Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Bertie pressed his back against the door and turned his head slowly across his left shoulder. He imagined himself photographed from underneath. “Odd man in,” he said. He bounded into the center of the living room. I’ll bet there’s a lease, he thought. I’ll bet there’s a regular lease that goes with this place. He considered this respectfully, a little awed. He couldn’t remember ever having been in a place where the tenants actually had to sign a lease. In the dining room he turned on the chandelier lights. “Sure there’s a lease,” Bertie said. He hugged himself. “How the fallen are mighty,” he said.

In the living room he lay down on the couch without taking off his shoes. He sat up and pulled them off, but when he lay down again he was uneasy. He had gotten out of the habit, living the way he did, of sleeping without shoes. In his friends’ leaseless basements the nights were cold and he wore them for warmth. He put the shoes on again, but found that he wasn’t tired any more. It was a fact that dependence gave him energy. He was never so alert as when people did him favors. It was having to be on your own that made you tired.

“Certainly,” Bertie said to the committee, “it’s scientific. We’ve suspected it for years, but until our researchers divided up the town of Bloomington, Indiana, we had no proof. What our people found in that community was that the orphans and bastards were sleepy and run down, while the housewives and people on relief were wide awake, alert, raring to go. We can’t positively state the link yet, but we’re fairly certain that it’s something to do with dependency — in league perhaps with a particularly virulent form of gratitude. Ahem. Ahem.”

As he lectured the committee he wandered around the apartment, touring from right to left. He crossed from the living room into the dining room and turned right into the kitchen and then right again into Preminger’s small study. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” Bertie said, glancing at the contour chair near Preminger’s desk. He went back into the kitchen. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” he said, looking at Norma’s electric stove. He stepped into the dining room and continued on, passing Norma’s paintings of picturesque side streets in Mexico, of picturesque side streets in Italy, of picturesque side streets in Puerto Rico, until he came to a door that led to the back sun parlor. He went through it and found himself in a room with an easel, with paints in sexy little tubes, with brushes, with palettes and turpentine and rags. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” Bertie said and walked around the room to another door. He opened it and was in the Premingers’ master bedroom. He looked at the bed. “Here’s where all the magic happens,” he said. Through a door at the other end of the room was another small hall. On the right was the toilet. He went in and flushed it. It was one of those toilets with instantly renewable tanks. He flushed it again. And again. “The only kind to have,” he said out of the side of his mouth, imagining a rental agent. “I mean, it’s like this. Supposing the missus has diarrhea or something. You don’t want to have to wait until the tank fills up. Or suppose you’re sick. Or suppose you’re giving a party and it’s mixed company. Well, it’s just corny to whistle to cover the noise, know what I mean? ’S jus’ corny. On the other hand, you flush it once suppose you’re not through, then what happens? There’s the damn noise after the water goes down. What have you accomplished? This way”—he reached across and jiggled the little lever and then did it a second time, a third, a fourth—“you never have any embarrassing interim, what we in the trade call ‘flush lag.’ ”

He found the guest bedroom and knew at once that he would never sleep in it, that he would sleep in the Premingers’ big bed.

“Nice place you got here,” he said when he had finished the tour.

“Dooing de woh eet ees all I tink of, what I fahting foe,” the man from the Underground said. “Here ees eet fahrproof, aircondizione and safe from Nazis.”

“Stay out of Volkswagens, kid,” Bertie said.

He went back into the living room. He wanted music, but it was a cardinal principle with him never to blow alone. He would drink alone, take drugs alone, but somehow for him the depths of depravity were represented by having to play jazz alone. He had a vision of himself in a cheap hotel room sitting on the edge of an iron bedstead. Crumpled packages of cigarettes were scattered throughout the room. Bottles of gin were on top of the Gideon Bible, the Western Union blanks. His trumpet was in his lap. “Perfect,” Bertie said. “Norma Preminger could paint it in a picture.” He shuddered.

The phonograph was in the hall between the dining room and living room. It was a big thing, with the AM and the FM and the short wave and the place where you plugged in the color television when it was perfected. He found records in Preminger’s little room and went through them rapidly. “Ahmad Jamahl, for Christ’s sake.” Bertie took the record out of its sleeve and broke it across his knee. He stood up slowly and kicked the fragments of the broken recording into a neat pile.

He turned around and scooped up as many of Preminger’s recordings as he could carry and brought them to the machine. He piled them on indiscriminately and listened with visible, professional discomfort. He listened to The New World Symphony , to Beethoven’s Fifth , to My Fair Lady . The more he listened the more he began to dislike, the Premingers. When he could stand it no longer he tore the playing arm viciously away from the record and looked around him. He saw the Premingers’ bookcase.

“I’ll read,” Bertie said.

He took down the Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller and Ronald Firbank and turned the pages desultorily. Nothing happened. He tried reading aloud in front of a mirror. He went back to the bookcase and looked for The Egg and I and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies . The prose of a certain kind of bright housewife always made Bertie feel erotic. But the Premingers owned neither book. He browsed through Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with his fly unzipped, but he felt only a mild lasciviousness.

He went into their bedroom and opened the closet. He found a pair of Norma’s shoes and put them on. Although he was no fetishist, he had often promised himself that if he ever had the opportunity he would see what it was like. He got into drag and walked around the apartment in Norma’s high heels. All he experienced was a pain in his calves.

In the kitchen he looked into the refrigerator. There were some frozen mixed vegetables in the freezer compartment. “I’ll starve first,” Bertie said.

He found a Billie Holiday record and put it on the phonograph. He hoped that out in Los Angeles, Klaff was being beaten with rubber hoses by the police. He looked up at the kitchen clock. “Nine,” he said. “Only seven in L.A. They probably don’t start beating them up till later.”

“Talk, Klaff,” he snarled, “or we’ll drag you into the Blood Room.”

“Flake off, copper,” Klaff said.

“That’s enough of that, Klaff. Take that and that and that.”

“ Bird lives! ” Bertie screamed suddenly, invoking the dead Charlie Parker. It was his code cry.

“Mama may have,” Billie Holiday wailed, “Papa may have, but God Bless the child who’s got his own, who — oo — zz—”

“Who — oo — zz,” Bertie wailed.

“Got his own,” Billie said.

“I’ll tell him when he comes in, William,” Bertie said.

He waited respectfully until Billie was finished and then turned off the music.

He wondered why so many people felt that Norman Mailer was the greatest living American novelist.