A Moment of Doubt Read online

  The thin, effete hoodlum sighed. “But if you don’t tell it right, sir, why, he just won’t be able to get himself of on it, and by the time you finish a pack of lies, or a short version that leaves out important details, well . . .” Thimbelina threw up his hands. “Well,” he repeated, “I’m afraid he’ll just have to take it out on you.” He shook his head. “I won’t be able to control him.” He permitted himself a smile. “I might be forced into helping him . . . .”

  Windrow could feel the sweat, beading up on his scalp in the interstices of his processed hair . . . .

  Now wait a minute. We have the conventions, the mutual agreement between the author and the reader on certain matters of style, as laid out in the (unwritten) (hexadecimal) Hardboiled Bylaws. These, and the matter of big words. The detective does not have processed hair, o.k.? Get it straight. And never, ever, send your reader to the dictionary. He won’t go. Not only that, he’ll get pissed offat you because of his lack of knowledge. Moreover, the thought will absolutely not occur to him that it’s his knowledge that’s wanting, rather than your facility with the language. Surely, he will say, you uppity scrivener, there’s a word containing fewer letters and syllables, approximately equivalent to ‘interstices’? How does one pronounce that, anyway? It sounds like a brand of seat-belt for a race of spiders . . . .

  I’ve tripped the Fag Flag in the Hard Boiled Bylaws. I forgot about it, or went too far, or no longer care . . . . Something . . . . At any rate, BOOK.SUB knows. When I return to my room the floor will be two feet thick in tractor-feed paper, covered with excoriations written at my own keyboard a scant two years ago . . . . BOOK.SUB will have rejected Squeam with a Skew in its entirety. That might have been o.k., but in dumping the book to disk on my computer the printer will fire up and list everything, the manuscript itself, the legal justifications, ticking off the appropriate Hardboiled Bylaws . . . . It’ll all be there, waiting for Marlene’s fireplace, and, later, the Rewrite and, ultimate bummer, Diminished Returns.

  This particular Bylaw is real simple. It says, Tough guys don’t get sodomized . That’s it. And, in extremis : Yea, even may they Pitch, verily they do not Catch . Now, I wield enough economic power to get around some things. After all, I’m a member of the Mystery Writers of America, who subscribe to these unwritten laws. And, bottom line, I’ve made some money. But here I’ve gone a step too far. There’s a corollary to the Sodomy Clause, and it’s real simple, too. It says: And if they do [get sodomized], they don’t like it. No way. Ever.

  There are notable exceptions. Cain’s Serenade , for example—although, look out, for here looms large ye Moral Imperative. A contemporary series, for another example, stars a gay detective, although, in fact, so far as I know, he cleaves, ahem, hard by the extremis corollary.

  But the point is, even though festooned with all these conventions, these unshaven detectives got to look clean, morally, that is: they can be hygienically reprehensible (it’s preferable), but their foe has to be morally inferior to them. They’re carrying around more eponymous gear than a soldier of fortune . . . .

  There he goes again. “Eponymous.” Sounds like a phone booth on a planet of spiders . . . Greek spiders . . . .

  So along with that, certain characters got to have ruined throats and cancer in their lives, to lend a certain amount of grit to this hallucination folks like to snuggle into and get thrilled by, while flying coast to coast or waiting on Death Row, like having a certain amount of sand in your salad means it’s organic lettuce, or something . . . .

  I mean, you’ve never even questioned Marlene’s existence have you? In fact, aren’t you just coasting along in here, waiting for me to get back to the house and be raped by Marlene? Or Tiny? Now there’s a real guy . . . . That immense cock of his looks like the bowsprit of the Flying Dutchman , heaving out of the gloom of the seedy Tenderloin hotel room . . . . You can hear the squish as he strokes the fantastic length and thickness of the far end of his viscera . . . .

  Viscera. That’s eyewash on the planet of spiders, just hold it up to your face with your pedipalps . . . . Well don’t forget the octoculars , too, godammit. You know, binoculars for spiders? Eight eyepieces, eight lens tubes, four focus knobs . . . Jesus Christ . . . .

  But to have deliberately given her cancer, then forgotten about it, only to run its course in her helpless body . . . . Had no one thought to get her to a doctor?

