The gypsys curse, p.1
The Gypsy's Curse, page 1
THE GYPSY’S CURSE
A novel
Harry Crews
1974
My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.
-DIANE ARBUS
I
One
For the record, call me Marvin Molar. I said to call me Marvin Molar because that’s not my real name. It’s only what I call myself. I don’t know my real name. Nobody does. Actually, somebody does, but I don’t know where they are. Al Molarski raised me and named me Marvin and his name is all I’ve got. But I dropped the “ski” part of it and just call myself Marvin Molar. I figured I had enough wrong with me without being a Polack, which is what Al is.
I lived upstairs in some rooms at the back of the Fireman’s Gym with Al and a kid from Georgia named Leroy and a seventy-year-old ex-prizeflghter with a bad brain named Pete who was a nigger. The kid kept the gym clean and pretended he was training for another fight. The nigger drove the car and talked to himself. I did the best I could nickle-and-diming at Rotarians’ meetings and shopping malls and wherever else they wanted to see me do my act.
Al owned the gym, which had nothing to do with firemen by the way. It was just called the Fireman’s Gym. It was probably always called that but I don’t know for sure. Al didn’t talk much. I had been there all my life—since I was a baby—but I didn’t know much about how things got to be the way they were because Al hardly ever talked and I couldn’t talk except with my hands or else write it out on a piece of paper so I was easy to ignore if you wanted to. But of course most people didn’t want to ignore me. Most people paid too much attention to me, just about everybody except Al. He didn’t talk much and you would be lucky if he looked at you. He would look near you. But he wouldn’t look at you. One of his favorite tricks was to look at your left ear. He would just stare at it and it made him look kind of stunned, like his eyes were not focusing and like he might be a little crazy which he probably was. With the things that happened to him, he should have been crazy as a bat.
I had my reasons to be bitter, but I wasn’t. And I wasn’t as bad off as I sound either. Actually, in a lot of ways, I was pretty goddam bad off but not as bad off as I sound—or as bad off as I looked for that matter. One thing I do is read a lot. I’m not a dummy. Some people thought I was, but I wasn’t. It’s easy to think that a guy who can’t talk or hear is a dummy but anybody who thought that about me was a long way from being right. The whole wall above my bed was filled with shelves of books. And I read’m too; they weren’t just there for show. I wasn’t like Pete and Al and the Georgia boy whose name was Leroy and who was a dummy from being hit on the head so much. I’m not as sharp as I’d like to be—who is?—but I’m pretty sharp for somebody who has every right to be bitter.
The day she called was Sunday and Sunday was a little different for me from the other six days in the week, but not a whole lot different. I didn’t have to start my workout until nine o’clock instead of eight on Sundays. That’s why I was still in bed. When I opened my eyes that morning I saw the same thing I saw every morning. The note my parents left with me.
It was in one of those gold-gilt cheapy frames that people buy out of Woolworth’s to frame their kid’s high school diploma in. And that was where Al got it, out of Woolworth’s. The frame, not the note. And I read it that morning just like I did every morning. God knows I didn’t have to read it. I had seen it on the wall ever since I’d been there, sixteen years. For the record, that’s how old I am, sixteen. January twenty-first I’ll be seventeen. We called January twenty-first my birthday. But that wasn’t it. That was just the day my parents left me on the stairs leading up to the Fireman’s Gym. The note was pinned to the blanket wrapped around me.
Al said it was a very nice blanket, not a cheapy at all. A first class blanket. And the note was typed, if you can believe that. I can’t get over it, the note being typed. It had turned yellow behind the glass of the diploma frame, but you could still read it from all the way across the room. Here was what it said:
WE ARE YOUR NORMAL PEOPLE AND WE CAINT STAND IT. WE JUST CAINT STAND IT. WHOEVER YOU ARE, WE WOULD BE ABLIDGED IF YOU WOULD TAKE CARE OF THIS FOR US BECAUSE WE CAINT STAND IT ANY MORE.
THANK YOU
HIS PEOPLE
PS It caint talk.
