Midnight Cowboy (2 page)

That was the way Joe imagined it. This is what actually took place:

He clicked across the street, pushed through the revolving door and into the Sunshine Cafeteria, swung his new body past the tables and toward a door that said
EMPLOYEES ONLY
on it. This door marked the end of the air conditioning; inside it was hot and steamy. He passed through another doorway that led into the scullery. A colored man of middle age was filling a tray with dirty dishes. Joe watched as the man filled the tray and placed it on a conveyor belt that would carry it through the dishwashing machine. Then he smiled up at Joe and nodded toward a mountain of dish-filled wire baskets stacked on the floor. “Looka that shit, will you?” he said.

Joe stood next to the man. “Listen, uh, it looks like I’m headin’ East.” He lit a cigarette.

The man looked at Joe’s suitcase. “You ain’t coming to work?”

“Naw, I don’t guess. I just come to say goodbye, tell you I’m headin’ East.”

“East?”

“Yeah. Oh, hell yeah. Thought I say g’bye, take a look around the place.”

A door opened and a fat woman with a splotchy face stood there shouting
“Cups!”
at the top of her voice. Then she closed the door and was gone.

The colored man put his hand forward. “Well. Goodbye.” They shook hands and for a moment Joe felt reluctant to release the other man’s grip. Inexplicably, he felt like putting on an apron and starting to work, but that was out of the question. “What the hell am I hanging around here for, right?”

“That’s right,” the man said, looking down at his own hand, still caught in Joe’s. “What you going to do back there, East?”

“Women,” Joe said. “Eastern women. They got Eastern women back there, and they going to pay for it, too.”

“Pay for what?” The man finally got his hand free.

“The men back there,” said Joe, “is just faggots mostly, and so the women got to buy what they want. They glad to pay for it’ cause it’s just about the only way they can get it.”

The colored man shook his head. “That must be some mess back there.” He took another empty tray and began filling it with cups.

“Yeah, it’s a mess. And I’m going to cash in on some of it. Isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know nothing about it.”

“What do you mean? I just told you.”

“Yeah, I know, but I don’t know.”

“Well, they’s no use hanging around here. I got places to go. Right?”

Joe Buck, all dressed up like a cowboy, suddenly knew he was not a cowboy at all. He stood there with his mouth slack, his big, slightly bucked teeth showing white, his blue eyes caught on the older man’s face. “Papa,” his eyes said, “I am going now to seek my fortune and have come to ask your blessing.” But of course the poor colored man was not his father. Nor was Joe the son of anyone in particular. And so he walked out of that scullery. The place owed him a day’s pay, but he had no stomach for an interview with the pink man who was manager of the Sunshine. Besides, he knew he would never actually tell the man to put the dishwashing machine up his ass.

He walked through the cafeteria and out onto the sidewalk, where it was evening and pleasant and clearly springtime, and pretty soon, with the clicking of his own heels to nourish his heart as he walked toward the bus station, he felt fine and his thoughts were thousands of miles away: walking down Park Avenue in New York City. Rich ladies looking out their windows swooned to see a cowboy there. A butler tapped him on the shoulder, an elevator whirred him up to a penthouse, a golden door opened to admit him to a large apartment carpeted from wall to wall with soft brown fur. Madame was wearing scanties covered by a sheer black negligee. At sight of Joe Buck, breathing became a labor: She was overwhelmed. Quivering with desire, she threw herself at once onto the soft floor. The juices of her womanliness had already risen to meet him. There was no time for undressing. He took her immediately. The butler handed him a check, signed in a florid hand, on which the amount had been left for him to fill in as he chose.

