CHAPTER THREE

THE MAN WAS MOSTLY SHOULDERS. HE wasn’t really big, I was taller than he was, but he had these wide shoulders and no neck at all, and he was wearing a sinister short-brimmed hat and a black suit, and he looked like a Chicago gangster. Maybe he was nothing more desperate than a Chicago mutual funds salesman, but I don’t really think so. I think he was a Chicago gangster. If not, he’s in the wrong line of work.

In which case I know exactly how he feels.

He came toward me, and I picked up the rhythm of his walk and got my timing into gear. When he was just the right distance away, I took the pasteboard slip from the top of the stack and thrust it at him. If it had been a knife, and a couple of inches longer, it would have pierced his left lung.

But it was just a piece of paper and it never touched him. And amazingly enough he never touched it, either. He just kept right on walking and went past me as if I were invisible. I turned to look after him.

“Stay awake, Chip!”

I spun around. Gregor clicked the shutter, and I opened my hand and let the piece of pasteboard float to the ground. My gangster friend had missed his golden opportunity, all spelled out in smudged black letters on a yellow card, and saying:

HELLO THERE!

Your candid photo has just been taken by Gregor the Pavement Photographer! Your picture will be ready within twenty-four hours! Bring or mail this card with the some of one ($1.00) dollar to Gregor the Pavement Photographer, 1104 Halstead! Find out what you look like to others! See yourself as the world sees you!

It was a pretty tacky little slinger, no question about it. And even if you dropped the excess exclamation points and spelled sum right and printed the message in unsmudged ink on a less gaudy stock, it would still be nothing that most people would want to carry with them forever. That few of them were so moved was readily seen by a glance at the pavement to my rear, where any number of the yellow cards presently reposed.

In plain English, there were little yellow slingers all over the place, some of them crumpled, others just plain dropped. Most people dropped them without even finding out what they were, but almost all of them did take the cards when I shoved them at them. The gangster was rare. The average person has trouble not taking anything you hand him. It’s a reflex, I suppose. I don’t know whether the gangster had lousy reflexes or tremendous cool, or whether he was so tied up in his own little world that he hadn’t even seen me. Nor did I have time to worry about this, because I had to pass the next card to the next person, who would in due course add it to Chicago’s littering problem.

The gangster came by around a quarter after four, and there wasn’t another memorable person for the rest of the day. This was my sixth day working for Gregor, and by now a person had to be pretty remarkable in order for me to take any real notice of him. Every day I would see tens of thousands of people, and I would poke yellow slips at thousands of people, and I would poke yellow slips at thousands of them. At first it was such a constant parade of new faces and bodies that I started getting a headache from it. But then it straightened out and smoothed out and the pedestrians lost their individuality. They were just part of the crowd, and I found myself tuning them out the way you tune out anything that’s always there. I no longer really noticed the traffic noises, and I no longer smelled the smell of State Street, and in the same kind of way I no longer noticed the swarm of people. Every once in a while one of them would manage to be more than just another shadow in the crowd. The gangster type, and an occasional cripple, and particularly attractive girls, for example.

A few minutes after six, Gregor said, “Oh, the hell with it, keed, let’s call it a day.” He folded up his tripod and put his camera in the case. We walked to 1104 Halstead Street, where Co-op Photography was located. Co-op Photography was a name to put on the door, actually. Inside the door there was a large room jammed with desks and three smaller rooms, two of them darkrooms and one of them a slapdash studio with lights and a couple of backdrops. For ten dollars a month Gregor got the use of a desk, two hours a day of darkroom time, and use of the studio by arrangement. There was also a switchboard and a girl who functioned as a sort of collective receptionist, but it cost an extra five dollars a month to receive calls there, and Gregor figured it wasn’t worth it. So we walked past the girl without asking if anyone had called, and Gregor put some things in the desk, and took some other things out of it, one of them being a bottle of peach-flavored brandy.

“Jesus sonofabitching Christ,” he said, reflectively. Gregor was a short dark mixture of various Balkan strains that didn’t go together all that well. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks hollow. He had the heaviest beard of anyone I ever met. When he swore I always had the feeling I was hearing wrong, because he never sounded mad or aggravated or anything. He would say various obscene things in the tone of voice you would use to say, “I’m going down to the store for a new tube of toothpaste” or “I wonder how the White Sox did today.” It took a whole lot of getting used to.