And there I was under the blanket, a great big kid, probably three or nearly four years old already. I found that out from Al. Even though he doesn’t talk much, I have managed to find out a few things in sixteen years. And one of the things I found out was that I was three or four already when he found me on the stairs. So off the record I’m not sixteen. I’m probably nineteen or twenty, but like I said, Al counted my birthday from when he found me. And if he said that was my birthday, what could I do? It would be easy to be bitter, but I’m not. I got better things to do with my time than be bitter. I did look at that note a lot though. It hurt my heart that those words were misspelled. Type up a note to abandon a baby and then misspell the words. Something in that rubs you the wrong way. They couldn’t have been people who read much. They might even have been dummies like Leroy and the nigger. That hurt my heart but it might be true.
I remember when the telephone rang. I could feel it all the way across the room. It came through the floor from the little table by the door and up into the bed. Al was standing at the stove with his back to me cooking eggs and bacon for him and Leroy and Pece. I wasn’t allowed to eat until after my morning workout. Even on Sunday. His back got still as a wall. He knew I could feel the telephone ringing. He slid the skillet off the fire and went to the little table by the door. After touching his cauliflowered ear with the receiver, he turned and stared at a spot just over my head somewhere in the first shelf of books. I watched his lips. But he didn’t speak. He stood there looking stunned and distant. I took my hand out from under the covers and asked who was calling. I already knew and he knew I knew but I asked him anyway just to get him a little tight. I watched his mouth and finally he said, “Her.”
“Ask her what she wants,” I said.
He put his mouth to the receiver, and turned his head so that I could barely see the corner of his mouth. “He says to tell you he can’t talk now.”
I snatched down a book from the lowest shelf and threw it as hard as I could. It hit a picture of Al posing in a pair of swim trunks on the deck of a Navy battleship. Al slowly looked up and cut his old-man eyes at the picture where it lay on the floor. Then he stared at my left ear. He did it all real slow, like he did everything.
“If you’re going to lie,” I said, “turn your head all the way around.”
“Did you say Al lies?” he said.
He always called himself by his name. I think he thought it made him sound scarier, which it does.
I said: “If you’re going to lie, turn your head all the way around. I can read the corner of your mouth. I can even read the way your chin moves.”
“Al don’t lie,” he said.
“I can talk, baby,” I said to Al. “You know how I love to talk to you.” Al said what I said into the phone, his eyes dead and steady now, lost among the curling mat of black hair on my fantastic chest.
I watched Al’s mouth. It said: “You didn’t come back last night.”
“You know I would have if I could,” I said.
“You coming down today?”
“Sure,” I said. “Right after the workout. Pete’ll bring me down.”
Leroy had come in now and was standing just inside the door, squinting at us—Al and me—his beat-together eyes swinging from my hands to Al’s face. He couldn’t read lips or sign language or probably even writing although I don’t know that for sure, but I do know he thought what we did was magic. I’d never seen him say it, but I knew that was the way he thought about it. Leroy was a little afraid of me and if he watched me and Al talk with our hands very long he started to turn gray like he might throw up. But I ignored him. I was zeroed in on Al’s mouth, until it was Hester’s mouth I was looking at. I could see her great little pointed tongue all wet with peppermint spit right there in Al’s mouth.
“You like it, don’t you?” she said.
“Don’t I just about faint?” I said.
“You want it this afternoon?”
“Hot damn,” I said.
“I’ll make it good for you,” she said.
“You always do.”
Al and I stared at each other across the room. His eyes always got blank and flat when I talked through him on the phone. It was almost like he didn’t listen in, even though it had to go through him. But I knew he did. Al didn’t miss much.
Finally she said: “Did you ask him yet?”
“What?”
“Did you ask him?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” I said. “When I get to the beach.”
“You didn’t ask him.”
“I have to go now,” I said.
“Ask him before you come, you hear?”
“I have to go now, sweetheart. Good-by.”
Al hung up the phone. He went over to the stove, his back still as a wall again, even though his arms were moving around over the pots. I threw another book, but this time I was careful not to hit anything. It wouldn’t do to get Al too tight.