  The first thing was food. Yes, food. I grabbed a taxi and motored to North Beach, thinking all the way over there about how Hemingway, when he had no money, would describe in his nascent novels and stories fantastic meals in wonderful detail, to slake a hunger that ultimately would be satisfied beyond his wildest nightmares. I, possessed of so insignificant a talent, could afford to eat a huge Hu Nan meal at Brandy Ho’s. Sweet and sour dumplings in a delicious ginger sauce sprinkled with chopped peppers and garlic, stuffed with a paté of pork and vegetables. Hot and sour beef, with sliced carrots, garlic, and onions, served over steamed rice. Cold noodle salad, with huge bean sprouts, plenty of slivered chicken, slices of raw, fresh cucumber, covered by a peanut sauce of extreme zest. Three Kirin beers. I skipped the smoked ham fried rice, with ropes of scrambled egg and fresh garden peas, likewise the carp, broiled whole and served on a bed of vegetables and rice, and segued directly to ginger ice cream with green tea, and ate the whole meal with my shades on. Absolutely No MSG. Meals with MSG are for when you have a deadline and the nightmares aren’t forthcoming. But when you can eat like this, why write about it? Taking a post-prandial stroll up Grant Avenue, I saw many poets. Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso and Kay McDonough with baby Nile, Neeli Cherkovski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Janice Blue all dressed in blue, David Moe, Jack Hirschman and Sara Menefee. While Kaye wasn’t listening Corso told me I had no balls. Neeli told me he wasn’t getting published. I discreetly refrained from telling him about BOOK.SUB. Without saying a word, Bob Kaufman said

  My radio is teaching my goldfish jujitsu . . . .

  Jack Hirschman read me one of the poems he’d written that day.

  PEACEDOVE

  Of the dove, of the

  dove-lands and what they mean,

  how it is

  to be

  a dove, a struggle-dove

  the dove that’s been born

  over and over since

  the end of the World War,

  and where the dove comes from

  and how it stands for

  the utter

  invincibility of peace

  and is always triumphant

  as the sincerely innate

  inspiration of human beings.

  At the time Jack hated electricity, so I knew he’d eschew anything as electrifying as BOOK.SUB. And all I could think about there on the street, with my full stomach, and hungry gentle poetic friends, was that I hadn’t killed anybody yet today. But I had seen someone I’d maimed. This did not throw off my digestion. Instead, I got drunk and fell into a pit of nerves, woke up as somebody, somewhere, else. A pseudonym. So now, was the question, could the Moral Imperative yet seek me out? Of course. This is just a detective novel. I’m going to get mine, right in the kisser, from the sword of the Avenger, whoever she is. Would it be the lady with the ruined throat and tongue? Or would Tiny get to Windrow before he expired from AIDS? Does he really have AIDS, or is Thimbelina just smarter than Windrow? How about that woman who never got skinned in The Gourmet? Would somebody be selling pieces of me with Velcro fasteners on Fisherman’s Wharf? How would it come? When? Should I get BOOK.SUB’s by now not inconsiderable legal DO loop to make out my literary estate to Marlene?

  Marlene. Right then, right there, in front of a dive called The Saloon on Grant Street, I resolved that never, ever, would I use the beautiful Marlene in a book. Stay just as you are, baby. Let your life take its natural course. Fuck your tenants as they come and go, collect their rent, forget them when they leave, keep a clean house. I’ll never lift you, whole or in part, out of your quiet if somewhat adventurous little
life next to Alta Plaza Park, and use you in a detective novel, so help me god. And I weaved down and around the corner, through the milling, frightened tourists, a bum or two, a poet/hooker, a saxophone player, a barker, to Carol Doda’s Condor Club, at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. There, on the side of the building, is an ersatz California Historical Marker, commemorating the Condor as the Original Site of the Invention of Topless Dancing, if you care to believe that, and, placing one hand over my heart and the other on the plaque, I knelt on the sidewalk and repeated my solemn oath, aloud.

  Someone charitably dropped a handful of coins between me and the wall.

