Hot Night in the City Read online

  "Loving Grace Appleby was the best piece of ass that ever drew breath on God's good green earth. You can't compare her to other women, no more'n you can compare a ten-car, high-ball railroad carnival manned by top-drawer scam-mavins to a broken-down three-truck punk show run by a handful of forty-mile stumble bums."

  I wasn't with the carnivals yet, so I didn't know about highballs and scam mavins and forty-milers and punk shows, but I got the idea that this Grace Appleby was something special.

  He sighed and said in a voice soft with memories, "...Loving Grace Appleby... Oh, my, my, my! She danced the hoochie coochie with Happy Elmer's show, and believe-you-me, kid, when, she did her little appetizer in front of the show tent, those rubes would crowd around and stare up at her, their mouths open, their eyes bugging, and their imaginations chugging full steam ahead, while their wives either huffed off in disgust, or stood there stiff as stone, staring daggers towards Grace, their lips pressed together so tight they almost bit 'em off. Grace was the highest paid hoochie-coochie girl in the game because Happy Elmer made every flatman and wheel spinner on the midway give her a cut, and the scam mavins were willing to pay it because of the way she drew in the marks and left them stunned and ready to be plucked. Grace Appleby was prime stuff. And I am talking prime here!"

  "What happened to her?"

  "Oh, she went the way of all flesh, kid. She got old and sick and fat and her face got bottle cut in a fight over loving rights. But in her prime, there wasn't a red-blooded carnie who wouldn't have given his gift of gab for half an hour with Grace. I remember one man declaring that he'd willingly eat a mile of her shit just to see where it come from... and there ain't no higher praise nor loftier sentiment than that. I'm telling you, boy, Grace was amazing! Matter of fact, they wrote a spiritual hymn about her.

  "But I don't want you to think she was a loose woman or anything like that. Nosiree, Robert. Her hoochie coochie was full of promissory notes, but she never paid off on them. Oh, sure, on the carnival's last night in town she'd do her famous Midnight Double Blow-Off Special that cost the mark a whole dollar to watch (adult males only, please, to protect women from damaging thoughts and youngsters from draining habits). And she'd flash a boob at 'em just before the lights went off and she disappeared behind the curtains, but that's the closest she ever got to Hookerville. No, Loving Grace Appleby never sold her body. But every once in a while she'd give it away. Some lucky carnie would catch her fancy, and she'd invite him to her wagon and we wouldn't see him again until the next morning, when he'd be found walking around the midway, dazed, his eyes glassy, and a vague little smile on his lips. We'd all gather around and ask him how it'd been, but the lucky guy'd never tell us, not because he was prudish and sin-whipped like some mark might be, but because he just couldn't find the words to do the experience justice."

  "Did she ever choose you?"

  "No, son, she didn't. And that's my greatest regret in life. I'd of given her my fullest attention and eager cooperation, believe-you-me, but she never chose to bestow her amazing gifts on me. But she did choose that stupid mark of a preacher!"

  "What?"

  "That's right! This one night after the show, Grace was having a laugh and a beer with a bunch of us in the cook tent, and in walks this Bible-pounder and says he wants to see her privately. Well, we all hooted and said sure, and the people in hell want ice water, too! He explained that several women of his parish had complained about the corruption of morals caused by this Whore of Babylon, who— We all stood up and tightened our belts and got ready to kick a little pious butt, but he lifted his hand and explained that he was just quoting the women and not making any accusations off'n his own bat. And we told him he'd better not be, and we sniffed and flexed our shoulders and settled down again, each hoping that Grace had noticed how he'd jumped to her defense—you know how men do. Then this preacher explained that he hadn't come to drive Grace out of town, like his parishioners wanted him to. Instead, he'd come to save her. Well, we all hooted again, but Grace stood up and said she thought it was very kind and neighborly of him to concern himself with the well-being of her soul, and she'd be pleased to hear what he had to say. And off they went to her wagon, leaving the rest of us staring and shaking our heads and saying that there's no accounting for taste.