He uncapped the bottle and took a drink and asked me if I wanted one. I said it sounded like a good idea. He gave me the bottle and I took a drink. The first time he had done this I wanted to wipe the neck of the bottle or something, but then I decided that anybody who stood out in the middle of State Street all day the way I had done was already exposed to every germ known to modern man, and besides there was something vaguely insulting about insinuating that Gregor was diseased or something.

I don’t know what good peach-flavored brandy tastes like, or even if there is any such thing, for Pete’s sake. This was very cheap stuff. If you’ve never had it, you’ve got the right idea. I think you could duplicate the taste by mixing equal parts of the sweet syrup from canned peaches and Zippo lighter fluid, but if you mixed it that way it would probably cost you more than Gregor paid for it.

He took another drink himself and put the cap on the bottle and the bottle in the drawer. Another photographer, an old man who wore suspenders all the time, believe it or not, came over and asked how it had gone.

“How should it go?” Gregor demanded. “You take the pictures and you see what happens.” He pawed through a handful of letters on the desktop, held one of them to the light, and squinted suspiciously at it. “So either there’s a dollar in it or there isn’t,” he said thoughtfully. “And what difference does it make?”

You may have gathered that he didn’t have the greatest moneymaking operation in the world. Good gathering. Gregor, from what I had seen, was a pretty fair photographer, but one look around that office told you that pretty fair photographers were in less demand than, say, pretty fair aerospace engineers. (Whatever they are: I don’t understand the term, but the Tribune’s classified pages are filled with people who want to hire them.)

Gregor’s business was straightforward enough. He stood there on State Street, taking pictures of people walking by, and as they passed I gave them a numbered slip, and theoretically they sent in the slip with a dollar, and theoretically the number on the slip enabled Gregor to find the right negative and print it and send the print to the customer.

“I don’t always get the right picture to the right person,” he had confided once. “Especially before I started using a kid. I would do the shooting and the card passing all by myself, and I would get the numbers a little off synch, and then I’d get some jerk writing in from Denver to tell me that he got the wrong picture, and I should either send him the right one or send his dollar back. So how am I supposed to straighten it out? Some of the jerks write back three, four times for a lousy dollar. Think how many times I must make a mistake and they don’t write at all. Sometimes I wonder if anybody ever gets the right picture. But what do they want it for in the first place, huh, keed? Answer me that. I have this way of making a buck and I am damned if I can tell you why anybody at all ever sends for the Jesus sonofabitching Christ photographs.”

Tonight his mood was less reflective. He seemed annoyed at the volume of late mail, and he cursed pleasantly as he slit the flaps of the envelopes and shook out the dollar bills. There were a couple of checks, and one clown had sent a dollar in stamps, and another hadn’t enclosed any payment at all.

He put away the orders he would fill tomorrow and added the money to his wallet. “The one with the stamps,” he said, “should sit on a hot stove waiting for his picture to come, the son of a bitch. Let’s see, keed, eleven-thirty to five-thirty is six hours at a buck and a half is what? Nine bucks?”

“Eleven to six. Seven hours.”

“Ten bucks?”

“Ten-fifty.”

He counted out ten singles. He didn’t have any change, he said. I had change, I said. So he discovered two quarters in his pocket and gave them to me.

“You’re the only one making any money,” he told me. “Don’t spend it all on the same girl, huh?”

I laughed politely and counted the bills again, and counted the money in my wallet. “Hey, that’s great,” I said.

“You’re in Rockefeller’s class now?”

“Not quite, but at least I can pay my rent by the end of the week.”

“Whattaya been doing?”

“Paying a day at a time. It’s three-fifty a day, but the weekly rate is only twenty-one bucks, so I’ll be getting one day a week free.”

“Jesus. You’re paying twenty-one bucks a week for a place to sleep?”

“That’s right.”

“Keed, that’s wrong. Where you staying, the Ritz?”

“As a matter of fact it’s a real dump. But at the price—”

“You’re paying way too much, Chip.”