There was a juke box in the depot at Houston. As Joe climbed aboard the bus he heard the voice of some fine, big Western woman singing about a
wheel of fortune turning turning turning
, and it seemed to him that what this woman was getting at, she was sending all the studs East to clean up. Joe smiled his crooked and gleaming white smile all the way down the aisle, knowing and savoring something he had no words for about destiny: that there is a certain way of climbing inside of time that gives a man ownership of the world and everything in it, and when this takes place there is a kind of
click
, and from then on when you hear a juke box, for instance, it plays only what you need to hear, and everything, even Greyhound buses, operates for your convenience—you walk into the station and you say, “What time’s a bus to New York City?” and the man says, “Right away,” and you just step on the thing and that’s all there is to it. The world is music and yours is the rhythm that owns it. You don’t even have to snap your fingers, the beat is you, and when you think about those Eastern women, the big broad on the juke box sings the finish of the thought for you,
yearning yearning yearning
, that’s what they’re doing in the East. (Okay, here it is, lady, it’s just climbed on the bus, it’s on the way!) And there’s a seat for you, two of them in fact, one for your butt and one for your feet, and you don’t need a reservation, the whole world is reserved, and the minute you sling your horsehide suitcase onto the overhead rack, the driver shifts into gear and begins to back out on schedule. Maybe not on schedule from the Greyhound’s point of view, but from yours. Because you
are
the schedule, and that bus
moves
.

Now at this time in which Joe Buck was coming out of the West on that Greyhound bus to seek his fortune in the East, he was already twenty-seven years old. But he had behind him as little experience of life as a boy of eighteen, and in some ways even less.

He had been raised by various blondes. The first three, who brought him up to the age of seven, were young and pretty.

There was a great deal of coming and going in the household of the three blondes and he was never certain which of them was which. At various intervals, each of them seemed to be his mother, known as Mama this or Mama that, but he later learned that two of them were merely friends in whose household his real mother shared. But the blondes all were nice to him, allowed him to do as he pleased, brought gifts and fondled him a great deal. And at least one of them sang around the house a lot:
Wonder When My Baby’s Comin’ Home, The Tumbleweed Song, Accentuate the Positive, The Lady in Red, He Wears a Pair of Silvery Wings
, and others. Thinking back on the matter, Joe Buck always supposed that this singer of the household was his actual mother.

There was in those days a war taking place, and some of the blondes were involved in it. They would go out at all hours wearing slacks and babushkas and carrying lunch pails. Sometimes there were bus trips between Houston and Detroit, and Joe remembered living in those cities some of the time. Wherever he was there would be men in uniform coming into the house, staying awhile and then leaving. Some of these men were known as husbands, but Joe could not remember being told that any of them was his father. (Later he was able to surmise that he had been born out of wedlock.)

At a certain point, which happened to be on the day of an exceptionally still and white sky, he was delivered to a fourth blonde in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and from then on and forever he was never to see the other three again. When he would think of them, he would think also of that special white sky and imagine those yellow-haired women to be hiding somewhere behind it.

Now the fourth blonde was his grandmother, a silly and skinny little thing named Sally Buck. For all her skinniness, she was prettier than all the others put together. She had enormous gray eyes with lashes black as pitch and waxy thick, and knees that made you cry they were so sorry-looking and knobby. If there is some part of every loved one that will make you cry to contemplate it, such for Joe were these poor, sad, bony knees of Sally Buck. Sally ran a beauty shop that kept her away from home ten and twelve hours a day, and so the boy unhappily spent his after-school hours in the company of various cleaning women. These women were never blonde, and they never wore lavender or pale-green or lemon-colored dresses; they never seemed to look at him either, and had they chosen to, it would have been necessary to do so out of very ordinary eyes with lashes that were scarcely visible at all.

Sundays were not much better. Sally usually went on dates. She had a weakness for men, especially outdoor ones, and many of her beaus were ranchers who wore Western hats. These big, broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced Western men went for pretty little Sally in a big way. She was all gossamer and perfume and fingernail polish, and they were all leather and muscle and manure, and each was titillated by the contrast. Sometimes Joe was taken along on these dates and he liked and admired a number of Sally’s men, but only one of them paid him any more than a counterfeit token of attention.

