Candy

Chapter Five

I WAS PROCESSING the application of a Miss Matilda Ferkel, a shrivelled little thing who had taught school for thirty-two years, who lived alone in a residential hotel off Gramercy Park, and who wanted to borrow one hundred dollars to give her Siamese cat Lemuel a decent burial.

It’s a genuine pleasure to do business with people like Matilda Ferkel.

Processing her application was just so much paperwork, just a matter of form. There was about as much chance that Miss Ferkel would default on her loan as there was of the Washington Senators winning the World Series. Matilda Ferkel just didn’t come on like a crook.

Besides, her story had touched the strings of my heart. Her cat Lemuel had been her constant companion for almost twelve years, which is evidently quite a distance for a cat, and then poor old Lemuel just sort of dried up and died, and now that Lemuel was in heaven it didn’t seem fitting and proper to consign his corporeal remains to the incinerator.

Hence the loan, and it was for a good cause. It was also for a cunning twenty-five percent interest, but that is neither here nor there.

Anyway, here I am processing Miss Ferkel’s application when my faithful co-worker Les Boloff ups from his chair, meanders over to my desk and leans on it with his face sort of hanging. He looked sad.

Hell, he always looked sad. Les was one of those unfortunate bastards who always seems to have recently emerged from a Turkish bath. It can be twenty below out and he is still swimming in his own sweat. He’s a soft, fat guy to begin with, the type of guy you know after one glance to be a real sweet slob, a nice Joe who’ll do anything for you, and a guy who has never made much of anything out of his life.

“Jeff—”

I tried to smile but it hurt. It was tough enough raising my head the way I felt, let alone smiling. So I just looked up at him with an expressionless expression on my poor face and waited for him to say something.

“Jeff—”

“What gives, Les?”

“Let’s have lunch together.”

I shrugged. “That’s all?”

“Yeah, I figured it might be nice to go out together to get a bite instead of ordering food up. About noon or so?”

“Okay by me.”

“Fine,” he said. “There’s a Chink place around the corner that gives you a good meal for a buck or so. I used to eat there once, twice a week.”

He turned to go.

“Les—”

“Yeah, Jeff?”

“What’s the bit?”

He hesitated—just for a split-second, but enough so that I knew there was plenty that wasn’t right in the world. “Nothing,” he said. “We’ll talk about it at lunch.”

I went back to Miss Matilda Ferkel and her dead cat but my heart wasn’t in it. Something was wrong, something that was deeply disturbing to my good friend Les, and to make things just that much cooler I was hungover to beat the band. The band that I wanted to beat was the one that was playing funereal rhythms inside my head. I didn’t mind too much that the drummer was pounding my cerebellum or that the cat on trumpet didn’t have the decency to use a mute—this was par. But if the bastards would only have played something cheerful, things would have been rosier.

I glanced around the office and saw gleefully that it was empty of customers. This isn’t normally an occasion for rejoicing but I had something special in mind. I opened the bottom drawer of my desk, unearthed a bottle of rye and took a hearty guzzle from the bottle.

It worked.

The band was playing happy music now. And the trumpet genius had a mute on his horn now.

Ah.

You see, I didn’t mind the band as such because I was used to it, used to a morning hangover as part of the daily routine, used to drinking myself quietly to sleep every night in my revolting little room in the Kismet Hotel, used to waking up every morning with the boys jamming in my skull. It was all part of the game, and the fact that the game was not worth the candle is a fact everybody should kindly refrain from mentioning.

One solid month.

One month without seeing or speaking to my mistress, one month without knowing where she was or what she was doing or if I would ever see her again.

Candy.

My mistress.

Oh, it had been one hell of a month, let me tell you. Things had settled down to a monotonous routine that was almost comfortable until you stopped to think about it. A room at the Kismet Hotel complete with a liquor store across the street. A job at the Beverley Finance Company complete with a bottle in my bottom drawer. A couple drinks during the day to take the edge off. A few quick belts at the bar around the corner the minute I got out of the office. A dinner of sorts at a lunch counter and a bottle to take to bed.

What else could I take to bed?

Not Lucy.

Not Candy.

That left me with a bottle.

Which was better than nothing at all, I suppose.

One night it got bad enough for me to go whore-hunting, and for that it has to be very bad indeed. But the bottle was no great soulmate that night and I got up, put on a suit and tie and got the hell out of the hotel. The whores had switched their location since my last visit to Whore Row, which wasn’t particularly astounding. I hadn’t needed to go on a whore-hunt in the past eleven years.

They used to be on Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 48th. Then the city had a clean-up campaign and for all of a week, I guess, they went into hiding. Now they were on Seventh Avenue between 47th and 52nd, which is as good a place as any. They stand in doorways and say nothing, and little men dressed very nattily stop occasional passers-by and exalt the charms of the various whores.

Dressed nattily. That reminds me of the old vaudeville bit that went something like:

Do you like to dress nattily?

No, but I’d like to undress Natalie.