  "Well, I guess this preacher didn't have the slightest idea of what Grace had in mind because when she made her intentions clear, he came backing out of her tent, stammering and gulping and begging her not to misunderstand his mission. Then he turned and ran, and the last we saw of him he was disappearing down the midway, all elbows and heels and flapping coattails.

  "Would you believe it? That butt-stupid guilt peddler had a chance to experience heaven right here on earth, but he ran off and left poor Loving Grace Appleby as frustrated as a one-armed paperhanger in a roomful of electric fans! And you've got the brass to tell me you admire this man? Back off and give me breathing space, will you?"

  I thought about all this for a while, then I said that it probably took a whole lot of willpower for him to run away, but it was the right and proper thing for a preacher to do.

  Dirty-Shirt Red stopped short and turned to me. "Kid? I'm beginning to think that maybe you ain't got the makings of a carnie in you, after all."

  "Well, maybe not. But I admire that widow's kind nature, the way she gave us those po'boys and pie and—"

  "An easy mark. Hell, even 'bo's can score off her!"

  "—and I admire a man like that banker who managed to put together enough money for a big car and fine clothes and servants and—"

  "Just another mark. I told you how I scored a buck off'n him on a ham wheel, for Christ's sake!"

  "—and I'd just love to be looked up to and admired, like those churchgoers were admiring that preacher and hanging on his words."

  "The dumbest mark of them all! Threw away a chance with Loving Grace Appleby! Look at you, standing there with your face hanging out, telling me how you admire all those marks. What you don't seem to be able to get into your thick head, kid, is that the lowest, most down-on-his-luck carnie in the world is worth more than the kindest hearted, or the richest, or the most pious mark that ever stumbled onto a midway. That's how it is, and that's how it will always—" He stopped short.

  "What is it? What's wrong?"

  He was staring down the track into the evening gloom. "I'll be damned," he whispered. "I'll be god-good'n-damned if it ain't... How about that?"

  I followed his stare, and there approaching us down the tracks was this... floppy thing. That's the only way I can describe this apparition. It was a man. But he didn't walk like a man. With each step, he'd lift his knee high and flop his foot out like he couldn't feel anything from his hips down. His elbows would jerk out to both sides at once, and he kept shrugging so hard I thought his shoulders would pinch his head off. He was dressed in stuff that looked like he'd robbed a scarecrow, and the way his rags were flopping and fluttering all around him didn't calm the general effect at all. His white hair was straggly and tangled, and as he approached I could hear that he was carrying on an animated conversation with someone he was plenty mad at.

  Dirty-Shirt Red pulled me over to the side of the track to make room, and this apparition passed us by, jabbering and jerking, and winking and jabbing whoever he was talking to in the ribs with his elbow, and never even noticing us.

  "Snatch off your cap, kid!" Dirty-Shirt told me. "If you're so hot to admire somebody, start admiring! That there is Carl 'Friendly Fingers' Boyd. He used to be the best three-card monty dealer in the game!"

  THE SACKING OF MISS PLIMSOLL

  Miss Plimsoll was plain.

  Oh, she was loyal; you had to give her that. Totally, relentlessly, oppressively loyal. But this canine virtue was not sufficient to alter his determination to be rid of her, because, to be frank, her plainness was an embarrassment to him. Almost a personal affront.

  Not only the reading public, but also the lemming swarm of academic critics proclaimed Mat
thew Griswald to be the Last of the Disenchanted Generation; the archetype of the moody, creative loner; a tough word merchant whose crisp, minimalist style concealed profound depths of sensitivity. And over the years he had come to share this perception of him. A snotty novelist of the New York gosh-it's-tough-to-be-me-and-misunderstood school went so far as to describe him as 'head priest of his own cult, forever burning incense at the altar of Matthew Griswald.' This was envious nonsense, of course, but, yes, Matthew did see himself as tough, heroic, virile, yet through it all deeply sensitive. And no sensitive man would fire the woman who had stood by him through the years of his Great Drought, when he couldn't write anything worthwhile, just because she wasn't a pretty little bit of sexy fluff.

  But consider the way Plimsoll dealt with his guests!