This man was named Woodsy Niles. His beard was blue and his eyes were bright, and he showed Joe Buck how to ride a horse and how to make a slingshot, and he taught him how to chew tobacco and how to smoke cigarettes, and a special way of holding his peter so that he could piss an arc higher than his own head. Woodsy Niles was a happy kind of man who had his own pleasurable and snappy way of doing everything, even walking. Yes, he walked as if he believed no moment should pass without pleasure, and he took enjoyment even from such simple acts as moving across a room or opening the corral gates. He sang a lot of songs, too, this Woodsy Niles, sang them in a fine manly voice, accompanying himself on a guitar, and sometimes when they spent the night at his ranch, Joe would awaken as late as three
A.M
. to the songs that issued from the bedroom where Woodsy and Sally slept. The boy always supposed Woodsy had simply awakened in the night feeling far too strong and handsome and salty to squander himself on mere sleep, and was forced to let off some of the excess in a chorus or two of
The Last Roundup
. He did the “git alongs” in a way that made Sally giggle, and when he got to the part about the place in the sky where the strays are counted and branded, Joe was apt to get the blues, but in a strangely pleasurable way, and he had to restrain himself from joining the beautiful people in the bedroom. This was one of the first things Joe learned about lying with a woman in the night: You sing songs to her. It seemed a splendid way to do, and what’s more, the whole house got the good of it.

But inevitably Sally had some falling out or other with this remarkable man—as sooner or later she did with all the others—and Joe was left to pine for him as for a goneaway father. But surely it was in this time of Woodsy Niles that Joe had begun to see himself as some sort of a cowboy.

There was, following this love affair, a flurry of Sundays in which Sally Buck took the boy to church. What she liked best about these mornings was their promenade aspect, the opportunity afforded for daytime dress-up. Spending almost all of her daytimes in the shop, she had, for example, few opportunities to parade around in her lovely hats. And the boy set her off well; everyone said they looked like a mother and son team, an illusion that seemed to chop an entire generation of years from her age.

But for Joe these visits to church were another matter altogether: After the regular services, the adults had coffee and rolls in the church basement while the youngsters attended Sunday school upstairs. It was at these sessions that Jesus replaced Woodsy Niles in Joe’s affections. He was taught by a young lady with warm, humorous, kindly eyes that Jesus loved him. There was always a painting on an easel in front of the class; it depicted Jesus walking with a boy child. You could see only the back of the boy’s head, but Joe felt that he himself was that child. Songs were sung, songs about how Jesus walked with him and talked with him and told him he was His own. And one day the young lady teacher told about the events of a certain terrible Friday in the life of this gentle, bearded man, and then she passed out small colored pictures that they were allowed to keep. Jesus was looking right at him, and his eyes said: “Let me tell you I have seen an awful lot of misery, and have suffered something fierce in my life, but it sure is a comfort to have a cowboy like you for a friend.” Something like that. Something that gave Joe a personal and strong feeling of connection with the suffering that was going on in those eyes, along with a desire to alleviate it in some way. Studying the picture, it: occurred to him that, clean-shaven, Jesus might have a blue face like Woodsy’s, and he began to wonder if there might be other similarities as well. For several nights he placed on his chest of drawers in front of the Jesus picture a plug of tobacco and a pack of Camels, and each morning he checked to see if anyone had come in the night for a chew or a smoke. No one ever did. And soon he lost completely the belief that there was anyone walking with him or talking with him or telling him he was His own. Jesus joined the people Joe would never see again; He was behind the sky with the three blondes and Woodsy.

That summer flurry of churchgoing ended for good when Sally Buck landed a new beau, a telephone lineman. He walked into her shop one afternoon, his wide leather belt riding low on his hips, heavy with tools, to make an installation. Sally’s pupils dilated at the sight of him, and by the time he returned to his truck, the lineman had fallen under her pretty little gray-eyed spell.