  But even as I so swore, my heart froze beneath the palm of my hand, galvanized into arrhythmia by a current that shot between it and the brass plaque. Hadn’t I, somewhere, just last year, in This World Leaks Blood , or was it Through a Mandible, Delicately , or . . . . But hadn’t I, just last year, used Marlene’s pussy in a particularly grizzly scene? Just her pussy? Yes, I had, but it was in Heart of Mercury , a horrible scene, in which a young Oedipal Adonis had received his mother’s pussy in the mail. It was sent to him by an insanely jealous rival for his mother’s affections who, failing in his advances, had succumbed to the temptation of torturing and killing the woman, in order to deprive the rest of the world of her charm and affection. It was an unfortunate thing, a thing I deeply regretted doing, so deeply that, immediately upon completion of this very arduous piece of writing, so complicated in its ramifications that I sat up all night finishing the book, yet so real to me as I created it that my keyboard and cashmere sweater and chair seat were wringing wet with perspiration long before I was finished, that I immediately availed myself of the consolation of the real thing, even though it was three flights up and four in the morning, to assure myself that, (a) she was still alive and intact, and (b) it was as good as I remembered, and wrote, it. She was and it was and we were all so very young then . . . .

  But it had been so necessary, borrowing Marlene’s vagina, to the solution of the case. When the son opened the box containing the horrible discovery, there necessarily had to be a detailed description, absolutely lurid and convincing, for verisimilitude. Really, I outdid myself. In the course of things I had to restrain myself from running upstairs to make a detailed inspection, so as to get everything just right. But I knew that would lead to a cul de sac, so far as the novel went, and stuck to the task at hand, only later paying the visit. And, as the Moral Imperative would have it, this vicious act led to the unraveling of the perpetrator’s otherwise unconnected but nonetheless stealthy and heinous butcherings, which had stymied Windrow and half the finest minds of the San Francisco Police Department for nearly two hundred pages . . . .

  The words of my oath died on my lips. Would Marlene’s vagina go the route of Myra’s tongue and larynx? Had I been innocently littering the city with ruined minds and bodies?—Innocently? Venally !—And, and what about my own penis? Had I not used my own penis in dozens, if not hundreds of fuck scenes? Had my mercenary practices insured that I contract, sooner if not later, herpes, syphilis, dismemberment, gonorrhea, three or four rapacious strains of venereal disease, as unidentifiable as they were incurable, urethritis, warts, impotency, AIDS itself? Would some sadist with sharpened canines and one eye soon slake his hunger with a grilled penis and cheese sandwich? Still kneeling against the wall I opened my fly and made a careful inspection. Still there, unpoxed. But even as I picked my teeth after dinner, somewhere in the back of my mind I planned to go home and write

  The thin man shrugged. “Stretch Windrow’s asshole,” he said to Tiny. “And make it last!”

  How could I do other than use my own asshole as a model, in a stretch of the imagination? I’m not going to bitch about violence in our society. It’s always been here, it’s always going to be here. It’s the violence in my mind that bothers me.

  Then it becomes a matter of an ice pick. Or perhaps an adze. Versus a chair leg or a splitting maul, nine pounds. Asleep in your bed. 3:45 a.m. The house creaks. Moonlight pours through an open window. Shadows move in the stairwell. Was that a whisper? A footstep? A seagull lands on the roof with a distant thump. A raccoon makes its way through the ivy on top of the fence. It’s chilly and you curl up in the bedclothes, for warmth. But that leaves your back exposed to the ice pick. Th e ice pick is very thin. It will penetrate the down comforter, the two or three wool blankets, your Tee shirt, your skin, musculature, the organ or perhaps bone beneath. Th e organism, your body, will scream and writhe around the wound before trying to twist away from it. The ice pick makes a very small puncture, so it will be necessary to strike very accurately, or many times. These in turn require absolute cool, or complete frenzy . . . .

  What if I’d had the MSG?

  . . . a fortunate thing for the victim if the first blow misses the vital organ or artery, and lodges in bone, a rib or clavicle. The undoubtedly determined force directing the initial strike ensures that the instrument, once lodged in bone, becomes very diffcult to remove quickly, for the next thrust. Th is the victim can turn to his advantage. Even asleep, one may react. Screaming may help, but the chairleg under the bed is a better idea. Crush the wrist of the assailant, possibly disarming him. Likewise his skull. In any case, if the ice pick remains lodged in the victim, the assailant, disarmed, ironically becomes the target of his own violence. For the victim, stabbed, will not rest until he has pulped his oppressor, and likely will continue to rain blows long after the culprit has died . . . .

