Andrew Shaw - Sin Hellcat

The desk clerk recognized me, called up, spoke softly for a moment or three, and gave me the nod. The elevator took me to her floor and her door was open, her face smiling at me.

“Harvey,” she said, looking at me oddly. “Is something wrong, baby?”

“Long time no see,” I muttered vacantly. I poured myself into her room and her arms swallowed me.

I was twenty-two. A lovely age to be; I hadn’t been twenty-two for years. How many years? No, no, that required counting, and counting hurt the head, and there was the dim possibility I would wake up. Voices murmured.

Back, back, back down into unconsciousness. Where was I? I was twenty-two.

Yes, that’s it. I was twenty-two, and it was summer. Oh, my God, was it summer! It was summer like the inside of an oven, which one shared with the biggest klieg light of them all. Too hot and too bright, and the humidity was fantastic. The air was about eighty per cent water; one didn’t walk down the street, one did the breaststroke. And that’s the only kind of breaststroke one did; it was much too hot for any other kind, and besides that I was living at the Y.

That’s it! I was twenty-two, and it was summer, and it was New York, and I was living at the Y. “I’m going to New York after graduation,” I said to everybody. “But I hear it’s awful expensive to live in New York. I don’t know what to do about an apartment.” And everybody said. “Live at the Y. It’s cheap, and it’s clean.” So I lived at the Y.

And nobody told me I was going to be pawed surreptitiously all the time. And in that heat, too. All these heavy-breathing dark-eyed boys prowling the clean cheap halls at the Y, panting. They were the only things around hotter than the sidewalks.

And the sidewalks were hot. I walked on them, and the bottoms of my shoes got hot. And then I walked some more, and the bottoms of my feet got hot. And then my feet, which were encased by shoes, got hot. And then my ankles got hot. And then I walked into a bar and sat down at a table, because I couldn’t take my shoes off if I sat on a stool at the bar, and I spent a dime of what was left of my savings on a glass of draft, and I sat holding the cold glass in both hands and wiggling my toes. I was twenty-two, and despite it all it was delicious to be alive.

A man came over to my table. It was three-thirty in the afternoon, there were only about eight or nine people in the entire bar, and this man came over to my table. He wasn’t one of the ones like at the Y, he was one of the ones like at the bar, gray-suited and somber-faced, with twenty-year-old bodies and thirty-year-old faces and forty-year-old jowls and fifty-year-old appetites for booze.

This man came over to my table. “You’ve got your shoes off,” he said.

I was twenty-two and my shoes were off and it was delicious to be alive. “By God, sir,” I said, “you are absolutely right.”

“I think that’s great,” he said. He wasn’t drunk, but then he wasn’t sober either. He waved a hand that more or less held a glass containing an amber fluid and two clear unfogged ice cubes with holes in their tummies. “I think that’s absolutely great,” he said, expanding on his last remark, and added, “Mind if I sit down?”

“By all means, sir,” I said. I was twenty-two, and I called everyone over twenty-five ‘sir,’ because that’s the way I was brought up, buddy.

He sat down, lowered the glass to the black Formica table top, and leaned forward to study me, one might say, piercingly. After too long a time of this activity, he straightened up, leaned forward again, and said, “You married?”

“Not as yet,” I said, so there would be no misunderstanding.

“Hah!” he cried, and sloshed drink on the Formica “I knew it,” he announced. “The minute I looked at you, and I saw your shoes was off — were off — I said to myself, ‘There is a free man. That man over there with his shoes off is not married to anybody at all, not even once.’ That’s what I said to myself.”

“You converse rather well,” I complimented him. God, it was delicious to be alive!

“Do you want to know something?” he asked me. Accepting my millisecond of silence for consent, he hastened on. “I have been coming into this bar every afternoon,” he announced, adding parenthetically and inaccurately, “at the coffee break, for the last eight years. Summer, winter, hot weather, rainy weather, all of that stuff. And do you want to know something?”

“Something else?” I asked him.

“I have never,” he said emphasizing his words by rhythmically sloshing drink in the general neighborhood, “never in all that time seen anyone in here take off his shoes. What do you think of that?”

“Not much,” I said.

“Exactly!” he cried.

At that moment, a waiter came by. I could tell he was a waiter by the filthy apron wrapped round his middle. Everything else in the bar, including the bartender, the customers, the glasses, the tables and the floor, all were clean, except this dour-faced man in his rape-of-Troy apron. “You can’t have your shoes off in here,” is what he said to me.

I had just about decided that my shoes were getting a lot more attention than they deserved. They were just a cheap pair of old black shoes. I’d worn them for three years now, practically all the way through college. Not to bed, of course, but almost always else.

The man opposite me said, “Never mind,” to the waiter.

The waiter looked at him, and then looked questioningly at the bartender over there, and the bartender shook his head in a leave-them-alone gesture, and I knew at once that I was talking to an Important Man, and I thought of all the success stories I knew which opened in bars, but practically all of them were sexual, so I dropped that line of thought. I was living in the Y, and it had been five weeks since I had last seen Jodi, and there was little likelihood I would ever see her again, and I hadn’t yet found a job so that I could have an apartment and meet girls and start all over again with someone else, so I did my level best not to even think about sex. The heat helped, that way.

The Important Man then said, “What’s your line, my friend?

“I don’t have one yet,” I admitted. “I came to New York three weeks ago,” I explained, “armed with my brand-new sheepskin, and I’ve been prowling the streets, turning down management-trainee jobs, ever since.”

“Good,” he said. “What kind of college? You an engineer or something? Or what?”

Did I look like an engineer? “It was a Liberal Arts College,” I said, rather stiffly, “and quite a good one at that, where I obtained a Bachelor of Arts, with a major in English, primarily American and British Literature.”

“Now, what the hell,” he said. He looked at me, frowning, puzzled, obviously ready and willing to learn something. “Now what the hell did you do that for?” he asked me.

I blinked. I’m sure I did. “What the hell did I do what for?” I parried.

“Get your degree,” he explained patiently, “in English. Now, you could of got your degree in anything you wanted, history or science or even philosophy, and you could of been adapted into American industry, some way or another. But English? Let me tell you something, my friend. By the way, the name’s Tom Stanton.”

“Harvey Christopher,” I told him, and we solemnly shook hands. His hand was wet. From the drink. I surreptitiously dried my hand on my trousers.

“Let me tell you something, Harv,” he said, for which I never forgave him. After all, I had been calling him ‘sir.’ “It’s this way,” he went on, ignoring my reaction. “American industry, now, distrusts the English major. And for very good reasons, too. The English major is very liable to be a guy who thinks like mad, all the time, but what he’s thinking about is very rarely much use to American industry. You see what I mean? What, do you figure to be — a writer?”