Two Much!

38

When i saw the Alfa, I knew I couldn’t do it.

Coming interminably down in the freight elevator, my two new friends standing on either side of me like temple columns (“my name, dear, is Simpson, not Samson,”), I had given myself any number of reasons why what was happening to me was not really a defeat after all, but might even be considered in some ways a victory. Art Dodge, driven out of town by Ernest Volpinex, would disappear from the scene. Tomorrow, Bart Dodge would sneak back from St. Martin, have a wonderful reconciliation with Betty, and live happily for the foreseeable future. With any luck, I might even get to keep Liz’s ten thousand dollars; if it cleared before she put a stop payment on it. I’d known all along I should stop playing this twin game, should settle into one persona and begin to harvest my crops, so now circumstances were forcing me to take the road I had already acknowledged to be the path of wisdom. And if the taste in my mouth was partly bile, if the lump in my throat was partly rage, if the fact of my exile was mostly Volpinex’s victory rather than mine, so what? Bart could get even with him for me later.

That was what I’d talked myself into during the elevator ride. But when we stepped out to the street and I saw that white Alfa Romeo illegally parked by the fire hydrant in front of the building, dealer plates wired on and greenshirted driver from the dealership waiting there to hand me the keys, I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t lie to myself about victory and defeat, I couldn’t con myself into wisdom or acceptance, and I goddamn well couldn’t take any airplane to any island in any Caribbean.

The street was its usual workday derangement of activity. The garment district is New York’s version of the Baghdad marketplace, with trucks instead of camels, wheeled garment racks instead of burros, and taxis taking the place of the vizier’s horsemen. A ferment of tongues is heard, all of them degradations of one or another major language: spic, yid and black predominate, but wop, wog, and various variants of chink are also featured, plus other rarer spices in this or that section of the stew. (What the fellas in the turbans speak I don’t know, but it sounds like warm shit being stirred by wooden spoons.)

“This way,” one of my teammates said. “We’re parked around the corner.” So the three of us turned right and moved away from the building and the lovely white Alfa (I knew better than to look back at it, though I wanted to) and walked off along the buckled sidewalk into the dishevelment of the garment district.

We walked three abreast, of course, which wasn’t easy in that crowd, and several representatives of society’s disadvantaged races gave us dirty looks as they stepped off the curb to go around us; three white men taking up the whole damn sidewalk.

Soon we found ourselves moving slowly behind a drove of slow-moving garment racks, propelled by a rabble of spics and spades. The former spoke Cockroach, their version of Spanish, and the latter spoke Harlem, a bastardization of English composed principally of the noun muhfur and the adjective muhfun.

We were almost to the corner, walking closely behind this shuffling shoal, when I suddenly raised my head and yelled, “You fuckin’ niggers move your fuckin’ black asses out of the way!”

The number of eyes that turned in my direction was gratifying. Linking my arms with my bewildered comrades, marching forward, I loudly announced, “We’re comin’ through, jigaboos, so move it!”

The first punch was thrown by a musclebound black whose T-shirt fit him like Saran Wrap, turning his ripply chest and shoulders into a snowbound anatomical study. The punch was thrown at me, but I was no longer there to catch it. The instant I saw that arm rear back I turned and ran.

There was yelling behind me, some of it in actual English. Racing at top speed, skipping sideways between garment racks, hopping over fire hydrants and cardboard cartons, lunging through clusters of dolly-wheeling trolls, sliding along the plate glass windows of the button factory, I didn’t look back until I was parallel with the Alfa, and even then I didn’t stop. I took it for granted I’d have to leave the neighborhood for a while, and running would be faster than the stop-and-go single lane of taxi-truck-tourist traffic oozing along the middle of the street.

Yes, I would have to depart. Here they came, running along after me, bowling over the pedestrians I’d skirted, creating secondary fist fights and shouting matches in their wake, and even from here I could see the murder in their eyes.

Not my friends of the airline ticket; they were way back where I’d left them, barely discernible in a whirling frenzy of pummeling arms and legs. It was a flying squad of jigaboos, led by my friend in the form-fitting T-shirt, that was pounding after me now, and I really doubted St. Martin was the destination for me they had in mind. Facing forward again, knocking down a pair of fat female Puerto Rican sewing machine operators starting out for an early lunch (spic-ettes? spic-esses?), I bounded over their barrelly bodies and ran for daylight.