In which Rachel gets her yo-yo back, Roony sings a song, and Stencil calls on Bloody Chiclitz

 Profane, sweating in April's heat, sat on a bench in the little park behind  the Public Library, swatting at flies with rolled-up pages of the Times  classified. From mental cross-plotting he'd decided where he sat now was the  geographical center of the midtown employment agency belt.

A weird area it was. For a week now he'd sat patient in a dozen offices,  filling out forms, having interviews and watching other people, especially  girls. He had an interesting daydream all built up, which went: You're  jobless, I'm jobless, here we both are out of work, let's screw. He was  horny. What little money he'd saved from the sewer job had almost run out  and here he was considering seduction. It kept the time moving right along.

So far no agency he'd been to had sent him anywhere for a job interview. He  had to agree with them. To amuse himself he'd looked in Help Wanted under S.  Nobody wanted a schlemihl. Laborers were for out of the city: Profane wanted  to stay in Manhattan, he'd had enough of wandering out in the suburbs. He  wanted a single point, a base of operations, someplace to screw in private.  It was difficult when you brought a girl to a flophouse. A young kid with a  beard and old dungarees had tried that a few nights ago down where Profane  was staying. The audience, winos and bums, had decided to serenade them  after a few minutes of just watching. "Let me call you sweetheart," they  sang, all somehow on key. A few had fine voices, some sang harmony. It may  have been like the bartender on upper Broadway who was nice to the girls and  their customers. There is a way we behave around young people excited with  each other, even if we haven't been getting any for a while and aren't  likely to very soon. It is a little cynical, a little self-pitying, a little  withdrawn; but at the same time a genuine desire to see young people get  together. Though it springs from a self-centered concern, it is often as  much as a young man like Profane ever does go out of himself and take an  interest in human strangers. Which is better, one would suppose, than  nothing at all.

Profane sighed. The eyes of New York women do not see the wandering bums or  the boys with no place to go. Material wealth and getting laid strolled  arm-in-arm the midway of Profane's mind. If he'd been the type who evolves  theories of history for his own amusement, he might have said all political  events: wars, governments and uprisings, have the desire to get laid as  their roots; because history unfolds according to economic forces and the  only reason anybody wants to get rich is so he can get laid steadily, with  whomever he chooses. All he believed at this point, on the bench behind the  Library, was that anybody who worked for inanimate money so he could buy  more inanimate objects was out of his head. Inanimate money was to get  animate warmth, dead fingernails in the living shoulderblades, quick cries  against the pillow, tangled hair, lidded eyes, twisting loins . . .

He'd thought himself into an erection. He covered it with the Times  classifed and waited for it to subside. A few pigeons watched him, curious.  It was shortly after noon and the sun was hot. I ought to keep looking, he  thought, the day isn't over. What was be going to do? He was, they told him  unspecialized. Everybody else was at peace with some machine or other. Not  even a pick and shovel had been safe for Profane.

He happened to look down. His erection had produced in the newspaper a  crosswise fold, which moved line by line down the page as the swelling  gradually diminished. It was a list of employment agencies. O.K., thought  Profane, just for the heck of it I will close my eyes, count three and open  them and whatever agency listing that fold is on I will go to them. It will  be like flipping a coin: inanimate schmuck, inanimate paper, pure chance.

He opened his eyes on Space/Time Employment Agency, down on lower Broadway,  near Fulton Street. Bad choice, he thought. It meant 15 cents for the  subway. But a deal was a deal. On the Lexington Avenue downtown he saw a bum  lying across the aisle, diagonal on the seat. Nobody would sit near him. He  was king of the subway. He must have been there all night, yo-yoing out to  Brooklyn and back, tons of water swirling over his head and he perhaps  dreaming his own submarine country, peopled by mermaids and deep-sea  creatures all at peace among the rocks and sunken galleons; must have slept  through rush hour, with all sorts of suit-wearers and high-heel dolls  glaring at him because he was taking up three sitting spaces but none of  them daring to wake him. If under the street and under the sea are the same  then he was king of both. Profane remembered himself on the shuttle back in  February, wondered how he'd looked to Kook, to Fina. Not like a king, he  figured: more like a schlemihl a follower.

Having sunk into self-pity he nearly missed the Fulton Street stop. Got the  bottom edge of his suede jacket caught in the doors when they closed; was  nearly carried that way out to Brooklyn. He found Space/Time Employment down  the street and ten floors up. The waiting area was crowded when he got  there. A quick check revealed no girls worth looking at, nobody in fact but  a family who might have stepped through time's hanging arras directly out of  the Great Depression; journeyed to this city in an old Plymouth pickup from  their land of dust: husband, wife and one mother-in-law, all yelling at each  other, none but the old lady really caring about a job, so that she stood,  legs braced, in the middle of the waiting area, telling them both how to  make out their applications, a cigarette dangling from and about to burn her  lipstick.

