After the First Death - Lawrence Block [10]
While Audie Murphy and Randolph Scott led the forces of good to their inevitable triumph over the forces of evil, I hunched in my seat and followed the action on the screen, letting the films bake my psyche as a Turkish bath might have done for my body. Everything drained out. The headache went away, the fear, the pain, everything. Anesthesia.
And the hours slipped neatly away. If I were going to escape from New York City now was emphatically the time to do it. In a matter of hours the police would be looking for me, and once that happened bus terminals and airports and railway stations would cease to be safe. (It occurred to me now that I should have taken my checkbook, that the airlines would have accepted a check. It had not occurred to me before. And it no longer seemed to matter. I was watching the movie, I would go on watching the movie; as long as I stayed where I was nothing bad could happen to me. The cocoon mentality.)
When I entered the theater, the Audie Murphy picture was about a third gone. I watched it to the end, and then I watched the Randolph Scott picture, and then I watched a coming attraction for something and a Roadrunner cartoon and a two-minute advertisement for the goodies available at the downstairs refreshment stand in the main lobby. Then I watched the Audie Murphy picture to the point where I came in, and, since there was no particular place to go next, I stayed there to watch it through to the end again.
Remember, said an inner voice.
No. No, I’d rather not
Remember last night.
No. I had a blackout. I’m entitled to a blackout
Lift the curtain. Bring back bits and pieces of it—
Why?
He who fails to learn from the past is condemned to repeat it.
But it had already been repeated. Why remember it again? Look, there’s Audie Murphy, here’s the part where he beats the hell out of the rotten crooked sheriff, watch it now—
Remember.
I gave up and sat back and closed my eyes and turned off the movie and let myself remember.
It had, tritely, been a day like any other day. Outside, as inside, I had come to learn the safety and security of pattern, of habit I had learned not to rush things but to let them come as they would, living my own life in a neat and orderly fashion that would supply a counterfeit purpose when none in fact existed. I lived frugally, in my two ill-furnished rooms on East Ninth Street. I ate out of cans or took meals at a cafeteria around the corner. I shaved each morning, and I wore clean clothing every day, and I made myself busy although I had nothing to be busy about. I walked to Tompkins Square Park and played chess with some of the elderly pensioners who sunned themselves there. I wandered to the public library and read all manner of books and magazines. Frequently, but not invariably, I bought the Times and read the classified ads, neatly marking those offering jobs for which I was presumably qualified.
In the beginning I had actually answered some of those ads, but I learned quickly that this was a futile occupation. For the time being I had several thousand dollars of savings set aside, and the way I was living it would last quite awhile. When it ran out I would find a way to avoid starvation, some sort of day labor job, something anonymous.
There had been one job offer, Turk’s suggestion that I might help him cut heroin with sugar and quinine and package it for sale to his various outlets. “You want to make it on the outside,” he argued, “you got to get something sweet going. A cat like you or me, once he been inside, ain’t nobody going to make him president of U.S. Steel. You need to find a hustle.”
And Doug MacEwan’s suggestion, while geared more along socially acceptable lines, made much the same point. He thought I ought to go into business for myself, as small businessmen do not need to provide backgrounds and references for an employer’s satisfaction. I had almost as much difficulty seeing myself as the