Oh, well. So I found my whore next to the Brass Rail and we repaired to a hotel that was, if possible, worse than the Kismet. It made the Somerville look like something Hilton was saving up to buy. No roaches in this place—they were afraid of the big bugs.

So we checked into the hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Mordecai Sledge at a cost of a hot two bucks and checked into bed for another ten. The girl told me her name was Mildred and she was no bargain. She wouldn’t have been much of a bargain at fifty cents in Gimbel’s basement, and at ten bucks I was really getting a screwing.

Which had been my object to begin with, so why fight it?

But she was really pretty awful. I got undressed and sat down on the edge of the bed while she peeled off a cruddy red dress with nothing under it. There should have been something under it—she would have looked a hell of a lot better.

She had big breasts but they were the type that could put you off breasts for life. To say that they were not firm is like saying that the ocean is not dry. They drooped like wet noodles.

So did I.

Breasts—hell, she could have slung them over her shoulder. I was half expecting her to grin at me and tie them in a bow or something.

So there we were, both of us naked and both of us on the bed and both of us equally bored with the whole procedure. I didn’t even mind the ten-spot at this point; I just wished I was home in bed with my bottle. My lack of enthusiasm must have been evident because she asked me what was the matter.

I started to tell her that what I really wanted was a piece of Candy, but I don’t think she would have understood. Instead I told her it was all a horrible mistake and I’d better get home to my bottle.

“Here,” she said, pushing me back down on the bed. “I know what’s wrong. You’re just a little tired is all.”

“Maybe.”

“You been drinking?”

I nodded miserably.

“That’ll do it. Here, you just lie down like this and I’ll see what I can do to help you. I’ll make it real easy for you.”

“I’d rather you made it hard for me.”

She laughed at that one. They stopped laughing at it forty years ago at Minsky’s but she was in a happy mood.

“Lie down,” she said. “Relax.”

I tried to.

“Close your eyes.”

I closed my eyes. Ah, it was better already—I didn’t have to look at her.

“Now,” she cooed. “Now I just know everything’s going to be all right. You just wait and see if I don’t know what I’m talking about. Everything’s just going to be all hunkydory now.”

If there was ever a speech less flawlessly designed to get a man in the mood …

But the gal knew what she was doing. Her hands were soft and she put them to good use. They were all over me, touching, caressing, squeezing, pinching, fondling, and doing all these diverse tasks with the utmost in competent professionalism.

Hand and lips, teeth and tongue.

Her mouth warm and demanding. Her hands quick and certain.

Her hungry mouth.

When I got home I took three showers and still felt dirty. I drained the bottle dry and collapsed in the chair and slept for six hours sitting bolt upright.

The Chinese restaurant, coyly called the Hoy Polloy, got rich on buck-a-plate lunches by cramming the tables close together, so close that you could gobble up somebody else’s chop suey if your own moo goo gai pan wasn’t to your liking. Les and I had a table in the back that we got to by air-lift. He ordered two dishes from number something and one from number something else and I drank a double rye with a little soda while we waited for our slop to come. The rye was good and I lapped it up like a camel after a long trek across the Sahara. Les stared balefully at the rye until it had all been transferred from the glass to my gullet, which is where it obviously belonged. Then he took the cigarettes that I offered him and lit them both with the lighter his wife gave him as a birthday present.

“Jeff,” he said. “I don’t know how to say this—”

I let him try again.

“Look, Jeff—Joe and Phil are right guys, wouldn’t you say?”

He meant our bosses, Joe Burns and Phil Delfy. “Yeah,” I agreed. “Thieves, too. Crooks, undoubtedly. Loan sharks, inevitably. But I’ll go along with the notion that they’re right guys.”

He pouted. “They always treated me decent.”

“Me too.”

“They aren’t tough to work for, Jeff. They don’t make a guy hit a time clock or work like a galley slave like some of the bastards in the business.”

“Hell,” I said. “We work on an incentive basis. A time clock would hurt them as much as it would aggravate us. It’s only to their own advantage—”

He held up a hand. “I know it,” he said, “but a lot of momsers wouldn’t see it that way. Joe and Phil give the pair of us a pretty straight deal.”

I nodded. I wanted to find out what he was getting at. “Jeff,” he said. “You’ve been with Beverley how long?”

“Four, five years. Something like that.”

“You figuring on going somewhere else soon?”

I just stared at him for a minute. It took me that long to make sure that he wasn’t kidding.

“No,” I said. “No, but—”

“I don’t like to be the one to say this,” he cut in, “but if you don’t straighten out soon you’re going to be out on your ear. If—”

“Hey, hang on a minute!”

He held up the hand again. “Jeff,” he said pleadingly, “it’s not my idea. Believe me, to me you’re a nice guy. I want you working in the same office with me forever. I mean it—it’s not that we know each other so closely because we don’t, but I like working with you and by me you’re all right. But the way you’ve been going at it lately—”

“Like how?”

“Like that,” he said, pointing to the rye. There were two more ounces in it now—I’d managed to catch the waiter’s eye while Les was talking. “You’ve been drinking like you heard rumors of another Prohibition.”

