CHAPTER II
Table of Contents Jake Lennox had been fighting a losing battle with himself for ten years, and it was a struggle he had never been aware of. The two levels of his mind hated each other and were tearing him apart. Jake had a conscious ideal, the model of the man he wanted to be ... austere, kindly, infallible, sophisticated. Like many of us, he suffered from the Mignon Complex. He was bitterly ashamed of his background. He had had a squalid childhood as the son of a drunken Long Island clam-digger, and would have liked to awaken one morning to discover that he was really the second son of the Marquis of Suffolk.
But deep down inside, Jake was a hell of a rowdy guy; full of laughter and boisterous energy, yearning for ribald friends and a burning girl he could love and marry and riot in bed with. He was not aware of this. He believed in the conscious image of what he wanted to be. And while the lusty passions within him fought to overturn and destroy the world he had made for himself, his conscious mind was fighting desperately to hold it together.
Occasionally the conscious mind gave way, which is why Jake Lennox awoke on Christmas night in the role of another man. He was convinced that he was Mr. Clarence Fox from Philadelphia. I got this story from Jake and from Aimee Driscoll when I went up to her apartment to claim Jake's overcoat and precious gimmick book. Jake couldn't face Aimee again. She represented the turmoil inside him which he could not acknowledge.
Aimee (how about that name?) is a blonde with a poached face and the fattest behind and bosom in the hustling racket. If you looked at her through a gin bottle you might imagine that she was a busty Swedish acrobat, which was what betrayed Jake. There are front-men and rear-men, Aimee kindly explained to me, and she parlays both into a lovely living. Mr. Clarence Fox was an All-Around Camper.
He awoke, still drunk and still bloody from the brawl in Ye Baroque Saloon where he had acquired Aimee. He wore his underwear and was cramped into an overstuffed sofa and covered with a gritty Navajo blanket. It was dark. Lennox let out a roar that slid into a ballad which he'd composed the night before and with which he'd been injuring ears ever since.
Aimee heard the racket, ran into the living room and turned on the lights. Lennox winced, closed his eyes, and sneezed three times in stately waltz tempo.
"Less light," he muttered. "A switch on Goethe. I am excessively educated, and all by hand. Need more crud in my blood." He began to roar again.
"Stop that noise, Clarence!" Aimee called from the door. "Stop that goddam singing."
Lennox finished the ballad which included every dirty word he knew. Seventeen, by actual count.
"And stop talking dirty," Aimee told him primly. She was wearing a bra, panties and high black net stockings; not, she pointed out, in hopes of arousing the beast in Mr. Fox. It was her conventional uniform. As a matter of fact she knew he was still drunk and hoped he wouldn't start anything. She waddled to the sofa and bent over Mr. Fox solicitously. He had been very generous to her even though her professional services had not yet been requested. Mr. Fox stared up at her bursting cleavage, then suddenly thrust his heavy hand down into it.
"The All-Mother," Lennox laughed.
He hurt her. Aimee squawked and jerked back. Lennox held on to the bra and tore it away. He began to cheer: "Brah! Brah! Brah!" waving the bra like a college pennant.
"You goddam lousy bum!" Aimee screamed. "You're mean. You're mean dirty drunk. I never liked you from the beginning, you goddam lousy son of a-"
"No, no," Lennox protested. "An act of admiration. 'Fair is my love, for April's in her face, her lovely breasts September claims his part....' Poem by R. Greene. Speaks for C. Fox."
He lurched up from the sofa, captured Aimee and clutched her reverently. He pressed his face between her breasts. He had not shaved in a day and a half, and his beard was excruciating. Aimee fought and twisted and thrust him away. Lennox straightened and rocked like a high mast.
"'But Cold December dwelleth in her heart,'" he mumbled sorrowfully. "Where's the woman who'll give passion with the sweetness of virgins and the lunacy of whores? You give, Aimee, but you taste like money." He staggered, tripped on a mass of cardboard and wrapping paper, and fell heavily into a three-foot Christmas tree that expired with a jingle and pop.
Aimee burst out laughing. She was revenged. Lennox arose in a fury, seized the Christmas tree by the butt and beat it savagely against the wall. Aimee protested. He leaped toward her and lashed her across the high fat buttocks. Aimee screamed. Lennox slipped and bruised himself on a solid square object covered with tissue paper. He clutched it.
"You leave that alone, Clarence," Aimee yelled. She forgot all other outrages and ran across the room. She clawed at Lennox and tried to pull him off. The tissue paper tore away.
