At that time, television’s two primary taboos were sexual perversion and antireligious sentiment. Any synopsis submitted that incorporated even a whiff of such goings-on would likely be given a muscular rejection. The first story Alexander submitted concerned a sex-crazed religious fanatic who doubled as a serial killer of young girls. While he did sell this proposal, Alexander was considered anything but television’s savior.
A long-time fan of horse racing, Alexander was publicity director for the California Jockey Club before joining the armed forces during World War II. When he retired from mystery and suspense writing, he rekindled his passion for the horses by publishing The History and Romance of the Horse (1963) and A Sound of Horses (1966).
Originally published in the May 1955 issue of Manhunt, “Mama’s Boy,” the story of a vicious psychotic, is a fine example not only of Alexander’s hard-edged style and faintly amoral outlook, but also of his seemingly innate understanding of characters whose moral and social awareness is fast disintegrating.
J. A.
Mama’s Boy
(1955)
1.
He awakened at noon. That was his usual hour unless there’d been something special the night before. If there’d been something special, he slept later. He was scrupulous about having eight hours of sleep. He yawned and rubbed his big hand over the blue briar patch on his jowls that always grew overnight no matter how late and how closely he shaved. The sandpapery touch of his beard gave him a sense of assurance. His beard was rough, rough like he was, he thought. A man’s beard, not just fuzzy female down that some men called whiskers.
He lowered his hand and fondled his chest. The hair was thick and matted, like an animal’s. He liked that, too. He was always seeking a sense of assurance from observing and touching his own powerful body. He liked to flex his biceps and square his shoulders and throw short, wicked punches at imaginary adversaries when he was alone.
As always, when he first awakened, he kicked off the covers and lay still in bed, regarding himself in the full-length mirror on the door of the closet across the little room. That was the only thing he liked about this flea trap — the big mirror. He guessed they had the mirrors in the rooms because the cheap hotel appealed to Broadway dolls, night club chorines and hustlers. There were also a few grifters like himself who roomed there.
He slept without pajamas, summer and winter. He lay there and admired himself in the mirror. He was six feet tall and had the bulging, hourglass build of a professional weight-lifter. His body was always bronzed. One whole corner of the little room was filled by an enormous sun lamp. He’d stolen it from the apartment of a middle-aged woman he’d picked up in a bar once. It was the biggest thing he’d ever stolen. He’d intended to hock it with a fence he knew on Sixth Avenue, but he’d decided to keep it. It made him look as if he’d just stepped off a train from Florida, and he liked that.
He suddenly realized it was Friday. That meant he’d have to be on the prowl again tonight. The room rent was due again tomorrow and there was less than ten bucks in cash strewn over the dresser-top. He hadn’t paid the rent for two weeks. By tomorrow the bill would be thirty-four dollars and they wouldn’t let it ride any longer. They’d lock him out tomorrow night if he hadn’t settled up at the desk. They’d hold his clothes and his sun lamp and his toilet articles and even his stack of magazines. Tonight he had to go down to one of those traps in Greenwich Village that were patronized by unaccompanied middle-aged women. He’d have to pick a well-dressed one with jewelry, one that looked like ready money. Usually they didn’t carry much cash in their pocketbooks, of course. Just enough for the drinks. But they almost always had cash and jewelry and other valuables in their apartments. All you had to do was get them to take you home. He knew where to look for cash and valuables. The old dolls all hid them in the same places, like the medicine cabinets in their fancy bathrooms. Sometimes, if you couldn’t find what you were looking for, you had to smack them around a little.
He liked that. That was the real kick, beating them up. That was what he liked. It was a bigger kick than finding a shoe box full of hundred-dollar bills and diamond rings in their apartments.
He got up and posed in front of the mirror, flexing his muscles, throwing short jabs and uppercuts at his image. Then for ten minutes he did sitting-up exercises, bends and pushups. There was a pile of magazines and paperback novels on the glass-topped table that served him as a desk. The magazines were all physical culture publications. The ones he’d saved, a dozen or so, all had his picture in them. He often made a few bucks hiring out as a photographer’s model. The soft-cover books were all murder stories with lurid covers. They concerned the adventures of guys who spend most of their time beating hell out of naked blondes who were on the make for them. Usually they wound up putting a forty-five slug into the blondes.
He lifted a magazine off the top of the pile and admired his picture on the cover. “Buck Crowley, a Leading Mr. America Candidate,” the caption read. In the cover photograph he was wearing only a loincloth. He was standing spraddle-legged and holding aloft a bar bell that wasn’t as heavy as it looked.
He put the magazine down and picked up a letter from Moira, who was living at some place down in Florida now. Moira was one of the middle-aged women he’d picked up in a Village trap one night, and she’d been a good source of income for him for months. She was always giving him little presents that could be converted into cash. Moira was a widow, but she had married this rich old man who was retired and she had gone down to Florida to take care of him. Moira was cagey. She’d given him only a post office box for an address. He took the letter out of the envelope, read it again, and threw it down angrily.
Jesus, what mush, he thought. Could you imagine the dumb woman putting stuff like that on paper? That was really leading with the chin. He grinned and read his own scrawled writing on another sheet of paper he hadn’t mailed yet.
Dear Moira,
I got the 25. It’s not enough. I got to have a lot more, at least a couple hundred. If you haven’t got it you can get it from that rich old man you married alright. You better. If you don’t I’ll find out how to write to him and tell him some things about you and me maybe.
Your friend,
Buck
He went into the connecting bath he shared with the tenant of the next room. He tried the door of the neighbor’s room. It was locked from the other side. He didn’t bother to bolt it from his side. He never did. There was a puny little guy lived in the next room. Crowley was always halfway hoping the puny little guy would blunder into the bath while he was there so he could show him what a real man who took good care of his body looked like. There wasn’t any use in fooling around with the puny little guy, though. He couldn’t have any dough or he wouldn’t be living in a trap like this, in the Forties west of Eighth.
Crowley used almost a whole cake of wafer-thin hotel soap in lathering his shaggy body under a warm shower. Then he turned the cold water on full-blast. His teeth chattered and his body shook, but he endured the icy torture for two full minutes. That was part of his daily regimen. He dried himself with the last of the three sleazy bath towels the hotel issued to its guests in the course of a week. Then he slapped rubbing alcohol on his body, kneading the muscles as he applied the pungent stuff. What he really needed was a good rubdown, he reflected. But in his present financial state he couldn’t afford a gym or a Turkish bath. As he shaved, he thought: Maybe after tonight I can afford a few little luxuries. A Broadway haberdasher was displaying a new line of tight-fitting pink sports shirts, but they cost $8.95 a copy. Moira used to give him presents of expensive haberdashery from time to time, he recalled. He’d got twenty bucks from a hock shop for a gold tie clasp with twin hearts on it that Moira had given him. What the hell did he need with a tie clasp? He seldom wore a tie. He liked open-throated shirts that showed the hair on his chest.