  Or sushi . . . ? What is the aggression quotient of sushiff

  The screaming can be a problem. Is this a rural or an urban kill? They will have planned accordingly . . . .

  I wake up in the middle of the night, or half wake up, and there it is. The shadows are there, the house creaks, the seagull lands on the roof and I twitch so violently my back goes out. I’m so exhausted from failing to avoid Marlene when I came in that I nod out in spite of my terror, and the whole scenario blossoms in my mind like a flower of blood in a foetid syringe . . . .

  Removing the ice pick is best left to the hands of skilled personnel.

  If the weapon of choice is a burnishing tool, the wounds must necessarily give more trouble, as the three-sided puncture conforming to the silhouette of the tool will bleed profusely, and give great diffculty of repair, even to the finest surgeon . . . .

  Where might Martin Windrow have seen that? How about a mimeographed handbook found in the drawer of a right-wing extremist?

  The kind of mercy Marlene won’t show me . . . I can live with that . . . She’s not showing me mercy so she can show me some real mercy . . . But the scenarios, they leave me alone when she’s outraging my sensibilities and, I must admit, sometimes I make advances on my own. Nothing out of line, you understand, nothing that might undermine the landlord/tenant arrangement. Never sleep in her bed, for example, snuggling up together would violate everything, show us both the kind of tenderness neither of us could stand, although, given her head, Marlene might like to go along with that . . . As the years go by she could gradually ease the tenants out, one by one, insofar as rent control allows, and put a child in each vacated room . . . Redecorating them first . . . I’d keep my room as an office and studio, for the computer and phone lines, a mail drop. Maybe take her name, too. Get rid of Jas Jameson, detective writer, a name that bears the onus of years of fictional violence, of sexual outrage, and lately of fraudulent endeavors . . . .

  A man gets tired. Tired of looking over his shoulder every time he goes out for the paper, tired of keeping a loaded pistol next to the cup of coffee on the arm of his favorite chair. Tired of keeping the volume down on the television, the stereo, the Sunday afternoon opera, so he can hear someone sneaking up on him. Tired of sending his little girls and his wife out of town at the least sign of trouble. Tired of forgetting what name the signatory is supposed to be on the check he’s signing. Tired of looking out for the guy that’s stronger than he is, tired of trying to second guess the weaker and stupider
ones. Tired of winning all the time, knowing he only gets to lose once. Tired of resolving everything with violence, tired of bargaining with muscle. Tired, tired, tired . . . .

