Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

Teresa unfurled a fresh stick of gum, popped it into her mouth, rolling it up as she did it, and waved away his comment. “My folks? My old lady’s dead and my old man wouldn’t care what happened to me as long as I kept bringin’ in that twenty a week for rent.”

They walked out onto the sidewalk and he started to steer her up the street to Romeo’s where the thirty-five-cent plate of spaghetti seemed about right for this date. “Whaddaya do for a livin’,” Rusty asked.

She cocked an eyebrow at him and a little half-titter escaped her small mouth. “I work in a office down on Nineteenth Street. Accountin’ an’ like that, y’know.” Rusty knew. He knew many young guys and broads who had been forced out of the streets into these treadmill jobs. If she cleared forty-five dollars a week she was lucky. Twenty to her old man for rent… no wonder she was looking for a pickup come Sunday nights. She was past kid age when she could scream over Eddie Fisher and Elvis without being self-conscious. She had reached the age when she was worried about the future and knew she was not pretty enough to make a good match. She had reached the age when comic books no longer appealed to her. She was a lost one, too—a transition person—stuck in a groove and too confused to find her way out.

Sunday night pickup. Just out of the jailbait class. And raring to romp.

They ate their spaghetti in relative silence. She liked Fats Domino. She did not like the movie they had seen—wasn’t that Jayne Mansfield just too cheap in them tight red dresses why hell I’d never wear a dress like that. True, thought Rusty, all too damned true. She did not like New York mugginess. She did like Rusty. She would not at all mind the idea of going to a hotel with him.

She was old enough to buy a bottle at the state store, but it was closed. Rusty knew a place where Sunday did not matter. She only hesitated a moment when Rusty suggested a fifty-fifty split on it. She bought a bottle of good Scotch from the man and Rusty wondered how she knew good from bad. She didn’t seem to have the brains.

They had no trouble at the Southern Hotel—Rusty had been there before and knew the system. Two bucks extra and they weren’t disturbed all night.

She wasn’t very good in bed and later in the night, when the sounds from the airshaft had diminished, she cried against his unresponding shoulder. She cried about the trouble she had curling her hair, and the way her nose swelled with allergies in the summer, and the way she loved him, and the sorrows that only the city and the night and life can bring. Rusty hardly heard. He was sunk in his own black thoughts.

It did no good; Dolores was dead, Moms was dying inside, there was no thought at all of Pops, and he was garbage from top to bottom. Everything was sliding downhill again. It did no good to make the attempt. It did no good. What the hell, it did no good.

Everything was rotten. Everything stunk. He hit her and she crept closer to him in the sticky sheets. He reached over and took the nearly empty bottle. If it ran out before the thoughts were drowned, he’d send her out for another.

She’d go. He’d make sure she went.

He finished the bottle.

It was a bad night all around.

rusty santoro

the cougars

the beast

Beside him in the dirty, rumpled, sweat-reeking sheets, the slim body of a strange girl lay humped and sleeping. He stared across and down at her for a long moment, trying to place her—then it all came back in sequence and his hatred for himself became even greater. She had cried and he had hit her in the face. She had not left him. He recalled dimly that he, too, had cried, and that was the reason she had stayed, clinging close to him in binding misery.

But the stench of sour liquor pervaded the cheap hotel room, seeping in and out of the cracked yellow paint, rolling around the rusty shank of the fire extinguisher pipe jutting from one wall at ceiling level.

The place was hot and muggy. He stumbled from the bed, dragging a sheet with him and stamped furiously at it, finally disengaging its cloying weight. He threw up the water-stained blind and the dim light of the gray airshaft poured across the bed. He turned in the face of it and stared at her naked body, sprawled sidewise across the mattress. It had been a lousy night. Poor slob of a broad. He slumped down in the seedy, overstuffed armchair near the silent radiator.

The picture of Dolores came back and he could hardly help comparing her with this girl in the bed. It was not a flattering comparison, and then he remembered this girl had one thing his sister had lost.

Her life.

He twisted in the chair, and bit his fist. He beat at the arm of the chair and golden spores of dust rose twistingly in the weak shafts of light from the window. He could feel the tears coming, he could feel his heart breaking. God, he could feel the edge of the Earth up-ending to send him screaming into the Pit. Rusty had never known such a pain, worse than switch, and worse than zip, and worse than broken bottle. It was the worst. It was so low, it crawled.

Moms was all alone. He had to get home. That had been bad yesterday. Real bad. Leaving her like that. He must be crazy, he must of been out of his skull. He had to get back.

He moved rapidly, then, and paused in his dressing for only a moment, considering whether he should waken the girl and say goodbye, take her to breakfast. He decided not to do it. The nights were one thing, but the days were another. For a minute he stood watching her deep, even breathing, watching her small breasts rise and fall, half covered by the not-quite-clean sheet. He felt terribly sorry for her, and for himself as well. He started to reach for his wallet—perhaps a dollar would help her out—then stopped his hand. She wasn’t a whore, he berated himself sharply. She wasn’t cheap although she was lonely. She wasn’t a slut just because she was afraid.

He reached into his hip pocket and took out his wallet.

In an inner pocket he found the souvenir Spanish coin he had been given by his mother, many years before, to keep as a good luck piece. (“Keep this in your pocket, and you’ll never be broke.”) The boy stared at it intently for a long second.

He laid it down on the soiled towel that lay across the bureau top as a doily.

He closed the door quietly behind himself.

The subway was nearly deserted. As he sped uptown, he could see trains zipping past in the opposite direction, laden with early morning office workers, their faces blank with half-sleep, their eyes directed to their newspapers, folded lengthwise for column-reading, and to avoid jostling the riders on either side. But Rusty’s train was nearly empty.

The train roared clankingly through the tunnels, the stanchions zipping by outside the window till they became one vertical blur. An old woman sat huddled against the far wall, beneath a spaghetti ad, looking as though the sauce was dropping on her, weighing her down. A young man with a tweed topcoat lounged across and up a few feet from Rusty, reading the day-old book review section of the Times. Every few minutes he would rub the bridge of his nose.

The constant machine thrummmm of the train somehow soothed Rusty. He thought of the million times he had ridden the underground, and it was a familiar thing. It made his thoughts easier, his thoughts clearer.

He thought of the times he had ridden this subway with his sister. She had been so gentle and slim beside him. Her face the playground of a thousand smiles. Her eyes the lights that lit the darkness. She was gone now. Dead. The family had two dead ones now—Dolores and Pops. He was as good as dead. He was no use to anyone and she was cold and gone.