Midnight Cowboy (3 page)

There followed a year in which Joe saw hardly anything at all of his grandmother. For that matter he saw very little of anyone at all. A listlessness took possession of him during that fall of his fourteenth year, and by Thanksgiving he had ceased going to school. The effort needed to get there and to remain awake could no longer be summoned in him. Several boys of Joe’s temperament, boys unresponsive to talk, drifted away from the school that year. Some few remained for the social life, but this was no lure to Joe, who never had been included in it. No one had disliked him, but then, no one had really noticed him much either. He was simply the one with the big front teeth (sometimes called “Buck” Buck), the one who seldom spoke, never had his lesson, and always managed somehow to angle a seat in the back of the room. Sally was visited at her shop from time to time by truant officers, but this never resulted in any real action on her part or theirs, and Joe was left to do as he pleased. He got up at noon, combed his hair a lot, smoked cigarettes, ate peanut butter and sardines, and watched thousands of miles of film unroll on the television set in Sally Buck’s living room. He kept that TV going from noon till long past midnight. Away from it for any length of time he actually became confused and disoriented. He urgently required the images it gave out, and especially the sound it made. His own life made very little noise of its own, and he found that in silence there was something downright perilous: It had enemies in it that only sound could drive out.

Then, too, the TV had lots of blonde women, and every last one of them looked somehow like one of his own. It seemed that every stagecoach and covered wagon, every saloon and every general store, if you watched it long enough, would prove to have a blonde in it: The swinging doors would open, or the curtains would part, and out would come Claire Trevor or Barbara Stanwyck or Constance Bennett, looking for all the world like his own familiar yellow-haired women. And who would that tall man be, riding high in his saddle, face against the sun, jaw squared toward goodness and justice, bursting with his own hardness and strength and purpose, and portrayed by anyone from Tom Mix to Henry Fonda? Why, that was Joe Buck himself. In a sense.

During this time of his television addiction, an astonishing thing was happening to him. He was becoming, day by day and bit by bit and feature by feature, as tall and strong and handsome as a TV cowboy. One day, when summer had come and gone and then had come again and Joe was swimming in the river, there was a moment in which he discovered himself to be inhabiting the body of a man. He climbed out of the water and looked down at himself and there he saw this shimmering new man conveying himself through the mud on a man’s strong legs. His arms and body had developed a full muscle structure, and there was on his chest and limbs a perfectly presentable man’s growth of dark body hair. He became tremendously excited by these sudden discoveries and hurried home on his bicycle to study the situation in Sally’s bedroom mirror. He found that his face too had changed: Its outlines were more squarely defined, and somehow his mouth had grown up to accommodate his big teeth so that they had become a good white shiny asset.

He was so pleased with what he saw that he got dressed up and went strutting about the neighborhood, supposing that others too would see what had taken place in him and find it remarkable. (No one did.) He stopped at Sally’s shop. She said, “Good Lord, honey, those clothes look awful on you, they’ve gotten away too small.”

“No,” he argued, “they no smaller than they was.”

She said, “Oh yes they are,” and she gave him money for a new outfit.

Later that afternoon, Joe paraded through the streets of Albuquerque in bright-blue slacks, an orange sport jacket and oxblood shoes with cleats on the heels. Sally said the outfit seemed to clash a little, “but you look real cute, have you got a girl?”

At home, straining his eyes toward the mirror until they were all but inflamed, he wondered what had happened to his delight with himself. The new man was still there with all his beauty intact, but somehow the marvel of him had gone sour, the elation had broken apart and become a misery. And suddenly he knew why. For a dreadful thing had come about in him that day: an awakening to his own lonesomeness.

