Shot of the girl. She does not seem to know what to do. The expression on her face says that she is frightened but she makes no move to run away.
Shot of man’s face.
Subtitle: NOW WE’VE GOT YOU!
The man grabs the girl from behind and holds her around the waist. She struggles but cannot get away. The woman moves in front of the girl and takes the girl’s breasts in her hands.
Shot of woman’s face.
Subtitle: I’M GOING TO HAVE FUN WITH HER.
The woman suits her actions to her words.
The camera has a good time watching this most unusual display.
Shot of man’s face.
Subtitle: IT’S MY TURN NOW.
The man and the woman succeed in getting the unwilling girl down upon the ground.
The man falls upon the girl and begins to make love to her.
The camera watches.
He was walking.
It was night, a very black night, and he was walking. Five fresh hundred dollar bills were in his wallet. They had not been there before.
They were his to keep. They were his in reward for having participated in the most sickening display of promiscuity he had ever heard about, not to say had anything to do with. They were his, and he had worked hard for them.
He wanted a drink.
The movie ended, and that was just a signal for the rest of the festivities to begin. The festivities had been odd ones. Someone had given him something to drink, something which contained a powerful stimulant, and the stimulant had gotten him through the evening in one piece.
In the course of the evening he had made love, not just to Sheila, but to every woman around at least once. He had made love in manners not even he had had any familiarity with. He had made love in ways that were sickening and disgusting, but he had done everything they had wanted him to do.
Now he was exhausted.
He walked down Fifth Avenue alongside of the park. He thought how late it was and wondered why he didn’t hop into a cab and go home. Home? The hotel, then. He didn’t have a home. The Ruskin was the best substitute available.
A cab cruised hopefully by but he didn’t bother to hail it. He kept walking.
Because it occurred to him that there was no point in hurrying to get home. No point at all. What was there when he got there? Just a bottle and a bed — cognac to drink and a bed to curl up and sack out in. That was incentive enough generally, but after what he had been through it was not incentive enough.
Nothing was.
He had arrived. He was a real gigolo now, reputation established, good clothes, money in the bank, the manners of a gentleman.
A gigolo.
And what the hell good was that? For that matter, what the hell good was he? What the hell good was Johnny Wells? The answer was simple.
No good.
No good at all.
I ought to kill myself, he thought. Not because my problems are too much for me. Not because I’m desperately unhappy. Just because there is no point in going on. Just because I’m bored stiff and I’m going to be bored stiff for the rest of my life. How many years left? Twenty or thirty or forty or fifty or sixty?
Too many.
Too many years.
And the years would all be the same. The same damn routine going on and on forever. Oh he could relax now and then, take things easy. He could travel or knock off for awhile, or something. There were loads of things he could do.
They all added up to nothing.
A big fat nothing.
And suddenly he realized he was only nineteen years old... that was it, he remembered; nineteen, definitely... and his life was ended. He had pulled himself up out of a gutter and made something of himself, just once. Oh, not during his gigolo period, which had returned, but during those brief days when he had known a great deal of innocent peace, hard work, simple happiness with Linda. He had put the lie to those who said teen-agers could never make a go of marriage. He had, and Linda had, and now neither of them were alive any more. She was dead, and he wasn’t a man any more, he was simply a nineteen-year-old kid who had been living way over his head in a world full of knees in the groin and fingers in the eyes. Nothing... he was reduced to nothing!
Nothing to do and no place to go and nobody to see. Nothing at all — and that, all in all, was the reason he ought to kill himself. It was simply that there was nothing left to live for, and wasn’t that reason enough?
No, it wasn’t.
Because there was nothing to die for, either. Right away, when Linda died, he could have killed himself. Then there might have been a point to it, a reason for it.
But he hadn’t had the guts then. And now there was less point to dying than there was to living. So he might as well go on, because there was nothing else to do.
When another cab came by he hailed it and hopped into the back seat. He tried to relax while the cab headed for the Ruskin, tried not to think about Sheila Chase or her sickening husband or anybody else at the party.
It was hard forgetting them.
It wasn’t any easier back at the Ruskin. But at least he had the cognac. It let him forget a great many things.
He drank himself to sleep.
Chapter Ten
The drinking did it.
It will do it every time. Drink enough, often enough and the world is going to fall in on you. It doesn’t matter who you are. It happens every time.
It happened to Johnny. To Johnny Wells, the golden boy who could do no wrong.
It happened to him like a ton of bricks.
Too many nights passed in a fog of alcohol. Too many days passed the same way, and too much money went out while no money came in. When the money goes that way you can bet that the end is not far away. It might have taken a long time, because there was quite a bit of money, but it didn’t. The money didn’t last that long because he was too drunk to hang onto it.
He managed to get rid of almost all the money at once. It happened in a rather interesting way, and it was funny, if one finds such things amusing.
He woke up one day at eleven in the morning with a tremendous thirst. His hands were shaking and he felt like a mangy dog. He knew the cure, however, because he had been there before. This was nothing new to him. It was just a repetition of the way he woke up every morning, the way he felt every morning. His hangover was the only friend he had and he would have been lost if one morning he had awakened without it.
He knew the cure. He reached out for the brandy bottle which was always by the side of the bed. There was enough in it to take the edge off, which is what he wanted to do. He brought the bottle to his lips and drained it in a single swallow. Not all of the brandy wound up in his mouth. Some of it slopped over his face and wet his beard. He hadn’t shaved in several days and his beard was long already, a thick covering of stubble that kept him looking like hell.
The brandy helped.
It did part of the trick, anyway. The headache did not entirely disappear, but then it never did. The headache was always with him in one degree or another, a constant reminder that he needed a drink. Because he always needed a drink, from the moment he woke up in the morning until the moment he passed out at night.
There was nothing to do about it but drink. One time he had remembered Ricky, and in a moment of pure desperation had presented himself at the nearest army recruiting office. He figured they could take custody of his mind and body for three years. Maybe they could straighten him out. It was a cinch he couldn’t do the job himself.