Andrew Shaw - Lover

The Seventh Avenue IRT pulled into the 96th Street station with a metallic screech. The doors opened. Six passengers left the third car from the front and made their way to the stairwell that would take them to the street.

There were two ladies in their fifties. One had a red bandana over her head and carried a black patent leather purse. The other was bareheaded and a shopping bag dangled from her left hand. There was a middle-aged man, small and featureless, who looked like an accountant. He carried a nine-by-twelve manila envelope under one arm and walked with measured steps. There was a teen-age girl wearing false breasts and too much make-up, and her behind twitched as she ascended the flight of stairs. The movement was meant to be provocative but the girl succeeded only in burlesquing the motion. There was another girl, older, who looked like a prostitute on her day off. This was not unusual, since she was in fact a prostitute, and the day might be said to be her day off in that she worked only at night. She was returning now from an afternoon movie on 42nd Street. She went to the movies every afternoon and worked every night, except for four or five evenings each month when she took an enforced vacation.

There were those five two old ladies, one man, one teen-ager and one professional slut.

And there was Johnny.

He was seventeen, but you would be hard put to guess his age by looking at him. He looked both older and younger depending on how you viewed him. If you saw the hardness around the well-spaced dark brown eyes, if you saw the tightness in the corners of the firm but full mouth, you might guess that he was in his mid-twenties. But then you noticed the almost too-easy walk, the cat-like way the long body moved with easy fluid grace. And his clothing faded denim dungarees tight on his hips and legs, a still-shiny black leather jacket with zipper pockets placed him again in his teens.

His name was Johnny Wells.

He mounted the stairs quickly and effortlessly and looked out at the intersection of Broadway and 96th Street. On the second floor of the building at his side was Manny Hesss pool hall. The boys were there now he guessed. Ricky and Long Sam and Beans, each with a cue in his hand and a gleam in his eyes. They werent actually waiting for him, he knew, but he was expected. Now was the time to climb the flight of stairs which would creak under his feet, to nod briefly to those patrons and hangers-on whom he knew, to take a heavy cue from, the stand and run off a quick thirty points of straight pool with the boys.

He didnt feel like it.

To begin with, he was too damn hungry to care much about pool or Ricky and Long Sam and Beans or anything else except filling his stomach as quickly as possible. Hed been prowling around downtown all day long and he was fed up with the hollow feeling in his stomach. He needed a decent meal and he needed it in a hurry. There were other things that would come afterward, more important things, but it was impossible to concentrate on anything else when you were hungry. Food first then the rest.

He dipped a hand into the pocket of his blue jeans. There was a jingle of coins but he missed the rustle of currency. You could keep the coins, he thought. Stick to the folding green, lots of long crisp bills, and to hell with the nickels and dimes and quarters. The crap about taking care of the pennies and the dollars would take care of themselves was crap and nothing but. That had been one of his old mans bits of brilliance, along with the penny-saved-is-a-penny-earned routine, and where had it gotten the old man?

The grave, he answered himself. When you never hauled down more than thirty bucks a week, you didnt save too many pennies. And no matter how well you took care of them, they were still pennies. And then the old man was dead, just as the old lady had been for eight years, and there werent even enough pennies left to bury him properly. The city had taken care of that.

Johnny Wells pulled his hand out of his pocket and looked at the coins in it. There was a nickel and eight pennies. He counted them three times. Then, suddenly, he laughed wildly and threw the coins into the gutter.

To hell with the pennies!

He ignored the people who stared at him and strode away quickly. When there was no place else to go, it was time to go home. Not that home was worth the trouble it took to get there, he thought. But he might as well get his moneys worth out of the place. He wouldnt be staying there much longer. He hadnt paid a nickel of the rent for the past six weeks and he wasnt going to pay now. In another day, he judged, the landlord would get around to changing the locks. That would leave him out in the cold.

Where was he going to stay then? And what was he going to use for money? Those were good questions, but he didnt worry about them. Something would turn up. Something always did turn up, if you were a sharp good-looking kid with an eye open for a quick couple of dollars and the guts to get ahead. If you went through with your eyes shut and your shoulders sagging, then you were going to take it on the chin all across the board. But a sharp kid never got licked. He came out on top.

His room was on the top floor of a run-down brownstone building on 99th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. He went through the hallway and climbed four flights of stairs, following his nose. It was easy to follow your nose in his building. The second floor smelled of cabbage, the third floor of garlic, the fourth floor of booze. You could tell that a batch of Irish lived on the second floor, a slew of Italians on the third, and a couple of lushheads on the fourth. You could also tell that the occupants of the building were not exactly rolling in dough.

He took the stairs two at a time and hit the top floor without breathing hard. He was in good shape. That was one thing about the life he led, he thought. It kept a guy on the go, kept his muscles in shape. And there was no extra weight on his frame, not when he never had any extra food to stuff his guts with. His arms and legs were strong, his stomach flat without a spare ounce of tissue on it. His chest was firm and hard and well-muscled. He was in damned good shape.

He kicked open the door of his room, pleased that that bastard of a landlord hadnt gotten around to locking him out yet. Not that it would make a hell of a lot of difference. The room wasnt much good for sleeping in and nothing more. There wasnt room to swing a cat in it, he thought, and he was a very swinging cat.

He smiled. That sounded nice.

The room was very small. Its one window faced the brick wall of a building on 98th Street, and the room was dark day or night. A covering of scarred and cracked linoleum topped most of the floor, but the linoleum had been cut poorly and didnt fit well. There was a single cot that sagged in the middle. The sheets were dirty since he never bothered to change them.

There was no chair in the room, only a single dresser with three drawers, two of which opened. The top of the dressers was scarred with burns from twenty or thirty years of forgotten cigarettes, many of them his own. His clothes hung from nails that some enterprising tenant had driven into the wall. There was no closet in the room.

A pigpen, he thought. Six bucks a week and not even worth that much. It would be a pleasure to leave the goddamned place. Wherever he wound up, it wouldnt be a hell of a lot worse than the place he was in now.

He kicked the door shut, then tossed himself down on the bed without taking the trouble to remove his shoes. What the hell why keep the sheets clean? Theyd be somebody elses problem soon enough anyway. What the hell concern were they of his? Why worry about them?

There were other things to worry about. Food, for example. That was the short-range problem, the immediate concern. And money; and a place to live. His last eight cents were scattered in the gutter at Broadway and 96th, waiting for some penny-pincher to pick them up and stow them away in a lockbox. Hell, eight cents wasnt going to do him any good. It cost almost double that for a ride in the lousy subway.