Never having had a friendship on his own, Joe knew nothing of how to bring such a situation about. His way of proceeding was to pick out a person he liked and then do a lot of hanging around in the hope that a friendship would come into being. He tried this method on: the grocer’s widow, two gas station attendants, the girl who issued money orders at the Rio Pharmacy, an old immigrant shoemaker, an usher at the World movie theater. But they never seemed to understand what he hoped to achieve. Gradually it became clear to him that conversation was a necessary part of the development of personal ties, but Joe rarely had anything to say, and on occasions when he did dredge up a few words, his listener as a rule remained unmoved and the effort went for nothing. He was simply no talker. His best conversations were with Sally, but even they were conducted on the run. He’d be sitting, say, on the edge of the bathtub watching her paint herself in the mirror over the sink; the greater part of her attention would be given over to the considerable task of getting some twenty years erased from her face, and very little would be left over for her grandson.

It was during the fall of his seventeenth year, and in this mood of hunger for affectionate connections in the world, that Joe one evening wandered into the World movie theater and began a brief and pleasurable and terrible association with a girl named Anastasia Pratt.

The name of Anastasia Pratt, even though the girl herself was only fifteen, was legendary to the young people of Albuquerque. Such legends rarely derive from fact alone: Invention as a rule takes a part in their creation. But the behavior of Anastasia Pratt from the time she was twelve was such that the imagination was stunned; no one by lying could have made it seem to be much more bizarre or improbable than it already was.

She was known as Chalkline Annie, suggesting the order that had to be maintained in order to serve efficiently the large numbers of boys to whom in a single half hour she made her body available.

Behind the silver screen at the World movie theater was a large room in which were stored the letters for the marquee, uniforms for the ushers, towels and soap and various other supplies and equipment. In one corner were stored some ends of carpeting left over from the theater’s most recent refurbishing. It was in this corner that the legend of Anastasia Pratt was created in the flesh. She labored as well in various living rooms, bedrooms, parked cars, and garages, in school grounds at night, and even under the sky along certain desert highways in fair weather. But it was on this stack of carpet ends in the storeroom of the World movie theater that Anastasia was most often used and by the greatest numbers.

Neither pretty nor unpretty, she appeared to be an ordinary schoolgirl, so ordinary that in light of her actual behavior the effect seemed almost studied. She wore the usual clothes—skirts, blouses, sweaters, ankle socks, and saddle oxfords. Her hair was chestnut-colored, combed straight back and held with a clip. She wore no makeup to speak of, merely plucked her eyebrows and dabbed on a little lipstick. In the daytime you would see her walking always alone to and from school, carrying her books, and seeming to be as open-eyed and listless and mildly troubled as any virginal and solitary adolescent is apt to be. Unless you knew of her special activities, you would have had no reason to look twice at Anastasia Pratt. But with that knowledge, the contrast between what you imagined and what you saw was astonishing. One young; wag referred to her as Virgin Jekyll and Miss Hyde.

Despite the girl’s fame there were at least three persons who were totally unaware of her conduct. Two of these, of course, were the girl’s parents, the father a strict, hard-working, irritable bank cashier and the mother a thin-lipped, shifty-eyed piano player at the Truth Church. The third ignorant party, until a certain Friday evening in October, was Joe Buck.

They met at the World water fountain. Joe stepped back and held the faucet for her. She drank and then looked at him gratefully and smiled. He smiled back. She said: “Would you like to sit with me?”

They sat on the side, about a third of the way down the aisle. Anastasia immediately placed her knee against Joe’s and began to wiggle in an unmistakably provocative way. Suddenly they were holding hands. Just as Joe was beginning to worry about the perspiration emanating from his palm, she took his hand and used it to caress her thigh. Then the girl used her own hand boldly to study the extent of his excitement. Finding it to be considerable she took hold of his face and begged him to kiss her. Joe was not at all disinclined to do so; in all the excitement he simply hadn’t thought of it; but there was in her request such urgency, such desperation that when he did kiss her, the girl’s lips clung to his mouth as if she were taking from him some life-giving substance. He felt as if he were administering to a person who had been fatally wounded in an accident but who was not yet quite dead.

A pack of boys came down the aisle and sat behind Joe and Anastasia Pratt.

