There’s a grille up in the wall that’s between the men’s and women’s johns, but you can’t hear much for some reason or other (I know some guys had wanted to hear what their dates were saying after a prom one night, and they could only make out mewling sounds). There is a line wrench with an octagonal socket on the end, leaning against the wall under the sink, so the mains can be turned off completely. Why bother? There isn’t enough water coming out to count.
The room is about three-and-a-half feet across.
It is something over nine feet long.
It is very high, maybe ten or eleven feet high.
And all at once, I know it is shaped just exactly like a coffin, a coffin goddamit! A coffin and I’m buried with this no-good sonofabitch Kurt, who wants me dead and now I’m dead with him in the motherin’ coffin with me, and that makes no sense at all , and I get very angry about it when I think about it …
“C’mon, throw, double mah bet,” Kurt said, and I came up from way down there, angrier than anything, and just stood there watching those two red plastic dice in his hand that I knew, I mean, I knew they were ringers, so what the hell did he think I was, a nut or something!
“I don’t want to play with those dice,” I said.
So I’d opened my big mouth and put down his whole race — that sick bit again — by calling him a cheater. “Teddy, what you doin’?” he asked, and he was so soft it was painful, because I knew he wanted to swing on me, it was that coughing, whispery voice. “What you doin’, man? You sayin’ I’m not straight … that what you sayin’ to me?”
Oh jump, oh jump jump jump, he’s gonna bust on me any second now, I knew it! “No, listen, hey, I just don’t want to shoot any more. I mean, c’mon, you can’t keep me in here against my will (he laughed at that, short and sharp). You know damned well Bernie’ll wonder where you are.”
Bernie ran the Shack, but I guess he was afraid of that mean streak in Kurt, too, because he warned and threatened him with firing and stuff, but he never did anything, and Kurt was about as afraid of him as he was of me, which was not at all.
“Now, c’mon!” I shouted. “I’m a free guy and you can’t keep me in here, what are you, nuts or something?” Pow! The pain was back, back again from wherever it had been and I learned it hadn’t been bad at all before. Now it was bad.
I flopped toward him, tried to hug him, show him my love. “Please, please, please, Kurt,please lemme outta here, I’m sick, I’m very sick, I’m dying, Kurt. Please, he’ll leave!”
He shoved me back, and said: “Stop tryin’ to whup the game on me, boy. Just shoot.”
He pushed me down by the back of my neck and I had one bloody die in my hand, and the shaking was so bad it looked like every last die in the world was right there, in the oily palm of my hand.
I threw it against the walclass="underline"
How did you get hooked? How the hell did you stop being a simple-minded college sophomore who went to the Heidelburg for beer and jazzed around at the fraternity house, and dated balling chicks with nice smooth shins above their bobby socks, and became a junior who needed more money for junk than he did for books or tuition? How did you get so screwed up that you wind up on your knees in a toilet, golden, crying like a psycho? Boy, is this ever miserable …
It clattered to a stop and lay there very square, very red, and very six.
Kurt called me a dirty name.
He threw his, and it was a five. Ding! Just like that. Two hundred and eighty dollars. Two hundred and eighty punches in the mouth he was going to give me. I had won with his own loaded square cube dice, oh boy that was it!
“Sheet, sheet, sheet!” he cursed, drumming at that brown colorless linoleum. Oh, God, was he mad. Mad isn’t enough of a word for it. He was so mad he wanted to tear my eyes out. Then he picked up those dice and threw them into the toilet!
I had to vomit.
“Hey, get away from the sink!” I shrilled leaping up about as fast as I could. I tried to elbow past him but he grabbed me and spun me back, and the puke which had started up caught midway in my throat —God! — and a little spinnet of dribble hit him on the hand and another on the neck, and that was the end of it. I had spit on him.
You figure it.
The battle of the races was at me all at once.
Why me? I’m innocent I tell you, and he was hitting me, and screaming so loud I knew everyone in the Shack was sitting silent and catching it all, “Who’d you think you are, man, who the eff you think you are you gone spit on me, you — ” and he started cursing and hitting me, and so help me God I could barely feel it I was so sick and headachey and vile and wanting to curl up and twitch. He was shrieking and balling and banging on me and I was clattering against those walls like a pea in a pod.
Until he grabbed up that shake knife from his sock and rattled it up into sight, and quiet, so quiet, so very quiet he hissed me, “You ever been marked, man? You ever been marked?”
And he came on to me. I screamed. I screamed very loud, “Kurt, don’t cut me, don’t hurt me, don’t cut me, Kurt,” but he was coming, and I just fainted away and was wide-awake as he stumbled over where I’d been, and I was too scared to do anything at all, so I reached under and grabbed his leg. He came back around so gracefully it was pretty to see, and he did a little movement with his knife hand, and I felt a razor go so smoothly through my face, and then there was blood. I mean, just like that, I was cut, and not lightly either. I was cut real good.
He wanted more. He wanted all of me, every bit of my white skin covered red, and he came again, and I scuttled back on my can, across the floor, and my hand hit that line wrench about two feet long, and I swung it up and hit him someplace private with one movement and then hooray,he screamed.
So I got up and belted him again, the sonofabitch.
And then a couple more times.
And I knew my Man was getting quietly up from his table, leaving fifteen cents for a tip, and walking to the front to leave another quarter with his bill, and walking unconcerned out the front door, because he couldn’t afford to be around noise and trouble.
So I hit Kurt another one, just because I wasn’t going to get my fix and was just going to have to puke and die and that was the last of it. I mean, it was so terrible.
When they finally busted down the door I was just sitting there on the floor with my feet against that other wall, about three feet away, and the line wrench hanging down between my knees, and crying, just crying, like a simp.
But what else could I do? I mean, when you hurt as bad as I did, and there was Kurt all dead and messy and me so ill I couldn’t stand it, sitting in my own stuff, it was just hopeless. Just the end of it.
So I wondered all the usual stuff: like why was it I couldn’t lose when I wanted to, and couldn’t win when I wanted to, and why did they keep saying I was going to jail and maybe a nut house, because I knew all that, I knew it, man.
I didn’t get my fix.
I even lost when I wanted to win.
Sitting there in the toilet, on the floor, all golden, made of base metals.