  She didn't openly disapprove of the cinema idols, the meteors of the jet set, and the rest of the social leeches and cultural sponges who sought to affirm their importance by casually letting it drop that they had been invited to one of Matthew's famous parties, but she was annoyingly unimpressed when he mentioned one of these beautiful people, and she would communicate this apathy by a dry, "Oh, really?" or a yet more deflating, "Is she someone I should know, sir?"

  Not only was she unimpressed by those who flocked to praise him and to be seen doing so, she wasn't all that impressed by the Grand Old Man of American Letters himself. Of course, he didn't expect her to fall into ecstasies of adulation. By no means! But his four decades of literary prominence merited a certain deference, a certain...

  And then there was the way she would arrive at his flat each day so businesslike and full of solemn purpose that he never dared to tell her that he had decided not to work that day because he was tired, or had a nasty hangover, or was just feeling lazy. Her busy, puritan presence forced him to grind out his daily quota of words, whether he wanted to or not.

  But while these irritations of long standing constituted the background climate for his decision to give her the sack, there was no denying that the basic reason was the fact that Plimsoll was plain. Remorselessly, unrepentantly plain. Christ, she even lacked the intriguing ugliness of the jolie laide. Her plainness had a negative, draining weight. Her entry into a room had the same effect as three pretty girls suddenly leaving. (He liked that line. He had used it before. Several times, in fact.)

  While he denied having manufactured his public image as a gruff, macho man of action, Matthew recognized its commercial advantages, and there was no denying that his he-man persona would benefit from his having a secretary others would envy: the sort they would assume he slept with when he was too busy to shop around the sexual meat market that was bohemian London of the No-Longer-Swinging Seventies. What his image needed was a secretary who would stir envy in his guests: a lissom, haughty Black, maybe, or an exotic Oriental, or better yet a cute Cockney in a miniskirt. No one could accuse Plimsoll of being exotic or cute. In fact 'cute' was the kind of word one avoided in her presence, lest the clear intelligent eyes behind her round steel-rimmed glasses rake one with icy scorn.

  Griswald scrubbed his white whisker stubble with his knuckles as he padded barefoot into his living room to survey the wreckage of last night's bash. A hybrid between a sigh and a groan escaped him. He hadn't intended to throw a party; it had just happened; and before he knew it the place was full of smoke and chatter, and everybody was drinking his booze and stroking one another's egos, and butts. And now the place smelled like a Catalonian bordello, and the jagged edges of a hangover lacerated the backs of his eyes when he moved his head.

  He sloughed off his thick terry bathrobe and stood in his shorts, his breasts and stomach flaccid beneath the purplish varnish of sunlamp tan that leathered his skin. To think that this sagging gut had once absorbed body blows in the ring! With a sigh, he began the torture of his morning exercises, despite the sour taste in his mouth and the shards of pain behind his eyes. The first sit-up brought a thud of blood to his head, and he lay back with a martyred moan.

  "Oh, God." He covered his face with his hands. Why did he subject himself to this daily hell? Was it his fault that the reading public insisted on identifying him with the athletes, warriors, and white hunters he wrote about?

  Of course it was his fault. He had milked those roles for all they were worth.

  Well, let's get on with it. Thirty-five of the best!

  One.... uh... two... uh... three... oh, God... four... uh... five... uh...

  By the time his third novel appeared—all solid adventure tales told with journalistic economy and garnished with a trick of repetition he had gleaned from an expatriate American poetess who theorized that readers felt impelled to fill perplexing repetitions with layers of subtle significance— Matthew found himself lifted into cult status by critics who praised his deceptively simple style and devoted paragraphs to his deceptively two-dimensional characters with their deceptively juvenile values and their deceptively selfish goals. This rush into fame almost cost Matthew his career—indeed, his life. He made the understandable, if lethal, mistake of believing what they wrote about him, and for the next eleven years he tried to write in the style of Matthew Griswald. And failed, of course.

  Fourteen... uh... fifteen... Oh, Christ! Now I've lost count. Well, twenty-one... uh... twenty-two... uh...

