Bitter Bronx by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online

“Look what’s become of you! You’ll die here without the sunlight. We can’t make do without our Adonis.”
    And the negotiations began. Count Dracula was all about negotiation, nothing else.
    â€œI won’t have dinner with war widows.”
    â€œAll right,” he said. “I’ll say you’re allergic to food. But you’ll meet with them for fifteen minutes, right in the showroom.”
    â€œTen,” I said. “Not a minute more.”
    I collected all my things and went out the door with Dracula. We drove down to Shmatahland in his limousine. The streets were cluttered with men and boys wheeling enormous carts of merchandise—Seventh Avenue had a hum I’ve heard nowhere else, the sound of human traffic spinning off the walls of buildings, bouncing up and down, until the air itself was swollen with a soft, incessant noise that entered showrooms and factories right under the roofs. I wasn’t sentimental about my stay in Shmatahland . I was a high-priced prisoner of war. But there was nothing diabolic about that noise. It was the hubbub of angels, brutal and busy, but angels nonetheless.

ARCHY AND MEHITABEL
    I ’d never heard of Archy and Mehitabel. The idea of a cockroach who could write poetry would have appealed to a kid from the Bronx. But I had to wait until I attended high school in Manhattan before I would learn about that cockroach and his companion, an alley cat who thought she was Cleopatra. The kids at Music and Art would quote line after line of Mehitabel’s meditations while I nodded my head.
    â€œToujours gai, kid.” That was her love cry to the cockroach.
    I was smitten by Archy and Mehitabel, and by the swagger of all those M&Aers from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The boys wore white bucks, shoes that looked like anteaters or rumpled rats and were the favorite footwear among Ivy Leaguers. These boys had one ambition: to get into Harvard or Yale.
    The girls weren’t that different. They scribbled poems at night and practiced their acceptance speech for the Pulitzer Prize. I had a secret crush on one of them—Merle Messenger. It happened in the fall of ’53. We were both sophomores in the same English class. She was tall and zaftig , with the ripeness of an opera star. She sang in the school choir and could have walked right into Julliard. But Merle didn’t want a career in music. She wanted to teach world literature at one of the Seven Sisters. She read with a terrifying appetite. She had lavender eyes, like Elizabeth Taylor, and when she talked of Mehitabel or Natasha in War and Peace , those lavender eyes had all the little explosions of the Milky Way.
    I was mute around Merle. The Bronx had very small purchase on West End Avenue. And I was startled when she asked me to study with her.
    â€œYou’ll give me courage,” she said. “I always shiver before an exam.”
    And so I visited Merle on a Friday night in November. It was like entering Ali Baba’s den. The building had a doorman in a gray uniform, and elevator operators in identical gray. I had to announce myself. I was summoned into the lobby. One of the elevator men pulled on a golden lever and we shot upstairs in an ancient, shivering car.
    Merle’s mother met me at the door. She was president of the PTA at Music and Art. Her name was Yvonne. She wrote novels for young adults. Merle’s father was a book critic for the World-Telegram & Sun .
    He clapped his hands and Merle came out of her room. She was wearing slippers and gorgeous blue pajamas under a silk robe—that’s how she dressed for a study date. Her mom and dad didn’t even notice.
    â€œYvonne,” said the book critic, “look what Merle has done. She’s brought us Jerry Salinger’s double. Doesn’t he have Jerry’s big ears?”
    It’s true. I did have big ears—and Salinger’s brooding, dark demean.
    â€œAh,” said