Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

He sat down on the Premingers’ coffee table and marveled at his being alone in so big and well-furnished an apartment. The Premingers were probably the most substantial people he knew. Though plenty of the others wanted to, Bertie thought bitterly, Preminger was the only one from the old crowd who might make it. Of course he was Jewish, and that helped. Some Jews swung pretty good, but he always suspected that in the end they would hold out on you. But then who wouldn’t, Bertie wondered. Kamikaze pilots, maybe. Anyway, this was Bertie’s special form of anti-Semitism and he cherished it. Melvin Gimpel, for example, his old roommate. Every time Melvin tried to kill himself by sticking his head in the oven he left the kitchen window open. One time he found Gimpel on his knees with his head on the oven door, oddly like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Bertie closed the window and shook Gimpel awake.

“Mel,” he yelled, slapping him. “ Mel .

“Bertie, go way. Leave me alone, I want to kill myself.”

“Thank God,” Bertie said. “Thank God I’m in time. When I found that window closed I thought it was all over.”

“What, the window was closed? My God, was the window closed?”

“Melvin Gimpel is so simple

Thinks his nipple is a pimple,”

Bertie recited.

He hugged his knees, and felt again a wave of the nauseous sickness he had experienced that morning. “It’s foreshadowing. One day as I am shoveling my walk I will collapse and die.”

When the nausea left him he thought again about his situation. He had friends everywhere and made his way from place to place like an old-time slave on the Underground Railway. For all the pathos of the figure he knew he deliberately cut, there were always people to do him favors, give him money, beer, drugs, to nurse him back to his normal state of semi-invalidism, girls to kiss him in the comforting way he liked. This was probably the first time he had been alone in months. He felt like a dog whose master has gone away for the weekend. Just then he heard some people coming up the stairs and he growled experimentally. He went down on his hands and knees and scampered to the door, scratching it with his nails. “Rrrgghhf,” he barked. “Rrgghhfff!” He heard whoever it was fumbling to open a door on the floor below him. He smiled. “Good dog,” he said. “Good dog, goodog, gudug, gudugguduggudug.”

He whined. He missed his master. A tear formed in the corner of his left eye. He crawled to a full-length mirror in the bathroom. “Ahh,” he said. “Ahh.” Seeing the patch across his eye, he had an inspiration. “Here, Patch,” he called. “Come on, Patch.” He romped after his own voice.

He moved beside Norma Preminger’s easel in the sun parlor. He lowered his body carefully, pushing himself slightly backward with his arms. He yawned. He touched his chest to the wooden floor. He wagged his tail and then let himself fall heavily on one side. He pulled his legs up under him and fell asleep.

When Bertie awoke he was hungry. He fingered the twenty dollars in his pocket that Preminger had given him. He could order out. The light in the hall where the phone and phone books were was not good, so he tore “Restaurants” from the Yellow Pages and brought the sheets with him into the living room. Only two places delivered after one A.M. It was already one-thirty. He dialed the number of a pizza place across the city.

“Pal, bring over a big one, half shrimp, half mushroom. And two six-packs.” He gave the address. The man explained that the truck had just gone out and that he shouldn’t expect delivery for at least another hour and a half.

“Put it in a cab,” Bertie said. “While Bird lives Bertie spends.”

He took out another dozen or so records and piled them on the machine. He sat down on the couch and drummed his trumpet case with his fingers. He opened the case and fit the mouthpiece to the body of the horn. He put the trumpet to his lips and experienced the unpleasant shock of cold metal he always felt. He still thought it strange that men could mouth metal this way, ludicrous that his professional attitude should be a kiss. He blew a few bars in accompaniment to the record and then put the trumpet back in the case. He felt in the side pockets of the trumpet case and took out two pairs of dirty underwear, some handkerchiefs and three pairs of socks. He unrolled one of the pairs of socks and saw with pleasure that the drug was still there. He took out the bottle of carbon tetrachloride. This was what he cleaned his instrument with, and it was what he would use to kill himself when he had finally made the decision.

He held the bottle to the light. “If nothing turns up,” he said, “I’ll drink this. And to hell with the kitchen window.”

The cab driver brought the pizza and Bertie gave him the twenty dollars.

“I can’t change that,” the driver said.

“Did I ask you to change it?” Bertie said.

“That’s twenty bucks there.”

“Bird lives. Easy come, easy go go go,” Bertie said.

The driver started to thank him.

“Go.” He closed the door.

He spread Norma Preminger’s largest tablecloth over the dining-room table and then, taking china and silver from the big breakfront, laid several place settings. He found champagne glasses.

Unwrapping the pizza, he carefully plucked all the mushrooms from it (“American mushrooms,” he said. “Very square. No visions.”) and laid them in a neat pile on the white linen. (“Many mushloom,” he said. “Mushloom crowd.”) He poured some beer into a champagne glass and rose slowly from his chair.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “to the absent Klaff. May the police in Los Angeles, California, beat his lousy ass off.” He drank off all the beer in one gulp and tossed the glass behind him over his shoulder. He heard it shatter and then a soft sizzling sound. Turning around, he saw that he had hit one of Norma’s paintings right in a picturesque side street. Beer dripped ignobly down a donkey’s leg. “Goddamn,” Bertie said appreciatively, “ action painting.”

He ate perhaps a quarter of the pizza before rising from the table, wiping the corner of his lips with a big linen napkin. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I propose that the ladies retire to the bedroom while we men enjoy our cigars and port and some good talk.”

“I propose that we men retire to the bedroom and enjoy the ladies,” he said in Gimpel’s voice.

“Here, here,” he said in Klaff’s voice. “Here, here. Good talk. Good talk.”

“If you will follow me, gentlemen,” Bertie said in his own voice. He began to walk around the apartment. “I have often been asked the story of my life. These requests usually follow a personal favor someone has done me, a supper shared, a bed made available, a ride in one of the several directions. Indeed, I have become a sort of troubadour who does not sing so much as whine for his supper. Most of you—”

“Whine is very good with supper,” Gimpel said.

“Gimpel, my dear, why don’t you run into the kitchen and play?” Bertie said coolly. “Many of you may know the humble beginnings, the sordid details, the dark Freudian patterns, and those of you who are my friends—”

Klaff belched.

“Those of you who are my friends , who do not run off to mix it up with the criminal element in the far West, have often wondered what will ultimately happen to me, to ‘Poor Bertie’ as I am known in the trade.”

He unbuttoned his shirt and let it fall to the floor. In his undershirt he looked defenseless, his skin pale as something seen in moonlight. “Why, you wonder, doesn’t he do something about himself, pull himself up by his bootstraps? Why, for example, doesn’t he get his eyes fixed? Well, I’ve tried.”