One of them said, “Jesus, it’s Anastasia Pratt.”

“You’re kidding,” said another.

A third said, “Who’s the guy?”

“He’s
kissing
her.”

“Hey, somebody’s kissing Anastasia Pratt.”

“Who is he? Who’s the guy kissing Annie?”

“Hey Annie, who you got there?”

Anastasia turned around and in a whining voice said, “Shut up. Please shut up. Give me a chance, will you?”

“Give you a chance? I’ll give you a chance.”

“Here you are, Annie, here it is.”

“Me, too, Annie, how’s this? Want me to knock it against the back of your seat a few times for luck?”

Joe did not yet understand what was taking place. He’d seen lots of couples necking in this very theater, and always they had been left unmolested. He was frightened and he was confused. Apparently in his inexperience he was doing something wrong, but he hadn’t the faintest notion of what it was, and he knew even less how to handle himself in such a situation.

One of the gang stood up and leaned over the row of seats and recognized Joe Buck from grade-school days. “Hey, it’s Buck. It’s Joe Buck,” he announced, resuming his seat.

Joe didn’t know the voices behind him and he was afraid to turn around and look.

“Hey, Joe,” one of them whispered to him. “You been kissing Anastasia, you better go swallow a drug store and I ain’t kidding. She’s copped every joint in Albuquerque.” This voice was not hostile, it was in fact friendly and urgent in its tone. Joe then turned and saw a dark Italian boy he remembered from school. His name was Bobby Desmond.

Anastasia Pratt got up from her seat and flounced up the aisle. The gang ran to follow her. Before leaving with the others, Bobby Desmond paused long enough to tap Joe’s shoulder and say, “Come on.”

Joe got up and followed. In the back of the theater were six boys, all of high-school age, blocking an exit. Anastasia was pleading weakly to be allowed through. A tall, skinny, pimply, loudmouthed blond boy said “Hey, Annie, Gary Amberger’s upstairs and he’s dying to see you.”

“He is not,” said Anastasia, but her eyes said, Is he really?

“Okay, he isn’t. I’ll go tell him he’s not there.”

“No, but I mean he is not,” Anastasia said.

And then they were all trooping down a side aisle of the World movie theater, this line of boys and Anastasia Pratt, heading toward a red exit sign at the left of the screen. Joe, following behind Bobby Desmond, brought up the rear. As he went through the curtains under the sign he heard the voice of some Hollywood woman on the screen saying: “I tell you, the situation’s gotten entirely out of hand. Our only hope is to pretend that nothing’s happened.”

They all filed up a short flight of steps and into the storeroom. Someone turned on a light. Anastasia said, “Where is he? Where’s Gary Amberger?”

The tall blond boy, whose name was Adrian Schmidt, said, “Over on the carpets, Annie, over on the carpets.” He went into that corner, saying, “Hi Gare, Anastasia’s here.”

She said, “You’re lying. This is just a trick. To get me here. I know you boys.” And then, “Gary? Gary!” she called. “If you’re there, say something.”

A woman’s voice, projected electronically, said, “Blow out your candles now, darling, and make a wish!” “No!” said a little girl’s voice. “We haven’t sung happy birthday yet!” Then there was much shouting from the screen and a chorus of people sang
Happy Birthday
.

Anastasia said, “I want out of here,” and that got the door closed. For everybody in the room except Joe knew she did not want out of there at all.

“I still don’t believe he’s back there,” she said, “but I’m going to take a look just the same.”

In the corner Adrian Schmidt was lying on the carpets, exposed, handling himself, and then all the boys were exposing themselves, and then Anastasia Pratt was lying on the carpets, demanding petulantly as she pulled down her panties that “somebody nice has to be first, otherwise nothing doing.” Adrian Schmidt was told he had to wait till last as punishment for lying to her about Gary Amberger. But she had known there wasn’t any Gary Amberger any more. Gary Amberger had moved to Battle Creek Michigan three years earlier and everybody knew it.