The Stand

  "Nothing and I don't think so," he said, and walked over to her in his bare feet. "Listen, the somebody I have to meet is my mother. I just got into town two days ago and I didn't call her last night or anything... did I?" he added hopefully.

  "You didn't call anybody," she said sullenly. "I just bet it's your mother."

  He walked back to the bed and stuck his feet in his loafers. "It is. Really. She works in the Chemical Bank Building. She's a housekeeper. Well, these days I guess she's a floor supervisor."

  "I bet you aren't the Larry Underwood that has that record, either."

  "You believe what you want. I have to run."

  "You cheap prick!" she flashed at him. "What am I supposed to do with all the stuff I cooked?"

  "Throw it out the window?" he suggested.

  She uttered a high squawk of anger and hurled the spatula at him. On any other day of his life it would have missed. One of the first laws of physics was, to wit, a spatula will not fly a straight trajectory if hurled by an angry oral hygienist. Only this was the exception that proved the rule, flip-flop, up and over, smash, right into Larry's forehead. It didn't hurt much. Then he saw two drops of blood fall on the throw-rug as he bent over to pick the spatula up.

  He advanced two steps with the spatula in his hand. "I ought to paddle you with this!" he shouted at her.

  "Sure," she said, cringing back and starting to cry. "Why not? Big star. Fuck and run. I thought you were a nice guy. You ain't no nice guy." Several tears ran down her cheeks, dropped from her jaw, and plopped onto her upper chest. Fascinated, he watched one of them roll down the slope of her right breast and perch on the nipple. It had a magnifying effect. He could see pores, and one black hair sprouting from the inner edge of the aureole. Jesus Christ, I'm going crazy, he thought wonderingly.

  "I have to go," he said. His white cloth jacket was on the foot of the bed. He picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.

  "You ain't no nice guy!" she cried at him as he went into the living room. "I only went with you because I thought you were a nice guy!"

  The sight of the living room made him feel like groaning. On the couch where he dimly remembered being gobbled were at least two dozen copies of "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" Three more were on the turntable of the dusty portable stereo. On the far wall was a huge poster of Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw. Being gobbled means never having to say you're sorry, ha-ha. Jesus, I am going crazy.

  She stood in the bedroom doorway, still crying, pathetic in her half-slip. He could see a nick on one of her shins where she had cut herself shaving.

  "Listen, give me a call," she said. "I ain't mad."

  He should have said, "Sure," and that would have been the end of it. Instead he heard his mouth utter a crazy laugh and then, "Your kippers are burning."

  She screamed at him and started across the room, only to trip over a throw-pillow on the floor and go sprawling. One of her arms knocked over a half-empty bottle of milk and rocked the empty bottle of Scotch standing next to it. Holy God, Larry thought, were we mixing those?

  He got out quickly and pounded down the stairs. As he went down the last six steps to the front door, he heard her in the upstairs hall, yelling down: "You ain't no nice guy! You ain't no--"

  He slammed the door behind him and misty, humid warmth washed over him, carrying the aroma of spring trees and automobile exhaust. It was perfume after the smell of frying grease and stale cigarette smoke. He still had the crazy cigarette, now burned down to the filter, and he threw it into the gutter and took a deep breath of the fresh air. Wonderful to be out of that craziness. Return with us not to those wonderful days of normalcy as we--

  Above and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what was coming next.

  "I hope you rot!" she screamed down at him. The Compleat Bronx Fishwife. "I hope you fall in front of some fuckin subway train! You ain't no singer! You're shitty in bed! You louse! Pound this up your ass! Take this to ya mother, you louse!"

  The milk bottle came zipping down from her second-floor bedroom window. Larry ducked. It went off in the gutter like a bomb, spraying the street with glass fragments. The Scotch bottle came next, twirling end over end, to crash nearly at his feet. Whatever else she was, her aim was terrifying. He broke into a run, holding one arm over his head. This madness was never going to end.

  From behind him came a final long braying cry, triumphant with juicy Bronx intonation: "KISS MY ASS, YOU CHEAP BAAASTARD! " Then he was around the corner and on the expressway overpass, leaning over, laughing with a shaky intensity that was nearly hysteria, watching the cars pass below.

