All the world's a stage and the people merely players,
or, perhaps in this case, victims
or, perhaps in this case, victims
The Play by Benjamin Welton
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“Goodnight!
Such sweet and soft lips. Death is a negro slave dining on raven guts...”
The homeless
man with the pockmarked face was shouting across the mostly empty room. His
eyes were watery with the unfocused sentimentality of an alcoholic. His hands,
although clenched tight for dramatic effect, looked weak. He was on his back,
letting the microscopic bugs bite him throughout his nightly oratory.
Fran, his
long-suffering wife and a sometime prostitute, had grown accustomed to these
performances. Her husband had once been a famous poet, she told the young
drifter that the couple had picked up at the Catholic shelter. She knew he
didn’t believe her, but she kept listing off his accomplishments because it was
her routine.
“He used to
live in Greenwich Village after war. Everyone knew that he was the best poet
there. He practically invented the whole Bohemian fad. He and his friend Herman
started a publishing house, you know? They got big. The Times wrote about them,
and Scott Fitzgerald apparently used them in The Great Gatsby.”
How much of
this was true, she didn’t know for sure. Fran had met him on the way down, so
she could only take his word for it. And he was a liar, that was the problem.
He lied to landlords and he lied to the sisters at the shelter. No, I’ve given
up the demon liquor, he’d tell them, I’ve decided to live the godly life. Some
fib. He had never known a sober day in all their married years.
To make
matters worse, he had a hot pocket and couldn’t keep money cool. Fran would
always tell him to save up for food or milk, but he’d just go right out to
Judge Meyer’s bookstore and buy more poetry books than he could afford. Meyer
was a sap, so he kept lending him credit. Then, after coming to his senses
about wasting all the money, he’d go on a bender in the Village and cry for
hours about the 1920s and all the good things that could’ve been better. Fran
would wait three days then come and get him.
“Gee, I
don’t get it. How come a pretty young thing like you stays with an old drunk
like him?”
The strange
kid from the shelter talked like he was from the Bronx but had the boyish charm
of a Midwesterner. Fran found him exhilarating, even if his flattery was a bit
much. Fran was forty-five, so she was far from young. Still, despite the rough
years, she looked fine and did her best to maintain some semblance of a figure.
After all, johns don’t like them too fat or too skinny. It’s best to stay in
the middle for the bigger green.
Fran figured
the kid for a virgin with a little money saved up for lunch. At best she was
likely to score $25. That wasn’t much, but worth a play, and after tapping
twice on the rotten floorboards with her ruined sandals, she started to take
her clothes off.
As expected,
the kid didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He pumped with an irregular
beat, while his attempts at tenderness were as awkward as a crucifix hung above
a toilet. Fran stayed stoic and let the young beast sweat on her. Throughout
the whole ordeal they could both her him reciting lines on the next cot.
Of course
the point was to drown out his motions. The years of alcohol abuse made his
hands and feet hard to control, but he found over the years that his voice
could mask any accidental slips or involuntary kick outs. Tonight he didn’t
have to do too much masking, for Fran had left the knife in his jacket after
the last job. All he had to do was get his fingers on the handle, get the thing
out in the open, line up, then close his eyes.
He got to
stage four before everything went haywire. After years of running the gig
successfully, a trip-up was bound to happen. He was old, drunk, and useless.
Hands fumble and good ideas blur. The tongue loosens sometimes, and that makes
the wrong people get wise.
“Hey,
watchit. What the hell are you doing with that thing?”
“Traveller
be warned: not all nights are safe for rest! Wicked ones and bad ones
come....wicked ones and bad ones come and fall, they do.”
“C’mon,
grandpa. She asked for it. Put that cutter away and go back to bed.”
“Sacrifice
is what is needed. You can get up now, Fran. I do believe this young man is as
good as ours.”
“The fuck
you think.”
The young
boy shoved the bleary-eyed poet backwards. The force was enough to take the man
off of his feet. The knife went to the floor to the right. The young man picked
it up with the type of fingers that were used to weapons, and after adjusting
his grip, he took after the old man’s throat. He died tried to gurgle out
something he had written in 1922.
Fran, who
was in the middle of trying to get her blouse on, took the same knife in her
shoulder. It was not a killing blow, but it wounded her enough to set her on
her knees. From there, the young man dragged the somewhat dull blade across her
windpipe.
He left the
apartment without cleaning up. He dropped the knife on the stairway that lead
to the street. He first went to a diner for coffee and pie (he got $1.25 from
Fran’s purse), then he went to the nearest police station. He told the desk
sergeant that he had killed a bunch of Communists, and that the city should
give him a ribbon and a chance to talk to President Eisenhower.
They booked
him later that night. In the morning, a short, fat detective asked him about
similar slayings from two years prior.
