Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“I’m not an addict,” the boy blurted. “I don’t even have a habit.” Now the rush of his speech muffled his impediment. Feldman wondered where it had gone, then tuned in on the spurious, jazzy scat of his tumbling speech. The kid could be a fake.

Feldman interrupted him. “What is this? What are you pulling here? What do you mean you’re not an addict? What’s all this? What’s going on? What are you driving at?”

“Oh,” the boy said, “oh. I’m sorry. Maybe I had the wrong idea about this setup.”

“Setup?”

“I heard talk.”

“Talk? What talk?”

“That you do f-favors.”

“Yes?”

“That you d-do favors. I need something. I’m too listless. I need a prescription.”

“A prescription? What prescription?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know the name of the stuff. But I had it once and it h-helped.”

Feldman picked up the phone and began to dial at random. The young man jumped. It was all the test he would ever take, Feldman thought prophetically, seeing his alarm as the sign of his legitimacy, that single reflex the springing of his addiction. He remembered for him what the boy would forget: that instinct did him in, that he had been hooked at such and such a time on such and such a date by nothing more palpable than his brief alarm. “Busy,” he said curtly. “I’ll try again in a minute.” The boy settled back, and in a moment Feldman dialed Freedman’s number.

“Freedman? Feldman. What do you say, Freedman?…Listen, I meant to thank you about Lilly, but I’ve been a little queasy about the whole thing…Well, it’s a bad business all around…No. Lilly’s all right. He was a first-rate man. But what I called you about — well, she’s depressed. I forgave her, but the whole thing still doesn’t sit right with her. I tell her a thousand times a day, ‘Lilly, it’s all right. Everybody makes mistakes.’ I’ve even confessed to fictive infidelities of my own, but the girl’s ridden with guilt…Tranquilizers?” He looked at the boy in the chair; the young man shook his head. “No, Doctor, she’s been on tranquilizers, and they just don’t seem to do the job. As a matter of fact, your man prescribed them himself as a precaution. I’d call him back to ask for something stronger, but Lilly doesn’t want to have anything more to do with him. Too ashamed. She ripped his name off the label first thing. I’ve never seen anything like that girl’s shame. You know Lilly, she’s a ball of fire when she’s herself…Won’t stir out of the house, doesn’t even want to get out of bed. I wanted to bring her over to see you, but she doesn’t know you gave me that fellow’s name, and she’s afraid she’d blurt out the whole story in the consultation room. She’s in terrible shape, Doctor. I’m really worried this time. I’m thinking maybe I should have let her have the kid. She’s so listless . I’ll tell you the truth — I’m afraid she’s going to start seeing him again… Him . The nigger. Well, he’s our dry-cleaning man. Big black brute he is. I think of that nigger’s cock in my Lilly’s pussy, and I want to cry. I need some help on this, Doc…Her bowels? How are her bowels?” The boy nodded agreeably. “One thing, Doc, her bowels are right as rain…A fever?” He looked at the young man. “No. No fever.” The boy imitated a sleeper. “It’s just this listlessness. Sleeps around the clock…What? What’s that? The superamphetamines?…What they give the advanced catatonics, you say?” He looked at the beaming boy. “Well, that sounds all right to me. Why don’t we just try that? Tell you what, call the pharmacist in your building, and I’ll send my boy over to pick it up. And say, Doc, I want you to come by for that suit. Hear?…I mean that…Much obleeged. Really, Doc, much obleeged to you.”

He scribbled an address and handed it to the young man. “If you run out we can have it renewed,” he said.