  "Couldn't you have handled that better?" he said, totally unaware he was speaking out loud. "Oh man, you coulda done better than that. That was a bad scene. Crap on that, man." He realized he was speaking aloud, and another burst of laughter escaped him. He suddenly felt a dizzy, spinning nausea in his stomach and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. A memory circuit in the Department of Masochism clicked open and he heard Wayne Stukey saying, There's something in you that's like biting on tinfoil.

  He had treated the girl like an old whore on the morning after the frathouse gangbang.

  You ain't no nice guy.

  I am. I am.

  But when the people at the big party had protested his decision to cut them off, he had threatened to call the police, and he had meant it. Hadn't he? Yes. Yes, he had. Most of them were strangers, true, he could care if they crapped on a landmine, but four or five of the protestors had gone back to the old days. And Wayne Stukey, that bastard, standing in the doorway with his arms folded like a hanging judge on the big day.

  Sal Doria going out, saying: If this is what it does to guys like you, Larry, I wish you were still playing sessions.

  He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, looking for a cab. Oh sure. The outraged friend bit. If Sal was such a big friend, what was he doing there sucking off him in the first place? I was stupid and nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up. That's the real story.

  You ain't no nice guy.

  "I am a nice guy," he said sulkily. "And whose business is it, anyway? "

  A cab was coming and Larry flagged it. It seemed to hesitate a moment before pulling up to the curb, and Larry remembered the blood on his forehead. He opened the back door and climbed in before the guy could change his mind.

  "Manhattan. The Chemical Bank Building on Park," he said.

  The cab pulled out into traffic. "You got a cut on your forehead, guy," the cabbie said.

  "A girl threw a spatula at me," Larry said absently.

  The cabbie offered him a strange false smile of commiseration and drove on, leaving Larry to settle back and try to imagine how he was going to explain his night out to his mother.

  CHAPTER 11

  Larry found a tired-looking black woman on the lobby level who told him she thought Alice Underwood was up on the twenty-fourth floor, doing an inventory. He got an elevator and went up, aware that the other people in the car were stealing cautious glances at his forehead. The wound there was no longer bleeding, but it had caked over into an unsightly mess.

  The twenty-fourth floor was taken up by the executive offices of a Japanese camera company. Larry walked up and down the halls for almost twenty minutes, looking for his mother and feeling like a horse's ass. There were plenty of Occidental executives, but enough of them were Japanese to make him feel, at six-feet-two, like a very tall horse's ass. The small men and women with the upslanted eyes looked at his caked forehead and bloody jacket sleeve with unsettling Oriental blandness.

  He finally spotted a door with CUSTODIAN & HOUSEKEEPING on it behind a very large fern. He tried the knob. The door was unlocked and he peered inside. His mother was in there, dressed in her shapeless gray uniform, support hose, and crepe-soled shoes. Her hair was firmly caught under a black net. Her back was to him. She had a clipboard in one hand and seemed to be counting bottles of spray cleaner on a high shelf.

  Larry fe
lt a strong and guilty impulse to just turn tail and run. Go back to the garage two blocks from her apartment building and get the Z. Fuck the two months' rent he had just laid down on the space. Just get in and boogie. Boogie where? Anywhere. Bar Harbor, Maine. Tampa, Florida. Salt Lake City, Utah. Any place would be a good place, as long as it was comfortably over the horizon from Dewey the Deck and from this soap-smelling little closet. He didn't know if it was the fluorescent lights or the cut on his forehead, but he was getting one fuck of a headache.

  Oh, quit whining, you goddam sissy.

  "Hi, Mom," he said.

  She started a little but didn't turn around. "So, Larry. You found your way uptown."

  "Sure." He shuffled his feet. "I wanted to apologize. I should have called you last night--"

  "Yeah. Good idea."

  "I stayed with Buddy. We ... uh ... we went out steppin. Did the town."

