Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Considering the anguish of his body, it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he was hooked. Momentarily this appealed to his sense of the dramatic, but then he realized that it would be a terrible thing to have happen to him. He could not afford to be hooked, for he knew with a sense of calm sadness that his character could no more sustain the responsibility of a steady drug habit than it could sustain the responsibility of any other kind of pattern.

“Oh, what a miserable bastard I am,” Bertie said.

In near-panic he considered leaving the Premingers’ apartment immediately, but he knew that he was in no condition to travel. “You wouldn’t make it to the corner,” he said.

He felt massively sorry for himself. The more he considered it the more certain it appeared that he was hooked. It was terrible. Where would he get the money to buy the drugs? What would they do to his already depleted physical resources? “Oh, what a miserable bastard I am,” he said again.

To steady himself he took a bottle of Scotch from the shelf in the pantry. Bertie did not like hard liquor. Though he drank a lot, it was beer he drank, or, when he could get them, the sweeter cordials. Scotch and bourbon had always seemed vaguely square to him. But he had already finished the few liqueurs that Preminger had, and now nothing was left but Scotch. He poured himself an enormous drink.

Sipping it calmed him — though his body still ached — and he considered what to do. If he was hooked, the first thing was to tell his friends. Telling his friends his latest failure was something Bertie regarded as a sort of responsibility. Thus his rare letters to them usually brought Bertie’s intimates — he laughed at the word — nothing but bad news. He would write that a mistress had given him up, and, with his talent for mimicry, would set down her last long disappointed speech to him, in which she exposed in angry, honest language the hollowness of his character, his infinite weakness as a man, his vileness. When briefly he had turned to homosexuality to provide himself with funds, the first thing he did was write his friends about it. Or he wrote of being fired from bands when it was discovered how bad a trumpeter he really was. He spared neither himself nor his friends in his passionate self-denunciations.

Almost automatically, then, he went into Preminger’s study and began to write all the people he could think of. As he wrote he pulled heavily at the whiskey remaining in the bottle. At first the letters were long, detailed accounts of symptoms and failures and dashed hopes, but as evening came on and he grew inarticulate he realized that it was more important — and, indeed, added to the pathos of his situation — for him just to get the facts to them.

“Dear Klaff,” he wrote at last, “I am hooked. I am at the bottom, Klaff. I don’t know what to do.” Or “Dear Randle, I’m hooked. Tell your wife. I honestly don’t know where to turn.” And “Dear Myers, how are your wife and kids? Poor Bertie is hooked. He is thinking of suicide.”

He had known for a long time that one day he would have to kill himself. It would happen, and even in the way he had imagined. One day he would simply drink the bottle of carbon tetrachloride. But previously he had been in no hurry. Now it seemed like something he might have to do before he had meant to, and what he resented most was the idea of having to change his plans.

He imagined what people would say.

“I let him down, Klaff,” Randle said.

“Everybody let him down,” Klaff said.

“Everybody let him down,” Bertie said. “Everybody let him down.”

Weeping, he took a last drink from Preminger’s bottle, stumbled into the living room and passed out on the couch.

That night Bertie was awakened by a flashlight shining in his eyes. He threw one arm across his face defensively and struggled to sit up. So clumsy were his efforts that whoever was holding the flashlight started to laugh.

“Stop that,” Bertie said indignantly, and thought, I have never been so indignant in the face of danger.

“You said they were out of town,” a voice said. The voice did not come from behind the flashlight, and Bertie wondered how many there might be.

“Jesus, I thought so. Nobody’s answered the phone for days. I never seen a guy so plastered. He stinks.”

“Kill him,” the first voice said.

Bertie stopped struggling to get up.

“Kill him,” the voice repeated.

“What is this?” Bertie said thickly. “What is this?”

“Come on, he’s so drunk he’s harmless,” the second voice said.

“Kill him,” the first voice said again.

“You kill him,” the second voice said.

The first voice giggled.

They were playing with him, Bertie knew. Nobody who did not know him could want him dead.

“Turn on the lights,” Bertie said.

“Screw that,” the second voice said. “You just sit here in the dark, sonny, and you won’t get hurt.”

“We’re wasting time,” the first voice said.

A beam from a second flashlight suddenly intersected the beam from the first.

“Say,” Bertie said nervously, “it looks like the opening of a supermarket.”

Bertie could hear them working in the dark, moving boxes, pulling drawers.

“Are you folks Negroes?” Bertie called. No one answered him. “I mean I dig Negroes, man— men . Miles. Jay Jay. Bird lives.” He heard a closet door open.

“You are robbing the place, right? I mean you’re actually stealing , aren’t you? This isn’t just a social call. Maybe you know my friend Klaff.”

The men came back into the living room. From the sound of his footsteps Bertie knew one of them was carrying something heavy.

“I’ve got the TV,” the first voice said.

“There are some valuable paintings in the dining room,” Bertie said.

“Go see,” the first voice said.

One of Norma’s pictures suddenly popped out of the darkness as the man’s light shone on it.

“Crap,” the second voice said.

“You cats can’t be all bad,” Bertie said.

“Any furs?” It was a third voice, and it startled Bertie. Someone flashed a light in Bertie’s face. “Hey, you,” the voice repeated, “does your wife have any furs?”

“Wait a minute,” Bertie said as though it were a fine point they must be made to understand, “you’ve got it wrong. This isn’t my place. I’m just taking care of it while my friends are gone.” The man laughed.

Now all three flashlights were playing over the apartment. Bertie hoped a beam might illuminate one of the intruders, but this never happened. Then he realized that he didn’t want it to happen, that he was safe as long as he didn’t recognize any of them. Suddenly a light caught one of the men behind the ear. “Watch that light. Watch that light,” Bertie called out involuntarily.

“I found a trumpet,” the second voice said.

“Hey, that’s mine,” Bertie said angrily. Without thinking, he got up and grabbed for the trumpet. In the dark he was able to get his fingers around one of the valves, but the man snatched it away from him easily. Another man pushed him back down on the couch.

“Could you leave the carbon tetrachloride?” Bertie asked miserably.

In another ten minutes they were ready to go. “Shouldn’t we do something about the clown?” the third voice said.

“Nah,” the second voice said.

They went out the front door.

Bertie sat in the darkness. “I’m drunk,” he said after a while. “I’m hooked and drunk. It never happened. It’s still the visions. The apartment is a vision. The darkness is. Everything.”

In a few minutes he got up and wearily turned on the lights. Magicians, he thought, seeing even in a first glance all that they had taken. Lamps were gone, curtains. He walked through the apartment. The TV was gone. Suits were missing from the closets. Preminger’s typewriter was gone, the champagne glasses, the silver. His trumpet was gone.