"What'r you protecting? Virginity?" Lennox growled.
"It's the Christmas present you gimme. You bought it last night. Don't you bust it!"
Lennox peeled away tissue paper to reveal a dark wood console and a twelve inch TV screen.
"The Monster!" he cried. "The One-Eyed Beast!" He hammered the top of the set with his fists. Aimee fought him helplessly, then darted away and returned with an empty quart beer bottle. She swung it with both hands and clubbed Lennox across the back of the neck. He fell forward into the rubbish like a tackle throwing a rolling block. He was the size of a tackle.
Lennox climbed to his feet, his throat working convulsively. "Bathroom," he croaked. He was sick. Aimee knew the symptoms well, and no vendetta was worth another cleaning bill. She turned Lennox around and pushed him competently through a narrow door into the small bedroom and then into the bathroom. She turned on the light, flipped up the toilet lid and with the skill of long experience, bent his head down to the bowl. Then she backed out and slammed the door.
During the preliminary moment of agony, Lennox thought: "They play Boys' Rules. Oh Virgins! Respectables! Learn from them-" Then the purge began.
When the heaving stopped, Lennox straightened painfully, flushed the toilet, then examined his face in the mirror. To him it was the face of Mr. Clarence Fox, the visiting Quaker from Philadelphia. His cropped hair was still sleek; nothing could ever muss it. But his dark eyes had heavy purple shadows around them, and his lined face was bruised.
He was purged, still drunk, but beginning to sober. He staggered to the bedroom, found his clothes neatly hung in a closet, and dressed. He went out into the living room. Aimee had straightened it. She wore a white housecoat blemished by green and scarlet petunias, and was kneeling alongside the new television set plugging it into a wall outlet.
"If you got any on the floor you better clean it up," she said icily.
"Merry Christmas," he answered. "Happy to pay for damage to life and limb."
Lennox reached into his pocket, took out his wallet and was fingering through it for money when his eye noticed the identification card.
"This isn't my wallet," he said.
"What?"
Lennox plucked at his shirt dubiously. "Not my clothes either."
"What are you talking about, Clarence? Them's your clothes." Aimee switched on the set and fiddled with the controls.
"No. Not mine. Belong to somebody else. Character named Lennox."
"Who?"
He extended the wallet for Aimee to examine. "My name's Fox. Clarence Fox from Philadelphia. This is Jordan Lennox, says here. See? Jordan Lennox. How'd he get into the act?"
The screen ignited, herringboned, then sprang into life. The blast of Johnny Plummer's orchestra filled the room with bright expectation. A Main-Title card displayed white comedy letters against a cartoon background while the voice of Oliver Stacy read it with frenetic sell: THE MODE SHOW ... STARRING MIG MASON AND DIGGY DIXON ... PLAYING-'WHO HE?'
"Who He!" Aimee called over the burst of studio applause. I love that program. I get every question right. I could make a fortune if I could get on." She backed up, feeling for a chair, her eyes fixed on the screen.
Jake Lennox's consciousness ignited, herringboned, then sprang into life.
"'Who He!'" he burst out, stunned and bewildered. "That's my show."
Clarence Fox stole back to Philadelphia.
"That's my show," Lennox repeated.
"How do you mean, your show?"
"I write it. I own a piece of it."
"That's a hot one," Aimee laughed.
"Don't you understand? It's my show. I'm Jake Lennox. I write that-I-What the hell am I doing here? I'm supposed to be at the theater."
Lennox turned and stumbled out of the apartment. He clattered down the brownstone stairs and fell half a flight. It was bitter cold on the street. Snow and rain were falling, and the air was like ice-water. Lennox ran west to 3rd Avenue, the great exposed nerve of The Rock's delirium. It was empty. The bars exuded urine-colored light. The antique shops blazed with cut-glass chandeliers. Alongside him, a darkened barber-pole still revolved its red and white spiral with the sound of guillotines.
A small man in a derby, pea-jacket and white duck trousers passed him and addressed him brightly: "Hiya, Dan. Nice to see you again." The man in the derby continued up 3rd Avenue greeting empty doorways in friendly tones: "Hello, Jerry. Long time no see.... Hiya, Pete? How's the family? Glad to see you, Ed." Lennox stared at him, then saw a cab, ran for it and leaped inside.
"Gotham four one thousand," he called to the driver. He shook his...
