The Thomas Berryman Number

Ronald Asher slumped up against a dwarf oak at the center of the yard, growing disenchanted with news reporting I could see. It wasn’t exactly as Hunter Thompson had anti-romanticized it in

Rolling Stone.

A slight breeze turned oak leaves, lifted the blond hair on Toy’s forehead, softly bristled my beard.

Ben Toy leaned back and closed his eyes. He was king of the hospital.

After a minute watching five or six contented-looking mental patients sunbathing around the yard, I closed my eyes too.

This was privilege, I was thinking. This was interviewing Elizabeth Taylor over breakfast in a flowery Puerto Vallarta courtyard.

“Tom Berryman never did know it.” Toy alternately sucked in the morning air and sniffled. “But on and off for about six months I’d been seeing this wiggy Jewish lady … this shrink in New York.”

I opened my eyes and saw that Toy was looking at me too. “Why didn’t Berryman know?” I asked.

“Because he would have had a shit fit. He wanted me around because I was dependable. He didn’t have to worry when I was handling details for him. I was backup.

“So I had to be very careful about this lady. It was all on the sly. All my visits. It was all about me getting depressed. No big shit anyway.

“I went to see her the Wednesday after we’d met Harley Wynn in Massachusetts. I was feeling like a dishrag again. She usually gave me some pills. Valiums. Stelazines.

“This was the day the walls came tumbling down on my head … I remember how it was real sunny. Nice out. I wouldn’t have believed it was going to turn into such a shit day …”

New York City, June 14

Toy’s doctor was a Park Avenue psychiatrist, a seventy-year-old woman who preferred being called Reva to Doctor Baumwell.

She saw all her patients at a luxury apartment in a prewar building on the corner of East 74th Street. She always wore dark dresses and red high-heeled shoes for her appointments.

In his six months with Reva Baumwell, Ben Toy had never once spoken about Thomas Berryman.

For her part, Reva talked of little else except rebuilding Toy’s personality. This was “getting as common as face-lifting” she said in an unguarded moment. She also forewarned him that this rebuilding process would probably involve a crisis for him. She was continually asking him if he was about ready for a little crisis, a little pesonality change for the better.

Sometimes, Toy considered the psychiatrist certifiable herself. But she dispensed tranquilizers like vitamin pills, and Ben Toy believed in Valium, in Stelazine and Thorazine. They had a proven track record. They worked for him.

When he left Reva Baumwell’s apartment building that day he had a prescription for twenty milligrams of Stelazine in the pocket of his peach nik-nik shirt. Basically, he was feeling pretty good about life.

Then he saw Harley Wynn again.

This time Wynn didn’t run away. He was leaning against a silver Mercedes parked in front of the building’s awning. The smug look on his face brought to mind F.B.I. agents harassing hippie dope dealers.

The two of them met under the building’s long shadow.

“I saw you on East End Avenue too,” Wynn said in a drawl that seemed to be thickening. “You see, I’ve been thinking about last week. I decided you were a little too abrupt with me … So I’ve been following you around. I’ve seen Berryman.”

Ben Toy’s impulse was to sucker-punch Wynn right there. To smash his head across the car hood.

“I want to talk to him,” the southern man continued. “Face to face … we have things to discuss about Jimmie Horn.”

Toy lighted up a cigarette, “Where did you see Berryman?” he asked.

“Outside of Eighty Central Park South,” Harley Wynn said. “He was with this tall girl. Foxy lady. They caught a cab.”

“All right,” Toy said.

Together, they started walking toward 72nd Street. Toy stopped at a corner phone booth on 72nd and called Berryman.

Berryman listened to the whole story before he said a word.

“That’s his fuck-up,” was what Toy remembered him saying first. “I’d have to say it’s your fuck-up too,” he went on. “I think you know the alternatives. I hope you do anyway.”

Berryman hung up on him, but Toy held the receiver to his ear an extra minute or two. His head was reeling.

Then Toy swung open the phone booth door and smiled at the young southerner for the first time. What he said was, “Everything’s cool. Berryman said it was my fuck-up … He wants to talk to you this afternoon.”

A little after three o’clock that afternoon, Ben Toy sat beside the slightly younger Wynn in the crackling red leather seat of an Olds 98.

Toy was thinking that his mind was going to snap. Crack like somebody’s backbone.

The shiny black sedan was parked in bright sun in a Flushing junkyard near La Guardia Airport. It was all flat, baking weeds over to dismal, sagging high-risers a mile or so away.

Harley Wynn kept saying that Berryman was late. Five minutes late. Ten minutes late. Fifteen minutes late.