Profane made out his application, dropped it on the receptionist's desk and  sat down to wait. Soon there came the hurried and sexy tap of high heels in  the corridor outside. As if magnetized his head swiveled around and he saw  coming in the door a tiny girl, lifted up to all of 5' 1" by her heels.  Oboy, oboy, he thought: good stuff. She was not, however, an applicant: she  belonged on the other side of the rail. Smiling and waving hello to everyone  in her country, she clickety-clacked gracefully over to her desk. He could  hear the quiet brush of her thighs, kissing each other in their nylon. Oh,  oh, he thought, look at what I seem to be getting again. Go down you  bastard.

Obstinate, it would not. The back of his neck began to grow heated and rosy.  The receptionist, a slim girl who seemed to be all tight - tight underwear,  stockings, ligaments, tendons, mouth, a true windup woman - moved precisely  among the decks, depositing applications like an automatic card-dealing  machine. Six interviewers, he counted. Six to one odds she drew me. Like  Russian roulette. Why like that? Would she destroy him, she so  frail-looking, such gentle, well-bred legs? She had her head down, studying  the application in her hand. She looked up, he saw the eyes, both slanted  the same way.

"Profane," she called. Looking at him with a little frown.

Oh God, he thought, the loaded chamber. The luck of a schlemihl, who by  common sense should lose at the game. Russian roulette is only one of its  names, he groaned inside, and look: me with this bard on. She called his  name again. He stumbled up from the chair, and proceeded with the Times over  his groin and he bent at a 120 degree angle behind the rail and in to her  own desk. The sign said RACHEL OWLGLASS.

He sat down quickly. She lit a cigarette and cased the upper half of his  body. "It's about time," she said.

He fumbled for a cigarette, nervous. She flicked over a pack of matches with  a fingernail be could feel already gliding across his back, poised to dig in  frenzied when she should come.

And would she ever. Already they were in bed; he could see nothing but a new  extemporized daydream in which no other face but this sad one with its  brimming slash-slash of eyes tightened slowly in his own shadow, pale under  him. God, she had him.

Strangely then the tumescence began to subside, the flesh at his neck to  pale. Any sovereign or broken yo-yo must feel like this after a short time  of lying inert, rolling, falling: suddenly to have its own umbilical string  reconnected, and know the other end is in hands it cannot escape. Hands it  doesn't want to escape. Know that the simple clockwork of itself has no mare  need for symptoms of inutility, lonesomeness, directionlessness, because now  it has a path marked out for it over which it has no control. That's what  the feeling would be, if there were such things as animate yo-yos. Pending  any such warp in the world Profane felt like the closest thing to one and  above her eyes began to doubt his own animateness.

"How about a night watchman," she said at last. Over you? he wondered.

"Where," he said. She mentioned an address nearby in Maiden Lane.  "Anthroresearch Associates:" He knew he couldn't say it as fast. On the back  of a card she scribbled the address and a name - Oley Bergomask. "He hires."  Handed it to him, a quick touch of fingernails. "Come back as soon as you  find out. Bergomask will tell you right away; he doesn't waste time. If it  doesn't work out we'll see what else we have."

At the door he looked back. Was she blowing a kiss or yawning?

II

 Winsome had left work early. When he got back to the apartment he found his  wife, Mafia sitting on the floor with Pig Bodine. They were drinking beer  and discussing her Theory. Mafia was sitting crosslegged and wearing very  tight Bermuda shorts. Pig stared captivated at her crotch. That fella  irritates me, Winsome thought. He got beer and sat down next to them. He  wondered idly if Pig were getting any off of his wife. But it was hard to  say who was getting what off Mafia.

There is a curious sea story about Pig Bodine, which Winsome had heard from  Pig himself. Winsome was aware that Pig wanted to make a career someday of  playing male leads in pornographic movies. He'd get this evil smile on his  face, as if he were viewing or possibly committing reel on reel of  depravities. The bilges of the radio shack of U.S.S. Scaffold - Pig's  ship - were jammed solid with Pig's lending library, amassed during the  ship's Mediterranean travels and rented out to the crew at 10 cents per  book. The collection was foul enough to make Pig Bodine a byword of  decadence throughout the squadron. But no one suspected that Pig might have  creative as well as custodial talents.