“It’s the cheapest hotel in Chicago. Or at least in the downtown area. I looked all over.”

“Hotels!” He waved a great sigh and shook his head. “Hotels are for a night, two nights, a weekend maybe. Hotels aren’t to live. Who the hell can afford it? Twenty-one bucks a week and you don’t even get any meals or anything, is that right? Son of a bitch, you know what I pay? Eighty-five a month, and that’s two rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom. You got a private bath in that hotel of yours?”

“No.”

“I pay the same as you for Aileen and myself, an apartment instead of a room. That’s what it costs you to live in that hotel of yours.” He scratched his head. “Tell you the truth, I don’t see how you can live. What did I pay you today, eleven dollars?”

“Ten and a half.”

“Whatever it was. So three and a half from that for the room leaves seven, and figure a buck and a half each for breakfast and lunch is three from seven leaves four, and a decent dinner if you eat it out has to cost you two and a half bucks at the bottom, leaves you what? A dollar and a half? You can just about go to the movies.” He shook his head again. “On top of which there’s no work when it rains and no work when I got a big darkroom schedule. I don’t know what I’ve paid you altogether over the past couple of weeks, but it can’t come to all that much.”

It didn’t. I had worked six days out of the past nine, and my total earnings were $57.75. But then my expenses weren’t as high as he had figured them. My breakfast was seventy cents and my dinner ranged from a dollar to a dollar eighty. My lunch was generally a candy bar, and I had found a place where they only charged a nickel for a nickel bar. And sometimes I had a cup of coffee next door to the hotel before I went to sleep.

So actually I was saving money. I had hit Chicago two weeks before with $27.46 in my pocket, and I had earned $57.75 from Gregor and another twenty dollars and change on other jobs I had picked up a day at a time, and my current balance stood at just over $36.

At this rate, though, it was going to take me an awfully long time to become what you would call wealthy. Also I was due for some capital expenditures, if you want to call it that. Like washing my underwear and socks at night meant I had to put it on slightly damp in the mornings, which wasn’t all that much fun. And it might be nice having another pair of pants and another shirt, not to mention the fact that the State Street sidewalks were having a bad effect on my shoes.

“Chip keed, I got an idea.”

I looked at him.

“Suppose you could pay the same twenty-one bucks a week, or for the sake of convenience call it twenty, meaning you’re saving a dollar right off the top, and you get a place to sleep and it’s a clean place and all, and you share the bathroom with two people instead of three hundred, and on top of everything else, you get home cooked breakfasts and dinners included. How’s that sound?”

“Where is the place? Madrid?”

“Right here in beautiful Chicago. Just three blocks from here.” One of the sunken eyes closed very slowly in what I had grown to recognize as a wink. “C’mon, keed, let’s get our asses in gear. I gotta tell Aileen she’s running a boardinghouse.”

I was a little uncertain about this. I mean, it sounded great, and if anything it sounded too great. The only question was whether I wanted to get that tied up with Gregor. My job was doing menial labor for a failure, and that didn’t quite fit in with my goal of a position with Opportunity For Advancement. Not that I figured Gregor would want to evict me if I went to work for somebody else. I was bright enough to realize that my room and board would just about pay the rent on his place, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first of us to come to this realization. But I didn’t know whether I wanted to be around him off the job as well as on it, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be what amounted to a part of his family, sharing two rooms and a bath with him and Aileen.

Then I met Aileen.

I moved in that night. There wasn’t all that much involved in moving in, since I didn’t even have to go back to the hotel. The nice thing about not owning anything is that you don’t have to go back for it. So when I say that I moved in, all it really amounts to is that I went to Gregor’s apartment and met Aileen and had dinner and stayed the night.

It was a million miles away from the Eagle Hotel, believe me. Dinner was spaghetti and meatballs, and while it didn’t fit the homemade label Gregor had hung on it—the spaghetti was out of a box and the sauce out of a can—it was still far better than the blue-plate special in a diner on Madison. And afterward we sat around in the living room and watched television and talked a little, and before they turned in Aileen made some more coffee (instant coffee) and brought out some A & P brand jelly doughnuts, and afterward she gave me a sheet and a pillow and a pillowcase and they went to their room and left me the couch.