And still he was at their mercy, riding passenger to their driver’s seat. He undertook to teach himself the pharmacopoeia — much as, weeks before, he had pored over the illustrations in medical texts, learning the uterus like the parts of speech — and in a week had a junkie’s knowledge of all soft anodynes, and thought in ampules and capsules and decimaled grain. The pusher , he thought, there’s a salesman. But it was hopeless, he reflected bitterly, with a wishful pitch, like the acceptance speech of a dark horse, already half formed in his head. “Shit! Shit for sale! Shit for shooting, for snuffing and smoking. Swallow it with water from the tap or stir it in lemonade sweetened to taste. Imported shit shipments. Domestic shit grown in our own vacant lots. Airplane glue for the kiddies and Dad’s war-earned morphine and Demarol for Grandma. Psychedelics for the whole family. (The family that prays together stays together.) Why toss and turn another moment? Throw away those sleepless nights. Shit here. Shit for pain and shit for pep, shit for languor, shit for gloom. (Thank you, and will there be anything else, sir? A hypodermic, sir, a syringe? Needles? Have you thought of everything?) ” Too bad he would never make it. To wheel and deal in ultimate products: ah! oh! me oh my! Hangmen’s rope, warheads, heavy water and the life of Christ. (Judas, there was a salesman!) Damn, he thought. Damn the ICC, damn Food and Drugs and SEC. Damn the board of health and the FCC and the fire and boxing commissions. Damn all rulings of the Supreme Court in restraint of trade, and the laws that keep my help from going naked in the aisles. Damn the timers of the stoplights, and those who license, and those who make the rules for the safety checks of airplanes. Curse the up-to-snuff thickness of rails that support such and such a weight at such and such a temperature. Damn, too, the snoops who oversee the construction of bridges and insist on precautions before letting a single worker go into a mine or a tunnel. Damn that measly conspiracy of the civilized that puts safety before profit and makes hazard illegal, and damn finally, then, those at the top who would extend longevity by requiring dullness and who this morning reduced almost to absolute zero the possibility that when I left my house after a handsome breakfast that followed an eight-hour restoring sleep, I would see one man come after another man with a knife.

That’s that, he sighed, a realist who surrendered quarter where it was due and would never be a pusher, but merely sin’s friend downtown, a doer of favors, crime’s wardheeler, transgressions’s lousy legman, wrong’s cop and felony’s cabbie giving directions to the conventioneers.

But seeking to cover all markets, he needed to know the names of the pushers. He dialed Freedman. “It’s me, Doctor…Not good, Doc, not good. Sad and downhearted. Got the blues you know, old time, sunk-spirit funk. The fantods, Physician…No no, nothing you could call a new wrinkle. It’s Lilly again. We hooked her, Doc. Lilly’s hooked. She come up a dope fiend. Flaming, raging addict, Lilly is. She’d kill for the stuff, Doc. Yes sir, she’d lie and steal and murder and cavort. We did it this time. Freedman. We sure did a job on old Lilly. Good thing I’m rich, a habit like she’s got. Only thing keeps her off the street this minute’s my money, I guess. Have to appreciate small blessings, way I look at it. But Lilly, well sir, Lilly’s got a monkey on her back like King Kong…No, no. You know Lilly, her character. A cure’s out of the question. Only way to make her stop is tie her up and sit on top of her. A cure’s out. Lilly’s system just couldn’t stand up to cold turkey. No, Doc, I look down that lonesome road, and all I can see is doom in that direction. We’re just going to have to accept it, I’m afraid, and that’s why I had to call my family physician…No, hell, I understand your position. I know that as a medical man you can’t just go on prescribing these drugs for her…I know about your Hippocratic oath, and I want to tell you I respect you for it…. Ab solutely not, out of the question, I appreciate that. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. But still and all, Doctor, you’re the one got her into this, ruined her health with an abortion, then prescribed narcotics to bring her round again…No, of course I’m not blaming you. Of course not. You did what you thought necessary. But, well sir, we’re decent people, Lilly and me. What do we know about the underworld and the syndicate and those plug-uglies? I was hoping I could get the names of some pushers from you so’s I could keep Lilly supplied, so’s the cupboard’s never bare…Sure, pos itively , that’s all I want…How’s that?…You will? Well, I appreciate it. Here, just let me get a pencil and a sheet of paper. Okey-dokey, I’m ready…Uh huh. Uh huh. Him? Tch tch…Uh huh. Uh huh. Fine, I got it all down. Thank you…But I do have a bone to pick with you, Dr. Freedman. Can you guess what it is?…That’s right, the suit…All right, now that’s a promise. That’s a promise from a man that’s under the Hippocratic oath.”