Answered Prayers by Truman Capote Read Free Book Online

Rumpelmayer’s, “this is crackerjack”; and “Oh,” said Daisy, as we joined a Broadway crowd urging a suicide to hurl himself off the ledge of a window in the old Roxy, “oh, this really is crackerjack.”)
    Me, I was Daisy in Paris. I spoke no French and never would have if it hadn’t been for Denny. He forced me to learn by refusing to speak anything else. Unless we were in bed; however, let me explain that, though he wanted us to share the same bed, his interest in me was romantic but not sexual; nor was he disposed toward anyone else; he said he hadn’t had his circle squared in two years, for opium and cocaine had castrated him. We often went to Champs-Élysées movies in the afternoon, and at some juncture he always, having begun slightly to sweat, hurried to the men’s room and dosed himself with drugs; in the evening he inhaled opium or sipped opium tea, a concoction he brewed by boiling in water the crusts of opium that had accumulated inside his pipe. But he was not a nodder; I never saw him drug-dazed or enfeebled.
    Perhaps, at night’s end, with approaching daylight edging the drawn bedroom curtains, Denny might lapse a bit and carom off into a curvaceous, opaque outburst. “Tell me, boy, have you ever heard of Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café? Sound familiar? You betcher balls. Even if you never heard of it and maybe think it’s some after-hours Harlem dump, even so, you know it by
some
name, and of course you know what it is and where it is. Once I spent a year meditating in a California monastery. Under the super-supervision of His Holiness, the Right Reverend Mr. Gerald Heard. Looking for this … Meaningful Thing. This … God Thing.
I did try
. No man was ever more naked. Early to bed and early to rise, and prayer, prayer, no hooch, no smokes, I never even jacked off. And all that ever came of that putrid torture was … Father Flanagan’s Nigger Queen Kosher Café. There it is: right where they throw you off at the end of the line. Just beyond the garbage dump. Watch your step: don’t step on the severed head. Now knock. Knock knock. Father Flanagan’s voice: ‘Who sent ya?’ Christ, for Christ’s sake, ya dumb mick. Inside … it’s … very … relaxing. Because there’s not a winner in the crowd. All derelicts, especially those potbellied babies with fat numbered accounts at Crédit Suisse. So you can really unpin your hair, Cinderella. And admit that what we have here is the drop-off. What a relief! Just to throw in the cards, order a Coke, and take a spin around the floor with an old friend like say that
peachy
twelve-year-old Hollywood kid who pulled a Boy Scout knife and robbed me of my very beautiful oval-shaped Cartier watch. The Nigger Queen Kosher Café! The cool green, restful as the grave, rock bottom! That’s why I drug: mere dry meditation isn’t enough to get me there, keep me there, keep me there, hidden and happy with Father Flanagan and his Outcast of Thousands, him and all the other yids, nigs, spiks, fags, dykes, dope fiends, and commies. Happy to be down there where you belong: Yassah, massuh! Except—theprice is too high, I’m killing myself.” Then, scrapping the sleazy stand-up-comic tone: “I am, you know. But meeting you has made me change my mind. I wouldn’t object to living. Provided you lived with me, Jonesy. It means risking a cure; and it
is
a risk. I’ve done it once before. At a clinic in Vevey; and every night the mountains collapsed on me, and every morning I wanted to drown myself in Lac Léman. But if I did it, would you? We could go back to the States and buy a filling station. No, no foolin’. I’ve always wanted to run a filling station. Somewhere in Arizona. Or Nevada. Last Chance for Gas. It would be real quiet, and you could write stories. Basically, I’m pretty healthy. I’m a good cook, too.”
    Denny offered me drugs, but I refused, and he never insisted, though once he said: “Scared?” Yes, but not