I swallowed the rye.

He looked hurt. “Jeff,” he said, “believe me, by me you could drink oceans and it wouldn’t bother me. But—”

“Phil and Joe?”

He nodded.

“Look,” I said. “Phil and Joe are hardly saints. You don’t find saints in the finance business. You rarely find saints in the respectable banking business, for that matter. And Beverley Finance is as far removed from the respectable banking business as—”

I had a good image cooked up but he cut me off. “Jeff,” he said, “let me say two things. First of all, no matter how crooked Phil and Joe may seem to you, their operations are strictly within the letter of the law. Our clients are not pulled off the streets and nobody makes them borrow. They come to us—remember that. They come to us because we fulfill a legitimate need.”

I shrugged. There was room for argument on that score. You might say we created the “legitimate need” with our coy little advertisements. But I let him finish what he was trying to say.

“Second,” he went on, “neither Phil nor Joe expects anybody working at the place to be a plaster saint. If a man beats his wife they don’t care. If a man takes dope they don’t care. But if it gets in the way of the business they do care, and for that who can blame them?”

I held up the empty glass and nodded at it. “Does this get in the way of the business?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He looked unhappy. “You keep a bottle in your desk—twice yesterday you took a drink while there were clients in the office. You smelled of liquor and the clients can tell this. You slur your words from time to time—maybe you haven’t realized this but I’ve noticed it. You—”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly. You put through one application that it was lucky Miss Glaser caught because he was in the book as a deadbeat. All you had to do was look in the book and you would have known it, but you got careless.”

“Which one was that?”

“Harwell, Farwell, I forget.”

“Carwell,” I said. “Herbert Carwell. Hell, he seemed perfectly okay. I didn’t bother—”

“They always seem okay. Normally you would have checked the book, you always check the book before approving an application. This time you didn’t.”

“I—”

“Jeff,” he said, “I’m not trying to get on your back. I’m just trying to say that you’d better straighten out before you get fired, and I’m trying to say this as a friend. Is there something bothering you that maybe I can help you with? Is it money or anything like that?”

“No.”

It was a hundred thousand dollars that I didn’t have, two women whom I didn’t have, a whole life that I didn’t have. But I didn’t tell him this.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

I shook my head.

“Will you try to lay off the liquor? Look, it’s not just the job. My wife’s brother, he started drinking once five years ago and he hasn’t stopped yet. It can sneak up on you and all of a sudden you can’t stop or you don’t want to stop or I don’t know what. My wife’s brother, he’s a mess now. An alcoholic. A bum. Once a month he’s over to the house begging for a handout so he can buy a drink. What can I do? He’s my wife’s flesh and blood, I can’t turn him down. But before he started drinking he was a doctor with a practice that brought him in about thirty gees a year. A rich man, Jeff. Not rich like Rockefeller, but richer than either of us’ll ever be. Now he’s a bum. You see what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Try,” he said. “Just do me that favor. Favor—it’s a favor to yourself more than a favor to me. Just try to take it easy and cut down on the drinking.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try.”

I don’t know whether I meant it or not. I was just sick of listening to him, sick of hearing about his goddamned wife’s brother, sick of the whole sermon and the whole do-gooder bit he was playing. There was no question about his sincerity, no question but that he was one hell of a good guy trying to help me out.

This didn’t make me one whit less sick of listening to him.

We let it lay there and we started to eat the slop on our plates. He was plainly embarrassed—the two of us never talked much and now he had given me a straight-from-the-shoulder bit and he was worried about it. I could understand that.

We finished up, lit cigarettes and sipped coffee. The waiter glared at us, wishing we would get out already so he could fill the table with two other slobs.

We got back to the office, worked through the afternoon. Les and I didn’t say a word to each other for the rest of the day, which was easy because it was one hell of a busy afternoon. I had a good twenty people in the first two hours and things were hectic.

I kept wanting to reach for the bottle, kept wanting one little shot to make the afternoon go a little faster. But I left the bottle where it was.

Evidently what Les had said had made some sort of impression on me. Hell, I didn’t want to be out of a job. I joked a lot about Beverley Finance and I had a fairly cynical attitude for the whole mess, but it was a pleasant place to work and it paid a lot better than most occupations I was suited for.

That was only part of it. The other was that damned sermon about his wife’s brother, the doctor with the big thirst. I didn’t want to wind up in some gutter. I didn’t want to be an alcoholic, and I didn’t need Les to tell me that I was well on the way to that happy state.

But—

One time I had the drawer open and sat there looking down at that beautiful bottle.

But I left it there. It wasn’t easy, but I left it there and closed the drawer again.

I got through the afternoon. Somehow, due to the grace of some unknown and mysterious god, I got through the afternoon. It was tough but I made it.

And then it was five o’clock and I walked out into New York, gobbled a plate of chili at the Alamo on 47th Street and washed it down with cream soda. Beer is perfect with chili but I stuck to cream soda.

I left the restaurant and went for a stroll.

And then the world flushed itself down my toilet.