  I come home a little drunk, on me it looks tired. The Plymouth is still parked up the street, a shadow in the passenger seat. The yellow Mercedes is gone. The Moral Imperative. Marlene is in the parlor on a big Victorian sofa reading Vogue . She’s on her belly turning pages, her legs up in the air waving idly back and forth. The lavender house dress with yellow flowers . . . . There’s a thin-stemmed glass of red wine on the rug nearby. I am tired. Her strawberry hair with the blonde tail and the violet eyes and the absolutely clear complexion . . . . Here lay a woman whose husband decided he was gay and left her, it took her years to get her self-esteem back. Even though she knew better she could not refrain from blaming herself, and he, married to the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, whom he loved in fact, he was too confused to help her, he couldn’t even help himself, he could only follow his desires, and these led him far, far from her arms, or the arms of any woman. This is a tough thing for anyone to take. It’s worse than divorcing an asshole you made a mistake with, and more complicated than deserting someone you love for someone you love more. No matter how enlightened, the loved one abandoned in favor of a change in gender suffers greatly from a profound sense of inadequacy, compounded by their sense of loss. Marlene’s been working on it, and she’s coming along nicely. She has the advantage of being attractive, which has brought her plenty of experience in dealing with the vicissitudes of love—translated, this means that all men are assholes. We’ve been working on that. Compassion is the key. Compassion, time, and realism in the matter of resisting her charms. I go into the parlor and sit on the edge of the sofa. She continues to read. The hem of the dress is high up her thighs and she caresses my cheek with her toes. Her ass is irresistible, it curves up and away from her thighs beneath the dacron of the dress, but she’s been resisting advances from me on that score, she never liked the idea of sodomy, and now that her husband has gone fag, even though it’s been two and a half years, the suggestion makes her suspicious, and she balks. But Marlene is a passionate woman . . . . I need to do some research . . . . I run the palm of my hand along the nodes of her spine to the top of the low back of her dress and find the tab of the zipper there. I push my hand further until my fingers tangle in her blond tail and massage the base of her neck. She drops her head and turns against my hand. My hand comes back down her spine and brings the tab of the zipper with it. A V opens along her back, and the flesh is warm to the touch. The zipper stops just at the base of her spine and I rub her there. She drops her knee off the couch and puts her foot into my crotch. Her behind begins to move off the couch, she’s face down in Vogue now, making little sounds as she breathes. I lift the hem of her dress. Her ass is exposed, her cunt below it. Ah good, I think, it’s still there, intact. I cup her vulva with the palm of my hand and she moves against it, my fingers cover her clitoris, separate the lips, my thumb finds her anus and she puckers up, as if giving a kiss, and the tip of my thumb slips in . . . . Now my other hand has found her breast and nipple, she crushes a cosmetics advertisement in her fingers, the telephone rings in my room upstairs, and I insert a finger in her vagina. It’s very wet. I lubricate the outer lips by moving the finger in and out, in and out . . . . The thumb goes in a little more, the nail disappears, the first knuckle, and I hear the modem upstairs taking the call. Now Marlene has twisted around and is pulling at my belt. She has my cock in her mouth and upstairs the printer goes to standby with a barely audible tweet. She’s voracious, I arch against her mouth and substitute my index finger for my thumb in her anus, she does not resist. On the contrary, she moves her hips in a circular motion that helps the ringfinger enter as well. The thumb finds her clitoris, the forefinger her cunt, my wrist is killing me. Vogue hits the floor. Her teeth rake my foreskin. The printer upstairs tweets loudly and begins to print. I pull my cock out of her mouth and enter her cunt, from behind. It’s still intact, it’s still perfect, it’s a reason to live. I’m grateful and relieved . . . . She shouts and thrusts against me, nearly throwing me off the couch. I grip her hips and dig in my heels, holding on for my life. The woman comes almost immediately, long before I’m ready, with a scream. Time passes, we work at it, then she comes again. We’re out of practice, we need to spend more time together. Sweat has appeared on my forehead, a bead drops off my nose onto her back. Marlene drops her head with a groan to the cabbage rose cushions, and raises her hips in the air. Below me I can see her asshole, I can hear it whispering to me, here, stupid, it’s saying, put something here, it puckers come-hitherly. I pull my gleaming cock out of her cunt and place the length of it between the cheeks of her ass. I slide it back and forth, and wonder if I’ll ever last long enough to get it into her, this is all rather exciting. But I’m hesitant, I don’t want to risk all the progress we’ve made. Not for a mere thrill . . . . As if reading my thoughts Marlene reaches behind and places the tip of my penis against her anus. Even though the printer upstairs is a dot matrix job, very fast, still it’s printing madly. Somebody’s downloading a large file into my system. She presses the tip down, and thrusts her behind upwards. It’s tight. She quickly removes her hand, spits into it, and brings the spittle back. She moistens the tip lovingly, taking care that the points of her nails don’t scratch too much, just a little . . . . This is a thing not to be rushed, but pressing down the length of my cock and raising my hips lets the head slip in. Marlene groans and strokes the remaining length. I try to move the tip in and out a little bit, to get her used to it. The printer pauses for a form feed, which advances the paper to the next page, and starts to print again. Then Marlene encircles the base of my cock with her thumb and forefinger and pulls the entire length of it into her ass in one long, slow glide. Reverse peristalsis. Look it up. We groan together, as if we’ve heard a bad pun. She digs her nails and teeth into the arm of the couch, with her other hand she pulls at my scrotum. I cannot make it last, and quickly I’m hunched over her back, buried in her ass, saddling her entirely with my weight, both hands clutching at her breasts, sighing and coming like a repressed priest. Marlene comes again, with a little help from her hand, and we yell together. The telephone downstairs begins to ring. We ignore it. After awhile it stops ringing.