“It smells terrible in here.”
“Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”
“If I know it was like this, I’d been in here long ago.”
“I do not know why you are in here now, as a matter of fact, or why you have this sudden compulsion to invade my sanctuary. I doubt whether it will ever be the same after the trauma of this intrusion by an alien spirit.”
“I came to talk to you, boy. Get your face out them pillows.”
“This must be the influence of that ludicrous representative of the law. He seems to have turned you against your own child. By the way, he has left, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, and I apologized to him over the way you acted.”
“Mother, you are standing on my tablets. Will you please move a little? Isn’t it enough that you have destroyed my digestion without destroying the fruits of my brain also?”
“Well, where I’m gonna stand, Ignatius? You want me to get in bed with you?” Mrs. Reilly asked angrily.
“Watch out where you’re stepping, please!” Ignatius thundered. “My God, never has anyone been so totally and so literally stormed and besieged. What is it anyway that has driven you in here in this state of complete mania? Could it be the stench of cheap muscatel that is assaulting my nostrils?”
“I made up my mind. You gonna go out and get you a job.”
Oh, what low joke was Fortuna playing on him now? Arrest, accident, job. Where would this dreadful cycle ever end?
“I see,” Ignatius said calmly. “Knowing that you are congenitally incapable of arriving at a decision of this importance, I imagine that that mongoloid law officer put this idea into your head.”
“Me and Mr. Mancuso talked like I used to talk to your poppa. You poppa used to tell me what to do. I wish he was alive today.”
“Mancuso and my father are alike only in that they both give the impression of being rather inconsequential humans. However, your current mentor is apparently the type of person who thinks that everything will be all right if everyone works continually.”
“Mr. Mancuso works hard. He’s got a hard road at the precinct.”
“I am certain that he supports several unwanted children who all hope to grow up to be policemen, the girls included.”
“He’s got three sweet chirren.”
“I can imagine.” Ignatius began to bounce slowly. “Oh!”
“What are you doing? Are you fooling with that valve again? Nobody else got him a valve but you. I ain’t got no valve.”
“Everyone has a valve!” Ignatius screamed. “Mine is simply more developed. I am trying to open a passage which you have succeeded in blocking. It may be permanently closed now for all I know.”
“Mr. Mancuso says if you work you can help me pay off the man. He says he thinks the man might take the money in installments.”
“Your friend the patrolman says a great deal. You certainly bring people out, as they say. I never suspected that he could be so loquacious or that he was capable of such perceptive comment. Do you realize that he is trying to destroy our home? It began the moment that he attempted that brutal arrest in front of D. H. Holmes. Although you are too limited to comprehend it all, Mother, this man is our nemesis. He’s spun our wheel downward.”
“Wheel? Mr. Mancuso is a good man. You oughta be glad he didn’t take you in!”
“In my private apocalypse he will be impaled upon his own nightstick. Anyway, it is inconceivable that I should get a job. I am very busy with my work at the moment, and I feel that I am entering a very fecund stage. Perhaps the accident jarred and loosened my thought. At any rate, I accomplished a great deal today.”
“We gotta pay that man, Ignatius. You wanna see me in jail? Wouldn’t you be ashamed with your poor momma behind bars?”
“Will you please stop talking about imprisonment? You seem to be preoccupied with the thought. Actually, you seem to enjoy thinking about it. Martyrdom is meaningless in our age.” He belched quietly. “I would suggest certain economies around the house. Somehow you will soon see that you have the required amount.”
“I spend all the money on you for food and whatnots.”
“I have found several empty wine bottles about lately, the contents of which I certainly did not consume.”
“Ignatius!”
“I made the mistake of heating the oven the other day before inspecting it properly. When I opened it to put in my frozen pizza, I was almost blinded by a bottle of broiled wine that was preparing to explode. I suggest that you divert some of the monies that you are pouring into the liquor industry.”
“For shame, Ignatius. A few bottles of Gallo muscatel, and you with all them trinkets.”
“Will you please define the meaning of trinkets?” Ignatius snapped.
“All them books. That gramaphone. That trumpet I bought you last month.”
“I consider the trumpet a good investment, although our neighbor, Miss Annie, does not. If she beats on my shutters again, I’ll pour water on her.”
“Tomorrow we looking at the want ads in the paper. You gonna dress up and go find you a job.”
“I am afraid to ask what your idea of ‘dressing up’ is. I will probably be turned into an utter mockery.”
“I’m gonna iron you a nice white shirt and you gonna put on one of your poppa’s nice ties.”
“Do I believe what I am hearing?” Ignatius asked his pillow.
“It’s either that, Ignatius, or I gotta take out a mortgage. You wanna lose the roof over your head?”
“No! You will not mortgage this house.” He pounded a great paw into the mattress. “The whole sense of security which I have been trying to develop would crumble. I will not have any disinterested party controlling my domicile. I couldn’t stand it. Just the thought of it makes my hands break out.”
He extended a paw so that his mother could examine the rash.