I wasted a lot of time and mental energy trying to figure out how to turn that couch into a bed. It wasn’t designed to make the switch. It was just a couch, and by the time I figured this out for myself I was tired enough to sleep standing up in a closet.

I spread the sheet on the couch and got undressed and rolled up in the sheet. I wondered if I ought to buy a pair of pajamas or something. Then I wondered about Aileen, and if maybe she would come out and kiss me good-night or something.

She was pretty spectacular. Longish light blond hair and oval cat’s eyes and high Slavic cheekbones and a full wet red mouth. She had the most goddamned suggestive mouth I have ever seen in my life. Her body reinforced the Lustful Peasant image in a big way. Large heavy pointed breasts, a hint of a belly, wide hips, large rounded bottom, big well-muscled thighs. The dress she wore was supposed to be a shapeless style. Only when she wore it, it took on a shape. It was really something amazing to watch her walk around in that thing, with all that flesh making interesting movements against the cloth of the dress.

I kept thinking about her, and imagining things. She was about the most sexual person I had ever met in my life. She just exuded this constant aura. It wasn’t that she put out feelers or gave the impression that she was hot for me or anything, but even if she decked herself out in a nun’s habit and cut her hair in a crew cut it would still be hard to spend ten seconds with her without imagining what she was like in bed.

I imagined she was fantastic. I imagined that she would make love like crazy, and that she would take a man and screw him absolutely blind (I now knew why Gregor’s eyes seemed to be falling back into his head) and then, when she was done with you and you were deliciously half dead, she would wrap you up in her arms and legs and breasts and keep you warm as toast all through the night.

I kept on with this imagining, and you know how it is, what with one thing leading to another, well. There was a point when I realized that no one was going to break the mood by doing something creative with the plumbing, and I also realized that she was going to change my sheet in the morning, and maybe you can think of more embarrassing things to have happen, and maybe I can now, but I certainly couldn’t then, and didn’t even want to try.

The next afternoon I bought myself a second pair of socks.

“Now was I right or was I right?” Gregor said every now and then. “Here you’re saving all kinds of money and living like a human being. Was I right?”

He was right, all right. Each morning I got up bright and early and had a glass of unfrozen orange juice and a cup of instant coffee and a bowl of cornflakes or rice toasties or something like that. There was one of those undairy creamers to put on the cereal. The list of ingredients sounded like the secret formula for the hydrogen bomb, for Pete’s sake. Well, there’s nothing like home cooking.

Then, about five days out of eight, I would go to work for Gregor, putting in an average of six hours’ work. When he had some developing and printing to do, I generally kept him company in the darkroom. He wanted to charge me for photography lessons. I got out of that one by offering to help him in the darkroom for a dollar an hour instead of a dollar and a half. We compromised; he didn’t charge me, and he didn’t pay me. It was fairly interesting, and I learned what the different chemicals were and what they did. I also learned that one place I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life was in a darkroom.

On my days off, I sometimes picked up day work handing out passes for television shows or going door to door in some place like Oak Park, taking sample bars of a combination soap and cleansing cream (Neither soap nor cleansing cream, but new improved Urglegurgleblech) and rubber banding them to people’s doorknobs. It’s against the law to put anything that’s not mail into a mailbox, and they wouldn’t fit under the door the way handbills do, so you had to loop them on the doorknob, which was very time consuming.

I took a few home for Aileen. You were expected to—what the hell, a sample was so people could sample it, no? But I didn’t do what I really wanted to do, which was to stuff the whole batch of them down a sewer and go to the movies. For one thing, I had come to see that a man gets ahead in this world by doing his job to the best of his ability and playing fair with his employers. For another thing, a kid from Missouri dumped his soap and the crew chief caught him and beat the living shit out of him.

The rest of the time, when I wasn’t working or helping in the darkroom, I divided between the apartment and the rest of Chicago. I would go out at night with no particular goal in mind, maybe stopping at the library for a while and then roaming around the city. The idea of meeting a girl of some sort or another was always in my mind, but then it always had been, and it had never done me any particular good before, and it didn’t now, either. Most of the time, as a matter of fact, I never even saw a girl, or if I did she was with somebody.