One night Task Force 60, made up of two carriers, some other heavies and a  circular screen of twelve destroyers, including the Scaffold, was steaming a  few hundred miles east of Gibraltar. It was maybe two in the morning,  visibility unlimited, stars blooming fat and sultry over a tar-colored  Mediterranean. No closing contacts on the radars, everybody on after  steering watch asleep, forward lookouts telling themselves sea stories to  keep awake. That sort of night. All at once every teletype machine in the  task force started clanging away, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Five bells,  or FLASH, initial contact with enemy forces. It being '55 and more or less  peacetime, captains were routed out of bed, general quarters called,  dispersal plans executed. Nobody knew what was happening. By the time the  teletypes started up again the formation was scattered out over a few  hundred square miles of ocean and most radio shacks were crowded to  capacity. The machines started to type.

"Message follows." Teletype operators, com officers leaned forward tense,  thinking of Russian torpedoes, evil and barracudalike.

"Flash." Yes, yes, they thought: five bells, Flash. Go ahead.

Pause. Finally the keys started clattering again.

"THE GREEN DOOR. One night Dolores, Veronica, Justine, Sharon, Cindy Lou,  Geraldine and Irving decided to hold an orgy . . ." Followed, on four and a  half feet of teletype paper, the functional implications of their decision,  told from Irving's point of view.

For some reason Pig never got caught. Possibly because half the Scaffold's  radio gang, also the communications officer, an Annapolis graduate named  Knoop, were in on it and had locked the door to Radio as soon as GQ was  called.

It caught on as a sort of fad. The next night, precedence Operational  Immediate, came A DOG STORY, involving a St. Bernard named Fido and two  WAVES. Pig was on watch when it came over and admitted to his henchman Knoop  that it showed a certain flair. It was followed by other high-priority  efforts: THE FIRST TIME I GOT LAID, WHY OUR X.O. IS QUEER, LUCKY PIERRE RUNS  AMOK. By the time the Scaffold reached Naples, its first port of call, there  were an even dozen, all carefully filed away by Pig under F.

But initial sin entails eventual retribution. Later, somewhere between  Barcelona and Cannes, evil days fell on Pig. One night, routing the message  board, he went to sleep in the doorway of the executive officer's stateroom.  The ship chose that moment to roll ten degrees to port. Pig toppled onto the  terrified lieutenant commander like a corpse. "Bodine," the X.O. shouted,  aghast. "Were you sleeping?" Pig snored away among a litter of  special-request chits. He was sent down on mess cooking. The first day he  fell asleep in the serving line, rendering inedible a gunboat full of mashed  potatoes. So the next meal he was stationed in front of the soup, which was  made by Potamos the cook and which nobody ate anyway. Apparently Pig's knees  had developed this odd way of locking, which if the Scaffold were on an even  keel would enable him to sleep standing up. He was a medical curiosity. When  the ship got back to the States he went under observation at Portsmouth  Naval Hospital. When he returned to the Scaffold he was put on the deck  force of one Pappy Hod, a boatswain's mate. In two days Pappy had driven  him, for the first of what were to be many occasions, over the hill.

Now on the radio at the moment was a song about Davy Crockett, which upset  Winsome considerably. This was '56, height of the coonskin hat craze.  Millions of kids everywhere you looked were running around with these bushy  Freudian hermaphrodite symbols on their heads. Nonsensical legends were  being propagated about Crockett, all in direct contradiction to what Winsome  had heard as a boy, across the mountains from Tennessee. This man, a  foul-mouthed louse-ridden boozehound, a corrupt legislator and an  indifferent pioneer, was being set up for the nation's youth as a towering  and cleanlimbed example of Anglo-Saxon superiority. He had swelled into a  hero such as Mafia might have created after waking from a particularly loony  and erotic dream. The song invited parody. Winsome had even cast his own  autobiography into aaaa rhyme and that simpleminded combination of  three - count them - chord changes:

   Born in Durham in '23,

   By a pappy who was absentee,

   Was took to a lynching at the neighborhood tree,

   Whopped him a nigger when he was only three.

 [Refrain]:

Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance.

 Pretty soon he started to grow,

   Everyone knew he'd be a loving beau,

   Cause down by the tracks he would frequently go

   To change his luck at a dollar a throw.

   Well he hit Winston-Salem with a rebel yell,

   Found his self a pretty Southron belle

   Was doing fine till her pappy raised hell

   When he noticed her belly was beginning to swell.

   Luckily the war up and came along,

   He joined the army feeling brave and strong,

   His patriotism didn't last for long,

   They put him in a foxhole where he didn't belong.

   He worked him a hustle with his first C.O.,

   Got transferred back to a PIO,

   Sat out the war in a fancy chateau,

   Egging on the troops toward Tokyo.

   When the war was over, his fighting done,

   He hung up his khakis and his Garand gun

   Came along to Noo York to have some fun,

   ............