“That is out of the question,” he continued. “It would bring all of my latent anxieties to a head, and the result, I fear, would be very ugly indeed. I would not want you to have to spend the remainder of your life caring for a lunatic locked away somewhere in the attic. We shall not mortgage the house. You must have some funds somewhere.”
“I got a hundred fifty in the Hibernia Bank.”
“My God, is that all? I hardly thought that we were existing so precariously. However, it is fortunate that you have kept this from me. Had I known how close we were to total penury, my nerves would have given out long ago.” Ignatius scratched his paws. “I must admit, though, that the alternative for me is rather grim. I doubt very seriously whether anyone will hire me.”
“What do you mean, babe? You a fine boy with a good education.”
“Employers sense in me a denial of their values.” He rolled over onto his back. “They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe. That was true even when I worked for the New Orleans Public Library.”
“But, Ignatius, that was the only time you worked since you got out of college, and you was only there for two weeks.”
“That is exactly what I mean,” Ignatius replied, aiming a paper ball at the bowl of the milk glass chandelier.
“All you did was paste them little slips in the books.”
“Yes, but I had my own esthetic about pasting those slips. On some days I could only paste in three or four slips and at the same time feel satisfied with the quality of my work. The library authorities resented my integrity about the whole thing. They only wante
d another animal who could slop glue on their best sellers.”
“You think maybe you could get a job there again?”
“I seriously doubt it. At the time I said some rather cutting things to the woman in charge of the processing department. They even revoked my borrower’s card. You must realize the fear and hatred which my weltanschauung instills in people.” Ignatius belched. “I won’t mention that misguided trip to Baton Rouge. That incident, I believe, caused me to form a mental block against working.”
“They was nice to you at college, Ignatius. Now tell the truth. They let you hang around there a long time. They even let you teach a class.”
“Oh, it was basically the same. Some poor white from Mississippi told the dean that I was a propagandist for the Pope, which was patently untrue. I do not support the current Pope. He does not at all fit my concept of a good, authoritarian Pope. Actually, I am opposed to the relativism of modern Catholicism quite violently. However, the boldness of this ignorant lily-white redneck fundamentalist led my other students to form a committee to demand that I grade and return their accumulated essays and examinations. There was even a small demonstration outside the window of my office. It was rather dramatic. For being such simple, ignorant children, they managed it quite well. At the height of the demonstration I dumped all of the old papers—ungraded, of course—out of the window and right onto the students’ heads. The college was too small to accept this act of defiance against the abyss of contemporary academia.”
“Ignatius! You never told me that.”
“I did not want to excite you at the time. I also told the students that, for the sake of humanity’s future, I hoped that they were all sterile.” Ignatius arranged the pillows about his head. “I could never have possibly read over the illiteracies and misconceptions burbling from the dark minds of those students. It will be the same wherever I work.”
“You can get you a good job. Wait till they see a boy with a master’s degree.”
Ignatius sighed heavily and said, “I see no alternative.” He twisted his face into a mask of suffering. There was no use fighting Fortuna until the cycle was over. “You realize, of course, that this is all your fault. The progress of my work will be greatly delayed. I suggest that you go to your confessor and make some penance, Mother. Promise him that you will avoid the path of sin and drinking in the future. Tell him what the consequence of your moral failure has been. Let him know that you have delayed the completion of a monumental indictment against our society. Perhaps he will comprehend the magnitude of your failing. If he is my type of priest, the penance will no doubt be rather strict. However, I have learned to expect little from today’s clergyman.”
“I’m gonna be good, Ignatius. You’ll see.”
“There, there, I shall find some employment, although it will not necessarily be what you would call a good job. I may have some valuable insights which may benefit my employer. Perhaps the experience can give my writing a new dimension. Being actively engaged in the system which I criticize will be an interesting irony in itself.” Ignatius belched loudly. “If only Myrna Minkoff could see how low I’ve fallen.”
“What that girl’s doing now?” Mrs. Reilly asked suspiciously. “I put out good money for you to go to college, and you have to pick up with somebody like that.”
“Myrna is still in New York, her native habitat. No doubt she is trying to taunt the police into arresting her in some demonstration at this very moment.”
“She sure used to get me nervous playing on that guitar of hers all over this house. If she’s got money like you said, maybe you shoulda married her. You two might of settled down and had a nice baby or something.”
“Do I believe that such obscenity and filth is coming from the lips of my own mother?” Ignatius bellowed. “Now run along and fix me some dinner. I must be at the theater on time. It’s a circus musical, a heralded excess which I have been waiting to see for some time. We study the want ads tomorrow.”
“I’m so proud you gonna work at last,” Mrs. Reilly said emotionally and kissed her son somewhere in his damp moustache.
*
“Look at that old gal,” Jones mused to his psyche as the bus bounced and threw him against the woman sitting beside him. “She think cause I color I gonna rape her. She about to throw her grammaw ass out the window. Whoa! I ain gonna rape nobody.”
He moved discreetly away from her, crossing his legs and wishing that he could smoke on the bus. He wondered who the fat cat in the green cap was who was suddenly all over town. Where would that fat mother show up next? There was something ghostly about that greencap freak.