There are supposed to be slightly more women than men in the country, but if you’ve ever wandered around a big city after dark you couldn’t help becoming convinced that there are maybe twenty or thirty men on the open market for every woman. I don’t know where the girls go at night, or what they do, but they aren’t where the men are.

Once, in a sort of middleclass hippie place on Rush Street, I seemed to be doing pretty well with this girl with long hair and sunglasses. She was from some college. I told her I was a dropout, which wasn’t all a lie. We were getting along fairly well, but then her date came back and that was the end of that. And another time a woman got interested in me at a diner. I was having coffee to keep warm and she was having coffee to sober up, I suppose, but it wasn’t working. She had a puffy look, as if someone had taken a bicycle pump and put a little air in all the cells of her body. At first I thought she was about thirty-five, and the closer I looked the older she got. It was like watching the aging process through the modern miracle of time-lapse photography, as they say in the commercials.

We went and sat together in a booth in the back, and she kept breathing on me and dropping single entendres. She put her hand on my leg. Then she put her hand a little higher and gave me a friendly squeeze. By this time she looked about a hundred and eight and I got this all-embracing wave of nausea. I said I had to go to the toilet. I was half afraid she would follow me. I wouldn’t really put it past her. I went to the john, and then I went to the back entrance and slipped out, leaving her to pay for my coffee and find some other boy to molest. I went out of my way to avoid that particular diner ever after.

And you know something, by the time I was a couple of blocks away from that woman, I called myself every name I could think of. I mean I really felt stupid. Obviously she was nothing spectacular, but the thing of it was that she was there, for Pete’s sake, and she was willing. And it wasn’t exactly as though I had to beat women off with a club. I was, let’s face it, a very horny kid with a desperate desire to stop being a there’s-that-dumb-word-again virgin. She could at least have served that purpose. I didn’t have to love her to ball her. I didn’t even have to like her.

That was as close as I came to scoring in the streets of Chicago, that and a couple of others and come-hither glances from faggots, with one of them going so far as to make a tentative grab for me while I was making use of an industrial bathroom fixture. I told them all no, and they all took no for an answer. I guess nobody found me exactly irresistible.

You might think, after all that, that I would have spent all my time around the apartment. I did spend a lot of it there, as a matter of fact, but what drove me out of there from time to time was the fact that Aileen was driving me right out of my mind.

It wasn’t just what she looked like, which I told you about. It wasn’t just that their bedroom door was not very substantial, and that I could hear them whenever they made love, which they did almost every night. (If they hadn’t, I would have worried about Gregor. Really.) And it wasn’t just that she was so sane and healthy about her physical self that she was completely casual about walking around half naked in front of me, giving me groin-grabbing glimpses of one part of her after another until I literally ached.

It was that, on top of all of this, I was really digging her and Gregor as human beings. And it was a strange relationship, see, because I really didn’t know what sort of relationship it was supposed to be. They were both a lot older than me. I think Gregor was in his forties, and I suppose she must have been close to thirty. So some of the time they were something like replacement parents, and since they had come into my life so shortly after my own parents left it, this did seem a logical role for them to play.

But I had never felt about my own mother as I felt constantly about Aileen. (Or if I did, I wasn’t aware of it, and I’d just as soon not find out about it now, either, Dr. F.) If Aileen was my mother, then I was King Whatsisname with the broken ankles. And proud of it.

They were also like an older brother and older sister, and they were also like my boss and his wife, and they were also like my landlady and her husband, and, oh, it was too involved to keep straight. So the outcome was that I felt very comfortable and secure hanging around the apartment, reading a book or watching television or playing knock rummy with Gregor or helping Aileen with the dishes. I felt very comfortable almost all of the time, and then all at once, I would just have to get out of there before I started running around on all fours and chewing at the carpet.

I mean linoleum.

It was on a Friday night when Gregor got a phone call and said he had to go out. The first time this sort of thing had happened I got very ginchy about being left alone with Aileen, very hopeful and very anxious both at once, but nothing happened then, and after that I got accustomed to it and thought nothing of it. If anything, I found it very relaxing to be alone with her. I could talk to her when there were just the two of us in a way I couldn’t with Gregor around. About my folks, for instance, and what I wanted out of life, and various heavy things it would have embarrassed me to talk about in front of Gregor. Aileen hardly ever said much, but she had a way of listening that went down very smoothly.

