Answered Prayers

All this! Snores. Soiled breathings. Asphyxiation. The lugubrious slapslap of searching feet. On my way "home," ha ha, I bought a pint of clearance-sale gin—the kind of raw ambrosia that would gag a slew of skid-row throats. I killed half of it in two gulps, then began to nod, began to remember De

Stop. You're pissed, P. B. You're a loser, an asshole dumb drunk loser, P. B. Jones. So good night. Good night, Walter Winchell—in whatever hell you're baking. Good night, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea—in whatever sea you're sinking. And a very special good night to that wise philosopher Florie Rotondo, age eight. Florie—and I mean this, honey—I hope you never reached the interior of the planet Earth, never discovered uranium, rubies, and Unspoiled Monsters. With all my heart, what there is of it, I hope you moved to the country and lived there happily ever after.

II

KATE McCLOUD

"I may be a black sheep, but my hooves are made of gold"

During the week my sainted employer, Miss Victoria Self, sent me out on seven «dates» within three days, even though I pleaded everything from bronchitis to gonorrhea. And now she's trying to talk me into appearing in a porno film ("P. B. Listen, darling. It's a class production. With a script. I can get you two hundred a day"). But I don't want to go into all that, not just now.

Anyway, last night I felt too ripple-blooded, too restless to sleep; it was impossible, I just couldn't lie awake here in my so-divine Y. M. C. A. cell listening to the midnight farts and nightmare moanings of my Christian brethren.

So I decided to walk over to West 42nd Street, which isn't far from here, and search out a movie at one of those ammonia-scented all-night movie palaces. It was after one when I set out, and the route of my walk carried me along nine blocks of Eighth Avenue. Prostitutes, blacks, Puerto Ricans, a few whites, and indeed all strata of street-people society-the luxurious Latin pimps (one wearing a white mink hat and a diamond bracelet), the heroin-nodders nodding in doorways, the male hustlers, among the boldest of them gypsy boys and Puerto Ricans and runaway hillbilly rednecks no more than fourteen and fifteen years old ("Mister! Ten dollars! Take me home! Fuck me all night!")circled the sidewalks like buzzards above an abattoir. Then the occasional cruising cop car, its passengers uninterested, unseeing@ having seen it all until their eyes are rheumy with the sight.

I passed The Loading Zone, an S & M bar at 40th and Eighth, and there was a gang of laughing, howling, leather-jacketed, leather-helmeted jackals crowded on the sidewalk surrounding a young man, costumed exactly as they were, who, unconscious, was sprawled between the curb and the sidewalk, where all his friends, colleagues, tormentors, whatever the hell you care to call them, were urinating on him, drenching him from head to heel. Nobody noticed; well, noticed, but merely enough to slow their movement slightly; they kept walking-all except a bunch of indignant prostitutes, black, white, and at least half of them transvestites, who kept shouting at the urinators ("Stop that! Oh, stop that! You fairies. You dirty fairies!") and slapping them with their purses-until the leather-boys started hosing them down, laughing the louder, and the "girls," in their stretch pants and surrealist wigs (blueberry, strawberry, vanilla, Afro-gold) ran in flutterbutt flight down the street shrieking, but enjoyably so: "Fags. Fairies. Dirty mean fags."

They hesitated at the street corner to heckle a preacher, or an orator of sorts, who, like an exorcist demolishing demons, was assaulting a shifting, shiftless audience of sailors and hustlers, drug-pushers and beggars, and white-trash farm boys freshly arrived at the Port Authority bus terminal. "Yes! Yes!" screamed the preacher, the flickering lights of a hot-dog stand greening his young, taut, hungry, hysterical face. "The devil is wallowing inside you," he screamed, his Oklahoma voice thorny as barbed wire. "The devil squats there, fat, feeding on your evil. Let the light of the Lord starve him out. Let the light of the Lord lift you to heaven—"

"Oh yeah?" yelled one of the whores. "Ain't no Lord go

The preacher's mouth twisted with lunatic resentment. "Scumbags! Filth."

A voice answered him: "Shut up. Don't call them names."

"What?" said the preacher, screaming again.

"I'm no better than they are. And you are no better than I am. We're all the same person." And suddenly I realized the voice was mine, and I thought boyoboy, Jesus, kid, you're losing your marbles, your brains are ru

So I hurried right into the first theatre I came to, not bothering to notice what films were on display. In the lobby I bought a chocolate bar and a bag of buttered popcorn-I hadn't eaten since breakfast. Then I found a seat in the balcony, which was an error, for it is in the balconies of these round-the-clock emporiums that the shadows of tireless sex-searchers weave and wander among the rows-wrecked whores, women in their sixties and seventies who want to blow you for a dollar ("Fifty cents?"), and men who offer the same service for nothing, and other men, sometimes rather conservative executive types, who seem to specialize in accosting the numerous slumbering drunks.

Then, there on the screen I saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. An American Tragedy, a film I'd seen at least twice, not that it was all that great, but still it was very good, especially the final scene, which was unreeling at this particular moment: Clift and Taylor standing together, separated by the bars of a prison cell, a death cell, for Clift is only hours away from execution. Clift, already a poetic ghost inside his grey death-clothes, and Taylor, nineteen and ravishing, sublimely fresh as lilac after rain. Sad. Sad. Enough to jerk the tears out of Caligula's eyes. I choked on a mouthful of popcorn.

The picture ended, and was immediately replaced by Red River, a cowboy love story starring John Wayne and, once again, Montgomery Clift. It was Clift's first important film role, the one that made him a "star" — as I had good reason to recall.

Remember Turner Boatwright, the late, not too lamented magazine editor, my old mentor (and nemesis), the dear fellow who got beaten by a dope-crazed Latino until his heart stopped and his eyes popped out of his head?

One morning, while I was still in his good graces, he telephoned and invited me to di