  "I figured it was that. That or something like it." She hooked a small stool over with her foot, climbed up on it, and began to count the bottles of floor-wax on the top shelf, touching each one lightly with the tips of her right thumb and forefinger as she went. She had to reach, and when she did, her dress pulled up and he could see beyond the brown tops of her stockings to the waffled white flesh of her upper thighs and he turned his eyes away, suddenly and aimlessly recalling what had happened to Noah's third son when he looked at his father as the old man lay drunk and naked on his pallet. Poor guy had ended up being a hewer of wood and fetcher of water ever after. Him and all his descendants. And that's why we have race riots today, son. Praise God.

  "Is that all you came to tell me?" she asked, looking around at him for the first time.

  "Well, where I was and to apologize. It was crummy of me to forget."

  "Yeah," she said again. "But you got your crummy side to you, Larry. Did you think I forgot that?"

  He flushed. "Mom, listen--"

  "You're bleeding. Some stripper hit you with a loaded G-string?" She turned back to the shelves, and after she had counted the whole row of bottles on the top one, she made a notation on her clipboard. "Someone has had themselves two bottles of floor-wax this past week," she remarked. "Lucky them."

  "I came to say I was sorry!" Larry told her loudly. She didn't jump, but he did. A little.

  "Yeah, so you said. Mr. Geoghan is gonna be on us like a ton of bricks if the damned floor-wax doesn't stop going out."

  "I didn't get in a barroom fight and I wasn't in a strip-joint. It wasn't anything like that. It was just ..." He trailed off.

  She turned around, eyebrows arched in that old sardonic way he remembered so well. "Was what?"

  "Well ..." He couldn't think of a convincing lie quick enough. "It was. A. Uh. Spatula."

  "Someone mistook you for a fried egg? Must have been quite a night you and Buddy had out on the town."

  He kept forgetting that she could run rings around him, had always been able to, probably always would.

  "It was a girl, Ma. She threw it at me."

  "She must be a hell of a shot," Alice Underwood said, and turned away again. "That dratted Consuela is hiding the requisition forms again. Not that they do much good; we never get all the stuff we need, but we get plenty I wouldn't know what to do with if my life depended on it."

  "Ma, are you mad at me?"

  Her hands suddenly dropped to her sides. Her shoulders slumped.

  "Don't be mad at me," he whispered. "Don't be, okay? Huh?"

  She turned around and he saw an unnatural sparkle in her eyes--well, he supposed it was natural enough, but it sure wasn't caused by the fluorescents in here, and he heard the oral hygienist say once more, with great finality: You ain't no nice guy. Why had he ever bothered to come home if he was going to do stuff like this to her... and never mind what she was doing to him.

  "Larry," she said gently. "Larry, Larry, Larry."

  For a moment he thought she was going to say no more; even allowed himself to hope this was so.

  "Is that all you can say? 'Don't be mad at me, please, Ma, don't be mad'? I hear you on the radio, and even though I don't like that song you sing, I'm proud it's you singing it. People ask me if that's really my son and I say yes, that's Larry. I tell them you could always sing, and that's no lie, is it?"

  He shook his head miserably, not trusting himself to speak.

  "I tell them how you picked up Donny Roberts's guitar when you were in junior high and how you were playing better than him in half an hour, even though he had lessons ever since second grade. You got talent, Larry, nobody ever had to tell me that, least of all you. I guess you knew it, too, because it's the only thing I never heard you whine about. Then you went away, and am I beating you about the head and shoulders with that? No. Young men and young women, they go away. That's the nature of the world. Sometimes it stinks, but it's natural. Then you come back. Does somebody have to tell me why that is? No. You come back because, hit record or no hit record, you got in some kind of jam out there on the West Coast."

  "I'm not in any trouble!" he said indignantly.

  "Yes you are. I know the signs. I've been your mother for a long time, and you can't bullshit me, Larry. Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you couldn't just turn your head and see it. Sometimes I think you'd cross the street to step in dogshit. God will forgive me for saying it, because God knows it's true. Am I mad? No. Am I disappointed? Yes. I had hoped you would change out there. You didn't. You went away a little boy in a man's body and you came back the same way, except the man got his hair processed. You know why I think you came home?"

  He looked at her, wanting to speak, but knowing the only thing he would be able to say if he did would make them both mad: Don't cry, Mom, huh?