When the book hit the wall, Al waited about a minute before he turned around real slow and focused on my ear. He didn’t say anything. Leroy was sitting at the table now, staring at my hands. He had only been living there a month and he watched my hands when I talked like they might turn into rabbits.
“Did
He just stared at me. I could see the grease popping out of the skillet behind him on the stove, making little blue stars in the fire. Finally he said: “Yes.”
“I want it,” I said.
He turned back to the stove, shook the skillet, then looked over his shoulder and said: “Good-by.”
“All right,” I said, “good-by.” But he already had his face turned away and didn’t see it.
I sat up in bed, took the nylon strap down from its hook on the wall and began to bind up my legs. See, that’s why the people—my parents, I guess, except I’ve never been sure of that or really able to believe it— why the people who left me on the steps of the Fireman’s Gym didn’t have to worry about me getting up and wandering off even though I was a great big kid. These legs I was born with shouldn’t happen to a dog.
I could swim pretty good but I never did, ever since a boy about five years old standing by the pool one day told me I looked like a tadpole. My upper body doesn’t sit on the back seat to nobody, but in the water my little legs trail along behind like, well, like a tadpole’s, I guess. For the record, they’re only three inches around and they look like they don’t have any bones in them except they do. Bones but no feeling. I thought a couple of times about getting them cut off but I could never bring myself to do it. I mean they’re my legs even if I can’t do anything with them. I keep’m folded back and bound against the cheeks of my ass with a nylon strap and walk on my hands. My act is all hand-balancing stuff that Al taught me and I can do just about anything on my hands you can do on your feet. I mean my arms, hot, measure twenty inches around and I don’t know how much you know about arms but a pair that tapes twenty inches’ll stop people in the street.
I slid out of bed and went over to where the book I threw knocked Al’s picture off the table. I rocked over into a one-hander and picked the picture up and put it back. Just about everywhere you look in the Fireman’s Gym or in the rooms we live in, you see pictures of Al in swim trunks or wrestling tights, usually with four men hanging from each arm or a car running over his chest or him standing on a platform with a small cow hanging from a harness hooked into his teeth or something like that. When he was young he was wrestling champion of the United States Navy for six years and he never got over it. He spent the rest of his life tearing tennis balls in two, bending dimes between his mean fingers, twisting bridge spikes and generally scaring the shit out of everybody. Along with the pictures of Al, there were bridge spikes bent like pretzels, and decks of cards with a piece the size of a thumb torn out of one corner and U-shaped quarters lying all over the place. Al’s hands and wrists were a nightmare.
After I put the books back, I went over and pulled myself up in a ladder-back chair. Al had the food on the table by then and Pete came shuffling in talking to two invisible seconds, telling them if they could stop the blood in his mouth that he would take the bum out in the next round. He choked on blood, coughed, and sat down by Leroy, who had a piece of bread in each hand and was batting the eggs back and to across his plate. Al’s got a special place in his heart for boxers because you can fuck over their heads so easy.
God knows where he got Pete; he was here when I came here, looking just like he does now. But the Georgia kid, Leroy, walked in off the street a month ago. He was carrying a canvas bag and had on what looked like a railroader’s cap. Al was sitting on the stool behind the wire cage where the towels and massage oil and Hoffman food supplements were kept. There was where Al sat mostly when the gym was open. Sometimes he wouldn’t move off the stool for five or six hours. I was working on the Roman rings when the kid came in. He stopped at the top of the stairs and just stood there. He stayed there a long time watching the iron freaks pumping steel in the front part of the gym where the light was better. Then he saw Al sitting behind the screen wire. He walked over and stopped in the open door leading into the cage.
I hung in the rings and watched them.
“I’m a boxer. Name Leroy.”
Al didn’t look at him. He didn’t say anything either.
“I thought to work out here,” said the kid.
Al almost turned his back and looked down at the other end of the gym as though the thought of a boxer working out here had never come to him. But there was a ring down there where he was looking, and some heavy bags and a speed bag and skip ropes and stuff hanging on the wall.
