Collected Prose

his mask drop. Blustering forth his thanks in the highly embroidered, Dickensian language that came so effortlessly to him, he would assure me that I would be paid back promptly, just as soon as circumstances allowed. “I am most grateful to you for this bounty, young man,” he would say, “most grateful indeed. It’s just a loan, of course, so you needn’t fret about being reimbursed. As you might or might not know, I’ve suffered some small setbacks lately, and this generosity of yours will go a long way towards helping me back to my feet.” The sums in question were never more than a pittance—forty cents here, twenty-five cents there, whatever I happened to be carrying around with me—but Joe never flagged in his enthusiasm, never once let on that he realized what an abject figure he was. There he stood, dressed in a circus clown’s rags, his unwashed body emitting the foulest of stinks, and still he persisted in keeping up his pose as a man of the world, a dandy temporarily down on his luck. The pride and self-deception that went into this act were both comical and heartbreaking, and every time I went through the ritual of giving him another handout, I had trouble keeping my balance. I never knew whether to laugh or cry, whether to admire him or shower him with pity. “Let me see, young man,” he would continue, studying the coins I had just put in his palm. “I have, let’s see, I have here in my hand, hmmm, fifty-five cents. Add that to the eighty cents you gave me the last time, and then add that, hmmm, add that to the forty cents you gave me the time before that, and it turns out that I owe you a grand total of, hmmm, let’s see, a grand total of … one dollar and fifteen cents.” Such was Joe’s arithmetic. He just plucked figures out of thin air and hoped they sounded good. “No problem, Joe,” I would say. “A dollar and fifteen cents. You’ll give it to me the next time.”
    When I came back to New York from the Esso ship, he seemed to be floundering, to have lost some ground. He looked more bruised to me, and the old panache had given way to a new heaviness of spirit, a whining, tearful sort of despair. One afternoon, he broke down in front of me as he recounted how he had been beaten up in some alleyway the night before. “They stole my books,” he said. “Can you imagine that? The animals stole my books!” Another time, in the middle of a snowstorm, as I left my ninth-floor apartment and walked to the elevator down the hall, I found him sitting alone on the staircase, his head buried in his hands.
    “Joe,” I said, “are you all right?”
    He lifted his head. His eyes were infused with sorrow, misery, and defeat. “No, young man,” he said. “I’m not all right, not the least bit all right.”
    “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked. “You look terrible, just terrible.”
    “Yes,” he said, “now that you mention it, there is one thing you can do for me,” and at that point he suddenly reached out and took hold of my hand. Then, looking me straight in the eye, he gathered up his strength and said, in a voice trembling with emotion, “You can take me back into your apartment, lie down on the bed, and let me make love to you.”
    The bluntness of his request took me completely by surprise. I had been thinking more along the lines of a cup of coffee or a bowl of soup. “I can’t do that,” I said. “I like women, Joe, not men. Sorry, but I don’t do that kind of thing.”
    What he said next lingers in my mind as one of the best and most pungent statements I have ever heard. Without wasting a second, and without the slightest trace of disappointment or regret, he dismissed my answer with a shrug of the shoulders and said, in a buoyant, ringing tone of voice, “Well, you asked me—and I told you.”
    I left for Paris some time in the middle of February 1971. After that encounter on the staircase, I didn’t see Joe again for several weeks. Then, just days before my departure, I bumped into him on Broadway. He was looking much better, and the hangdog look had disappeared from his face. When I told him I was about to move to Paris, he was off and running again, as effusive and full of himself as ever. “It’s odd that you should mention Paris,” he said. “Indeed, it’s a most timely coincidence. Not two or three days ago, I happened to be walking down Fifth Avenue, and who should I bump into but my old friend Antoine, director of the Cunard