“Well, I gonna tell that po-lice I gainfully employ, keep him off my back, tell him I met up with a humanitaria payin me twenty dollar a week. He say, ‘That fine, boy. I’m glad to see you straighten out.’ And I say, ‘Hey!’ And he say, ‘Now maybe you be becomin a member of the community.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I got me a nigger job and nigger pay. Now I really a member of the community. Now I a real nigger. No vagran. Just nigger.’ Whoa! What kinda change you got?”
The old woman pulled the bell cord and got out of the seat, trying self-consciously to avoid any contact with the anatomy of Jones, who watched her writhing through the detachment of his green lenses.
“Look at that. She think I got siphlus and TB and a hard on and I gonna cut her up with a razor and lif her purse. Ooo-wee.”
The sunglasses watched the woman climb off the bus into a crowd standing at the bus stop. Somewhere in the rear of the crowd an altercation was going on. A man with a rolled-up newspaper in his hand was striking another man who had a long red beard and was wearing Bermuda shorts. The man in the beard looked familiar. Jones felt uneasy. First there was the green-cap phantom and now this person he couldn’t identify.
Jones turned from the window when the man in the red beard ran off and opened the Life magazine that Darlene had given him. At least Darlene had been pleasant to him at the Night of Joy. Darlene subscribed to Life for purposes of self-improvement and, in giving it to Jones, had suggested that he might find it helpful, too. Jones tried to plow through an editorial about American involvement in the Far East but stopped midway, wondering how something like that could help Darlene to become an exotic, the goal that she had referred to again and again. He turned back to the advertisements, for they were the things that interested him in magazines. The selection in this magazine was excellent. He liked the Aetna Life Insurance ad with the picture of the lovely home that a couple had just bought. The Yardley Shaving Lotion men looked cool and rich. That’s how the magazine could help him. He wanted to look just like those men.
*
When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life. Ignatius was about to say this to himself; then he remembered that he went to the movies almost every night, no matter which way Fortuna was spinning.
He sat at attention in the darkness of the Prytania only a few rows from the screen, his body filling the seat and protruding into the two adjoining ones. On the seat to his right he had stationed his overcoat, three Milky Ways, and two auxiliary bags of popcorn, the bags neatly rolled at the top to keep the popcorn warm and crisp. Ignatius ate his current popcorn and stared raptly at the previews of coming attractions. One of the films looked bad enough, he thought, to bring him back to the Prytania in a few days. Then the screen glowed in bright, wide technicolor, the lion roared, and the title of the excess flashed on the screen before his miraculous blue and yellow eyes. His face froze and his popcorn bag began to shake. Upon entering the theater, he had carefully buttoned the two earflaps to the top of his cap, and now the strident score of the musical assaulted his naked ears from a variety of speakers. He listened to the music, detecting two popular songs which he particularly disliked, and scrutinized the credits closely to find any names of performers who normally nauseated him.
When the credits had ended and Ignatius had noted that several of the actors, the composer, the director, the hair des
igner, and the assistant producer were all people whose efforts had offended him at various times in the past, there appeared in the technicolor a scene of many extras milling about a circus tent. He greedily studied the crowd and found the heroine standing near a sideshow.
“Oh, my God!” he screamed. “There she is.”
The children in the rows in front of him turned and stared, but Ignatius did not notice them. The blue and yellow eyes were following the heroine, who was gaily carrying a pail of water to what turned out to be her elephant.
“This is going to be even worse than I thought,” Ignatius said when he saw the elephant.
He put the empty popcorn bag to his full lips, inflated it, and waited, his eyes gleaming with reflected technicolor. A tympany beat and the soundtrack filled with violins. The heroine and Ignatius opened their mouths simultaneously, hers in song, his in a groan. In the darkness two trembling hands met violently. The popcorn bag exploded with a bang. The children shrieked.
“What’s all that noise?” the woman at the candy counter asked the manager.
“He’s here tonight,” the manager told her, pointing across the theater to the hulking silhouette at the bottom of the screen. The manager walked down the aisle to the front rows, where the shrieking was growing wilder. Their fear having dissipated itself, the children were holding a competition of shrieking. Ignatius listened to the bloodcurdling little trebles and giggles and gloated in his dark lair. With a few mild threats, the manager quieted the front rows and then glanced down the row in which the isolated figure of Ignatius rose like some great monster among the little heads. But he was treated only to a puffy profile. The eyes that shone under the green visor were following the heroine and her elephant across the wide screen and into the circus tent.
For a while Ignatius was relatively still, reacting to the unfolding plot with only an occasional subdued snort. Then what seemed to be the film’s entire cast was up on the wires. In the foreground, on a trapeze, was the heroine. She swung back and forth to a waltz. She smiled in a huge close-up. Ignatius inspected her teeth for cavities and fillings. She extended one leg. Ignatius rapidly surveyed its contours for structural defects. She began to sing about trying over and over again until you succeeded. Ignatius quivered as the philosophy of the lyrics became clear. He studied her grip on the trapeze in the hope that the camera would record her fatal plunge to the sawdust far below.