“I got some money,” the kid said.
He put his hand in his back pocket and took out a black change purse. He opened it and even from where I was on the rings I could see the bills folding out in a little roll. Al didn’t look at the money or the purse or the kid.
“I come from Bacon County, Georgia,” said the kid, “on the Greyhound today.” He looked down at the canvas bag he was carrying. “I fight anybody,” he said. “It don’t matter.”
He stood there shifting from foot to foot and I saw he had scar tissue in his eyebrows. I quit watching and dropped into an iron cross on the rings and held it until I saw black spots start to dance in the air and heard a high whistle that I hear when I’m about to pass out. I think it comes from the blood in my heart.
Finally, I looked back and the kid was saying: “ … and on Sunday I’d hitch up the wagon and drive around from farm to farm fighting anybody that’d put on the gloves with me. Sometimes I’d git thirty, thirty-five fights, in just a Sunday.” He paused and looked down at his bag and at his change purse he was still trying to show Al. “I fight anybody.”
Now Al stood up and put his hand on the kid’s shoulder. I remember how he flinched under that hand. Al’s fingers were about eight inches long—you think I’m saying more than it was, but I’m not—they were about eight inches long. He can hold a medicine ball like an orange, and I remember how the kid cut his eyes to look at the hand on his shoulder like he’d found a rattlesnake there. But I saw too how the boy loved that hand, wished it was his. Hell, I can understand that.
Al still hadn’t looked at him and still hadn’t said anything, or at least I hadn’t seen him say anything, and Al pointed to the back of the gym to the room where the lockers and showers were, where little clouds of steam were always coming through the door, and kind of pushed the boy toward it. The boy looked and mumbled something like—I couldn’t make it out exactly—something like, “I ’preciate it,” and started back, but Al held his shoulder tight and lifted the change purse out of his fingers. He took a long time looking down into the purse and then he emptied it, took all the money out of it, and sat back down on the stool and began to count it real slow. The boy watched him, and that was when Al looked at him for the first time. It was to hand him the empty purse back. The kid held it a moment and then walked on back to the lockers. After a while he came out wearing his railroad cap and dressed in a yellow bathing suit, black tennis shoes with black nylon socks. He punched the hell out of the heavy bag for the rest of the afternoon. I had to do my act that evening at the Springfield Shopping Mall and when the nigger drove me back after dark there was another bunk in the place where we live and the kid was in it with his face turned to the wall, fast asleep.
That was Al Molarski for you. He would take the last thing in the world you had and then give you a place to sleep.
They were about through eating now. Pete had carefully wiped his mouth and hands with the sleeve of his shirt and Leroy was hooking and jabbing the last piece of egg yolk around on his plate. Leroy hooked and jabbed about all the time. He slipped punches in his sleep too.
Al stood up from the table. The other two stood up with him. It was time for the workout and I was anxious to get it over with. The rest of Sunday was free if I didn’t have to do my act anywhere and the only place I had to be was in the basement of the Baptist church at seven-thirty that evening to balance for some boy scouts, but the rest of the time was mine.
I slid off the chair onto my hands and followed the three of them down the hall to the steam room. I always take a little steam to warm up for a workout. I wasn’t wearing anything but jockey shorts and I kept them on. Al held the door open for me and I went in and pulled myself up on a wooden bench. The steam hung in wavy layers under the yellow bulb in the ceiling. In a minute the three of them came in naked, one behind the other. Al and the boy were the same color, not white, but kind of an off gray, like they’d got that way from being mashed under something. The nigger was purple under the light, and steam beaded him like drops of oil. I rolled onto my back and Pete came to hang over me, rubbing my chest and pulling at me and gently pounding my shoulders. Hanging over me, his teeth were white on purple while he talked. He was his second and then his manager and then himself and then the ref and then the guy he was fighting and sometimes somebody I didn’t know. Behind him, Al was leaning back with his eyes closed and he wasn’t moving at all except for his hands feeling each other, soft and slow as a girl. The boy sat beside him, slipping punches and hooking. I couldn’t read his nose, but I knew he was snorting.