  "I think you came home because you couldn't think where else to go. You didn't know who else would take you in. I never said a mean word about you to anyone else, Larry, not even to my own sister, but since you've pushed me to it, I'll tell you exactly what I think of you. I think you're a taker. You've always been one. It's like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me. You're not bad, that's not what I mean. Some of the places we had to live after your father died, you would have gone bad if there was bad in you, God knows. I think the worst thing I ever caught you doing was writing a nasty word in the downstairs hall of that place on Carstairs Avenue in Queens. You remember that?"

  He remembered. She had chalked that same word on his forehead and then made him walk around the block with her three times. He had never written that word or any other word on a building, wall, or stoop.

  "The worst part, Larry, is that you mean well. Sometimes I think it would almost be a mercy if you were broke worse. As it is, you seem to know what's wrong but not how to fix it. And I don't know how, either. I tried every way I knew when you were small. Writing that word on your forehead, that was only one of them... and by then I was getting desperate, or I never would have done such a mean thing to you. You're a taker, that's all. You came home to me because you knew that I have to give. Not to everybody, but to you."

  "I'll move out," he said, and every word was like spitting out a dry ball of lint. "This afternoon."

  Then it came to him that he probably couldn't afford to move out, at least not until Wayne sent him his next royalty check -- or whatever was left of it after he finished feeding the hungriest of the L.A. hounds--on to him. As for current out-of-pocket expenses, there was the rent on the parking slot for the Datsun Z, and a hefty payment he would have to send out by Friday, unless he wanted the friendly neighborhood repo man looking for him, and he didn't. And after last night's revel, which had begun so innocently with Buddy and his fiancee and this oral hygienist the fiancee knew, a nice girl from the Bronx, Larry, you'll love her, great sense of humor, he was pretty low on cash. No. If you wanted to be accurate, he was busted to his heels. The thought made him panicky. If he left his mother's now, where would he go? A hotel? The doorman at any hotel better than a fleabag would laugh his ass off
and tell him to get lost. He was wearing good threads, but they knew. Somehow those bastards knew. They could smell an empty wallet.

  "Don't go," she said softly. "I wish you wouldn't, Larry. I bought some food special. Maybe you saw it. And I was hoping maybe we could play some gin rummy tonight."

  "Ma, you can't play gin," he said, smiling a little.

  "For a penny a point, I can beat the tailgate off a kid like you."

  "Maybe if I gave you four hundred points--"

  "Listen to the kid," she jeered softly. "Maybe if I gave you four hundred. Stick around, Larry. What do you say?"

  "All right," he said. For the first time that day he felt good, really good. A small voice inside whispered he was taking again, same old Larry, riding for free, but he refused to listen. This was his mother, after all, and she had asked him. It was true that she had said some pretty hard things on the way to asking, but asking was asking, true or false? "Tell you what. I'll pay for our tickets to the game on July fourth. I'll just peel it off the top of whatever I skin you out of tonight."

  "You couldn't skin a tomato," she said amiably, then turned back to the shelves. "There's a men's down the hall. Why don't you go wash the blood off your forehead? Then take ten dollars out of my purse and go to a movie. There's some good movie-houses over on Third Avenue, still. Just stay out of those scum-pits around Forty-ninth and Broadway."

  "I'll be giving money to you before long," Larry said. "Record's number eighteen on the Billboard chart this week. I checked it in Sam Goody's coming over here."

  "That's wonderful. If you're so loaded, why didn't you buy a copy, instead of just looking?"

  Suddenly there was some kind of a blockage in his throat. He harrumphed, but it didn't go away.

  "Well, never mind," she said. "My tongue's like a horse with a bad temper. Once it starts running, it just has to go on running until it's tired out. You know that. Take fifteen, Larry. Call it a loan. I guess I will get it back, one way or the other."

  "You will," he said. He came over to her and tugged at the hem of her dress like a little boy. She looked down. He stood on tiptoe and kissed her cheek. "I love you, Ma."

  She looked startled, not at the kiss but either at what he had said or the tone in which he had said it. "Why, I know that, Larry," she said.