Gregor went out around eight-thirty, and Aileen and I talked and watched television for about an hour and a half. Then he came back looking happy.

“We’re in business,” he told her. “Mark can use as much as five hundred or a thou’s worth of the right stuff.” He turned to me. “A photography assignment, keed. You thought I made the whole nut snapping dummies in the street, didn’t you? But sometimes something good comes up.” To Aileen he said, “I’ve got the studio from now until four in the morning if I want it.”

“You want to go there?”

“Right. And use the darkroom right there, and deliver the goods in the morning. And have the money in my pocket before that kike changes his sonofabitching mind. You want to get ready, keed?”

“Me?”

“He means me,” Aileen said.

“My prize model.”

I said, “No kidding? You do the modeling?”

“That’s how I found her, keed. My best and sweetest model. You ever look at the fashion magazines? Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar”

“Greg, put a sock in it, damn it.”

He smiled at her. “Sure, they’re all dying to give her a spread, aren’t they, keed? And she’d give them a spread in return.”

“Greg, in one minute you can go take pictures of soup cans.”

“Just kidding.”

“I mean with photographic artistry like yours, Greg, the subject’s not really important, is it? You could go take artsy-craftsy shots of sewer gratings and the museums would stand in line for them.”

“Baby, all I said—”

“I mean let’s keep track of just who we all are, why don’t we?”

This went on awhile. I had the feeling that I’d walked in on the last reel of a movie that only made sense if you’d seen the first part. I was still thinking it over while Gregor packed his gear and Aileen went off to change her clothes and make herself up. When they were ready, Greg started picking up his equipment, and I offered to help him carry it.

He said, “Well, sure, I suppose—” and she cut in to suggest that I come along and watch a photographic session.

“You futz around in the darkroom all the time, you might as well get acquainted with all sides of the photography business. Isn’t that right, Greg?”

“You really think so?”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s fine with me, keed.”

“It’s certainly fine with me.”

“If you say so.”

“Because this would be a dumb time for modesty, I certainly think.”

“If you say so.”

“And Chip’s practically one of the family, aren’t you, honey?”

I listened to all of this without saying anything. I suppose you figured it out a long time ago, but then you’re sitting down somewhere reading it all at once, while I was living it a little at a time. I knew there was a lot going on that I wasn’t getting, but that was as far as I could go with it. I was lost, and waiting for someone to find me.

So we walked the couple of blocks to the office suite. It was empty except for a little guy at one of the desks who was catching up with his bookkeeping. He looked up when we came in and then looked down again. We ignored him and went into the studio. Gregor locked the door.

He set up his equipment and arranged various lights and things, explaining it all to me as he did it. I didn’t catch much of what he was saying because I was too busy trying to figure out what I was missing.

Then he was ready, and Aileen gave an odd little smile and got up on top of this dark green velvet couch. She gave a tug and lifted her dress up over her head and tossed it across the room out of camera range.

There was nothing under it but Aileen.

Oh, I thought. Nude pictures. Cheesecake, so to speak. Now I understood.

But not entirely.

“It’s a mutual thing we’ve got going.” Aileen said, spreading her legs. “It’s actually a beautiful relationship, Chip. See, Greg takes my picture, and in return I take his.”

I looked at Greg. He was buried under the black cloth and looked as though he was part of the camera apparatus. I looked at Aileen again. She had her hands between her legs, one on each side of what I was looking at.

“Only I have a built-in camera,” she was saying, “and I don’t have to futz around with floodlights or exposure settings. I just take aim and snap away. Say cheese, Greg.”

Greg didn’t say anything. I suppose he was still under the hood.

I wasn’t looking at him, actually.

My mouth was as dry as a sand sandwich and I had this weird chilly sweat all over my hands and feet and under my arms. And I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and I couldn’t stop shaking all over, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the most fantastic thing I had ever seen in my life.

The shutter worked.

“Click!” Aileen said.