner and clerk for Stillman and Chase, the premier financial house of the world.

It was a nightmare job, and I would have done far better laboring in the fields. As I was supposed to arrive at offices on Broadway and 100th Street at eight
A.M.,
I had to arise at five. This has become a lifelong habit, but I had never done it even on the farm and at first it was rather difficult. By the time I dressed, made breakfast, and set out for the station, it was six. I made the 6:40 train, reading the war news until Marble Hill, and switched to the Broadway IRT, a local all the way down.

If the train was late, so was I, and at Stillman and Chase if you didn't punch the clock by eight you were docked a day's pay. I was supposed to serve coffee to the account brokers, but of course that was impossible. I traded with a Negro boy, and he served the coffee while for an hour I shined shoes. From nine to ten he and I polished brass, wood, and marble, and then, at the market's opening bell, he kept polishing and I started running.

I made four round-trips each day between 100th Street and Wall Street, although the last return left me at Grand Central, where I boarded the train home. I carried a big canvas-and-leather bag sealed with a two-pound padlock and identified with a green leather patch that bore the inscription,
S&C—1409.
In this bag were orders, confirmations, stock certificates, and money.

We never carried more than a thousand dollars' worth of anything in the bag, but a thousand dollars then was enough to buy two automobiles, and runners were always being held up. Some disappeared, perhaps to start a new and richer life in a little town like Los Angeles, or perhaps to float face down in the East River. It was a dangerous job: you couldn't read on the subway, because you had to keep your eyes peeled.

That summer they tried to rob me about a dozen times—grown men, often in groups. Because the bag was locked around my waist they had either to kidnap me, cut the bag open, or cut it away from me.

When they tried to cut the bag away, it was with huge bolt cutters, and in the struggle they were never very accurate. I have bolt-cutter scars at my waist now, though they have faded. Over the years, the women with whom I have been intimate have always been intensely curious about these marks. The first time she saw them, Marlise said, "Oh, you old enough to be bite by dinosaur."

Cutting the bag open was no picnic either. We called that a "Mayor Gainor," after the mayor who was assassinated by a series of mechanically precise knife strokes in the gut. From my unfortunate perspective, the knives looked like windmill blades in the nickelodeon. I have their scars, too.

The kidnappers were the worst, because they would put a pistol up against you and threaten to shoot if you didn't go with them. If you
did
go with them, they would almost certainly kill you, so we refused to go, and some of us got shot. "Nothing's in the bag but orders!" I would shout, on the downtown run, or "Confirmations!" on the uptown. "The old man in the next car has a diamond stickpin, a cop is coming, I've got to go to the bathroom, I'm going to throw up." Then, in the moment of truth, I would break away. Breaking away has never failed me.

Not all was terror. I met a girl named Maggie, a cashier in a sheet-music store in Times Square. Maggie is not much of a name, but to me it was the most beautiful sound in the world. She was fifteen, a superiority that I found totally oppressive, and she treated me with disdain that turned to amazement after I began passing to her the twenty-page love letters I would compose on weekends.

In her actual presence I was paralyzed and would turn the color of freshly butchered meat. I think she must have wondered why it was that I never seemed to breathe. Mostly I couldn't speak, but sometimes I would grunt like an ape. And once when she accidentally touched my hand I got an instant and unstoppable erection that required me to walk from the store doubled over with my forearms pressed against my thighs. With the Stillman and Chase bag strapped to my back, I looked like the Hunchback of Notre Dame all the way to Wall Street.

She had a blood-and-milk complexion, slightly carroty because she was Irish, strawberry-blond hair, green eyes, broad shoulders, and beautiful hands. If I had not been so awkward perhaps she might have understood how much I loved her. Even though I was an insane fourteen-year-old boy, I would have loved her as she may never have been loved in her life.

Once, my uncle looked at me askance and said, "Why is it that every two days you bring home a fresh copy of 'I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy'? You don't even read music."

"I like it," I said.

"But having two copies doesn't change it, does it?"

"Yes," I said, floundering. "Yes, it does."

"How?"

Here, God threw me half a life preserver. I didn't hold it against Him, for when it has really been necessary, He has thrown me whole rafts of them. "It's like money," I said. "Every dollar bill is the same, isn't it? But you want as many as you can get."

Then God threw the other half of the life preserver to my uncle. "They're not the same," he said, somewhat embarrassed. "Each one is different:
the serial numbers
"

"That's idiotic," I replied, and so it went, as it always did in my affectionate struggle with my uncle, whose only fault was that he was not my father.

I was taken from him the summer that I worked for Stillman and Chase. And then, in another summer, when I had begun to work for Stillman and Chase in a more elevated capacity, he was taken from me. No one at Stillman and Chase even blinked. I walked around in a daze for two weeks, but for them it was business as usual. I didn't like that. Institutions, you see, can wear down the soul with relentless and uncompromising force. They expect mothers to leave their children, fathers to work themselves to death, and fourteen-year-old boys to get stabbed and cut and have cheap pearl-handled pistols shoved up their nostrils.

No one ever complains as one would if just a man were to require the same. As an apprentice, you learn not to harbor a grudge against the abstraction that loots your days, breaks your health, or demands your life. But I was taught something different. For whatever reason, I see corporate bodies, entities, even principles, the way primitive people saw the stars. I group their million unaccountable points into one bear, or one archer, or one Perseus holding the head of one Medusa, and I hold them accountable as if they were the man sitting next to me on the trolley.