  Fortunately for his finances, if not his art, the critical and academic communities had invested too much of their reputations in him to permit him to fail; so his Pulitzer Prize came during the years when he was constipated with efforts to write like himself.

  ...Thirty-four... uh-h-h... thirty-five... uh-h-h. Oh, to hell with it! Enough!

  Matthew had never trusted intellectuals, being himself more a man of the senses than of the mind, more a man of experiences than of experience. His male characters were all creatures of action, not of reflection; and his female characters were the stakes for which the men played, not players in the great game. In short, Matthew gave voice to the infantile ideals of the masculine America of his era. But for all his intellectual and philosophical shallowness, he had an original temperament, an eye for evocative detail, a good ear for dialogue; and he was always a stern critic of his own work. It was this critical gift that was his undoing. Late one afternoon at the height of his popularity, he stood at his writing easel, reading for a third time that day's output of self-emulation. He ended up staring through the pages, his eyes defocused, until the room darkened into evening. With no histrionics, he took the nearly-finished manuscript and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. Somewhat more theatrically, he drank a bottle of whiskey in two hours and got so sick he had to spend four days in a hospital, after an undignified session with a stomach pump. For more than two years after that he suffered what he called the Great Drought, during which he didn't write a word. Lost and scared, he made an ass of himself with drinking and scrapping and women, all to the delight of the journalists. In the end, it was fear that saved him. It was either get back to writing, or suicide.

  Funny how life turns on little things: when he put the barrel of the newly cleaned and oiled shotgun into his mouth, he was nauseated by the cod-liver-oil taste of it, a taste that suddenly carried him back to a childhood dominated by a cold, demanding father whom he had spent the rest of his life 'showing'. He shuddered and gagged and put the gun aside.

  As a palpable symbol of making a fresh start, he left New York for London, where he took a flat and began working. He cut down on his drinking by staying dry until dark, and he began a routine of regular meals and exercise. And every day, every day, every day, he ground out a self-imposed number of pages in which he tried to free himself from the old, monosyllabic, staccato style and the worn-out idiom of the Tough Hero with Hidden Pain. At first, things went very badly. Like the circus performer who lets go of one trapeze bar before the other is within reach, he abandoned one style before he developed another, and he fell into the void. In seeking to avoid the trivial, he found himself creating the tedious. He had never had much to say, and now he had
lost the ability to say it in the old crisp yet evocative way.

  But with strength of will born of desperation, he forced himself to pour out the words, turning out pages of flaccid sentences, stupid characters, and ridiculous stories—most of it going directly from typewriter to wastepaper basket, rejected by his unforgiving critical sense, the one talent that did not wither during the Great Drought. His money ran thin, and he survived on little checks his agent sent from reprint and residual rights. Fortunately, his foreign sales remained strong because the monosyllabic simplicity of his style and the transparency of his characters' motives made him easy to translate without significant loss, and easily understood by non-English speakers with fifteen hundred word vocabularies. Although his ability to write fiction had diminished, he could still sell articles on hunting and fishing and Spanish blood sports.

  But the time came when he knew he must start producing fiction, if he were to prolong his fame and fashion. He decided to hire a literary secretary to free himself from the time-consuming, patience-fraying business of cleaning up copy. Someone—he no longer remembered who—recommended a copy editor at his British publishing house, a woman who had a fascination with his writing and who might, therefore, be willing to work cheap.

  And that was how he began working with Miss Plimsoll, who was everything a secretary should be—everything, that is, except pretty enough to contribute to the Griswald image. Efficient and unobtrusive, it wasn't long before she was handling his correspondence with his useless agent and with those readers who still sent letters—mostly ploys to get his autograph, which still had some value in the collector's market. She also managed his flimsy finances and kept his ever-shrinking social calendar. She even did minor editorial work, cleaning up fuzzy passages, deleting inadvertent repetitions, patching up little lapses in logic and sequence, all of which freed his time and energies as he entered the most frantic phase of the Great Drought. He inflicted a yet more grueling work rate on himself which, even when it failed to recapture success, at least dulled his panic with the anodyne of fatigue.