“From here on in,” Helen Dawes promised, “you can rest assured that we will treat our toilet with the tender loving care a mother bestows on her first—born infant. Isn’t that right, Melanie?”
“Ah’ll be jus’ as good an’ careful to that johnny as Ah know how,” Melanie vowed.
“Then if there’s nothing else, I’ll be going now,” the plumber said.
“There’s nothing else,” Helen Dawes assured him.
“Oh.” The plumber looked from Melanie to Helen with disappointment. “Then I’ll be going. I’ll send you my bill.”
“You do that.” Helen saw him out the door and closed it firmly behind him. Then she turned to Archie. “I think we can manage without your help, too,” she told him. “I’m sure it’s ‘way past your bedtime, so if you want to toddle along, why we’ll excuse you.”
“Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?” Archie remarked. “I'm hip. But first I would like to ask what gives with you and Professor Beaumarchais."
“Nothing gives. Not any more. I haven’t seen him in two years. And the last time I did see him, he was plenty miffed because I gave him the go-by for a girlfriend. He took it as a personal insult that I could prefer a woman to him.”
“How did you meet him in the first place?”
“Oh, he came into a strip joint I was working about four years ago. He gave me a big play. He was throwing money around like so much grass~seed, so I let him throw some my way. When I gave him what he wanted, he threw some more. It was pretty hot and heavy for about eight weeks. Then he went back to Paris. He was over twice more before the last time. We bounced the bedsprings both times. But, like I said, the last time I had something going with this girl and he left steaming. I haven’t seen him since.”
“Did you know a blonde with the same name as yours, Helen, or a redhead named Dixie that he might have made a scene with?” Archie wanted to know.
“No. Say, listen, you ask a helluva lot of questions. What are you, some kind of junior G-man or something? I don’t have to stand here playing quiz games with you. Whatever it's all about, I don’t know anything. So why don’t you pick up your bag of questions and take off, sonny?”
“Okay. I’m splitting.” Archie started out the door.
“Y’all be suah to come see us soon again, heah?" Melanie’s voice called after him with true Southern hospitality.
“But don’t call us; we’ll call you.” Helen Dawes’ firm tones overrode Melanie.
“I might just do that,” Archie called back over his shoulder.
Downstairs, out in the street again, Archie peered at his list of names and addresses in the dim light from the doorway of a coffeehouse. The closest address to where he was was in Peter Cooper Village in the East 20s. He glanced at his watch. It was getting quite late. He decided to call first before going to the address.
The phone hung on the wall in the coffeehouse. Behind Archie as he dialed a bearded poet was declaiming his verses in angry, booming tones. His voice mingled with the buzzing in Archie’s ear as the circuits rang the number he'd dialed.
“Hello?” The female voice was wide awake and chirpy.
“Hello. Is this Dixie Kupp?"
“The bowels speak with the soul-voice of countless Nedicks hot dogs!” the poet rumbled.
“Yes. This is Dixie Kupp. Who’s speaking?"
“My name is Archimees Jones, and -”
“From groin to groin the crabs of love do scamper and proliferate . . .”
“I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. Are you calling from a party, or something? There's an awful lot of noise. It sounded like you said Archimedes something.”
“Jones!” Archie shouted. “I’m Archimedes Jones. I’m a friend of Professor Beaurnarchais. I'd like to come up and talk to you.”
“This dysentery of the mind, this thinning out of turds of thought . . .”
“Beaumarchais? You mean Andre Beaumarchais? Did, he tell you to call me?”
“Not exactly. I’m a friend of his, and I’d like to talk to you about him.”
“. . . like a faceless foetus turned to feces by the drowning, ever-running natal waters . . .”
“Then André didn’t tell you to call me?”
“Well, no, but —”
“. . . by mother, which is half a word . . .”
“Would it be all right if I came over now?” Archie shouted.
“I don’t know. I think it’s my husband you want to see. André has been dealing with him. But he isn’t home now. He works nights.”
“. . . held fast by the unbreakable umbilical, suckled poisonously by the nippled apron-string . . .
“No. I don't think I want to see your husband. It’s you I want to talk to. Alone. Can I come over?”
“Well . . . I guess it’ll be all right. But you’ll have to be quiet so you don’t wake the kids
“. . . cosmeticized with dollar signs, the painted harlotry of mumsy-dominated maledom on the crawl . . .
“I’ll be quiet,” Archie promised. “I’ll be right over. Ten or fifteen minutes.
“All right. I’ll be waiting.” Dixie Kupp hung up.
“. . . twin H-bombs descended from the rocket phallus, gonads laden with the spermatozoa of death, the monster-rnaker pointed toward the stars and spewing fallout seeds in its wake, seeds of barrenness to cloak the earth, this earth, our earth, the macrocosrn of our world reflected in the microcosm of the Zen-contemplated, Yogi-eyed navel already thick with the belly-button lint of carelessly strewn roentgens dropped on this, our world, our pad, to poison baby’s milk, mother’s milk with strontium ninety bearing universal cancer and . . .”
Archie closed the door of the coffeehouse behind him and shut off the poet’s voice. He walked to the curb and hailed a cab. Ten minutes later he alit on the outskirts of Peter Cooper Village.
It was like being dropped at the beginning of a brick maze. It was like finding oneself about to be swallowed up in an architectural nightmare. It was like walking into a yawning trap of solid geometry, a three-dimensional trap with cement quadrangles and oblong recreational areas and sterile squares offering entry to the fourteen-story hell-shells which a multitude of middle-class New Yorkers call home.
Archie contemplated it for a moment. If the suburbs were made up of boxes, little boxes, all made out of ticky-tacky, then metropolitan housing was a matter of bricked-in cubbyholes, all the same, prison cells with venetian blinds, tiers of cross-ventilated dungeons rising high but low and dank of spirit, the squared-off and sterile nests of a people without faces, a people who could afford dishwashers, but hadn’t the price -- and never would have— of a personality of their own. Maybe, Archie thought to himself, the far-out poet hadn’t been so obscure and wide of the mark at that. It was all part of the same thing. The blank towers around him were just one more sign of how the race of man was being outstripped and dehumanized by its technology.
He put it out of his mind and plunged into the maze in search of the particular coop housing Dixie Kupp. Five minutes of looking, and he was hopelessly lost. No explorer penetrating an untrammeled African jungle had ever been so lost. The red-brick sameness of the forest hovered over him in very direction. Each clearing in the cement jungle looked like every other clearing. The sounds of the wasteland wilderness were all around him, the sounds of chattering TV sets, the ominous hum of air conditioners -- dormant, yes, but was their attack imminent? and which way would they zoom when they struck? — the squeaks of a thousand bedsprings as a thousand uniform human seeds were planted during a thousand uniform TV commercials, the slam of refrigerator doors and the faint crunch of teeth on snacks—such were the sounds of the honeyed brick hives which comprised this jungle. And the wasteland had its odors, too—smells of stale deodorant and aromas of cellophane in which last night’s dinner had been packaged and the characterless sweat odors of the air-conditioned flesh of human robots from 1-A to 18-P. Yes, Archie was lost in the jungle — and its natural denizens, every creature which inhabited it, was as lost as he.